Ragged Glory: The Rainbow Nation in Black and White

By Ray Hartley

As a leading political journalist and newspaper editor, Hartley had the best seat in the house for the unfolding drama of the new South Africa, as well as privileged access to many key players, including Nelson Mandela himself. Admirably concise but rich in detail, drawing on a wide spectrum of interviews, documents and experiences, Ragged Glory offers a bracingly critical look back at the achievements and the failures of two turbulent decades, during which South Africa took its place at the table of free nations but lost something of its moral authority. On a cold Highveld morning in May 1994, Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to become South Africa's first democratically elected president. A new era had begun. The promise of those heady days of political transition soon gave way to a more sober view on the magnitude of the challenges facing the new government. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, the country grappled with the restructuring of the state, massive inequality and poverty, rising crime, battles over economic policy, the arms deal, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the BEE era, the cancer of political corruption and the rise of a new and predatory political elite. With the removal of Mbeki, followed by the interregnum of Kgalema Motlanthe, the stage was set for the coming to power of the controversial Jacob Zuma. All of these are key threads in Ray Hartley's rich and complex narrative history of the democratic era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781868425570

Ray Hartley

RAY HARTLEY worked as an administrator at the CODESA negotiations, which ended apartheid. He has covered the unfolding drama of the new South Africa as a political correspondent, travelling extensively with Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Hartley was the founding editor of The Times, and editor of South Africa’s largest newspaper, The Sunday Times, from 2010 to 2013. He is author of Ragged Glory: The Rainbow Nation in Black and White and editor of the essay collection How to Fix South Africa.

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Preface

Twenty years after it abandoned apartheid and charted a new, democratic course, South Africa remains an enigma to observers of its political life. It is, on one hand, an example of a successful transition from minority rule and oppression to constitutional democracy, with all the trappings of a modern state. There is much to celebrate. But, on the other hand, it is also a country under siege, as self-enriching, extractive elites from the old and new orders seek to line their pockets at the expense of the poor. The institutions designed to protect democracy are frequently under threat, their backs to the wall, as powerful figures try to disarm those standing in the way of accumulation. South Africa is a country moving forward, but its pace is slowing and it is taking the occasional backward step as it carries more and more of the baggage of corruption, patronage and crime.

My goal in writing this book has been to explore how the country has found itself in this precarious position twenty years after it embarked on a journey full of hope. I have attempted to trace the events, people and – to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s expression – the ‘tipping points’ that have shaped the first twenty years of the ‘new’ South Africa.

My primary source is my own experience. I was fortunate to witness South Africa’s democracy take shape from the best seats in the house. As an administrative official in the constitutional negotiations of the early 1990s, I watched negotiators such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Roelf Meyer and the late Colin Eglin shape the constitution that would guide the new democratic polity. As a political reporter, first for Business Day, and later for South Africa’s largest circulation newspaper, the Sunday Times, I covered the months leading up to the first democratic election. I travelled extensively, visiting the conflict-ravaged townships around Johannesburg, the quasi-military training camps of the Inkatha Freedom Party deep in rural KwaZulu and the battlefield of Mmabatho in the then Bophuthatswana, where a right-wing coup attempt was put down. I reported on Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk as they campaigned for votes in the lead-up to the election of April 1994.

Once the dust of the transition had settled, I worked as political correspondent for the Sunday Times, covering the first democratic parliament and the Nelson Mandela presidency, travelling with him on historic visits to the United Kingdom, France and New Zealand. I followed Thabo Mbeki as he consolidated power at the centre and shifted the emphasis from reconstruction and reconciliation to transformation and fiscal conservatism. I travelled with him to Japan, China (including Hong Kong) and South Korea as he played to his strength as a diplomat. And I witnessed the incredible meltdown that saw him pursue bizarre policies on Aids and the accommodation of Robert Mugabe’s increasingly renegade regime in Zimbabwe. As founding editor of The Times, I watched as Jacob Zuma administered the coup de grâce at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference, which led to the party’s putting Kgalema Motlanthe into office in 2008 to mark time until the 2009 election, when Zuma himself took power. Zuma’s consolidation of the accumulation and cronyism, which had begun under Mbeki, and, to a lesser extent, under Mandela, has cast a shadow over the recent period. As editor of the Sunday Times, I saw much of this controversy unfold before my eyes as the country’s top journalists courageously – and often at great personal cost – broke the scandals that have plagued the Zuma years, including the falls from grace of police commissioner Bheki Cele and public works minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde, the cronyism and corruption of cooperative governance minister Sicelo Shiceka, and the abuse of resources by communications minister Dina Pule. These exposés and their outcomes – all of these political bigwigs lost their jobs – is, at once, evidence of everything that is wrong and everything that is right with South Africa’s democratic system. They should never have broken the public’s trust, but, once they did, they were dealt with, albeit reluctantly.

