Professor Colin Bundy
South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement: Brave New World or Long Shadow of the Past?

Professor Colin Bundy - South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement: Brave New World or Long Shadow of the Past?

- Good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Before I hand over to Professor Bundy, I just wanted to come on and just say that our hearts, you know, it’s just a shocking situation in Israel, that our hearts and our prayers are with our friends there, with our family, with our participants, and a great deal of our participants are from Israel. It’s just, we can only hope and pray for a swift resolution to this shocking, shocking situation. We’ve swapped things around this week. The programme with Jeremy Rosen, Rabbi Rosen, will be on tomorrow evening at 7:00 p.m. in lieu of Trudy, and we will get an update from an Israeli, a journalist, on Wednesday. So, I just wanted to say to all of you, I’m sure many of you have got friends and family, we are thinking of you, and our prayers are with you and your community. So, thank you, Colin, thank you for giving the space to do this, and I’m going to hand over to you. Thank you.

• Thanks very much. May I just associate myself with what Wendy has just said, a dreadful, dreadful situation. One only hopes that it’s resolved before too long. Some of you may have been with me a week ago on the wonderful platform provided by Lockdown University when I described how the ANC and the ruling National Party both came to the reluctant conclusion that neither could prevail over the other and that negotiation was the only way forward. In the long term, the de Klerk regime had more to lose than the ANC, and so it accepted the need to engage. In the long term, the ANC had more to gain from a negotiated settlement than the government did, and so it entered the process. But how does one make sense of the negotiations and their outcome? How does one understand an intricate series of encounters that began in May, 1990, arrived at an interim constitution in November, 1993, and led to the country’s first democratic elections in April, 1994? Well, various explanations are available. I’m going to suggest three of them. One is captured in the title of the American journalist, a very good journalist, Patti Waldmeir’s influential account. Her book was called “Anatomy of a Miracle”. She called the negotiated demise of apartheid one of the most extraordinary tales of the 20th century, in which a nation stepped through the looking glass and emerged as the mirror image of its former self. In her telling, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela were central to the miracle. I’m quoting again, “History will surely claim these two men as its heroes, compatriots jointly devoted to their common fatherland. They were reasonable men, prepared to compromise, and so they chose a future based on common values.”

Secondly, and a contrary view, there’s the analysis presented by Hermann Giliomee. He is not persuaded that the negotiations are a triumph of reason, and he does not regard de Klerk as heroic. He portrays the NP leader as a pragmatist rather than a politician of principle. He says he was a tactician and not a strategist, guilty in the heat of negotiations of, quote, “fundamental mistakes” and, quote, “major errors”. Desperate to end economic sanctions, de Klerk rushed his fences and surrendered far more than he gained, “and,” concludes Giliomee, “he lacked the ruthlessness that characterises most great leaders in turbulent times.” And thirdly, there’s a competing but parallel view. Instead of blaming de Klerk, this one is critical of the ANC. It holds that the ANC was outmanoeuvred, or duped, or co-opted, that the ANC negotiators lack the requisite progressive ideas and strategies to counter conservative ideas pushed by local big business, by the World Bank, and by the de Klerk government. Alternatively, the leadership didn’t need to be persuaded. It wanted to have access to state power and to capital. It was guilty of betrayal. In this narrative, “a small group of oppositional politicians emerged to hijack the country’s mass popular movements,” unquote. Now, there are some insights in each of these three approaches, but I don’t find any one of the three of them very helpful as historical explanation. They all rely heavily upon a great-man-in-history approach. They provide personalised accounts which either praise or blame Mandela or de Klerk, or both. They focus on the motives and pronouncements of political leaders, but not the context in which these took place nor the dynamics in which individuals were caught up, more the balance of forces locally and internationally. I shall say something about the process of negotiating, about its context and its content. By content, I’m not referring to the fine details, but to the overall package, the political and economic arrangements that were arrived at and bequeathed to the Government of National Unity that took office in April, 1994.

