Chapter 2 - Explaining the Miracle
Max du PreezWe, the people of South Africa,
Recognise the injustices of our past;
Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;
Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and
Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.
We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as toHeal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;
Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.May God protect our people.
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
God seën Suid-Afrika. God bless South Africa.
Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika. Hosi katekisa Afrika.- Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996
More often than not, a group that has the monopoly of power in a country will only lose it through war or violent revolution. It is extremely rare in history to give up power voluntarily, for a group to negotiate itself out of power. Yet that was what happened between 1990 and 1994 in South Africa – the Whites-only National Party had had a firm grip on political and military power since 1948 but made a deal with the Black majority to establish a democracy and transfer power to the winner of the elections.
On 10 May 1994 Nelson Mandela stood on a stage in Pretoria declaring, “Free at last”. He had just been inaugurated as free South Africa’s first president. The same aircraft which had bombed his followers in neighbouring states did a fly-past to honour their new commander-in-chief. And next to the new president stood one of his deputy-presidents: F.W. de Klerk, leader of the National Party and former State President of apartheid South Africa.
What prepared the ground for the South African transition?
The world, South Africans included, called it a miracle. But what made that miracle possible? How did it happen that those who enjoyed power and privilege under apartheid negotiated it away?
Black South Africans’ resistance against apartheid was consistently squashed by the police, using wide-ranging security legislation. In March 1960 policemen killed 69 people and wounded 180 when they tried to stop a mass demonstration against the pass laws at Sharpeville. The massacre led to a hardening of attitudes on both sides. The government declared the African National Congress a banned organisation, and in the next few years imprisoned several senior ANC leaders on Robben Island. Leading members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party formed a guerrilla army which later became the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.
The White government felt secure because neighbouring Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) was run by a White minority under Ian Smith, Mozambique and Angola were ruled by the Portuguese, and Namibia (then South West Africa) was firmly under South African control. However, after a coup d’etat in Portugal in 1974, the Portuguese withdrew from Africa; Angola and Mozambique became independent under the leadership of the former liberation movements. In 1978 the Security Council of the United Nations adopted a resolution demanding Namibia’s independence, a resolution that gained increasing support over the years.
The resistance to apartheid simmered for a few years and burst into the open again on 16 June 1976 when the Soweto students demonstrated against Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools; the demonstrations escalated into an open rebellion. In the aftermath of the uprisings large numbers of young people left for neighbouring states to join the ANC in exile.
After a long and bloody war of liberation, Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, with Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) as president. It was slowly becoming clear that White minority rule in South Africa could not last forever.
Prime Minister P.W. Botha soon came under strong pressure internally and externally to reform apartheid. His government’s response was to change the constitution to make provision for separate legislatures for Coloureds (House of Representatives) and Indians (House of Delegates). These chambers existed alongside the White House of Assembly.
Between 1984 and 1987 there were almost daily confrontations between security forces and UDF supporters. The Botha government also unleashed clandestine units such as the police death squad at Vlakplaas outside Pretoria and the military dirty tricks team, the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). The country was on the brink of civil war.
In 1985 the National Party government came under such pressure that State President Botha announced that he was going to make a major declaration on a new way forward. The speech was advertised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a crossing of the Rubicon; it was expected to announce an end to the pass laws and the release of Nelson Mandela. When Botha delivered the speech, however, it failed to live up to these high expectations. The disappointment led to a period of international sanctions and isolation that threatened to cripple the South African economy.
The Chase Manhattan Bank in the United States executed its decision, made two weeks earlier, to stop rolling over loans to South African borrowers; other major financial institutions followed suit. This led to a falling of the rand and a flight of capital from the country. In 1986 the United States, the Commonwealth and the European Community imposed stiff political, economic and financial sanctions. Apartheid South Africa stood virtually alone, and experienced its worst financial crisis in decades.
Why did sworn enemies agree to talk to one another?
