Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  'It's tough,' said Bronkhorst, whose swarthy features and black grizzled hair suggested an African strain had entered his bloodline in the distant past. 'There are no luxuries. You have to be self-sufficient, but if you want to hear a hyena at night you have to make some sacrifices. We're not European any more, we are African.'

  As they sat on the stoep with their two small children, with the sun going down, that did not seem an exaggeration. The Bronkhorsts genuinely appeared part of their landscape. For this reconciliation they had to thank a bald-headed chain-smoking career politician, Frederik Willem De Klerk, the last of the Afrikaner patriarchal leaders. February 2nd 1990, the day that De Klerk stood up in parliament in Cape Town and announced the unbanning of the liberation movements and the release of Mandela, has been the subject of more conjecture and celebration than just about any other date in South African history.

  With historical hindsight it is easy - and indeed increasingly in vogue as the years pass - to play down the significance of De Klerk's decision, on the lines that it was the inevitable step for him to take. Ever since the townships erupted in the mid Eighties, white rule lurched from crisis to crisis: international pressure mounted; the economy shrank amid disinvestment and sanctions; logically something in Pretoria had to give if South Africa and the Afrikaner were not to slither into the abyss of civil war. Then, according to the glib version of events, in the nick of time world politics intervened: the collapse of world Communism removed the 'rooi gevaar' (red peril) which had sent shivers through many an Afrikaner nursery over the years, and thus the way was clear to reform.

  De Klerk himself has always stressed that unbanning the ANC was a strictly logical step. He had had no blinding flash of light, he explained time and again to interviewers keen to profile the iconoclastic Boer. Falling back on his training as a lawyer he had weighed up the situation at his holiday home at Hermanus on the coast. He had balanced the conflicting imperatives of leading the volk and realized that, although they could fight on, he had no alternative if he really was both to safeguard their interests and to ensure their survival.

  And yet, however obvious that may seem now, at the time it was far from clear-cut. While it was traditional for the opening address of a new session to sketch out the coming year's policy, all too often over the years since taking office in 1948 the Nationalists had used the occasion to tighten up rather than reform. After his inauguration as state president in November 1989 De Klerk had belied his conservative reputation by repealing some of the pettier and more absurd apartheid laws. The authorities had even given tacit approval to an anti-apartheid demonstration outside the parliament planned for the same day as his address. But few dared to hope that De Klerk would take the decisive steps avoided by his predecessor, P.W. Botha.

  So secretive was De Klerk about his intentions that he had not even briefed his wife, as he told me in 2010 on the 20th anniversary. The first inkling she had that anything was up was when he stood on the steps outside parliament and said to her “After today South Africa will never be the same again.” On the eve of the speech Western diplomats cautioned the foreign press against expecting too much. It is easy to understand their caution. Although the security forces had by the late Eighties lost control of many of the townships, the ANC was years from being able to march into Pretoria. The party's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, (MK) had barely chipped the apartheid edifice. The repression of township unrest was costly in money and lives, but the security forces felt under no real threat.

  De Klerk bridled when he felt history was being written without recognition of his role and, at a press conference in October 1998, he said, 'The reality is that it was we ourselves who abolished apartheid, not primarily because we were forced to do so, but because we came to the realization that it was wrong and could not bring justice to all our people.' Most black South Africans would dispute that he was driven by a desire for justice, but it is hard to challenge the logic of his opening claim. He told me in 2010 that he had had no last minute doubts. “I believed I was doing the right thing. It was a rational decision. I thought it through. There was nothing opportunistic.” Even if MK had drastically stepped up its offensive, it was far from clear whether the Nationalists would have flinched. The Afrikaners, like the Serbs, take pride in wrapping themselves in the past.

  I lost count of the number of Afrikaner homes, which displayed a plaque with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s testimonial to their doughty ethos:

  Take a community of Dutchmen of the type who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix them with a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Then finally put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament realism and an ardent consuming patriotism.

  By 1990 many Afrikaners had long since been urbanized. More than a million trooped into work every day in the civil service or public utilities before returning to their comfortable bungalows, many with swimming pools and maids. Although some seemed twenty years behind the prevailing fashion in the West, with safari suits, A-line skirts and even beehive hair-dos not out of place, they bore little relation to the hardy caricatures of Conan Doyle.

  And yet tradition still ran deep in Afrikaner veins. For many it was a point of principle that the more the outside world criticized South Africa and lectured them on the need for reform, the more obdurate they would be. De Klerk, or F.W. as he was widely known, was steeped in such thinking.

  In nature and nurture De Klerk was every inch the blue-blooded Afrikaner Nationalist. His brother Wimpie, a reformist commentator, later mused that F.W. was 'genetically predetermined to become a politician’. 1 Their grandfather, Willem De Klerk, a dominee (priest in the Dutch Reformed Church), was a friend of Paul Kruger, the Boer War leader, and played a leading role in forming the National Party in the Twenties. F.W.'s father, Jan De Klerk, was a Nationalist cabinet minister for fifteen years, and his aunt, Susan, was married to Hans Strijdom,

  'The Lion of the North', South Africa's prime minister from 1954 to 1958.

