Redefining the Enemy

One of the more striking aspects of contemporary South African history is that the abolition of formal apartheid, the gradual repeal of the race laws during 1991, passed almost as a nonevent. In contrast to what was universally described as Pretoria’s “dramatic turnaround” in February 1990 (the legalizing of banned organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela), the advent of a new era of legally unregulated race relations was scarcely noticed. To understand why, one must first realize that many apartheid laws had been largely ignored and unenforced for some time. The reality of integration in some city housing, in English-language universities and private schools, and above all in the workplace had rendered the laws obsolete long before they were formally abolished. No influx-control measures, for example, could stem the flow into the cities of rural migrants in search of jobs and better living conditions. Repealing the laws simply verified social trends that had outpaced ossified regulations. Therefore, under nonapartheid conditions, little or nothing changed.

Given that the disenfranchised enjoyed no formal political power, the dominant minority remained unthreatened. Many whites now wondered why they had not supported the policy change earlier, since the immediate benefits outweighed the potential dangers. On the strength of their formal rejection of apartheid, South Africans were admitted to places hitherto closed to them. They could participate in the Olympics; they could travel more freely as landing rights for South African Airways were extended. In short, South African whites were no longer outcasts—a status they had deeply resented. Now they could hold their heads high again. The stigma was gone, and without the sky falling in. The secret to the growing approval for de Klerk among the dominant white minority lies in the hope that they could continue to dominate without costs attached. Normalcy for whites had returned despite the lasting abnormality from the legacies of apartheid. Few ruling groups in history have ever wriggled themselves out of a deadly predicament more elegantly. The world praised and rewarded a change to what should have been normal policies and intergroup relations in the first place.^[1]

Nationalists repeatedly made it clear that negotiations would have nothing to do with surrender but would simply concern power sharing. F. W. de Klerk insisted that to “those who arrogantly equate the concept of a new South Africa to a takeover of power, the message needs to be transmitted loudly and clearly that the new South Africa will not fall prey to a section of the population at the expense of the rest” (Cape Times, April 13, 1990). He emphasized that “we will not accept a dispensation in which the quality of existing liberties and rights are dismantled.” His constituency, de Klerk asserted, was “not prepared to bow out apologetically from the stage of history”; whites would still play a “key role,” he predicted.

How, then, did the apparent political miracle of a privileged minority voluntarily agreeing to give up exclusive political representation come about? The process began much earlier than the March 1992 referendum or even the rise to power of de Klerk and the release of Mandela. Apartheid—the gigantic Verwoerdian dream of social engineering—had increasingly proven a dismal failure, despite all the zealous efforts of its advocates in power. Its rising internal and external costs, both real and symbolic, had led to halting, ambivalent moves to reform since the late 1970s under the hardline Prime Minister John Vorster. His successor, P. W. Botha, essentially continued the policy of reluctant liberalization without being able to break with the racial paradigm and blind anticommunism. But with the end of the cold war, negotiations and compromise between previously implacable ideological foes became not only possible but imperative for both sides. Unlike in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, in South Africa no religious values impeded bargaining over power and privilege. The elites, no longer constrained by dogma, were free to be pragmatic as they adjusted to new realities.

As early as 1986 Pretoria came close to embracing alternatives. Sections of the National Party and the cabinet, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs under Pik Botha, had seriously considered the option of negotiations at the time of the mission of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) in the spring of 1986. Letters had gone out from Foreign Affairs to Washington and to European capitals saying that Mandela could be released provided the Western powers would back South Africa in any ensuing internal strife. Since 1983 the secret Broederbond under its new head, Pieter de Lange, had circulated a document about the minimal conditions for future Afrikaner survival, which culminated in the sentiment that “the greatest risk is not to take any risks.” However, as the scuttling of the EPG mission by the South African bombing of the capitals of the Frontline States on May 19, 1986, proved, in the internal power struggle the hardliners in the security establishment won out over the softliners in Pik Botha’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Chris Heunis’s Department of Constitutional Development. The time for liberalization was not yet ripe, given cold war mentalities. Until the securocrats were deprived of their ideological weapon—a Moscow-directed ANC-led onslaught—and were themselves party to the transition, P. W. Botha’s administration could not travel the final road, particularly not under foreign prodding rather than under its own steam.

