Introduction

The first necessity was to establish the National Peace Committee (NPC), from which the other structures would derive. The NPC was not statutory; its legitimacy rested solely on multiparty consensus through the Accord. By remaining non-statutory it remained approachable by the PAC and other organizations that refused any formal relationship with the government. By nominating the persons to be appointed to the NPS, Commission and Police Board, it conferred its own consensual legitimacy on them. The reports submitted to the State President by the NPS and Commission went also to the NPC.

The NPC was to ‘monitor and to make recommendation on the implementation of the NPA as a whole, and to ensure compliance with the Code of Conduct for Political Parties and organizations’ (8.2). It had powers to ‘promote the aims and spirit of the National Peace Accord’ (8.4.1.1); to convene the signatories ‘where necessary’ and to ‘negotiate and conclude further agreements to achieve the objects of the National Peace Accord’ (8.4.1.4).

The NPC provided the space, outside the constitutional talks, for parties at national level to complain about each other. Although it was not called the ‘National Dispute Resolution Committee’, it had the function of resolving disputes concerning transgressions or interpretation of the political Code. It could refer complaints to a sub-committee or arbitrator (9.2–6) but had no coercive powers beyond publicly shaming the offenders. It developed amendments to the Accord, mainly concerned with the complaints procedure, which however were not incorporated due to the difficulty of reconvening the signatories to agree them.

The NPC established and oversaw national sub-committees for Publicity, SERD, and Complaints. It was most active during its first year, when the Full NPC met frequently. Then Publicity, and finally SERD, moved to the NPS and, as Rupert Lorimer who served on both bodies remarks, in terms of activity the NPS ‘really supplanted the NPC’. In terms of maintaining contact while the constitutional talks were in abeyance from May 1992 to April 1993, the monthly NPC Executive meetings continued to bring the three main parties together and there were no walk-outs.

Western Cape

The Western Cape stretches northwards from Cape Town to the Namibian border, and far eastwards along Africa's southern coast. It is home to the majority of the Coloured population, who were battered by apartheid. From the 1970s onwards Xhosa work-seekers migrated from the eastern Cape to create informal settlements near Cape Town. Being illegal, these were constantly at war with the authorities. The 1980s saw intense conflict between police, young ‘comrades’, warlords and people; and the start of complex taxi wars. Small towns throughout this region were affected by boycotts, protests, and land issues around squatter settlements. The IFP was not a significant player, but the structures saw plenty of action in this region. Its unique contribution was its ‘Media Peace Centre’, airing peace programmes on TV and radio and experimenting with ‘video dialogues’. Susan Collin Marks, an RPC member, has described this region's work in vivid detail (Marks, 2000).

A ‘Cape Town Peace Committee’ already existed, co-chaired by the Mayor and Archbishop Tutu. The NPS consulted with it on 20 November 1991 (Tutu was away on sabbatical). Its purpose was specifically to mediate the taxi wars, work that it quickly handed to the RDRC. After a wider meeting on 14 January the RDRC was launched at a well-attended plenary in Salt River Town Hall on Sunday 16 February (Marks, 2000 p.23).

Graham Higgo, retired Chairman of Reckitt & Coleman, a Rotarian and founder member of NIR, was elected Chair, and the theologian Prof. Jaap Durand, Minister in the DRC in Africa, anti-apartheid Vice-rector of UWC, Vice-chair. In August when Higgo became NPS Marketing Committee Chair they exchanged roles, Durand becoming Chair; and in 1994 businessman Ernest Wilson became Co-vice-chair. The CBM provided an office in the suburb of Bellville and seconded its own Regional Director, Retief Olivier, part-time as the region's Director. Olivier eventually became full-time Regional Manager.

The RDRC Executive deputed a sub-committee to form LDRCs. It hit a wall with its first attempt, a combined LDRC for the formal black township of Nyanga and its neighbour, the lawless shacklord-dominated informal settlement of Crossroads. The Executive heard on 19 March that just two out of thirty-five invitees had turned up to the exploratory meeting.

Introduction

Publicity was the one activity for which government had funds readily available. The NPC instantly established a Publicity and Communications Sub-committee and appointed leading advertising agencies, a PR agency, and Media Liaison Officer.

The advertising campaign began over Christmas, aiming to ‘sell’ peace itself, raise awareness of the Accord, encourage participation in the structures, and create a popular movement for peace. Each Christmas saw a fresh advertising launch. In between came launches of the Peace Song and Peace Doves symbol, the National Peace Campaign with its September 1993 Peace Day, and the declaration of 1994 as a Year of Peace. Slowly, media coverage changed from sceptical to enthusiastic as the structures grew and peace events balanced and in many places replaced reports of violence. The T-shirts were wildly popular. Peace became ‘cool’.

