07 Aug 2013 | Cape
Town Press Club | Tony Leon
“The Mandela Presidency: Beginning or
Ending of Free Space for South Africa? Some Lessons for Today and the Future”
Cape Town Press Club, Kelvin Grove Club.
Wednesday 7 August 2013 at 1900.
Barry
Streek, whose imperishable memory we honour tonight, was foremost a man of the
press, the embodiment of a passionate and proficient journalist, in whose veins
the printer’s ink ran very deep indeed. For a significant part of his
professional life, writing for a South African newspaper, through the thicket
of curbs, bannings and regulations, was in the words of the doyen of media
lawyers of the apartheid age, Kelsey Stuart, “Like walking through a minefield
blindfolded.”
Barry
and other colleagues of that time did more than navigate this treacherous
terrain with tenacious skill and some daring; they brought to light and to the
attention of an often somnambulant country and unsuspecting world, the full and
unexpurgated story of the dark underbelly of the apartheid state and the forces
which it unleashed to protect its privileges.
When
Barry’s journalistic career was in its commencement, the legendary Joel Mervis
was Editor of the Sunday Times. In his commissioned history of Times Media, and
its predecessor South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN), in whose employ
Barry worked for much of his professional life, Mervis wrote –
“Even though statecraft and the craft of
journalism have much in common, they are, like opposing barristers in court,
basically adversaries.” [i]
Until
the advent of full-blown democracy here in 1994, Barry and his like-minded
colleagues in the so-called “Morning Group” of SAAN newspapers had no doubt on
which side of the equation they operated.
He was an impassioned champion for the fairness, openness and equality
which was the almost exact opposite of both the state and its craft until the
ascent to the presidency of FW De Klerk in 1989.
It
was at a moment shortly after the election, in early September 1989, that Barry
and I encountered each other for the first time, in the rabbit-warren of first
floor offices at the back of the old assembly in Parliament where the
parliamentary press gallery was housed.
“Have
a drink”, might not be the first words he uttered to me on entering the office
which he shared with Anthony Johnson, his Cape Times journalistic Siamese twin, but it was a good
approximation of our early relationship at any rate. A stop over with Barry and his colleagues was
an early and essential rite of passage
for a freshly minted and somewhat
ambitious Member of Parliament such as I
was back then; and I made many rounds to his and neighbouring offices,
desperate to ensure some coverage in the next day’s editions! Many libations helped ease those and many
subsequent encounters.
Those
were remarkable and heady days indeed as the apartheid order started, both
under its own hand and from the forces ranged against it, to yield to the
demands of the new. The contours of the
new democracy could only be vaguely seen at the time of the dawning of the
country’s new age. Even the announcement of its arrival - in perhaps the most
remarkable and unexpected speech ever delivered form the podium of parliament -
on 2 February 1990 - was unimaginable just weeks before its delivery.
The
British historian CV Wedgwood wrote-
“History
is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can
never know what it was like at the time.”
Barry
and his colleagues and I and others who
entered parliament at the end of the apartheid era, and those who joined the
negotiations process from exile and from prison, lived that history and helped
write that story; perhaps one of the most remarkable in the annals of the modern world.
Sadly,
Barry Streek’s early death seven years ago, in July 2006, robbed him of the
opportunity to see how the journey to democracy continued. Doubtless he would
have strong views about our uneven progress, and some significant regressions,
since then and Barry being Barry would have made them known in emphatic and
vivid terms!
Barry’s
passions for social justice and media freedom and indeed for the very Cape Town
Press Club which honours him with this lecture tonight are well known to us
all. They were his sheet anchors in the turbulent times which he ably chronicled. Less well known to me, at any rate, was a
fact gleaned recently from a colleague, that Barry was an avid and prodigious
collector of maps.
This
information inspired me use tonight’s lecture to contemplate a period of which
Barry was a full and enthusiastic reporter - the presidency of Nelson Mandela.
Did that now almost golden, and increasingly distant, chapter in our national
story, provide us with a road map to guide us in building a house of durable
freedom and democracy on the stony soil of our country? Has the structure which
Mandela helped to build withstood the unanticipated damage and corrosion in the
years which followed?
