Tribute by Tony Leon at the Dene Smuts Farewell, Bishop's School, Cape Town Sunday April 13 2014
"Always a Signpost, never a Weathervane"
On 6 September 1989 the voters of the Groote Schuur constituency -which comprised the white residents of a big slice of Cape Town's Southern Suburbs -elected a well-known journalist and pioneering magazine editor and prize-winning author to Parliament for the first time. Her name was Dene Smuts. She was then 40 years old and was, in addition to a stellar and principled career in the media, also immersed in raising her two then very young but always very special and talented children Markus and Julia.
On the same day, over one thousand miles away, the voters of Houghton, Johannesburg also elected me, for the first time, to Parliament. And thus it was, a few days after that watershed election, which propelled FW De Klerk to the presidency of South Africa, that I first met Dene in the caucus of the Democratic Party. It is difficult to believe, but is indeed true, that we have now known each other -first as colleagues, later as firm friends, for nearly twenty-five years.
But not only in the matter of her political and parliamentary longevity, Dene is made of far sterner stuff than me and she lasted in parliament five years beyond my own bailout from it in 2009. Thus tonight we gather to pay tribute to Dene Smuts and mark her extraordinarily distinguished two and -a -half decades of public service to both the parliament and the people of South Africa.
When any career of political significance ends, I believe there are three important questions to answer. And since I have been asked to deliver this tribute tonight by Councillor Matthew Kempthorne, I have taken the liberty of both posing them and providing the answers in respect of our gallant friend Dene Smuts.
1. Did the person who held public office in national institutions make a difference for the better and leave behind a legacy for others to emulate?
2. Did the person, in all the vicissitudes and compromises embedded in any political life, fundamentally uphold the first principles of the causes she was entrusted to serve?
3. Did the person keep faith with these values, but also with intelligence and thoughtfulness adapt to the changed environment so that her contribution would not just be about consistency but also about achievement and relevance?
When we reflect, even with objective detachment, on the performance and the role played by Dene, we can say with great certainty that her twenty five years in parliament answers -beyond argument -each of them in the affirmative. Allow me, briefly to reflect on them.
1. In all her roles, as the first female whip in parliament , as a constituency MP when we had real constituencies, as a frontbench opposition spokesperson (before we grandiloquently renamed them ‘shadow ministers') variously on Home Affairs, Communications, and latterly in Justice and Constitutional Development, Dene made an outsize difference, in fact many of them. Perhaps for us, as young colleagues at a moment of transcending and fundamental change, being at the coalface and in the negotiations' chamber as the 1993 and later the final 1996 constitutions were being inked marked our finest hours.
In each of these varied roles Dene brought that rare trifecta of attributes to the fore: a keen intelligence, a fierce commitment to, and understanding of, the cardinal issues and what Malcolm Gladwell calls the "10 000 hour rule": The backbreaking, line-by-line hard work needed to move beyond rhetoric and aspiration toward concrete achievement and credible result. She did not, objectively as a member of a minority party she could not, succeed at all times and perhaps had as many defeats as victories.
But if you look at the attempts to carve out a coherent and modern communications' policy fit for this country, the bill of rights in the constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, a proper process for judicial appointments and the independence of the legal profession, and latterly the significant improvements in the Protection of State Information Bill, you might wish to go to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. And not just because it is both beautiful and was part of Dene's first constituency. But if you wander around you will find the burial stone of its pioneering botanist, Henry Harold Pearson, who perished from pneumonia in 1916. His epitaph reads-
"If ye seek his monument, look around."
Dene has a singular advantage over Professor Pearson since she is still happily and vigorously with us this evening. But if you look into the detail and depths of her legislative and constitutional achievements, those words provide an apt and living tribute to her accomplishments.
2. On the second question, Dene and I probably had as many disagreements as we had meetings of the mind, and some of them were very fierce clashes indeed. But when she and I and other colleagues clashed with her, it was always about a big issue, not about personal slight dresses up as a matter of principle.
In a political world, perhaps inside this party even , where disagreement and dissent is often a synonym for disloyalty, I can attest to the fact that not once, not ever, not a single time, did Dene ever advance a point to gain personal advantage or, heaven forbid, to ingratiate herself with the leadership! But she always advanced and held her view and her always forthright opinion, often in the teeth of immense resistance, like a sort of modern day political Esther who famously said , "Kom ek om,so kom ek om."
In fact when I think back to the most difficult days of survival for this party and its cause, when Dene and I constituted two of the surviving 7 MP's after 1994 (and I am delighted that a third member of our small band Ken Andrew is with us tonight), I can honestly say that I never had to watch my back as leader, because she always had it covered. She was in that sense very old-fashioned: inside the caucus you could have a flaming row, and outside of it she would support the mandated decision and never leak her disagreement to ingratiate herself or her cause with the media.
