Speech by Ambassador Tony Leon to the 50th Anniversary Congress of the “Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola” (CREA) in Córdoba, Argentina on Wednesday, 01 September 2010

“HOW THE NEW SOUTH AFRICAN NATION WAS BUILT.”

Firstly, allow me to congratulate CREA on celebrating its 50th anniversary. I have learnt in just 10 months as South African Ambassador to Argentina that Argentine agriculture is world-class. It is this important economic sector which has spurred the impressive levels of export-led growth, allowed the accumulation of foreign reserve surpluses and healthy fiscal balances. This has allowed the Argentine economy to avoid many of the problems and crises afflicting so many other world economies during this severe global recession.
But it is not only the health of the Argentine economy which CREA sustains. With its vast networks of clubs and organizations, CREA today is a major pillar of what the social and political scientists call “civil society”. History teaches us that a dynamic society, based on voluntary organizations is an essential condition-alongside political parties, free media and an independent judiciary -for democracy to take root and endure.

Secondly, it is a great honour to share this platform with John Carlin. He is first remembered in South Africa for his brilliant newspaper reporting during our epic, eventful and even violent transition to democracy during the 1980’s and 1990’s. He is today, of course, famous across the world for his bestselling book on Nelson Mandela and the Springbok Rugby triumph in the 1995 World Cup, which Clint Eastwood transformed into the major motion picture “Invictus”, which has made such a powerful impact on movie audiences throughout the world, and which premiered in Argentina in January 2010. Rugby, of course, is one of the many ties which bind Argentina and South Africa. The elevation of the Pumas into the TriNations tournament shortly will further the links between our two countries.
Thirdly, I have been invited here today not because President Jacob Zuma appointed me from the opposition ranks to be his government’s Ambassador to Argentina. Rather, it is because of my 20 year career in South African politics that allowed me to participate first-hand as a builder of our new nation, when we resolved one of the world’s most strife-ridden conflicts and helped build a new democracy and a new nation.

Fourthly, as an audience you have the option of listening to my remarks in very bad Spanish or in more fluent English. I have made the choice for you, and will deliver my observations in English, aided by the expert translation of Nadia Volonté of the South African Embassy in Buenos Aires.

My first day at an official opening of South Africa’s then white dominated Parliament was over 20 years on 2 February 1990. I was an elected Member of the third party in the chamber, the anti-apartheid Democratic Party. It only enjoyed some 20% support from the white electorate. The majority National Party government had over 50% of the seats, while the hard-line, right-wing Conservative Party was the second party, or Official Opposition. Yet on that day, President FW De Klerk exploded a political bomb of thermo-nuclear intensity. Its after-effects are still radiating over the South African landscape today. This man, the elected President of white South Africa, and the inheritor of the apartheid system which advanced and advantaged the minority on the basis of the oppression and exclusion of the majority, turned his back on the convictions of a life-time and in one speech overturned the 350 year-old South African political and racial order.

That day in Parliament, President De Klerk announced the unbanning of the majority-supported African National Congress, SA Communist Party and Pan Africanist Congress and the imminent release from jail of Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for high treason in 1963, and kept in captivity for 27 years and the commencement of all-party negotiations for a democratic constitution.

The brief description of the roller-coaster four years which followed can be summarized in short-hand:
The negotiations started with “talks about talks” between the ANC and National Party in 1990, and were followed by the multiparty Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) in 1991.

Codesa sought to establish a common vision of what needed to be achieved, which it did through the “Declaration of Intent”. Signatories to the Declaration undertook to: bring about an undivided South Africa with one nation sharing a common citizenship; heal the divisions of the past and establish a free and open society based on democratic values protected by law; and create a climate conducive to peaceful constitutional change by eliminating violence, intimidation and destabilization and by promoting free political participation, discussion and debate.

The Declaration also committed parties to establishing a constitution that would ensure, inter alia:

a. that South Africa would be a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist state in which sovereign authority is exercised over the whole of its territory;

b. that the Constitution would be the supreme law and that it would be guarded over by an independent, non-racial and impartial judiciary;

c. that there would be a multi-party democracy with the right to form and join political parties and with regular elections on the basis of universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll;

d. that there would be a separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary with appropriate checks and balances;

e. that the diversity of languages, cultures and religions of the people of South Africa would be acknowledged;

f. that all would enjoy universally accepted human rights, freedoms and civil liberties including freedom of religion, speech and assembly protected by an entrenched and justiciable Bill of Rights and a legal system that guaranteed equality of all before the law.

