PW Botha said that he registered the point, but some neighbouring states were helping the ANC to launch terrorist actions into South Africa. He then complained about the ANC office in London. I said that, as the Prime Minister had told him when she had met him at Chequers, the office was permitted to operate in London, provided it did so within the law.
As in all my meetings with PW Botha, who never forgot that his mother had been interned by the British during the Anglo-Boer War, this one was conducted with the two of us alone in a small study in the Tuynhuys. His domed bald head and tinted glasses gave him an eerie appearance, accentuated by the fact that our meetings took place in semi-darkness, lit only by a small green lamp on his desk, conjuring up images of what it must have been like calling on the Führer in his bunker.
The ‘Groot Krokodil’ (Big Crocodile), as he was less than affectionately known by supporters and enemies alike, was prone to furious outbursts of temper that left many of his ministers frankly terrified of him. On 6 September 1966, the day his leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, had been assassinated, he had confronted Helen Suzman in parliament, ‘arms flailing and eyes bulging’, yelling at her that ‘you liberalists are responsible for this’. In a prior meeting with him, opposition leader Frederik van Zyl Slabbert had remarked that Chief Buthelezi wanted to be the ‘only bull in the kraal’, only for PW Botha to release the supposedly private tape recording of their meeting. Before each of my encounters with Botha, I made a silent vow that it was not going to be in his interests to release the transcripts of any of his conversations with me.
The deputy foreign minister, Kobus Meiring, invited me to meet a dozen young National Party MPs who, he assured me, were reform-minded. The result was a very interesting and encouraging encounter with Roelf Meyer, Sam de Beer, Leon Wessels, Renier Schoeman, David Graaff and others, most of whom were to serve in the government of FW de Klerk.
A meeting with Chris Heunis, the Minister for Constitutional Development – or rather the lack of it – had the opposite effect. His hopes of succeeding PW Botha had been destroyed by Denis Worrall, who had resigned from his post as the South African ambassador in London to run for parliament as an independent, challenging Heunis and very nearly defeating him in his Helderberg constituency in the 1987 elections. With a lugubrious walrus moustache, unmatchable pomposity and a visceral dislike of the British, Heunis warned that no interference by Mrs Thatcher in South Africa’s affairs would be tolerated.
As I drove each morning to the embassy in Cape Town along the magnificent Rhodes Drive, which bisects the campus of the University of Cape Town, I would encounter from time to time groups of students skirmishing with the riot police. The sympathies of the outraged motorists were by no means with the students. The courageous vice chancellor of the university, Dr Stuart Saunders, frequently was to be found standing in the middle of these disturbances.
The embassy itself, reflecting our shared history, was to be found in the government complex, immediately opposite parliament and the President’s office. This caused great annoyance to PW Botha, who sent me an envoy requesting us to move. In reply I inquired whether the South Africans had any intention of moving South Africa House from Trafalgar Square.
I made a pilgrimage to Stellenbosch to meet the undisputed leader of the Afrikaner business community and great philanthropist, Anton Rupert. The extraordinary business acumen of this self-made billionaire was equalled by his no less extraordinary modesty. We would have lunch with a minimum of fuss in the local restaurant, where he appeared to be positively revered. When I asked him if he could not use his influence with PW Botha to propel him in a more positive direction, he showed me an exchange of messages with the President in which he had made the same argument in the politest possible terms, only for Botha to take no notice whatsoever.
His English-speaking counterpart, Harry Oppenheimer, had served as an opposition member in the South African parliament, had supported Helen Suzman when she sat as the sole MP opposed to apartheid and had sought to set an example to other South African companies in terms of the reformist political stance of the Anglo American Corporation. That said, as he told me himself, he did not believe that he or Anglo American or the business community had any influence on PW Botha at all.
