23 Jul 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Politicsweb
Address by Ambassador Tony Leon, Council of KwaZulu Natal Jewry Annual
Meeting, Durban, July 23 2013
"The False Twilight of the
Two South Africas"
President, Vice President, Office Bearers of the Council of Kwa Zulu
Natal Jewry.
Good evening and thank you for inviting my wife Michal and I to share
this evening with you.
I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity of presenting my remarks
in my home town and at a venue, the Jewish Club, which so framed my childhood
and early political career. It was here that I used to play tennis on a Sunday
afternoon back as a schoolboy in the 1960's, and it was also here shortly after
my election as Leader of the Democratic Party in 1994 that I used to address
our members at conferences and in 1996, where we held our eve of election rally
for the Durban municipal elections back in June 1996. So the Jewish Club has
been a still and enduring centre in a very turbulent and fast moving world, and
in my own personal and political journey.
On the subject of this club and this community, just last week I sent a
packing case of old press cuttings and speeches to Institute of National
Contemporary History at the University of Free State, where my political papers
are archived. I happened to open one of the albums from 1990, and came across
the following invitation card:
Durban Women's Zionist League Invites you to the 56th Annual
General Meeting.
Guest Speaker: Mr Tony Leon MP for Houghton
Subject: "Is There a Role for Jews in South Africa?"
Durban Jewish Club, Wednesday 21 February 1990 at 9.30 am.
I must have answered the question posed in the affirmative, for here,
twenty three plus year later, we still are and I am still the guest speaker at
the same venue to the same community!
You might recall, through the mists of time, what was going on back then
and there in February 1990. My address to the Durban Women's Zionist League
occurred just three weeks after then President FW De Klerk detonated his speech
of thermo-nuclear intensity in parliament on an unsuspecting political
landscape to an unbelieving world, which had long since written off the
prospects of a negotiated, peaceful and democratic settlement being possible in
apartheid South Africa. As a consequence of President De Klerk turning his back
on 350 years of South Africa's history, just 10 days before my lesser speech at
the Durban Jewish Club, Nelson Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison
as a free man for the first time in 27 years. Those were exciting but uncertain
days indeed as we faced history-in-the-making, with no certainty as to how it
would unfold and where it would leave the South African way of live.
I was curious, reading through the same album, to see what outcome I
predicted back then for this and the larger South African community, as I, a
backbench MP then commencing the first of what would be twenty years in
Parliament, threw my Sangoma bones and donned the robes of Madame Rose peering
into my crystal ball of South Africa's future. Political predictions are always
a hazardous business, and most do not read so well later on. As Samuel Goldwyn
memorably said -
Always avoid making predictions, most of all about the future.
The same album did however contain a short report of my Durban speech in
the Cape Argus of 21 February 1990, under the headline -
Genie Out of the Bottle for Good, says Leon. An extract from it
reads:
President De Klerk's reform initiatives would unleash their own momentum
and timetables for change, which would probably consign other grand plans and
timetables to oblivion in the next few months. In these circumstances it was
the duty of a white politician to tell the truth that sooner rather than later
South Africa was going to be governed by a government in which the majority of
participants were black..."
In that, I suppose safe and perhaps inevitable, prediction I was
correct, and the rest, as they say, is history, and has been our lived reality
since April 1994.
But it was not always such a certainty that we would be gathered here,
in peaceful circumstances, although doubtless in fewer numbers than back then,
some twenty three years later.
A few years ago, the late Israeli historian and journalist, Amos Elon,
published a book of magnificent and tragic history- "The Pity of it All: A
History of the Jews in Germany 1743- 1933". You will note the period the
book covers, from the entry of the first Jews, under extreme sufferance and
prejudice into Berlin, through centuries of persecution into a golden age where
Jewish life, letters and civilisation flourished in post Bismarkian Germany
until the ascent of Hitler in January 1933, where the book, and effectively two
hundred years of Jewish communal life, ends.
This book is unusual because it deals not with the unique evil of the
holocaust, but with the land, language and historical tides which shaped, and
ultimately, destroyed arguably the greatest of all European Jewish communities.