The Codesa talks failed and faltered over and over again, and were interrupted by violence—by the state, by the ANC, by the Inkatha Freedom Party, and by radical parties opposed to the negotiations—on several occasions. Support for the negotiations was renewed in 1992 when two-thirds of white voters in a referendum voted “yes” in favour of De Klerk's efforts. The fact that violent parties were excluded from the talks built public trust in a peaceful resolution to the conflict; that trust was sustained even after public talks collapsed after a second Codesa in 1993.

Finally, in 1993, an interim constitution was agreed upon and adopted. It formed the legal basis for the 1994 elections. When the new democratic Parliament convened in May 1994, it did so as the Constituent Assembly. Among its other duties, its task was to conduct negotiations towards a final constitution—which, after the new Constitutional Court suggested amendments, was passed in 1996.

South Africa's hard-fought democracy, then, was won, not through the barrel of a gun, but through peaceful (albeit painstaking) negotiation, mediation and accommodation.

However, this historic summary ignores the crucial and deeper questions of human agency and under-states the political risks and turmoil of this extraordinary and unprecedented political transition. After all, there are few examples from history of where a powerful and politically dominant-minority more or less voluntarily negotiated its way out of power, and how a dominant and historically oppressed majority agreed to surrender the uncertain gains of armed revolution for certain peace, but less than total victory. In my remaining remarks, I will attempt to explain the “Anatomy of the Miracle”, as one excellent observer entitled our political transformation.

Many obvious and more subtle forces were at work in creating South African democracy.

First, there was “The Human Factor” (incidentally, the initial title of John Carlin’s book “Invictus”). The central role and personalities of FW De Klerk and ANC leader Nelson Mandela were crucial in providing the glue which held a deeply divided, and often warring nation, together.

De Klerk came from a deeply conservative and religious background. He was prince in the National Party kingdom: his uncle JG Strijdom had been the second apartheid Prime Minister in 1954 and his Father had served as President of the Senate. He narrowly won the leadership of his party in February 1989, beating a more liberal opponent. This happened after all-powerful President PW Botha was felled by a stroke. It is true that between 1978 and 1989, Botha had commenced a series of striking reforms: he legalized black trade unions, scrapped the prohibition on inter-racial marriages, lifted the industrial colour bar accepted the permanence of blacks in urban areas (under “grand apartheid” planning they had been hitherto confined to 13% of the rural hinterland).Yet as these incomplete reforms unleashed increasing black militant activism, Botha used repression and the imposition of Emergency-rule to tamp down demands for the end of apartheid. He faltered at the essential step of recognizing black participation in the central parliament, and increasingly relied on military control over the democratic process. It was, ironically, the very process of his reforms which opened space for black resistance and his impulse for repression which led to a violent and dangerous stalemate.

However, it was external factors-increased international isolation and punitive sanctions-which caused the collapse of South Africa’s currency in 1985.The drying up of foreign capital inflows and with no way out of the political crisis at home, saw the Botha regime run out of options. On it s right-flank, a resurgent Conservative Party was gaining at the polls, and on he left a violent insurrection in the Black townships was threatening a revolutionary civil war. Botha was too stubborn to accept the logic of the situation. True, he began to make the first approaches, in secret, to Mandela and attempts to negotiate with the ANC. But his insistence on preconditions rendered such talks still-born.
The result was a period of surreality fully worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A repressive gloom hung over the country and its stagnant economy. It was the “Autumn of the Patriarch.”

After Botha’s stroke and De Klerk’s ascent, real change commenced. De Klerk, an unlikely reformer, could read the writing on the wall and also saw the corner into which his predecessor’s policies had painted him. During much of the National Party’s rule, the threat of Communist Party takeover of the “South African way of life” had been used to blunt the forces of change. De Klerk realized that with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the year before, he could now act with decisiveness. His powers of logic and analysis, two of his key attributes, led him to the inevitable conclusion that only a full democratic order, negotiated by the true (rather than the puppet leaders favoured traditionally by the National Party) leaders of the black majority could lead to an enduring settlement.

It is also true, that like his counterpart in the Soviet Union at that time, Michal Gorbachev, De Klerk mistakenly believed that he could reform the political system he led, rather than surrender his central control of it. That is why he initially promised minority (White, Coloured and Indian) South Africans a host of minority vetoes and permanent power sharing formulae, none of which were finally enacted. But as the historian RW Johnson, pointed out with accuracy-
“De Klerk having unleashed a tidal wave of change, had almost immediately lost control of events. He was in the position of a man who had shot the rapids in a canoe and who, whatever his previous plans, very quickly finds himself amidst boiling white waters, navigating frantically to avoid whirlpools and rocks just to stay afloat.”

