definitely not a behind-the-scenes sort of guy, and he had a nose for politics.
His father-in-law, Japie Basson, was by the mid-1970s the UP member of parliament for the Johannesburg seat of Bez Valley. Basson was opposed to the plan to dissolve his party in 1977. But when the UP was torn apart, he became one of the founders of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP, or Progs). This would also be Wiese’s political home for a few years.
Colin Eglin was the PFP’s first leader, and Helen Suzman and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert were among the other prominent figures in the party. The Progs were opposed to the host of discriminatory laws enacted by the National Party and were not in favour of one group dominating another. Today this might not sound like the most radical of ideas, but the Progs had the view that negotiations between the different groups in South Africa’s diverse population were the way forward for the country.
In 1977, shortly after the dissolution of the UP, Prime Minister John Vorster called a general election. Lawmakers were still warming their seats after the previous election in 1974. Calling an election in 1977 was clearly a tactical move by Vorster to consolidate his majority in parliament, leaving the opposition scurrying to reorganise.
‘Van Zyl Slabbert phoned me, I was in London, he said, “Look, we are looking for candidates, would you consider being a candidate in Stellenbosch?”’18 So Wiese thought about it. ‘I called my wife and I told her and she immediately said, “No, that’s fine,” because she knew that as a Prog there was no chance of my winning Stellenbosch.’
In the end, Wiese was not the candidate in his university town, but contested the seat of Simonstown. His opponent was John Wiley, the sitting MP, and candidate of the South African Party (SAP). He had been part of the UP, but broke away with five other MPs who claimed a name for their party that had last been used in the 1930s.
But Wiley wasn’t a ‘Sap’ in the true sense of the word. He was willing to lean to the right to court more conservative voters. The NP became aware of this and took to the idea rather kindly. In 1977 the Nats didn’t even put a candidate into the field for Simonstown, thereby providing a significant boost to Wiley’s chances.
Wiese approached the election with the bright-eyed optimism he would exude as a public figure in the coming decades. ‘It was highly probable that the PFP would be in a position in the next election to field enough candidates to make a bid to take over government,’ he said in the weeks leading up to the vote.19
In actual fact, the PFP had decided not to field any candidates in Nat strongholds. The NP was a formidable political machine and the PFP was the new kid on the block. But Simonstown was an important seat and a hotly contested one. In this mostly English-speaking constituency, Wiese presumably thought he need not worry much about Afrikaner nationalism or unenlightened voters, giving him the opportunity to explain to his audiences just how unsustainable apartheid has become. ‘The Nationalist government had proven beyond all reasonable doubt that it is a government that South Africa can no longer afford,’ he said before the election.
Three weeks before voting day, Wiese and Wiley met in Fish Hoek’s town hall for a debate. It was the late 1970s and there was a lot to discuss – such as the absurdity of the black homelands, the future of South West Africa and domestic stability after the Soweto riots – but this meeting was organised by the Save Rhodesia movement, which had a strong presence in the area in the form of Rhodesians who had retired to the seaside. Rhodesia, which would later carry the name Zimbabwe, was at the time embroiled in its own bush war. Ian Smith and his white minority government were fighting against the military wings of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union.
‘I don’t consider Rhodesia an issue in this election …’ said Wiese at the meeting, upon which the audience wanted to know why not.20
‘South Africa has quite enough of its own troubles,’ he answered.
‘Nonsense. They are our blood brothers,’ a member of the crowd shouted back.
After this confrontation, Wiese was more diplomatic, but some in the crowd jeered when he suggested that Rhodesia’s problems should be left to Rhodesians. Others cheered him on.
Wiley began to read the crowd better as the evening wore on, pledging that he was unashamedly pro-Rhodesian. He referred to South Africa and its neighbour as having common enemies and said that liberals were part of a communist plot for world domination.
White fears of black domination weighed heavily on the election of 1977, and the economic hardships of sanctions and isolation were not a strong enough argument for the PFP to win enough hearts and minds. The Nats won the election with a landslide, capturing 135 of the 165 seats in parliament. The Progs managed 17 seats, enough to make them the official opposition.
Wiese’s father-in-law was one of those 17, but Wiese himself was not. Wiley won 4927 votes to Wiese’s 3306, with about 64% of constituents casting their ballots.
Despite his performance in the election, Wiese climbed the ranks in the party and from 1978 to 1979 was a member of the PFP’s federal executive committee. But when Wiley gave up his seat in 1980 to join the Nats, Wiese did not contest the by-election that followed.
In the meantime, PW Botha had taken over the reins of the NP as party leader and of the country as prime minister after John Vorster’s resignation in the aftermath of the Information Scandal. Botha, an NP stalwart and long-serving minister of defence, talked the talk of large-scale political reforms – difficult to believe after so many years as the country’s foremost securocrat.
Botha wanted to make coloureds and Indians part of government. One of his moves was to abolish the Senate and replace it with an advisory body called the President’s Council. The new body consisted of whites, coloureds and Indians and had the task of developing a new constitutional dispensation. There was no black African representation on this council.
Botha and his inner circle had done the maths and come to the conclusion that the white minority could not go it alone. Conveniently, he saw South Africa as a country of minorities in which all the different groups had to meet each other somewhere in the middle if they were to have a common future. Instead of a black majority, he saw each and every ethnic group as a minority. The Zulus might well be the largest single group, but in Botha’s world they were still a minority when compared to the rest of the population.21
The President’s Council was the forerunner and incubator of the tricameral parliament of 1983, a new constitutional dispensation that gave coloureds and Indians limited participation in the legislative branch of government. The condition laid down for their inclusion, of course, was that white votes would carry enough weight to prevent other groups from exercising any real power.
The PFP, meanwhile, elected Van Zyl Slabbert as leader. He made it no secret that he was opposed to Botha’s reforms as they still aimed to ‘exclude 70% of the people from dialogue and negotiation’.22 Slabbert was also dead-set against participating in the President’s Council. But Basson, by this time chair of the PFP caucus in parliament, announced to the press that he would be willing to serve on the President’s Council. To Slabbert’s great disappointment, he reiterated this view in a parliamentary debate. Shortly thereafter Basson left the PFP. A month or so later, Botha appointed him to the President’s Council.
Wiese also parted ways with the PFP, citing the party’s ‘boycott attitude’.23 He described the President’s Council as the biggest step to date in South Africa on the road of negotiations and an honest starting point in the quest for a generally acceptable constitutional regime. ‘It should be clear to all objective observers that the Prime Minister and the Government, by inter alia the appointment of the President’s Council, are sincere in following the route of negotiation with and between all population groups of our country.’ He described the PFP’s attitude to the President’s Council as ‘illogical and ill-considered’ from a party that put great store by negotiation politics.24
Van Zyl Slabbert did not like this description at all, especially from someone he had known since university and with whom he got on well. ‘If I and my party are stereotyped as seeking confrontation and radicalisation, we