The Publicity Sub-committee moved to the NPS in August 1992; it was reconstituted as the Marketing Committee, and launched a research-based grassroots mobilization strategy with a major research workshop in March 1993. It established an Arts and Entertainment Sub-sub-committee. It adopted the Cape Town-based Media Peace Centre which aired peace programmes on radio and TV and pioneered mediation through ‘video dialogues’. Over Christmas 1993 the NPS Marketing Committee was replaced by the Marketing Division under Communications Coordinator Mark Manley. Manley ran workshops country-wide to encourage leaders to become active in peacebuilding, and oversaw the advertising to encourage a peaceful election. Closure aborted the Division's plans for continued grassroots peacebuilding, peace education, and the promotion of social cohesion.

How to ‘sell’ peace?

The Publicity and Communications Sub-committee was appointed at the NPC's first meeting on 1 October 1991. It convened on 22 October. Chaired by Hall, it initially consisted of two representatives from each main party: Saki Macozoma and Bernie Bernickson (ANC-Alliance), Suzanne Vos and Dr Denise Bjorkman (IFP/KZ government), Tertius Delport and Jac Rabie (NP/Government). Communications expert Lorraine Fourie was lent by the CDS.

Introduction

The National Peace Accord was negotiated, and the National Peace Convention planned, in just three months, chiefly the hectic weeks 11 July to 14 September 1991. The Preparatory Committee aimed to bring about ‘consensus amongst the three major parties on a Peace Agreement which can be endorsed by other interest groups at a national convention and implemented nationally, regionally and locally as a matter of urgency’. It established four Working Groups to negotiate the agreements, and a fifth, the ‘Process Group’, to coordinate the work, compile the Accord, and plan the signing ceremony. This chapter looks at the peacemaking process, the next at the negotiation of the agreements.

The Preparatory Committee

At 7pm on Monday 24 June ten facilitators, ten negotiators and three supporting staff – Val Pauquet, Theuns Eloff and his PA Pam Saxby – gathered at Barlow Park.

The ANC-Alliance sent Thabo Mbeki, Aziz Pahad, Jayendra Naidoo and Sam Shilowa; the IFP, Frank Mdlalose, Walter Felgate and Suzanne Vos; and the NP/ Government, two Deputy Ministers: Roelf Meyer (Constitutional Affairs) and Johan Scheepers (Law and Order), and Constitutional Adviser S. S. (Fanie) van der Merwe.

The facilitators present were John Hall, Jabu Mabuza, Bobby Godsell, Sean Cleary, Louw Alberts, Johan Heyns, Gerrie Lubbe, Ron Steele (for McCauley), Tom Manthata (SACC, for Frank Chikane) and Paddy Kearney (Diakonia Ecumenical Centre, Durban; Natal Church Leaders Group, possibly for Khoza Mgojo). Absent were Motsuenyane, Tutu, Chikane, and Mgojo.

This ‘Preparatory Committee’ met on six evenings between 24 June and 12 September. The CBM supported it with space and staff in its own offices. For the churches, Val Pauquet worked from home. The government gave increasing assistance through its Constitutional Development Service (CDS). Funds came initially from the CBM, then the government shouldered responsibility.

The CDS, based at 260 Walker St, Pretoria, was not yet a full Department but had a Minister in Gerrit Viljoen, a Deputy Minister in Roelf Meyer, and a director in ‘Constitutional Adviser’ Fanie van der Merwe. An unusual government asset, it was originally established to service P. W. Botha's constitutional plans, and now existed to facilitate political change.

The National Peace Accord was the first in the sequence of multiparty initiatives that marked South Africa's transition. In June 1991, fifteen months after Mandela's release in February 1990, the nation was mired in a complex of suspicions and violence. The ANC–IFP conflict had spread. It had not been possible to start multilateral constitutional talks and thus move towards an election. Still less was the nation ready for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What it was able to do, once the politicians had accepted the intervention of civil society facilitators, was to negotiate a set of agreements, the National Peace Accord, to regulate the behaviour of political parties, the government, and security forces, and to mandate civil society to join in the work of peacemaking and peacebuilding. The creation of the NPA was South Africa's first experience of constructive multiparty negotiation. Having signed the Accord, the nation had a means to tackle the violence and was free to start constitutional talks.

Strengths and weaknesses

The top party leaders bound themselves, as signatories, to ‘ensure as far as possible that all our members and supporters will comply with the provisions of this Accord and will respect its underlying rights and values’ (NPA p.4). It was a weakness that other considerations initially swayed the top ANC and IFP leadership. To maintain credibility with their supporters they did not unequivocally call for a cessation of violence but practised an ambivalent rhetoric of ‘defence’, legitimizing revenge while denying that their own supporters were responsible for any violence.

