A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  They were greatly mistaken. The ANC, confident that it would win most of the seats in the new parliament, was adamant that the new constitution should create a unitary state with minimal checks on the power of the majority to impose its will. Moreover, Mandela was psychologically and intellectually stronger than de Klerk, and in the committees where the day-to-day work of CODESA was done, Cyril Ramaphosa, the chief ANC negotiator and former trade union bargainer, was more effective than Ter-tius Delport, his government counterpart. Mandela’s determination that the Whites should not be able to prevent the ANC from dominating the new South Africa was bolstered by his knowledge that if he yielded too much he would play into the hands of his ANC critics. But, as he had shown in the memorandum he sent to President Botha from jail, he was also realistic in his awareness that the ANC would have to placate the Whites, who dominated the economy and controlled the police, the army, and the bureaucracy, by giving them some sense of participation and security in the new South Africa.40

  In spite of their fundamental differences and their increasing dislike for each other, de Klerk and Mandela were bonded in a common commitment to the peace process.41 But de Klerk had to secure his own power base. Therefore, in March 1992, after losing two by-elections to the Conservative party, he held a referendum of the white electorate. The result was resounding support for the peace process. Eighty-seven percent of those eligible did vote, and 68.7 percent of those who voted endorsed “the continuation of the reform process that the state president started on February 2 1990 and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiations.”42 That result emboldened de Klerk to toughen his stand in CODESA; however, on May 26, when he insisted that the new constitution should place more limits on the power of the majority than the ANC could possibly accept, CODESA broke down.

  Four months of heightened conflict throughout the country followed the failure of CODESA. There was a particularly bloody episode on June 17, 1992, when Zulu hostel dwellers at Boipatong, forty miles south of Johannesburg, made a vicious attack on a neighboring shack settlement and killed forty-five people, mainly women and children. Three days later, de Klerk courageously tried to appease the residents of Boipatong, but his convoy was driven out by an angry mob and police opened fire, killing three and wounding many more.43 Mandela then suspended all talks with the government, and fighting escalated in KwaZulu and Natal, where both sides committed atrocities. The ANC was running a campaign of “rolling mass action,” which culminated in August when several million workers went on strike and Mandela led fifty thousand followers though the streets of Pretoria to the government buildings. But that was not enough for the ANC radicals, who believed that events justified their demands for a resumed armed struggle. They managed to persuade a majority of the ANC’s executive committee to campaign to bring down the governments of three Homelands—the Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, and KwaZulu—starting with the Ciskei. On September 7, Ronnie Kasrils, a former chief of intelligence of the guerrilla forces and member of the Vula operation, led seventy thousand marchers from Kingwilliamstown to nearby Bisho, the Ciskei capital; but the Ciskei police opened fire and routed them, killing twenty-eight. Mandela, who had consented to the project with reluctance, then called a halt to mass action and reprimanded Kasrils.44

  By that time, South Africa verged on anarchy. As bloodshed mounted, the economy slumped, Western governments pressured all parties to cooperate in finding a peaceful solution, and de Klerk and Mandela both came to the conclusion that it was essential to get the negotiations back on track. The decline in their personal relationship made that difficult, but Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer, the government’s new principal negotiator, had been meeting quietly throughout the crisis and persuaded the two leaders to talk with each other. On September 26, when they met, Mandela and de Klerk signed a Record of Understanding that incorporated Mandela’s demands. The hostels would be fenced, IFP members would be prohibited from publicly carrying axes, knobkerries, sharpened metal sticks, and spears (which they called their traditional weapons), and the remaining ANC prisoners (including convicted criminals) would be released. Martin Meredith, a biographer of Mandela, believes that this was the moment when the government lost control of the transition process and Mandela gained a psychological ascendancy over de Klerk that he never lost.45 Although de Klerk endorsed that Record of Understanding, he still hoped to get a white veto in the constitution, but Mandela made it clear that that was not possible. It was Joe Slovo who paved the way to a solution of the problem of satisfying the National party without sacrificing the long-term interests of the ANC. Realizing that an ANC-dominated regime would not be able to govern effectively without the cooperation of Whites, he suggested in an article in the fall 1992 issue of the African Communist that the constitution should contain “sunset clauses.” After heated debates, the ANC executive committee agreed that the interim constitution should honor the existing contracts of civil servants, judges, police, and military personnel, and provide for a period of compulsory power-sharing in the cabinet.46

