There is something deeply disturbing about South Africa's supposed democracy, with the statement by the South African Communist Party that the late and highly respected Judge Arthur Chaskalson - former Chief Justice, and the first President of the Constitutional Court, who died last week - had "represented the SACP at the CODESA negotiations in the early 1990's."

It was one thing for then Advocate Arthur Chaskalson to have been "a member of the underground SACP in the difficult years of the 1960's", as the SACP also states.

The SACP, like the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, was then an illegal political party under intense persecution by the apartheid state. Public acknowledgement of one's own Communist Party membership at that time, except in extreme circumstances - such as in a statement from the dock after conviction in court, as in my own case in 1965 - was out of the question, given the party's illegal status.

By the time of the CODESA negotiations on South Africa's constitutional future in the early 1990s, however, the SACP was a fully legal party.

How appropriate and how honest was it then for the SACP to be "represented" in these negotiations by...a hidden hand?

How does this hidden political relationship with the SACP square with the reputation for independence and judicial integrity with which Advocate (later Judge) Chaskalson has been associated since 1990, when the SACP was unbanned, along with the ANC, the PAC and other political groupings?

It begs a question: how many more hidden hands does this political party operate in South Africa's supposed constitutional democracy? And who are they?

And in what ways has - or has not - such a secretive, hidden, political relationship served the personal interests of this or that person, or the party interests of the SACP, rather than the interest of the public?

Who can be trusted?

This is a deeply troubling acknowledgement of a radical lack of candour, on the part of one the most honoured and trusted figures in South Africa's post-apartheid constitutional life.

Did Judge Chaskalson trust the people of South Africa so little, that he did not choose to trust them with his little secret?

In which case, what kind of democracy is this?

Why, if this were a real constitutional democracy, did the people not have a right to know?

And - how can such a political party be trusted?

By coincidence, the British/American political journalist Janet Daley made a very relevant comment in her weekly column, published in the Sunday Telegraph in Britain the day after the SACP issued its not a little smug announcement about the late Judge Chaskalson's covert history. Janet Daley made her point in the form of a little story. She wrote:

"In The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E M Delafield's delightfully witty account of middle-class British life in the Thirties, there is a splendid anecdote about a party given by the local aristocrat. All of the more acceptable neighbours and villagers are graciously invited to an evening reception at the stately pile.

"At some point, the provincial lady, in search of something or other, opens the door to a room in the great house to find the titled man himself, his wife and a dozen or so of their friends in lively, convivial conversation. She realises that what she has stumbled across is 'the Real Party'. For them and their social intimates, this, and not the patronising official hospitality in the rooms outside, is the actual event: the party within a party."

As Ms Daley goes on to say, many voters in Britain today "believe that they are living in a country where there is a permanent party within a party. That the social event - the democratic process - to which they are invited is not the one where the important people are talking to one another and making the decisions that will affect everyone's lives: that the Real Party is taking place" ...somewhere else, out of sight, where the important decisions of the country "will never involve consultation with the great mass of the population."

How strange, how sinister, that it should take the death of one of the most honoured figures in South Africa's constitutional process to reveal the means by which the "Real Party" trusts the public it claims to represent.

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