I sought to befriend two South Africans I greatly admired and who were to remain close friends of mine to the end of their lives: Helen Suzman and Van Zyl Slabbert. Helen Suzman and I were returning from our first lunch together when, as we entered the parliamentary precinct, an Afrikaner guard peered into the car. Recognising Helen and then me, he backed away. ‘Can’t you see the balloon coming out of his head? Conspiring with the enemy,’ Helen laughed.
The politics of the white community remained quite tribal. There was no direct relationship between Helen Suzman and the verligte Afrikaners, but some of them were starting to make speeches about the unworkability of various aspects of apartheid that sounded eerily like the speeches she had made many years before. In 1986, at the time of the repeal of the pass laws, a National Party MP, Albert Nothnagel, declared that she had been proved to have been right all along.
Frederik van Zyl Slabbert had been the charismatic leader of the Progressive Federal Party, and had infuriated Suzman by abruptly deciding to resign from parliament to pursue extra-parliamentary efforts to engage in serious discussions with the ANC. Together with Alex Boraine, Van Zyl Slabbert formed a think-tank, the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa), and his efforts culminated in the historic meeting between a group of mainly Afrikaner intellectuals and Thabo Mbeki and his colleagues in Dakar in June 1987. Van Zyl Slabbert was denounced for his pains by PW Botha as one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’. Helen Suzman had been angered by his decision to stand down from parliament, thereby damaging his party. Helping to achieve a reconciliation between the two of them was scarcely less challenging than persuading the government to start talking to the ANC.
In Johannesburg and Pretoria I met three other Afrikaners who were to become both friends and powerful allies. The first of these was Pieter de Lange, head of the Broederbond, the secret society that linked together the Afrikaner elite. For decades, this had been regarded by outsiders as exerting a sinister influence. It was true that the Broederbond was dedicated to the promotion of Afrikaner interests – above all, culture – and was one of the mainstays of the regime. Pieter de Lange, however, had circulated to the members of the society a remarkable discussion document in which he invited them to think the unthinkable. Suppose, it said, there was an African majority in parliament and in government one day: how then could Afrikaner interests be protected? Warning clearly of the impossibility of preserving the status quo, the document contained the striking phrase, ‘the greatest risk is not taking any risks’.
De Lange described a long discussion he had had with Thabo Mbeki at a conference in New York in 1986. ANC president Oliver Tambo also had been asking to see him. De Lange was scathing about Dr Andries Treurnicht and the Conservative Party (CP), whose members had been trying to paralyse any thinking about the future in the Broederbond. His view was that the Group Areas Act and the Separate Amenities Act would have to go. PW Botha thought exclusively in terms of Afrikaner interests; he would not allow Mandela to die in jail, but would go on insisting on an absolute renunciation of violence. De Lange’s conviction was that there would have to be a historic compromise between Afrikaner and black nationalism and that this would have to come sooner rather than later.
I said that it seemed to me that the one encouraging feature of the situation was the intensity of the debate within Afrikanerdom about the direction reform should take. Although not numerically strong, people like Hermann Giliomee, Willie Esterhuyse and FW de Klerk’s brother, Wimpie, represented an important fraction of the intellectual elite in a society which paid more homage to professors than we did in Britain!
There followed a meeting with the head of the Dutch Reformed Church, Professor Johan Heyns. I was to spend many hours with him at his
modest bungalow in a suburb of Pretoria. Professor Heyns had declared apartheid a heresy, thereby splitting his church and provoking the fury of the conservatives. He was to prove the most effective of allies in a series of tight corners over the next four years. He was assassinated in November 1994 by a right-wing gunman while playing cards with his granddaughter in the house where he had received me with such kindness.
The Bank of England had impressed upon me the high regard in which they held the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Gerhard de Kock. I found him pessimistic about South Africa’s economic prospects. He was predicting 2 per cent growth in the economy for 1987 and 1988 – not enough to keep pace with the increase in population. This weakness he saw as the result of PW Botha’s stop/go attitude to political reform. He was determined that South Africa must honour its debts. But the refusal of the Western banks to extend any further credit meant that the country was obliged to export capital to pay down its debts, rather than importing capital to fund its development.