And finally, I came to try to assess just how much the settlement changed and how much it left intact, whether it represented a crucial break with the past or was a moment illustrating just how tenacious was the grip of the past. I argued previously that after four decades in power, the NP was in political, ideological, and economic crisis. The apartheid project had run its course, and when ill health ended the petulant presidency of P.W. Botha, his successor, de Klerk, and his colleagues grasped an available nettle. At the same time, the ANC’s stated mission of a seizure of power was no longer credible, and instead, the exiled body made a strategic turn away from arms struggle towards negotiations. Can we put up the first slide, please? There are any number of detailed accounts of the machinery of negotiations, the labyrinthine committees in the working groups, the late night sessions, the plenaries and the public statements, the showdowns, the brinkmanship, the chemistry between individuals forced to work closely together, and how deals were cut. I’m not offering any of that, but here’s a very, very brief chronological reminder of what took place. Beginning of February, 1990, de Klerk, in effect, triggered negotiations. Mandela was released from prison, and the next three, the Groote Schuur Minute, the Pretoria Minute, and the D.F. Malan Accord, all talked about what the negotiations would contain. They were also preoccupied with the return of exiles, the release of political prisoners, setting, really, the rules of the game. The Pretoria Minute and the D.F. Malan Accord included agreement by the ANC to suspend the activities, the armed activities, of its armed wing, MK, but that was not known.

That was not made public at the time. September, 1991, the National Peace Accord was a major attempt to address the political violence that was raging, and then in December, 1991, CODESA, Convention for a Democratic South Africa, met. 19 parties were represented, and it arrived at a striking initial series of agreements, listed there. It also appointed five working groups, which did the heavy lifting, went away, and came back and reported in May, 1992, six months later. But one of the working groups had deadlocked, and CODESA, that plenary, the second plenary, broke up late at night on May the 15th, with the talks deadlocked and negotiations ceased temporarily. There was a massacre at Boipatong, there were other deaths, and the ANC adopted what it called “rolling mass action”, and for June, July, and August, there were no substantive negotiations. And at the end of September, a Record of Understanding was signed, I shall say a little bit more about it later, between the government and the ANC. Can we just move down to the bottom of the slide? Thank you. The successor to CODESA, the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum, NPNF, commenced its work, and by November, it delivered. It delivered an interim constitution, which was not very different from the constitution finally approved in 1996. In 1994, crucially, the Zulu Inkatha Party, led by Buthelezi, and the Afrikaner Freedom Front, led by Afrikaner Generals, decided late in the day to join the electoral process, and in the first democratic elections, very high turnout, 83%, the ANC, that 67% is wrong, it should be 65.7. It was just under a 66% thing.

The National Party won a fifth of the votes, and Inkatha won a 10th, and they were the three parties that passed the threshold in terms of becoming members of the Government of National Unity, and in May, the 10th, Mandela was sworn in as President. Okay, let me proceed. I want to make a couple of general points about the process. Firstly, they were both multi-party, as you’ve seen, and they were bilateral. CODESA and the second one, the Multi-Party Forum, involved about two dozen different groups, and these ranged from Inkatha and Bantustan parties to the Afrikaner right, the Pan Africanist Congress, the Democratic Party, and so on. And all of these groups were able to press their views and press for changes, but when it came down to it, the ANC and the NP government had the two leading roles on a crowded stage, and at key moments, it was bilateral moot agreements between them that rescued or redirected the entire process, and this was expressed in a convention that was called Sufficient Consensus. You didn’t have to have unanimity on any particular clause that was agreed, you needed sufficient consensus, and in reality, that meant a position where the two main parties agreed. Secondly, and almost by definition, negotiations involved compromises and concessions on both sides. Such compromises were made more likely by the continuation of political violence after 1990. In Natal and on the East Rand, supporters of Inkatha fought with supporters of the UDF and the ANC in savage and costly conflicts. Political killings between 1990 and 1994 took somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 lives. Both the government and the ANC were aware of the danger of such violence spreading, and they believed that agreement between themselves was necessary to end the killing. Broadly speaking, the National Party compromised more on political issues, the ANC compromised more on social and economic issues.