The
‘first rough drafts of history’ was the wonderful definition of journalism penned
by Washington Post publisher Phil Graham. And so, the issue is: How will future generations, as they leaf (or
more accurately, Google) through the ‘first rough drafts of history’ judge the Mandela
years and what has followed: will his successors be remembered for
consolidating the new democracy, or
will some be remembered as having lost their way as they vandalised the
structures and excavated under the foundations they were bequeathed?
Foremost,
is the difficulty of separating the power of human agency from what Karl Marx
termed the “motive forces of history”, and the confluence of events and the
formations which propelled them. Undoubtedly, while Mandela was at all times
the servant and symbol of the political movement he led, he also, at key moments,
provided personal leadership which proved quite decisive in determining the
course of this country.
On
the personal, as I wrote in my political biography: “Mandela was an
extraordinary phenomenon. At one level he was all too human, but at another level
he inhabited a plane out of reach of most mortal politicians (in which latter category
I decidedly place myself). It had been my great gift that my leadership had
commenced under his presidency and had grown, not under his enormous shadow,
but because of that special light which he shone on so many, including me.”[ii]
There
are many members of tonight’s audience, and certainly the man whose memory we
honour in this lecture, who also basked in that radiance.
Equally,
Mark Twain reminded us that “Every man is a moon with a dark side that he
doesn’t show anyone.” We can also
bracket Mandela with Mahatma Ghandi, as one of the select few of any age who
transcend the politics of their age and rank in that rare category of truly good and the great. But we should bear
in mind George Orwell’s necessary caution and apply it to both men:
“The
problem with conferring sainthood on Ghandi is that you need to rescue saints
from under a pile of tissues and saccharine.”
Certainly,
from my angle of both proximity to and distance from him, the Mandela
presidency was an all-inclusive effort, which operated on many fronts. He led a
Government of National Unity until 1996 and no sooner had its largest minority
component (the National Party) left it, than he sought to include others,
including my party, in it. Even when we could not agree to square that circle,
of going into government but also maintaining a critical stance outside of it, Mandela
continued to reach out by both gesture and intervention, to ensure that
minority views were obtained and some buy-in on critical issues was achieved.
I
was, accordingly, often at the receiving end of what the ghost writer of his
autobiography (and, latterly, Editor of Time Magazine) Richard Stengel defined
as “The full Mandela”-
“He
is a power charmer –confident that he will charm you, by whatever means
possible. He is attentive, courtly, winning, and to use a word he would hate,
seductive. ..The charm is political as well as personal, and he regards himself
not so much as the Great Communicator but as the Great Persuader…he would
always rather persuade you to do something than order you to do so..(but) he
will always stand up for what he believes is right with a stubbornness that is
virtually unbending.”[iii]
I used to tell my political colleagues after
one or another session with the great man and a dose of “The Full Mandela”
that, from an opposition perspective, it was a little like the political
equivalent of the seduction scene from “Fatal Attraction”!
My
first conclusion, on contrasting the Mandela presidential years and those which
followed it, starts with a caution: His great personal characteristics aside,
Mandela’s presidency had the advantage of occurring at a time of transcending
national and international change. He was the bookend between the dying of the
old order and the dawn of a new age. By the time he took office, the seventy
year era of Communist rule over Eastern Europe and forty-six years of apartheid
rule (and three centuries of racial domination) at home had just come to at an
end. It was an era of new and brave and dramatic beginnings.
It
was on his watch that the first democratic parliament convened, a new
constitution was negotiated and inked, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
commenced and concluded its work and the country and its First Citizen basked
in the attention and admiration of the world. Such an alignment of stars is
rare in any country’s history; and,
sometimes, it is easier to guide
the ship of state through the high seas of big events than it is navigate
through the smaller, but often unseen
and therefore more treacherous , currents which it fell to his successors to
manoeuvre .
But,
some blind spots aside, Mandela led by example in opening up the free space
necessary for a democracy to take root in this country. His rare combination of
personal history and enforced 27 year period of reflection and introspection
perhaps uniquely equipped him for the task of being the country’s
cheerleader-in-chief for democratic freedom.
