Letters
Vol. 21 No. 18 · 16 September 1999
From Anthony Sampson
R.W. Johnson’s attack on my authorised biography of Mandela (LRB, 19 August) is largely based on his own conviction that Mandela was a secret member of the Communist Party. But he provides no documentary evidence, and consistently misrepresents both me and Mandela. He says I was determined ‘to find no Communist influence in the ANC’ and that I didn’t realise that its Congress of the People in 1955 was a CP front: in fact, I specifically say that the Central Committee of the CP ‘threw itself into organising the Congress of the People’. He even claims I ‘quote approvingly’ Mandela’s attack on the British Government for burning children alive in Kenya. In fact, I quote it as an example of how Mandela was ‘becoming more attached to the rhetoric of Marxist anti-colonialism’. He says I ‘ludicrously’ quote Mandela’s denial at the Rivonia trial that he was a member of the CPSA, and that I didn’t ‘realise the trick’ – that the Party had been renamed the SACP. But Mandela didn’t say that at the trial: he simply stated that, while influenced by Marxism, ‘I have denied that I am a Communist.’ And no South African Government was able to show that he belonged to the Party: the official liquidator of the Party stated in 1970 that he was not a member or even active supporter of the CP.
Johnson says that Mandela made handwritten copies of Stalin’s writings, which helped to convict him at the Rivonia trial. But I could find no such transcriptions from Stalin in the official records. Can Johnson produce them? As a South African ex-Communist, he is convinced that he and his former comrades successfully dominated the ANC, which was a ‘shambles’, and used Mandela and others for their own ends. But as Mandela writes, ‘who is to say that we were not using them?’
Johnson’s other facts are equally unreliable: he even gets the date of the banning of his own former party wrong – it was 1950, not 1952.
Anthony Sampson
Tisbury, Wiltshire
From Anthony Sampson
R.W. Johnson’s attack on my authorised biography of Mandela (LRB, 19 August) is largely based on his own conviction that Mandela was a secret member of the Communist Party. But he provides no documentary evidence, and consistently misrepresents both me and Mandela. He says I was determined ‘to find no Communist influence in the ANC’ and that I didn’t realise that its Congress of the People in 1955 was a CP front: in fact, I specifically say that the Central Committee of the CP ‘threw itself into organising the Congress of the People’. He even claims I ‘quote approvingly’ Mandela’s attack on the British Government for burning children alive in Kenya. In fact, I quote it as an example of how Mandela was ‘becoming more attached to the rhetoric of Marxist anti-colonialism’. He says I ‘ludicrously’ quote Mandela’s denial at the Rivonia trial that he was a member of the CPSA, and that I didn’t ‘realise the trick’ – that the Party had been renamed the SACP. But Mandela didn’t say that at the trial: he simply stated that, while influenced by Marxism, ‘I have denied that I am a Communist.’ And no South African Government was able to show that he belonged to the Party: the official liquidator of the Party stated in 1970 that he was not a member or even active supporter of the CP.
Johnson says that Mandela made handwritten copies of Stalin’s writings, which helped to convict him at the Rivonia trial. But I could find no such transcriptions from Stalin in the official records. Can Johnson produce them? As a South African ex-Communist, he is convinced that he and his former comrades successfully dominated the ANC, which was a ‘shambles’, and used Mandela and others for their own ends. But as Mandela writes, ‘who is to say that we were not using them?’
Johnson’s other facts are equally unreliable: he even gets the date of the banning of his own former party wrong – it was 1950, not 1952.
Anthony Sampson
Tisbury, Wiltshire
Vol. 21 No. 19 · 30 September 1999
From Anthony Lewis
In his savage review of Anthony Sampson’s Mandela: The Authorised Biography, R.W. Johnson displayed a contempt for the present Government of South Africa and a hatred of the African National Congress that may have surprised some readers (LRB, 19 August). It was not surprising to those familiar with Mr Johnson’s writings.
