NATIONAL PARTY’S EXISTENTIAL FEARS 

From a SPEECH BY FORMER PRESIDENT F W DE KLERK TO THE INSTITUT CHOISEUL PARIS, 14 JUNE 2004 on the THE EFFECT OF SANCTIONS ON CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN SOUTH AFRICA 

 

“Why then did South Africa endure all these sanctions and isolation for so long? Why did it not accept the kind of constitutional settlement in 1970 or in 1980 that it was prepared to accept in 1990? The South African government had three broad concerns: 

“The first was the right of white South Africans – and particularly Afrikaners – to national self-determination. Unlike any other settler group in Africa, the Afrikaners were a nation. They had their own language. The central theme of their history had been their wish above everything else to rule themselves – which had led them twice during the nineteenth century to defend their independence against Britain. In 1900 – during the Anglo-Boer War – few people in Europe questioned the right of the brave ‘Boers’ to national self-determination. In the post-colonial world of the 1960s and 1970s hardly anyone any longer acknowledged this right despite the fact that it remained the driving force of Afrikaner politics throughout the first sixty years of the 20th century. How could this right to self-determination possibly be maintained in a one-man, one-vote dispensation? For white South Africans acceptance of a one-man, one-vote solution evoked very much the same fears and reaction that could be expected from Israelis were they ever to be asked to consign their fate to a one-man, one-vote election in a greater Israel/Palestine in which they would be heavily outnumbered. 

“Secondly, former governments were deeply concerned about Communist influence in the ANC. They knew that a majority of the members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee were also members of the South African Communist Party. They knew that SACP cadres controlled key functions within the ANC alliance, most notably its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. They knew that the SACP proposed a two phased revolution – a national liberation phase that would include all forces opposed to apartheid during which the ANC would be the vanguard party; and a second ‘democratic’ liberation phase that would culminate, under the leadership of the SACP, in the achievement of the ‘democratic’ revolution and the establishment of a ‘people’s democracy’. Former NP governments did not feel that they were under any moral obligation to accept a one-man, one-vote process that would quickly lead to the demise of democracy and the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime – as had already happened in a number of neighbouring states. This was not a question of ‘reds under beds’. The communist threat was very real. The contest between the free world and the Soviet bloc was taking place through third world liberation struggles. One of the main battlegrounds was southern Africa where South African forces had until as late as the end of 1987 been involved in large-scale battles with Cuban and Soviet-led forces in Angola. 

“Thirdly, they were worried about chaos. It was one thing to accept the necessity of a liberal democratic transformation, even if this meant the end of the dream of Afrikaner self-determination. It was entirely another thing to accept one-man, one-vote elections that would be held only once and that would open the gates to the kind of tyranny and chaos that had characterised the post independence experience of the great majority of African states. One must remember that throughout the ‘eighties there were only one or two democratic states in the whole of Africa.”