Elon notes, in his introduction, -
Some claim to have discerned an inexorable pattern in German history
preordained from Luther's days to culminate in the Nazi Holocaust. According to
this theory, German Jews were doomed from the outset, their fate as immutable
as a law of nature. Such absolute certainties have eluded me. I have found only
a series of ups and downs and a succession of unforeseeable contingencies, none
of which seem to have been inevitable. Alongside the Germany of anti-Semitism
there was a Germany of enlightened liberalism, humane concern, civilised rule
of law, good government, social security, and thriving social democracy. Even
Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 was not the result of electoral success
(the Nazi's share of the vote had seriously declined in the Fall of 1932).
Rather, Hitler's triumph was the product of backstage machinations by
conservative politicians and industrialists who overcame the hesitations of a
senile president by convincing him (and themselves) that they were
"hiring" Hitler to restore order and curb the trade unions.
Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really
happened. The past is often distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by
it...Fritz Stein the foremost expert on the subject of the assimilated Jews of
Germany, has argued that the history of assimilated Jews of Germany was much
more than the history of tragedy; it was also for a long time the story of an
extraordinary success: "We must understand the triumphs in order to
understand the tragedy." We must see the German Jews in the context of
their time and, at the very least, appreciate their authenticity, the way they
saw themselves and others, often with reason. For long periods, they had cause
to believe in their ultimate integration, as did most Jews in Western Europe,
in the United States and even in czarist Russia. It was touch and go almost to
the end."
I am not attempting, obviously, to compare the fate or fortune of this
community, in early 21st century Durban, South Africa to the
circumstances of the Jewish community in Germany of eighty years ago and
before. However, there are some useful parameters which Amos Elon does provide
particularly when he refers to "a series of ups and downs and a succession
of unforeseeable contingencies, none of which seem to have been
inevitable."
The same frame, in my view, provides a useful lens through which to view
our own "ups and downs" of two past two decades, and more pertinently
posit some thoughts on our future. In both looking back and casting forward, we
can agree, with respect to our own country, that Amos Elon's conclusion of the
triumphant and then tragic history of Jews in Germany that there is no
"inexorable pattern" of events and "no absolute
certainties" and "no inevitable contingencies."
Shortly after my speech here in Durban back in 1990, I encountered an
impressive journalist based in Johannesburg, who was the bureau chief of the
New York Times. Bill Keller was to be an eye witness and chronicler for that
mighty newspaper of South Africa's transition years from apartheid to
democracy, and all the epochal events between those two book ends of our national
story. After leaving South Africa he went on to become editor in chief of that
global shaper of opinion. Recently, in May 2013, he revisited South Africa,
through the pages of the New York Review of Books. This was his take on current
events here-
"If South Africa does not leave you full of ambivalence you have
not been paying attention. It is a country where the ruling alliance includes
the Communist Party, but the real economic power is capitalist; where
corruption is rampant but a vigorous press reports it; where the constitutional
court legalised gay marriage and lesbians are gang raped; where the (shopping)
malls are populated by a multiracial consumer class, and millions live in
shacks. It is inspiring and dispiriting."
Locally, and in similar vein, at the recent (June 2013) Alan Paton
Literary Awards ceremony, eminent Constitutional Court Justice, Edwin Cameron,
eloquently described the duality of South Africa today:
We are now nearly twenty years into our constitutional democracy. Much
has been achieved -perhaps more than those of us who tend to worry realise.
Almost all violent crime is down. Compared with 1994 the murder rate has
halved. The government's housing programme has put many millions of South
Africans in their own homes. In 1994, just more than half of households had
electricity; now 85% do. In 1994, just more than a third of six-year old
children were in school; now 85% are.
The average black family income has increased by about a third. And,
through the system of social grants totalling about R120-bn every year, the
very poorest in our country are afforded some elements of a dignified material
existence and some access to a measure of social power.
Most importantly, these material gains have been achieved in a
functioning democracy.
Our polity is boisterous, rowdy, sometimes cacophonous and often angry.
That much is to be expected. But after more than two decades, we have more
freedom, more debate, more robust and direct engagement with each other -and
certainly more social justice than 20 years ago.
But after listing these not inconsiderable achievements, the learned
Judge goes on to note that "all is not well". In this regards he
cites the evidence which will be well known to members of this audience tonight
and to many outside the walls of this hall: a political debate that is
"divisive to the point of annihilation"; the prevalence of a "race rhetoric that often substitutes for
performance". Gross inequality, largely racially structured persists two
decades on and in other areas, everything from schooling to basic services
evinces an "institutional decay and infrastructural disintegration that
have reached dismaying proportions."