Moreover, during the 1980s South Africa’s rival intelligence services vied for dominance in the National Security Management System and State Security Council (SSC), on which P. W. Botha relied as his base. The old Bureau of State Security (BOSS) under the megalomaniac General Hendrik van den Bergh had become discredited in 1978 in the wake of the notorious information scandal. In 1979 it was reorganized as the National Intelligence Service (NIS), led by the political science professor Niel Barnard. The NIS differed from the smaller Department of Military Intelligence (DMI), which Botha favored, by defining the main threat to South African security and minority rule as internal to the country. The DMI, in contrast, saw the threat as a communist-led onslaught originating outside the country’s borders. The DMI engaged in destabilizing the Frontline States in order to deprive the ANC of forward bases, while the NIS favored a more diplomatic approach, as evidenced by its support of the Nkomati nonaggression accord with Mozambique. It was the special forces within the DMI, its hit squads and its assassins, who lost out in the emerging politics of negotiations.

Already in 1987 the minister of justice had had an unpublicized dinner in his home with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. After being transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor prison on the mainland, Mandela was occasionally taken out on sightseeing trips in the Cape so that state officials could have easier access to their most prominent inmate. He was repeatedly offered release by P. W. Botha on condition that he explicitly renounce violence, but he refused. Prisoners could not engage in free contractual arrangements, he replied, and his release would have been meaningless if the ANC was unable to engage in free political activity.

Leading members of the Broederbond, including the older brother of de Klerk, had since late 1986 met secretly with ANC officials in London, particularly Thabo Mbeki, Aziz Pahad, and Jacob Zuma, then the head of ANC intelligence. In July 1987 a historic and much-publicized meeting took place in Dakar between a large group of South Africans with ANC leaders living outside the country. Organized by F. van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine’s Idasa, this meeting set the trend for the next three years and culminated in the lifting of the ban on the ANC in February 1990, by which time even P. W. Botha and F. W. de Klerk had held several meetings with the imprisoned Mandela, after initially threatening the Dakar organizers with charges of treason.

In part, the official denunciations, prior to 1989, of any dialogue with the ANC, as well as the intrigue and rivalry surrounding such dialogue, stemmed from intense bureaucratic competition over who would control the inevitable future negotiations. Access to Mandela, for example, became a highly prized asset. As minister of prisons, Kobie Coetsee refused permission to see Mandela to his senior colleague Chris Heunis, so that Coetsee and his protégés, rather than Heunis’s Department of Constitutional Development, could retain control. Barnard’s NIS withdrew the security clearance of two senior officials, Kobus Jordaan and Fanie Cloete, both of Heunis’s department. They were considered too liberal for having engaged in independent efforts at dialogue with the ANC, as had a host of other organizations, following the successful Dakar example. At this stage, P. W. Botha’s administration followed a basic two-track policy: Heunis’s department was supposed to find a legitimate internal solution through co-optation of black leaders outside the ANC; if that were to fail, and it became increasingly evident that it would, negotiations with the “real enemy” should be explored with the hope of splitting the movement by concluding a deal with moderate nationalists but not communists.

In February 1990, with the mandate for negotiations received just four months earlier, the government could begin to move boldly without jeopardizing parliamentary seats. In any case, since another election under the tricameral constitution was quietly being ruled out, the government could stake its long-term political chances on the success of negotiations.

In 1990 the world witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of the South African government and the African National Congress socializing, even bantering, with each other for the first time. Not only was the ground irrevocably laid for negotiations and compromises between two deadly rivals, but the antagonists actually established a cordial relationship during the three days of talks at the foot of Table Mountain. They discovered, in Thabo Mbeki’s words, that to their mutual amazement they “had no horns.” Members of the dreaded Security Police, assigned to guard the ANC delegation, became buddies with their enemies and were soon on a first-name basis. While white and black South Africa wondered about respectable “terrorists” being invited into the official residence of South African prime ministers, a flabbergasted correspondent observed: “When Mbeki began to crack jokes, accompanied by some boyish elbow-tugging with General Basie Smit, the chief of the Security Police, the unusual appeared to become elevated to the sublime.”

