‘What if the Progressives won?’
In 1982, a good friend and fellow Afrikaner, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, led the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) in the general election on the platform of a liberal democracy based on universal franchise. On the eve of the election, Adrienne, our youngest daughter, then 11, came to me a little perplexed. She had an argument with her friends at Bloemhof, an Afrikaans-medium school for girls in Stellenbosch, where more than 80 percent of the Afrikaner voters supported the National Party (NP) during the early 1980s. The question was: ‘Which party would you support, if you could have voted today?’
As could be expected, most of my daughter’s friends instantly opted for the NP. Adrienne, however, backed the PFP. Her friends exclaimed: ‘Oh you silly one. Then the blacks will come to power.’ My daughter replied bravely: ‘No, the Progressive Federal Party will govern.’ She asked me: ‘I am right, am I not?’ For once, I was at a loss for words in a conversation about politics in my own home. Slabbert laughed when I told him the story, and joked: ‘We shall turn these blacks into Progressives.’ But there was of course a fundamental problem that plagued all of us who supported Slabbert and the PFP. What if the blacks were not progressives of the liberal-democratic kind that Slabbert was?
Into extra-parliamentary politics
A constitutional settlement at risk
The golden moment that never was
* This article was first published in Alfred LeMaitre and Michael Savage (editors) The Passion for Reason: Essays in Honour of Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball , 2010).