Unsurprisingly, last year saw the highest number of service-delivery
protests, and nearly nine out of ten of them were violent. More and more
municipalities and national departments fail to meet the basic auditing
requirements.
He concludes this list of lamentable failures and shortcomings with this
warning:
Not unconnected with the accounting chaos, the tide of corruption washes
higher and higher. It threatens to engulf us. The shameless looting of our
public assets by many politicians and government officials is a direct threat
to our democracy and all we hope to achieve in it.
To many, the culture of high minded civic aspiration that characterised
our struggle for racial justice and our transition to democracy seems
distinctly frayed, if not in tatters.
What are we to make of these essentially two South Africas, identified
by an eminent foreign journalist and a distinguished local jurist? In truth, we
live in both of them and there is enough evidence to point to our country
either becoming a fast tracked success story of the future or a failing state,
remembered for the big things it got right two decades ago, but for the many
things which have gone wrong since then. Perhaps the truth lies in both
directions, a sort of "schizophrenic republic" (as James Baldwin
dubbed the USA) with islands of success and achievement afloat in a sea of
sleaze and dysfunctionality.
Late last year, Michal and I returned from three years abroad as South
African Ambassador to Argentina and surrounding countries. The advantage of my
appointment as President Zuma's emissary abroad was that it allowed us, to look
at South Africa from a distance and to swop my previous job of selling the
opposition to South Africans for the task of selling South Africa to the South
Americans. "Distance", as Queen Elizabeth once observed, "lends
enchantment." I sincerely believe that we never sold out on any core
principles, but do believe that our service proves that your party identity is
irrelevant when it comes to serving your country.
I have just written a book The Accidental Ambassador -From Parliament
to Patagonia- which chronicles our adventures in the land of the Gaucho and
Evita, a country of even more extreme contradictions than South Africa. Just
one example of this, which I detail in the book, is the presence in Buenos
Aires of one of the largest and certainly most thriving Jewish communities in
the world, numbering some 175 000, which after 1945 had to co-exist with a
host of high-end Nazi war criminals, from Joseph Mengele (who was never
apprehended) to Adolf Eichmann who famously was.
Aside from observing the similarities and differences between two
societies, separated by their turbulent histories, the South Atlantic Ocean and
the Spanish language, the most striking takeaway feature of Argentina is the
most important, baleful lesson it offers us here at home: You cannot live in
the past. Argentina in the 1930's was one of the ten largest economies in the
world, where the expression "as rich as an Argentine" echoed across
the grand salons and estates of Europe, most of whose countries were considerably
poorer and certainly less democratic than this famed home of endless Pampas,
whose grasslands produced most of the beef and much of the cereal for the world
back then.
Today, Argentina is in free-fall. Its economy is considerably smaller
than South Africa's, and it is by any measure far worse governed, less
democratic than we are; it is also the world's poster boy for spectacular
economic folly. In my book, I identify the fault line which runs through
Argentine politics. I called my chapter on it, "Vote for A Better
Yesterday" -an accurate and sad diagnosis for a country which still
adjudicates political decision making through the lens and memory of President
Juan Domingo Peron, who died in 1974, and his second wife, Evita, who died in
1952! Living on past glories relieves you of having to making the tough choices
going forward. It might help win elections but, as Argentina's case proves, it
beggars the future.
What suggestions can I then make about our own situation here in South
Africa and ensure we do not be remembered for the big things which we got right
twenty or more years ago and also for the considerable failures which we have
witnessed since the golden years of the Mandela presidency? Will we continue to
make down payments on the past or will we make a pact for the future?
If you go back to the list enumerated by Justice Cameron, you will see
that many, although certainly not all, of our post -1994 achievements have
happened in arenas outside the ambit of the state or government. Although the
government has in fact delivered many services and entitlements to the poorest
and most marginalised, it has failed in other key areas of state performance,
from providing certainty to the investor community and so creating conditions
for sustainable growth and employment, to achieving good and balanced labour
relations and basic, never mind good, maths and science education to the next
generation.