As an example, the Times published in December 1996 a supposed news report by Mr Johnson. He wrote that the Constitutional Court of South Africa, in finding that the country’s new Constitution met the legal tests laid down for it, had ‘bent the knee to the ANC leadership’. Mr Johnson added that the ANC ‘has an overwhelming majority’ in the Court. A week later the Times published a letter from Sydney Kentridge (now Sir Sydney), a great South African lawyer who has more recently become a leading figure at the English Bar. Of Mr Johnson’s statement that the ANC had ‘an overwhelming majority’ in the Court, Mr Kentridge wrote: ‘This is simply false.’ He pointed out, among other things, that six of the 11 members of the Court had been judges of the Supreme Court of South Africa appointed by the previous, National Party Government. As for bending the knee, Mr Kentridge said: ‘a less subservient court … would be hard to find.’
That Mr Johnson would write falsely about matters so easily checkable says all that needs to be said.
Anthony Lewis
Boston, Massachusetts
From Anthony Lewis
In his savage review of Anthony Sampson’s Mandela: The Authorised Biography, R.W. Johnson displayed a contempt for the present Government of South Africa and a hatred of the African National Congress that may have surprised some readers (LRB, 19 August). It was not surprising to those familiar with Mr Johnson’s writings.
As an example, the Times published in December 1996 a supposed news report by Mr Johnson. He wrote that the Constitutional Court of South Africa, in finding that the country’s new Constitution met the legal tests laid down for it, had ‘bent the knee to the ANC leadership’. Mr Johnson added that the ANC ‘has an overwhelming majority’ in the Court. A week later the Times published a letter from Sydney Kentridge (now Sir Sydney), a great South African lawyer who has more recently become a leading figure at the English Bar. Of Mr Johnson’s statement that the ANC had ‘an overwhelming majority’ in the Court, Mr Kentridge wrote: ‘This is simply false.’ He pointed out, among other things, that six of the 11 members of the Court had been judges of the Supreme Court of South Africa appointed by the previous, National Party Government. As for bending the knee, Mr Kentridge said: ‘a less subservient court … would be hard to find.’
That Mr Johnson would write falsely about matters so easily checkable says all that needs to be said.
Anthony Lewis
Boston, Massachusetts
R.W. Johnson writes: I began my review of Sampson’s Mandela by pointing out that one is always being ‘put right’ about South Africa by people who have chosen not to live here and that if you puncture their distant moral certainties you get a roar of rage. This turns out to have been exactly right. I choose to live here, just as Messrs Sampson and Kentridge chose to leave. Can no one else see the absurdity of sitting in London or Wiltshire and always knowing better about this place than those of us who face its daily realities?
Anthony Lewis is quite wrong in all respects. I don’t hate the Government here – I said in my review how it was impossible not to sympathise with Mbeki and what a lovable figure Mandela is – nor the ANC: indeed, I am on my way, as I write, to give them a briefing at their headquarters, a place I have visited on a number of occasions to provide free help and advice just as I do for the Pan Africanist Congress, the Inkatha Freedom Party, Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement and so on. Political parties are not hateful things. What I do very much dislike is party hegemony and the Orwellian rewriting of history it involves.
Lewis is also wrong about the Constitutional Court. Sydney Kentridge (now Sir Sydney) was, I’m afraid, quite misleading on the subject. Of the 11 members of the Court, ten were appointed by President Mandela and one by President Mbeki. To make these appointments, both men had, perforce, to choose from among a judiciary mainly appointed by their predecessors, but it was not difficult to find ANC supporters among their ranks, partly because the bench – though the Nationalists tried to stuff it with their lackeys – was never homogeneous and partly because some judges, noticing which way the wind was blowing, had worked hard to ingratiate themselves in advance with the new regime. As for the current balance on the Court, I think it is held to be quite uncontroversially true among lawyers here that the Government can count on the sympathies of a large majority of its members and it is certainly keen to keep things that way. This is not surprising: it’s what every American President from FDR to Reagan has done with appointments to the Supreme Court. The same thing happens around the world, though judges everywhere hate to admit it. I would have expected Anthony Lewis to know that.
Anthony Sampson says he did not quote Mandela approvingly on the subject of the British roasting babies in Kenya, but only to show how Mandela was ‘becoming more attached to the rhetoric of Marxist anti-colonialism’ (Letters, 16 September). Yet the passage about roasting babies is introduced with the remark – which I take to be applauding – that Mandela’s first major speech as President of the Transvaal ANC managed to ‘link the South African struggle to others in Africa’. But in any case, Marxist anti-colonialism was no bad thing and certainly didn’t oblige one to invent nonsense.
