An Open letter to Hermann Giliomee, Michael Savage, David Welsh and Lawrie Schlemmer

Dear All

All of us were close friends of Van Zyl Slabbert and all of us will have mourned his passing. Personally, I felt dissatisfied with many of his obituaries, not only because they lacked analytical insight in the way most obituaries do but because I had the feeling - I think many of us did - that Van's passing had a significance beyond the man precisely because he was just about the best thing that white South Africa had to offer.

Also, if truth be told, most of us had a feeling that although Van's achievements were many, that they could have been far more and greater and that, like white South Africa itself, he could have given a much better account of himself. Part of the problem is that none of the obituaries have really looked at the meaning of Van's career in historical context. Allister Sparks, in an interesting piece, talked about Van as one of the heroic figures of the anti-apartheid epoch - a comparison rather spoilt by his nomination  as another such hero of Richard Goldstone, who hanged 28 black men and sentenced another four to be flogged.

This during the period when Goldstone was trying to curry favour with his apartheid masters. Little wonder that nowadays his CV omits all mention of his years as an apartheid judge. To put Goldstone alongside Van in such a way is simply gross. Even at the height of apartheid Van would never have consented to hang or flog a single black man. Indeed, the fact that apartheid was at its height would have made him feel that such actions were all the more gross and indecent. Van simply does not belong in the company of men like Goldstone, indeed, his memory is insulted by the comparison.

Van represented the very best that white South Africa had to offer: intelligent, humorous, humane, liberal-minded and deeply concerned for the future of his country beyond any personal motive. So his truncated and ultimately unsuccessful political career poses the question, what went wrong? The answer is traceable to the meetings with the exiled ANC that Van had as PFP leader in the mid-1980s. Van told the ANC, look, we're both anti-apartheid though we use different means. I think the armed struggle is both wrong and ineffectual but OK, that's your method. We believe in peaceful political change and since there's no doubt that that will have to happen in the end, we ought to talk to one another. To which his ANC interlocuteur, Thabo Mbeki, replied that the ANC would be happy to talk but the great obstacle was the fact that he led a white party in an all-white parliament. It was a matter of principle for the ANC not to have any relationship with such a party for that might be thought to imply acceptance of racial separateness and white rule.

What is missing from all the obituaries is the fact that it was this leverage from Mbeki that caused Van to resign the PFP leadership in 1986. In effect a deal was done: Van would resign, form Idasa and he would then be rewarded with public talks with the ANC - hence the famous Dakar meeting and subsequent meetings Van organised between SA business and the ANC.

There is no doubt that Van placed enormous store on his relationship with Mbeki - he was so grateful for his support on one occasion that he exclaimed that "I would die for that bugger". As I know from many conversations with Van, he had high hopes that this relationship would ultimately lead him to playing a significant role in making sure the new dispensation would work. "When the ANC take over", he told me, "they're going to need all the help they can get. And it's vital for all of us that they succeed because only that way can the country succeed."  But Van, of course, was just one more person who had been charmed and deceived by Mbeki: trusting him had been a fatal error.

Many of the obituaries spoke of how Van had lost all faith in Parliament and seemed to endorse that judgement, and then continued to speak about Van as if this meant he had lost all interest in conventional political power. I think this gets things wholly wrong. First, Van never lost his taste for public life and hungered for a return to public life until not long before he died. Second, like many highly intelligent men, Van had a very low boredom threshold and was always restlessly wondering about better things to do.

He got bored with theology and turned to sociology. He soon got a chair but he had got bored with academic life and turned to politics. But he soon got bored with Parliament too and, before he got involved with Mbeki, had already applied for the vice-chancellorship of UCT. So when Mbeki came along and gave Van new and extra reasons to leave Parliament, he was really knocking on an already half-open door.

Van justified his resignation by saying Parliament had become irrelevant - but this was, of course, quite wrong. The remaining eight years of Parliament saw frenzied competition between the CP and PFP as to which would be the official Opposition and this period also saw the PFP and Nats thrown increasingly together against the hardliners. In 1990 the epochal move away from Parliament came from within Parliament and throughout the frenzied period of 1990-94 Parliament remained a valid and powerful chamber. And alone of all the old order institutions it retained its role quite unchanged into the new order. The fact is that Van was badly missed and could have played a dramatically enhanced role had he stayed in Parliament. Resigning was a complete mistake.

Van was not a gullible man. I think the reason he trusted Mbeki was two-fold. One was that like so many white South Africans he had been driven to the point of desperation by apartheid and he was thus ready - too ready - to believe in someone who might be a saviour. The other was that, big-hearted and large-spirited himself, he probably didn't allow enough for the fact that other people might not be the same. As Smuts said, "small men prefer sycophants around them" - and Van was nobody's sycophant. In retrospect one can see that it was a disastrous error for Van to give up the PFP leadership, a post which, had he retained it, would have allowed him to play a key role in the transition, especially since he would probably have accepted De Klerk's proposal for a joint DP-NP caucus at Codesa, an offer which Zach de Beer refused without informing the DP caucus.

The notion that the ANC could set preconditions about what Van had to do before it could talk to him depended, of course, on its possession of the moral high ground - an idea which now seems merely funny. Really Van should have refused this precondition - in effect a demand that he give up his political career. After all, the ANC was no better: it didn't allow whites to join it until Morogoro and it was perfectly happy to deal with bantustan politicians or, ultimately, the NP itself.

Both the PFP's all-whiteness and the ANC's all blackness were equal results of the same troubled national history. Sensible men would have accepted that, sat down and talked. By accepting Mbeki's precondition Van had also demonstrated that Mbeki could make even a liberal leader jump through any hoop of his devising. It was a fatal admission of weakness which, of course, Mbeki took full advantage of.

Why honour any deal with someone who was willing to sacrifice his entire political career just for the right to talk to you? And of course the ANC wanted more. Idasa had to lean its way and give jobs to its friends. "We let all sorts of rats and mice in", Van once told me. It was the same at the Open Society Foundation where the board of trustees groaned with Mbeki's intimates. This was hardly something that happened by accident. Van tried to keep the door to Mbeki ajar long after Mbeki had slammed it.

The NIS visited Van in Oxford just before De Klerk's 1990 speech to ask his advice. Whatever you do, he told them, don't unban the ANC but leave the ban on the SACP. The SACP flourishes in secrecy and likes it. It's vital to get them out in the open so they can't control things from the shadows. The NIS was surprised but took his advice. In 1995 Van asked what I thought if he should join the cabinet, perhaps as foreign minister. I said it would be hopeless unless he joined the ANC. It was a price he was prepared to pay.

Jokingly, I pointed out that Slovo would never tolerate a liberal white who was smarter than him at the cabinet table: maybe Van would need to join the SACP. Van said "No way". But that of course was the point: Van could never have accepted the discipline of either the SACP or ANC. One suspects Mbeki realised that about Van from the start. Van was always his own man and somewhat larger than life. He also tended to assume an intellectual equality with whoever he was talking to - and he was, in fact, far cleverer than Mbeki. From Mbeki's viewpoint, this was a toxic mix. One just has to imagine Mbeki trying to put Aids denialism past Van at the cabinet table to realise how unworkable it would have been. But in any case for Mbeki there were comrades (i.e. clients) and there were enemies: there was no room for good-hearted independents in that vision.

Personally, I was somewhat shocked. By 1995 it was already tolerably clear that the ANC was a hegemonic and potentially anti-democratic party. It had business, the whole media and almost all the NGOs on its side. The last thing it needed was further reinforcement. I have always seen the lesdership of the PFP/DP/DA as a crucial role in South African society for whoever occupied that role was pro tem the leader of the whole liberal current in South Africa, the incarnation of the liberal spirit. So I was considerably distressed to see Van so keen to bid for a place at Mbeki's side, willing even to join the ANC to achieve it. He seemed to have left liberal principles quite out of account.

His reply to that was two-fold. First, he pointed out that the ANC was likely to be in power for at least the rest of his life and therefore any constructive good had to be achieved through it. Opposition politics had little to offer by comparison. Second, he pointed out that the real alternative to Mbeki was a Cosatu-SACP coalition which would probably be a whole lot worse. An unspoken third point, I always felt, was that he had already thoroughly paid his dues, had committed himself on Mbeki's side and that this now represented by far his biggest investment in the new order.

Having got that far down the road, the logic was to carry on all the way. This latter motive seemed to me the most important of all for it was already clear that an ANC government would be offensive to liberal principles, that Mbeki was by no means keen to offer Van any important role, and that Van's liberal spirit would not fit into any such government.

So Van hung on, carefully refraining from saying anything too critical of government, occasionally getting small jobs - the local government and electoral reform commissions - but otherwise ignored. Meanwhile other whites with only a fraction of his talents - Alec Erwin, Ronnie Kasrils, Derek Hanekom, Sue Van der Merwe - received major roles.

Then in 1999 Van approached me, keen to run for the premiership of the Western Cape. For which party, I asked? Well, he could launch a new one. I said that was crazy and that his party, whether he liked it or not, was the DP, although it was then running at only 12%-15% in the Western Cape. After some thought he agreed and asked me to conduct some polls to see what his chances would be of achieving 50% or more.

I reported back that there was no such chance: for that election at least the NP and ANC would be the two biggest blocs in that province. At most he might lead the DP to 25% but he would still face the question of which of the two big parties he would form an alliance with. At which point I suggested he talk to Tony Leon. The two men got on well but Van was emphatic that he could only envisage an alliance with the ANC while Tony had already decide on the "Fight Back" campaign of all-out opposition to the ANC. In effect Van still wanted to keep open his channel to Thabo while Tony, knowing that that would simply mean handing the Western Cape over to ANC rule, dug in his heels.

