NEGOTIATING HISTORY
A new book delves into the backstory of the negotiations that ended apartheid and forged a multiparty democracy in SA — the secret talks and power struggles behind the transition
On February 2 1990 SA president FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC, SACP and Pan Africanist Congress, and the release of struggle stalwart Nelson Mandela. It was a seminal moment for the country — the start of the negotiations that would bring about the end of apartheid and the transition to multiparty democracy. But these were by no means the first negotiations between the opposing sides.
In Breakthrough: The Struggles and
Secret Talks that Brought Apartheid SA to the Negotiating Table, Mac Maharaj and Z Pallo Jordan draw on a range of historical sources — including Mandela’s prison files, minutes of ANC meetings, notes from the secret negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid government at the Mells Park country estate in the UK, and the Broederbond archives, among others — to tell the backstory of SA’s negotiated transition. This is an edited extract.
By the mid- to late1980s, the ANC was steadily delimiting the parameters for possible negotiations, and changing the terms of the public debate.
In September
1986, the party’s constitutional commission reported to the national executive committee (NEC), saying:
Our proposal is that ... the NEC consider the adoption and publication of the guidelines
in the form of a document that will be titled “Proposed Foundations of Government in a Democratic SA”. The document could then be presented to our people as a whole, inviting their active participation and contribution towards preparing a final document.
This approach, which sought to bring on board not only ANC members and supporters, but all South Africans, was aimed at ensuring maximum buy-in.
An exchange of views on the proposed guidelines between the commission and the national working committee (NWC) led to the adoption and publication of “Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic SA” in August 1988.
The document drew considerable attention. The Afrikaner group at the Mells Park talks engaged with these guidelines during the sixth meeting at the UK country estate, held at the end of September 1989. The United Democratic Front and trade union federation Cosatu discussed it, as did some media outlets.
The guidelines were preceded by a public commitment in the ANC’s 1987 January 8 statement to a list of fundamental individual rights and an explicit rejection of group rights.
“The revolution,” said the NEC, “will guarantee individual and equal rights of all South Africans without regard to any of these categories (which define our people by race, colour or ethnic group) and include such freedoms as those of speech, assembly, association, language, religion, the press, the inviolability of family life and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention without trial.”
The statement made the achievement of democracy the primary focus of any negotiations, asserting that “we shall translate that fundamental democratic principle into practice whereby each person shall have the right both to vote and to be voted to any elective organ in the new united and nonracial SA”.
The statement expressly invoked the experience of the people of SA, and linked it to an internationally recognised experience, proclaiming that:
All should be free to form and join any party of their choice, without let or hindrance. But as a people, we must state clearly that
democracy in our country cannot succeed if it permits the organised propagation of ideas of fascism, racism and ethnicity. Apart from our own experience, we cannot, in the name of democracy, tolerate the organised sustenance of conceptions which led to World War 2 and which have since been categorised and dealt with as a crime against humanity.
The message to friends and foes — and those yet to be won over — was loud and clear. The ANC was taking occupation of specific strategic sites in the terrain: the battle for positions had begun on a battlefield named “negotiations”.
The statement posed a crucial question: “Is it possible today and in the future to enter into negotiations with self-confessed enemies of democracy with the aim of creating a democratic SA?”
And it provided an unequivocal answer: “We reiterate our commitment to seize any opportunity that may arise, to participate in a negotiated resolution of the conflict in our country …
“Let those in our country who, in the face of our mounting offensive, have started talking about negotiations, commit themselves publicly to this perspective. In addition, and of decisive importance, they must demonstrate by practical deeds their commitment to this objective as well as their acceptance of a rapid and irreversible process leading to the emergence of such a … society.”
Were the positions taken in this January 8 statement philosophically or ideologically driven?
The answer lies in an appreciation of the multiclass, anticolonial, national character of the ANC. The glue that bound the diverse classes and communities within the party was a commitment to destroy apartheid and build a nation based on the Freedom Charter.
Among its members and in its deliberations, all schools of thought within these parameters were given the space to address the challenges the movement faced. The overriding condition was not the label on your sleeve, but the solutions you brought. In deliberations, the weight your views enjoyed on a particular matter included the track record of the usefulness of your positions in the past rather than the philosophy or ideology you espoused.
In a public lecture on May 28 1987, ANC president Oliver Tambo took note of the position of Western powers that had recently entered into official contact with the ANC. They did this, he said, because the argument that they were seeking change in SA by talking exclusively to PW Botha’s National Party regime had become unsustainable.
The Commonwealth’s eminent persons’ group (EPG) had found that the majority of people within SA “recognised the ANC as their political representative”. This meant that, “if the Western powers were still interested to project themselves as brokers, honest or otherwise, these governments would have to be seen to be talking to the ANC”, Tambo stated.
However, this did not mean that they had changed their attitude towards the ANC. “On all major questions … the coincidence of views between the Pretoria regime and the powersthat-be in most of the West persists,” he said.
Tambo acknowledged that “repeated calls have been made on the Botha regime to enter into negotiations with its opponents”, but that nothing had been said “about how this regime will ultimately be brought to the negotiating table”.
The EPG, he said, had noted that the apartheid government “is not yet prepared to negotiate fundamental change, nor to countenance the creation of genuine democratic structures, nor to face the prospect of the end to white domination”.
Furthermore, said Tambo, the EPG’s report had stated that the “test of the genuineness of the call for negotiations must necessarily turn on the willingness of those who make this call to change the attitude of the Pretoria regime towards these negotiations”.
Instead of appeasing the Botha regime, he said, the international community should direct its efforts towards ending the apartheid system.
“Any new international initiative seeking to bring about negotiations would be grossly misplaced … because the Botha regime is not prepared to address this fundamental question.”
Democracy in our country cannot succeed if it permits the organised propagation of ideas of fascism, racism and ethnicity
ANC January 8 statement, 1987
The ANC NEC devoted considerable time to assessing the situation as events unfolded during 1987, taking into account the question of negotiations raised by both the Pretoria regime and the various Western powers. It shared its views with the public in a statement titled “The Question of Negotiations” on October 9 1987, in which it reaffirmed the ANC’s willingness “to enter into genuine negotiations provided they are aimed at the transformation of our country into a united nonracial democracy”.
It emphasised that “this, and only this, should be the objective of any negotiating process”.
The NEC ruled out the unilateral abandonment or even suspension of the armed struggle, because “cessation of hostilities would have to be negotiated and entail agreed acts by both sides”.
It drew attention to the regime’s co-option manoeuvres and rejected “without qualification the proposed National Statutory Council which the Botha regime seeks to establish through legislation to be enacted by the apartheid parliament”.
“This can never be a genuine and acceptable mechanism to negotiate a democratic constitution for our country … [The council is] nothing but a device intended to enmesh all who sit on it in a bogus process of meaningless talk which has nothing to do with any genuine attempt to design a democratic constitution.”
The 1987 January 8 statement, the October 1987 statement on negotiations and the August 1988 “Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic SA” constituted critical beacons guiding the democratic forces as they navigated their way through uncharted waters. They also formed the platform for the Mells Park talks, the numerous engagements with delegations from SA organised by the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in SA, as well as ANC engagements in international forums and with foreign governments.
But while these beacons helped set the course, they were not sufficient to ensure that the initiative remained in the ANC’s hands — especially given the number of moving parts that were at play.