Tony Leon on Nelson Mandela

15 May 2014 | Andrew Donaldson | Original Publication:  Politicsweb

Andrew Donaldson interviews the former DP leader about his new book "Opposite Mandela"

IN his new memoir, Opposite Mandela: Encounters with South Africa's Icon (Jonathan Ball), Tony Leon offers a behind-the-scenes insight into how the country's first democratically-elected president related to his political opponents (see Kindle edition here). Leon was, of course, leader of the then-minuscule Democratic Party and later the Democratic Alliance, and although the two men clashed, sometimes fiercely, on the issues of the day, the young white MP would enjoy an extraordinary accessibility to Nelson Mandela and his office.

Although this access ended abruptly when Thabo Mbeki took over, Leon's relationship with Mandela continued until 2006 - the time of their last conversation. Opposite Mandela is a chatty, personal account of those turbulent, "history-in-the-making" years. Leon engagingly explores such issues as race, reconciliation and corruption; these themes not only marked that period but continue to dominate as President Jacob Zuma enters his second term of office. The Mandela that emerges in Leon's account is a complex figure. There is the much-adored, warm, generous leader - and there is the Mandela the public seldom saw: Machiavellian, flawed, irrational and combative.

Our interview took place on Wednesday morning, at the Mount Nelson Hotel.

POLITICSWEB: The big surprise here, as you tell it, is the warmth of your relationship with Mandela. 

LEON: "It was an extraordinary feature. Not just of those times, but perhaps of what followed."

But there was also acrimony... 

"There were some pretty rough moments. But that's natural if you were on different political sides. That's why I wrote the book. There's a huge body of literature on Mandela - the authorised biography, the unauthorised biography, the book by the jailer, and so on. These people all had unique access to him. I had a different sort of access, based on the fact that I wasn't a supporter of his party. I was an opponent, and right from the beginning, when he moved into [Houghton], the area I represented [as an MP] back in 1992, he sought me out ... well, I sought him out - he was the most famous resident. But he responded to me so warmly and effusively from the very first moment, and that really persisted right until I left the leadership of the DA. That probably says a great deal about Mandela more than anything else. Richard Stengel, his ghostwriter, makes the point that Mandela was a great persuader and a great charmer. He was ... Stengel used the word ‘seductive'. In the political sense."

You write that FW de Klerk made that observation, that the charm was one of Mandela's two great faults, that he'd use it to smooth over problems without taking effective remedial action. The other was that he would sometimes fly off the handle without checking his facts beforehand.

"That was accurate in many ways. We had a big barney right at the beginning, in Parliament [in 1994], when I took the government on over the Shell House massacre. Mandela did not like to be crossed on certain issues. On other issues he was very relaxed. I also think Mandela did enjoy a robust discussion, a different viewpoint. It was almost useful for him to show me off - I was almost like a mascot at all these state dinners. [Leon gives a dubious impersonation of Mandela:] ‘This young man, he gives me all my trouble. Ha, ha, ha.' ‘Look here, we've got a functioning democracy here. If you have any doubt about that, just ask this young chap. He's the bloke giving me all my problems.' He would laugh about it."

There's a great anecdote about how, at one such function, to honour Queen Elizabeth II, this "democracy" spiel failed with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. ["Why is your party called ‘Democratic'?" Philip demanded. "Aren't you all democrats now in South Africa? The problem with the word ‘democratic' is that all those republics in the Soviet Bock called themselves democratic and they weren't democratic at all, were they?"]

"Yes, he was not very impressed when Mandela gave him the normal ‘democratic' banter. ‘Oh what's so democratic about you.' He also went on to ask me, ‘What sort of democrat are you?' I said, ‘Well, we're liberals.' ‘Oh,' he said, ‘well, why don't you call yourselves liberals? We have plenty of liberals in England.' I said, ‘It's not really a very popular term in South Africa.' ‘Oh, I wonder why that is. . .' Well, one might wonder today as well."

The "rot", if we could call the intemperate and corrupt creep in our current public life, started on Mandela's watch.

"It's a mixed picture. Of the many things that happened on his watch, he got far more things right than he got wrong. But certainly the orange lights started to flash, as they would have, and now they've gone to bright red. I think the underestimated part of the Mandela years was that [ANC national] conference in Mafikeng [in December 1997]. Because the speech he made there really gave the green light for cadre deployment. It was the green light for turning on the press and civil society. It was the green light for deployment across the whole of society. Those were green-lighted at the end of the Mandela term, and he went along with it. He articulated it.

