South Africa is a country rich in political history but poor in political biographies. In English there are only W.K. Hancock’s biography of Jan Smuts and Alan Paton’s biography of Jan Hofmeyr that can be called truly brilliant. In recent times there appeared Charles van Onselen’s superb biography of Kas Maine, a black squatter who survived on “white” land despite all obstacles put in his way. Fresh on the market is a superb biography of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, perhaps the most charismatic white opposition politician in the era of apartheid    

Biographies of presidents constitute almost a discipline on its own in the United States and there are several outstanding ones. There is also an abundance of biographies written for popular consumption like Johnny, we hardly knew ye (1972). It is the title of a remarkable popular biography of the charismatic President John. F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. The authors were Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, who as young aides to the charismatic president got to know him intimately.

A few years ago I recommended this book to Albert Grundlingh, a fellow-historian who at that point had just embarked on a biography of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Slabbert was a rising star on our political firmament. In many ways he resembled Kennedy except that he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Slabbert entered South African politics in 1974 and served as leader of the official opposition in Parliament from 1979 to 1986 when he dramatically abandoned the institution, depicting it as having become politically irrelevant while the country was heading for a precipice. Grundlingh replied: “‘Van Zyl, we hardly knew ye’ would be a very apposite title for the biography of him that I am writing. The title he ultimate chose for the book that has just appeared is Slabbert: Man on a Mission (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg and Cape Town).

Slabbert’s mission was to find a way to address South Africa’s problems before instability and stagnant growth engulfed the country.

Like Kennedy, Slabbert was a charismatic figure, hugely popular and highly respected, but unlike Kennedy, who was born into a rich and well connected family, very few people actually knew something of Slabbert’s background. He and his twin sister, Marcia, were born into a dysfunctional family, which soon broke up. They were mostly brought up by their grandparents who farmed in the district of Pietersburg. His grandfather had done surprisingly well as a United Party candidate in the general election of 1944. In 1974 Slabbert nearly joined the UP, which would have been a fatal error.

Like Hendrik Verwoerd, Slabbert enrolled at Stellenbosch University (SU) with a view to becoming a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. Like Verwoerd he abandoned a career in the church to become a lecturer in the Department of Sociology of the university. Like Verwoerd, he set out to find a political model that would forestall violent clashes between whites and blacks.

I got to know Slabbert when we were both graduate students at SU. As young lecturers we both became members of a discussion group formed by Johannes Degenaar, a greatly esteemed philosopher. Watching Slabbert arguing in discussion groups was a great pleasure. He would listen carefully to an argument and would then unpack it, praising what was valuable and relentlessly criticising what was flawed. I have encountered very few peers in my academic career.

Grundlingh explains very well how Slabbert’s academic training shaped his outlook in addressing the racial problems of South Africa. He was particularly impressed by the paradigm of structural functionalism developed by Talcott Parson, an American sociologist who at the time was considered one of the most influential social theorists in the world. It argues that societies become functional only if they succeed in developing institutions that generate growth and stability and consensus of values.

This perspective is almost the direct opposite of apartheid which proceeded from the assumption that groups differ so sharply in their values that they have to be kept apart for the sake of avoiding future violent conflicts. Late in Parsons’s life Slabbert met his guru when he visited South Africa, but Parsons was more interested in talking about the strawberries that he cultivated than in discussing his theory.

In later years Slabbert struck up a firm friendship with the German sociologist Heribert Adam, whose book Modernizing Racial Domination: South Africa’s Political Dynamics (1971) greatly influenced the debate among academics about South Africa’s future. Whereas most foreign scholars argued that South Africa was so unstable that a violent revolution was most likely, Adam, like Slabbert, insisted that imaginative reforms could break the political deadlock.

Grundlingh explains lucidly how his studies at Stellenbosch enabled Slabbert to express his proselytising instincts in a rational manner. He had very few peers in dissecting the shortcomings of apartheid in a rigorous way and in holding up a different future for a society that seemed to be deadlocked politically.

He developed a relaxed form of self-confidence and a gentle way of mocking both himself and Afrikaner leadership that was still quite patriarchal. People on the campus became convinced that he was heading for great things. Senior staff members told him that if he watched his step he could fairly soon expect to be elected as Rector of the university.

Slabbert enjoyed being a student and young lecturer at Stellenbosch. He frequently stated that he experienced more than enough academic freedom on the campus to be able to express himself fully. But this immensely talented man was also perennially restless. Between the late 1960s and 1974, when he was elected to Parliament, he was attached to three different universities –Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Wits.