I have supplemented my memory by drawing on my extensive collection of primary documents, magazines, journals, interviews and notes from the period. In addition, I have interviewed many key players over the past two years. Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer provided invaluable perspectives on the transition and the politics of economic empowerment. Joel Netshitenzhe, who served under all four presidents, offered powerful insights into the problems encountered by a new elite taking power. The observations of the last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, as well as those of opposition leaders Tony Leon and Helen Zille, were invaluable, as were those of Mark Gevisser, the author of the great biography Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.

Gevisser’s book is among several powerful works of non-fiction on which I relied. Others included Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren’s study of the arms deal, The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything, De Klerk’s autobiography, The Last Trek: A New Beginning, Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela and Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC and The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.

I hope that by reading this book you will come closer to understanding the road that South Africa has travelled over the past twenty years.

In the beginning

Against the cold, pale sky of a highveld winter, power shifted.

It was 10 May 1994, the day of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The world’s political royalty had gathered to witness what would come to be caricatured as the ‘miracle’ of South Africa’s rebirth.

Mandela, tall, upright and wearing a serious expression, became the first South African president elected by all the people as he raised his hand and took the oath of office behind blue safety glass.

On the lawns of the Union Buildings, where I stood, dumbstruck at the enormity of the occasion, my notebook hanging uselessly at my side, thousands of South Africans struggled with their tears as they experienced that rarest of things: the moment of liberation.

The months leading up to the inauguration had been bathed in blood as the daily death toll from political killings mounted. Commuters had been thrown from moving trains by killing squads. On the East Rand and in townships outside Johannesburg, thousands had died – shot, hacked to death or burned alive – and many more had been injured or detained without trial, or had disappeared. In KwaZulu-Natal, thousands more had died in bloodletting between the African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha, some of it cynically engineered by ‘third force’ operators sent into the field by the apartheid government to foment what was called ‘black-on-black’ violence.

Now, after a history fraught with colonialism, racial conflict, war and minority rule, a new, united nation was being born, and its first leader embodied a spirit of peace, reconciliation and renewal. It was not hard to believe that good had triumphed over evil.

Mandela was wearing a dark suit and conservative green tie, the unofficial uniform of presidents and prime ministers. He was the towering figure of the transition, and would soon undertake a personal transition from Mandela to Madiba – his clan name. He would lose the suit and tie in favour of less-formal ‘Madiba shirts’, worn loosely over his trousers, though often with the top button done up in one last grudging nod to formality. For now, he was playing the role of president.

At his side stood FW de Klerk, the last apartheid president, and Thabo Mbeki, both deputy presidents in the Government of National Unity (GNU). The terms of the Interim Constitution allowed for a ‘First Deputy President’ (Mbeki) and a ‘Second Deputy President’ (De Klerk). The next decade would see the rise of Mbeki and the decline of De Klerk as Mandela steadily removed himself from the national stage.

Mandela’s speech set the tone for his administration, as millions of South Africans listened and watched:

The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace.

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.¹

Mandela’s administration would make the ‘healing of the wounds’ its first priority. He saw national reconciliation as the precondition for mobilising South Africa behind the larger ‘reconstruction’ project to make up for the failings of decades of racial discrimination.

When Mandela had finished speaking, South African Air Force planes roared overhead, followed by military helicopters with giant flags suspended beneath them. Finally, Impala jets left smoke trails in the colours of the new flag. The spectacle was thrilling, but, more profoundly, it provided symbolic evidence that the South African military would defer to the new leadership and to the democracy it had failed to prevent.