"And even corruption. I heard a radio commentator yesterday suggest that [former health minister, now chair of the African Union] Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is completely untainted by corruption. It's absolute rubbish. The biggest single corruption case at the start was over Sarafina II, which was the diversion of all that European Union Aids money into a play produced by her best friend, [playwright] Ngobeni Ngema. It was a complete waste of public expenditure, and it wasn't the amount involved, R14million [that was troublesome], it was the fact that Mandela closed ranks around her. [Mandela would do the same with scandals involving Stella Sigcau and Allan Boesak.] Rather than standing against the transgressor, he actually stood with the transgressor, he protected the transgressor and didn't stand against the sin. The arms deal was green-lighted on his watch, although we didn't know the extent of the corruption until he left office. It is fair to say that some early clues were salted to a problem that has become very embedded in South Africa."

Even so, he fought bitterly against his own party when it came to reconciliation.

"Yes. Mandela understood very well that you must actually be generous in victory and not mean-spirited. That is a very powerful lesson that he managed to get his way with. He did stand up against the ANC on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,, for example. Mbeki went to court [to stop the TRC interim report from being issued] and Mandela said, basically, publish and be damned. I think that Mandela's attachment was not just to the constitution, which was something after all that he helped negotiate and certainly signed into law, but the rule of law itself. I cite that Louis Luyt [SA Rugby] court case where [Mandela] was dragged to court, subpoenaed as a witness, and the court found against him. It didn't make a very complimentary finding on his credibility as a witness. He was deeply outraged that he was dragged there. But he [appeared before the court], he said, ‘because of my respect for the administration of justice'. That really did mark him out in comparison to that which followed. So I think on some of those very big things, he did set the right signal. But other things, less so."

What if he had he served a second term?

That is the very great question. Well, the point to me about Mandela - as a person, a politician and everything else - was that he was deeply adaptive and flexible so he didn't stick to the hidebound positions because he'd once articulated them and the party held them. He demonstrated that with our first get-together way back in 1992 when he was telling [DP stalwarts] Ken Andrew and Zach de Beer and me how he'd been to Davos, the World Economic Forum, and he'd been bashed over the head by all these business people. As he put it, ‘They all want to be photographed with me, but they wouldn't donate a cent to South Africa because of [the ANC's] policies of nationalisation so I came back and said, Listen boys, we must change our policy.' 

"So I think Mandela did take lessons from the real world. He wasn't in that bubble, strangely enough, that so many politicians and business leaders find themselves in, which is an echo chamber. You know, ‘Yes sir, how high must I jump?' He did on many issues show a flexibility. HIV/Aids was perhaps the best example of that because, although the ignoring of the pandemic happened on his watch and he did nothing about it, the moment he stepped down as president, he listened and saw what was going - his own son had died of an Aids-related illness - and he changed. And then he tried to get the ANC to change, and that ended very unhappily for him. [In his book, Leon points to biographer Martin Meredith's ‘painful' account of an NEC meeting where Mandela tried in vain to get Mbeki and his supporters to revise their stance on HIV/Aids. Mandela was torn apart by ‘wild, aggressive and merciless' NEC members. ‘After his mauling,' one witness said, ‘Madiba looked twice his age, old and ashen.']

"But he then went out to proselytise for anti-retrovirals and against denialism. So you can't help but think that if he served a second term that South Africa would not have had that calamitous policy. I also think that Mandela's instincts - and you saw that with the Sani Abacha incident when [the Nigerian despot] executed [activist] Ken Saro-Wiwa - were, with certain qualifications, in favour of human rights."

He had no qualms, though, about who he took money from?

"No, he didn't. Basically he had an enormous attachment to countries or organisations that were pro-ANC during the struggle and he tended to allow that to be a blind spot. I mean, look at [former Indonesian dictator, President] Suharto. The irony is that Suharto was the one who gave Mandela those batik-styled shirts. But he did a lot of damage besides... In some ways it was purely mercenary so, for example, Suharto got [SA's highest honour, the Order of Good Hope, in exchange for contributions to the ANC's 1994 election fund]. It was a cash for an award offer. Ideologically, Suharto was vehemently anti-Communist. [Suharto's brutal anti-Communist purge of 1965-66 left at least 500 000 dead and about three times as many imprisoned.] And, don't forget, the ANC was busy fighting on behalf of independence in East Timor at the same time they were bestowing this honour on the very people [the Suharto regime] who had massacred the people in East Timor.

