An easily forgotten fact of South African media history is that Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert was, for a very short time in 1993, chairman of the board of the SABC. He was appointed by the then president FW de Klerk, who used his powers to veto the selection panel’s choice, author Njabulo Ndebele. De Klerk’s justification for the unilateral edict? Ndebele could not speak Afrikaans.
Taking place mere months before the first democratic election, De Klerk’s gesture incensed a constitutionally powerless ANC. In his book Beyond the Miracle Allister Sparks recalls that Slabbert’s initial instinct was to decline the position, but that he was eventually persuaded to accept for a two-month stint. Writes Sparks: “As Mandela and De Klerk hurled angry exchanges at each other and protesters demonstrated outside the SABC building, Slabbert called an emergency board meeting on 24 July at which Fatima Meer, a feisty sociologist and long-time political activist, attacked him, saying it was unacceptable at this time of change for control of the pivotally important SABC to move from one white Afrikaner male to another.”
Sparks goes on to note that Meer’s assault on Slabbert was unwarranted, given the former politician’s anti-apartheid record and central role in coordinating the historic meeting between verligte Afrikaans leaders and the ANC in Senegal in 1989. Nevertheless, taking account of the SABC’s deeply compromised past, the symbolic burden of Slabbert’s nationality clearly outweighed his political credentials – although “deeply offended”, he acknowledged as much by swiftly vacating the chair to make way for one Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.
More than a decade later, Afrikaner identity and its symbolic outputs are no less of a personal concern for Slabbert. Today he is the chairman of “Aardklop”, an Afrikaans foundation established to promote and safeguard the arts. Significantly, the foundation’s aims extend to South African language groups beyond Afrikaans, and to racial groups beyond the Afrikaner.
If there are internal inconsistencies in these facts, Slabbert may provide a hint as to the reason. On reading certain Afrikaans magazines and newspapers – “thoughtful” titles like Rapport, Beeld and Insig – he finds confirmation for his strong sense that Afrikaner confusion is well advanced: “The overriding point to make is that a lot of Afrikaans people are realising they are not the people the apartheid government tried to define. There is almost some kind of ideological deconstruction going on. A lot of Afrikaners are joining the ANC, yet if you go back to 1989 they were still playing the National Party’s game. These titles reflect that confusion.”
Slabbert admits that his own identity is implicated in the cohesive self-image the National Party apparatchiks endeavoured, over a period of 40 years, to construct. By way of example he describes visiting the Cango Caves for the first time in 1956. “They dimmed the lights and there was organ music. A booming voice proclaimed, ‘the history of civilisation in South Africa began in 1652 with the arrival of the white man’. As a kid you don’t question that.”
Of course Slabbert is now 65 and the intervening years have seen him question far more challenging edifices. Famously, in 1986 he asked himself whether parliament was an irrelevant institution in the context of South Africa’s political problems, and having answered in the negative he resigned as head of the Progressive Federal Party, then the official opposition. Even more famously, shortly after leaving politics he asked whether a never-ending spiral of violence was the country’s inevitable fate, and having answered “no” once again he spearheaded some of the earliest negotiations between Afrikaners and the ANC (which culminated in the Dakar talks alluded to above).
But has half a lifetime battling head-on with the worst effects of Afrikaner nationalism totally removed the 16-year-old from the cave? To borrow from Plato’s analogy, maybe Slabbert is now seeing forms where previously he saw shadows, because 50 years on he is confronted with the existential side-effects of that history-by-white-man anomaly. “I see a lot of soul-searching going on. Who are we? Do we care about the language? Do we preserve Afrikaans as the language of science?”
As for the last question, the immediate reference is the “Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns” (Academy for Science and Arts). Slabbert asserts that the organisation used to be the intellectual expression of old-style Afrikanerdom. “Now Professor Jakes Gerwel, who is the new face of the Academy, would never call himself an Afrikaner.”
Just two days before this interview with Slabbert, Gerwel – a member of the Naspers board of directors, chancellor of Rhodes University, and formerly director general in the office of the presidency of Nelson Mandela – had presided over a conference where it was decided that the Academy would rename itself. The goal, according to Gerwel and a 50-member panel, was to seek the establishment of “‘n Afrikaanse, nie-rassige, legitieme akademie vir die boefening van wetenskap en kunste binne ‘n demokratiese en veeltaligheidskonteks” (an Afrikaans, non-racial, legitimate academy for the promotion of science and the arts inside a democratic and multi-lingual context).