When I arrived in South Africa, relations with the leaders of the UDF were strained because of the British government’s opposition to sanctions. It was obvious that greater efforts needed to be made by us to get much closer to the future leadership of the country. Some of the younger members of the embassy and consulates had good contacts in the townships. I encouraged them to give an over-riding priority to developing these. It was difficult and sometimes hazardous but very rewarding work, which they did to such effect that they became known as the ‘township attachés’.
It was not possible to send young members of the embassy into the townships, still less to visit them myself, as I aimed most weeks to do, without doing more to help the people living there. First Chris Patten and then Lynda Chalker, as the ministers in charge of overseas aid, allocated the relatively modest sums needed to enable us to support, eventually, over three hundred projects in Soweto, Mamelodi, Crossroads, Gugulethu and many of the other townships and squatter camps in the Cape and the Transvaal. These projects, amazingly, were controversial at the time, as it was argued by various anti-apartheid campaigners outside South Africa that this was merely ameliorating apartheid and, therefore, postponing the day of reckoning. This doctrine of ‘worse is better’ did not appeal to me. Above all, it did not appeal to people in the townships, who desperately needed help and support. Virtually all the projects we supported were run by determined opponents of the regime, and when their parties were unbanned we discovered what we knew already – that we had established contact with most of the internal leadership of the ANC and PAC.
I tried also to establish friendships with a number of ex-Robben Islanders who had served long sentences in prison with Mandela, including Neville Alexander, who made the film Robben Island Our University. Several of those who had been released belonged to the Africanist tradition, including Fikile Bam and Dikgang Moseneke, both of whom went on to distinguished legal careers in the post-apartheid era – Moseneke as Deputy Chief Justice. In Soweto, Dr Nthato Motlana continued to play a prominent role on behalf of the ANC, and I made regular visits to Albertina Sisulu. I also tried to show all the support I could for the Delmas treason trialists, Popo Molefe and Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota, by attending sessions of their trial, and was rewarded with their friendship when they eventually were released.
In Johannesburg, I made contact with Cyril Ramaphosa, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), at the time in the thick of a miners’ strike. Ramaphosa, a redoubtable negotiator, assured me that he had no intention of ‘doing a Scargill’ and destroying his own union (Arthur Scargill had led the British mineworkers to defeat in a year-long confrontation with the government of Margaret Thatcher in 1984–85). After he had extracted all the concessions he could, one week later the strike was settled.
As our purpose was to persuade the government to talk to the real black opposition leaders, we sought to use the embassy and consulates as a proving ground for this. A number of Robben Islanders became regular visitors to the embassy, as did a number of National Party MPs. We invited representatives of both groups to the embassy, without telling them who else might be there. This led at first to one or two difficult moments, but not for long, as they became accustomed to these encounters and found that there was plenty to discuss. For those who had been imprisoned at one time or another did want to tell those in or close to authority about their experiences, the effects on them and their families of the apartheid laws, including the still-segregated schools and residential areas, and their political demands. There were by now people in positions of real power and influence in Afrikaner society and on the fringes of government, or among its younger elements, who wanted to know whom in fact they were going to be dealing with. Some at least among them could hardly fail to be impressed by the qualities of those the regime had condemned to years of imprisonment for their political acts and views.
There followed a meeting with PW Botha’s chief henchman, the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, leader of the group of so-called securocrats – key ministers and senior defence, police and intelligence chiefs – surrounding the President. A former Chief of the SADF, Malan was the leading proponent of the theory of the ‘total onslaught’ against South Africa by the Soviet Union and its allies. Though careful not to give written orders to this effect, Malan was a great believer in ‘taking out’ enemies of the regime, internally through special force units, which had developed into assassination squads, and externally by whatever means were necessary. He had received from PW Botha our warning about cross-border raids, but contended that he had to defend South Africa against terrorist groups poised to cross the borders. I said that of course he would defend the borders, but the air strikes on neighbouring capitals that had put an end to the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group’s visit had not hit any ANC targets at all.
