Learning to listen and hear
LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT
ANC Today Volume 6, No. 35 o 8-14 September 2006
At some point during 1989, in Lusaka, I received a message from Professor Willie Esterhuyse that we should meet in London. Accordingly, I informed our then President, the late Oliver Tambo, about this message. I told him that the indication was that Professor Esterhuyse would be bringing a message for the ANC from the apartheid government. President Tambo told me that one of his recurring nightmares was that one day this government would send us a message indicating its readiness to negotiate an end to the apartheid system, and that we would fail to understand the message and therefore fail to respond to it correctly. He said that over the centuries, and especially during the apartheid years, a deep gulf of mutual antagonism had developed between especially the African majority and the ruling white minority, especially the Afrikaners. He feared that so deep was this chasm that we had reached a stage such that the two sides would find it difficult even to hear each other. Hence his recurring nightmare that when the apartheid regime sent a message that it now wanted a genuine peace and an end to white minority rule, we would read this as being nothing but a ruse intended to demobilise us from struggle, with the aim of perpetuating apartheid. Thus as the possibility for a peaceful end to the apartheid system presented itself, we would decide that this was precisely the moment to intensify our just war against this system. He said that it might very well be that the message communicated by Professor Esterhuyse signified that the apartheid rulers were now ready to engage the ANC in discussions aimed at achieving a genuine peace and an end to white minority rule. He said that whatever might have been happening at that time, we needed to ensure that we did not make the grievous mistake of failing to hear a message of hope that our enemies might seek to communicate.
He therefore authorised that I should proceed to London, listen to what Willie Esterhuyse had to communicate, and report back, which I did. And indeed Professor Esterhuyse had brought a message that the apartheid regime wanted to talk directly with the ANC leadership in exile. He conveyed the proposals made by the regime to establish direct contact between its representatives and the delegation that would be chosen by the ANC, and other matters relevant to the convening of the first meeting. President Tambo and other ANC leaders he consulted agreed that we should respond positively to all the suggestions conveyed by Professor Esterhuyse. The first meeting that began our process of negotiations, and therefore the very first meeting between the apartheid government and the ANC, took place in Switzerland. Jacob Zuma and I represented the ANC. The South African government was represented by two senior officials of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Mike Louw and Maritz Spaarwater. This began a succession of meetings, which addressed the demand repeatedly made by our movement, that for any negotiations to take place, the necessary climate had to be created. Accordingly, by the end of 1989 we had agreed, among others, that Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners would be released, and the ANC, the SACP and all other progressive organisations would be unbanned. By leaping over the gulf that separated the oppressed from the oppressor, to listen to, hear and understand the words communicated by the oppressor, our movement had managed to avoid transforming Oliver Tambo's nightmare into reality. We can indeed say that when the drum of peace was sounded, we did not mistake this for a new summons to the war regiments. I have often wondered what would have happened to our country and people if we had allowed our history so to condition our minds that we failed to hear the message of the oppressor conveyed to us by Professor Esterhuyse!
The recounting of a 1989 episode in our history has been provoked by an extraordinary event that took place at the Union Buildings in Tshwane five weeks ago. I refer here to the encounter, with which many of us are now familiar, which took place at this seat of government between Rev Frank Chikane, Director General of the Presidency, and former Minister in the apartheid government, Mr Adriaan Vlok. Once again, what happened on that day has imposed an obligation on all of us to ask ourselves many questions that are important to the future of our country, centred on such important questions as private imperatives and the public good, 'the RDP of the soul', national reconciliation, nation building, a new patriotism, and so on. But, centrally, I believe that this happening, and especially the legitimate and necessary debate it has provoked, has also made it necessary for all of us as South Africans, to pose the question whether we are indeed listening to and hearing one another! Or is it the case that the chasms that continue to fracture our society are so big and deep, that we are still unable to hear one another! I have been present at an occasion when some people laughed when reference was made to the fact that Adriaan Vlok washed Frank Chikane's feet, as though this act amounted to nothing more than the height of comedy. I have seen public comments that "the more I think about it, the more I have to stop myself from laughing out loud." I have also seen it said that, "we respect the fact that Vlok is at a point in his own life where he wished to seek resolution, in his own way and for his own reasons, for the past. But what he did is neither precedent-setting nor sufficient." This comment appeared under the heading, "Gesture not good enough".
