FW de Klerk’s testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week was widely billed as an “apology for apartheid”. In reality it was less a case of mea culpa than J’accuse.
The African National Congress, he suggested, was more a hindrance to reform — which was firmly on track from 1978 — than a force for liberation. Where the atrocities of the “dirty war” in the 1980s were concerned, he had no knowledge of them. If they were committed, they were the work of the security forces on the ground, acting without authorisation. And even those atrocities had to be understood (excused, was the implication) in the context of “unconventional” warfare forced on the National Party government by the “revolutionary” onslaught of he communist-backed ANC. “It would be a serious mistake to adopt a simplistic approach in judging such abuses and violations,” he warned the commission.
More disturbing, however, than this exercise in historical revisionism, was his failure to acknowledge the suffering caused by apartheid. He appeared to be offering a defence for a few isolated human-rights abuses rather than a perverse and gigantic exercise in social engineering which literally wrecked the lives of millions.
It was not as if he distanced himself from the years of “grand” and “petty” apartheid. He noted that his father was a cabinet minister under three prime ministers and conceded that “I myself have always been a loyal supporter of the National Party. I supported its policies in the period before 1978 …” He even declared that “I retain my deep respect for our former leaders. Within the context of their time, circumstances and convictions they were good and honourable men …”
The National Party leader’s failure to appreciate what “apartheid” represented to the majority of South Africans leaves one desperate to find a mechanism to bring some understanding home to him. At risk of over-simplification (which seemingly poses little risk where De Klerk is concerned) it might be worth seizing on an analogy he himself used before Desmond Tutu & Co.
At one stage De Klerk told the commission it was a “simple truth” that “no president, minister, commanding officer, business manager, or school principal” could “know everything which takes place within the realm of his or her managerial responsibilities.” Let us choose the principal and extend the metaphor, rolling up in this august person the “honourable” men to whom De Klerk referred — DF Malan, JG Strijdom, Hendrik Verwoerd, BJ Vorster, PW Botha and (for the sake of continuity) De Klerk.
Our principal rules over a school which, through force of demographic circumstance, has a student body which can be arbitrarily divided. For novelty’s sake let us leave aside pigmentation of the skin and choose the colour of their eyes.
Our “honourable” principal announces that, for anthropological reasons which he is unable to substantiate on any scientific grounds (a detail which detracts not an iota from his sense of God- given certainty), the blue-eyed girls and boys are superior to the brown, the green, the grey and all the rest of them (the amber are “honorary blue”, because Jones’s father is rich, but that is a by- the-way).
Henceforth, our honourable principal declares, the blue-eyed kids will sit at the front, on chairs behind desks with pencils, books and sharpeners while the rest will muddle along on the floor where they are invited to do their sums with fingers in the dust. The polyocular lot will anyway be excluded from all classes which teach anything more than the basics of hewing wood and drawing water, because the colour of their eyes make them unqualified for any higher education. They are also condemned to sit at the back of school assembly, to sleep at the windy end of the dormitory and to serve as fags to the blue-eyed kids while avoiding any social intercourse with them on pain of a sound whipping to both parties.
This dispensation creates such a sense of over- bearing superiority among the blue-eyed pupils that a number of unsavoury incidents ensue, the most memorable being the occasion when a particularly gifted brown-eyed kid is cornered in the school toilets and beaten to death on the grounds he is uppity. When some tearful students report this unfortunate incident to the Latin master he declares that the boy’s death “leaves me cold”, a sentiment which draws no complaint from the oh-so-honourable principal.
Rumour of the state of affairs in our school filters out beyond its high walls and word gets back to the honourable principal that lynch-mobs are forming in the neighbourhood. Already alarmed by reports from snitches in the student body that the polyocular students are plotting to put broken glass in the scrambled eggs they are forced to serve up to the blue-eyed kids every morning, he has a Damascene experience.
Inviting the parent-teachers’ association (previously banned) to form a school board he appears before them to say: “The teachers are proud of the role which they have played, in conjunction with others, in putting our school on the road to peace, prosperity and reconciliation … we have gone through a period of deep self-analysis and we are indeed renewed from within … we are prepared to admit our many mistakes of the past and are genuinely repentant … we have apologised … we have also forgiven … can I have my job back ?”