Slabbert’s role in bringing about the retreat and ultimate demise of apartheid is greatly underestimated. Economic sanctions hurt the economy, but they did not affect the lifestyle of whites. Diplomatic sanctions were inconvenient, but hardly enough reason to give up power. What made a difference in the NP government’s calculus was Afrikaners abandoning their belief in apartheid as a functional system and a justifying ideology. Without such an ideology, the gratuitous cruelty, greed and privilege that went hand-in-hand with the system could not be justified.

The unique thing about Slabbert’s approach was that, unlike many liberals, he took seriously the ideology of apartheid, as Hendrik Verwoerd articulated it in the early 1960s. The wholesale demonization of the apartheid ideology and every aspect of the policy is a phenomenon of the past thirty years. In 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General, several times met Hendrik Verwoerd privately to discuss ways in which apartheid could be turned into what the Secretary-General called a ‘competitive alternative’ to integration.

The great liberal historian CW de Kiewiet remarked after a visit to South Africa in 1963 that Verwoerd was addressing the country’s grave problems with ‘boldness, shrewdness and even imagination’, adding that it was ‘by no means absurd’ to suggest a comparison between Verwoerd and Charles de Gaulle, ‘the stern, headstrong but deeply imaginative leader of France’. When Verwoerd travelled to London in 1961 to discuss South Africa’s membership of the Commonwealth, De Gaulle extended an invitation to visit him in Paris for talks, which Verwoerd had to turn down because a mass reception of him on his return to South Africa had already been planned.

Slabbert was not afraid to speak openly about the appeal of apartheid when he was still a student and young lecturer. Talking of the 1960s Slabbert described ‘the excitement, even the thrill’ of some Stellenbosch students when the ideology was explained. He stated that it had ‘a coherence and systemic quality which cannot be dismissed as racism pure and simple’. It ‘made logical sense and addressed very prickly issues’.

However, as Slabbert stressed, the core assumption was wrong: that the country contained ‘a plurality of voluntary ethnic minorities’, that the respective racial groups wished to govern themselves, and that they all wanted the highest level of self-determination, even independence. Because laws, starting with racial classification, destroyed voluntary association and imposed ethnic group membership on everyone, the whole scheme was untenable.

From my own experience I know that Afrikaner nationalists listened only to those critics who could genuinely speak of ‘we’ in reasoning with them about the need for reform. In the anti-apartheid ranks the person who could do so best was Slabbert. He did so without what I would call a moralistic attitude. Instead, he trenchantly exposed the increasingly stark contradiction between the idealistic motives and the sordid policy in practice. Yet he never sounded morally superior and he always listened in an open-minded way. Everyone who knew him sensed that he never forgot his Afrikaner roots.

In 2008, when I was a member of the Stellenbosch University Council, I successfully proposed Slabbert as Chancellor. My argument was simply that no one had done better than he had in persuading the Afrikaners as ruling group to abandon apartheid. Slabbert was also adamant that Afrikaans should remain the main medium of instruction and that its new mission was addressing the fact that in their participation in university education brown Afrikaans speakers lagged far behind the other groups in South Africa.

In 1974 Slabbert entered politics as the Progressive Party candidate in the Rondebosch seat. Grundlingh describes it vividly in Man on a Mission;

‘Slabbert found the campaign trail exhilarating. It appealed to all his senses: the challenge of conveying political logic to voters; the emotional satisfaction of conveying political logic to voters; the emotional satisfaction from interacting with a range of people ,which energised him and the competitive element in electioneering, where the outcome is not necessarily ensured.’

He won his seat handsomely. Commenting in the Cape Times, Gerald Shaw wrote that he had never seen a novice candidate as gifted as this one. He came across as a man of honesty, resolution, and strength of character.

In 1979 Slabbert became leader of the Progressive Reform Party, which was now the official opposition in the wake of the United Party’s demise in 1977. He was a fresh breeze in the increasingly stale parliamentary politics, which were attracting ever fewer of the best talents of white society.

The Nationalist MPs did not quite know how to deal with him. In the four years they were in Parliament together John Vorster refused to return his greeting when they passed each other walking down a corridor of Parliament. Here he was: among the best and brightest in the Afrikaner community, someone passionate about Afrikaans, the writings of N.P. Van Wyk Louw and the poetry of Breyten Breytenbach, but at the same time denouncing apartheid, which he had come to see as a dire threat to society. He was forceful and highly intelligent without being overbearing, highly persuasive, a man with a razor-sharp analytical mind. ‘His style is so utterly different’, a reporter observed. ‘It is his unique ability to reduce politics to a series of simple, logical arguments that would progress to a single, devastating conclusion.’[1]

That conclusion was that apartheid had irreversibly failed. Time and again he ridiculed the huge gap between the promises of apartheid ideology and the sordid reality. He distinguished between sham and genuine reforms, arguing that sham reforms were very dangerous because they created the illusion of change and a false sense of security. His immediate objective was a political realignment, bringing reformists across party ranks together. Once that had happened the serious task of preparing whites for white-black negotiations for a new constitution could begin.