General Dallaire commanded the UN troops deployed in Rwanda during the catastrophic genocide in that country in 1994. His book, "Shake hands with the devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda", stands out as a compelling account of what happened. In the Foreword to this book, Samantha Power wrote: "Dallaire can't escape the memories. He recalls the rat that wandered around the UN compound. His men thought the creature was a terrier, so fat had it grown on the flesh of dead Rwandans. Dallaire once picked up a Rwandan child whom he saw twitching with life. But when he held the 'tingling and mushy' being in his arms, he realised that the movement was caused by maggots feasting on the dead youth. He came across the whitened skeletons of women who had been raped: 'The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them.' As he writes: 'It's as if someone has sliced into my brain and grafted this horror called Rwanda, frame by blood-soaked frame directly on my cortex.' " Dallaire himself has explained that, "There is no doubt that the toxic ethnic extremism that infected Rwanda was a deep-rooted and formidable foe, built from colonial discrimination and exclusion, personal vendettas, refugee life, envy, racism, power plays, coups d'etat and the deep rifts of civil war. In Rwanda both sides of the civil war fostered extremism." He ends the book with the following words: "No matter how idealistic the aim sounds, this new century must become the Century of Humanity, when we as human beings rise above race, creed, colour, religion and national self-interest and put the good of humanity above the good of our own tribe. For the sake of the children and of our future. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y." (Where there's a will there's a way. Let us go for it.)
Because we too were exposed to the most brutal violence that claimed many lives, including the years immediately preceding our transition to democracy in 1994, we cannot but feel a deep sense of personal revulsion and anger when we read of the skeletal remains of women who had been raped, murdered and defiled in unconscionable acts of barbarism, and of rats in Rwanda having grown to the size of terriers by feeding on the abandoned human dead. Although we were never condemned to suffer the horror of the genocide in Rwanda, we would nevertheless understand what General Dallaire means when he writes of "a deep-rooted and formidable foe" born of "colonial discrimination and exclusion", "toxic ethnic extremism", "envy, racism, power plays.and the deep rifts of civil war". The overwhelming majority among us would immediately and without hesitation support the clarion call made by General Dallaire that "as human beings, (we must) rise above race, creed, colour, religion and national self-interest and put the good of humanity above the good of our own tribe." I have cited the unimaginable horror of the genocide in Rwanda and the lessons we should draw from it, to use it, in a manner of speaking, as a magnifying glass to bring into sharper relief what happened in our own country.
I hope that this will serve the better to explain how some might feel that what Adriaan Vlok said and did amounts to no more than a joke, or an insufficient gesture as a response to the grievous harm and pain that was caused to an entire people by the erstwhile captains of the apartheid system, such as Adriaan Vlok. For his part, in a sermon on 3 September, in his Apostolic Faith Mission Soweto church, in the presence of Adriaan Vlok, Rev Chikane said: "Whatever other people may say, I have no doubt that Mr Vlok must have gone through what is called a 'Damascus Road experience' like Paul (Saul) did." He had himself come face to face with death, as a result of the wearing clothes that had been contaminated with toxic chemical substances produced and used against him by the experts in chemical and biological warfare charged by Adriaan Vlok and the apartheid regime to develop and manufacture these supremely inhuman and now prohibited weapons of mass destruction.
Adriaan Vlok was born on 11 December 1937 in Sutherland, and grew up on a smallholding close to the Orange River, attending Neilerdrift Primary School and Keimoes High School. Following three months of military training in Pretoria during 1957, he began work for the Department of Justice in the magistrate's offices of Keimoes and Upington. Between 1959 and 1966 he served as a senior official at the department's head office in Pretoria, and was appointed private secretary to Pelser, Minister of Justice, a post he held for four months before becoming assistant private secretary to John Vorster. He completed his Dip Proc at the University of Pretoria in 1962. Vlok had an active interest in military matters and following his basic training, voluntarily joined the 'Regiment Oranjerivier'. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant before he resigned his commission on entering active party politics. In 1972 he was elected to the Verwoerdburg City Council and served on its management committee. He joined the National Party in 1959 and in 1964 began to participate actively in party functions. He was elected Member of Parliament for Verwoerdburg in 1974. In 1984 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Defence. In 1985 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Law and Order, a portfolio he held concurrently with that of Deputy Minister of Defence. In December 1986 he was appointed Minister of Law and Order. As Minister of Law and Order, he was also responsible for administering the National Security Management System (NSMS), the mechanism formed to coordinate and oversee the entire repressive machinery and offensive of the apartheid regime. At the end of July 1991, in a Cabinet reshuffle carried out because of our movement's resistance to the raging state-sponsored political violence at the time, Vlok was redeployed to the post of Minister of Correctional Services. He resigned from active party politics in 1994.
