The End of Apartheid by Robin Renwick Read Free Book Online

negotiations on their proposed National Council. They wanted black representation, but only in a purely advisory role.

CHAPTER III

‘Let us pray’
October 1987
    I had my first meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of whom I was a wholehearted admirer. He had been boycotting my predecessor because of his disagreement with the British government about sanctions. So, before setting off for South Africa, I went to Lambeth Palace to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, who knew of my involvement in the Rhodesia negotiations. I asked him on that basis to point out to Desmond Tutu that I could hardly be regarded as a supporter of apartheid, which he kindly agreed to do.
    Each meeting with Desmond Tutu would open with the words, ‘Let us pray’, with both of us falling to our knees. After I got to know him better, I suggested that this was his way of letting me know that there were three of us in the room and I was outnumbered. In reality, he was absolutely right. For with South Africa at the time in the grip of PW Botha and General Malan, who had created the CCB, a secretparamilitary unit to eliminate enemies of the regime, there was indeed plenty to pray about.
    Desmond Tutu said that he knew I was not a believer in general sanctions. He was an advocate of sanctions only because he could see no alternative. ‘Constructive engagement’, the phrase coined by US envoy Dr Chester Crocker, had failed. Tutu felt that Britain’s opposition to sanctions was based on our commercial interests. I said that our economic interests and jobs in Britain were indeed a factor in our attitude to sanctions. But there were other factors too. If we had agreed that Europe should ban the import of fruit and vegetables from South Africa, this would have been liable to put a hundred thousand non-whites out of work, rendering with their dependants half a million people destitute. If we believed that further sanctions would cause apartheid to be removed within two or three years, I had no doubt that we would impose them. But we did not believe that. People who lost their jobs would be out of work for the foreseeable future, as Tutu himself acknowledged.
    I added that, if comprehensive sanctions were imposed, the economy of Zimbabwe would collapse long before that of South Africa, as would the economies of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. If companies like BP and Shell left, their health, welfare, education, training, pensions and scholarships programmes would be lost. I did not expect him to agree, but I did ask him to accept that our opposition to general sanctions was sincerely based.
    I gave him details of our assistance to Mozambique. He said that President Chissano had spoken to him about this. He knew that the Prime Minister had advised the Americans against support forRenamo. I explained that we also had launched a us$20 million programme to provide scholarships for black South Africans. We also were giving direct help to a lot of church and community group projects in the townships. I needed help from him on this, as some of the external anti-apartheid organisations were contending that this was simply ‘ameliorating apartheid’. Tutu promised his support for the projects. He continued to decline to meet US and British representatives so long as their governments opposed additional sanctions, but decided to waive this ban so far as I was concerned.
    I was able to start establishing a particularly close relationship with the South African Director-General for Foreign Affairs, Neil van Heerden, one of the most outstanding public servants I ever encountered, in his own or any other country. He assured me of his determination, and that of Pik Botha, to make progress at long last towards a solution of the Namibia dispute. Pik Botha, he said, genuinely wanted to work towards a normalisation of relations with Mozambique, an eventual signature by South Africa of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the