Politics, however, is about the manipulation of symbols as a precondition for the exercise of real power. This striking event thus needs to be decoded for its psychological implications. The instant love affair between the National Party and the ANC replicates an experience many South African exiles from different political backgrounds have had when they meet abroad. Free of the apartheid framework, they discover their common South African–ness. A psychological explanation of cordial relations between former archenemies would point to the rediscovery of bonds of origin, of a repressed kinship. Children of the same soil come to realize what they have in common. Meanwhile, the forgiveness of the ANC brought renewed legitimacy to a beleaguered regime. The state president could now walk through the front door of the world. Celebrated as peacemakers endowed with strategic foresight, the engineers of apartheid occupied a new moral high ground.

This psychological constellation also explains the surprising cohesion that the National Party displayed during the process of change. Most seasoned observers expected defections to the right if the leadership were “to go so far.” Yet the party caucus endorsed the Cabinet’s moves unanimously, issuing encouragement and congratulations. Such support was particularly surprising because the caucus was left in the dark about the precise contents of the president’s speech of February 2. The crucial last-minute input and consultation took place not within his own constituency but with an opponent in prison. The potential coalition, the government of national unity, was born at this moment. As a result, a sense of relief—even euphoria—swept the land. Finally there was light at the end of a dark tunnel. Both sides frequently stressed the foolishness of not having undergone the exercise of reconciliation years ago.

An even more remarkable feature of the process was the forgiveness displayed by the victims. With no bitterness over decades of suffering, with no word about revenge for horrendous crimes, Mandela publicly declared, “Let bygones be bygones.” With this attitude, Mandela did, in fact, manufacture a new myth: that the past no longer matters. But it does. It may be forgiven, but it can’t be forgotten.

There is insufficient space to weigh all the causes for this shift in strategy. However, the government’s own explanation is interesting. The National Party’s mouthpiece, Die Burger, invoked historical character traits—“the Afrikaner’s desire for freedom”—as lying “at the root” of this switch: “The knowledge that their own desire for freedom may not involve the permanent subservience of others compels the continent’s first freedom fighters now—only 80 years after Union—to take the lead in the quest for the joint freedom of all in the country” (February 5, 1990). There was no perception of defeat or outside coercion, no admission that a new policy had to be adopted in order for South Africa to reenter the world economy (personal interviews of cabinet ministers, 1990). On the contrary, self-confidence reigned supreme among Afrikaner policy planners, who congratulated themselves for grasping a unique opportunity to exploit the end of the cold war.

For above all else, it was the change in the Soviet Union that emboldened Pretoria to unban the ANC. “In the government’s perception the ANC without Soviet backing was a containable force,” observes Hermann Giliomee (African Affairs 91, 1992, p. 359). With the active encouragement of the ANC to find a peaceful political solution and the simultaneous overtures by Moscow toward Pretoria during the joint negotiations on Namibia, even stubborn cold war warriors in the South African government could not fail to see unique opportunities. The “total onslaught” ideology had become totally discredited. Thus the politics of withstanding threats gave way to the politics of exploiting opportunities. With the increased pressure from below and encouragement from its allies abroad, particularly Margaret Thatcher, the National Party could now project itself as in tune with world trends by liberalizing and promising negotiations for democracy. Even the conservative Afrikaner nationalists were taken aback by the collapse of their “evil empire.” Only P. W. Botha in his literal wilderness warned his successor against misplaced trust in the KGB and cunning Americans (personal interview, 1990).

Sanctions were hardly mentioned as a crucial impetus for the change. This attitude demonstrates how much Pretoria’s confidence had increased since the scare in mid-1989, when the country’s reserves were apparently down to thirty-one days, of obligations. “What was crucial in the Cabinet’s calculation was not the threat of sanctions but the government’s belief that the economy would beat them and would survive risky political experiments, which the unbanning of the ANC undoubtedly is.”^[2] However, the theme of the 1992 referendum campaign—that the victory of a negative vote would have consequences “too ghastly to contemplate” in terms of economic decline and renewed social isolation—suggests that outside pressure had a far deeper impact on both sides than was normally recognized. A review of the competing claims can shed light on the complex origins of the historic compromise.