Sampson also says that he could not find any trace of Mandela having made handwritten copies of Stalin’s writings. He should have looked at page 190 of his own book: ‘the most apparently incriminating notes were 62 pages on a writing pad about Communism, in Mandela’s handwriting. They were in four parts, including one on Stalin’s The Foundations of Leninism.’ Mandela accepted authorship in court.
Sampson believes that my review was really all about whether Mandela was ever in the Party. If he’d read it properly he would have seen both that I don’t really think it such a big deal whether anyone was once in the Party or not, and also that I agree that by the time Mandela stood up in the Rivonia trial in 1963 he could tell the perfect truth about not being a Party member. Actually this was not the nub of my review at all. What I found disappointing about Sampson’s book was that a great deal of research had been thoroughly spoilt by his accepting and parroting the ANC/SACP party line on hundreds of issues. This is, of course, the new orthodoxy here but that doesn’t make it true. What I find particularly perplexing is the fact that when I lived in England Sampson was somewhat to the right of me – SDP (when that was flavour of the month) to my Labour – whereas when he comes out here he takes the ANC/SACP line. it’s as if he wants to be on the side of the fashionable, conventional wisdom wherever he is. My own beliefs do not change with geography.
Vol. 21 No. 21 · 28 October 1999
From Anthony Lewis
R.W. Johnson originally claimed that the African National Congress had ‘an overwhelming majority’ on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Now (LRB, 19 August) he says ‘it is held to be quite uncontroversially true among lawyers here that the Government can count on the sympathies of a large majority’ of the Court’s members. That statement is equally false. It would be treated with derision by South African lawyers. In the few years of its existence the Constitutional Court has decided major cases against the wishes of the Government and the ANC.
For example: 1. In 1995 the Court held unconstitutional a decree by President Mandela providing for local elections in the Western Cape Province. The Court held that only Parliament had power to do so. President Mandela called Parliament back into session to pass the needed legislation.
2. In 1996 the Court considered whether the proposed final South African Constitution met, as required, principles set out in the interim charter. Most political parties urged the Court not to certify the draft; the ANC indicated that it favoured certification. The Court held that nine provisions did not comply with the principles, and the text had to be redrafted and adopted anew.
3. In 1998 the ANC challenged a KwaZulu-Natal provincial statute establishing local councils. The Court unanimously dismissed the challenge.
Johnson sought to explain away the fact that a number of judges on the Constitutional Court had originally been appointed to other courts during the apartheid years and hence could not have been supporters of the ANC. ‘Some judges,’ he wrote, ‘noticing which way the wind was blowing, had worked hard to ingratiate themselves in advance with the new regime.’ That is a contemptible defamation of those few judges who had the courage to try to breathe some humanity into the application of cruel racist laws.
Anthony Lewis
Boston, Massachusetts
From V.M. Hunt
R.W. Johnson attacks Anthony Sampson for being inaccurate about South Africa because he lives elsewhere. Yet Johnson, a South African resident, states that during apartheid Indians didn’t ‘have to worry about pass laws or curfews or learning English or the thousand and one other handicaps that beset Africans’. They did. They could not cross a provincial border without obtaining a permit in advance. They were subject to educational, residential and business segregation. They had indeed to learn English, which was not the mother tongue of many of them. Unlike Africans, they were not even allowed in the Orange Free State.
V.M. Hunt
Parktown, South Africa
From David Brokensha
R.W. Johnson claims that the fact that he lives in South Africa puts him in a superior position to those who live outside the country. This is a very dubious proposition. In 1957, the then President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, invited F.M. Bourret as a special guest to the Independence celebrations. She had written, according to Nkrumah, ‘the best history of Ghana’ (The Gold Coast: A Survey of the Gold Coast and British Togoland, 1919-51). Mother Bourret was then living in an enclosed convent in California, and her excellent book was the result of an outstanding mind combined with the resources of the Hoover Library. It is not necessary to live in a country in order to understand it; it may even be a handicap.