Still, with figures such as Dan Roodt, founder of Praag (“Pro-Afrikaanse Aksiegroep” [Pro-Afrikaans Action Group]), writing books such as The Scourge of the ANC, the new definitions championed by the likes of Gerwel are far from uncontested. If there is such a thing as the contemporary Afrikaner’s quest for meaning, Roodt’s writings embody its reactionary elements. “ANC rule in South Africa,” Roodt declares, “represents the biggest scourge visited upon the country since our traditional enemy, Great Britain, invaded us one hundred years ago—”
In one sense, Slabbert views this cultural tension philosophically. The Afrikaans language itself will resolve the matter, he contends. Either it will go under or it will survive. The essential arbiters, he says, will be popular media, urbanisation and the new crop of Afrikaans writers. “Youth culture will play a role. It links into urbanisation. We [white Afrikaans-speakers] are the fastest urbanising culture in South Africa. There is also the influence of the US on our media. If you look at what counts for entertainment on the TV channels, hell, it must be tough to be a young person. And young Afrikaans writers also contribute to this feeling of ‘forget about the safari boytjies’. I hate stereotypes of this nature because it debases a good intellectual argument, but unfortunately the debate seems to take place on this level.”
So in the other sense Slabbert is a purist? He doesn’t deny it outright. “When the Free State rugby captain comes off the field and says, ‘dit was awesome gewees‘, what is that? Is that Afrikaans? That’s rubbish. Antjie Krog will immediately call me a fuddy-duddy for saying this—maybe I am.”
Or maybe he’s just elusive, intellectually enigmatic, loath to plaster inscrutable topics with concrete statements. Slabbert, it seems, is a member of that rare breed that can hold two conflicting thoughts without the need to reconcile them. It’s a quality that must have stood him in good stead in his own political days, and one that he evidently admires in President Thabo Mbeki.
As Sparks quotes in Beyond the Miracle, from an interview with Slabbert on Mbeki’s strategy for handling the irreconcilable: “The ANC want to consolidate the liberal democracy and they want to go for growth, and pursuing the one creates problems for the other—So you have to manage these political consequences, which is what Mbeki is trying to do. He’s doing it by co-option – using the communists in his government to deal with the unions and carry out the privatisation – and he’s doing it by taking control of the ANC. He is determining the public representatives right through from the national to the local level, which is authoritarian and undemocratic. So he makes the ANC undemocratic in order to preserve a democratic system—If I were in his [Mbeki’s] position I would make the same choices.”
That last statement was made a few years ago and lately Slabbert’s “not so sure” he’d make the same decisions as the president, but his admiration for a certain style of realpolitik remains. This (begrudging?) respect does not extend to the president’s handling of the media, however. Slabbert is uncomfortable with the view of Joel Netshitenzhe – head of the Government Communication and Information System and member of Mbeki’s inner circle – that media in a developing country could justifiably play more of a “development communication” and less of a “watchdog” role. He argues that there is nothing inherent in media that allows it to damage the democratic process, and that the courts are the best remedy for irresponsible journalism.
One wonders whether his view would be the same if he were still in the trenches. Thinking back to such a time, he avers that when he was the leader of the opposition he was “a pawn in the hands of the English press”. Of course the same can hardly be said of Mbeki and today’s press – English or Afrikaans – so what is Slabbert’s take on the ideal South African media system?
Given his chairmanship of Caxton, Slabbert is in a good position to answer the question. He is also in a good position to give an insight into the ongoing rumours around an impending deal between Caxton and Johnnic Communications, owner of the Sunday Times.
“If you are going to preserve an independent media in South Africa it has to be black-owned and it also has to make money. So if you do get a deal between Johncom and Caxton you would have the best of all possible worlds. But there is nothing sinister, I can assure you that. In any case, I am a non-executive chairman. I don’t conclude deals.”
Perhaps another quality of Slabbert’s, another mark of the skilled politician, is the downplaying of his ability to influence. From a humble and non-descript office in Melville, Johannesburg, he acts as a figurehead for listed corporates and cultural foundations, he exchanges ideas with the country’s leading thinkers and writers, he dispenses his penetrating political insights to hordes of comment-hungry journalists.
On the subject of media, cultural dominance and competing versions of reality, he leaves this journalist with a pearl. “I always say we went through 40 years of inherited Afrikaner history. Now, do we go through another 40 years of inherited ANC history?”