Anthony Egan
ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE: THE END OF APARTHEID AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA by Patti Waldmeir (WW Norton, R134,95)
SING THE BELOVED COUNTRY: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA by Peter Hain (Plutos, R98)
ALL SIDES OF THE STORY: A GRANDSTAND VIEW OF SOUTH AFRICA’S POLITICAL TRANSITION by Kaizer Nyatsumba (Jonathan Ball, R79,95)
ACCOUNTS of South Africa’s 1990-1994 transition to democracy abound and there are no signs that this publishing growth industry will decline in the immediate future. These new books are additions to the genre and approach their subject from different angles. All have their strengths – and weaknesses.
Peter Hain, unlike Patti Waldmeir, was a participant in the struggle against apartheid since the 1960s. He first came to prominence when -while still a teenager – he gave the funeral oration at the funeral of John Harris, hanged for his role in the bombing of Johannesburg station. Hain says this happened because his parents had been banned by the state. He is also adamant that Harris never intended to kill anyone and had given the authorities sufficient warning; the state, he charges, deliberately ignored the warning for political reasons.
Later,in exile and as a student activist, Hain focused his attention on the sports boycott as a means of putting pressure on the South African government. For this he and those who supported him in the Liberal and Labour parties were the target of “dirty tricks” by the South African Bureau of State Security (Boss).
These and other stories – like his secret return to South Africa with a television crew to investigate apartheid and sport – are interspersed with potted accounts of the developing struggle against apartheid up to the 1994 election. These are perhaps useful for an overseas readership, but are too short and lacking in analysis to add much to our understanding of the transition. They clash with the autobiographical parts of his narrative, which are far more interesting, and to my mind much better written.
American journalist Patti Waldmeir draws heavily – and usually effectively – on interviews, personal experience and contemporary documents for her eminently readable account of the transition. Playing on the language of miracle, she seeks to understand “the very human personalities and very real historical forces that drove the apartheid drama to its end”.
The result is a strong but conventional account of the familiar facts: the violent stalemate within South Africa during the 1980s; the beginnings of dialogue between the then government and the African National Congress; the role of Nelson Mandela; the 1990 unbannings; the Codesa processes; the often extremely violent crises; the resolution and the election.
Waldmeir intersperses her interviews with impressionistic accounts of her own experience of the process. She writes well, but Ifelt the text was marred by a number of presuppositions that lurk beneath the surface of her text. She tends at times to reduce the conflict to an Afrikaner/African or black/white conflict – which is a pity, since she is also all too aware of the politics of non-racialism.
There is also a tendency to buy into the false dichotomy of “hard men” versus negotiators within the ANC (lumping communists in the former category). This division was a nonsense which the Nationalist Party government unsuccessfully tried to exploit.
But Waldmeir does manage to capture the often chaotic sense of the period of transition, noting the problems and imperfections of the election. “The death of apartheid,” as she says, “is one of the great tales of 20th-century politics. And will remain so – whatever the sequel.”
The book by Kaiser Nyatsumba, political editor of The Star, is a selection of articles reflecting the period from 1990 to early 1996. If we are not satisfied by its more than 300 pages, the author notes that we can get more from the newspaper’s archives.
In these pieces Nyatsumba is “thinking on his feet”, analysing events almost as they happen. All Sides of the Story is, thus, itself a document of the transition, without the benefit of hindsight.
A strength is Nyatsumba’s interest in the “other” players, the groups who seemed significant but turned out to be “also- rans” (or even “non-starters”). Most transition literature sees the process as very much an ANC/NP contest, but Nyatsumba’s look at the ideas and aspirations of the Pan Africanist Congress, Democratic Party, Inkatha Freedom Party and Azanian People’s Organisation reminds us of what South Africa was like in the early 1990s. Less interesting are the pieces covering the first few years of Mandela’s presidency.
None of these books satisfy entirely; none are definitive. Nor should they be, for history must continually be rewritten.