Malan claimed that, in Mozambique, Renamo were not getting help from the South African military. I said that, if that were so, they most certainly were getting help from others in South Africa. He expressed concern about the major Angolan offensive, involving the Cubans and Russians, being mounted against Unita leader Jonas Savimbi’s base at Jamba, in the southeast of the country. The Angolans had a vast amount of heavy equipment and air defence missiles supplied by the Russians, posing military problems for South Africa. I had little doubt that the very capable South African forces operating inside Angola, with their own air support, would stop the Angolan advance. But, clearly, the war there was becoming more costly for the South Africans.
September 1987
I had a first meeting with FW de Klerk, leader of the National Party in the Transvaal, and then Minister of National Education. De Klerk was reputed to be a very conservative figure, but I found him to be open, friendly and impressively self-confident. He knew, he said, of my involvement in the Rhodesia settlement. He wanted me to know that, if he had his way, South Africa would not make the same mistake the Rhodesians had. What was the mistake, I asked. ‘Leaving it far too late to negotiate with the real black leaders,’ was the reply.
The Separate Amenities Act, he said, would be repealed in due course. The Group Areas Act could not be repealed immediately, because of the concerns of poorer whites, who were disposed to vote for Treurnicht and his colleagues in the Conservative Party. As sports minister (1978–79) he had abolished apartheid in sport, only for the international sports sanctions to remain in place.
I made the journey to the Zulu capital, Ulundi, to meet Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Minister of Kwazulu. He had rejected the government’s offer of ‘independence’ for his homeland and insisted that he would not negotiate until Mandela was released. The ANC and Buthelezi’s party, Inkatha, were engaged in a bloody struggle for power and territory in Natal, with Inkatha predominant in the quasi-feudal rural areas and the ANC among Zulu youths in the townships.
Visiting Buthelezi in his stronghold at Ulundi was like stepping back in time. On ceremonial occasions he was to be found brandishing a battle axe an
d wearing a necklace of lions’ teeth, but these accoutrements disguised a very sharp mind indeed. He was intensely conscious and proud of the history of the Zulu nation, reminding me that he had himself played the role of King Cetshwayo in the 1964 film Zulu, which also starred a young Michael Caine.
He knew the Prime Minister well, having been introduced to her by the writer Sir Laurens van der Post. She found Buthelezi’s views on sanctions and the armed struggle far more compatible than those of the ANC. Laurens van der Post, who was a friend of the Prime Minister and of the Prince of Wales, believed that the Zulus were the key to the future of South Africa. In an attempt to broaden his horizons, I arranged for him also to meet Thabo Mbeki, but Laurens dismissed the pipe-smoking Thabo as unacceptably westernised. When she asked me about Laurens’s opinions, I told Margaret Thatcher that, while Buthelezi had strong support in Natal and among the Zulu mineworkers on the Witwatersrand, Mandela and the ANC had nationwide support. There could be no settlement without them, as Buthelezi himself recognised.
In this meeting, Buthelezi said that the problem was defeating two evils – poverty and apartheid, not just apartheid. The experience of neighbouring Mozambique showed the futility of liberation coupled with economic ruin. Apartheid was doomed, but ANC bombs pushed white South Africans deeper into the laager. They were attacking the state at its strongest point. After twenty-five years of ANC attacks, there were no ‘liberated zones’; not even a single bridge had been destroyed. He would continue to seek genuine negotiations through an inclusive indaba (discussion). He had just rejected the latest attempts by the government to draw him into negotiations on their proposed National Council. They wanted black representation, but only in a purely advisory role.
CHAPTER III
‘Let us pray’
The End of Apartheid Page 4
