More on Mandela

The ANC and the Government continued their discussions, some at a bush retreat on the Botswana/ Northern Transvaal border and later with now twenty six parties meeting as a Negotiating Council. Generally the Government and the ANC were able to agree on most things; when there was any difficulty Meyer and Ramaphosa got into a huddle and came up with an acceptable compromise. Buthelezi and his Inkatha was a notable absentee from the discussions. At about this time Buthelezi developed an alliance with the Conservative party led by the rabidly right wing Andries Treurnicht. In the middle of the negotiations a white supremacist with links to the Conservative party assassinated Chris Hani, one of the more charismatic leaders of the military wing of the ANC. Mandela went on television urging both blacks and whites not to react saying. 'a white man full of prejudice and hate came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster, but a white woman of Afrikaner origin risked her life so that we may know and bring the assassin, to justice,' De Klerk was unable to do anything of significance in the crisis. The mantle of leadership had fallen firmly on Mandela from this point on. The negotiating process was speeded up deliberately.

The final clause of the constitution was agreed on November 18^th 1993. This was an agreement between South Africans with no outsiders at all involved in the process; this was and remains its great strength. The agreement was a compromise between power sharing and majority rule where minority parties would share in executive power for five years until the election due in 1999.

Almost right up until the historic election of 1994 there was a significant threat from a disaffected coalition consisting of the far right Conservative party now led by General Constand Viljoen who was previously head of the South African Defence Force (SADF), the lunatic fringe AWB, and the 'homelands' of Kwa-Zulu, Bophuthatswana and Ciskei. The idea was that Inkatha, the Bophuthatswana Defence Force, together with armed elements of the Conservative Party would gather in Mmabatho, the capital of Bophuthatswana, where it was hoped that elements of the SADF would join them. This would have been a formidable force had it occurred as planned and could have derailed the political process altogether. It turned into a complete fiasco and all the elements of the coalition dispersed once the disaster became clear.

Buthelezi and Inkatha were only persuaded to join the election process eight days before it was due to be held, which involved much reprinting of ballot papers and some delays in getting the ballot papers to the various booths. So it was a very close run thing. There was some attempted disruption of the election held on April 27^th 1994, with some six polling booths being blown up and the ANC's office in Johannesburg being virtually demolished by a large car bomb.

It is clear that but for Nelson Mandela, the probability was that South Africa would have descended into a bloody civil war from which there was no escape. The whole process from the time he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town in 1982, to his release from jail eight years later and the tortuous negotiations in the four years after that until the April 1994 election required infinite patience, and a deep understanding of what the Afrikaner Government were giving up and the pressures they were under. It also required absolute faith in his own position and that of the ANC and its disparate alliances. Time and again Mandela interceded, stood firm, or made appropriate concessions all of which allowed what now seems to be the inevitable process to come to its just conclusion. South Africa was surely blessed by having such a man at such a critical time in its history.

I and my family finally applied to migrate to Australia in August 1984 when the Tri-Cameral Parliament was introduced, which attempted to altogether disenfranchise the black majority, confining their political aspirations to the so-called black homelands. We arrived here in January 1986, obviously with no knowledge of the goings on behind the scenes.