WHEN Anglo American chairman Gavin Relly and African National Congress publicity chief Thabo Mbeki sat down alongside each other in the Zambian bush last week, shared tobacco pouches and puffed merry smoke rings past each other, there was good reason to wonder what, if anything, was being cooked up.
For sure, an important political process was underway. But what did it mean for the ANC and its support base as opposed to big business?
Clearly not the same thing.
Relly and Mbeki had the comfort of both being pipe smokers. But, for the rest, the common ground between the two parties was more limited.
They were all South Africans. They all professed to share a concern that democracy should be achieved in South Africa with the minimum of suffering, though they disagreed on what exactly democracy was, particularly the extent to which wealth needs to be redistributed in order to give it concrete meaning.
Both front- and back-door ANC sources say no deals were reached. It was just “an exchange of views”. — Howard Barrell in Harare, Weekly Mail, September 20 to 26 1985