David Brokensha
Fish Hoek, South Africa
From Oleg Gordievsky
R.W. Johnson is right in saying that the Nuremberg Trials were a flawed exercise. They were better than nothing, however: after all, Germany became fully denazified. But after the collapse of Communism there were no Nuremberg Trials of those evil regimes. As a result, we have contemporary Russia, that post-totalitarian mutant.
I also agree with Johnson’s statement that some ANC leaders in the past ‘had multiple paymasters’. I personally have had encounters with a few of them. Western intelligence services made great efforts to know ‘what was going on inside the ANC’, but the KGB had all the information on a direct line from the CPSA. The KGB cultivated contacts in the national liberation movements mainly in order to have agents in the future Governments of South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique.
Oleg Gordievsky
London WC2
Vol. 21 No. 22 · 11 November 1999
From Paul Trewhela
In the debate as to whether Nelson Mandela was at any time a member of the South African Communist Party, I’m inclined to side with R.W. Johnson’s surmise (that he was) rather than Anthony Sampson’s (and Mandela’s own) assertion that he wasn’t.
From 1963 to 1967 I was a member of the SACP and worked closely in the SACP/ANC underground with Ruth First in Johannesburg, writing propaganda for the ANC military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. A leaflet written by me for First, distributed in May 1963, appeared in evidence against Mandela and his colleagues in the Rivonia Trial later that year. After First had left the country, I edited the underground journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe, Freedom Fighter, and during the Rivonia Trial, passed copy for typesetting to my Party contact, Hilda Bernstein, whose husband Lionel (‘Rusty’) was on trial alongside Mandela. Later I was on trial, and in prison, with the SACP chairman, Bram Fischer, and central committee members Ivan Schermbrucker and Eli Weinberg. The understanding I had from them was that Nelson Mandela was ‘one of us’.
His transcription in 1962, in longhand, of a classic text of Stalinist Marxism (‘How to Be a Good Communist’, by the President of China, Liu Shao Chi) makes no other sense to me. Mandela’s explanation for this in his autobiography – that he wrote it to prove a point to a black SACP leader, Moses Kotane – is unconvincing.
In a sense, however, the issue is irrelevant. The SACP and the ANC leadership were so closely identified with each other over this period and subsequently as to be virtually indistinguishable. Leading figures in the exile who were unable to stomach the relationship were expelled in the Gang of Eight episode in 1975. Lesser critics later disappeared into ANC prison camps in Central Africa, where some were killed.
I find it probable that Mandela was a member of the SACP at the time of the setting up of Umkhonto in 1961 and that he found it politic to resign formal membership after his return in secret to South Africa from his undercover support-raising trip in Africa and Britain in 1962. In practice, whether he was ‘in’ or ‘out’ by then did not make an iota of difference. Given the ‘Africanist’ concerns of newly independent African leaders impressed on him during this trip – in particular, by Kaunda in Zambia – it was to the advantage of the SACP as well as the ANC that by the time of his arrest in August 1962 he was ‘out’. As he writes in his autobiography, his principal conclusion from his trip abroad was that the ANC ‘had to appear more independent’ of the SACP, and that resulting organisational changes were ‘essentially cosmetic’, in order to make the ANC more ‘palatable’ to allies in Africa. Certainly, in this period Mandela had no substantial strategic or programmatic differences with the SACP, or with the Soviet Union. Of course, this is not to gainsay his substantial independence of judgment, especially as a prison ‘statesman’, with a unique capacity for harmonising differences.
Paul Trewhela
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
From R.W. Johnson
David Brokensha (Letters, 28 October) is quite right that living in a country doesn’t automatically mean you know more about it than those who don’t (though it helps). My point was rather that some choose to leave South Africa and some, like me, love the place and choose to come back here – and that this should count for something. V.M. Hunt, in the same issue, is equally right to point out that Indians were heavily disadvantaged by apartheid – though less so than Africans. The only thing about which I’d disagree is their difficulty in learning English. Growing up in Durban, where around half of all South Africa’s Indians live, I never met an Indian who wasn’t fluent in English. The educational achievements of the Indian community – their pupils, with fewer advantages than whites, frequently top the exam lists in every subject – are quite remarkable.