It was around this time, most analysts agree, that the leadership on both sides started to realise that neither would be able to defeat the other militarily. The only other option was to negotiate. De Klerk and Mandela both indicate in their autobiographies that this realisation came in the mid-1980s, although Patti Waldmeir (1997) suggests that the military leaders of the ANC favoured a military solution until the late 1980s. Senior UDF leader, Mohammed Valli Moosa, told Waldmeir that the UDF had told the ANC leadership during this time that there was a stalemate.
In February 1986 the leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly, Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, shocked the White establishment when he resigned from Parliament. He said that the country was being torn apart and that Parliament’s reactions were irrelevant. A week later he was joined by the chairman of the Progressive Federal Party, Dr Alex Boraine.
To many activists in the UDF and the ANC, Slabbert’s resignation suggested that there could be an alternative to a violent conflict between a White power bloc and the Black majority. It seriously undermined the rigid distinction between “parliamentary politics” – meaning the Tri-cameral Parliament where all decisions were made – and “extra-parliamentary politics” – the political activities of the majority of South Africans.
Dissidents among the National Party’s main constituency, the Afrikaners, started to voice their protests in the late 1980s. In July 1987 a group of 60 mainly Afrikaans opinion formers had a week-long meeting with the exiled ANC leadership in Dakar, Senegal. The Botha government reacted angrily, accusing the group of making common cause with “terrorists”. The country’s Afrikaans newspapers and The Citizen attacked the group for legitimising the ANC.
The group said in an unpublished statement issued in Dakar after the talks had taken place,We share a common belief that serious discussions with the ANC must form part of the search for the resolution of conflict and the transition towards a peaceful and just future. We believe that as a result of our conference in Dakar, we have demonstrated that such discussions can take place and that they can be constructive. We hope that what began in Dakar will continue inside and outside of South Africa and will eventually involve the South African government itself. In our discussions, we found that it was possible for South Africans, who are in many ways far apart, to have frank and cordial exchanges on crucial issues facing our country.Graham Leach, a BBC journalist, said about the Dakar initiative at the time:
There was no major breakthrough towards peace; that had not been the object of the talks. But it was nevertheless a landmark. If one day the South African government does decide to negotiate with the ANC, it may only be possible because the Slabbert delegation, and others following, have paved the way. The mission to Dakar was the beginning of a process which will slowly make it acceptable and respectable for Afrikaners to talk to the ANC (Leach: 1989,163).Slabbert later wrote, “The fact that the meeting played a significant role to launch the politics of negotiations and to legitimise negotiations with the ANC internally, only dawned on them and on us much later” (Van Zyl Slabbert: 1999, 38). One of the important things about the meeting was that it showed both the ANC and the Afrikaner delegates that the stereotypes of each other were just that; it served to ease the prejudices that had been formed over the years.
The Dakar initiative was followed by several similar meetings between the ANC and other delegations from South Africa. Business leaders had more than one meeting, and progressive Stellenbosch students met the ANC in Maputo. The Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South African (IDASA) organised further meetings in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Germany, France and the United States. None of these meetings provoked the hysteria that Dakar had; in fact, they became quite a common part of the political landscape.
By 1988 a new progressive movement among Afrikaners was gaining ground. An anti-apartheid newspaper, Vrye Weekblad, was launched in 1988; it not only allowed Afrikaans-speaking readers access to the views of the Black majority, but exposed apartheid’s violent excesses such as the existence of police and army death squads. An alternative Afrikaans music culture, which was overtly political and challenged apartheid and the power of the National Party government, gained popularity from 1989. The movement was referred to as the Voëlvry movement, after the name of their nationwide tour; it featured rock singers like Johannes Kerkorrel, James Phillips and Koos Kombuis. Prominent Afrikaans writers and academics voiced their support for the new dissident cultural movement.
When did the negotiation process actually start?
