Howard Barrell
OVER A BARRELL
Helen Suzman was speaking with little fear of contradiction. “Some odd characters,” she told the assembled Democratic Party faithful on Monday, “have been joining the party.”
She had the good grace this week – at a ceremony to name the DP’s parliamentary caucus room in Parliament after her and to rehang her portrait there – not to identify those she considered her party’s stranger recruits to the liberal cause. But we of lesser grace will list a few of them.
There is Russel Crystal, erstwhile security police spy, confederate of Craig Williamson and diligent servant of one of the 20th century’s less charitable machineries of repression. There is Annette Reinecke, one of the most bitter opponents of the old “Progs” in the Western Cape and a former United Party rightwinger and provincial councillor, who eventually found a home in the National Party. There is Hernus Kriel, who was minister of law and order in the years leading up to the 1994 election when the police had even less success than earlier in capturing the killers of African National Congress supporters. There is that reborn liberal of less recent vintage, Tertius Delport, who led conservative resistance in the NP to many of the compromises proposed by Roelf Meyer and others at the constitutional talks in the early 1990s that produced our democracy. And there are many others of similar pedigree.
The DP’s new allies, as opposed to new members, now include Louis Luyt, leader of the Federal Alliance, and Lucas Mangope, head of the United Christian Democratic Party. In the late 1970s, Luyt helped the lieutenants of former prime minister John Vorster use state funds improperly to found The Citizen, then a pro-apartheid newspaper. And Mangope, who once governed the former homeland of Bophuthatswana, is a convicted fraudster.
And, if Marthinus van Schalkwyk accepts what many others believe has the certainty of gravity – that his New National Party does not have a future on its own – the DP, or the alliance emerging around it, may soon be richer by one more former apartheid intelligence agent. For, in an earlier incarnation, that is what Kortbroek was.
This line in recruits represents something of a break from tradition for the DP. Liberals of the old school have tended not to have the stomach for accomplices of this kind. Their delicate sensibilities have, more often than not, led them to conclude that it is better to belong to a small and (as they would see it) virtuously pure party than to suffer the moral blemishes that may come with growth and political relevance.
But members of the disinfectant tendency no longer dictate the DP’s rules of engagement. To the limited extent that they still raise objections to some of those now being drawn into their party’s expanded embrace, their voices are surprisingly muted. Their doubts seldom rise above polite demurrals registered in the honeyed accents of our leafier suburbs.
Tony Leon’s leadership is a big factor in this change. Lachrymose liberalism is not the volksleier’s cup of choice. For Leon, muscle and a little meanness are indispensable aids to morality. He is not in politics to be forever “right” yet forever irrelevant. Rather he is in opposition now in order to win power later – 10 or 15 years down the line. And that, for him, means growing the DP – wherever it will grow, among former apartheid security personnel no less than anywhere else.
It is, perhaps, Leon’s unwillingness to roll over in guilt and ask to be tickled that so angers his many antagonists in the ruling party. He fans their rage further by implicitly asserting through his pugnacious behaviour a principle that underlies South Africa’s Constitution. It is this: that, except in cases in which the law decides otherwise, everyone emerging from our damaged past – whether white or black, formerly pro- or anti-apartheid – now has the right to an unapologetic declaration of his or her views and interests. In other words, the views of a Mangope are no less legitimate than those of a Mandela – although judgements about which are the more worthwhile may differ.
There are some in the ruling party for whom this principle jars badly. They have accepted that most people who bore some responsibility for apartheid and its worst excesses will be neither tried nor convicted of any offence. Yet they appear to demand of such people that each of them still wear his or her past like a guilt- laden ball and chain. The result sought is that this mark of shame for the past will, whenever the ANC chooses to make it, discredit anything the bearer says on the issues of today and tomorrow.
In the eyes of some senior members of the ANC – as the ruling party’s submission to the Human Rights Commission’s hearings into the media evinced – mere possession of a white skin may qualify someone for that burden.
The path to forgiveness offered by the ANC is for the “guilty” to join it. But the ANC’s absolution is likely only ever to be conditional on those so “forgiven” not proving awkward. So good luck then, John Gogotya MP (ANC), loyal apartheid enforcer in the 1980s. Ndikufisela intlantla, Stella Sigcau, former president of Transkei. Geluk, Pik Botha, apartheid salesman extraordinaire. Mooi skoot, Kallie Knoetze.
Our freedom makes several demands of us. One of them is that we understand a paradox. Freedom does not engender only what we consider the unblemished, the savoury or the good.
lllRather, it throws up much we might consider bad. The lllchalllllenge is to hold lllwide the bands lllof our tolerance so lthat, in suppressing what llwe find vile, we do not also destroy much that is good. This gives to what Suzman called the “odd” among us a moral right. It is a right many more of us may need to respect.
Whether or not the “odd” will become as nice and as boring as the rest of us – well, that is another question.