It was during this time between 1994 and 1999, when I think Dene sometimes must have had doubts about the direction I was providing as leader, that she was prepared to serve in one of the major leadership positions as the Federal Chairperson of the Democratic Party, and remind the party faithful at our congresses that their cause was still worth the fighting for, despite the odds which seemed so stacked against us back then.
And when fortune or the electorate smiled much more favourably upon us in the 1999 election, she took not just a front rank in the caucus of the Official Opposition and parliament, but provided a role model to new and inexperienced MPs, a mentoring role she continued to play after 2004 and 2009. And as this party expands further in size, after the 7 May election, and a party which just fifteen years ago had just over a half dozen MPs, becomes perhaps a caucus of over 100 MP's, the new enrolment would do well to emulate another of Dene's attributes, perhaps ever rarer today where the party machine (always a particular bugbear of Dene's) makes demands of its MPs and reduces the role of the individual legislator to a sort of glorified constituency manager.
It is this: there are two types of politicians (and doubtless some who inhabit a sort of muddle in the middle). You can either be a weather vane or a signpost. If you are the former, you will twist in the wind, depend for your key advisor on the last person you spoke to and try to suck up to those in power and trim your sails to the prevailing winds of political correctness. That is the easy path of least resistance, but it usually leads, over time, downhill.
Or you can be the rarer bird in the political aviary, a signpost, which does not bend to the vagaries of the moment but stands for a cause greater than personal advancement or temporary vote-winning, for an enduring set of principles and beliefs. Beyond argument, Dene belongs in the second category. That, incidentally, did not always make her the easiest or most agreeable of colleagues, but over time it served this party and its causes with unusual distinction.
3. The answer to the third question appears to be a contradiction of the second answer, but on examination it is not. Because although Dene always stood for principle, she was never hide-bound or old fashioned in adapting them to meet the dramatically changed circumstance we lived through, from the end of apartheid to the establishment of a constitutional democracy on the stony soil of a divided South Africa.
Whether it was the modernisation of old Afrikaans institutions such as her alma mater the University of Stellenbosch, the placement of second and third generation rights in the constitution and the principle of horizontality (don't even try to ask tonight what that means or Dene might just tell you at some length and with even greater feeling!) in its application, Dene was a modernist who realised, before many other traditional liberals, that the late president PW Botha was onto something when he said, "Adapt or die." And so to create a liberal and democratic state of meaning to the bulk of South Africans you had to, in her view, make it relevant beyond the traditional and narrow confines of simply containing the power of the state, important though that is.
Dene was able to influence so many of these outcomes and reappraisals because in the words of my brother Peter, she and the late Colin Eglin were "the finest constitutional lawyers around the table, even though neither had any formal legal training. " Dene did, however, have the singular advantage of the fine judicial example of her father, the late Judge President of the Free State, Mr. Justice Frank Smuts, as an admired paterfamilias.
But I don't want my remarks tonight to simply reflect a dull and worthy political life of high achievement and no light-heartedness or laughs. Because as many of you know, Dene, especially after a few libations, can be uproariously funny in poking people in the ribs. And two of the bonds which drew us further together were her sense of humour and an often very irreverent view of some of our colleagues. I leave you with two nuggets which I can repeat in public at least.
In the 1996 local government election day in Cape Town, Dene and I were visiting the polling station at Fernwood. Our reception was very muted from the good voters of Newlands lining up to vote. After our less than ecstatic response, Dene waspishly observed to me "Ja. You know why those people were looking at their shoes instead of at us? ""No, why?", I responded. "Because they know they should be voting for us, but actually they are going to be voting today for someone else. " And when the Nats. nearly beat us there, her dark humour was almost, but thankfully not, vindicated.
Around the same time, we were having a very tiresome debate in parliament about the underperformance and maladministration of the Gender Commission - a Chapter 9 body, then as now, of some constitutional importance but, in practise, of unsurpassed uselessness. The maladroit chairperson of it came to Parliament and demanded a larger budget. Dene's response was classic" "You don't need more money; you need a good brain between your ears and a good pen to write with!"
Although we associate her with these Southern Suburbs and much of her public life has been conducted in English, it is worth recording that she is" ‘n trots Vrystater " of origin and her mother tongue is actually Afrikaans. So allow me to conclude with one of the great poems from the canon of Eugene Marias as we take leave of Dene Smuts and contemplate our public life in her absence:
‘ n Druppel gal is in die soetste wyn;
‘n traan is op elk' vrolik snaar,
In elke lag ‘n sug van pyn,
In elke roos ‘n dowwe blaar.
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