  By the time the government and the ANC resumed negotiations, the government’s authority had eroded. In his frequent foreign travels, Mandela had clearly won the battle for external support. At home, the white right was gaining on the National party in the polls and several cabinet ministers had resigned. Moreover, the Goldstone commission’s latest report said that it had uncovered a secret operation set up in 1991 by the Department of Military Intelligence to discredit the ANC, and Lieutenant-General Pierre Steyn, the army chief of staff, had discovered evidence of military intelligence involvement in train massacres, assassinations, and gun smuggling.47 Negotiations between the two major parties went well enough for a new Multiparty Forum to be convened on April 1,1993. This body included all the major political organizations in the country except the IFP and the Conservative party, which continued to oppose the process. Throughout its sessions, there was ferocious fighting among Africans in KwaZulu, Natal, and the Johannesburg area. Buthelezi threatened civil war if his demands were not met and joined the white right to form a Freedom Alliance to struggle for a federal constitution. The AWB, trying desperately to derail the proceedings, was responsible for two conspicuous events. First, on April 10, an AWB member shot and killed Chris Hani, the popular and able young general secretary of the Communist party, outside his home in a Johannesburg suburb. Mandela stopped that event from triggering riots serious enough to destroy the peace process by making a dignified appeal for calm on national television. He pointed out that the assassin was a Polish immigrant and the eyewitness who made the report that led to his arrest was an Afrikaner woman. In that crisis it was Mandela, not de Klerk, who had shown himself to be the real leader of South Africa.48 The second episode was bizarre. On June 25, hundreds of AWB men, led by Eugene TerreBlanche, drove an armored car through the glass windows of the World Trade Centre while the Multiparty Forum was in session. They shouted abuse at the delegates, assaulted them, occupied their seats, and urinated on the floor.49

  In spite of those distractions, the Multiparty Forum delegates toiled slowly but surely to create the interim constitution. Delegates and advisers of the small Democratic party—the party led by well-educated liberal white professionals—played a major part in the drafting process. On June 3, 1993, the Forum set a date—April 27, 1994—for the election of the new legislature. On November 17, de Klerk reluctantly yielded to Mandela yet another time and consented that decisions in the cabinet would not require a special majority; the next day a plenary session approved the interim constitution. In December the old white-dominated South African parliament passed the necessary legislation to ratify the document, thus providing legal continuity between the old regime and the new. Parliament also created a multiparty Transitional Executive Council, which became the de facto government of South Africa until the election, and an Independent Electoral Commission, which was responsible for organizing the election.50

  In his autobiography, de Klerk states that in his closi
ng speech to the Multiparty Forum he said, “We have shown that it was possible for people with widely differing views and beliefs to reach basic and sound agreements through compromise, through reasoned debate and through negotiation. I added that the transitional constitution was the distillation of the dreams of generations of disenfranchised South Africans. It offered a reasonable assurance of continuing security for those who traditionally had had the vote. ... It satisfied all of us sufficiently to meet our most pressing concerns and hopes.”51

  The ANC was delighted with the outcome. Its major concessions—the sunset clauses—would gain the cooperation of Whites during a transitional period, but their effects would be only temporary. In the long run, the ANC expected to have unfettered legal power to implement its program. Slovo called it “a famous victory,” as indeed it was.52 It was also a vindication of Mandela’s vision and persistence in concentrating on the negotiation process and ignoring the cries of ANC hotheads for the continuation of an armed struggle that was unlikely to achieve victory in the foreseeable future.

  The Interim Constitution

  Under the terms of the interim constitution, the legislature it created was to enact a final constitution in 1996.53 However, the interim document included a set of basic constitutional principles and made them binding, on the new legislature. It therefore became a precedent that the final constitution would follow in most respects. The document was long and detailed, filling 222 printed pages that were complex enough to be unintelligible to most South Africans. It was a liberal democratic constitution, including ideas borrowed from western Europe and the United States, modified by South African experience. The entire constitution was rigid: amendments required a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of both houses of parliament. A Constitutional Court was to judge the constitutionality of laws and executive actions. South Africa was divided into nine provinces, which incorporated the former Homelands as well as the four former provinces (map 10). Although the powers of the provinces were considerable, they stopped short of federalism as it exists in the United States.

  The document contained several peculiar features. First, there was an elaborate Bill of Rights, including economic rights as well as the classic civil and political rights; but many of the economic rights could not possibly be enforced at law, as in a clause that gave children the right to security, rudimentary nutrition, and basic health services. Second, as a result of Slovo’s initiative, civil servants, judges, police, and military personnel could hold their jobs until they reached retirement age, and there was a form of compulsory power-sharing until 1999, when the election was to be held under the final constitution. A minority party that won 20 percent of the vote could designate a deputy president, and parties that won 5 percent of the vote were entitled to cabinet seats. Third, party bosses acquired exceptional powers. Under a list system of proportional representation, they prepared the list of candidates for their party. If members of parliament resigned from their party or were dismissed by it, they lost their seats, which were automatically filled by the next persons on the party list. Fourth, “traditional authorities” (chiefs) were empowered to apply customary African law in their communities, even though customary law was often in conflict with the Bill of Rights; for example, it subordinated women to male control, whereas the Bill of Rights guaranteed women equality with men. Fifth, in a provision not equaled anywhere else in the world, there were no fewer than eleven official languages: English, Afrikaans, and nine African languages, including isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sesotho. In practice, English was already becoming the principal language of business and administration. Finally, several sections of the interim constitution, including those dealing with human rights, land restitution, customary law, and the powers of the provinces, were ambiguous and would need to be fleshed out by political action or resolved by the Constitutional Court.

