Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
One of the more remarkable pieces of reportage on the election just past was a Sunday newspaper story early in the campaign, written without a hint of irony, about Musibudi Mangena, president of the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo).
Mangena was saying, again without a hint of irony, that whereas other political parties were fighting merely to be the major opposition force, he and Azapo, which then commanded considerably less than 1% support in the opinion polls, were preparing to take power in our dear country.
Well, hello there, Musibudi, what kind of dagga do you chaps smoke up in Pietersburg?
Anyway, this Monday just past (June 14), there was Mangena in the House of Assembly in Cape Town when Thabo Mbeki was elected president.
Mangena was resting his backside not on one of the seats of power, but on a particularly obscure stretch of the backbenches.
He was there to preach black exclusivity as Azapo’s lone MP, courtesy of the fact that, following its campaign, Azapo still commanded considerably less than 1% support.
His immediate neighbour was Dominee Cassie Aucamp, there to proclaim the cause of Afrikaner exclusivity as leader and sole representative of the Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging.
If the irony was lost on the rather dour Mangena – who projects all the determined misery of a man who will forever be in search of hopeless causes – it did not seem so on Aucamp.
I’ll swear I saw him looking to his left, shaking his head and smiling when he recognised that, sitting alongside him, was a fellow flat-earther – even if one from the other side of the saucer, if you see what I mean.
Two seats on sat Louis Luyt, biltong boet and defender of the one true faith: rugby.
Here, more so than in the handover of the presidency from Nelson Mandela to Mbeki then under way, was a cameo of the miracle that is now South Africa.
Elsewhere in the Assembly on Monday the Leon was lying down with the lamb.
Wrapped in a riotous Sotho blanket, Patrick “Terror” Lekota, back from the exile in the National Council of Provinces to which he was banished by fellow African National Congress leaders in 1997, was doing his best to be polite to his immediate neighbour, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. For reasons perhaps best known to her, she was dressed entirely in funereal black.
The Leon himself, installed at last as official leader of the opposition, was like a cat surveying a lake of cream. He seemed to be doing his best, however, not to be seen to smile. Tony was maintaining the Leon scowl – part baring of teeth, part sniff of contempt, part irritated derision, but all aggression.
The boyz and gals of the Democratic Party around and behind him could not, though, contain themselves. All smiles, only smiles and, if it were possible, forever smiles.
And down the opposition front bench – far down the front bench, beyond Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the Inkatha Freedom Party’s impi – slumped the sad figure of Marthinus van Schalkwyk, strangely brave in his moment of defeat, the erstwhile official leader of the opposition and perhaps soon- to-be-erstwhile leader of the New National Party. Behind Kortbroek sat his much- diminished group of men and women, some still bearing the blank looks of the truly beaten.
Across the central aisle that divides the brightly lit Assembly sat a lanky, benign, smiling sphinx, presiding over what may well be the crowning moment of his life. For perhaps nothing so much signifies the possession of power as the willing surrender of it.
Gracious to the last – even to the extent of sometimes embarrassing the recipients of his generosity – Mandela insisted that Mbeki take the president’s seat in the Assembly immediately following the latter’s unanimous election as president.
Mbeki, a man who has sometimes seemed so tightly tied within himself that one fears the unravelling of a single knot, looked unusually relaxed.
This may have had something to do with the flu medication he was having to take. But it almost certainly had more to do with his accession, at last, to a position that has seemed, in my eyes anyway from the moment I first met him in 1981, to be in some strange sense naturally his: the leadership of South Africa.
The opposition parties seemed to feel much the same on Monday afternoon. In the warmth of the tributes many paid him from the podium below the speaker’s chair there seemed to be more than a recognition merely that it was fruitless to oppose his candidacy. They seemed to be saying that there was no better person for the job that now needs doing; that no person is better prepared for power in our land.
Coming from one’s opponents, that recognition is a statement of confidence indeed. Mbeki must now show that this confidence is well placed.