It is easy, but in my opinion, wrong to see in this state-failure the
failure of our country. I am indebted to my 26-year old Israeli-South African
stepson, Etai, a South African citizen by choice rather than birth, for this
observation.
Indeed, the sun may have set on many of South Africa's historical
accomplishments - achieving a democracy on the stony soil of racial conflict
and giving the world the example of a rainbow nation - but in some ways this is
a false twilight. Left often to our our own devices, we discover that in the
process our own devices are still considerable.
Just look at the performance and benchmarking of our private sector,
which despite rather than because of government interference, achieves some of
the top positions on global surveys for its regulation, efficiencies and
performance. Just look at the international achievements of Durban born
entrepreneurs such as Stephen Saad and Martin Moshal to mention two high
achievers in the hyper competitive world markets in which their businesses
excel and operate. Think of how our positioning on the southern tip of the
African continent, the world's fastest growing economic region is a net plus
today, in terms of teeming future markets; whereas when I grew up here the same
continent was a byword for conflict and disease and poverty.
But to live in South Africa today requires us to be in South Africa, not
just physically, but mentally and spiritually and politically. Too often,
particularly in minority communities, there is a tendency to be a bystander and
not an "upstander" in charting the country's progress. It is a case
of politics and civil engagement being "their" responsibility and not
"our" concern or obligation. And so because some of us adopt what I
call "the half a loaf" attitude of living in the country but not in a
civic sense being engaged with it, our commitment -no less than our expectations
- is half baked.
Frankly, as an English-speaking Jewish South African from Durban I was,
objectively, triply disqualified from assuming the leadership of a major
political party twenty or so years ago. In the days of white politics it was
assumed that only an Afrikaner could lead a political movement, and since 1994
it was assumed that only a black person could lead an opposition party. I do
not claim any exceptionalism for myself, except to note that if I had
concentrated on my adjectival limitations, instead of my" South
Africaness", I would never have entered, let alone got going, in the
arduous arena of South African politics.
Let me conclude with another Durban figure of current eminence. Nearly
ten years ago, in December 2004 I addressed a meeting of the SA Jewish Board of
Deputies in Cape Town. The atmosphere there was certainly a lot cooler (or
hotter, I suppose) than it is here tonight. For I went there to criticise the
Board, not to praise it. An account of this meeting appears in the excellent
work, "The Jews of South Africa" by Professors Milton Shain and
Richard Mendelsohn (Jonathan Ball. 2008).
I explicitly said that the Board back then was practicing what I termed
"the creping politics of influence" with the then government. It went
cap-in-hand to seek favours, and I asked the question: "It is unclear why
the leaders of the Jewish community should feel that they have to "ask
favours" form anyone at all ... the security and entitlements of this
community are not a privilege granted by the government or the ruling party or
(any department of state). These are constitutional rights."
My rather robust views did not find favour back then with this
community's leadership, who preferred a path of quiet and non-confrontational
engagement with the authorities.
I was therefore genuinely pleased when Mary Kluk of Durban assumed, in
more recent times, the leadership of the Board and began to advance the
interests of the community in a more forthright fashion. The B.D.S
("Boycott, Disinvest and Sanction") campaign against Israel, for
example, called for a variety of responses.
Mary, and her colleagues, did not simply "go along to get
along". They confronted the one-eyed and one-sided attitude and standpoint
of the SA Government with a variety of responses -public, legal and, where
necessary, confrontational. That is why the "labelling" of products
from the Occupied Territories by the DTI has been pursued by the Board in the
public arena in a more effective fashion than we witnessed in the past. May
this be the hallmark of community leadership going forward.
In 2004, Natan Sharansky , the former Soviet dissident and political
prisoner, who became a political leader in Israel, published a major work on
freedom entitled "The Case for Democracy." In the book he elaborates,
with passion and clarity, that freedom is rooted in the right to dissent, to
walk into the town square and declare one's views without fear of punishment or
reprisal.
For the many things that have gone right and wrong with South Africa
since our first steps toward becoming a free society back in 1990, Sharansky's
universal observation that "the democracy which sometimes dislikes us is a
much safer place than the dictatorship which loves us" must serve as our
guide into the future.. We must use that "safe place" to stand up for
the values which matter and the causes which endure to this community and,
beyond it, for the interests of all freedom-loving South Africans.
• Leon is the author of The Accidental
Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA
