Free The End of Apartheid by Robin Renwick Page B

Africa’s debt-repayment problem constrained economic growth to well below the level needed to provide for a population currently increasing by three quarters of a million people per year. I said that, if Mandela died in prison, the result would be an internal explosion and near-total isolation. When I raised this with General Malan or the police chiefs, they said that releasing Mandela would give a new impetus to revolution. But I did not believe that they had any understanding of the economic consequences of not releasing him. A resumption of investment would happen only if Western banks and governments believed that South Africa had more convincing plans for its own future.
March 1989
    Following the assassination of Dulcie September, the ANC representative in Paris, in March 1988, we became concerned about the possibility of an attack on ANC personnel in London. The Prime Minister decreed that we must give the South African government the clearest possible warning that any such action would attract a strong reaction from us, which I duly relayed to Van Heerden and the Presidency. This included telling them that we had received information that South African military agents were planning such action and this must be terminated immediately.
    I reported that, to the dismay of his ministers, PW Botha was planning to return to his office. De Klerk was continuing to make reformist statements and the cabinet had rallied behind him. PW Botha was declining to set a date for an early election, causing a head-on clash with De Klerk, who also was being supported by the Afrikaans press, with Wepener and
Die Burger
calling publicly on the President to go. Even Botha’s closest allies were telling me that he would have to stand down.
    As my friend Kobus Meiring had been appointed Administrator of the Cape – the senior official of the province – I asked him to promise at last to open the magnificent beaches to South Africans of all races. Kobus, whose own apartment at the Strand was on a still-segregated beach, needed no persuasion to do so.
    It now became possible to discuss with members of the government all the issues that had been forbidden territory for so long, as they were terrified of their leader. I was able to establish a regular pattern of meetings with De Klerk, who had convinced me of his intention tomake major changes. De Klerk’s friends were not the security chiefs, but the business community of Johannesburg, and precisely those leading Afrikaners who had felt alienated under PW Botha.
    Gerhard de Kock by this time was dying of cancer. He was a golf-playing friend of De Klerk’s, and was determined to warn the new leader of the National Party what would happen to South Africa if the capital outflow continued. De Kock spent the last months of his life convincing his friend that only disaster could result from continuing on this course.

CHAPTER VII

‘The whole world will be against you – led by me!’
    In my first meeting with him, I told PW Botha that I did not know whether, in my time as ambassador, I would see the end of all the remaining apartheid legislation. But I did hope to see a solution at last to the long-standing problem of independence for Namibia.
    Shortly afterwards, I made the first of a series of visits to Namibia, still firmly under South African control. This wild and beautiful territory is a place to which it is easy to form a strong attachment. Most of the country is semi-desert, with vast farms able to support only a few animals. The Skeleton Coast and Etosha Pan are two of the world’s great nature reserves. The only easily cultivable land is in the Kunene Valley in the north, inhabited by the Ovambo people, where the war between South African forces and Swapo guerrillas was at its worst.
    Namibia had been colonised by the Germans at the tail end of the nineteenth-century ‘scramble for Africa’, and they had named it South West Africa. The two main