  10. South Africa’s postapartheid provinces

  The Election of 1994

  Between the completion of the interim constitution on November 18, 1993, and the election in late April 1994, South Africa continued to teeter on the brink of civil war. The National party and the ANC, which had brokered the constitution, and the other political parties that had been involved in the negotiations and had endorsed the document were committed to taking part in the election; but on February 12, the deadline for registering to participate, the Conservative party, the IFP, the ruling parties in the Ciskei and Bophuthatswana, the PAC, and the radical Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) failed to do so. The PAC and AZAPO still favored the armed struggle and believed that the ANC had given too much to the Whites; but although they made a few murderous attacks on Whites, such as when the PAC’S military wing fired on the congregation in a church in a Cape Town suburb, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-six, neither of them had enough resources or members to threaten the peace process. The Ciskei and Bophuthatswana leaders wanted to hold on to the powers they had acquired under apartheid, but unlike KwaZulu, they were pawns of the South African government and were unpopular with their own people.

  The serious challenges to the peace process came from the IFP and the white right. The IFP resented its failure to succeed in the negotiations and demanded that KwaZulu should be virtually independent. It probably had the support of a majority of the Zulu people who, in all, amounted to 22 percent of the population of South Africa. For several years it had been acquiring funds, arms, and military training from rogue elements in the South African government. The white right denounced de Klerk as a traitor. The Conservative party and several more extreme parties coalesced into a Volksfront led by Constand Viljoen, a former head of the South African army, who would play a vital role in the events leading up to the election. Like his colleagues, Viljoen found it difficult to abandon his engrained racist assumptions, feared that the ANC would wreck the country, and was furious with de Klerk and his colleagues for negotiating away white supremacy. The Volksfront was formidable because its members were accustomed to military discipline, owned modern firearms, and permeated the senior ranks of the army, the police, and the bureaucracy. In October 1993, moreover, the Volksfront joined in an unlikely alliance with the IFP and the governments of the Ciskei and Bophuthatswana. They demanded that South Africa should be a loose confederation of sovereign states, including the Homelands and a Volkstaat for Afrikaners. Violence between the ANC and IFP rose to unprecedented levels on the Witwatersrand and in KwaZulu and Natal, while far right Whites broadcast racist propaganda from an illegal radio station and bombed ANC offices.54

  Realizing that it would be disastrous if any substantial organization refused to take part in the election, both Mandela and de Klerk tried hard to win over the standouts. Ever since he left prison in February 1990, Mandela had repeatedly tried to befriend Buthelezi and persuade him to cooperate in founding a nonracial, united South Africa. Moreover, in August 1993, soon after the creation of the Volksfront, Mandela had made contact with Viljoen and other senior generals, and by the end of 1993 ne and Mbeki had succeeded in gaining Viljoen’s respect by showing that they had sympathy for Afrikaners and understood their fears for the future. On February 16, as the crisis deepened, Mandela announced a series of concessions. There would be wider powers for the provinces and more protection for both Zulu and Afrikaans culture; KwaZulu would be joined to Natal province with the name KwaZulu/Natal; and members of the new parliament who wanted a Volkstaat would be able to elect a council to explore that possibility. Since Buthelezi still did not yield, Mandela went to Durban on March 1 to meet him and make an impassioned speech for peace: “I will go down on my knees,” he said, “to beg those who want to drag our country into bloodshed and to persuade them not to do so.”55 De Klerk, too, held a series of meetings with Buthelezi and the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelethini, but to no avail.56 Buthelezi still refused to participate in the election; but Viljoen decided to keep the election option open by announcing the formation of a new party—the Freedom Front party—and registering it just before mid
night on March 4, the extended deadline set by the Independent Electoral Commission.57

  A week later, the opposition from the right and its associated Homelands collapsed. Lucas Mangope, the dictator of Bophuthatswana, insisted that his Homeland should maintain the “independence” it had been given by the apartheid regime and banned the ANC from campaigning there. But the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the territory, including most of the civil servants and many members of the security forces, resented Mangope’s autocratic leadership and wished to be part of the new South Africa. When they rose in rebellion, Mangope appealed to the Volksfront for help, and Viljoen mobilized a private army of four thousand men, telling the AWB leaders that he did not want them to participate. On March 11, however, a ragtag group of AWB men drove their cars to Mmabatho, the capital of Bophuthatswana, shooting randomly at African men, women, and children in the streets. The local army then rebelled and forced the raiders to retreat ignominiously. Three AWB men, who had been shooting through the window of their Mercedes, were stopped by gunfire and a Bophuthatswana policeman shot them to death in full view of television cameras. The South African government then assumed direct control of the territory and Mandela was wildly applauded at a mass rally in Mmabatho. Soon afterward, the equally unpopular Ciskei government also surrendered its independence, in the face of striking civil servants and looming mutiny in the police and army. Those events thoroughly discredited the Volksfront and its allies. Viljoen, supported by a substantial section of the Conservative party leadership, took the final step toward participation in the election by registering the names of his Freedom Front candidates, which left the IFP and a greatly weakened Conservative party as the only significant holdouts. The Conservative party could then be ignored, but not the IFP, which controlled a large territory and millions of potential voters.58