A fiftieth anniversary, and the smell of green leather

It happened half a century ago, but I remember it as though it was yesterday – down to the smell of the wood panelling and the green leather.

On Wednesday 21 August 1974, I was sitting the gallery above the old House of Assembly, waiting for Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert to make his maiden speech.

It was just after lunch, when the chamber was usually quite empty. But then something remarkable happened. Slowly and silently, people from both major parties, but particularly the NP – backbenchers, frontbenchers, and even cabinet ministers – began to filter into the chamber.

In terms of parliamentary convention, MPs who make their maiden speeches are meant to restrict themselves to relatively uncontroversial topics, and are not heckled or interrupted – but Slabbert’s was delivered in an unnatural, almost eerie, silence. It took me a while to figure out what was happening. I eventually realised they had all come to listen to him not in a spirit of skepticism, derision or hostility, but simply because they were mesmerised.

Just four months previously, Slabbert had been hoisted aloft by an ecstatic crowd outside the Rondebosch Town Hall after winning this previously safe seat from the United Party. In the process, he became one of seven more Progressive Party MPs due to join Helen Suzman in parliament.

His candidacy had not only galvanised the constituency, but the entire election campaign. A veteran political journalist wrote he was the ‘most gifted novice candidate’ he had ever seen. At house meetings, he was introduced as a new Jan Smuts, and even Sir De Villiers Graaff was moved to remark that he was a ‘bright young fellow’.*

Part of Slabbert’s attraction lay in the fact that he was an unapologetic, rugby-playing Afrikaner, thereby legitimising Afrikaner participation in ‘liberal’ politics that had hitherto been associated with Harry Oppenheimer and an English-speaking elite. Added to this, he seemed to have found a new way of talking about politics that promised to break the logjam in white party politics.

However brightly he might have shone in the hustings, parliament would be his political baptism of fire. This was a horse of a different colour -- an unforgiving, even brutal theatre, filled with wizened predators on both side of the chamber.

Colin Eglin had experienced this in his first speech in the no confidence debate just three weeks before. Despite his many sterling qualities, he was a dour and unimaginative speaker. Moreover, he was an open target, as he had briefly been in parliament before the PP broke away from the UP in the early 1960s.

Eglin was nervous about his speech, which was meant to benchmark the PP’s return to parliament, and with good reason. The UP Old Guard had an axe to grind with him, and were lying in wait. When the day came, old warhorses like Vause Raw and Lionel Murray heckled him mercilessly right from the beginning. Eglin became flustered, and eventually lost his nerve. It was an ugly episode -- his confidence was shattered, and it took him a long time to recover.

While clearly a more accomplished – even electrifying -- speaker, Slabbert was still faced with a sizeable challenge. On the one hand, he could only make a non-controversial speech. On the other, expectations – whether those of friend or foe – were very high, and he had to make some sort of impact.

In the event, he found a clever and elegant solution, namely to draw on his previous role as a social scientist to make some supposedly objective remarks about South African politics and society. This enabled him to propose a fresh, more ‘rational’ approach to South African politics, and also to spell out his credo for his parliamentary career.

He also wasn’t fazed by the occasion – seeming quite relaxed, despite the forbidding setting, he spoke fluently and confidently, only glancing occasionally at a few handwritten notes.

Individuals, Slabbert said, were seldom granted the privilege of becoming members of an institution that was so directly involved in the historical conflicts of its own society as the South African parliament. Therefore, he thought it important to gain as much clarity as possible about its nature and role as well as the position in which any member of parliament found himself, irrespective of his party-political convictions.

Other maiden speakers had drawn on previous professional experiences to deliver non-controversial analyses. ‘I should like to follow suit, and, as a former sociologist with a special interest in political processes, make a few objective statements about what I regard as the paradox of white politics in South Africa.’

This could not be laid at the door of any particular group or individual, but had to be seen against the backdrop of two features of South African society -- the socio-cultural composition of its population on the one hand, and the nature of parliamentary democracy on the other.

The former had been analysed from various perspectives, and included the class model, the colonial model, a purely racial analysis, and a model which was ‘enjoying a fair measure of prominence at present, namely that of the plural society’.

Its salient feature was the existence of a plurality of races and/or ethnic groups within one social structure. At the same time, its political and economic structures were predominantly controlled by one race or ethnic group, which played a key role in its conflicts and developmental problems.

South Africa was an obvious example of a plural society. At the same time, it was a partial parliamentary democracy, with the governing party rising to power by gaining the support of the majority of enfranchised voters.

In conventional democracies in western Europe, governing parties were exclusively responsible to their electorates. By contrast, the core of the paradox of white politics in South Africa lay in the fact that any person who, with the aid of the entrenched democratic process, had become a member of parliament had responsibilities which extended far beyond his or her mandate.

Both the government and the opposition had to react to demands and pressures which originated not only from the white electorate but also from outside. In short, parliament was functionally involved with the problems of both black and white politics while being dependent solely on white politics.

This placed particular responsibilities on all members of parliament, and presented them with certain basic dilemmas. The first was the choice between the exploitation of short-term political gain at the cost of long-term political development. The second was the choice between responding to white political pressure on the one hand without provoking increased black political pressure on the other.

The third was the choice between the formulation of rational political solutions and taking cognisance of the actual political emotions and trends in the country. ‘This paradox, and the dilemmas connected therewith, is the lot of every member of this House.’

