Anyone who has lived in South Africa knows that it is a Janus-faced country. This is particularly true of its political life, for both black and white South Africans are addicted to histrionics and windy rhetoric. Everyone is in search of moral catharsis. When you look behind some of this the reality is often rather tawdry. Assessing how to treat this two (or more) sidedness sometimes seems like a full time job and is part of the incredible richness that living in South Africa provides.
Take one of the most moving moments which even this country-which specialises in moving moments-has ever seen: Nelson Mandela's release from jail. Who can forget the images of Nelson and Winnie, wreathed in triumphant smiles, walking up and down, arms held aloft in salute? I am not ashamed to say I shed tears as I watched. But the ANC insisted on taking charge of arrangements which, as anyone who knew anything about the movement could have guessed, meant it would be a shambles. Sure enough, Winnie arrived hours late, the ANC could not control the crowds, the ANC driver charged with getting Mandela to Cape Town city hall did not know the way and got lost, the car got stuck, Mandela had an appalling hardline speech forced on him by others, things spun out of control, the young comrades went looting, some got shot dead. It was not long before the Mandelas were divorced, and few were surprised by the revelations of Winnie's infidelities and greed, or her subsequent conviction for child-kidnapping.
That gives us some complex images to juggle with, all in technicolour, all true, all violently discordant with one another. But it happens often. Yesterday I spoke to a young assistant of mine I had sent to cover the unification of the black, white and Indian farmers' unions in KwaZulu/Natal, in South African terms no small event. He said that at the launch event there were a lot of speeches, a lot of political markers put down, and then Mandela danced with the children. The 78-year-old president had simply got up in the middle of the proceedings and, to the horror of his security guards, ambled down to where choirs of young Zulu children were singing and begun to dance with them. In a way it is ridiculous, it is not how presidents behave. But eyes already brim with tears at the thought of how we are going to feel when this hugely adored old man, his past heroism worn so lightly, is no longer there to gambol in the sunlight with the next generation; for he dances for us all.
In her new book, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (Viking, ?20), Patti Waldmeir, who won a deservedly high reputation writing for the Financial Times from here during the transition period, sometimes succumbs too far to the temptation to play to the emotional highs and lows the country affords. Her book's historical and political analysis is studded with little italicised vignettes, fastening on some appalling cruelty of apartheid, little snapshots of Mandela as a living saint, Desmond Tutu saving the life of a man about to be necklaced by a township mob and so on. After a while you get the feeling that out here we live in a sort of moral waxworks in which only these huge highs and lows exist.
The truth is a lot more mundane. It is, for example, only too easy to cite episodes involving Tutu which show him in a rather different light, or to quote either extremely silly or frankly alarming things that Mandela has said or done. The temptation for foreigners is to treat the country as a sort of giant morality play or, worse, an occasion for emotional tourism. Currently, for example, a lot of black Americans are wafting around out here drawing all sorts of false analogies based on seeing everything through a double set of American and South African stereotypes. Such people are merely part of the passing show but they do not make it easier for others to understand either what is really going on here or how on earth we got to where we are.
The big and virtually unspeakable truth is that, wicked and dreadful though it was, apartheid was, if seen in comparative perspective, a relatively mild historical experience. People were shoved around, bullied and deprived of rights, not allowed to live where they wanted, sometimes beaten up, often exploited and frequently humiliated: all very horrible and inexcusable. But compared to, say, what has happened in Rwanda, or the Holocaust, or even with the almost casually atrocious and even genocidal policies typical of many colonial and slave-owning societies, apartheid was merely grossly insensitive and unkind social engineering. Not many people were directly killed by it. And underneath and around it in a host of domestic and work situations, the tenor of race relations at grass roots was surprisingly good: people rubbed along. This was, ultimately, why the transition could take place and why it was not quite such a "miracle" as is claimed. Despite all the cruelties and indignities of apartheid, South Africans were not so far apart at the end of it that they could not find one another and do a deal. Take Waldmeir's book cover photo of Mandela and de Klerk holding hands in mutual happy triumph and then try and imagine one of, say, Adolf Hitler and Ben Gurion in 1945. The one is real, the other is unimaginable.
The second truth behind the advance to democracy is that we have merely exchanged one dominant party regime for another. The National Party, in its 46 years in power, became wondrously corrupt, showed scant regard, even within the confines of a restricted franchise, for civil liberties, engaged in large-scale social engineering, inflated the state bureaucracy with jobs for its friends, relatives and political trusties, used its leverage to achieve more of the same in the private sector and conferred systematic privilege on its own race in the labour market ("job reservation"). The ANC has only had three years in power, but already there are serious signs of corruption, the same ambitions at social engineering, strong pressure on the liberal institutions of the press and the universities, the inflation of the state bureaucracy to produce jobs for friends, relatives and political trusties, leverage exercised to achieve the same in the private sector and systematic privilege conferred on one race in the labour market ("affirmative action"). The notion that this form of political change is a "miracle" does not always get quite the applause here that emotional tourists might expect, although it is certainly true, of course, that everything would undoubtedly have been a whole lot worse if the transition to democracy had not taken place.
The oddity of that transition was, as Waldmeir shows, that it was launched by de Klerk on assumptions that soon ceased to apply. De Klerk believed that he would not need to concede untrammelled majority rule but that he could achieve a permanent form of power-sharing with a minority veto and the entrenchment of group rights. He also knew that by taking the initiative in abolishing apartheid, the NP had shot the ANC's fox. The ANC, for its part, was bemused both by the unexpectedness of the turnaround and by the fact that the NP, which it had always depicted as virtually Nazi, was now emerging as a political rival. The NP's apogee came with the whites-only referendum of March 1992 where it asked for and got a thunderous (69 per cent) mandate for its strategy of negotiation.
But de Klerk allowed his advantage to dribble away through arrogant over-confidence. Ludicrously, the NP named as its key negotiator a relatively untried junior minister, Tertius Delport, who had no authority to close deals. As one might have predicted, the ANC's chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, ate him for breakfast. Amazingly, by May 1992 the ANC and NP were arguing about whether the parliamentary majority required to amend the constitution should be 70 per cent or 75 per cent, with the NP holding out for the latter figure. In fact de Klerk should have taken what was on offer then-in the end he had to settle for a two thirds majority. What really did the damage was the Boipatong massacre and the subsequent ANC "mass action" for together they simply made the point that the country was virtually ungovernable and that there was no hope of restoring governability unless the ANC could be somehow persuaded back to the conference table. The longer the hiatus went on, the more it became clear that the ANC alone had the solution to the crisis and the stronger its bargaining position became.
Roelf Meyer, the NP's chief negotiator, is now reviled as "the man who sold the Afrikaner out" (and with him, the rest of the whites). The great innovation which freed the NP to settle was the "sunset clauses"-pension protection, job guarantees for white civil servants, amnesty for those who had committed "political crimes" under apartheid, compulsory power sharing and a government of national unity. Bit by bit the NP gave ground, siding with the ANC against Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), agreeing to the release of political prisoners who had committed such gross murders of civilians that de Klerk had vowed never to let them go, giving way on its demands for federalism, agreeing that the new parliament would also be a constituent assembly, and that cabinet decisions could be taken by simple majorities. With these last two concessions the remaining barriers to outright majoritarianism fell. In the end the NP even conceded a general election date without having worked out what the constitution was to be. As one NP backbencher commented bitterly, this was tantamount to handing over the deeds to the farm before agreeing the price.
By the end there was nothing left of the prospectus de Klerk had promised his white electorate in 1990-92. Why did he give way? Some of the reasons now given enrage many Afrikaners. Waldmeir records how de Klerk and Mandela were due to visit the US to receive the Liberty medal from President Clinton and Mandela refused to go unless de Klerk agreed to the election date, so he gave in. Similarly, her statement that ANC negotiators were surprised that de Klerk did not fight harder for Afrikaner rights has become a political hot potato. Meyer's own rationale was that in the end it mattered far less to insist on the wording of this or that clause than to get a commitment from the ANC that it would govern "in a spirit of national unity."