Finally, I agree with Anthony Lewis that there have been a few occasions on which the Constitutional Court has not upheld the Government view. What he misses is that to date there have been only two major Constitutional issues on which the Court has had to rule. The first was the stipulation in the interim Constitution that the final draft should not in any way reduce the powers of the provinces to the advantage of central government. However, the list of areas of legislative competence reserved to the provinces was very much reduced in the final version of the Constitution, and a whole new doctrine of ‘co-operative governance’ was introduced, enjoining the provincial and central governments to work together – with the central government view prevailing where there was a conflict. Without any doubt this meant that the promise of no reduction in the power of the provinces was broken – yet the Court allowed it to go through.
The second concerned the law that registration to vote in the 1999 election should depend on having a bar-coded ID book. Because the bulk of Africans only got their ID books after 1990 most of them had the new kind, whereas most whites, Coloureds, Indians and Africans who had lived in the ‘independent homelands’ all tended to have old-fashioned IDs. The latter groups – who also tended to be Opposition voters – were effectively disenfranchised by this law: up to four million were unable to vote, as securing a new ID was no easy matter and in any case the old ID remained a perfectly valid legal document.
The remarkable thing about this law was that it made the exercise of a fundamental right (the franchise) dependent on the possession of a discretionary document: it was like making a driving licence essential to the vote. There were widespread protests and initially even the ANC caucus was dismayed, but the law was rammed through on a three-line whip. Given the centrality of the struggle for the franchise in South African history – the Afrikaner Nationalists had begun their rule by disqualifying black voters – this was a case where the Court absolutely had to stand up. It didn’t.
I can only ask Anthony Lewis to imagine what would have happened in the US had a Federal promise not to reduce the powers of the states been broken – or millions of Opposition voters been disqualified from the exercise of the franchise. It was, after all, a proud and crucial part of the civil rights struggle that the US Supreme Court rejected all literacy tests and other artificial barriers to the exercise of the franchise. That said, these are early days for the Court here and even those limited and timorous assertions of judicial independence that we have seen are to be welcomed.
R.W. Johnson
Johannesburg
Vol. 21 No. 23 · 25 November 1999
From Iain Edwards
In his review of Anthony Sampson’s Mandela (LRB, 19 August), R.W. Johnson maintains that Indian Communists spread stories about the active role of whites in the 1949 Indian-African riots in Durban. Despite Johnson’s denials, whites were looters, gave active support and viewed the events with satisfaction. Unproven stories of whites initiating the riots did surface immediately afterwards. I have not heard that Indian Communists put these about. Does Johnson have contrary evidence?
Johnson also claims that MK, the ANC’s military wing, was a South African Communist Party initiative and that Sampson naively follows Slovo’s ‘whopper of huge proportions’ clouding tight Communist control of MK from beginning to end. Johnson should look at the primary material, including SACP documents, released over the last five years. Much supports Slovo’s memory. Further, despite Johnson’s claims, Slovo was never MK’s supreme commander.
Many of Johnson’s apparent revelations have long been accepted as accurate historical interpretation. For example, it is acknowledged that the Freedom Charter did not simply spring from ‘thousands of scraps of paper’ sent in by distant ANC branches and communities, as some ‘Struggle’ legends once suggested. But accepting this does not mean subscribing to Johnson’s approach to history. His claim that Lionel Bernstein drafted the Freedom Charter is interesting, too: Bernstein does not admit to this in his autobiography. Johnson should reveal his sources.
Johnson’s political analysis is sometimes wanting. He criticises the United Democratic Front for lying about its links with the ANC, but leaving aside complications in the relationship, does he seriously expect the UDF to have announced itself as the public face of the outlawed, exiled, underground and hunted ANC?
Johnson claims that the ANC is turning its own distorted history into an official orthodoxy. He is wrong. The South African landscape is littered with white triumphalist monuments. Further, as documents from the pre-1994 National Monuments Council reveal, many monuments commemorating 19th and early 20th-century events were erected only during the late Seventies and Eighties: when white power in South Africa was facing its ultimate challenge.
In dealing with the conflicts which climaxed at the banks of the Ncome River in 1838, later renamed Blood River as part of modern Afrikaner (nationalist) mythology, Johnson appears to believe that any interpretation which fails to view the trekkers as victims amounts to a ‘classic’ (black) ‘nationalist rewrite’. Could Johnson please tell us exactly what the trekkers were doing in the Zulu Kingdom?
