Fading Colors

Drew Clark from the October 1997 issue

Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa, by Patti Waldmeir, New York: W.W. Norton, 303 pages, $27.50

In the year leadin up to F.W. deKlerk's declaration on February 2, 1990, legalizing the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress and freeing Nelson Mandela, socialism in South Africa looked forward to a bright future.

Never mind that apartheid's strongest supporters--from its implementation in 1948 onward--were found not among wealthy English-speaking capitalists but among poor and unskilled Afrikaners who felt their jobs were threatened by Africans and mixed-race "coloureds." Never mind that the sharpest broadsides issued against the National Party's increasing racial authoritarianism in the 1960s and '70s came not from black militants but from a grandmotherly Jewish lady, Helen Suzman, whose avowedly free-market political base resided in Johannesburg's wealthy northern suburbs. Never mind that in the tumultuous 1980s, among the first landlords to skirt segregation laws weren't shadowy fly-by-night real estate brokers, but the Anglo-American Corporation, a conglomerate with the dominant position in the country's principal stock exchange.

The perception that capitalism was in cahoots with apartheid made it seem as though South Africa's "mass democratic movement" of the late 1980s was in the vanguard of the (communist) revolution. The governing National Party fed this fear, taking out full-page newspaper ads declaring that "Free Enterprise is Working" in 1989, a time when Africans, coloureds, and Indians still could not legally buy property in most of their country.

Yet while conventional political labels like liberal and conservative have always seemed anomalous in South Africa, the events of the past decade have decisively settled a once-open question: Were racial or class divisions at the heart of the country's dilemmas?

In her book Anatomy of a Miracle, journalist Patti Waldmeir shows that apartheid was indeed a misunderstanding between races. Africans and Afrikaners were not really so different. Each desired freedom and prosperity. When blacks and whites would finally sit down and negotiate their differences on equal terms, it could be done without dire and tragic repercussions.

Traditionally, South Africa's classical liberal historians saw racial animus as the root cause of the dilemma in which the ruling white minority found itself in February 1990. Radical historians saw white capital holders as the chief villains, creating disparities in wealth between rich and poor. The fact that a relatively free economy and multi-party democracy exist within the post-apartheid state unmasks the error of viewing South African history through the lens of class struggle.

Yet when Nelson Mandela walked free from the grounds of the Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, and delivered his first public speech in more than 27 years, he embodied the threadbare mantras of socialism. Filled with incendiary language, talk of intensifying the armed struggle, and ringing defenses of the
South African Communist Party, Mandela's speech pegged him as the revolutionary that the government had tried to depict him as for decades.

First impressions can be deceptive, however, as Waldmeir notes in her reporting on this incident. The next morning, Mandela appeared to reporters at the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"The ANC is very much concerned to address the question of the concerns of whites," she quotes Mandela as saying. "They insist on structural guarantees to ensure that...majority rule does not result in the domination of whites by blacks. We understand that fear. The whites are our fellow South Africans. We want them to feel safe."

While some would argue that South Africa's new constitution does not prevent majority domination and that whites do not feel safe in a country where the rate of crime against whites is drawing closer to the rate of crime against blacks, the "miracle" that Waldmeir describes is not an occasion for churlishness or cynicism. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Anatomy of a Miracle is that the author gives credit to each of the parties involved without telling the story of the new South Africa as a fairy tale. An American reporter for London's Financial Times in both Zambia and South Africa, Waldmeir writes this history without straining the reader's patience or credulity.

And notwithstanding the rediscovery of common interests by all South Africans, the events leading to the peaceful transfer of power from the National Party to the African National Congress are remarkable on both ends of the transition. Waldmeir was beaten to the punch by two books whose authors were somewhat closer to the events at hand, former Rand Daily Mail editor Alisdair Sparks's 1995 Tomorrow Is Another Country (a sequel to his excellent 1990 history, The Mind of South Africa) and Nelson Mandela's own 1994 Long Walk to Freedom. Waldmeir puts a new spin on many of the choicest anecdotes from these two books and insists on looking at the sometimes not-so-pure motivations of Mandela, de Klerk, and other players.

In spite of a relentlessly fascinating subject that keeps the reader pressing forward to know more, Anatomy of a Miracle struggles at first to find its footing. Attempting to tell us something about F.W. de Klerk and his role in presiding over apartheid's demise, Waldmeir sketches two scenes in which military airplanes play the starring role. One is a celebration of Republic Day in 1966, on the anniversary of South Africa's independence from Britain and at a time when the Afrikaner seemed invincible. The other, on May 10, 1994, marks the moment that the vanguard of the country's air force tipped its wings to their new commander, Nelson Mandela, with deputy president F.W. de Klerk at his side.

These illustrations, meant as teasers, are more of a distraction. With it comes Waldmeir's annoying habit of inserting herself into her story--to ask a question here, to tell about her sleepover at a black family's "matchbox house" in Soweto there--as if to prove her bona fides. Mercifully, these interjections are confined to small chapters between installments of the book's central drama, the negotiations between the National Party and the African National Congress.

It is a story that Waldmeir tells well. Through a progression of chapters that logically unfold, she centers the reader's attention on the major events and struggles leading up to the peaceful transition of power. Each is so gradual and such a natural extension of previous developments that one can easily forget just how remarkable were these 10 years for resolving the fundamental problem of race-based government in South Africa.

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