However, while the final constitution contained few of the guarantees de Klerk had sought, other than an entrenched bill of rights and security of tenure and pensions for senior civil servants, he accepted the new order. After a very disappointing 20% of the national vote in the 1994 democratic elections, he accepted his role as second deputy President in the Government of National Unity (which disappeared in 1999). He helped vouchsafe the new democracy until he retired from politics in 1997.

Undoubtedly, the decision to award him the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace alongside Nelson Mandela was entirely merited. Mandela generously describes him, notwithstanding fierce disagreements between them, as “a great son of Africa.”

But if De Klerk was a necessary figure for Whites to ease the pain of political surrender, then Mandela was the indispensable leader ,first for Black South Africans, and soon enough for the whole of South Africa . He personified forgiveness, reconciliation and the power of personal example.

Millions of words, dozens of books and movies and 30 years in the international spotlight have transformed Mandela from man to myth, and from politician to saint. Mandela is not a saint; but he is an unusual and extraordinary human being. Having got to know him reasonably well since we first met in 1992, and having commenced my own political leadership at the onset of his Presidency in 1994, allow me to make a few brief observations on perhaps less well-known factors in his background which helped shape his crucial role in our democratic story:

• It was Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island –South Africa’s Alcatraz-for nearly 20 years which, ironically, in many ways prepared the way for his Party’s rule:

He has often spoken and written of how incarceration on “The Island” provided an essential ingredient for his struggle: “Time to think”, as he puts it. Time to mature politically and to plot. One of the key ingredients of dealing with his initially hostile warders there was his mastery of their language, Afrikaans. His choice of Afrikaans-detested by most Blacks as the language of oppression-was not accidental. He considered knowledge of the enemy tongue an essential weapon in battle. Throughout his imprisonment he read Afrikaans avidly-history, poetry and philosophy, and insisted that his imprisoned colleagues do the same.

• He learnt about the “enemy Afrikaner” in human terms from his prison warders:

As one of his biographers put it, “he learnt the lessons of human nature at the ‘University of Robben Island’. As Mandela wrote: “The moment we arrived in Robben Island, a debate started among our Afrikaner warders; some saying let’s treat these people harshly so they respect white supremacy; others saying ‘their side will win ultimately, we must treat them in such a way that when they win it will not be a government of retribution.’
“We established a very strong relationship through talking to the warders, and persuading them to treat us as human beings. And the lesson we learnt was that one of the strongest weapons is dialogue.”

• Mandela’s own political evolution was from revolutionary firebrand to political moderate:

Mandela cut his political teeth in the militant ANC Youth League, which he helped establish. But by the time of his trial for High Treason in 1964, he sowed the seeds which suggested, even back then, that the white monolith would not be replaced by a black equivalent. Desmond Tutu later gave this vision of multiracialism the famous formula of “ a rainbow nation.” But in his famous speech from the prisoner’s dock, a speech that arguably saved his life, Mandela outlined a vision to which he stuck for the rest of his political life:

“I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if necessary it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

It would take 25 years before Mandela met a man capable of understanding this message. But when he met De Klerk, he declared to an initially skeptical ANC (in words similar to those Mrs. Margaret Thatcher used to describe Mikhail Gorbachev) that “he is a man we can do business with.”

• The constitutional negotiations in South Africa between 1990 and 1994 took place amidst violence from all sides, necessitating compromises and even shutdowns of the talks,at various stages. But the key to their ultimate success was undoubtedly the authority and personality of Mandela.

If De Klerk could deliver the Whites, Coloureds and Indians to a settlement, then no African could dare face down Mandela. He connected the new mass, younger township activists to the ANC’s historic past. The other two towering ANC figures then alive, OR Tambo and Walter Sisulu had retired from frontline politics. So Mandela alone represented the historic ANC. His release from jail had been an enormous global media event and he quickly gained the affection and respect of every section of the population. His courage, fortitude and resolution through 27 years in prison could not be argued with and he had humility, a lack of bitterness and sense of humour that were utterly winning. His popularity far outran that of the ANC, especially among minorities. All these factors meant that he could sell the settlement to all sides.

It is impossible in a mere speech to cover the complexity and list of comprehensive factors which propelled South Africa away from a racial civil war toward a democratic settlement. Nor was the unlikely achievement of this outcome, the end of history as far as economic inequality, violent crime, racial tensions and a host of issues which continue to challenge South Africa and South Africans sixteen years after Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as our country’s first democratic President. But our constitution, and the settlement on which it was founded, means that there is a firm foundation on which to resolve them. Not least-it also means there is light at the end of the tunnel, not simply greater darkness.

Issued by: Embassy of South Africa in Buenos Aires
Contact Tel.: (011) 4317-2997 or (011) 4446-8978
Date: 01 September 2010