Columnists should generally resist the temptation to write about themselves. Unless purely comic, the column that begins ‘I want to tell you about my awful experience on the Guava Fruit Airline the other day” is a self-indulgent expropriation of a public space.
But writing about the organisation that one has been employed by for 12 years is I hope forgiveable, especially if it seeks to make a broader point. When Thabo Mbeki addressed the Constitutional Assembly in 1996 and delivered the words ‘I am an African” it may have provided his most lilting rhetorical leitmotif but it was not the first time Mbeki had used such a phrase to stunning effect.
Nearly 10 years before that in Dakar, Senegal in 1987 Mbeki had led the ANC in a meeting with a delegation of members of the white, mostly Afrikaaner, political establishment, who had travelled from South Africa at the invitation of a new organisation known as Idasa.
There was a large degree of trepidation on both sides, but perhaps more anxiety on the part of the non-ANC group. ‘There were some very nervous Afrikaners sitting in the Air Afrique aircraft as it turned low over the lights of Dakar and approached the runway,” according to one member of the 61-person delegation from South Africa, the veteran journalist and writer Max du Preez.
‘Only a handful of them had had any contact with the ANC before and they were struggling to contain their subconscious prejudice before the first contact.” Then the meeting began and Mbeki introduced himself: ‘My name is Thabo Mbeki. I am an Afrikaner”. It was a brilliant piece of diplomacy, and by most accounts it not so much cut the ice as melted the iceberg.
To Rashid Lombard — who took, and has kept, an archive of extraordinary photographs from the meeting — it proved that Mbeki was not only a sophisticated diplomat but was ‘being groomed to be president one day”.
Looking back 20 years, Lombard says that the importance of the meeting was that ‘the bottom line was the acceptance that emerged that the ANC was going to the government in power one day and that it was already a government in exile —”
It is clear from the short account of its history that the NGO published as a part of its 20-year celebration at the Market Theatre on Thursday that the Dakar meeting was, if not its finest hour, then certainly its defining moment.
‘Dakar was the meeting that broke the monotonous circle of repression and revolt, in a sense it was the start of the negotiation process —” to the mind of another who was present, Pierre Cronje.
It was the frustration of the mutually-hurting stalemate that drove two white MPs, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine to resign from Parliament in 1986. They formed the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa. It was an apt name, though we have struggled ever since with the ‘a” of ‘alternative”: after all, when democracy arrived in 1994, what was the organisation to do with that part of the acronym?
The answer has been a mixture of principle and pragmatism. When Wilmot James took over in 1995 he had the wit and the confidence to recognise that Idasa needed to change with the times and so it developed a range of new programmes as a ‘critical ally” of democratic government.
This was not to everyone’s taste. Mbeki is like Margaret Thatcher, who once said ‘you are either for me or against me”. He let it be known that he much preferred the Idasa that quietly behind the scenes got the right people together and provided the congenial setting for his powers of persuasion.
Getting the right people around a table is a greatly undervalued commodity. Idasa continues to do just that — with citizens and their communities, with local governments, and with politicians throughout the continent, supporting a radical view of democracy that believes that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary feats.
Participating in one such meeting on the subject of Zimbabwean democracy not so long ago, one the senior leaders of the SACP noted in a whispered aside that so far as Idasa was concerned at least, he ‘could recognise regime change when he saw it”.
It may have had liberal roots, but organisations change, and its commitment today is to recognise that, as Paul Graham, its current CEO, says ‘unless we can create democracies in Africa that deliver livelihoods that are liberated from poverty as well as being peaceful and predictable, we are wasting our resources”.
Friday is International Right to Know Day. It’s a great pity that it falls at a point in South Africa’s history where, alas, there appears to be a growing tendency not to look back at the old days with nostalgia at the nobility of the struggle against apartheid and the unity of endeavour that brought about its overthrow but rather to mimic the secrecy, neurosis and paranoia of those times.
Clearly we are a long way away from the vision of an open society, self-confident and composed enough to handle the dual challenge of diversity and division. To talk of an ‘alternative” now would certainly be to create entirely the wrong impression. Yet however ironic it may be to use the example of a meeting that was necessarily constructed furtively, the unending search for a better way of doing democratic politics is nonetheless partly about sustaining the spirit of Dakar.