"We got into an argument, early one morning in January 1997 [shortly after Leon was offered a cabinet position by Mandela] because we were about to sell tank firing systems to the Syrian defence force. I mentioned to him that I didn't exactly have a pro-Syrian constituency in my little party, and he starts going into a thing about, ‘You know, America was against us, and Syria was in favour of us and therefore the regime of Hafez al-Assad [father of Bashar al-Assad], they were on the side of right and America was on the side of wrong.' 

"But he was prepared to speak up on behalf... I mean, look at [Robert] Mugabe! When he was rampaging through Zimbabwe in the 2000-2005 period I don't think that Mandela would have given him the kind of succour that Mbeki did. But you know, this is speculative."

At about that time, in January 1997 Mandela offered you a cabinet position, an appointment many DP members felt you should accept. Yet you refused because although Mandela had claimed there were often vehement disagreements in cabinet meetings and members were free to state their viewpoints, they would not be permitted to express their dissent in public. As he put it, "We must go out and face the world with one voice, just as Mugabe and [Joshua] Nkomo do."

"That sealed it for me. That's when I realised that this was a bridge too far. That is true, he did say that [Zimbabwe] was an example of a government of reconciliation, and I thought, ‘Ja, but at what price?' I don't think Mandela had a high regard at all for Mugabe. He told me once, ‘You know, we were in Addis Ababa, at a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity, and I came into the room and all the people, the dignitaries and the media, that were surrounding Mugabe left him and they came to talk to me.' And he said, ‘I think that he was very angry that day and I'm not sure that his anger has recovered.'"

Which brings us to Mandela's anger towards FW de Klerk, and his treatment of the  National Party leader. You quote a source as saying, "In Mandela's eyes, De Klerk became the proxy for much of the anger he felt and managed so masterfully to mask from view, towards the group and community FW came from." Who was this insider?

"I can't identify him because he was a person of consequence in Mandela's cabinet, and I suspect he will be a person of consequence in the future of this country, so let me not be more indiscreet than I already have been in this book. There was a very bad chemistry between De Klerk and Mandela - to the extent that Mandela would say that, look, it was easier to deal with PW Botha. But I put that down to the fact that they were both on the same stage at the same time. It's easier to look on a predecessor with more fondness than your contemporary. But I was struck by that ‘proxy' comment, because Mandela masked his true feelings very well in the national interest, and that De Klerk really was the proxy for what Mandela thought. We saw that at Codesa, back in December 1991. Wow, that fury came out there! That first meeting, there was a misunderstanding about who would speak last, and then De Klerk said something, and Mandela just lost it, just ripped into him, and said, ‘You have no idea what democracy means!' There was a lot of anger."

But they made up afterwards? There was, for want of a better term, a "gentlemanliness" to it all?

"There was - but there was no repair of the structural rift. Which was inherent in that government of national unity."

And Mandela could play the race card?

"He certainly played it on occasion, as I recall. But usually when he felt cornered. It wasn't done as a matter of course. The reflexive use of it now has almost discounted its efficacy but it was used by him to defend, I felt, the indefensible. Corruption, and so on. He had this wonderful attitude towards me until I crossed him on Shell House and then he just lost his temper, and said, ‘Well, you know, I know who you are, you're just a young man who wants to make a good impression, your party's all white.' What the hell, I thought, has that got to do with the price of eggs? He was very angry with this probe I was conducting into the massacre. It didn't start off like that but eventually when he couldn't convince me to back down he kind of used that tactic. But I would say that was more the exception than the rule with him."

Then there was the John Dugard affair. In March 1995 Mandela told your that there was a problem with the DP's nomination of Dugard - a professor in international law and a respected human rights champion - to the soon-to-be-established Human Rights Commission, and that Dugard should be dropped in favour of veteran MP Helen Suzman. There was no reason why, as you suggested, both of them couldn't be on the HRC, but Dugard had to be dropped?