While the government was condemning groups from inside South Africa for having talks with the external ANC leadership, elements within the government itself were beginning to establish contact with the liberation movement. It really started in November 1985 when the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, had a chance conversation with Winnie Mandela on a flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town. A few days later, Coetsee visited Nelson Mandela in a Cape Town hospital, where he was being treated for a health complaint. Early the next year Mandela was moved to his own “apartment” at Pollsmoor Prison, consisting of three adjoining prison cells, from where he could conduct “pre-negotiations negotiations” with the government.
Mandela met with Coetsee several times in 1986 and 1987. Then Coetsee appointed Niel Barnard and Fanie van der Merwe, the head of the National Intelligence Service and the Director-General of Prisons respectively, to carry on with the meetings. Barnard and Van der Merwe had regular meetings with Mandela between May 1988 and his release in 1990.
In December 1988 Mandela was transferred to a cottage in the grounds of Victor Verster prison near Paarl, with open telephone lines to his colleagues in Lusaka and elsewhere in South Africa. He was also allowed to meet with the political leadership of the UDF at his cottage. It was, in the words of Minister Coetsee, “a situation halfway between confinement and freedom”.
In March 1989 Mandela presented a memorandum to State President Botha, laying the foundation for negotiations. “Majority rule and internal peace,” Mandela wrote, “are like the two sides of a single coin, and White South Africa simply has to accept that there will never be peace and stability in this country until the principle is fully applied.” The leaders of the liberation movement would never submit to conditions “which are essentially terms of surrender.” He went on to say:
The key to the whole situation is a negotiated settlement, and a meeting between the government and the ANC will be the first major step towards lasting peace in the country, better relations with our neighbour states, admission to the Organisation of African Unity, readmission to the United Nations and other world bodies, to international markets and improved international relations generally. An accord with the ANC, and the introduction of a non-racial society is the only way in which our rich and beautiful country will be saved from the stigma which repels the world (Ebrahim: 1998, 441)
Nelson Mandela, memorandum to State President Botha, 1989
Mandela made it clear that he made this move without consultation with the external ANC leadership. The very next month, however, the ANC committed itself to the same ideas and proposals through the Declaration of the OAU’s ad hoc committee on Southern Africa. Known as the Harare Declaration and issued on 21 August 1989, it stated,
We believe that a conjuncture of circumstances exists which, if there is a demonstrable readiness on the part of the Pretoria regime to engage in negotiations genuinely and seriously, could create the possibility to end apartheid through negotiations…. We would therefore encourage the people of South Africa as part of their overall struggle to get together to negotiate an end to the apartheid system and agree on all the measures that are necessary to transform their country into a non-racial democracy.On 5 July 1989 Nelson Mandela met with P.W. Botha at Tuynhuys, the presidential office in Cape Town, without the knowledge of the South African public or even most senior members of the National Party. They had tea together and had an informal chat about South African history. Mandela said later that he had realised that day that South Africa had reached a point of no return.
On 12 September the first official contact between the exiled ANC leadership and the National Party government took place. Two National Intelligence Agency officers and the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma met secretly in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Which “little” turning points can be identified in the improvement of the relationship between the NP government and the ANC?
Events outside the control of politicians also played a role in changing the South African political landscape. On 18 January 1989, State President Botha suffered a stroke and decided to resign as leader of the National Party. On 2 February the party caucus chose F.W. de Klerk as its new leader. Although Botha made it clear that he had no plans to resign as State President, South Africans and the world knew that De Klerk would soon be the new head of state. He eventually became State President on 14 September 1989.
