South Africa twenty years ago

Given the mass of accumulated experience, your columnist may be forgiven for occasional trips down memory lane. This is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, but for me, more and more, the past informs the future. In March and April 1994, I was allowed absence from West Africa, in between my post-Babangida rehabilitation later the previous year and my return to full active duty as the reluctant boss of the offices in Cold Harbour lane. This was by special dispensation from an imaginative Managing Director at the Daily Times, the late and much-regretted Tunji Oseni.

I had been recruited to be a member of the EU observer team to the famous South African elections of April 1994, the first to be held under universal suffrage, in which a vast number of black Africans were finally able to vote for the first time in a non-racial election. The offer came from contacts that I had conserved since my nine-year period two decades previously as an international bureaucrat in Brussels.

It was an illustration of the principle that you never know how the good you do may catch up with you. This was one of the finest opportunities I ever had to actually go and spend two months in a country about which I had heard to much, as it was about to receive its baptism of virtue that would permit it to end its pariah status and emerge an a fully acceptable member of the international community. It turned out to be one of the defining moments of my professional career.

I was posted to Kwazulu-Natal, half-modernising province where the African National Congress was well established, and half-traditional separate area, dreamed up as part of the apartheid ideology of Bantustans. After EU briefings in Johannesburg and Durban, I was located in a sleepy little town (known locally as a ‘dorp’) in northern Natal, called Vryheid, not far from the KwaZulu Bantustan. It was still several weeks to the election, and it is hard to remember that at that time no-one could predict the likely outcome of events in the long run-up to the magical election date of April 27. There were multiple rumours abounding, and considerable apprehension of political violence of a kind that had already been experienced, especially in Kwazulu-Natal.

I was in a group of both EU and UN observers, including a fresh-faced German policewoman and a suave Burundian diplomat, and was lodged in a comfortable rest-house grandly called the Villa Prince  Imperial named after Eugene, son of Napoleon III, who wanted to fight in the British-Zulu war in 1879 but was killed by Zulus when he fell off his horse.  In Vryheid, the political situation was a reflection of the special ambiguity of KwaZulu-Natal as, although outside the Bantustan, the influence of the Inkatha Freedom Party(IFP) of Gatsha Buthulezi, was evident. Buthulezi, the uncle of Zulu King Goodwill,  was a one-time poster-boy of Margaret Thatcher, and favourite African politician among some South African whites, including Vryheid’s  MP. The local ANC branch was fairly beleaguered, and seemed to expect us, simple election observers, to play the role of peace monitors every time they tried to hold a rally for fear of attacks by rumbustious IFP militants.

One vivid recollection I have is of  a rushed drive to Ulundi, the KwaZulu capital, at the request of EU/HQ in Jo’burg, because it was expected that the Zulu king was going to make a speech announcing the secession of KwaZulu. In fact the speech said no such thing, simply expounding generalities about Zulu cultural identity. I still have a picture of myself sitting disconsolately outside Ulundi’s parliament building, at the foot of the famous 19th century ruler Shaka Zulu.

I had two excursions out of Vryheid – one to visit Tunji Lardner (a familiar name to this column) in Mmabatho, capital of the recently collapsed Bantustan of Boputhatswana. He was in his natural element as a UN observer. The second was to the EU offices in Jo’burg for ten days lending a hand with media relations at a tense time, with the ANC march on the Shell Centre and the bizarre Kissinger-Carrington mediation trying only half-successfully to bring Buthulezi into the election under the watchful eye of mandarins from the multi-national Anglo-American.

This was all a precursor to the miraculous day of the election itself which I observed in the rolling hills of Babanango, near the site of the Zulu defeat of the British at Isandhlwana. I can still see the long patient queues of voters, believing in the value of this first casting, which gave the experience an almost religious intensity.  But as a terrible counterpoint to this, reports kept coming through, like the beating of distant drums, of the mounting genocide in Rwanda. There was a truly terrible irony that South Africa’s transformation (amounting almost to an apotheosis) should have happened in the same month as Africa’s post-colonial nadir 2,000 miles to the north.

Kaye Whiteman