Thirdly, the South African negotiations were a good example of what political scientists call elite pacting or pacted transitions. Whatever level of popular support either side could claim, negotiations were ultimately carried out by elites, leaders who determine the terms of transition from an authoritarian to a democratic government. Pacted transitions need strong leadership and able negotiators. The ANC had in Mandela a leader of near-Messianic stature who could draw on a battery of skillful negotiators. Cyril Ramaphosa, currently President of South Africa, had cut his teeth, his negotiating teeth, as a leader of the National Union of Mines, and he’s broadly recognised as having been a major asset to the ANC in the process. Political elites, once the process of negotiations was fully engaged, discovered that they had more in common than they had initially assumed. Mandela’s protracted dealing with government officials before he was released were important in terms of establishing some shared understanding of the political impasse that both sides faced and of the costs of intransigence. Elites within the two parties had a common interest in compromise. They entered negotiations because of a shared fear of alternatives. Although it’s slightly artificial to separate them, I’m going to look first at political and then at economic negotiations. When they began, the broad positions of the NP and the ANC on the political future of the country were . The ANC entered the process demanding universal suffrage, equal rights for all citizens, and a strong legislature. It defined the future in terms of majority rule within a unitary state.

Overall, the ANC’s bargaining position stood for a non-racial democracy based upon liberal principles, and this was a package buttressed by history, by international opinion, and by the basic demographics of the country. By contrast, the NP defined the future in terms of power-sharing rather than straightforward majority rule, in consociational democracy, not majoritarian democracy, and with a federal structure and entrenched group rights, group rights, not individual rights, and the party entered negotiations convinced that it could avert majority rule as the outcome, a miscalculation that became evident as the process unwound. Ultimately, the NP was unable to win any of its initial key aims. There would be no consociational democracy, no group rights, and there would be a strong central government rather than federalism. The ANC also made concessions. It wanted a single House of Parliament, but conceded the NP and the Democratic Party’s demand for an upper chamber. The Bill of Rights would include a right to property, initially resisted by the ANC, but the most important concessions it made were time-bound, A sunset clause, so-called in the September Understanding, proposed by Joe Slovo, gave security of tenure to white civil services, and secondly, agreed that after the first election, all parties with 20 or more seats in the National Assembly would be represented within the Government of National Unity for at least five years, a form of power-sharing, but with a shelf life.

And these trade-offs were reflected in the interim constitution approved in November, 1993. Okay, that briefly summarises the political outcome of negotiations, but they left unanswered questions of what socioeconomic relations the new order would promote. Would majority rule mean redistribution from the few to the many? What development path would the new government pursue? How closely would it stick to international orthodoxy, or how far dare to challenge it? Economic policy issues didn’t feature much in formal negotiations, but directions that the ANC’s thinking on economic matters underwent, the dramatic shifts in its economic policy during this negotiations period do merit some exploration. They are far more contentious and controversial than anything the ANC won or conceded in the political sphere. Before 1990, before the February the 2nd speech, the ANC had paid surprisingly little attention to economic policies. It remained rhetorically committed to the Freedom Charter’s promise to nationalise banks, mines, and monopolies. In exile, reflecting its reliance on the Soviet block, the ANC professed a commitment to socialism and charged that capitalism was complicit with apartheid, but entry to negotiations meant that the ANC could no longer rely on slogans, but would have to consider policies, priorities, and possibilities, and with hindsight, it’s absolutely clear that the movement’s journey on this new terrain involved a dramatic change of direction and a political retreat. In six short years, the ANC’s economic policy set off from a socialist platform, chugged briefly along a social democratic branch line, but ultimately steamed into neoliberal central. By 1992, the ANC produced a policy document called Ready to Govern, which rode back from the radical readings of the Freedom Charter expressed during exile. It was silent on nationalisation. It accepted that property rights should be recognised.

