David Beresford: A SECOND LOOK
There is something gloriously tragic about the story of the Afrikaners’ search for a national identity and a home to call their own: the flight from the Cape, the jubilant discovery of the Nile (wrong stream, but what the heck) and their arrival in their garden of Eden, only to be robbed of it by that thieving imperialist, Lord Alfred Milner, thanks to the discovery of gold (richest of ironies).
And then the long haul again; their political trek to power in 1948 and their attempts to forge an ideological laager to keep out the modern counterparts to the heathen tribesmen and the uitlanders of the 19th century – only to find that time and circumstance had once more matched them against an enemy they could not defeat, this time in the form of a global consciousness, if not exactly a global conscience.
So the Peace of Vereeniging can be equated to the peace thrashed out at Kempton Park. Just as FW de Klerk offers a reassurance to the volk that this is not the end for them, but merely a fresh challenge – The Last Trek: A New Beginning – so did Paul Kruger console his followers at the end of his Memoirs, published nearly a century ago: “Nor, in so far as I myself am concerned, will I consent to lose courage because the peace is not such as the burgers wished it. For, quite apart from the fact that the bloodshed and the fearful sufferings of the people of the two Republics are now ended, I am convinced that God does not forsake His people, though it may often appear so.”
Kruger has been badly treated by history, a victim, one suspects, of the “bodyguard of lies” over whose wartime services that Anglo-Boer War veteran, Winston Churchill, was later to enthuse. Certainly the memoirs of the man who tends to be remembered in history as a figure of fun – a bewhiskered “flat- earther – deserve a place of honour among the great adventure books which Africa has produced in such profusion.
Of course there has been a change in the terrain since Kruger’s time. De Klerk, after all, could hardly be expected to thrill his readers with an account of a life-and-death wrestling match in a swamp with a buffalo. But, on the evidence of his autobiography, the suspicion must be that the last president of what might be described as the second South African Republic would avoid such an encounter less out of fear for the outcome than concern that he should not get his shirtsleeves dirtied. He is, in short, “Mr Clean” – a politician who dreams Teflon.
“Like any other people in the world at any time in history we were the products of our time and circumstances,” he pleads in mitigation early in the book. “Much of human history has been a tale of discrimination and exploitation …” Thus primed for an account of personal involvement in one such “tale of discrimination and exploitation”, the discovery that in De Klerk’s case the royal “we” excludes “me” from the ambit of confession is, to say the least, disappointing.
The De Klerks were at the centre of power in South Africa for much of the short history of apartheid. His father, who served in the Cabinet under prime ministers Hans Strijdom, Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster, nearly became state president (being foiled by a smear campaign, the nature of which his son does not confide). De Klerk himself followed suit, being leapfrogged into Cabinet as Vorster’s “blue-eyed boy” and holding a variety of portfolios until he succeeded PW Botha in 1989.
In all this time De Klerk emulated United States President Bill Clinton smoking dope – holding back from the sin of inhalation. He was a member of the Ruiterwag and the Broederbond, but never actually served on any of their structures. He presided over the administration of race classification, but “in the most humane manner possible and (tried) wherever I could to accommodate the special needs of the human beings involved”.
He attended State Security Council meetings, but failed to pay attention to security matters and left the legality of its activities to the better qualified such as then justice minister Kobie Coetsee. He watched Cabinet rule being reduced to “window dressing” under Botha, but “could do very little to change this state of affairs and had to be content with playing a watchdog role”.
As one follows the career path of this supremely toothless “watchdog”, this most pious of politicians, one can only sympathise with President Nelson Mandela’s irritation with him – an irritation which, at least by De Klerk’s account, appears to have driven the great man to acts of pettiness over the allocation of State homes after the National Party’s 1994 election defeat.
Part of the irritation with De Klerk lies in the apparent paradox that a man who was instrumental in destroying apartheid could have lived in the belly of the beast for so long without protest. How could a man who claims a place in history as a “great reformer” have shown such lack of passion for principle?
The Last Trek offers no explanation. But there is a temptation to see at least a clue to it in an account De Klerk gives of the final humiliation of Vorster when he was hunted down in Cabinet as the sacrificial goat in the Muldergate scandal. De Klerk recounts, with no apparent regret, how he seemingly delivered the coup de grce by telling his political mentor that he should go “for his own sake and for the sake of the country”.
Voster “closed the documents that had up until then lain open before him. Shortly afterwards he ended the conversation by announcing that he would resign.” De Klerk adds that when Vorster died in 1983, the family asked him to stay away from the funeral. The entire story is recounted with the calculating dispassion of a chess player revisiting a game, or of a fishmonger gutting a fish.
But, amid all the self-justification, comes the most powerful image of the book which, hopefully, will prove more enduring than speculation as to De Klerk’s curious character.
It is May 4 1994 and the ministers are gathered as usual under the vaulted roof of the Cabinet room in the Union Buildings. The French doors leading to the balcony are closed and shuttered as always, for security reasons. In the panelling of the semi-circular wall behind De Klerk’s chair are set two small alcoves containing bronze statuettes of two Voortrekker women by Anton van Wouw. They are the models for the statues that stand at the “Vrouemonument” in Bloemfontein, commemorating the women and children who died in British “concentration camps” during the Anglo- Boer War. Elsewhere on the walls are landscapes by JH Pierneef and Tinus de Jongh.
The meeting, observes De Klerk, was historic – “the last manifestation of white rule, not only in South Africa, but on the whole continent of Africa. It signalled the end of a process that began with the first council meeting convened by Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch founder of the Cape, 342 years earlier. We began our meeting, as always, with a prayer. On this occasion it was the turn of Mr Jac Rabie, the coloured minister of population development …”
And the coloured minister led them in prayer! It is a small detail in the greater scheme of things. But it offers reassurance that, wherever it may take them, at least the Third Trek will be informed by an appreciation of a shared humanity. Thus, therefore, to the stars.
FW de Klerk’s autobiography, The Last Trek: A New Beginning, is published by Macmillan