Ampie Muller: Afrikaner academic who pioneered talks between Nats, ANC
Ground-breaking peacemaker spent decades mediating SA’s bloody conflicts
● Ampie Muller, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 88, used his internationally renowned skills in conflict resolution to get the apartheid government and the ANC in exile to begin talking to each other.
In 1984, in the face of deep scepticism and hostility, he and his close colleague, the noted Quaker peacemaker Professor HW van der Merwe, were the first Afrikaner academics to visit the ANC in Lusaka.
A couple of “verligte” National Party MPs and members of the Afrikaner Broederbond were meant to go with them but pulled out when president PW Botha threatened to take away their passports, ranting that “we don’t talk to terrorists and murderers”.
Muller, Van der Merwe and Muller’s brother Piet Muller, who was then political editor of the progovernment Beeld newspaper, met Thabo Mbeki and Pallo Jordan.
Minister of justice Kobie Coetsee came to see them when they got back and wanted to know what the ANC leaders had said. With the full permission of Mbeki and Jordan they told him.
When they went back the following year they conveyed the apartheid government’s response to the ANC, and brought back with them the ANC’s response to the government.
In such a way they opened and maintained channels between the government and the ANC when neither party was able to communicate with the other directly, or even let it be known that they were communicating indirectly.
They also facilitated subsequent talks between South African business leaders and academics, and the ANC in exile.
They invited FW de Klerk and his cabinet colleague Gerrit Viljoen to accompany them on one of their visits. De Klerk said “the boss” would not allow them to go.
They persuaded the ANC to meet a group of senior Nat MPs in France under the auspices of the international Quaker movement, but again PW denied them permission.
In 1988, Muller and Van der Merwe — who’d been facilitating dialogue between political and ideological foes of all races since the early ’70s including Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement — had “talks about talks” with Mbeki and Jordan in Lusaka which paved the way for direct talks between the apartheid government and ANC.
In his foreword to Van der Merwe’s book, Peacemaking in South Africa, Nelson Mandela wrote that their work “contributed in no small way to the liberation of our country”.
Muller said later he didn’t think democracy would come to SA for another 20 years. “We hoped it would happen much sooner, but hope on the one side and belief on the other are not always superimposed. So 1994 came very suddenly, happily for us.”
Muller was born in Clocolan in the Orange Free State on December 27 1930, matriculated at Dirkie Uys High School in Warden where his father was the headmaster, and completed a BA, BA Hons and MA in psychology at Pretoria University.
He paid for his studies by working as a radio announcer with the SABC.
He won a scholarship to complete a doctorate in psychology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he met the legendary Afrikaans poet NP van Wyk Louw, and married his daughter Ria in 1956. She died in 1964 at the age of 32, leaving him with three small children to bring up.
At the age of 29 he became a professor of psychology at the University of Fort Hare before the government took it over. He loved being with the great nonracial mix of academics and future leaders.
He recalled chatting to ZK Matthews one day in the tea room and mentioning different styles of marriage, including “community of property”. ZK told him, “We blacks are married in community of poverty”, something he never forgot.
He was subsequently a professor and dean at the universities of Port Elizabeth, Witwatersrand,
Western Cape and Cape Town. At UCT, for 21 years he ran the Centre for Conflict Resolution, formerly the Centre for Intergroup Studies. He was a visiting professor at universities in the US and Germany.
In the ’70s he started Enlightened Action to provide a platform for black and white people to meet as equals. This brought him into contact with Van der Merwe, who asked him to run the Centre for Conflict Resolution he’d started at UCT.
During the state of emergency in 1986 Muller became the founding chairman of the South African Association for Conflict Intervention. Also at this time, when the townships were on fire, he started the Negotiation Skills Project in Soweto to empower black youth by teaching them negotiation skills.
He was brought in by the National Peace Secretariat during the bloody transition period following Mandela’s release to establish and co-ordinate regional dispute resolution committees to steer the country away from civil war.
He expanded the work of the Centre for Conflict Resolution to include courses on the influence of violence on children, defying the academic boycott by bringing an expert from Northern Ireland to give seminars on the subject. He also ran courses for teachers on conflict in their schools and how to teach pupils to deal with conflict in nonviolent ways.
The centre attracted students from around the world and many people involved in conflict resolution in Africa, the Far East and South America were trained by him. In the ’90s he helped to resolve conflict between the vigilante group Pagad and the police, and between warring taxi associations.
Muller, whose uncle was former South African state president Nico Diederichs, was delighted to discover through DNA testing that he had 5% Nigerian ancestry and was descended in part from Cape slaves.
He said this confirmed his belief that Afrikaners were naturally and historically part of the country’s greater racial mix, and should embrace rather than reject that.
Muller was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2018 but died of a pulmonary embolism. He is survived by his third wife, Dr Beverley Roos-Muller, three children and five stepchildren.