Over the past few years, there has been a remarkable outpouring of historical, political, biographical and autobiographical books in South Africa. Predictably, quite a few of them centre on or around apartheid. But the main difference between them and books written during the apartheid years is that the present crop of writers have had the benefit of hindsight - access to the record of what actually happened, and less need for guesswork.
In his outstanding new book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Professor David Welsh draws the line at 1994 when the ANC took office and white rule ended. His book though covers not just the 1948-1994 apartheid era. It is much richer in background and texture, because it is about both the centuries-old feud between Afrikaans and English-speakers, and what is known now as "the soul of the ANC."
As the South African tale unfolds, Welsh's book is also a reminder of the importance of the historian. After 15 years of ANC rule, the stardust about a "rainbow nation" is being brushed aside. In a way, disillusioning the nation is a pity, but the historian's realism is bringing out the best in today's literature.
The sheer scholarship of Welsh's book, the vast range of its material - studded by a wonderful collection of quotations on apartheid culled from apartheid's designers and opponents - puts it in the top class.
There must be a whole generation of South Africans (fewer whites than Africans of course) who have little idea of why the Anglo-Boer was fought (a National Party MP told me sternly it was "the English war), what gold and diamonds had to do with it, that it was one of Africa's first real guerrilla wars, and that 26,000 Afrikaner women and children died in a British concentration camp.
Welsh quotes General Smuts (1899) as itemising "with clinical and cold fury the injustices done by British ‘capitalist jingoism' to Afrikaners." Today's African nationalists substitute colonialism for jingoism, which is a way of reversing the same emotion.
So much has been written about apartheid that one wonders whether there is anything left to be said. As Welsh establishes, indeed there is. His new 650 page volume, now one of the definitive books not only on 46 years of apartheid, but also on what preceded 1948, outlines, too, why apartheid took the form it did - its mixture of legalism and bare-knuckle enforcement - whereas for African nationalism legalism is little more than an irritant.
The chapter on Groping Towards Negotiation, which describes how the NP government and the ANC - covertly in the 1980s and openly in the early 1990s- moved cautiously and suspiciously towards "talks about talks," each deadlocked in its position - is quite fascinating, not least because it illuminates FW de Klerk's character when he became NP leader in 1989, but also because of his understanding of the need for combining strategic thinking with power politics.
Welsh quotes an Afrikaner clergyman who overheard Verwoerd tell someone that he would entrench apartheid so deeply in society that whatever government came to power afterwards would find it impossible to undo what had been done.
Considering how race classification has been entrenched in law since 1994 (affirmative action, labour quotas, Africans at the top of the pile, etc.), all the ANC has had to do (as indicated above) has been to reverse the structure, making surprisingly few changes to the mechanisms of classification themselves, while entrenching classification in not quite the way Verwoerd had anticipated.
De Klerk has been criticised both for moving too fast for change and too slow. But he says he knew that if he had hastened reform, "I would have alienated key players and important constituencies". He would not have become leader, and "I would not have been able to do the things that I did when I was President. Timing change is of the utmost importance..."
De Klerk answers the question, raised often by his own supporters, whether he could have been tougher and held out for a better deal: "Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently and just in time to avert a revolution?" Probably this is the most familiar of all the questions asked about the NP-ANC settlement. Followers of the history trail have pursued it endlessly.
Welsh asks: "Why did the transition occur relatively peacefully? How does one explain why the sombre predictions of full-scale revolution, ‘fighting to the last drop of blood,' and so on, did not come true"?
He replies: "No single-factor cause satisfactorily explains the transition: it derives from a combination of factors...leadership was the indispensable element."
Welsh quotes the pithy comment by the late Piet Cillie, former editor of Die Burger (and professional cynic): "We had a choice between certain downfall and probable downfall, and De Klerk chose the latter."
(For further comment on De Klerk's leadership, readers can turn to Giliomee's The Afrikaners, published in 2002, to which two new chapters have been added, discussing the reason why De Klerk acted as he did, even at the price of being accused of "surrender.").
The relationship between De Klerk and Nelson Mandela started off well enough, but ended in enmity. On De Klerk's 70th birthday, Nelson Mandela spoke graciously of his opponent: "There is an almost unspoken realisation that we quite possibly could have fallen into the destructive racial war which everyone foresaw, had it not been for the daring foresightedness of FW de Klerk."
Later, Mandela lashed out at De Klerk quite savagely for criticising ANC policy outside the cabinet chamber, and it was only a mater of time before De Klerk withdrew his six-man team from the Interim Government of National Unity.
What did apartheid cost South Africa in human lives? It is impossible, says Welsh, to estimate the death toll, but he notes that the EPG (Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group) appeared to accept as credible a figure of 100,000 deaths caused by fighting outside SA, as in the conflict in Angola, plus 30,000 deaths caused internally, mainly from the Inkatha/UDF-ANC conflict.
However, deaths of people who had been denied access to anti-retroviral drugs have to be factored in. Welsh writes: "It should be an embarrassing fact for the ANC government that, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, between 2000 and 2005, President Thabo Mbeki's ‘denialist' views caused the death of over 330,000 HIV-positive people, as a consequence of deliberate delays in the provision of life-prolonging drugs - which Mbeki deemed toxic."
Not surprisingly, South Africa's leading AIDS activist, Zackie Achmat, has pressed for Mbeki to be charged with genocide.
Welsh's book offers a particularly valuable chapter, Opening Pandora's Box, in which he lays out in detail the negotiations that took place on which electoral system should replace the long-standing Westminster first-past-the post system.
In a country with a huge black majority like South Africa's, simply to continue the Westminster system would have meant demographically that the ANC would win almost all the seats in the new 400-member National Assembly. So the settlement brought in Proportional Representation.
This meant that ethnic groups could aim at seats in proportion to their population numbers: African 79.35%, white 9.5%, coloured 8.8%, Indian 2.4%. No provision was made for constituencies, although subsequently gestures were made.
In the 1994 election, the ANC won 279 NA seats and the Democratic Alliance 7 seats. After the 2009 elections, the ANC had 264 seats and the DA 67 (the remaining seats being held by 11 smaller opposition parties).
This suited the ANC. It looks good, it is almost democratic, even if majoritarian, and it is a gift to party bosses, who supervise their own lists of candidates and can strike off a troublesome MP with the stroke of a pen. Also, the PR system weakens the parliamentary system to the advantage of party headquarters.
It was "understandable and inevitable," Welsh writes, that the ANC should propose a straightforward system of ‘majoritarian' democracy...disinclined to heed any objections to equating democracy with majority rule..."
By Opening Pandora's Box, and following it with subsequent chapters on Negotiating the Interim Constitution and The Founding Election, Welsh superbly analyses not only the existing electoral system, but also much-needed alternative systems, such as principles of federalism and elements of constituencies.
One of the most rewarding aspects of Welsh's book is the way he lightens profound issues with numerous glimpses into the personalities and eccentricities of the players in the great game - a game the ANC understood very well, and the NP not so expertly.
Welsh concludes his impressive book: "More than a decade after 1994, democratic constitutional forms have been maintained, but a single-party dominant system has become entrenched. Democracy has survived, and even if it is democracy of a poor quality, South Africa is nevertheless a vastly better society than it was under apartheid."
Or is the jury still out on this one?
The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Cape Town, 2009 (purchase here).
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