peaceful streets, we repeatedly went over the agenda for the talks and discussed every last logistical detail. We were acutely aware that we could not make a hash of the talks: South Africa could not afford to begin the negotiations with disagreement and unnecessary suspicion.
The next morning, at the hotel’s breakfast table we recognised the Mbeki team in the dining room, but neither they nor we gave any sign of this. An hour or so later the two old arch-enemies met one another as South Africans in my hotel room and the negotiations, which were relaxed and good-natured, could begin.
With his quips, Mike Louw had everyone, especially Zuma, in fits of laughter, such as when he related his concern about wasting water in the hotel’s toilets in comparison with the water-saving pit toilets of his childhood days on a farm near arid Prieska in the Northern Cape.
The discussions were purposeful and went on until the early hours of the following morning. They focused sharply on the arrangements needed for bringing the vanguard group of ANC members back into South Africa so that they could attend the first formal, open negotiations on the country’s political future. There was never any question of undertaking this planning process without the ANC’s full partnership.
Mbeki, the ANC group’s spokesperson, informed us that some of his comrades believed that the government wanted to use the occasion as a pretext for luring the external wing’s leadership back into South Africa, only to put them behind bars. Happily, we were able to make short shrift of this ridiculous suggestion.
We told them that, if we did not accept one another’s bona fides and integrity, there was little hope of tackling the negotiations – or, for that matter, the current talks – with any success. We also pointed out that far greater challenges to mutual acceptance of our trustworthiness and honesty as negotiating partners no doubt lay ahead.
Mbeki also wanted to know how the government would react if Joe Slovo, chief of staff of MK and general secretary of the SACP, was part of the ANC’s core team at the initial negotiations. We answered that we were hardly in a position to choose the members of their negotiation team – and went on to joke that the government could even consider including right-wing fire-eater Eugène Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner-Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), in its own negotiating team.
However, that evening, when I gave President De Klerk provisional feedback on the course of the discussions, he dug in his heels and objected in the strongest possible terms to the very idea of the inclusion of Slovo in the ANC team, saying that his supporters would refuse to accept it. After a somewhat lengthy exchange of ideas, I reminded him of the Basil D’Oliveira fiasco of 1968: the government had refused to grant the former South African, a coloured batsman of note, a visa to tour South Africa as a member of the English cricket team. This had led to the cancellation of the tour – which, in turn, had encouraged various other sports sanctions against South Africa.
De Klerk finally agreed that we could not afford such foolishness in the upcoming political negotiation process.
In addition to the planning of the negotiations in South Africa, a number of political, economic and social challenges were raised time and again by both sides, but not discussed in detail – which was not the aim of the meeting. Furthermore, as officials, we were neither competent nor qualified to take a stance on matters of policy or core principles.
Another question Mbeki posed was insightful: Would the government permit the traditional practice of toyi-toyiing by his comrades during political demonstrations? The mobilisation of the masses was still one of the ANC’s most potent weapons and, on this, as far as the organisation was concerned, there could be no compromise.
My answer to Mbeki was that mass mobilisation often led to acts of revolutionary violence and that the ANC appeared unable to control its supporters when mass hysteria gained the upper hand. The security forces would then have to step in; after all, we could not conduct orderly and peaceful discussions against a background of threats and manipulation by an uncontrolled mob.
That evening, we enjoyed a delicious meal together in the hotel’s restaurant. And, even later, in the early hours, I ordered a bottle of Chivas Royal Salute – a fitting 21 years old – to be sent to the hotel room. Both sides held their enthusiasm carefully under wraps, but secretly we knew that our peaceful revolution had come of age.
We were delighted with the progress made on the previous day. In a rare moment of light extravagance, and in the spirit of what my mother used to say, I thought: The auditor general be damned! I trusted that he would be patriotic enough to excuse us this transgression in the light of what we were busy doing in the interest of the country and all its people. He did.
Later that day, everyone went back home. For the ANC members, this journey must have held new significance – ‘home’ would soon mean the land of their birth. It was moving to observe their nostalgic eagerness to return to our common fatherland.
A great deal of work awaited us there. We had to provide full details of developments to the president and the relevant ministers, especially Dr Gerrit Viljoen, minister of constitutional development, and his senior officials – especially the efficient Henk Fourie, Fanie van der Merwe’s administrative right hand – because the arrangements for the first official and public meeting between the two parties had to be handed over to the relevant state departments. After all, the spies could not exactly arrange the public peace process!
Furthermore, arrangements had to be made to bring the first members of the ANC leadership into the country. In terms of prevailing law, they could still technically be taken into custody when they set foot on South African soil. Agreement had to be reached with the security police and internal affairs officials, and arrangements had to be made to ensure that their arrival at Jan Smuts Airport was unhindered and inconspicuous.
The ANC vanguard comprised Jacob Zuma, Mathews Phosa and Penuell Maduna. They were brought into the country without incident from April 1990 and were accommodated in an NI safe house in Pretoria North. Here, for several days, talks were held, arguments exchanged and plans laid for the coming ‘summit conference’ between the ANC and the government.
Zuma and Phosa were good-natured, cordial and accommodating. In stark contrast, Maduna was acrimonious and frequently on the offensive; he seemed determined to rub our noses in his academic legal background. Perhaps the ANC thought that someone should provoke ‘the Boers’ or keep them in their place with high-handed arrogance. However, this proved unsuccessful.
At the NI house, a legion of administrative measures was put in place. Meanwhile, other ANC members, including some from the National Executive Committee, began to arrive in the country to launch the negotiation process. Both parties began to preen their feathers in preparation for the opening discussions in the process of reaching a constitutional settlement.
1 Minutes of the State Security Council meeting, 16 August 1989.
2 One of the best examples of this is the author Richard Rosenthal, who blames everyone other than himself for the failure of his uncalled-for attempts. See Richard Rosenthal, Mission Improbable (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998); and Willie Esterhuyse, Endgame: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), pp. 159–161, 169–171.
3 Maritz Spaarwater, Die spook wat boom geklim en lig gevind het (Hermanus: Erfenis Publikasies, 2015), p. 236; Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007), pp. 563–567.
4 Aziz Pahad, Insurgent Diplomat (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2014), p. 220; and Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country (London: Arrow Press, 1997), p. 113.
Chapter 3
Fifteen hundred crucial days
From Nelson Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990 until his inauguration as president on 10 May 1994, South Africans