  The family pulpit reinforced F.W.'s orthodox strait-jacket. He was a 'Dopper', a member of the strictest branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. Even if he had over the years displayed any liberal tendencies, the chances are they would not have lasted long over the breakfast table. Marike, his wife, who was his university sweetheart, made no secret of her strait-laced conservatism. Long after Mandela took office she was photo graphed in his presence, a picture of prim disapprovaL

  For much of F.W.'s political career Marike's views appeared to hold sway. He was known as a conservative in the turbulent and repressive Eighties. In 1985 he was reported to have been against the abolition of the Immorality Act, which prohibited sex across the colour line, one of the shabbiest of apartheid's phalanx of laws. He was seen as the most conservative of the three candidates who vied for the party leadership in 1989 when his predecessor, P.W. Botha, had a stroke.

  Such was the track record of the man who revolutionized South African politics. Seven years after his fateful address, he recalled in a political speech made in January 1997 the heart ache his decision had caused. 'The decision to surrender the right to national sovereignty is certainly one of the most painful that any leader can ever be asked to take. Most nations are prepared to risk total war and catastrophe rather than surrender this right. Yet this was the decision that we had to take. We had to accept the necessity of giving up on the ideal on which we have been nurtured and the dream for which so many generations of our forefathers had struggled and for which so many of our people had died.'

  F.W. set a precedent for Afrikaner Nationalists. His predecessors had either died in office or resigned in the wake of scandal or a party coup. He, however, effectively negotiated himself
from power, even if he did not mean to do so at the time. It was a turning point for South Africa and indeed the entire continent. It was no wonder that commentators searching for an explanation speculated lovingly, albeit it seems mistakenly, that he had had a Damascene conversion – although he disputes this idea. He told me in 2010 that by the mid-80s he had reached the “final conclusion” that apartheid was “unjust to the majority of the population.” For the first time since the days of the Boer War leaders who made peace with the British at the turn of the century, a volksleier (leader of the people) had opted to give ground in order to survive. The Afrikaners and their last leader now had to prove they could unhitch their wagons and adapt to the new order.

  *

  Lost in the loneliness of the high veld, the vast plateau 6,000 feet above sea level which covers much of South Africa's interior, the town of Koppies is an improbable place to go in search of insights into the mind of De Klerk, let alone optimism about the likelihood of the Afrikaner Nationalist adapting to the new order. One hundred miles south-west of Johannesburg, Koppies is the quintessential conservative dorp (small town) in the heart of the platteland (flatland), a repository of the bleakest side of the Afrikaner soul.

  With its trim green lawns the single street is as pristinely starched as the surrounding landscape, which stretches for mile after mile across open fields. The dried milk factory, once the main source of employment, has long since closed. When the sun goes down, the Hotel Friesland, a down-at-heel bungalow with a dingy bar, fills with farmers downing brandy and Coke. Fearful of change and of the future, the end of apartheid left the 2,000 white residents on the brink of despair. Only on Sundays does the town come to life. The Dutch Reformed church, an angular high-pointed edifice as totalitarian in structure as in ethos, fills with congregants in suits and patterned dresses. As soon as the service is over, they hurry home.

  Across the railway track its twin town, the satellite township, is the shambolic home to ten times as many blacks. KwaKwatsi is just one mile down a dirt road, but for the white residents it was an unthinkable journey before April 1994. There was a hang-dog subservience to anyone over forty in KwaKwatsi that leaves no doubt they had had to learn to know their place. On Sunday afternoons hundreds of people cram into the com munity centre for choral competitions. The close harmony resounds through the shacks and matchbox township houses, and, on the few occasions I heard it, seemed all the more striking and wonderful in the depressing surroundings.

  Koppies' plight is mirrored a hundred times over in the South African outback. Here, more than anywhere, I found myself face to face with the extraordinary conundrum of conservative Afrikanerdom, which has perplexed and infuriated outsiders for generations. How can such hospitable and God-fearing people be racist to the core?

  I visited Koppies regularly to take the pulse of the interior.

  For my first few visits I stayed at the Hotel Friesland, where the elderly proprietress epitomized the apparent paradox. In the winter she would give me a hot-water bottle and cook homely fare. In the summer she would serve home-made fruit juice and chatter about her late husband. Her down-to-earth manner was refreshing after the smug double-talk of many suburbanites and British expatriates in South African cities who have merely learned how to mask their racism in sugary platitudes. It is estimated that in the 1987 all-white election, English-speakers contributed over 40 per cent of the Nationalists' votes. And yet the blunt approach of the platte/and Afrikaner was racism at its most unrefined. After welcoming me fondly and asking after my family, in the same breath the proprietress of the Friesland would talk of the need to keep the 'smelly farm kaffirs on the stoep'.