"That was a strange one. [Leon writes in his book, ‘It suggested, and this later became the iron rule in the new South Africa, just as it had pervaded the old republic, that individual merit merit would be placed second to racial and political preferment. That the liberal community would, almost by definition, have more rights activists in its camp as a proportion of its overall numerical strength was passed over in this early signal that political and racial representivity would trump other considerations.' ] 

"That happened [at a time when it seemed the HRC] would have a huge role to play. Immediately afterwards there was controversy about the appointments with [then HRC chair] Barney Pityana getting into a row with [Judge] Dennis Davis, who hasn't a racist bone in his body and [who] criticised some rightwing conservative being there instead of Dugard. But then Pityana said, ‘If you criticise us you're criticising a black president and ipso facto you're a racist.' 

"It was such a thought-blocking response but that almost became the terms of trade for everything afterwards. I think that was a moment when we were having our maximum glasnost in South Africa and everything seemed open and Brave New World when - boom! Public appointments are now being made, you're being critical of them? You're going to be blocked with the racist card. And it doesn't matter who does it. For example, there's Joe Slovo's widow, Helena Dolny, being elbowed out of her position [as managing director] at the Land Bank by some apparatchik who was a homeland trustee who happened to be black. But she's white, so she can go to hell? The fact that she's Joe Slovo's widow and had impeccable credentials didn't matter. 

"I think if you're to look back at that you've got to say, ‘Well, there was a big paradox, and South Africa's filled with paradoxes and contradictions - because Mandela was in many ways the great non-racialist, the great rainbow warrior, but at the same time, very quickly, racialisation was reasserting itself across the board in South Africa. A lot of people didn't want to speak about that. ‘No, no, no, you can't say that,' and so on, but it was so. It's now entrenched, that re-racialistaion. It's not a question of affirmative action, it's a question of racial quotas. And racial quotas are very far from what the constitution had in mind and very far from that more hopeful vision of Mandela's."

Can we talk of deconstitionalisation? 

"I think there are a lot of threats to the constitution. I quote [Deputy Minister of Correctional Services Ngoako] Ramathlodi in my book, and he says there is a body of opinion inside the ANC that regards the constitutional transition as a bit of a hoax. [Leon reads:] ‘In 2011, [Ramathlodi] 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".' There are many others in the ANC who share this opinion."

You end your book with a quote from JM Coetzee, on Mandela: "He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the shadows."

"Mandela wasn't just a great man, which he was, he was also dealing with great times. When you're dealing with this drama, the end of an era, the beginning of a new one, it's..." 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

"Absolutely. Now it's the day-to-day stuff, which he didn't give that much attention to. That becomes the preoccupation of his successors. And that is probably true of every political succession where you have a new era and a great leader and by definition successors who have to deal with that. I think that was part of Mbeki's frustration, that he was the guy who had to deal with the rubbish and clean out the lavatories as it were. There was Mandela, basking in the adulation of the world, and there he was going around having to sort out everything."

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

MPs should be accountable to the four Cs - Dene Smuts

20 Apr 2014 | Dene Smuts | Original Publication:  PoliticsWeb

Outgoing DA MP notes that the undiluted list system has been devastating to our democracy

Farewell speech by Democratic Alliance Member of Parliament, Dene Smuts, April 13 2014

I am honoured by the presence of members of the executive of the provincial and metropolitan spheres. But I am honoured most of all by the presence and participation of Tony Leon, and Michal Leon who is a guest in her own right - she is quite simply the wisest woman I know.

It was Tony's vision of the "shining city on the hill" that guided the DA to the point where we can say to the electorate: here is the proof that we can govern, that our ideas work. It was also Tony who built the party to the point where it is poised to break the 20% barrier nationally.

You can't do that unless you can do what a party political leader is supposed to do: bring jou skapies bymekaar, en hou hulle bymekaar. He is revered for the way in which he kept his flock together inside the party, but he is not sufficiently acknowledged beyond its confines for the party political leader that he was.

He was a party political leader, I am a lawmaker and I bid you goodbye in that capacity.

At the opening of Parliament on 13^th February this year I could not help thinking, as we sat in the Chamber awaiting the President's arrival, that South Africa was falling down Alice's rabbit hole into Wonderland.

One female MP undulated across the floor like a giant caterpillar. She is the poor lady whose attire featured in many newspapers after she cut the dress off and wore only the lining. (I am not going to say her name because she is a very nice young woman.) What newspaper stills could not capture was the rippling and undulating effect of flesh under the thin and shiny lining. She was a giant deep yellow caterpillar undulating across the carpet after coming to the NCOP front benches to greet the Premiers. If, like Alice's caterpillar, she had been blue, we would have had a blue wave right there.

