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A few weeks after covering South Africa’s first democratic elections in April 1994 I was at my desk in a down-at-heel newspaper building in Johannesburg when my news editor came on the line from London. He was perplexed. He had covered apartheid South Africa in the 1960s. Like so many, he had long feared there was only one ending to white rule: a race-based war. And yet, with every day that passed after the election, the tension eased and the idea of the South African miracle took root.
It really looks as if this is going to hold, he mused. He was clearly still surprised that a storm that had been building for decades seemed to have passed.
I found myself thinking of this exchange when reading two fine additions to the library of books about apartheid’s aftermath. The Plot to Save South Africa, Justice Malala’s superbly reported account of the 10-day crisis 30 years ago when the transition arguably came closest to falling apart, is a reminder of the fragility of that time and how wrong it is to fall for hindsight and conclude that the negotiated transfer of power was inevitable. The Inheritors, Eve Fairbanks’ kaleidoscopic look at what happened next, reminds us that the passing of the storm was only the beginning and that overcoming the divisions after centuries of white rule was always going to be far harder than brokering a settlement.
These books appear at a time when the rapture over the “new” South Africa has long since curdled. The headlines are now — rightly — over the failings of the African National Congress after almost three decades in power. Power cuts are sweeping the country against the backdrop of the mismanagement of Eskom, the state electricity monopoly. The distinction between ruling party and state has vanished. The hope of five years ago that President Cyril Ramaphosa, a hero of the transition, could revive the party after the “state capture” of his predecessor Jacob Zuma has dissipated.
Both books, however, refreshingly take the reader away from the dismal record of the ANC. They take a longer view and each, in different ways, helps to explain how and why South Africa is where it is today.
Malala is one of a group of outstanding South African journalists who came of age around the birth of democracy. He did not flinch from criticising the ANC in its first decade in power, at a time when it must have been tempting to cut it some slack, given the unjust past. His previous book, We Have Now Begun our Descent (2015), was a bleak account of how, under Zuma, the ANC was turning into a parasitic elite. Here he goes back to that time of hope and uncertainty in the year before the end of white rule, to the very first story that he covered: the assassination of the charismatic head of the South African Communist party, Chris Hani, by a white extremist.
It was Easter Saturday 1993. Malala was a shy 22-year-old trainee at Johannesburg’s The Star newspaper. Not only was this his first story, it was also the most important he was to cover. Hani was the second most popular ANC figure after Nelson Mandela, he was lionised in the townships, and was seen as a likely successor to the “old man”. When the news broke of his assassination it was clear this could tear apart the negotiating process between the ANC and the white minority government. When it emerged that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Janusz Waluś, had links to the white rightwing establishment, concerns over a conspiracy to derail the process — and the threat of a backlash by enraged township radicals — intensified.
Malala has produced a compelling narrative of the ensuing days when South Africa’s future hung in the balance. Drawing on hundreds of conversations, he recreates the nightmare that confronted Mandela, leader of the ANC, the liberation movement that had been unbanned three years earlier, and FW de Klerk, then South African president, as they tried to keep the democracy talks on track while not losing the trust of their supporters.
It lays bare Mandela’s at times faltering but ultimately vital response in assuming the leadership of the country and averting a slide into chaos. Malala also tells the stories of people from across this sprawling country, from the Afrikaner housewife whose quick thinking led to the arrest of the assassin to the incompetent rightwingers who incubated the plot, to the township activists trying to keep the lid on the fury of their comrades.
The Plot to Save South Africa wonderfully captures the spirit of that time: the political amateurism of an era when all in the ANC, including Mandela, were barely protected in public and could have been assassinated on countless occasions; the self-obsessed mood of white suburban Joburg playing out on the talk radio station, Radio 702; the naive hopes of and about some of the ANC officials on the brink of power. And all the while Muhammad Ali was on tour and popping in and out of the news bulletins, and the Easter horse races at Johannesburg had to keep on schedule.
As Malala writes, it is now clear that this was when the sands of authority shifted away from De Klerk, the last leader of a white minority government. But that, of course, was not apparent at the time. Hani’s assassination could have been the tipping point that took South Africa down a very different path.
If there was one thing I would have liked more of, it is the perspective of the young Malala. The lot of a black reporter in a traditionally white newsroom would shed light on the realities of integration beyond the “Rainbow Nation” vision of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This is where Fairbanks plays her part — and so brilliantly.
“It looked, and people acted, like a storm had swept through,” she writes of the South Africa she found on her arrival there from America in 2009. “The kind that tears petals off flowering trees — the ones too new to fall otherwise — and scatters bright green and pink and gold all over the lawns and sidewalks.” From the moment she launches into this lyrical metaphor you are swept into an account of post-apartheid life like no other I have read.
Fairbanks has spent over a decade fossicking through small town and township South Africa, observing daily life and assessing how hard it is for a society to shed the structures of a race-based system that had applied for so long. Her narrative is shaped around the lives of three South Africans over several decades: Dipuo, an activist in the township rebellions in the 1980s; her daughter Malaika; and Christo, a farmer’s son, one of the last to be drafted to fight for the apartheid state.
Fairbanks is an outsider and with the acknowledged perspective of one who grew up in America as it wrestled with its own racial divisions. Yet while she steps back occasionally to deliver tart judgments, they are never glib and she is a listener and a storyteller.
Christo, whose army record lends himself to excoriation, is not a caricature. Fairbanks understands that for many whites this has been a period of confusing change — even if for many the contours of life are little changed. Her account of how the University of the Free State, traditionally a bastion of conservative Afrikanerdom, regressed in the early 2000s after a brief experiment in multiracialism to once again being effectively segregated on racial lines is devastating.
As, if not more, haunting are the passages telling the stories of Dipuo and Malaika as they navigate the opportunities and disappointments of liberation. Through Dipuo we see the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in 1996 to address the human right abuses of the apartheid era by granting amnesty in return for confession of political crimes, for what it was: a first step to reconciliation, yes, but in essence a television set that was more of a salve for whites than blacks.
Through mother and daughter we hear of the dilemmas of moving into what had been a “white world” — under apartheid the ownership and running of business, for example, was dominated by whites. At the heart of many of these stories is the question the author poses directly after an account of the massacre of dozens of striking miners by security forces in 2012: “Was the goal of the liberation struggle to radically dismantle this world or just to move more freely within it?”
As the seam of The Inheritors, the arc of the characters’ lives teases away at bigger questions: how long will it take for South Africa to overcome the legacy of apartheid, and how is one to judge how the country has fared since the magical election of April 1994?
As to the former, you have little doubt on finishing Fairbanks’ remarkable book that this is a long journey. Her story of her visit to a deserted former white town and encounter with an old black man still living there and tending but refusing to use a former whites-only bathroom is just one of many moving examples of the shadow of the past. As to the second question, many following the exposés of the incompetence and corruption of the ruling party will draw their own conclusions. For the good of South Africa the ANC needs a stint in opposition.
When you read these two books you have a timely reminder that history does not unfold in straight lines, of the extraordinary difficulties of overcoming an entrenched racial hierarchy, and that even those with moral compasses that guided them to fight what was once described as a crime against humanity might themselves be led astray — or left behind as a new elite abandons rectitude for raw greed.
The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation by Justice Malala, Simon & Schuster £25/$28.99, 352 pages
The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks, Simon & Schuster $27.99, 416 pages
Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor and a two-times former Johannesburg correspondent
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