Introduction

In May 1991 de Klerk attempted to call all parties to a Summit on violence. The liberation movements boycotted the event, demanding an impartial convener. Church and business leaders separately made efforts to overcome the impasse, then by joining forces they were able to insert themselves into the process as facilitators. The President's Summit went ahead, as did the boycott, on the understanding that church and business would then convene a more inclusive peace meeting.

Deadlock

The ANC was now setting deadlines. Its National Consultative Conference on 16 December 1990 charged the regime with failure to release all political prisoners, allow all exiles to return, and repeal the Internal Security Act: it had therefore failed to create a ‘climate conducive to peaceful negotiation for a new constitution’. Further, the current violence was – and was intended to be – an obstacle to negotiation. The Conference still mandated the NEC to proceed with ‘talks about talks’, but all obstacles must be removed by 30 April 1991 or the ANC would consider suspending the whole negotiation process.

In early April at an emergency NEC meeting Mandela discussed, as he puts it, his ‘doubts about Mr de Klerk’ (Mandela, 1994 p.708). As de Klerk puts it, Mandela ‘expounded his views about the government's complicity in violence’ (De Klerk, 1999 p.206). The ANC believed the government could stop the violence if it wished, but was rather fomenting it, to prevent free political activity and the start of negotiations.

On 5 April the NEC sent an Open Letter to Cabinet, an ultimatum expressing the ANC's perceptions and demands (text in Mandela, 1993 pp.85–91). It blamed the IFP for attacks, turning hostels into strongholds and bringing in supporters to stage ‘provocative armed’ demonstrations, ‘escorted by the police’. The government, it charged, was complicit. The IFP was recruiting township councillors, offering protection by force against ANC demands that they resign. The letter accused the police of ‘partiality, connivance, and complicity’, of attacking ANC supporters and failing to investigate massacres, train violence and the supply of firearms.

Introduction

This chapter traces the arrival of South Africa's unique mix of races and ethnicities, the birth of a single nation under white minority rule, the coming of apartheid, the turn to violence in 1960–61 and the beginning in 1976 of an inexorable movement for change.

The land and people

South Africa is strikingly diverse: a land of high rolling grasslands, spectacular mountains, endless semi-desert, lush semi-tropical hills, winelands and gold mines, stretching from the cold Atlantic to the warm Indian Ocean, from the tropical Limpopo to the storm-lashed rocks of Cape Agulhas.

A few of the San or ‘Bushmen’, remain. As hunter-gatherers they inhabited southern Africa unchallenged for at least 50,000 years, leaving rock paintings and ‘click’ languages. Within the past 2,000 years groups of cattle-owning ‘Bantu’ farmers migrated from central Africa, forging iron and building villages in the interior and down the eastern coast. Khoe hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, related to the San, populated the western Cape.

European explorers appeared in 1488 when Bartholomew Diaz, seeking a trade route to Indonesia, made landfall at Mossel Bay. In 1580, Francis Drake's expedition described the Cape as: ‘a most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth’. In 1652 white settlement began when the Dutch East India Company established a fort and vegetable garden at the foot of Table Mountain. Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers flowed in, enclosing the Khoe's lands and absorbing the people into a burgeoning slave population taken from Angola and the entire rim of the Indian Ocean: Indonesians, Malays, Bengalis, east Africans and Madagascans. The mixing of all these races created the ‘Coloured’ people, still living mainly in the Cape. The Afrikaans language developed as a local form of Dutch, spoken by whites and Coloureds. Its white speakers acquired the name of ‘Afrikaners’ (Africans).

Britain briefly occupied the Cape in 1795, establishing permanent rule in 1814, bringing merchants, missionaries, prospectors, and a liberal constitution with a colour-blind voters’ roll.

Introduction

Among its ‘General Provisions’ for the security forces, the National Peace Accord created a ‘Police Board’ consisting of police and public in equal numbers, ‘to consider and make recommendations to the Minister of Law and Order in regard to the policy relating to the training and efficient functioning of the police, with a view to reconcile the interests of the community with that of the police’ (NPA 3.3.3). It was a concrete expression of the philosophy of community policing, foreshadowing the use of such Boards in future policing structures. It brought together the top police officers and the country's leading minds on policing policy, in a creative and influential think-tank. Its civilian members were nominated by the NPC but it had no obligation to report to the NPC (in May 1992 the NPC suggested that it should, and in June 1993 the RPCs requested reports, which then began to flow and were widely disseminated). A personal link with the NPS was maintained through Peter Gastrow, the DP MP who sat on both bodies.

