Slabbert’s move away from his position in South Africa’s Options had much to do with his outrage at the government’s suppression of the popular revolt and his despair about the country’s future. But it was influenced equally by the friendship that he had forged with Thabo Mbeki as an up-and-coming leader of the ANC in exile.
In June 1987, some 60 South Africans (half of them Afrikaners), all personally invited by Slabbert, met with an ANC delegation under Thabo Mbeki in Dakar, Senegal. The Dakar meeting became a media event. It was the largest group to ignore the government’s strong stand against meeting with the ANC leadership in exile. Slabbert was held in high regard as a former leader of the opposition and on account of his bold move in resigning from Parliament to explore alternatives. (This and the following paragraphs are mainly based on Giliomee, 2009:671–75.)
The ‘internal South Africans’, or ‘inziles’ as they were called, were not representative of the Afrikaner community and some did not even consider themselves Afrikaners. They had two things in common: a feeling of responsibility for the hurt and damage apartheid had caused, and a fear that the struggle in South Africa would escalate into proliferating, random violence and perhaps even into civil war. Jakes Gerwel (1987:11), a member of the group of inziles, remarked that the conference was marked by their ‘honest, anguishing questions’.
The ANC was united in its rejection of minority rights as a cloak for the retention of ‘white privilege’. At Dakar and on other occasions, the ANC in exile presented the movement as united, whereas it was in fact divided and hopelessly indecisive, as Mac Maharaj, one of the delegates, would later point out (Russell, 2009:59). Any clear concession on minority rights would only have exacerbated these tensions. An abiding personal memory of the Dakar conference is a glimpse, through a slit in a curtain, of Mbeki apparently conducting a seminar with his group after a formal session.
Pallo Jordan, the ANC head of research, led the attack on minority rights at Dakar, insisting that the new South Africa had to be based on a rejection of the cultural and ethnic divisions on which apartheid was based. In the most sweeping of statements, he argued that all groups existing in South Africa had been ‘created, sustained and nurtured by state policy’, which had first tried to deflect the consciousness of the black masses into channels of ethnic nationalism, and, when that had failed, proposed devices such as group rights, power-sharing and federalism. The cleavages could be unmade precisely because they had been created by apartheid.
Jordan claimed that a new national consciousness was developing among the oppressed that took ‘no account of ethnicity, skin colour, linguistic affiliation’. National liberation had to be achieved through the creation of democratic institutions in the context of a unitary state that accorded rights to all citizens as individuals. He warned that the future government would adopt a policy of ‘liberatory intolerance’ towards organisations based on race or ethnicity. He went as far as citing Mbeki’s call of ‘I am an Afrikaner’ as evidence that blacks were prepared to embrace Afrikaners as fellow-countrymen (ANC, 1987:18, 19, 70).
Jordan’s idea that the racial and ethnic categories were the creations of the apartheid state was supported by some theorists who argued that modernisation would sweep away racial and ethnic divisions, but it flew in the face of the stubborn persistence of these divisions in all divided societies in the developing world. There was also an obvious contradiction in his argument. If the ANC wanted to retain race as a category to advance blacks and measure progress in this regard, then there could be no objection in principle to ethnic minorities mobilising on the basis of descent.
In a journal article published shortly after the Dakar conference under the title ‘Why won’t the Afrikaners rely on democracy?’ Jordan (1988:25) dismissed calls for minority rights as a refusal to ‘seek forms of mutuality’ with the African majority in a democracy. He mocked any anxiety over possible discrimination against whites under black rule by waxing lyrical over the non-racial tradition of the ANC. ‘The very fact that we had to struggle to maintain non-racialism has drilled it into the average member so that it was almost second nature.’ What he was saying, in short, was that the ANC could be trusted to take the interests of the minorities into account.
Mbeki was the greatest single winner at Dakar and subsequent meetings with Afrikaners. His emphasis on talk rather than fight had begun to win increasing support among ANC leaders as hopes of overthrowing the regime faded. He discovered at Dakar that non-binding assurances about a future ANC government fell on fertile soil. He had forged a firm alliance with Slabbert. At a meeting in Accra, Ghana, a hostile questioner challenged the motives and credibility of Slabbert’s group, who were visiting the city following the Dakar conference. Mbeki responded: ‘We are not fighting the white people. We are not fighting individuals, but as South Africans together we would like to come together to destroy the apartheid system.’ Slabbert later said that he had his ‘epiphany of loyalty’ at that moment, adding ‘I’d die for that bugger’ (Gevisser, 2007:514–15).
Eight years later, Slabbert would find that Mbeki would cut him off abruptly. He traced the cause of the split to a conversation they had shortly before Mbeki became Deputy President. Mbeki asked what Slabbert would do if he were in his place. Slabbert responded: ‘I would appoint a number of committees of experts in key areas to constantly remind me of how much I have to learn and how ignorant I am.’ He continued: ‘This must have offended him … [It] was the end of our comfortable relationship. He is the only person I know who has demonstrated to me that my friendship was expendable’ (Slabbert, 2006:57).
Perhaps Mbeki understood Slabbert to be saying that he could not expect to govern effectively without leaning on a coterie of white experts (Lelyveld, 2009:27). An alternative explanation, given later by Cyril Ramaphosa, is more plausible. A self-confident Nelson Mandela, he said, did not mind surrounding himself with clever advisers. Mbeki, by contrast, ‘needed to be the brightest in the room’. Ramaphosa wished that Mbeki had been bold enough to draw on advice from diverse sources and not just people with the same views (Russell, 2009:20).
To be fair to Mbeki, he never promised that Afrikaners, or whites in general who had not actively joined the ANC in its struggle, would become important players in a future black-led government. For him, the supreme challenge was for the ANC to prove that blacks could successfully govern the most advanced economy in Africa. The role of whites was essentially that of contributing their skills. Slabbert, on the other hand, was much more aware than Mbeki of the immense difficulties the ANC would encounter in running the country and stimulating the economy. He also genuinely believed in the non-racial promises that the ANC held out.