Among those present at the inauguration was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the country’s leading cleric, who had played a significant role in the fight against apartheid. Over the years to come, he would be a great supporter of the Mandela presidency, leading its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). And, years later, after Mandela moved off the stage, he would become one of the government’s leading critics. For now, he was overwhelmed by the occasion, and, at the sight of the SAAF jets, ‘[t]ears were streaming down my face. Almost as if from one throat, an ear-piercing roar broke forth from the South Africans who were there, and I think especially the black South Africans. It was as if it occurred to us all simultaneously that these war machines that had for so long been ranged against us were now ours – no longer just theirs – that this was indeed now our country in the profoundest possible way.’²

Mandela’s inauguration brought with it a spirit of hope and possibility that had until then been unimaginable. The impact of this moment on the lives of the majority of South Africans, who had been denied the vote and the right to own land or to start businesses in areas reserved for whites – the bulk of the country’s arable land and its major city centres and suburbs – is difficult to describe.

It felt as if South Africa was at the epicentre of global history-making, with Mandela’s face featuring on newspaper front pages and on the covers of leading news magazines. The world’s top news anchors and journalists were present as witnesses. The story of his rise to leadership after twenty-seven years in jail would become the key narrative of the new South Africa.

That narrative would describe South Africa as a political ‘miracle’, as races that once fought to the death embraced each other and pledged to build a new nation together. The ‘miracle’ description was a useful way of capturing the sheer magnitude of what had been achieved, but the new South Africa was the product of years of hard work and difficult compromises by political leaders across a wide spectrum. This vast social pact, engineered in the backrooms of negotiations by those who had put aside conflict in favour of a political settlement, would be tested in the decades to come.

South Africa, it seemed, had bucked the odds and emerged from the apartheid years with a blueprint for racial reconciliation. The effect of this moment on the wider world, crystalised by the inauguration of Mandela, was astonishing. Among the international guests starstruck by what would come to be known as ‘Madiba magic’ was Hillary Clinton, wife of then US president Bill Clinton. In a speech made at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), she reflected in almost biblical language on Mandela’s behaviour at the inauguration:

… President Mandela stood to greet us all and welcome us to that lunch. And he said, ‘I know you are all very important people, and I invite you all to our new country. I thank you for coming. But the three most important people to me, here in this vast assembly, are three men who were my jailers on Robben Island.’ I sat up so straight. (Laughter.) I turned to the person next to me to say, ‘What did he say?’ (Laughter.) He said that the most important people here were three of his jailers.

And he said, ‘I want them to stand up.’ And three middle-aged white men stood up. He called them by name. He said, ‘In the midst of the terrible conditions in which I was held for so many years, each of those men saw me as a human being. They treated me with dignity and respect. They talked to me; they listened. And when I walked out of prison, I knew I had a choice to make. I could carry the bitterness and the hatred of what had been done to me in my heart forever, and I would still be in prison. Or I could begin to reconcile the feelings inside myself with my fellow human beings.’³

There is something of the New Testament parable about Clinton’s retelling of this event. One of the prison warders, James Gregory, would later write of his experience: ‘As I sat watching the impressive line-up, a sense of the ridiculous overwhelmed me: just a few years ago many of these people were considered terrorists and criminals, a threat to our lives. They now mingled with dignitaries from 167 countries, filled with pride yet at this moment all content just to be sharing the same shaded sunlight. Could this really be happening?’⁴

The transformation of Mandela from struggle leader to saint was under way, not least because ‘multicultural’ countries such as the US, with its own bitter history of racial conflict, saw in him the possibility of redemption. And he offered politicians such as Clinton the opportunity to bask in his aura.

But it wasn’t all just sentiment. The US, Europe and Asia all saw in South Africa the gateway to influence and economic possibility in Africa. In the afterglow of the miracle transition, South Africa would punch above its weight in global diplomacy not only because of its charismatic leader, but also because it opened the door to African renewal.

The inauguration festivities also provided a lesson for Clinton and others hoping that a democratic South Africa would align itself with the West. The loudest applause for a head of state entering the Union Buildings amphitheatre for the swearing-in ceremony was reserved for Cuba’s grey-bearded Fidel Castro. His role in supporting Angola’s MPLA in its war with South Africa – a war in which the US had provided assistance to South African-backed Unita forces through the CIA – had not been forgotten. Was there anywhere else in the world where Hillary Clinton would share a room with Castro?

