I present the High Commissioner of South Africa.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am greatly honoured. Though I wish to regret publicly — I wish the press was here — that racism has been visited against me by Mr. Kessel this morning. He knows that I don't show when I blush, because I was born during the day and came out black. So he's been showering me with very nice things, and I've been not knowing how to show him I'm blushing, please stop. I shall complain to my president.
Five years after apartheid. I can't believe we are five years after apartheid. Apartheid was an evil — so declared by the United Nations. It disrupted the society of South Africa. The fabric of that society was completely messed up by this unfortunate philosophy.
We did it by agreeing first to suspend whatever constitution was running that country historically, because it was discriminatory. We agreed as a country that we would have a transitional constitution that would run that country between 1991 and 1995 — it must be five years — during which time we would then try and evolve and develop a final constitution for the country.
We have entrenched all possible freedoms in that constitution to ensure that never again in the history of that country would anybody get as mad as the apartheid perpetrators and oppress anybody on matter of colour, gender, size, shape. We have entrenched everything in the constitution. In fact, one of the Canadians doing sterling work in South Africa — that is Mr. Earl Johnson — has said once that we had over-legislated ourselves. It may be true, but the intention was that we are blocking any possibility towards aberration already now, so that we don't have to recall the constitution in another 20 years to say it is poor.
Arising out of that, we had then to clean up the legal framework and remove any discrimination. I've never seen a country whose laws were nothing else but just to discriminate. It was a fantastic country. So we had now to reverse the clock and clean up everything. Whether it's discrimination based on race, region, tribe, gender — anything. We had to clean up every law.
Everything — education. We had to collapse 13 education departments in one country. Very funny. 13, each one with its bureaucracy. Now, our struggle in the last two or so years has been to put them together into one education system in the country. It's not been easy, but we had to. Particularly because you are dealing with human beings whose careers, many of them, were based on that divisive system. Some people don't know anything else; they don't intend to be evil — but they were born, bred, looked after, trained to work within the apartheid system. Now overnight, you say to those poor people, out of that apartheid system, work in a normal system. Those poor people are in trouble. So we've been having problems with the former civil servants, including the police.
We had to be aware, also, to try and create an environment where we can work together. And that has not been easy. The blacks had every reason to go for the white women and rape them, because our sisters and mothers were raped by whites. The whites had every reason to cling to yesterday's privilege — because once you are privileged, very rarely as a human being do you ever surrender privilege. You have to be helped to get out of a privileged position.
This is not easy, as you may understand, from yesterday's disadvantaged. They would like a dramatic process of vengeance to show that "Mandela's got teeth. He must rough these whites." And we're saying, yes — you'll get a psychological kick, but after that, you've just opened a Pandora's problem.
Thirdly, we've had to deal with the pain of apartheid. The people who are hurting in that country, who are victims of the system — mainly black, but there are also white families that have lost their kin in the process called defence of apartheid in the past. Tragedies have happened. People have been killed, tortured, raped — all of that in the name of defence of white superiority and apartheid. We have to contain that anger and channel it constructively into other directions.
We also have then to address the social needs — housing, education, health. The land question, we had to address. Same philosophy. Do we go and collect people's land and give it to blacks? Those who have been in South Africa will know we have sprawling squatter camps over South Africa. Sprawling. You wake up, you drive — everywhere you find squatters all over. They need help, they need land. But you can't go and grab the land from those who have it. That readily.
In the region — we used to be a problem as a country. I will not include myself; the apartheid governments of South Africa used to be a problem. Cross-border attacks, destabilization of the economies in the region. So really, the region has never had a chance to address its problems properly. Some of them made mistakes, I'm sure — but at the back of whatever Zambia, Zimbabwe, whoever it is, wanted to do, was this looming fear that at any time South Africa may come and place a bomb, bomb a factory.