Recently,
Mandela’s close colleague, Pallo Jordan, reminded us that-
“During the Rivonia trial, Nelson
Mandela cited the Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights and the US Bill of Rights
as expressive of his vision of a free society.”[iv]
No less than his own movement’s Freedom
Charter, these international testaments of freedom clearly informed and helped
shape his world view and his tone of governance.
Famously,
Mandela’s rich and complex background also helped inform and shape his politics
and, later, his style of presidency. British statesman Denis Healey said
properly-rounded leaders needed “a hinterland”, a life and philosophy beyond
the narrow confines of the party diktat. Few
of any country’s rulers - and certainly none here since his presidency - have
enjoyed Mandela’s breadth of experiences.
Richard
Stengel, again, captures the complex and contradictory forces which shaped his
life and informed his politics: “His persona is a mixture of African royalty
and British aristocracy. He is a Victorian gentleman in a silk dashiki.”
Politics
and imprisonment might have shaped his life, but so too did his decision to
escape an early arranged marriage, commence the first-black law practise in
Johannesburg, and earning a living independent of the Party. He was more
certifiable member of the human race than a narrowly formed political partisan.
Doubtless
it was this rich personal hinterland which allowed him to call the Queen of
England by her first name and to win the adulation of rural peasants in his
home Province. It also informed some of his most powerful gestures and symbols.
Today,
in contrast, almost our entire political leadership is drawn from the ranks of
life-time politicians and trades unionists. This is not confined to the
governing party: many emerging leaders on the opposition side, as well, have
had no career outside of party politics.
Gestures
and symbols are, incidentally, hugely important and often underestimated in statecraft, and
Mandela had an almost genius-like ability to use them to shape his nation and
bind its component parts together. The Invictus
moment in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the tea party in Orania with widow of
the architect of grand apartheid Dr H.F. Verwoerd, and signing into law the
1996 South African constitution at Sharpeville, site of the grim police
massacre of anti-pass law protesters thirty five years before, were among the
highlights of a crowded, consequential and celebrity-filled presidency.
He
set the benchmark even before entering office:
You might recall a dramatic moment on the eve of South Africa’s first
democratic election in 1994, during the only television debate between
President FW De Klerk and Mandela. In the main it was a rancorous and
point-scoring exercise, with Mandela spending much of it on the offensive. Yet
toward its conclusion, Mandela reached across to De Klerk and took his hand and
said of his main rival, “I am proud to hold your hand…Let us work together to
end division and suspicion.” Posterity remembers that gesture better than the
debate, and thus the “Rainbow Nation” was born.
Paradoxically,
the most partisan of politicians, Mandela was also able to look beyond the
interests of the Party and make tough calls on it, to meet the needs of the
country-in-the making.
There
was another critical moment just after the 1994 elections, during its chaotic
counting process. You might recall the drama of unregistered ballots, pirate
voting stations and other jarring irregularities. During this long tallying process, the very
future was in the balance due to extreme electoral infringements in key places.
At one point, ANC senior officials met in Johannesburg and demanded the Party
take action, and at least call a press conference concerning what many insiders
apparently regarded as “grand theft”, which they believed had robbed the party of victory in
Kwa Zulu Natal and elsewhere. An eye witness at the meeting describes its
conclusion:
“Mandela
had said nothing during the discussion. Then he brought the room to a full stop.
“Tell the comrades to cancel the press conference. We will not do anything to
make the election illegitimate. The ANC will not say the election is not ‘free
and fair.’ Prepare our people in Natal and the Western Cape to lose.’ “[v]
He followed through on this example toward the
end of his presidency. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prepared to
publish its report in October 1998, both his predecessor and successor as
President attempted legal action to either amend or suppress its findings. In
contrast, Mandela said the equivalent of “publish and be damned.” As his
authorised biographer, Anthony Sampson, noted: “As head of state he saw himself
as having loyalties which went beyond the ANC…”[vi]
Indeed,
as president and even before, Mandela ensured that his presidential office was
no echo chamber reserved only for approving voices. He sought the counsel of a
range of viewpoints.