It dropped its previous promise to restructure the financial sector and welcomed the role, quote, “of a dynamic private sector in achieving growth,” unquote. The ANC leadership, in other words, was projecting more moderate, more business-friendly policies, and in 1993, the ANC’s shuffle towards the right economically became a quick-step. An ANC economic think-tank delivered a report that had been commissioned by the ANC two years later, two, two years earlier, and had seen a couple of dozen of economists, mainly based outside the country, work to deliver the report. Its recommendations were social democratic or neo-Keynesian. That is, they advocated an interventionist state with a two-phase development strategy. In phase one, public spending on social and physical infrastructure would kickstart growth. In phase two, appreciative and profit-hungry investors would jostle for opportunity in the growing economy. But when it was published, the ANC brusquely sidelined it, just dropped it. In negotiations, the ANC agreed to a constitutional clause guaranteeing freedom of operation for the Reserve Bank. It dropped its own proposals for more progressive income tax, taxes on the more affluent, and it accepted the property rights clause sponsored by big business. In November, 1993, the ANC entered a Transitional Executive Council, a kind of caretaker government, sharing power with the NP, and this body wrote privately to the International Monetary Fund, seeking a loan of $850 million over a five-year period, and the letter of intent to the IMF promised that state spending would be constrained, that budgets would be balanced, and taxes would remain where they were. The ANC had now signed up to the Washington Consensus. Why? Why did the ANC lurch from center-left to center-right on economic issues?

I suggest that there were three essential reasons. Firstly, the ideological moment was crucial. Domestically, there was the dire plight of the economy, but internationally, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major factor. We see intellectual and ideological moorings of many of the exiled leaders and domestic actors. Trevor Manuel had been a charismatic left-wing UDF activist, but in 1995, he explained that, and I’m quoting, “The collapse of the Soviet Union, the destruction of the Berlin Wall broke the revolutionary, romantic illusions of many. It shifted the debate very significantly,” unquote. And I think there was a loss of nerve, a failure to contest, or even interrogate, the messages being drummed by local business and a small army of international consultants. Privatisation, liberalisation, and deregulation were now the rules of the game. Secondly, there was a total disjuncture between the economic and political negotiations’ machinery of the ANC-led alliance. Political and economic decisions were arrived at very differently. In 1957, when the Gold Coast became Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah advised his political party famously, “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.” The ANC acted on the same principle, prioritising negotiations on the political future. ANC heavyweights at CODESA and the Multi-Party talks were simply not engaged in debates about macroeconomics or the development path of a post-apartheid government. Negotiations on the interim constitution were formal, every session minuted, their details pored over, consensus hammered out.

Alongside them were informal and fluid interactions between political and economic elites. Representatives of the corporate world and core ANC leaders met frequently and arrived at a common narrative. And thirdly, the ANC was directly, and it follows from that, the ANC was directly affected by external actors, local and international. Inside South Africa, business interest closed ranks and fought their corner. A powerful group of conglomerates lent its weights to influence a government in waiting. Scenario-planning exercises, headed by banks and building societies, were disproportionately influential in shaping economic thinking. May we have the second slide, please? The best-known of these scenarios was the so-called Mont Fleur Scenarios. It took the metaphor of flight and it outlined four possible futures. The first was the ostrich, with its head in the sand and stuck in the past. On the downward axis, indecisive governance. Secondly, there was a lame duck model. That saw an attempt by a weak, compromised government in power, and again, indecisive, although more representative. And then, very importantly, there was the flight of Icarus. Icarus, you remember, flew too close to the sun and plunged to the sea. The idea of Icarus here was that a Black majority government, unhindered by constitutional checks, would embark on huge public spending and crash the economy. And then, finally, and obviously the favourite flight, the flight of the flamingos, where, quote, “everyone rises together.” Trevor Manuel, whom I’ve mentioned, was a key member of the group that devised these.

You can take that down now, thank you, and he presented the scenarios to de Klerk’s Finance Minister, a man called Derek Keys, not a politician, but brought in from the private sector. He’s agreed to join the Cabinet, but very shrewdly insisted that he was an independent minister, appointed after consultation with the ANC. And Patti Waldmeir, whom I quoted earlier, described Keys thus, and I’m quoting, “A former businessman who became a great favourite with some of the top economic thinkers in the ANC. He had the clarity of vision to see what needed to be done and the political skill to persuade the ANC and the trade unions that they had seen it first themselves. He spent endless hours listening to the ANC and stroking its leaders,” unquote. He liked the Mont Fleur Scenarios. He updated them with fresh, in-depth data, and the ANC was now singing from the same hymn book as the government. And so, in this way, the ANC leadership drifted away from its base, abandoned a broadly supported transformational policy, accepted the logic of the World Bank and the IMF, and moved much more close, moved closer to business views in South Africa. There was a commitment to macroeconomic stability, to opening up the economy to international trade and finance, and an export-oriented growth path, the neoliberal orthodoxy of the day. The ANC accepted this agenda, and in return, very importantly, secured a commitment from big business that business would accelerate the entry of Black shareholders into boardrooms and directorates, what we now know as Black Economic Empowerment, BEE. In other words, to sum up, the negotiated settlement combined a significant restructuring of the political sphere and broad continuity in the economic sphere.