  A year later I had to find alternative accommodation after she was telephoned one day from London by an outraged reader of one of my dispatches. I had described her apartheid house rules, and this so incensed one of her fellow countrymen who were on holiday in Britain that he rang international directory enquiries for her number and vented a tirade of abuse through the ether. Thereafter I was one of 'them' and my access to her clientele and indeed her lodgings was at an end. My link with Koppies might have waned had I not already formed a bond with the local store-owner, whom I came to think of as the De Klerk of Koppies.

  Chari Van der Merwe was of De Klerk's generation and he shared his politics. He was a rare Afrikaner Nationalist in a town dominated by ultra-right-wingers who were opposed to and terrified of- the slightest reform. As the town mayor in the last days of white rule he had to be part diplomat and part dictator. His agonized stop-start relationship with the people of KwaKwatsi and his delicate dealings with his own tribe neatly mirrored De Klerk's attempts to come to terms with the 'new' South Africa.

  Our first encounter was not promising. It was a bitterly cold morning in the winter before the election, and relations between Koppies and KwaKwatsi had reached a new low. The previous morning at 4.30 a.m. on a pre-arranged signal the white residents had swung into action in their bid to keep the township and the 'new' South Africa at bay. Frustrated by months of black boycotts of their shops they had decided to take the fight to the other side and had barricaded the township.

  One unit took over the water-tower with its commanding view of the terrain. Another manned a side road, a third the main road and a fourth patrolled the surrounding fields. Within half an hour more than a hundred whites were in position, brandishing shotguns, side-arms and rawhide whips. Shots were fired at any black that had the 'impudence' to leave his home.

  Van der Merwe was the spokesman for the 'Action Committee'. He had been delegated that unpopular task as he was the most moderate committee member and also the only one with a good grasp of English. He stared at me suspiciously across a trestle table at the back of the hardware store. Two young boys in the doorway waved the standard of the nineteenth century Orange Free State Republic. Bakkies screeched to a halt outside, disgorging khaki-dad youths looking for instructions and dollops of hot soup from the womenfolk.

  My faltering Afrikaans greetings had done little to break the ice. Van der Merwe conferred with his colleagues before agreeing to talk. It was at least to my advantage that I was a genuine rooinek and not an English-speaking white South African, the devil incarnate for the right wing. Van der Merwe picked his words with the precision of a lawyer, pausing between sentences to check his drift na. We are not racist. We are just trying to stand up for our rights . . . We too have rights . . . How can you build an economy when you are dealing with endless strikes? Take my shop. For three months last year a group of blacks squatted on the corner outside and intimidated other blacks from coming in. My revenue went down 85 per cent and I am not the only one to suffer. We had to take a stand.'

  From the other side of the barricades the Afrikaners' angst looked more like bloody-minded bigotry. KwaKwatsi's indignant residents were brimming with tales of how the doctor refused to serve them and how a black traffic policeman had been thrown out of the Hotel Friesland. I drove back to Johannesburg that night wearily convinced that Koppies was doomed to long years of confrontation.

  Successive trips reinforced my pessimism until, more than a year later, several months after the April 1994 election; it became clear that just as no one had expected De Klerk to open the floodgates of reform, so Koppies was defying its type cast. Once again I interviewed Van der Merwe in his store but this time he wore a broad smile. The town's white council had just held its first joint meeting with the township council, in accordance with the constitution, and to his surprise but delight he had been asked by his new black colleagues to stay in charge.

  'Strange to say things have normalized. Last Christmas (the last under white rule) I sent out a letter to all the white residents assuring them that it would all be all right. The right-wingers didn't like this and called for me to resign. I said that I would stand against them and their bluff was called. We've brought in five black councillors. The blacks, you see, nominated me and we thought if those guys are being so generous we will allow one of them to chair th
e management committee.'

  It was a very De Klerkian tale. Vander Merwe's Christmas ultimatum to the local farmers echoed South Africa's whites only referendum in February 1992 when De Klerk took on and trounced the right wing on the issue of whether to push ahead with reform. After the dramas of the Action Committee the year before, it seemed miraculous that Koppies should have reached any accommodation with KwaKwatsi.

  The spirit of 'Afrikaner contra mundum' has always been offset by a desire to be liked in the outside world, and especially Europe. One of the major frustrations for fervent Nationalists was that the rest of the world 'did not understand' what they were trying to achieve. Vander Merwe seemed quietly pleased to have surprised me. It was as if he knew I had expected to hear tales of 'Koppies on the brink' and instead it, or rather he, Vander Merwe, had done the 'right thing' and embraced reform.

  But the language he used to describe those landmark moments laid bare the pain it had cost him, and also the obstacles, which would continue to hamper relations between the two communities. He clearly felt he had done the township a huge favour by bringing 'them' in, blind to the reality that they were fellow citizens of South Africa and more pressingly that the law now dictated that the worlds of town and township should coalesce. He was still far from treating his new colleagues as equals. He closed with a revealing display of bewilderment about Koppies' new residents.

  'The town swimming pool is now open to everyone but "they" are not using it. The church is open but "they" are not using it . . . And "they" are expanding at such a rate you do not know where they are coming from. A youth recently stood on my stoep and said we want power now. I said "Be realistic. Would I give my car keys to my son without teaching him how to drive ...?"