‘The liberation struggle, which has been fought for eight decades in our country, was underpinned by deep thought and searching for answers to questions about the nature of our society. The so-called “national question” is one which has constantly occupied the liberation movement. How are the interests of the different national groups to be accommodated within non-racial unity? And it is important, before we start this discussion on Afrikaner interests, to bear in mind that the national question concerns not only Afrikaners. If one asks about the place of a language group or culture in our shared land, then one must at the same time also consider the interests of others.’
Mandela stressed that the future of Afrikaans ‘cannot be equated with racism. At the same time there is a minority of people who do indeed exploit the question for racist purposes. There is a minority that uses the pretext of concern for Afrikaans to try to protect existing privileges by standing in the way of changes, which are in the interest of the nation as a whole.
‘Those who are genuinely concerned about Afrikaans should speak out against such an approach and those who adopt it. In so doing you will also help to ensure that the majority of your compatriots do not suspect a hidden agenda whenever the question of Afrikaans is raised.’ Conciliatory to the end, Mandela exhorted the Afrikaners to ‘conduct this discussion in a positive spirit! We are here to listen to each other and to seek solutions to any problems that may exist.’28
When Mandela signed the Accord on Afrikaner Self-Determination between the Freedom Front, the ANC and the National Party in April 1994, the Accord had established the idea of a volkstaat and the clouds of civil war had cleared.
On the day of Mandela’s election as president he broke from the ceremonial procession as he entered the National Assembly, to shake hands with Viljoen, now a member of Parliament. Viljoen recounts how, after the inauguration, Mandela told him: ‘I have a great desire to be a president not only of the ANC but to be a president of everybody, and I wish to give you free access to my office. If you have anything for the Afrikaner you would like to come and discuss, you can just ask.’
‘And believe me,’ Viljoen says, ‘it never took more than two days to see the president if there was something I wanted to discuss.’29
The continued existence of a Volkstaat Council made its way into the new constitution as a transitional institution.30 There was also agreement on the constitutional recognition of rights of voluntary communities as opposed to the group rights of apartheid. This in turn created a basis for voluntary cultural councils in each sphere of government and the establishment of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (also known as the CRL Commission), with powers to investigate complaints and resolve conflicts.31
In reality, however, the Volkstaat Council achieved little of substance. Its funding dried up in 1999, its founding legislation was repealed in 2001 and its reports went to the CRL Commission. The idea that Afrikaner concerns needed either a separate territory or a dedicated political party had lost the hold it once had.32
The Volkstaat Council had provided a forum, an ark in which a beleaguered people could find shelter, albeit from a storm that existed more in their imagination than in reality. The truth was that the turbulent waters had been calmed. The shift of political power played a part, as did reconciliation, in particular Mandela’s decision to devote a lot of his energies to an engagement with Afrikaner society. He did this knowing the history of antipathy towards the Afrikaners. ‘Feelings become particularly strong when our people think of the Afrikaner, the group that dominates the political institutions of the country, and sober discussion becomes difficult.’33
He took as his starting point the view that it was a mistake to ‘treat him [the Afrikaner] as a homogenous group with a uniform and unalterable attitude on race matters, holding that no useful purpose will be served by trying to reason with him’.34
He went steadfastly on, speaking to those Afrikaners whom he felt could be part of his project to build a stable democracy. At first this was puzzling, especially to some of the Afrikaners themselves. Beset by guilt, they naturally expected a hostile and vengeful reaction from Mandela and the black people he led. When the reverse happened, there was surprise and bafflement and – according to well-known poet and academic Antjie Krog – much more.35 In Krog’s interaction with members of the Afrikaner community during her stint as a radio reporter covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she found that Afrikaners interpreted African people’s readiness to forgive as weakness and inferiority. If half of what African people had endured had been visited on Afrikaners, they reasoned, the country would be steeped in blood.
In July 1995, the London-based journal South African Times asked various people what their birthday wishes would be for Mandela, basing their answers on what they imagined Mandela would want. In response, satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys asked, ‘What would Mandela want? A long life? Yes, yes, yes. A happy life? With all our hearts. A normal life? How? He doesn’t have to prove anything. Now, dangerously, he can tease and challenge, jeopardising his position as a rare and endangered species, in order to get across his point of view. It is so obvious what that is. The man is committed to forgive and reconciliate. The man embodies the best in all religions. Love your neighbour, even though he locked you up for twenty-seven years!’36
‘It was Mandela,’ Viljoen later recalled, like someone finally putting together the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. ‘Mandela mesmerised the Afrikaners. He was so acceptable. He created such a big expectation towards a real solution in South Africa that even the Afrikaner people accepted the idea.’37
* * *
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has become as symbolic of the new South Africa as apartheid had been of the old regime, coming second only to the new constitution. To the outside world, it has been a vivid demonstration of South Africa’s courageous mission to deepen democracy.