The ANC originally wanted the Board to have powers over police operations. It was, however, framed strictly as an advisory body to the Minister, with ‘no role in regard to the day to day functioning of the police’ (3.3.5). It was empowered ‘to do research’ and to call for representations from the public (3.3.4) and could make its recommendations public ‘in so far as it is essential in reconciling the interests of the community with that of the police’ (3.3.6). It had no power to enforce the implementation of its recommendations. These circumscribed powers and guarded language reflect the wariness with which the SAP in 1991 still regarded any intrusion by civilians in general, and the ANC in particular, into its operations. Mistrust was fully reciprocated on the ground; but the Board proved itself a significant element in a massive wave of change.

Police–community relations were woven into the fabric of the peace structures, particularly at local and regional levels. Some particular instances are highlighted here.

Introduction

Church and business could now form a convening group, mandated by government and the ANC-Alliance and reluctantly endorsed by Buthelezi. It successfully called and facilitated a ‘planning meeting’ representative of the whole spectrum of political parties and organizations except the far right, on 22 June 1991. The meeting agreed the issues to be addressed to combat violence, and appointed a Preparatory Committee to take the process forward.

Forming the ‘Facilitating Committee’

Two days after the Summit, on Monday 27 May, Louw Alberts, Frank Chikane, Johan Heyns, Ray McCauley and Ron Steele met at the SACC. Alberts explained his brief from the President, and asked all to play whatever role might be requested with ‘quiet consultation and confidentiality’ (Steele, 1992 p.155). They agreed to draw in others from church and business and meet as a facilitating group on Tuesday 4 June.

Suddenly, with the Rustenburg Committee in the news, Buthelezi granted it an audience. The Rhema Church chartered a plane and, early on 3 June, Alberts, Chikane, Heyns, McCauley, Steele and three others arrived in Ulundi. Disappointingly, Buthelezi spent the morning in the Legislature, leaving them to discuss the Rustenburg Declaration with the IFP's irenic national Chairman, Dr Frank Mdlalose, and other officials who gave them a grilling, dwelling on past resentments and treating the Committee as merely an extension of the despised SACC.

Buthelezi joined them for lunch. A cautiously positive joint statement emerged: ‘In the light of the open communication which took place, the meeting we believe, will probably have given momentum to our respective involvement in the peace process.’ Points for further discussion had been noted, including ‘more factors regarding the violence’ which were not been addressed by the Rustenburg Declaration, of which future peace initiatives ‘would have to take due cognisance’.

Steele (1992 p.157) felt the day was ‘a clear warning sign that any future peace negotiations or constitutional talks were going to be arduous and exhausting’. They flew back into a ‘fiery sunset’, vowing to continue and realizing the alliance with business would be vital.

The following afternoon, Tuesday 4 June, saw the first meeting of the ‘Facilitating Committee’: eleven members gathered for several hours in the Carlton Hotel's Town Room.

Introduction

South Africa's politicians wanted to manage their own transition, and to a large extent they did so, but others provided vital help. Alongside the increasing violence of the late 1980s came a flowering of ‘track-two’ peacemaking initiatives opening up communication between the conflicting parties, at home and in exile. Churches and business were frequently at the forefront, and between 1988 and 1990 both these pillars of civil society readied themselves to play a pro-active role in the political transition. At the same time Mandela and his captors reached out to each other and began to converse.

Churches and politics

The churches constituted by far the majority of South Africa's religious bodies. In the 1980 census 77% of the population identified as Christian, 1.8% Hindu, 1.1% Muslim and 0.4% Jewish. The churches fell broadly into five groups. The largest, 25.9% of the population, were ‘African-initiated’ independent churches, offshoots from mainstream churches, often small but including the politically conservative Zion Christian Church (ZCC) with over two million members.

The Dutch Reformed group, independent of Holland since 1824, accounted for 16.3%. It embraced the white DRC, its white offshoots the Nederduitsche Hervormde Kerk (NHK) and somewhat more liberal Gereformeerde Kerk (GK, nicknamed ‘Doppers’); and its black branches. Its Sendingkerk (Mission Church) contained just Coloured members, the black Africans having been transferred into the ‘Dutch Reformed Church in Africa’ (1952) and Indians into the ‘Reformed Church in Africa’ (1968).

When the DRC began missionary activity in the nineteenth century it assumed that all the baptized are one in Christ, and accepted all as members; but lay elders objected and in 1857 the Synod fatefully ruled that although it was desirable that black converts join existing congregations, nevertheless where this would, ‘as a result of the weakness of some’, create an obstacle to conversion, separate congregations could be formed (De Gruchy, 2004 p.8). The black congregations became the Sendingkerk in 1881.

When apartheid's theoreticians looked for theological justification, the DRC managed to supply it.