No doubt Dr. Niel Barnard and Mike Louw will one day tell their own stories of the events which led to the eventual handing over of all power to the ANC. Perhaps it was just as well that at that period of our history I was not a member of the Service any more, but farming with trout in the Eastern Transvaal and only sporadically writing fruitless letters to newspapers, to CODESA and to the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) of which I was a member.
Had I known then, what became general knowledge when Allister Sparks' book, Tomorrow is another Country, was published in October 1994 by Struik Publishers in Johannesburg, my memo dated 3 September 1990 to the AB would have been a different one altogether. What Sparks revealed was that starting from 1986 the chairman of the Broederbond,. Pieter De Lange, had been meeting with ANC leaders abroad, and that between November 1987 and May 1990 altogether twelve meetings were held in great secrecy between influential Broederbond members like F.W. De Klerk's brother, Wimpie, Sampie Terreblanche and Willie Esterhuyse and others, with senior ANC leaders in a luxury mansion which belonged to the mighty British mining house, Consolidated Goldfields in England. Consolidated Goldfields, of course, had a major subsidiary in South Africa. The chairman of this company, Rudolph Agnew, had "put up the funding for (Michael) Young to organize a series of secret meetings between the ANC and Afrikaner establishment figures" (p.78).
Wimpie De Klerk described these events in his diary as follows:
"For me personally they meant a great deal: the luxury trips and accommodation; the experience of sitting close to the fire and engaging in political breakthrough work to bring the National Party and the ANC to dialogue; the bonds of friendship that developed between Thabo (Mbeki), Aziz (Pahad), Jacob Zuma and myself; the access to direct confidential information; the position of intermediary, because from the beginning until now I have conveyed ‘secret messages' from the ANC to FW and even the other way around, but FW was and is very cautious..."
Just imagine me sitting there on the farm and knowing about these goings on! And about those sundowners - Esterhuyse told Sparks that after those experiences he was teaching his political science students that "negotiations do not always have to be formal, you can use Glenfiddich to resolve a problem".(p.86). You bet they don't have to be. Especially with the British Establishment paying for this extremely expensive whiskey!
The sadness of it all was that these naïve academics had not yet heard that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
The reader might be tempted to ask how these Broederbond fellows hoped to convince their brethren back home that one had to yield to the ANC's (and their British godfathers') demands and leave the Afrikaners with absolutely no power base and completely at the mercy of the black majority.
I am about to tell you. It was all spelt out in that letter of mine dated September 3rd 1990. In actual fact it was not a letter, it was a memorandum which I submitted to the secretary of our division, for submission to the Executive:
"THE ROLE OF THE AB AT THIS POINT IN TIME
On the 20th August 1990 a member of the Executive Council (EC), Dr............, addressed a meeting of our and a number of other divisions. During his talk he made the following points:
a. The EC's approach with respect to the problems facing the creation of a new South Africa, is to adopt the concept of holism. It follows from this approach that the new South Africa should consist of one undivided entity.
b. The most likely end model for the country will be a parliament consisting of two chambers. In the first chamber the members will be chosen by universal franchise, whereas members of the second chamber will be elected according to some form of group representation. It has to be accepted that in both houses there will be a majority of black members.
c. The EC relies heavily on negotiations, but it has to be spelt out that the only group with which no negotiations can be conducted is the "regses" (Rightwing Afrikaners).
This subject is probably the most important one the AB has ever encountered in its entire history. If you were to submit my fears as set out below, together with the division's comments to the EC , I shall esteem it a favour.
I am concerned that Afrikaners should see anything positive in the concept of holism, except in as far as it refers to its physical scientific dimension. The moment the concept is advanced as valid for human society, it becomes nothing else but a handy way to "prove" the validity of forced integration.
General Jan Smuts was the best known champion of this doctrine in South Africa - not in the period when he fought on the side of the Boer Republics, but in the period when he was a member of the inner circle of the British Establishment. This power block played a significant role in the history of South Africa and many other countries. For the British Establishment holism was as handy a tool as dialectical materialism was for the communists - it provided "scientific" proof for the correctness of their ideologies.
To advance the doctrine of holism at this point in time, when Afrikaners are divided, having a model of one undivided South Africa with a black majority government as one option, and partition so that a state for Afrikaners can be created as another option, appears to me to be a mistake. Many of us have succeeded in shaking off our colour prejudices, but heaven knows if we will ever learn to love the British Imperialism of yesteryear and its destruction of the two Afrikaner republics.
It worries me also that the EC has decided not to negotiate with the so-called ‘rightwing". I would have thought that Afrikaner unity should have been the most important task of the AB. I do not think the differences between Afrikaner groups are insurmountable.
Basically they differ over one great problem: The anti-government group fear that no future dispensation in terms of which a majority of Non-Whites will be admitted to governing organs will guarantee the protection of the property and safety of white people because the white people will possess no instruments of power. The pro-government group ( and, one has to conclude, the EC,) believe that built-in "checks and balances" will provide sufficient protection of white interests.
Unfortunately we cannot expect the anti-group to patiently sit and wait to see if their fears are realized, because if that what they fear becomes reality it will be too late to do anything about it...
The great majority of Afrikaners, even if they make all kinds of racist remarks among themselves, realize that in a future dispensation no forms of racial discrimination will be tolerated. The great majority of Non-Whites realize that some kind of protection for Whites will have to be provided, unless they are to be forced into the new dispensation as a future fifth column.
We all know that protection in the form of a number of seats in parliament is no solution. In any event such seats will be seen as representing a racist element. A constitution and a Human Rights Charter can also be by-passed by a strong government. (We did it ourselves when we removed the Coloureds from the Common Roll).
The only alternative, therefore, is the creation of a province or a state for Afrikaners."
I expanded at great length about this envisaged province, stressing that its locality and size would be a matter of consultation with other groups. I also stressed the fact that my definition of Afrikaners was people who spoke Afrikaans, irrespective of race, colour or creed. What had to be negotiated, however, was that the principle of such a state had to be accepted.
The AB never responded to my memo and I never attended another of their meetings. Many years later they wrote to me asking for a donation of some kind. I sent them a cheque and a copy of my memo, reminding them that I'd never had a reply to it. On February 18th 1994 the Secretary replied to my letter and thanked me for the cheque. Among other things he also made the following points:
"The great problem still remains where such a province or ‘volkstaat' or homeland or whatever one is to call it, will be situated. . How will it be accomplished? Some of the thoughts expressed in your letter will, of course, be totally unacceptable to a great majority of the so-called "regses". And that immediately puts the finger on the most serious question of our time, which is that Afrikaners or the so-called "regses" cannot agree on a single vision for the future."
These were valid points. However, I am still adamant that the principle of the matter should be debated. The locality and the how of the problem will follow logically upon the acceptance of the principle. Leaving Afrikaners in a limbo in which their language, their culture and their safety is constantly threatened is to add fuel to a simmering inferno which might one day destroy the very fabric of this beautiful country.
(Despite my utter contempt for the role played by Wimpie De Klerk and his cohorts in the run-up to the handing-over of power to the ANC, I have recently defended the AB in letters to the Afrikaans press where I have felt that the organization was unfairly blamed for sins which, to my knowledge, it was not guilty of. For this I have been vilified in the letters columns of some papers.)
This is an extract from Really Inside Boss: A Tale of South Africa's Late Intelligence Service (and Something about the CIA)
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