De Klerk wrote in his autobiography that he knew from the beginning of 1989 that he would have to put forward brave new initiatives “to liberate the Party from the corner into which it had been driven – or where we had landed through our own doing”. When he was chosen as party leader, he wrote, he told the caucus that “a quantum leap” would be needed – and someone shouted, “Jump, F.W., jump!” (de Klerk: 1999, 152)
The first important decision the new State President had to make was concerning a request for permission for a march through the streets of Cape Town by the mass democratic movement. Such marches and rallies were forbidden at the time. The request was brought by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. De Klerk came under pressure from Western governments and South African businessmen to allow the march as symbolic of his new conciliatory approach. De Klerk gave his permission and the peaceful march of tens of thousands of people quickly spread to Johannesburg, Pretoria and then throughout the country. Many of the placards read, “This is People’s Power!”, and that was indeed what it was – a national expression of protest against apartheid and political violence and of anticipation that a new era had dawned.
Many political analysts later agreed with Archbishop Tutu that these People’s Power marches kick-started the transformation process more than anything else, and that De Klerk had not bargained on them creating a new dynamic in the country. De Klerk says in his autobiography that this was not true, that the decision was made to allow marches and protests because they were needed for the kind of democratisation the NP meant to introduce.
In November 1989 people’s power in another part of the world led to one of the most important international events since World War II – the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the Soviet Bloc feared by the West for so long. The main reason given by successive National Party governments for banning the ANC – that it was a “pawn of international communism” – had now fallen away.
On 13 December 1989 the two men who were destined to lead South Africa to democracy – Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk – met for the first time at Tuynhuys. It was a friendly meeting, according to the two men, but Mandela did give De Klerk forewarning that he found unacceptable the National Party’s plans for special rights for ethnic groups.
De Klerk had other pressures on him than simply to end apartheid. In November 1989 Captain Dirk Coetzee confessed that, as the commander of the South African Police death squad at Vlakplaas, he had ordered and committed several murders of political activists. By the end of that year there were also reports of a similar unit in the South African Defence Force (SADF), the Civil Co-operation Bureau, who had in September assassinated SWAPO member, Anton Lubowski. For decades, White South Africans had been told that apartheid was actually a moral and fair policy in which races could develop separately. Now, the violent side of the apartheid ideology was slowly being exposed. In January 1990 De Klerk appointed Mr Justice Louis Harms to head a commission of inquiry into state-sponsored violence.
What is the significance of 2 February 1990?
On 2 February 1990 De Klerk opened the new session of Parliament. It was expected that he would announce major reforms, but few expected him to go as far as he did. He announced the unbanning of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress, the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act, the lifting of emergency media regulations and a moratorium on the death penalty. But most sensational of all, he announced that Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners would be released soon with no preconditions.
Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert says he asked De Klerk shortly after the speech what had moved him to go that far in his announcements. De Klerk answered that he had experienced “a spiritual leap away from apartheid” and that he would have been a fool not to take advantage of the gap that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe had provided.
A question that has often been debated since 1990 was whether De Klerk had any other option but to take the steps he did – in other words, does he deserve credit as the joint architect of the negotiated settlement? In theory, De Klerk could have stayed on P.W. Botha’s course and continued with piecemeal reforms. However, that would almost certainly have destroyed the South African economy and with it White wealth. It would probably also have ensured that the low-intensity civil war would have escalated considerably.Slabbert says he went away from his meeting with the feeling that De Klerk did not fully understand the magnitude of what he had unleashed and that he (De Klerk) thought he could control the process to the end.
Mandela wrote in his autobiography that De Klerk was “by no means the great emancipator”. Mandela believed that De Klerk’s goal was to create a system of power sharing based on group rights, which would preserve a modified form of minority power in South Africa. That there was at least some validity to this view became clear when the National Party insisted during later negotiations that Whites be given a right of veto and that “group rights” be guaranteed.
On the other hand, some analysts argue, the fact that De Klerk did not back down when P.W. Botha publicly distanced himself from the talks with the ANC and resigned from the party, or when the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) threatened a White counter-revolution, strengthens his credentials as a reformist.
Mandela met De Klerk for the second time on 9 February 1990. Two days later he walked out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison, a free man.
Nelson Mandela with Winnie Mandela as he is released from Victor Vester prison
(© Graeme Williams / South Photographs)In the following weeks and months, the exiles from the ANC and PAC started returning home.