The negotiated outcome was not only a political compromise, but also a class compromise. Politically, it advanced the interests of the Black majority and it ended the white minority’s electoral dominance. Socially, it protected the interests of capital and the better off at the cost of those of the working class and the unemployed. Put very simply, the political settlement was fairly radical. The economic deal was relatively conservative. Some commentators have argued that the ANC was duped, others that they consciously sold out, and I think both of those accusations assume that they began as economic radicals with clear-cut positions, but that simply misreads the ANC of the early 1990s. By 1990, senior members of the Communist Party, for example, such as Joe Slovo, were grappling with the question, “Has socialism failed,” a pamphlet he published. Slovo typified his party’s abandonment of old certainties. A month after Mandela’s release, he conceded that the market was a necessary mechanism in a modern economy. A year later, he told a journalist that the Communist Party had, quote, “rejected the prescription of nationalisation,” and in 1992, in another article he wrote, he posed the question, “What room for compromises?” Jeremy Cronin, perhaps the most thoughtful member of the Communist Party leadership, admitted in 1994 that, quote, “Real inroads have been made by capital into the ANC. Their arguments are more attractive and more persuasive to a wide range of ANC leadership than the counter-arguments, that are less confident, less coherent,” unquote. In other words, the accommodation that took place was not conspiracy, it was convergence.

Both sides of the agreement, the far-reaching political change and the essential continuity of social and economic structures, were the outcome of negotiations conducted at a particular time and place. The demise of communism had left only one system standing, Fukuyama’s “End of History”. It was a moment when the balance of forces was unfavourable to poor and marginalised citizens. It was a moment when choices had shrunk, the range of options had narrowed. For the elites, it made sense to act as they did, and it was not a one-sided deal. Big business and the ANC needed one another. Political violence raged. The economy was in dire straits, the NP had effectively abdicated, and big business was tainted by its historical association with apartheid. It required reinvention as multi-racial capitalism and was willing to usher in a democratic political order so as to win legitimacy. The ANC negotiators promised to provide a stable democratic government which could legitimate capitalism, and that was the core of the dual settlement reached in 1994. Whites gave up their control of the state in return for assurances on civil liberties, property, and the economy. The Black majority, the disenfranchised poor, won the vote. They became full citizens, but the ANC elite signed up to economic orthodoxy and entered the political kingdom. The settlement delivered non-racial democracy and multi-racial capitalism. For the final section of my talk, I’m going to address the question posed in my title, did the negotiated settlement usher in a brave new world, or was it shaped by the long arc of South Africa’s history? Make no mistake, it has been rare for a country with such deep divisions of race, culture, and wealth to manage a democratic transition of the kind achieved in South Africa, and it is equally rare for an undemocratic ruling group to give up power.

So, we must start with, I think, by recognising the exceptionality of this event, and I shall begin with the positive achievements of the settlement. Firstly, it established and it consolidated democratic institutions. This was a central and fundamental outcome. It created a political order resting upon basic democratic precepts, free, fair, and regular elections contested by a range of parties with universal suffrage and constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. Roger Southall, a leading South African political scientist, wrote in 2003, and I’m quoting, “It is vitally necessary to stress the obvious: overt, legalised race domination has gone. Democracy has replaced autocracy, and the country is, in plain, commonsensical terms, an immeasurably more decent, more just, and more humane place to live, despite the chronic violence and poverty that continue to affect large sectors of society,” unquote. Negotiated constitution boasts one of the most advanced regimes of human rights in the contemporary world. It provided all the familiar first-generation rights, political freedoms, legal equality, and so on, but also what are called second-generation rights, rights to housing, to education and healthcare, and third-generation rights, environmental rights, children’s rights, rights over sexual choice and reproduction, and the legacies of that settlement include an independent judiciary and a constitutional court that has held the ANC government to account on many issues. It’s bequeathed a fiercely independent media, and by international standards, an active civil society.

