Alec Russell on South Africa

I wonder if you might be able to run me through your history with South Africa. You were originally posted there as a foreign correspondent in the early 90's.

I first went to South Africa in an extraordinary, tumultuous time, just before the end of apartheid. It was May 1993, and no one was quite sure what way the country was headed. So my first year there was spent covering the very traumatic final year of white rule and the rise to power of the ANC, and then I stayed on for another four years covering Mandela’s presidency as a foreign correspondent.

I then left and was away for most of the decade, I went back once in the intervening nine or ten years before I returned in January 2007 for a second stint of correspondency for the Financial Times. I was then there for two years with my family, covering the end of the first chapter of the post-apartheid story, the last two years of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor and the rise of Jacob Zuma.

I found it was a very interesting and unexpected second chapter, I hadn’t expected to go back. I was in a good position to see how the country had changed and hadn’t changed, whereas people who had been living there all along watching this incremental change had lost sight of some of the things that were happening.

I’ve never been to South Africa, but from my reading there is this sense of huge diversity, of having been pulled and pushed into a country by the colonialists – is that a fair thing to say? I’m thinking of the book you’ve recommended, The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham.

Well I suppose it was partly pulled together by the British and by the Afrikaners. The British played a major role in the 19th century when the colonial powers were starting to carve up the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. The pivotal event that occurred for South Africa was in the 1860s when they discovered diamonds and then ten, fifteen years later they discovered gold and it suddenly became clear that this was not just another dusty African country, but an immensely wealthy one.

In a sense that sealed the fate of the country thereafter, there was this intense struggle for those resources between the Brits and the indigenous people and the Afrikaners who were also trying to carve out a patch of South Africa for themselves.

So certainly one can’t deny the role that Britain, and lately the Afrikaners, played in creating South Africa, in creating the boundaries and of course in moving the African people around willy-nilly to suit the interests of the white Africans.

What I hadn’t previously realized was the speed that this ‘scramble’ happened with.

Pakenham’s book is just an amazing account of, as you say, how extraordinarily rapid the annexation of an entire continent was. It happened over about 20 years, between 1880 and 1900, when Britain and France in particular but also Belgium, Portugal to a lesser extent, and latterly Germany, divided a continent.

One moment, in 1880, there was a large part of the continent that was pretty much unknown territory and the next it had all been annexed, and the local chiefs or ruling councils had all been pushed out of the way. I mean, it’s a fairly shabby story, but also a remarkable one.

It had pretty calamitous consequences for large parts of Africa, and the debate over the legacy of colonialism continues to rage. While sadly it’s become perfectly clear that some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, like Somalia for example, were better governed under colonial rule than they are now, the fact remains that for most black Africans the advent of the colonial powers was a psychologically traumatizing experience and you can see the consequences of that, I think, still. Certainly in South Africa today the past has not been forgiven nor forgotten.

But the Patti Waldmeir book, Anatomy of a Miracle, seems to be an almost grateful account of how well the transition of power went compared to how it could have gone.

I think that now that we’re fifteen years into the post-apartheid era and the ANC, which has been in power since the end of white rule, is somewhat fallen away from its high ideals, I think it’s easy to forget how amazing the transition was.

It’s easy to forget that in the eighties, when the fight against apartheid was at its height and there were hundreds of people dying in the townships, everyone was saying: This is going to end in a race w And it was very hard to see how the Afrikaner nationalists, who had been in power since 1948 and led by hard, tough men, were going to give up power – why should they?

They were in power, they had a very powerful military, and even in the eighties – even as in Britain and in the US people were campaigning against it – the fact remained that despite all the opposition protests and so on, the white military could easily have defeated any number of incursions from the ANC.

They could have stayed in power far longer than they did, and Patti’s book brilliantly describes this extraordinary seduction routine that Nelson Mandela in particular played on the Afrikaners. She also brilliantly describes the mindset of the Afrikaners, and how many of them were desperately trying to find some way of retaining a sense of modernity, even decency, while wanting to hang onto power, and eventually that got sort of whittled away.

It was an astonishing achievement.