We've gone back to the OAU and said we want to be an active, productive, supportive partner in the OAU. OAU has had its problems historically. They have, by and large, been a boys' club — scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. So a lot of wrongs have happened in the name of that. We think it is time we Africans practised what we preach. That is, if we believe in democracy, then stand up front and say: only democracy, freedom of speech, human rights.
Internationally, we've gone full force back to the United Nations and its agencies for participating. We participated with Canada on the non-proliferation treaty issues, the landmine issue. Indeed, even stretched our necks to the extent of challenging some of the big powers. There is a very interesting law called Helms-Burton. I don't know which power it is. We have had to stretch our neck. Sometimes you don't do that to that power, but you've had to do it. We're encouraged by the position taken by the country where I'm speaking from.
[On the justification for South Africa to be prepared to sell to other African countries —]
Yes, it's a big debate in my country just now. We have a very strong armaments industry. And my Minister of Defence, who used to be very critical of that industry, is now defending that industry. He wants to sell. Because he says our economy needs those dollars.
You mentioned briefly perhaps an impending explosion, and how would South Africa be placed to contain that. I'd like you to comment on what the possibilities are of an explosion in the sense that people — the majority of South Africans — have been patient in the wake of the new dispensation, and there hasn't really been a change in their daily lives, i.e. education facilities, housing. They've been very patient thus far. How long will that last?
Your guess is as good as mine. My fear, actually, is that that patience is running out. Apartheid has been removed formally, that is, on paper — but in the lives of people, it's still very much there. And it is that which is challenging us today. What do we do to provide the schools, the housing, the education that the people need? And I hope they'll give us more time than we actually need. Patience will stretch a little longer.
You've spoken of the tightrope and the difficulties of keeping a balance there. I'm wondering if you could cite one or two success stories where the former authorities, the white people, might have recognized the actual situation now and have decided to cooperate with it.
[On F.W. de Klerk —]
Let me be fair to South Africa and also say what is happening in the black camp. They also — the problem at times is not of superiority, it's also of inferiority. At times when you have an inferiority complex, you create problems for yourself. So we have now to say to the black South Africans: "Look, you don't have to prove you are as civilized as whites. Just be yourself."
Paul, you all remember, our group itself hosted Helen Suzman when she came to visit us — one of the major liberal forces in pre-current South Africa.
- Nelson Mandela — President of South Africa 1994–1999. The HC notes that Mandela has personally been ruled against by the Constitutional Court and accepted the ruling.
- F. W. de Klerk — last apartheid-era President; Mandela's negotiating partner. The HC's closing reflection on de Klerk as "an honourable man" echoes Mandela's own famous characterization.
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu — Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
- Helen Suzman — long-serving anti-apartheid liberal opposition MP; mentioned in the moderator's closing as having previously visited the host group.
- Earl Johnson — Canadian working in South Africa, noted by the HC as having said the new constitution may be "over-legislated."
- Mr. Kessel — Canadian figure who introduced the HC earlier the same day; made some joke the HC characterizes as "racism visited against me"; identity to be verified from Mark's notes.
- "Paul" — referenced by the moderator at closing as the convener of the group that previously hosted Helen Suzman; possibly Mark's own host or contact in Ottawa.
Two specific passages that work as Anabasis editorial spine:
- "If it resists, it breaks." The HC's compact summary of why de Klerk's flexibility (versus his predecessor P. W. Botha's rigidity) was the foundation of South Africa's avoidance of catastrophe. As a frame for the studio's work on present-day backsliding democracies: those that resist change rather than absorb it break. Worth quoting directly.
- "Even that hypocrisy is a step forward. It shows it's no longer the in-thing to support a wrong policy like apartheid. What we have to do now is to help transform that hypocrisy into reality." Editorially extraordinary — and directly applicable to 2026's relationship to performative democratic values. A Hungarian or Slovak audience hearing this from a South African diplomat in 1999 will hear it differently than they would hear the same point from a European commentator.