Clinton, after being briefed by State Department officials to avoid all contact with Castro because of domestic political concerns, was on her guard. ‘I frequently looked over my shoulder during the reception, watching for his bushy grey beard in the crowd of faces.’⁵

South Africa, for decades the polecat of the world, was being given a chance to reinvent itself. Mandela would remain firm friends with both Castro and the Clintons throughout his term of office, tantalisingly suggesting South Africa’s potential to assume a large global leadership role not supported by its location, its size or its history. But, over the next twenty years, the transition halo would fade, to be replaced by a new pragmatism as South Africa moved from a human rights-based foreign policy to an approach based more on its interests – sometimes the interests of the rich and powerful.

For now, the world celebrated, and Africa celebrated loudest. The ANC had established strong ties with liberation movements and governments across the continent, and they saw South Africa’s freedom as the last piece of the colonial liberation puzzle. Owen Kibenge of Kampala, Uganda, put it this way: ‘Ours was the only black and white television set in the dusty neighbourhood of a suburb in Kampala. As Nelson Mandela took the oath, the little room we used as a living room erupted with deafening applause. It felt like one of those days when an African team scores in a World Cup tournament and the noise just keeps on coming. We felt the electricity from that amphitheatre. I can still hear the applause.’⁶

Looming over Mandela as he spoke at the swearing-in was the mute façade of the Sir Herbert Baker-designed Union Buildings, at once reassuring and ominous. It was reassuring because its warm sandstone suggested that there would not be a great disruption, that the business of governing would continue, albeit with new officials and new priorities. To a country that, for decades, had stared into the abyss of racial genocide, this assurance was more than just symbolic.

But, even as the inauguration-day pageantry rose to a crescendo, ominous questions were being asked. The promise of South Africa’s transition was that decades of rule by patronage and fiat, of chauvinist assertions of military power and disregard for human rights, would give way to a ‘government by the people’. The expectation was that South Africa would become an example to the world of a country where the will of the people triumphed over the desires of the elites, where there would – to borrow the phrase uttered by Mandela in his inauguration speech – ‘never, never and never again’ be discrimination by one against another.

To achieve this, the new ANC government would have to craft a political machine that placed the people, and not the elites, at the centre of power. But would the new government be able to turn an administration that for generations had served a minority into a machine capable of serving all?

The Mandela ‘miracle’ narrative would prove to be a naive interpretation of the South African story. Beneath the veneer of reconciliation were very difficult questions about how to build a growing economy in an unsentimental and increasingly competitive world, while addressing a massive backlog in basic services – shelter, water, electricity, education, health care and roads – bequeathed by decades of discrimination.

And waiting in the wings, obscured for the moment by the celebrations, were those who saw the rise of a new South Africa and the advent of a new administration as an opportunity for crime and self-enrichment. Vast sums of money would have to be spent on infrastructure by a new government that would put in place a new layer of officialdom. There would be many a slip ’twixt cup and lip as bureaucrats and those tendering for state contracts would seek to make quick money for themselves.

Mandela’s challenges were stark, and those in the small band of people he would take with him to the Union Buildings were all too aware of this. First, he had to transform the state. Second, and by far the most difficult challenge, would be the battle to turn the moribund economy into an engine for growth, creating jobs and wealth for those excluded under apartheid and closing the massive gap between rich and poor. Third would be the task of building the democratic institutions and culture vital to introducing accountability and transparency to the new democratic order. Last, there would be the task of building a new, shared South African identity.

Twenty years later, South Africa would be a very different country, but not all of the changes would be for the better. And the scars of apartheid would remain, red and sore on the face of the rainbow nation.

PART ONE

From liberation to governance

CHAPTER 1

Mandela’s thorny crown

In December 1994, Nelson Mandela rose to deliver the ANC’s political report at the party’s elective conference on the campus of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. The moment, like so many in those early days of democracy, was heavy with irony. By night, former guerrillas, activists and prisoners slept in beds once the exclusive preserve of white Afrikaners, and, by day, plotted the way forward for the country’s government in dining halls and meeting rooms.

In the eight months since his inauguration, Mandela had begun a transition of his own. The formal suits and ties of office were giving way to the colourful, casual ‘Madiba shirt’ that was to become his trademark.