Van backed off, swore Tony to silence - but then a little later surfaced the whole affair himself and made critical remarks about Tony to boot. Clearly, he had wanted to return to public life and felt that Tony had blocked him. It was another major mistake. All the opinion polls were on Tony's side and by 1999 it was tolerably clear that Mbeki would leave Van out whatever he did. Had he gone the other way Van might have won the Western Cape for the Opposition even sooner than Helen Zille eventually did.

To me Van is a symptomatic figure. In common with most other South African liberals, the central struggle of his life was against apartheid and the Nats. At first the ANC were a distant presence over the sea but gradually their presence grew to dominate the picture. It is already hard to conjure back the time when the ANC possessed an absolute and absolutist moral authority - no one save a few cranks can still believe in that today - but then they were able to make imperative demands. To prove their bona fides whites must support the national liberation struggle and not quail from violence. Even to be allowed to speak to the ANC was a privilege granted only on conditions. Everything must be subordinated to a "progressive" perspective and to "people's power" which, of course, meant ANC power.

This presented liberals with not one but several quandaries. They wanted very much to be on the side of democracy but they had en route spent much time pondering the necessity for certain brakes upon simple majoritarianism in a complex and racially divided society - a graduated franchise, federalism, various schemes for power-sharing, concurrent majorities, group rights and so on. They had also taken a principled stand against the use of violence, intimidation and censorship.

Now, however, they faced an ANC which castigated as reactionary anyone who opposed simple majoritarianism, which happily supported "the violence of the oppressed against the oppressor" (that is, violence on their side), which used intimidation widely and freely, and which was willing to go to extreme lengths to deny free speech to its opponents. Even certain phrases ("black-on-black violence", for example) were verboten.

Faced with this liberals had a choice. Either they simply caved in, surrendered all notions of power-sharing, averted their eyes and ears from violence and intimidation and chanted the mantras endorsed by the ANC - these were the so-called "liberal slideaways" and there were very many of them. Or they could face the bitter fact that after a long and bitter struggle against an authoritarian foe they must now take up cudgels against another authoritarianism, this one with a majority at its back plus international opinion.

Not only would this entail a struggle longer than the lifetimes of many who faced it but the struggle might be hopeless and as it was liberals were well nigh exhausted. Moreover, they had grave reservations against a struggle against a majority regime, one which might appear to validate some of the reservations traditionally expressed by their Nat opponents.

Van faced these dilemmas as we all did. Although he and I often shared political discussions we never aired our philosophical choices so openly so I have to rely upon impressions. I had no doubt from the start that I was in the latter camp and that we had to face another long march to freedom, whereas Van was somewhere in between.

He was openly contemptuous of the sort of Opposition politics that Tony Leon exemplified, feeling that Tony was making empty debating points in a shadow Westminster style of battle. He agreed it was desperately easy to score points off an ANC which was often making one mistake after another but my impression was that he had had enough of Opposition politics and now wanted to play what he saw as a more constructive role in a key period of nation-building.

He did not recite ANC mantras or condone violence but nor he did speak out against them and he seemed to have lost all interest in the various devices for power-sharing that he had once favoured. And while Van's instincts certainly remained liberal he was no longer someone who felt he wanted to stand up for liberal positions as a matter of principle. To some extent this was doubtless just a matter of holding himself ready to work with Mbeki if the call came, but I sensed it was more than that.

Surprisingly for an ex-leader of the PFP he seemed to have lost all appetite for that sort of party or philosophy. Not only did he profess himself quite willing to join the ANC if need be but when he thought of running for the Western Cape premiership in 1999 his first thought, until I hit him over the head with the poll data, was to found a new party of his own. Even when I told him he had to have the support of the DP he accepted it equably but simply as a vehicle which, as we've seen, he then tried to personalize into a pro-ANC version of the DP.

Once he couldn't have that, he simply lost interest. Later, when he had become disillusioned and to some extent embittered with Mbeki, he was somewhat more outspoken but I did not sense that his fundamental position had changed. He told me that Jacob Zuma had approached him to act as a member of a brains trust and he had agreed to this but I don't know if it ever happened. To some extent I found his thinking in these years mysterious.

Van achieved a lot despite an extremely tough family background and political circumstances which were always adverse. He was probably the most talented South African politician since Smuts and certainly since Hofmeyr. So the tragedy of his truncated political career was not just his but all of ours. And yet as I contemplate the lost opportunities and mistakes of that career and his apparent loss of real political direction after 1986 he remains to me a somewhat enigmatic figure. I wonder, Hermann, Lawrie, David and Mike if you can tease the matter out better than me? Van was a good friend to me and I would like to understand.

RW Johnson

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter