A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  The members of the ANC executive in exile were not fully informed about Mandela’s dealings with government officials, but they, too, had been having a series of secret meetings with prominent Afrikaners. At a private house in England they discussed the future of South Africa and developed considerable social rapport across the color line.12 Yet they were deeply divided about the desirability of having formal discussions with the government. In August 1989, meeting in Zimbabwe, they issued a cautious document known as the Harare Declaration. It might be possible to “end apartheid through negotiations,” they said, if the Pretoria regime was prepared to negotiate “genuinely and seriously.” But first the government would have to do five things: lift the state of emergency and remove the troops from the townships, end the restrictions on political activity, legalize all political organizations, release all political prisoners, and stop all political executions. There was no suggestion of concessions to the white population.13

  Botha could not bring himself to negotiate with Africans, however, and in July 1989, when he eventually invited Mandela to the presidential residence in Cape Town, he did no more than indulge in small talk. But Botha’s leadership days were numbered: he had a stroke in January 1989, in February he resigned as National party leader, and in August he lost the post of state president following a revolt by his cabinet, whose members resented his autocratic ways.

  As Botha’s successor, the National party parliamentary caucus chose Frederik Willem de Klerk. De Klerk was the son and grandson of National party politicians. He was deeply committed to Afrikaner cultural and political nationalism, and he was regarded as a conservative member of Botha’s cabinet. He was, however, twenty years younger than Botha, and like many other Afrikaners of his generation, he realized that in its current form apartheid was not workable; it was necessary to respond to the domestic and foreign pressures by taking more drastic action than the tentative reforms adopted by Botha. His older brother, Professor Willem de Klerk, believes that soon after his election he underwent “a political conversion”; others have called it a “religious conversion.”14 After reviewing the situation, the new president concluded that the best hope for his people was to negotiate a settlement from a position of strength, while his government was still the dominant force in the country, and he persuaded his cabinet to approve of a remarkably radical initiative.15 On February 2, 1990, he announced in parliament the lifting of the ban on the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and the South African Communist party (SACP); the removal of restrictions on thirty-three domestic organizations, including the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the freeing of political prisoners who had been incarcerated for nonviolent actions; and the suspension of capital punishment. That speech went a long way toward meeting the preconditions for negotiations set by Mandela and the Harare Declaration. It was de Klerk’s great moment in history.16

  Nine days later, Mandela was released unconditionally after twenty-seven years in jail. Soon afterward he began a series of foreign travels to become acquainted with the contemporary world. He went first to Lusaka to meet his ANC friends in exile, then to England and the United States. He was treated as a hero everywhere. In New York, he had a triumphant ticker-tape parade down Broadway in a forty-car motorcade; in Washington he addressed both houses of Congress, where he received a standing ovation.17 De Klerk, too, visited Europe and the United States, where he received a warm welcome from politicians and businesspeople.18

  Talks about Talks

  Before they could start negotiations on substantial issues, the parties had to agree upon a format—who should participate and what should the agenda be? This took nearly two years. Leaders of the white establishment and the black resistance had to get to know each other and create a minimum of mutual trust before they could sit down together and thrash out the terms of a new political and constitutional order. Moreover, on both sides of the color line there were people who wished to torpedo the peaceful, negotiated change process. White South Africans—especially Afrikaners—had been molded by years of racist propaganda to abominate the very idea of black empowerment. The Conservative party, which won 30 percent of the vote for the white legislature in a general election in 1989, as well as several organizations still further to the right, vehemently opposed negotiations with Blacks; and so did elements in the army, the police, and the bureaucracy. Africans, too, were deeply divided on the issue. Many, especially former guerrillas who had spent years training to seize control of South Africa by force, were profoundly suspicious of Mandela and shocked by his independent discussions with the government.

  De Klerk met Mandela for the first time a month before he released him from prison. Although they disagreed about the way to solve South Africa’s problems, the meeting went reasonably well, and in his first speech as a free man, Mandela called de Klerk a man of integrity—a phrase that would come back to haunt him.19 Relations between them began to sour as early as March 26, 1990, when police, in one of many clashes with township residents, opened fire and killed eleven demonstrators at Sebokeng, thirty miles south of Johannesburg.20 Mandela then called off further meetings for a while, but on May 2, 3, and 4, about a dozen ANC leaders met their government counterparts for three days of talks at the president’s official residence near Cape Town. This was a get-to-know session, which went some way toward easing their personal relationships.21 The government then canceled the state of emergency, repealed the remaining apartheid laws, released most of its political prisoners, and allowed the exiles to return to South Africa with immunity from prosecution. In response, after a heated debate in the ANC executive council, Mandela announced that he was suspending the armed struggle on the advice of none other than Joe Slovo, the former head of the military wing of the ANC—the white man who was the symbol of evil communism to white South Africa.22