Even during the excesses of corruption and state capture during the Zuma presidency and the subservience of the parliamentary party to the leadership, these have been crucial elements, the judiciary, the media, and civil society, in any possible recovery of democracy, accountability, and full citizenship. Secondly, this settlement achieved a peaceful transition. There was no bloodbath, there was no armed uprising by white soldiers, and there was no continuation of civil war in KwaZulu Natal, and believe me, all of those were real possibilities during the early 1990s. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission served as an alternative to war trials or private vengeance. Thirdly, there was a significant level of delivery, especially during the first decade of post-apartheid rule, with clean water, electricity, clinics, and housing delivered to millions of citizens. And fourthly, South Africa enjoyed a heightened international profile and role, shedding its status as the global pariah overnight. However, there were also significant limits to what was achieved. In the short term, there was a considerable loss of capacities and energies in civil society. Participatory democracy was weaker than it had been before 1994. I’ll say more about that if anybody wants to. Secondly, violence and crime persist at chronically high levels. This is how a South African novelist conveys the mood in Johannesburg’s white suburbs, and it’s a longish quote. “We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine, fierce dog when the fine, fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold onto our handbags more tenaciously. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. They are holding a meeting in Parkwold tonight, and the people will ask for more police, and for heavier sentences for housebreakers, and for the death penalty for all who carry weapons when they break in,” unquote.

The novelist was Alan Paton, writing, believe it or not, in 1946 in “Cry, the Beloved Country”. It reminds us that crime and the fear of crime have preoccupied South Africans in the suburbs, and also in the townships, for generations in a society riven with violence. Some of you will have heard Jonny Steinberg last week speaking about Nelson Mandela. He has also written widely on crime, on policing, and gangs, and he puts it thus, and I’m quoting again, “Crime, and the fear of crime, is as old as South Africa itself. Fear in this country is saturated with politics; it is the product of estrangement between races, classes, and individuals. We are preoccupied with revenge; we worry that it will burst its walls,” unquote. Thirdly, there has been a spectacular failure to redistribute income, wealth, resources, and life chances more equally. Half the population, millions of people, remain impoverished. The main driver of poverty in South Africa remains a cruelly high unemployment rate. Poverty may have been ameliorated slightly since 1994, mainly through spending on social welfare, through pensions and child grants and disability grants, but at the same time, inequality has risen, and African middle class has grown rapidly since 1994, accelerated by state employment, by movement into managerial and professional roles, and by the hothouse growth of an entrepreneurial elite through BEE. In the early 2000s, Fortune Magazine noted that South Africa was creating about five and a half thousand dollar millionaires per year, the fastest such growth anywhere in the world, and these were mainly Black millionaires. And for that reason, inequality within the African population is now as pronounced, as stark as inequality within the population as a whole. The evidence is unequivocal.

Wealth in South Africa has been partly deracialized. Poverty remains strictly racialized, visited with particular severity upon Africans at the bottom of the economic pecking order now as in under apartheid. 1993, a political scientist called Mike Morris wrote presciently, in my view, and he warned, and I’m quoting again, “Powerful forces are leading us towards a new two nations society, a 50% solution that will allow some South Africans to embrace opportunity and privilege, but banish the rest to the margins,” unquote, and I think something very like his “50% solution” prevails today. Today, a well-to-do, multi-racial middle and upper-middle class inhabits a different physical, social, and ideological space from a dirt-poor, Black lumpenproletariat, an army of the unemployed. To conclude, and I know this isn’t very cheerful, but to conclude, South Africa’s history haunts its present to an overwhelming degree. Arguably, the single most intractable, most toxic presence of the past is how profoundly racialized South African society remains. Inherited structures of exploitation, poverty, and inequality were always going to be hugely difficult to unmake. The legacy of three centuries of colonial and racial oppression and of 40 years of apartheid will take generations to undo. The new South Africa will be 30 years old next year. It has developed and divvied and, by some measures, deteriorated in the shadow of the old South Africa. The great novelist, William Faulkner, was writing about a different segregated society when he famously warned, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Thank you very much. Let me visit some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Michael Polanski congratulates Wendy on the South African lecture series.