At the end of the day, however, de Klerk gave way for larger reasons. Having, in 1990, announced the end of apartheid, the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and SACP and the coming of universal suffrage elections he had shot the political rapids. Thereafter he was in a canoe-the ANC were in another-being whirled along by the pent up waters of long deferred historical change with unforeseen rocks, shoals and other hazards appearing with bewildering rapidity. In the end it had to be the height of de Klerk's ambitions simply to stay afloat. The real arrogance of the NP was not to realise this from the start and to believe that it was so much the master of the game that it could set the terms of what was to follow. One of the images which lingers from this period is of the bombastic Pik Botha, the foreign minister, saying that the NP had a secret weapon-millions of Zulu votes. What this meant, amazingly, was that Buthelezi would tamely deliver his electorate to the NP-despite the fact that, from the very outset, the NP had sought an alliance with the ANC to the exclusion of the IFP. The IFP might have been more logical partners, but only the ANC could offer a share in power-so the NP devoted itself to the ANC to the exclusion of all others. The basis of constitutional negotiation was that of "sufficient consent" which, as Ramaphosa explained, "means that if we and the NP agree, everyone else can get stuffed." A furious IFP boycott was all that could be expected after that.
Buthelezi's sporadic boycott of the constitutional talks and down-to-the-wire rejection of the elections earned him a bad press on all sides, compounded by the fact that the ANC and its friends in the media attempted to lay exclusive blame on him for the IFP-ANC violence which nearly tore the country apart in 1990-94. This angry dismissal of Buthelezi came to a crescendo after the Boipatong massacre of June 1992 in which 45 ANC sympathisers died at the hands of IFP supporters. The ANC used the massacre to insist that de Klerk and a shadowy "third force," working secretly with the IFP, were trying to destabilise the ANC and the country. Waldmeir looks at this and, as any honest person must, throws up her hands at the welter of accusation and the lack of evidence. Everything we know suggests that the victims of Boipatong died at the hands of a classic Zulu raiding party unconnected in any formal way to the IFP, the NP or the police and that this was simply the culminating act in a long community struggle.
None the less, Boipatong became an emotional rallying point for the ANC, so much so that within a few months it was reported in both the national and international media that the ANC had broken off the constitutional talks in protest over Boipatong-and indeed, the ANC often said as much itself-although Boipatong actually occurred two months after the talks breakdown. Much of the fury was directed at Buthelezi yet in the end he came through his test rather better than de Klerk, wresting last-minute concessions from the ANC, then winning power in his home province of KwaZulu/Natal, taking three cabinet seats and today occasionally playing the role of acting President when Mandela and Deputy President Mbeki are abroad.
Waldmeir is a sure guide to all this. There are occasional, confidence-sapping howlers when, for example, she has Harry Oppenheimer down as an MP and financial supporter of the Liberal party when in fact he belonged to the (quite opposite) United party, or when she gets the title of the influential Weekly Mail wrong. A more radical dissonance stems from the fact that Waldmeir's book-reflecting the spirit of its birth-exudes the euphoria of "the rainbow nation," of the South Africa that went multiracially crazy when it won the rugby world cup and saw Mandela, dressed in Springbok jersey, embrace the symbols that mean so much to Afrikaners. That the mood is now so very different is not due just to the inevitable hangover but to the fact that Mandela seems to be the only figure within the ANC who believes in the "spirit of national unity." To this end he has preached national reconciliation. But the instincts of the rest of the ANC-leaders and activists-are frankly, even brutally, majoritarian. As this realisation sinks in the feeling grows among the 37 per cent of the electorate who voted against the ANC that the euphoria of 1994-96 was based largely on the notion that whereas South Africa was promised an African nationalism pas comme les autres, what it has got is an African nationalism very much like the others.
For Roelf Meyer's rationale for accepting majority rule has not worked. When giving way on this or that point, Meyer would say that what really matters is the building of trust relationships to guarantee a future of permanent coalition and power-sharing. It was no secret that Meyer placed particular hopes on the relationship he had built with Ramaphosa-but this vision quickly crumbled. Ramaphosa was squeezed out and left politics, while of other such relationships of trust there was no real sign. Although the cabinet initially included both IFP and NP members in effect the ANC has ruled as if they were not there-indeed, the complete impotence of their attempts to influence policy was a major reason for the NP's ultimate withdrawal from the coalition.