What is the Groote Schuur Minute and what did it accomplish?
However, a new scourge threatened to overwhelm the nation and sink the talks – politically-motivated violence, especially in, the East Rand townships, the Vaal Triangle and what is now KwaZulu-Natal. On the surface it appeared that the conflict was between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha. However, the ANC maintained that a Third Force, a faceless group of state-sponsored agents provocateur, fuelled the conflict. This charge was later verified by the findings of the Goldstone Commission of Inquiry Regarding the Prevention of Public Violence and Intimidation and by evidence given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
On 1 April 1990 the ANC suspended all talks with the government to protest the killing of 16 people in Sebokeng; talks eventually resumed. This pattern was repeated several times, but on each occasion Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk would bring the two parties back to the negotiating table.
Then, on 2 May 1990, the ANC and the government met at Groote Schuur, the former official residence of South Africa’s prime ministers in Cape Town. The formal negotiations towards democracy in a unified South Africa had started.
The first days’ talks were exploratory and dealt with obstacles to negotiation. People on both sides were surprised that after so many decades of hostility they could talk to each other openly and straightforwardly, even share a few jokes. By the end of the third day they reached an agreement, called the Groote Schuur Minute. The ANC committed itself to a review of its armed struggle, and the government to reviewing security legislation and the end of the state of emergency. A working group was appointed to consider amnesty for political offences and the further release of political prisoners.
The main achievement of the Groote Schuur meeting, however, was that it generated a groundswell of hope and optimism in South Africa and in the international community that a solution would be possible. The only detractors came from the far-right-wing Conservative Party who said the National Party was selling out the Whites, and from the PAC and AZAPO who said the ANC was selling out Black South Africans.
De Klerk’s position was supported by the once very powerful Afrikaner Broederbond, by the Afrikaans newspapers and by the biggest Afrikaans church, the NG Kerk. However, in February 1992 De Klerk was shocked when his party lost the formerly safe seat of Potchefstroom to the Conservative Party in a by-election. De Klerk immediately decided to call a referendum for White voters on the reforms he had announced on 2 February 1990. He said he could not continue with negotiations without support for his policies.
In the weeks before the 17 March 1992 referendum, De Klerk and his colleagues held many meetings throughout the country. He promised White voters that he would not conclude any agreement unless it contained assurances that minorities would be protected from domination and made provision for power sharing.
A surprising 69% of White voters voted Yes to the question, “Do you support the continuation of the reform process that the State President started on 2 February 1990 and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?” This result was a huge relief to both De Klerk and Mandela.
What were the final stages of the negotiation process?
The stop-and-start negotiations came to an abrupt halt on 17 June 1992 when more than 40 people were massacred at Boipatong. The ANC accused the government of complicity and broke off all negotiations. The ANC’s secretary general, Cyril Ramaphosa, and the NP’s new chief negotiator, Roelf Meyer, were given the task of forming a new channel of communication between the two parties. Following a series of informal meetings between these two men, the breakthrough came at the end of September 1992 with the signing of a Record of Understanding.
Meyer explained the turnaround in events in an interview with the author:
The Record of Understanding that came about after three months of one-on-one negotiations between the government and the ANC was actually the birth of the new constitution and democracy in South Africa. The ANC had moved away from their demand for a quick fix and accepted a two-phase process: first there would be an interim constitution agreed to by all negotiating parties and an election with that as basis; then the elected assembly would draft the final constitution for the country.
We on the government side made a paradigm shift by dropping the demand for minority rights. Up to that point, our emphasis was on the protection of group and minority rights in the constitution, but now we accepted the safeguarding of individual rights and the protection of equal rights for all. Now we and the ANC could start talking the same language.