My benchmate James Selfe and I surveyed the general scene and agreed we were drifting into a whole different dimension here.

In the front benches proper on the ANC side, Minister Malusi Gigaba was wearing an SAA pilot's uniform and peaked cap. We have witnessed a touch of the Gilbert and Sullivan before, but never before I think, not inside the House, a politician in full fancy dress faked uniform.

At the closing sitting on 13^th March, a month later, to be fair, there was some flamboyance on the opposition side. Graham McIntosh, once of this tribe and now I forget of which, wore his Scots clan kilt and had himself piped out of the Chamber for the last time by the wailing lament of a bagpipe. He had a video cameraman walking backwards recording bagpiper and departing MP all the way to and through the lobby.

But it was Malusi Gigaba who remained in my mind's eye the next day, when four SAA flights were delayed by three hours or so at Cape Town International (while BA flew off at the appointed hours). We were nevertheless assured that the international flights with which we were connecting would wait for us.

As my plane came in to land at OR Tambo, we were told that SAA staff were standing ready to take us to our waiting international flights. Our designated young man had not been briefed but gave my boarding passes for Frankurt and Geneva one look and started sprinting, calling out like Alice's white rabbit that we would be late and also "time is money, time is money".

He left many of the international travellers behind at the pace he was running, whipped those of us remaining through passport control and then disappeared. We all scattered in different directions to find our departure gates, where no planes were waiting and in my case only a lonely cleaning lady could be seen, disconsolately mopping the floor. That left us all lost and each alone somewhere in an empty airport. We had left South Africa. We had passed through the looking glass.

However, this year is not the first time I have found the work of Lewis Carroll useful for comparative purposes in Parliament. Wonderland arrived more or less simultaneously with President Zuma.

For example, the procedures adopted to dispose of a perfectly good SABC Board which however contained two or three Mbeki appointees reminded me (as I wrote at the time) of the Queen of Hearts who insisted at the trial of the Knave of Hearts who Stole Some Tarts that the sentence came first and then the verdict, not that there had been an inquiry yet.

I would think that any impeachment proceedings now would follow the same course. President Zuma, like the Cheshire Cat, is going to vanish quite slowly until only the grin remains, with perhaps a pair of glasses intermittently pushed up the nose.

By then, Julius Malema may be sitting roughly where Prince Buthelezi now sits, wearing heaven knows what costume.

Now it is 13^th April and I depart, having completed five Parliaments. The question is not the one people keep asking me - why I am leaving or how I can leave - but how I stayed for nearly a quarter of a century when the work so consumes a person's life.

I have stayed because it has always been possible to get much and sometimes almost all of what I argued, and where all else failed, to effect damage control. It would have been nice to end on achieving my own two Private Member's Constitutional Amendments on the JSC and the NPA, but the arguments are out and have developed traction.

There are two approaches to opposition lawmaking work: making a noise and making a difference. Sometimes you have to make some of the former in order to achieve the latter, but mostly not. I have never been interested in work that does not have effect, and consequently I have always had a sense of agency.

My advice to an incoming caucus is that it is their job now to wake the ANC up out of ideological Wonderland (the ANC had a worse ideas about public and private enterprises when we started) and that making a noise will get you no more than President Zuma quoting Macbeth to great effect: "it is sound and fury, signifying nothing", he will say, then giggle, and bring the House down.

But my real interest is the caucuses that went before, and I am so happy and honoured to have some of our original people present at this farewell. I think it is worth looking at the reasons why we were successful as lawmakers over the years.

The first reason is the one which Dr Zach de Beer invoked: the long obedience. You will know the quote from Nietsche: "there should be a long obedience in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living". I have Dr de Beer's version of it, in his hand, in ink, somewhere among a quarter of a century's papers.

All of us from the old days know what that means. Our convictions were forged in adversity, because there was no profit and there were no rewards in being liberal before we had the Constitution in place.

On the contrary, there was only trouble. But both the Constitution and the policies produced as the fruits of the long obedience have stood the test of time - to this day we draw on the work of Ken Andrew on issues ranging from affirmative action to the youth wage subsidy, and on the work of Prof David Welsh on, for example, an electoral system.

The second reason why we were successful over the years flows from the first: we each knew exactly who we were, and that makes an effective MP.

The abiding formative influence for me on what a Parliamentary caucus and what an MP should be was the DP caucus after the 1989 election, some forty fiery souls. Everyone was a real MP, a full blown personality. The long obedience was in the same direction, it allowed for different positions and personalities. The battles were of epic proportions given Harry Schwartz's presence.