While
he was unyielding on his bottom lines, Mandela claimed no monopoly of wisdom on
key issues and sought a range of views and voices beyond the party faithful and
his inner circle.
I recall when I first met Mandela in July
1992, at a dinner he arranged at his Houghton home, he told me and two party
colleagues how his recent visit to the World Economic Forum at Davos had
convinced him on his return that the ANC had to change its economic policy. As
he rather pithily put it on that occasion, “Some of the biggest and most
influential businessmen in the world were at Davos. They were very happy to meet
me, but practically every one of them bashed me over the head because of our
policy of nationalisation (of industries). So when I got back to South Africa,
I got hold of our economics team, and said to them, “Boys we have got to change
our policy …and they agreed.”
Compare
and contrast that impulse with what prevails today in South Africa’s inner
councils of power, at a time of deep economic crisis. Last week, in a somewhat
gloomy, bit I fear accurate, description, the Financial Mail editorialised –
“Rightly
or wrongly, the ANC struggles to bring itself to listen to any institution,
organisation or individual outside its own ranks. The most important debates
within the ANC happen within the ANC. In the minds of the cadres, many of whom
think of themselves as part of a liberation movement rather than a political
party, outside critiques are almost by definition wrong. “[vii]
Contrary
voices are often irritating and discomfiting, but they are vital for obtaining
society’s buy-in and correcting course when change is indicated. They are often
the equivalent of the canary-in-the-coalmine who avert to the dangers which lie
ahead.
At
a meeting shortly after the 1994 election, Mandela told me, in private, “It is
important for the opposition to hold up a mirror to the government and point
out where we do things wrong.” He used almost this exact formula when he
benchmarked, in public, his soon-to-be elected government’s relationship with
the media. In February 1994, Mandela told the International Press Institute Congress-
“…The
media are a mirror through which we see ourselves as others perceive us, warts,
blemishes and all. The African National Congress has nothing to fear from
criticism. I can promise you, we will not wilt under close scrutiny. It is our
considered view that such criticism can only help us grow, by calling attention
to our actions and omissions which do not measure up to our people’s
expectations and the democratic values to which we subscribe.”[viii]
Four
years in office somewhat changed Mandela’s views, on both opposition and media
scrutiny. In December 1997, at the ANC 50th Conference in Mafikeng,
he severely criticised the press, non-governmental organisations, the
opposition, and other elements of civil
society. He identified them as part of
some vast and ill-defined ‘counter revolutionary movement.’ Even his staunch
press ally, The Guardian of London
called it “a profoundly depressing assault.”[ix] I
thought it marked the low -water mark of political paranoia, so distinct from
his hugely buoyant presidency.
I also believe that this Conference, far more decisively
than the better reported and more dramatic gathering at Polokwane ten years
later, set South Africa on the wrong course: it was here that the finishing
touches were sealed on cadre deployment, the capture of the State by the Party
and other elements of a determined hegemony so at odds with the constitution
concluded just one-and-a-half years before.
However
intemperate Mandela’s remarks in Mafikeng, they were a far cry from the
poisoned waters which now seem to separate government and the media and the
opposition and civil society today. They certainly did not lead to any
introduction of legislation to muzzle the media, such as the Protection of State
information Bill. But perhaps it sowed the seeds for a future showdown.
In
researching tonight’s lecture, I was reminded -in lighter vein - that Mandela
had his own “The Spear” moment,
though how we diffused it was perhaps telling.
He had an aversion to censoring anything, even pornography. In February
1998, Hustler magazine indecorously
named Mandela as “Asshole of the Month.” Then deputy minister of Home Affairs,
Lindiwe Sisulu, slammed the issue as ‘vile, outrageous and obscene’, and
apparently considered banning it. Mandela, in sharp contrast ‘laughed the
matter off’ and instead of rushing to court he said, somewhat oxymoronically,
the magazine’ should use its own sense of morality and judgment’. He surprised
his Director General, Jakes Gerwel, by asking impishly: “Have you seen this
month’s Hustler?” [x]
More consequentially, it was Mandela’s
attitude toward the courts and his faith in the supremacy of the constitution
and respect for its institutions which separated him from some of his
successors.