From its inception, the commission probed human rights violations and evolved mechanisms for those who owned up to their crimes. The naked truth about the apartheid regime’s hit squads and third-force violence had been brought into the public domain by the work of courageous journalists, most notably of the Vrye Weekblad and the Weekly Mail. As the hearings were conducted under the unwavering gaze of cameras, the full horror that had been perpetrated in support of apartheid was brought into the living rooms of a public that no longer had the luxury of pleading ignorance. The process also dealt with the gross human rights violations perpetrated in the pursuit of the liberation struggle. The TRC, then, became an equal-opportunity offender in the eyes of those brought before it, who usually regarded their actions through the prism of justifiable trespass. Throughout the country, there were debates about whether the violations committed by freedom fighters could ever be deemed coterminous with state violence under apartheid.
Without a leader of Mandela’s stature and moral standing, the TRC could not have done its work. He had to deal with arguments about the TRC at each stage: during the negotiations over the founding legislation, in the appointment of the commission, during the hearings and when the report was eventually published.
For instance, taking advantage of Mandela’s offer of the ‘open door’, Constand Viljoen had initially tried, albeit to no avail, to persuade Mandela against the TRC, saying it would have negative rather than positive consequences.38 Although later convinced of the merits of participating in the TRC, Viljoen had to consider the vulnerability of his supporters if the cut-off date for political offenders qualifying for amnesty remained at midnight on 6 December 1993, the date on which the TEC was established. He enlisted the help of the TRC’s Vice Chairman Alex Boraine to urge Mandela to move the deadline to 10 May 1994 so that he and his supporters could apply for amnesty for involvement in the plans to disrupt the election by force. Supported by De Klerk, Mandela resisted Viljoen. However, the retired general’s persistenc
e paid off as he was finally able to convince Mandela to support an extension of the date for the submission of amnesty applications from December 1993 to the date of Mandela’s inauguration in 1994.
It was not a decision Mandela was comfortable with: ‘We have been negotiating … since 1990, and people who committed offences after the start of negotiations are to me not at all entitled to consideration.’ Nevertheless, he acknowledged Viljoen’s role, saying, ‘We have been able to avoid a Bosnia situation because of the cooperation of leaders from a wide range of political affiliations … I could not continue to ignore his persistent appeals to me.’39
Viljoen later appeared before the TRC and applied for amnesty for his plans to disrupt the elections by force.
Niël Barnard, the former head of the National Intelligence Service who had started secret talks with Mandela in prison at P. W. Botha’s behest, also tried to prevail on Mandela. He arranged a meeting with Mandela and Johan van der Merwe, the head of the police, at a safe house. The two security officials tried to argue that the whole process would be divisive and would not yield any permanent benefit. Hearing them out, Mandela said he understood their arguments but disagreed with them. The past had to be opened up to inform people what had happened. It was the only way to start healing the country’s wounds.40
It was not going to be easy.
When P. W. Botha was summoned to appear before the TRC, in October 1997, he refused, creating a dilemma for Mandela.
In an interview with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Mandela pointed out that it was a ‘mistake to think that this transformation just took place without any hassle. We were faced with a situation of civil war here where the right wing decided to stop the election by violence. We had to negotiate, to use people who were influential, who could stop that. I am not going to say any particular individual assisted us in that regard. But we had to use people who were our mortal enemies in order to defuse that. And we have to think about that when problems arise.
‘I have spoken to P. W. Botha twice on this question about the TRC. I’ve spoken to all his children. I have briefed the South African Defence Force, the South African Police Services, the Dutch Reformed Church and others, because I know a little more than you do as to what is happening below the surface.
‘And it’s a serious mistake to look at matters from the point of view of what you see and which everybody notices. There are issues, which one has to consider, which many people are unaware of. It is necessary to try and defuse this situation. But our determination to do so cannot go so far as to allow people to defy the law. I have done my bit and I can assure you that P. W. Botha is not above the law and I will never allow him to defy the TRC. And I have urged his family to help to prevent his humiliation. And if he continues along this line, then the law must take its course. There is no question about that at all.’41
To haul a person such as P. W. Botha, the last of the Afrikaner warrior generals, before a tribunal was quite an undertaking. But even though Mandela had sought Botha’s help to quieten the right-wingers, who were spoiling for a fight, he still held the rule of law to be paramount. The law was the law. He didn’t want to see the old man pilloried, but if it came to that, so be it. He therefore asked Barnard to help him persuade Botha. Barnard declined. Botha would refuse. Forcing him would only make a martyr of him.42 It’s possible that Barnard was correct or – perhaps more likely – simply didn’t want to tangle with Botha, who had become even more irascible with age. Mandela might have been a man of firm convictions, but he wasn’t rash. The last thing he wanted was a resuscitation of the ghost of Afrikaner insurgence. In the end, Botha never did appear before the TRC.
The seven-volume report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 1999, with some of the volumes running to hundreds of pages, was a painstaking – and often painful – record. Part of it sought ‘to provide an overview of the context in which conflict developed and gross violations of human rights occurred’. Volume two focused ‘on the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, and attempts to understand patterns of abuse, forms of gross violations of human rights, and authorisation of and accountability for them’.43
It had been as difficult to run the process as it had been to garner usable information. Despite these difficulties,
a vast corpus of documentation was collected … However, the sources of information, while rich, were not evenly distributed, presenting difficulties in the identification of organisations and individuals who became perpetrators of torture, killing and other gross violations. The amnesty applications received from former members of the South African Police (SAP) represent an invaluable source of new material. The Commission received many applications from serving or retired police officers, specifying their role in gross violations of human rights. Some of these cases, such as the death in detention of Mr Steve Biko, were well known both at home and abroad; others were unknown outside a very small circle of the perpetrators themselves. The information contained in amnesty applications revealed a deeper level of truth about the fate of a number of individual victims.44
Unsurprisingly, there were reservations and criticisms from all sides. Noting them, Mandela accepted the report, saying: ‘I had no hesitation in accepting the report of the TRC presented to me in October, with all its imperfections.
‘It was inevitable that a task of such magnitude, done in so short a time, and so early in a process that will still take many years to accomplish, would suffer various limitations. And indeed the report itself highlights many of these.
‘It was also inevitable, given the nature of the divisions that do still run through our society, and the freshness of the wounds still to be healed, that the judgements of such a body will jar with how some or others of us see matters.
‘As we anticipated, when the report was handed over in October, questions arose about an artificial even-handedness that seemed to place those fighting a just war alongside those who they opposed and who defended an inhuman system.
‘Further still, the practical consequences of the compromise that gave birth to the amnesty process as an instrument of peaceful transition are painful to many of the victims of human rights violations and their families.
‘Many who lost loved ones or who lived through terror that seemed incomprehensible in its cynical inhumanity will wonder at what seems to be the dismissal of the existence of a “third force”: the fact of the existence of a deliberate strategy and programme by the powers that be, as they then were, to foment violence among the oppressed, to arm and lead groups that sowed death and destruction before and especially after 1990 …
‘Questions have also been raised regarding the impartiality or otherwise of the Commission. And some have sought to find in the work of this body, a witch-hunt against a specific language group.
‘It is not my task to pronounce upon all these issues, and some of them may no doubt appear in a different light when the TRC gives a more complete account after the amnesty process is completed.
‘It will be for the national debate we are starting here today, to come to a resolution where that is possible.’45
Having acknowledged the problems, Mandela insisted on the need for a national recognition of what had happened in the past, and the concerted effort that would be needed to make the TRC’s recommendations a reality.
‘The success of reconciliation and nation building,’ he said, ‘will depend on all sectors of society recognising with the world, as did the TRC, that apartheid was a crime against humanity, whose vile deeds transcended our borders, and sowed the seeds of destruction whose harvest we continue to reap today.
‘About this, there can be no equivocation: for it is this recognition that lies at the very heart of the national pact that is our new constitution, of our new democracy and the culture of human rights that we are building together.
‘For all its limitations, the TRC has performed a monumental task in helping our nation towards this understanding.�
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Whatever its limitations and successes, the TRC provided an opportunity – in the full glare of domestic and world attention – to shine a spotlight on the unacknowledged crimes and suffering of the past.
But responses to the TRC remained widely divergent. A survey by the Human Sciences Research Council in December 1998 showed the polarisation. Among African people, 72 per cent thought the TRC was ‘a good thing for the country’, while the same percentage of white people thought it a bad thing.47
Some of the respondents to the survey – among them those who regarded the reluctant and forced cooperation of perpetrators, such as De Klerk and others in the National Party, as a gross betrayal – wanted to let bygones be bygones. For them, acknowledgement of complicity with – or benefit from – a system that was being exposed as anachronistic was hard to take. Not a few of them retreated into the argument that their having agreed to relinquish political power was adequate penance.
For some of the victims, however, reliving the horrific experiences reintroduced them to forgotten traumas. There was an expectation from the majority that – beyond reparations – the TRC process would exact from the beneficiaries of apartheid meaningful contributions towards redressing the historical wrongs through faster transformation.
Mandela was aware of these tensions, as he was alive to the fact that a sizeable section of the white community had gradually come to embrace the TRC process and its implications for the new constitutional dispensation. In his 1997 State of the Nation Address, Mandela acknowledged that the government was ‘conscious of the concerns that some Afrikaner people have regarding, in particular, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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