I thought I was the only person who got on with Harry until I learnt from my friend and relation Adv Izak Smuts, brother to Julia of the Claremont committee, that he was the other one. Our number included Robin Carlisle, Jasper Walsh, the late Tiaan van der Merwe, David Gant. And only Peter Soal and Roger Burrows, with Sandy Slack supporting, could have kept the show on the road so authoritatively and so elegantly.

We were, of course, the babies: Tony, Mike Ellis, James Selfe and I. But after the 1994 election, we were three of the seven left, in the Assembly, together with Colin Eglin and Ken Andrew, Douglas Gibson and Errol Moorcroft.

So what if were only seven? We had in the 1989 election provided the tide on which FW changed history, and we were more effective than far larger parties because the Constitution which we were then completing was itself the fruit of the long obedience and we knew how to use it as sword and shield.

Also, the whole of the seven was more than the sum of its parts because we sparked each other off because we were still real MPs, despite having come in in 1994 on the list system.

The effects of an undiluted list system on political parties is just as devastating to democracy as we always said it would be. The effects are exacerbated by the modern practice of substituting marketing for the political persuasion of voters.

Accountability for an MP should lie to conscience, country, Constitution and constituency. Tony and Mike Ellis and I were perhaps the last of the real, directly elected Assembly MPs, genuinely accountable to the constituencies which elected us.

Tony and I won old Prog safe seats. They were difficult seats to account to. His was Houghton, where I was given a terrible time because I believed in affirmative action from the start. I still do. Mine was Groote Schuur, right here.

I so appreciate the role which Peter Fischer has played in arranging this farewell, and the choice of venue is indicative of the care with which he has worked. It is also poignant and pleasing that the Rondebosch Councillor and general constituency election leader Matthew Kempthorne is the son of my friend and first constituency secretary Vicky Kempthorne. I have known Matthew since he was a boy in our old Mowbray office and I am mightily encouraged by the quality brought not just by him, but also our election candidate from Rondebosch, Bronagh Casey, as well as their new Chairperson Tammy Evans.

But let me talk to the old people, if you will let me, and turn this into the last report back meeting, also to the spirits of those departed, and also to those personalities who endorsed me, like Morne du Plessis and the friends who ran voting stations for me, like Jenny du Plessis. I think I fulfilled the undertakings I made when I ran for office.

Campaigning then was a personal matter, not a scripted message. I campaigned on a new liberal democratic Constitution, and it was my privilege to be part of the creation of that Constitution from day the first to day the last, alongside Colin Eglin and Ken Andrew, with Tony, too, playing a major part.

If you will further allow me, I want to recall two things I said to the electoral college, part constituency part DP, which way after midnight on the relevant night in 1989 elected me over seven other candidates running against the sitting safe seat MP.

I was reminded relatively recently by someone whose mother was on the electoral college that I said I would be an MP until I was an old lady. That promise too, I have fulfilled. The other thing I said, and which I think may have influenced Colin Eglin to swing the vote my way, was that I saw sitting before me a sea of white faces, and that we needed to change that in the DP just as we needed to change South Africa.

Now tonight, the constituency to which I bid goodbye, is called Athlone 1. The Rondebosch ward and Claremont committee were assigned for some time to other MPs under the present random allocation system, but were recently added to half of the larger Athlone constituency which I shared for some years with Sheikh Shahid Esau.

To the original Athlone, I say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking me in. To Shehaam Sims, shukran, shukran, shukran. To Shahid, shukran. To Magedien and his family, shukran. To the chairwomen then and now, Bonita and Konieta, thank you and shukran. To Suzette Little, Zainu Waggie and Anthea Green and Mark Kleinschmidt and Ruth Gordon, thank you and God bless.

It is really good to see how the new wards and the old committees have integrated. Claremont over the years has often benefited from strong Jewish membership and also leadership - to Grace Richman, we will always remember Gerald.

If anyone wants to know why South Africa works, there it is: we are Coloured and white, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. But I think we can say that we live by the motto which our indispensable Constituency Operations Manager Berenice Lawrence features at the bottom of her emails. Taken from George Eliot, it asks: what do we live for if not to make life easier for each other?

Berrie, you are our compass in more than one way.

 

The Two South Africas

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 56^th 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 21^st 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