  But suspicions soon revived because there were loose cannons in both camps. In 1988, the ANC leadership in exile had authorized a group of ANC militants, led by Mac Maharaj, an Indian member of the ANC executive and former Robben Island friend of Mandela, to create an underground revolutionary network inside South Africa. This operation, known as Vula (the opening), did not achieve much, and Mandela probably knew nothing about it. But in July 1990 the police uncovered it, arrested Maharaj, and unearthed a mass of Vula documents, from which de Klerk concluded that even then, while Mandela and his colleagues were talking peace, they were still following a hidden agenda to overthrow the state by force.23

  The anti-ANC dirty tricks were much more serious. Throughout the years 1990 to 1994, deadly physical struggles for power were taking place alongside the negotiations for a peaceful settlement. In 1989, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations, 1,403 people died of political violence in South Africa. That was a record number, but it was only a prelude to what followed. There were 3,699 political killings in 1990; 2,706 in 1991; 3,347 in 1992; 3,794 in 1993; and 2,476 in 1994.24 It was the South African state, in the form of the government, the civil service, and the security forces, that was largely responsible for the killings. Ever since at least 1948, the state had been a gross perpetrator of human rights violations in South Africa, and it continued to be so during de Klerk’s presidency. Elements in the police, the army, and the security forces continued to kidnap, torture, and assassinate political opponents. De Klerk always denied that his government was behind the violence and insisted that he did everything he could to stop it; but Mandela came to the conclusion that a government-related Third Force was responsible for extensive attacks on ANC supporters, and his trust in de Klerk evaporated.25 News of the abuses began to appear in the press in July 1991, and over the next three years a commission headed by Judge Richard Goldstone issued a series of reports increasingly critical of government agencies. However, the full extent of the criminal activities was not revealed until after the change of regime, when Mandela appointed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.26 In 1998,
after three years’ work and thousands of interviews the commission reported that “a network of security and ex-security force operatives .. . fomented, initiated, facilitated and engaged in violence, which resulted in gross violations of human rights, including random and targeted killings.”27

  The KwaZulu Homeland and the province of Natal, which included Durban, South Africa’s major seaport, were a main focus of the vendetta against the ANC: by government agents. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, an ambitious, mercurial character, was prime minister of KwaZulu and head of Inkatha, which was originally a cultural movement but which became more and more political until 1990, when it was renamed the Inkatha Freedom party (IFP). Supported by conservative chiefs and largely illiterate peasants, he ran KwaZulu as a one-party state with gross violations of human rights, while most urban and better-educated Zulus supported the ANC. The two sides fought for control of territory. Buthelezi had previously been an active member of the ANC, which had encouraged him to form Inkatha; but he had broken with the ANC executive in exile in 1979, when it denounced him as a government collaborator for outspokenly advocating capitalism, opposing sanctions against South Africa, and presiding over an apartheid institution, the Zulu Homeland.28 Thereafter, Buthelezi identified himself as a Zulu nationalist, in contrast to the broad South African nationalism of the ANC. After the unbanning of the ANC, the struggle that had begun in KwaZulu and Natal in the 1980s intensified dramatically. Buthelezi resented being excluded from the ANC’s meetings with the government and feared that Zulu interests would be ignored. Like other Homeland leaders, he hoped to retain power by making KwaZulu a sovereign state or, at least, a member of a loosely federal South Africa.29

  Buthelezi and the government therefore had a common interest: both wished to undermine the ANC. South African army and police units provided valuable assistance to the IFP in the form of money, training, weapons, and personnel, and collaborated with the homeland government in covert activities against the ANC. Supporters of the ANC replied in kind, IFP “hit squads” and ANC “self-defense units” fought one another in rival villages, killing men, women, and children, and burning their homes. Although most of the victims were ANC supporters, a large minority were IFP supporters. Mandela tried to calm the situation in KwaZulu but without success, largely because local ANC warlords prevented him from dealing directly with Buthelezi until it was too late to be effective.30

  In 1990, political violence escalated in the Johannesburg area as well as in KwaZulu and Natal. There were struggles between rival political factions for control of the townships. In many cases, police turned a blind eye to IFP aggressors, or actually assisted them. Zulu male migrant workers, housed in squalid hostels, started a series of brutal attacks on township residents, killing many and destroying their homes. South African police planned and participated in some of those attacks. Also, gangs of unidentified people murdered passengers on trains commuting to and from Soweto. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found that members of the South African army’s special forces had collaborated with IFP people in planning those massacres.31

  The odds against a peaceful settlement in South Africa were increased by confusion within the ANC, which had enormous problems. The ANC members—700,000 according to Mandela—were an amalgamation of people who agreed in hating apartheid but who had very different experiences. Some, like Mandela, had been in prison for years. Others had been in exile—many had trained for guerrilla warfare in the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and tropical Africa. Most had remained inside South Africa and had been active in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Opinions differed sharply between those who favored negotiations with the government and those who feared that negotiations would result in a sell-out of black interests and clung to the vain hope that they could overthrow the regime by force. There were also ideological differences between the substantial number of dedicated communists in the ANC and those who were more open-minded about the structure of a future South Africa. Mandela was not a communist, but he was influenced by Marxist literature and communist friends. He was widely distrusted by many ANC members because of his secret discussions with the government, which took place without consultation with his fellow prisoners or with the exiled leadership in Lusaka.32 Moreover, his prestige (as well as his peace of mind) suffered because of the errant behavior of his wife, Winnie. He was deeply loyal to her because the government had grossly ill-treated her during his long imprisonment, but she had become an arrogant and violent woman. In June 1991, after a four-month, much-publicized trial, a judge called her an “unblushing liar,” found her guilty of kidnapping and assault, and sentenced her to six years in jail.33 (In June 1993, the Supreme Court confirmed the kidnapping charge, removed the assault charge, and reduced the punishment to a two-year suspended sentence and a fine.)