The main point of Mandela’s speech was that the ANC leadership had reached the end of its tether with the ‘power-sharing’ arrangement with the National Party of FW de Klerk, as embodied in the Government of National Unity. He dwelt at some length on the negotiating process and the accommodation of the former apartheid leadership during the transition, which had ‘with the minimum of disruption required their co-operation’. But, he observed, ‘the situation has markedly changed’.¹

Mandela had tired of De Klerk’s insistence on a greater role in government, and he could not longer hide his disapproval of what he saw as De Klerk’s arrogance: ‘We should accept that it is the necessary thorny crown of leadership that, like a suitor, we have to patiently bring in line elements whose own sense of self-importance lies in making a relationship tempestuous. We have to understand the reasons behind this, at the same time as we challenge the false notion that the Government of National Unity arrangement is God-given, and therefore, that governance and investor confidence would collapse without the participation of forces other than the majority party.’²

The ‘thorny crown’, with its reference to religious martyrdom, was a powerful image. Being in government had posed new, ‘thorny’ challenges for the ANC, which it had not faced as a liberation movement. Among these was the constitutional requirement that the leaders of the ruling party and the official opposition – Mandela and De Klerk – serve together in a government of national unity. Prior to the 1994 election, Mandela had frequently accused De Klerk of supporting political violence with the objective of weakening the ANC. In June 1992, he had even called off negotiations, following the Boipatong massacre, in which forty-one people had been killed by residents of a hostel controlled by the Zulu nationalist party, Inkatha. Visiting the scene of the killings, Mandela said: ‘I am convinced we are no longer dealing with human beings but animals … We will not forget what Mr de Klerk, the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party have done to our people. I have never seen such cruelty.’³

De Klerk had retaliated with accusations that the ANC was deeply involved with the violence, but the truth was that he needed Mandela more than Mandela needed him. In December 1994 they travelled to Oslo, Norway, jointly to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and appeared to make an effort to be seen to be getting along, although Mandela would continue to question De Klerk’s involvement in violence even as he said he was a worthy co-recipient of the prize.

When Mandela had arrived at the Union Buildings in May 1994 to take occupation of De Klerk’s old suite of offices, the atmosphere was hardly welcoming. The offices had been left bare, and there were no staff to be seen. At his side was Joel Netshitenzhe, one of the party’s leading intellectuals, whom Mandela would use to drive his presidency. ‘He gets to the office a day or two after the inauguration and the place was empty, not even the smell of coffee. Empty desks, empty shelves, empty spaces. People had to construct the presidency from scratch,’ Netshitenzhe recalls of that first day.

Mandela’s response was to call a meeting of the office staff for the next morning. He turned on the Mandela charm, shaking their hands and assuring them that no one would lose their jobs. He would remember their names and ask after their families whenever he saw them. The Afrikaner secretaries that he kept on would become loyal members of staff. He retained a major on his staff even though the man had been accused of helping to bomb an ANC building. His attitude was: ‘So what? I work in government with people who have done worse things than that.’⁴

The soft-spoken Netshitenzhe, a returned ANC exile who had worked closely with Thabo Mbeki, recalls that Mandela stressed his administration would follow a ‘law-governed approach’. The rules of the civil service would be followed to the letter. Although Netshitenzhe was by then a senior figure in the ANC, he had to apply for his position in the presidency, submitting his CV and assuring the bureaucrats who ran the public service that he was not in breach of civil service rules by holding inappropriate political office.

Another thorn in the crown was the need to restructure a morass of apartheid-era administrations into a single unified state. The Interim Constitution dictated the framework, but actually pulling it off would require one of the most thorough legislative overhauls ever attempted by a new government. The legal process had begun six months prior to the inauguration, when the Transitional Executive Council, representing all parties, had taken over the running of the country and overseen the passing of countless laws to shape the new state.

At the apex of the ‘new’ state stood the national government, voted into office for the first time by all adult South Africans. Below this were the nine new provinces, an amalgamation of the apartheid era’s four provinces and numerous so-called bantustans, or ‘homelands’ – ethnically defined areas where blacks were supposedly allowed ‘self-determination’ under leaders who often styled themselves as