Waldmeir quotes Mandela as saying that "Majority rule will apply-we just hope we will never have to use it," but this has remained merely a pious hope. True, from time to time Mandela upbraids some of his followers for behaving towards whites "as if they had been defeated on the battlefield, which they weren't" or for trying to outlaw the use of Afrikaans in the army. But Mandela is too old and out of it to make more than occasional such sallies or to follow them through. Even the "sunset clauses" have been disregarded de facto as thousands of senior civil servants have their lives made so uncomfortable that they resign. It is, in any case, Mbeki, not Mandela, who runs the government and he is renowned for the fact that the scores of officials who surround him include not a single white face. On a broader canvas, the overwhelming pressure for affirmative action appointments within the state machine and the broader labour market is felt by many non-Africans to be a reneging on the ANC's pledge of non-racism. The spirit of "we are the masters now" is too strong and too visible to be missed.
One exemplar of this is Kader Asmal, the senior ANC cabinet minister who has spent enormous energy trying to depict the NP as "the Nazis of Africa." Asmal is so confident of himself that he has publicly described Lucas Mangope, the former leader of Bophuthatswana, as "a baboon." Mangope is suing and it will be an interesting test of the new "hate speech" law whether an Asian, if he has the right connections, can thus get away with racist abuse of an African. But the same spirit is reflected in the efforts of Dullah Omar, the justice minister, to prevent the new tourist centre of Robben Island being administered by the NP dominated Western Cape government. The normal rules of provincial administration must not be allowed to operate in this case, argues Omar, because that would be analogous to having allowed the Nazis to run the concentration camp museums in postwar Germany. The message is that the NP-the second biggest party-cannot really be tolerated as an ordinary political competitor. Even Mandela sometimes echoes such effective one-partyism: touring KwaZulu/Natal not long ago he declared that the way to peace was for everyone to join the ANC and thus abolish the conflict.
Something of the same spirit has run through ANC relations with the IFP, although this is tempered by the fact that the party remains in the governing coalition and by the fact that the Zulu elite stands to gain almost as much as its ANC counterparts from affirmative action and other policies of Africanist preference. But Waldmeir notes that Joe Slovo, the Communist leader, and a number of other ANC leaders were actually hoping for an opportunity to "crush" Buthelezi and that not a few of them feel they made too many concessions to him. In fact the ANC has quite shamelessly welshed on the two key deals it made with Buthelezi-the promise of international mediation and the consigning of large areas of land to royal and chiefly control. What is really meant by "having made too many concessions to Buthelezi" is that it would be better if he and his party had not been allowed to exist. The great danger is that the 1999 election could produce a renewed opportunity for just such an all-out confrontation.
In a lot of ways this is all very commonplace. In any political system a party which gets over 62 per cent-as the ANC did-will not hesitate to take what it wants. Even to complain that this is indeed what is happening can sound churlish, particularly when whites, coloureds and Asians continue, on average, to enjoy a standard of living incomparably higher than that of Africans. It seems morally unanswerable simply to ask why should not every dog have its day? Something that is endorsed by so much political and moral logic may indeed be inevitable.
The problem lies with the country's 10m non-Africans, most of whom feel radically disenchanted with such a logic, to the point that huge swathes of them are emigrating. Currently the effect is disguised by the fact that many skilled whites and Asians over the age of 50, with retirement in their sights, are staying on, providing a sorely needed cadre of skills-but as this group moves out of the labour market the full effects of the departure of so many of their younger colleagues will be revealed. Since almost all the country's professional and managerial skills are in white and Asian hands, the result is a huge and desperately damaging de-skilling of the economy and society. This process is so fundamental that one has to ask whether the whole country may not founder as a result. Such wholesale emigration was disastrous in Mozambique and Angola, after all, and they were primarily agricultural economies. South Africa is an industrial economy which cannot work if it loses too many of its managers and professionals.
The unpalatable truth is that this de-skilling is a threat to the livelihood and even the safety of all South Africans, and that it ought to be a primary objective of government to staunch and reverse it. This is tantamount to saying that the first black majority government must set out to pamper the white and Asian minorities-surely too much to ask. The bare minimum requirement is that the promise of national reconciliation has to be kept, and has to be kept in terms that those minorities accept as just. Now that might really qualify as a miracle.