Q: “What was the Boipatong massacre, perpetrated by whom?” Gene Campbell asks.

A: One of the patterns of the level of civil war in the East Rand, southeast of Johannesburg, was clashes between Zulu-speaking migrant workers housed in male dormitories, clashes between them and between other inhabitants of the townships who were tended to be ANC supporters, and the Boipatong massacre saw precisely that. It saw an attack by Zulu-speaking migrants upon ANC supporters, and left 43 dead. That’s a brief answer. It’s complicated by the fact that at the time, and subsequently, there’s been considerable speculation as to what extent elements, rogue elements within the South African state, within the South African police and military, were aiding, assisting, and egging on the Inkatha Zulu-speaking migrants. I hope that that answers that one.

Q: Could I comment, Mike asks, on the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism on the agreements and negotiations?

A: I think that the collapse of the Soviet Union has two main implications for the negotiations process in South Africa. The first of these is from the point of view of the National Party. De Klerk, by his own account, in his autobiography, says that he saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a, quote, “God-given opportunity.” He felt that the ANC would be weakened by the fact that the Soviet Union could no longer support its arms struggle, sorry, I’m just going back to the question, and that it would mean also that his gesture, opening to negotiations, would be more favourably received by Western nations. And then, secondly, as far as the ANC was concerned, I’ve argued that it led to really a kind of collapse of old certainties, particularly for the exiled leadership rather than the internal leadership, although there were some there who also paid quite strong lip service to the idea of the socialist block and relied, in actuality, on support from the Soviet Union and East Europe in training and arms and money. And with all of that whisked away, it certainly, I think it affected the nerve of the ANC negotiators when it came to economic issues.

Q: Jill Murray asks, do I think that at the stage in negotiations, at the interim, and even the final Constitution, the ANC was negotiating in good faith or in the belief that they would be able to subvert the liberal democratic aspects? History seems to have suggested that the ANC negotiated in bad faith.

A: To the very, very best of my knowledge, the ANC negotiated in good faith. I don’t think there was any plan or plot subsequently to subvert the liberal and democratic aspects. However, I think it’s equally clear that elements within the ANC have undermined, or in your turn, subverted, many of the democratic aspects that were negotiated, and this was not entirely under the Zuma presidency, but accelerated enormously in those years. Cronyism, crony capitalism, corruption, straightforward looting, all of those could only be pursued by undermining and weakening democratic structures, and I’m afraid that that is part of the history of the last 20 years.

Lorna Sandler, “My late husband and I were on the spot when Mandela was released. I wanted to go to the attempt,” but your husband wouldn’t let you.

“Corruption, corruption, corruption,” says Monty Golden. “The rainbow nation, just help yourself to the spoils of change if you’re in positions of power.” That corresponds to what I said a moment ago.

Q: “Is it true that they named a shanty town after Joe Slovo?”

A: Yes, it’s on the approach between the airport and Cape Town City, on the N2.

And Rita answers that. “Joe Slovo was named after Slovo when he was the housing minister. With over 20,000 residents, it’s one of the largest informal settlements in South Africa.”

Dumarie says the main driver of poverty in South Africa is the ANC. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, but I can see your point.

Q: Dennis Damon, “What do you think might have been achieved by starting in the immediate post-apartheid era if marginal tax rates had been higher than those introduced by Mandela, a sort of local Marshall Plan, the extra cash to be designated for improving public works?”