The Hansard version ends with the following, rather convoluted sentence: ‘It is my wish that I, as the member for Rondebosch, shall endeavour in the best traditions of this house to make a bold stand against this paradox and the dilemmas connected therewith, and that I shall be open to welcome criticism whenever it would appear that I am no longer aware of the delicate relationship between the mandate of my constituency, however limited it may be, and the much greater responsbilities I carry when I set foot in this House.’

I don’t think it was as complicated on the day, but that’s what’s on record.

This short speech – barely two columns in Hansard – can be said to have started a new era in South African politics.

While not mentioning him by name, Slabbert had invoked the political scientist Arend Lijphart’s model of consociational democracy as a means of managing or resolving conflict in ‘plural’-- and often conflicted -- societies, typically by means of power-sharing.

This introduced a more neutral (or pragmatic) way of talking about South African politics, rather than the value-laden and ultimately sterile clash between conventional liberalism on the one hand and Afrikaner Nationalism on the other.

While, in the years to come, Slabbert would still be involved in vigorous and sometimes heated debates, his more ‘rational’ model of a society locked in unsustainable conflict which could and should be resolved by means of inclusive negotiation continued to permeate and eventually reshape the parliamentary discourse.

In 1986, after having risen to the leadership of the PFP and becoming Leader of the Opposition, Slabbert abruptly and sensationally walked out of parliament on the grounds that it had lost its relevance and that he would rather seek to make a contribution in the burgeoning extra-parliamentary political arena/theatre instead.

Together with Alex Boraine, who had followed him out of parliament, he formed the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for SA (IDASA) which, among others, led a group of Afrikaners to meet with ANC representatives in Dakar. Later, at more or less the same time as CODESA, he headed two years of complex talks aimed at unifying the racially separated administrations of the Johannesburg metropolitan area. Following the transition, he worked as a political consultant, entered the business world, and became chancellor of Stellenbosch University.

A few years into the new South Africa, he also headed a commission of inquiry into South Africa’s electoral system which recommended a hybrid system of constituency elections in tandem with proportional representation in order make MPs more directly accountable to voters. (The government, then led by Thabo Mbeki, simply ignored the proposal.)

Still, many people felt – and still feel today, 24 years after his untimely death at age 70 in 2010 -- that Slabbert never really reached his full political potential.

Specifically, despite his undeniable achievements in the extra-parliamentary domain, there are still those who feel he should have stuck it out in parliament, which would, among other things, have taken him to CODESA. (Of course, his colleagues in the then PFP took many years to forgive him for his walkout, if they forgave him at all.)

Those who seemed to think or imply that he might have taken a wrong turn include his close friend and colleague, the late Mike Savage, who wrote in an obituary that Slabbert’s ‘established and considerable negotiation skills, together with his knowledge about transitions to democracy in other countries, meant that his absence left the negotiation process all the poorer’.

It was certainly ironic that, after having played a pioneering role in advocating a negotiated settlement, Slabbert was not present at CODESA, simply because he no longer had a political power base. (I once asked him in an interview whether he regretted not being at CODESA. He replied – rather stiffly -- that the metro negotiations were ‘far more important than CODESA’, whose outcome was ‘predetermined’, and therefore a ‘foregone conclusion’.)

However, the judgment about his unfulfilled promise may well be misplaced. Specifically, one could argue that his greatest contribution to politics was made sooner rather than later, within parliament rather than outside. It lay in the fact that, subliminally and progressively, he changed the way in which NP politicians thought about South African politics, thereby helping to pave the way to the negotiated settlement and the political transition. And that, while this has largely gone unrecognised, it could hardly have been bettered.

It‘s tempting to speculate about what Slabbert would have thought of the South Africa of today, notably the reasons for its accelerating decline. He was certainly critical of the negotiated settlement and the new constitution, apparently on the grounds that it did not do enough to protect the cultural and language rights of minorities.

He might also have felt that due to an insufficient devolution of power (a key feature of consociational democracy), this opened the door to domination by a majority, leading to a parliament which could – despite the advent of universal franchise -- be described as the mirror image of the one he had walked into in 1974.

(Indeed, it could be argued that, during the long years of ANC dominance, its MPs were subjected to much the same skewed interests and sets of pressures as those that Slabbert had identified in his maiden speech.)

However, there is no indication that he foresaw the real cause of South Africa’s post-apartheid malaise, namely the advent of neopatrimonialism – traditional patterns of authority and patronage that are deeply imprinted in African societies (described as ‘patrimonialism’ by social scientists) which are carried over into post-colonial states, subvert their institutions and processes, and hollow them out from the inside.

This is the scourge of African politics, as stated quietly but emphatically by a veteran Zimbabwean activist and political scientist at a conference in Johannesburg a few years ago. (I mention this because it’s recognised so infrequently -- it’s a conversation we don’t seem capable of having.)

Indeed, while virtually unrecognised or unacknowledged, it can be seen as the real driver of South Africa’s post-apartheid meltdown, with ‘state capture’ under Jacob Zuma a textbook example.

With the benefit of hindsight, its advent in the ‘new South Africa’ has been absolutely inevitable, and it may still sink the country despite the formation of the GNU. After all, we are part of Africa, and what made us think we would be an exception?

As far as I know, Slabbert never foresaw this, or suggested how it could be avoided or at least ameliorated. But then, neither did Nelson Mandela.

The author is a writer and contract publisher, and a former journalist. After the 1974 elections, he joined the Progressive Party as a parliamentary researcher.

* These details have been drawn from Slabbert: Man on a Mission, Albert Grundlingh, Jonathan Ball, 2021.