This short biography tells the story that in Adriaan Vlok we have an Afrikaner who grew up and matured within the confines of the Afrikaner society of his day. He evolved, naturally, to join, represent and lead the party of apartheid, the National Party. Again naturally, Adriaan Vlok has been and is a devout Christian. We can safely assume that he was also a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond. Thus the man who washed the feet of a black man he grew up knowing belonged to a sub-human species, and whom he wanted dead because he represented the anti- Christ, was the product of an age and historical experience that produced people steeped in racism, who were convinced that they had to beat back a 'swart gevaar', (black danger), that permanently threatened the Afrikaner volk, and whose deep religiosity was used to justify evil. At the age of 69, one among these, Adriaan Vlok, took the decision to humble himself before one that he had once considered as being nothing more than vermin, in the same way that the genocidaires in Rwanda had convinced themselves that those they intended to kill and did kill, were mere "cockroaches". To show the depth of his penitence and remorse, and the sincerity of his apology, he decided to emulate Jesus Christ, who had knelt down and washed the feet of his disciples. In the Bible he gave to Frank Chikane, he inscribed the words, "I have sinned against the Lord, and against you. Please forgive me.", and referred Rev Chikane to the Biblical Psalm 51. This Psalm contains a verse that says, "Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place." He also referred to other texts in the Scriptures, and specifically the Acts of the Apostles. One of these quotes Paul as saying: "Lord.when the blood of your martyr Stephen was shed, I stood there giving my approval and guarding the clothes of those who were killing him."
While I hope that this does not communicate a message of arrogance, I believe that personally I heard what Adriaan Vlok said. I heard him say that he now unequivocally accepts that racism and apartheid were wrong and evil. I heard him say he did grievous wrong by supervising the murder of the martyrs. I heard him say he pleads for the forgiveness of the millions who suffered from what he and his colleagues in the National Party did. I heard him say he wants to do something to heal the wounds of the past, to close the poisoned chasm of which Oliver Tambo spoke, to join the architects of a new society at peace with itself. I heard him say all these things and was deeply moved that an elderly Afrikaner, with Adriaan Vlok's history and pedigree, could speak as he did and break with his past in the manner he has. What his words and actions said to me was that our society, which includes those who matured under circumstances very different from today's, is gradually growing out of its traumatic past. His words and actions said to me that even as he embarked on an intensely personal journey, Adriaan Vlok communicated a message to all who will listen, including the Afrikaner people he led, that together we must build a new and humane society of hope, in which we are each one another's keeper. As a South African, I felt uplifted and strengthened that Adriaan Vlok had spoken and acted as he did.
Remembering what Oliver Tambo had said when Professor Esterhuyse asked that we should meet in London, I have been asking myself whether, as a nation, we are listening to and hearing one another! Does white South Africa hear what the black people are and have been saying, and vice versa! Does adult South Africa hear what the youth are saying, and vice versa! Does male South Africa hear what the women of our country are saying! Does urban South Africa hear what the communal rural areas are saying! Do the commercial farmers hear what the farm workers are saying! Do the Africans in the Cape Peninsula hear what their Coloured neighbours are saying, and vice versa! Does the nation hear the voices asserting that each one of us, whether Afrikaner or Khoi or Venda or Coloured or Tamil or any other among our people, are entitled to and must have the possibility to define our identity! Are we succeeding to bridge the chasms of the past, regaining the capacity to hear human messages, and thus empower ourselves to achieve the objective of national reconciliation, which is of fundamental importance to our shared future!
In the midst of all this, and much else besides, I too, and especially my mother, regret that the TRC process did not succeed to unearth the truth about what happened to our own loved ones who disappeared without trace - my brother Jama Mbeki, my son Kwanda Mbeki and my cousin, Phindile Mfeti.
We are each products of our lived past and present. Inevitably, what we say and do is refracted by that reality, all of which impacts on others whose consciousness may be refracted by a different historical and social experience. To weld ourselves into one humane society, united in its diversity, surely, we must learn to listen to and hear one another. The first step we must take in this regard is to learn that our respect for one another's humanity includes respect for the reality that each one of us will take his or her unique or special and stony feeder road to join the national march towards the achievement of the objective of a "South Africa (that) belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity", as our Constitution says. This demands that we must cultivate the capacity to hear one another.
Thabo Mbeki
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