A: Dennis, I think that that is really, in my critique of the way the ANC negotiated, I think their failure to hold out for more progressive taxation before they took office or to try to do it once they took office was a major failure. When one thinks of the kind of morals, the moral goodwill that Mandela had internationally by 1994, an extraordinary available to him had they done so. I remember, I was living and working in South Africa at that time, and I remember going to seminars where people debated various forms of progressive taxation. One of them, semi-seriously, talked about attacks on swimming pools, so it would be racially blind, but would use owning a swimming pool as a kind of proxy for being better off. I think it’s also very relevant that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when it finally reported, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported to the ANC in 1997, it recommended a kind of one-off apartheid reparation and attacks on business and the wealthy, and it was Thabo Mbeki who turned that down. And again, I find that odd thinking because I feel that that kind of one-off reparation, which would’ve taxed business and would’ve taxed wealthier whites, would’ve had considerable symbolic importance as well as, what you say, extra cash for improving public works.

Q: “What has emigration out of the country done to South Africa?”

A: It’s costed a lot. The people who can emigrate are those with skills and qualifications, so South Africa’s lost a lot of both of those.

Q: Zoom User says, “What about the role of state capture and corruption in perpetuating racial inequality?”

A: Absolutely, state capture and corruption certainly work to entrench both poverty and inequality.

Q: Harris Gordon, “How well has South Africa managed to avoid the tribalism that brought many other African independent countries to their knees?”

A: By and large, South Africa has avoided that partly through very, very conscious attempts, particularly under the leadership of, successively, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, and Thabo Mbeki to balance their Cabinets and their structures across ethnic or language. I prefer those to tribal, but across those groupings in South Africa, and by and large, that holds.

Q: Yonni Apu and Alfred Cromwell’s asked, “What sort of jobs could address the problems of poverty, jobs that are not simply make work position, which intensifies corruption, but create real value to the economy and political stability? How can that be achieved either without external capital investment or with a sufficient level of return to be externally attractive?”

A: I’m not going to be able to go into this in any detail. I have written a little book on “Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present”, where I try to, my final chapter deals with your sorts of questions. In brief outline, I think it’s difficult to create jobs in large numbers given the growth path that the ANC adopted, that the ANC followed, a growth path with a heavy financialization of capital, with the economy dominated by large conglomerates, and with decisions not to go for labor-intensive industrialization. And there are plenty of South African economists who’ve argued that other countries, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, have demonstrated a similar kind of developmental levels of South Africa, but with a different developmental path that it is possible to create more jobs.

Q: “Beyond the initial agreement, how do you understand subsequent governments not doing more to address poverty and inequality?”

A: Well, a short answer is that 50% solution, complicated by the levels of corruption and feathering their own nests, but I think also the absence in the current growth path of available levers to pull to address poverty and inequality.

Somebody says, although I’m generalising, I haven’t actually pointed out the difficulties that have occurred to middle class whites who’ve suffered in their business or employment or the ability for their children to have an education. I’d have to be persuaded that there’s been significant levels of suffering particularly preventing white children being educated. I’d need to know more about what you think there.

Q: Josie Adler, would I say that the failure of the foreign ANC government to include the UDF to develop legitimate leaders is a factor in the current socially failed outcome?

A: Foreign ANC, I presume you mean the exiled leadership of the ANC. I absolutely agree that that was an element. Let me say two things about it. The nature of elite pacting, which I described, had two consequences. Firstly, it deradicalized the ANC leadership, but equally important, it demobilised its most volatile and committed followers. There was a significant drop in levels of democratic participatory politics after 1994. Hundreds of NGOs folded themselves into ANC structures. A lot of foreign funding moved away from NGOs and went directly to the ANC, and so that civil society, particularly for about 10 years, became blunted and more bureaucratic and much more subservient to the ANC. The second development that happened, and this is the failure to involve UDF leaders, has to do with Nelson Mandela’s term as presidency, where Mandela fell out. Mandela personally fell out with UDF leaders like Murphy Morobe, Cyril Ramaphosa, Cheryl Carolus, and others, and helped strengthen the weighting of the exiled ANC leadership as opposed to the domestic or UDF leadership.

Q: “What about crime at red traffic lights with carjacking?”

A: Shocking levels of crime. One of the things that’s distinctive about South African crime is that it’s often attended by gratuitous violence. That’s certainly the case with crime at red traffic lights and with house burglaries.

I think I’ve reached the end of those questions. Could I thank you all for posting questions, and I hope I’ve managed to answer some of them. I shall be talking about Nelson Mandela on Thursday this week. Thank you very much indeed.