Where Jamaica and de Klerk collide

FW DE Klerk left what might have been his morally most consequential act until after his death: an unequivocal apology for the immorality of apartheid and the “pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage” it caused “to black, brown, and Indians in South Africa’’. Which this newspaper accepts, on behalf of a country, the majority of whose people would be indistinguishable from most South Africans, as a genuine expression of remorse.

In a sense, Mr de Klerk, who is justifiably being hailed as a principal in the dismantling of apartheid has, by posthumous act, further vindicated Jamaica’s investment in the anti-apartheid enterprise and the heavy price we at times paid for this engagement. It is an absolvement of principle.

It is not that Mr de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, hadn’t, in life, said sorry or expressed regret for a social and political system that formally attempted to establish black and brown people as less-than. But they almost always left a feeling of a parsing of emotions and teetering uncertainty about Mr de Klerk’s expressions of regret. So despite his posthumous declaration of having repudiated the ideals of apartheid since the earlier 1980s, his actions of the 1990s had the visage of Realpolitik – of a leader having come to the conclusion that the system was no longer sustainable so was, therefore, taking pre-emptive action to cushion its collapse.

This, though, isn’t to suggest that Mr de Klerk isn’t worthy of credit for his actions after succeeding PW Botha in 1989 as South Africa’s white minority president. He accelerated negotiations with the liberation group, the African National Congress (ANC); freed the ANC’s leader, Nelson Mandela; and convinced white South Africans that continued minority rule was politically unviable. Indeed, the majority of the white electorate voted for its dismantling.

CONFRONTED

But Mr de Klerk, as he admitted, was confronted with, or from his perspective, favoured by, a critical global political development that influenced his action. Or, at least, the timing of it. “We benefited from a window of opportunity when the Berlin wall came down and communism imploded,” he told one interviewer.

In other words, he appreciated that South Africa couldn’t for much longer, with the waning of the Cold War, hold itself out as a Western bastion against communism. Not only would its external military, political, and economic support falter, it was likely, too, that its security apparatus would be defeated in a bloodier struggle by the ANC’s guerilla forces. Continued repression of black and brown people wouldn’t be strong enough to sustain the immorality of apartheid.

It was, therefore, to Mr de Klerk’s credit that he understood, and accepted, this dilemma and had sufficient political skills to convince white South Africans that they had to accept political change. In other words, it was an opportunity to engage in reform while they still had substantial control over, and thus the capacity to, influence and steer events.

Mr de Klerk had another ace: the willing partnership in Nelson Mandela, especially in the period prior to, and in the early years after, South Africa’s transition to multiparty democracy. Mr Mandela’s moral authority, exemplified, in part, by the post-election unity government he forged with Mr de Klerk’s National Party (in which Mr de Klerk was vice-president), sustained democratic order and restrained black and brown South Africans from seeking revenge against white people for their perpetration of a system whose survival depended on the privation of the majority.

GLOBAL EVENTS

The big global events that helped to spur Mr de Klerk, notwithstanding (the Berlin wall et al), the weakening of apartheid’s foundations was a long-term process that was contributed to by many forces, including, in no small measure, the principled actions of Jamaica. In the 1950s, Jamaica, still a British colony, was among the first countries to ban imports from South Africa – a move whose economic impact might have been limited but yet was of great symbolic and moral value to the victims of apartheid.

In the 1970s, Michael Manley, Jamaica’s prime minister, was a global champion against apartheid – and for the liberation struggles across southern Africa. That posture wasn’t cost-free. Indeed, Jamaica further soured its relationship with the United States as well as faced economic penalties from America for defying Washington’s wish that it not support Cuba’s intervention in Angola to back the ANC’s bush fighters against invading South Africa’s troops. Elsewhere, Mr Manley was also a proponent and a key architect of the Gleaneagle’s Agreement banning sporting contact with South Africa, which was so greatly betrayed by the West Indian rebel cricketers, captained by Jamaica’s Lawrence Rowe, with their 1982-83 tours of the country.

In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Jamaica was one of the first places visited by Nelson Mandela after his release from prison and that Mr Manley was invited to lead the Commonwealth’s observer mission for South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.

In that posthumously released statement, Mr de Klerk hailed South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution and urged people to make it the country’s guiding principle. He said: “The road forward is a difficult one. But I firmly believe that if we take hands and if all the reasonable people in South Africa put their heads together, we can overcome the challenges we face, and we can fulfil the tremendous potential that South Africa has.”

Those are sentiments which we believe are shared by the vast majority of the citizens of democratic South Africa, which Jamaica, through its moral stance, helped to make happen.