Slabbert’s career as a members of Parliament arrived at the cross roads when the NP government in the early 1980s devised a Tricameral constitution that included representatives of the white, coloured people and Indians, but left the black community without any parliamentary representation.

He campaigned all out for a No vote in the referendum but the white minority, including many leaders of the business community, endorsed it. Looking back it is clear that Slabbert was right: the cost of black exclusion was far higher than the benefits of co-opting the coloured and communities into a new dispensation.

Slabbert started feeling more and more alienated from the white-dominated system. The most urgent task in his view was drawing in representatives of all the communities, especially blacks living in the townships and filling the skilled labour ranks.

Slabbert had indeed become more and more alienated from the system because he felt the NP government was misleading both voters and the opposition parties about South African troops entering Angola in 1975-1976. His own half brother was among the troops but Slabbert only learned about the incursion when he visited the operational area as a member of a parliamentary team. The government had not informed public about cross-border operations and Slabbert, along with the other members of the parliamentary team, were sworn to silence. His whole system rebelled against this.

Early in 1986 Slabbert walked out of Parliament, calling the debates that took place there irrelevant to the future of South Africa. Senior members of his caucus, particularly Colin Eglin and the formidable Helen Suzman, were outraged. Eglin in a telephone call just after he had walked out called his action ‘vomitable’. When Slabbert tried to placate Suzman by telling her that he had served a full twelve years she exploded: ‘Twelve years! I have served 26 years, and half of them alone.’

In an interesting way Grundlingh links up Slabbert’s act walking out of parliament with his abandonment of his studies in the theological seminary of Stellenbosch in the mid-1960s. Slabbert told the dean that he would have completed his studies if only once in response to Slabbert’s questions about the Christian religion and the issue of calling the dean had replied that he did not know.

Graham McIntosh, a member on the left wing in the party’s caucus, wrote to Slabbert to tell him that he found his decision explicable and felt he could digest it. He added:

‘As you have always passionately and in my consistently sought to be always true and rational, your decision in this case must be based on a philosophical commitment. It is the kind of irrational rock against which the Dean of the Kweekskool [theological seminary] at Stellenbosch was powerless when you told him you had lost your calling. It is the same kind of imperative that takes men into religious life. On an existential basis your action is entirely explicable and I find that I can digest it.’

Slabbert now also no longer believed in the power sharing arrangements that he and David Welsh propagated in their book South Africa’s ’Options that appeared in 1979. Only racial equality and a fully representative system could address South Africa’s problems. Undoubtedly part of the reason for this shift was the relentless shrinking of the proportion of whites as part of the total population.

Together with Alex Boraine, a fellow member of his caucus that joined him in abandoning Parliament, Slabbert founded the Institute for a democratic Alternative for South Africa (Idasa). It sought to bring South Africans together from across political and racial boundaries to debate the prospects for a genuinely pluralist democracy in South Africa. Slabbert’s act did have an impact. Chis Heunis, Minister of Constitutional Development, later told me had never felt more despondent about the NP government’s efforts to engineer a political solution unilaterally. A few years later Heunis also resigned from Parliament.

Slabbert participated in the numerous conferences Idasa organised, including the opening one in 1987 in Dakar, Senegal, where sixty ‘internal’ South Africans and members of the ANC met for a week-long ‘seminar’ on South Africa. He rarely spoke. He and Thabo Mbeki were seen as two future stars ---a black prince and a golden boy, as I would later describe them in an analysis of the proceedings.[2] But the friendship between him and Mbeki did not last.

In 1999 Slabbert told me: ‘I have never known anyone who so much took my friendship for granted.’ Cyril Ramaphosa once remarked: ‘Mbeki always want to be the brightest man in the room.’ As Grundlingh’s excellent biography makes very clear: Slabbert was very bright and Mbeki probably saw in him a potential competitor that could not be controlled. Albert Grundlingh’s Slabbert: Man on A Mission is an enthralling book that deserves a wide readership. It is an invaluable addition to our stock of biographies

Hermann Giliomee is a historian who lives in Stellenbosch. His latest book is The Afrikaners: A Concise History (Cape Town: Tafelberg. 2020).