Our current President’s own ascent to office
can be, diplomatically, best described as a Houdini-like escape from the coils
of court processes, rather than an embrace of them.
In
contrast to Mandela’s championing of the constitution which he signed into law,
consider the recent scepticism of senior ANC executive member and Deputy
Minister of Correctional Services Ngoaka Ramatlhodi. In 2011, he stated that
the constitutional transition was a victory for ‘apartheid forces’ who wanted
to ‘retain white domination under a black government’. This was achieved ‘by
emptying the legislature and executive of real power’ and giving it to ‘the
other constitutional institutions and civil society movements.’[xi]
Apparently, other powerful voices in Mr Ramathlodi’s party and government share
this sentiment.
We
might conclude from this contrast that while the ruling party certainly
celebrates Nelson Mandela and his early legacy of armed struggle, it is far
more ambivalent about what we might term “Latter Mandelaism”, and his embrace
of the constitution, and some of those inclusive presidential characteristics I
have enumerated above.
But
let me conclude with a note of hope of how the spirit of democracy, freedom and
robust dialogue has actually taken root a decade and a half since Mandela left
formal office and entered “ a twilight
of greatness.”
During
his presidency, South Africa’s parliamentary opposition was deeply fragmented;
its civil society was still finding its feet after the long dark night of
apartheid and the press, whose leading editors were mostly drawn from the
minority, were at some quite decisive moments, mute and offside. The radiance of Mandela’s leadership,
ironically, both warmed our hearts but sometimes blinded “some among us “(to
borrow a favourite phrases of former President Mbeki) on our roles in a free
society and the rules of engagement needed for democratic deepening. In this respect, at least, there has been a
sea-change today.
In
June 2013, Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron delivered an influential
address at the Sunday Times Literary Awards. He eloquently signalled that in
one vital respect, and despite considerable damage done, our democracy remains
afloat, and in one sense is more seaworthy than in the recent past:
“Our
polity is boisterous, rowdy, sometimes cacophonous and often angry. That much
is to be expected. But after nearly two decades, we have far more freedom, more
debate, more robust and direct engagement with each other –and certainly more
practically tangible social justice than 20 years ago.”[xii]
The
push back by a diverse range of civil society actors here and the delayed
passage and marked improvement to the Protection of State Information Bill
earlier this year is a striking, encouraging example.
Just four years before Nelson Mandela’s
release walked back into freedom, another political prisoner was released from
jail, the first in the Soviet Union to be freed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Natan
Sharansky had also been convicted and imprisoned for High Treason. After nine
years imprisonment, he went into exile in Israel and subsequently became a
political leader there. In 2004, he published a powerful polemic, “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 consequence. ”[xiii]
For the many things that have gone right and wrong
with South Africa since our first steps
toward becoming a free society back in 1994,
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. It
was the light which illuminated the life and work of our late friend, Barry Streek.
[i]
Joel Mervis: The Fourth Estate. Jonathan Ball. 1989. Johannesburg at p ix.
[ii]
Tony Leon: On the Contrary-Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa.
Jonathan Ball. 2008. Johannesburg at p 498.
[iv]
Z. Pallo Jordan: “Big Bother would turn luxuriant green with envy.” Business
Day. 1 August 2013.
[v]
Stanley Greenberg: Dispatches from the War Room. Thomas Dunne Books. 2009. New
York at p 157.
[vi]
Anthony Sampson: Mandela –The Authorised Biography. Harper Press. 1999 at p
532.
[vii]
“Politics the Victim of Vavi Debacle” Financial Times August 2-7 2013.
[viii]http://www.anc.org.za/amcdocs/history/mandela/1994/sp940214.html.
[ix]
Anthony Sampson, op cit, at p 542.
[x]
Anthony Sampson, op cit, p 528.
[xi]
Justice Edwin Cameron: “Constitution Holding Steady in the Storm”: Sunday Times
June 30 2013.
[xii]
Justice Edwin Cameron: op cit.
[xiii]
Natan Sharansky: The Case for Democracy. Public Affairs.2004.New York at p
41-2.