  In July 1991, the ANC held its first conference in South Africa in thirty years. Ever since it had been banned in 1961, a tight clique of about thirty-five people had laid down policy for the ANC. In a highly contentious atmosphere, the 2,244 delegates, who had been elected by ANC branches inside and outside South Africa, met to transform a once secret, illegal movement into a mass political party with a broader and more democratic management. Since Oliver Tambo, who had held the ANC together during the later apartheid years, was not a candidate (he had had a stroke and died in 1993), there was no possible rival to Mandela; the delegates elected him president, although many of them still had reservations. For secretary-general they rejected Alfred Nzo, Mandela’s candidate and a senior member of the ANC in exile, in favor of Cyril Ramaphosa, who had built COSATU into a powerful opponent of apartheid and had become a conspicuous leader of the United Democratic Front. They also elected a sixty-six-member National Executive Committee (NEC), which included numerous men and women who had been active in the UDF and were virtually unknown to the formerly imprisoned or exiled members. Thereafter Mandela was the unchallenged head of the ANC, but he had to be careful to work in cooperation with the NEC.34

  Meanwhile, as the violence escalated in KwaZulu and the Witwatersrand townships, relations between Mandela, de Klerk, and Buthelezi degenerated. On September 14, 1991, concerned South African church, business, and civic leaders tried to stem the chaos by holding a conference at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg, where the three leaders and heads of other parties signed a code of conduct, which prohibited all parties from intimidating, threatening, or killing each other’s members. But Buthelezi misjudged the situation and ruined the conference. To demonstrate his strength, he bussed in two thousand armed Zulu warriors, who paraded outside the hotel, and at the signing ceremony he refused to shake hands with Mandela and de Klerk. Afterward, de Klerk tried to make excuses for Buthelezi’s behavior, but Mandela disagreed and publicly lambasted de Klerk.35 Nevertheless, both de Klerk and Mandela were determined to get substantial negotiations going, and they met privately several times to work out ways and means. Following these meetings, in late November leaders of twenty political organizations laid down ground rules for the talks. A Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), composed of twelve-member delegations from every participating party, was to meet under the chairmanship of two judges (one Afrikaner, the other Indian). CODESA was to write an interim constitution, in terms of which elections would be held for a Constituent Assembly, which would write a final constitution in accordance with principles laid down in the interim document.

  Constitution-making

  CODESA opened on December 20,1991, in the World Trade Centre outside Johannesburg. It was strikingly different from the National Convention of 1908–9, when thirty white men created the Union of South Africa out of four British colonies, with a flexible constitution that enabled the white minority to establish a system of racial domination, CODESA comprised nearly three hundred delegates, most of them Africans, many of them women. There were delegations from the government, from eight political parties, and from the ten Homelands. But
CODESA was boycotted by parties on both extremes that hoped to wreck the negotiation process: the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) on the African side, and the Conservative party and others still further to the right on the white side. Buthelezi allowed an IFP delegation to take part, but declined to do so himself.36

  In the plenary session on the first day, seventeen of the delegations endorsed a crucially important document—a Declaration of Intent setting out the basic components of an interim constitution.37 It was to provide for universal suffrage, a bill of rights including civil and political rights, an independent judiciary with the power to declare legislation invalid, the elimination of the Homeland governments, and the incorporation of their territories into a new set of provinces. The IFP and Bophuthatswana delegations wished to retain the autonomy of their Homelands and refused to sign. The day ended in an explosion between the two principals: de Klerk made a bitter attack on the ANC and an outraged Mandela responded in kind.38

  Although de Klerk and his colleagues endorsed the Declaration of Intent, they aimed to protect the interests of the white population by setting up constitutional obstacles to prevent white domination from being followed by black domination. Whereas in the past the National party had used its parliamentary majority to steamroll racist laws through parliament, now, facing the prospect that the ANC would become the majority party, it sought to curb it. Drawing on the work of Arend Lijphart, an American political scientist, the National party contended that political power in the new South Africa should be shared. Leaders of the two or three most successful parties should take turns as president. The cabinet should include members of those parties, and cabinet and parliamentary decisions should require the support of two-thirds or more of their total memberships. The bill of rights should protect racial and ethnic groups as well as individuals. Power should also be divided between the central and provincial governments, and the entire constitution should be extremely difficult to amend. De Klerk seems to have believed that, with the resources of the state behind him, he and his colleagues would be able to include enough of those obstacles in the constitution to preserve substantial power in white hands.39