The negotiations progressed more successfully during 1993, surviving the assassination of Communist Party leader Chris Hani by right-wingers on 10 April and an AWB attack on the negotiating chambers on 25 June. On 18 November 1993 a plenary session of the Multi-Party Negotiating Process ratified an Interim Constitution. In January 1994 a Transitional Executive Council was established to work with the government on matters concerning the transition. South Africa was well on its way to the first open election on 27 April 1994.
How did the Afrikaner right wing become part of the political process?
Trouble was brewing on the right. In March 1993 some 15 000 Afrikaner farmers attended a meeting to express their fear and anger at the direction the negotiations had taken. They appointed a Directorate of Generals to lead them – General Constand Viljoen, former head of the SADF, and retired generals Tienie Groenewald, Kobus Visser and Dries Bischoff.
Within two months, Viljoen and his generals organised and addressed 155 clandestine meetings countrywide. “We had to mobilise the Afrikaners psychologically, start our propaganda campaigns and stimulate thinking on alternatives to the ANC/NP model,” Viljoen told the author in an interview. “But as importantly, we had to build a massive military capability.” Viljoen says he mobilised between 50 000 and 60 000 men countrywide, and assumed that a large number of soldiers and policemen would join him when the time came. “I didn’t go from unit to unit recruiting them,” he said, “but most officers had a special bond with me. I knew I wouldn’t get the support of all the SADF units, but I knew which ones I would get. I had enough men and small arms, but I also needed armoured cars and heavier weapons. I knew I could rely on certain SADF units to supply that.”
General Constand Viljoen, in an interview with the author.
Working through Viljoen’s twin brother, theologian Professor Abraham Viljoen, they set up a meeting between the Directorate of Generals and Nelson Mandela and Joe Modise, commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe. The meeting took place in August in Mandela’s Johannesburg home. A follow-up meeting between Viljoen and the leader of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, Dries Bruwer, and the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma was held in Pretoria two weeks later. Viljoen insisted that the ANC incorporate the principle of self-determination in the interim constitution. Mbeki suggested that the April elections be used as a test of support for the idea of an Afrikaner volkstaat.
But Viljoen was becoming unpopular among his own constituency. At a huge meeting of right wingers in Pretoria in January 1994, Viljoen was shouted down by people who chanted, “We want war!”
In March Viljoen had a chance to test his military machine. Bophuthatswana leader Lucas Mangope told Viljoen that Umkhonto we Sizwe was planning to overthrow his homeland, and asked him for help. Viljoen quietly moved 3 000 of his men, mostly farmers who were commando members, to Mmabatho airport and issued them with weapons.
However, Viljoen had not bargained on the unruly men of the extremist AWB of Eugene Terre’Blanche to enter the fray. Mangope had asked that the AWB not be involved because they would be unacceptable to his people, and Viljoen requested Terre’Blanche to withdraw. Terre’Blanche refused, and his men drove through the homeland wildly shooting at people. Some were shot by Bophuthatswana soldiers, and the sight of three wounded AWB men pleading for their lives on live television and then shot in cold blood had a powerful impact on the country’s Whites.
Viljoen knew the foray was a complete disaster and ordered his men to go home.
But the effect it had on me was very important. I suddenly realised that it would be very difficult to conduct a complicated military operation under these fluid circumstances without plunging the country into whole-scale war. I wasn’t prepared to do that. The AWB factor and their indiscipline meant that I would not be able to absolutely control our forces. I knew for certain that the political strategy was the only one left…. In that sense Mmabatho was a very important turning point.
Viljoen phoned two senior members of his party, brothers Pieter and Corné Mulder, from Mmabatho and told them they should register as a political party for the April 27 elections.
Days after Viljoen and his colleagues registered under the name Freedom Front, the Inkatha Freedom Party of Mangosuthu Buthelezi also decided to register and take part in the elections. The threat of war and large-scale confrontation was averted, and the threat of White right-wing resistance was minimised.
On 27 April 1994 South Africa went to the polls for two days of peaceful elections. The miracle did happen.
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