The 16 December 1838 battle between Zulu warriors and land-hungry white trekkers is central to African, Afrikaner and Zulu nationalist and South African histories. MK was founded on 16 December 1961; its final parades were held on the same day in 1993. On 16 December last year the Minister for Arts and Culture unveiled a monument to Zulu warriors killed defending the Kingdom 160 years before. Alongside it is the monument to trekker victory in that same conflict, which is to remain. The day has long been a public holiday: in Nationalist times, the ‘Day of the Vow’; since 1994, the ‘Day of Reconciliation’.
Iain Edwards
Columbia University
New York
From David Dyzenhaus
R.W. Johnson seeks to discredit the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission through his laudatory review of a book by Anthea Jeffery (LRB, 19 August). He mentions the hostile reaction within South Africa to her earlier book on the conflict between the ANC and Inkatha. But since, in his view, she is an impressive and impartial scholar, he attributes that reaction, as well as the equally hostile reaction to her present book, to political correctness. In an essay which accuses the Commissioners of dishonesty and partiality, it might have been fair to mention that in South Africa Jeffrey's earlier book was mostly criticised for clear bias in favour of Inkatha and poor research. Her book on the TRC is being dismissed within South Africa for similar reasons. It is important to stress that this has been the view inside the country because Johnson has sought to pre-empt debate by claiming that people outside South Africa are ill placed to contradict his view of events. The LRB is lucky to have a reviewer with unique access to the truth.
David Dyzenhaus
University of Toronto
Vol. 21 No. 24 · 9 December 1999
From Anthony Sampson
The belief of ex-Communists, like R.W. Johnson and Paul Trewhela (Letters, 11 November), that Mandela was a Party member, is not surprising: many other white Communists thought he was, as I explained in my authorised biography. And in the early Sixties, like many socialist leaders in opposition, Mandela needed to appear more left-wing than he was.
But your correspondents provide no documentary evidence. The fact that Mandela transcribed a pamphlet by the Chinese President Liu Shao-chi is hardly conclusive, since he also copied out bits from many other leaders, including Afrikaner generals, Field Marshal Montgomery and Harry Truman. The South African Government tried desperately to find evidence that Mandela joined the Party and failed. Wasn't Mandela, as both he and I have suggested, using the Communists as much as they were using him?
Anthony Sampson
London NW8
From Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein
Iain Edwards appropriately questions several of the facts and opinions in R.W. Johnson’s review of Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela (Letters, 25 November). In doing so, however, he makes minor errors of his own. He claims, for example, that ‘it is acknowledged that the Freedom Charter did not simply spring from “thousands of scraps of paper” sent in by distant ANC branches and communities.’ Acknowledged by whom? Surely the facts can only be acknowledged by those who know them at first hand. Others might assume, allege, claim or imagine. But those involved know. Edwards apparently doubts Johnson’s claim that ‘Lionel Bernstein drafted the Freedom Charter,’ and adds that ‘Bernstein does not admit to this in his autobiography.’ Not so. I have not written an autobiography, and assume Edwards is referring to my political memoirs recently published as Memory against Forgetting. There I explain in some detail how I sorted and classified the ‘thousands of scraps of paper’ and reduced them to the best consensual form of words I could find, thus drafting the Freedom Charter – not ‘written’ but rather fashioned by me with its content provided by thousands of men and women of all races.
Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein
Kidlington, Oxfordshire
Vol. 22 No. 2 · 20 January 2000
From Neil Wilson
Has David Dyzenhaus (Letters, 25 November 1999) actually read Anthea Jeffery’s book on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Has he read the TRC Report itself? I note that he lives in nice, safe, and overwhelmingly white and wealthy Canada, a country with one of the most restrictive immigration policies in the world. I quote from Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s book Millennium.
Most of the really successful and enduring colonies which Europeans founded outside Europe to be, like South Africa, new “home countries” of their own – in what became North America, Siberia, Australia, and the South American cone – succeeded by extruding or exterminating, massacring or marginalising the indigenous peoples. South Africa’s history of mastering and exploiting native and neighbouring sources of labour looks positively benevolent by comparison. There are and can be no Native American or Aboriginal or Samoyed equivalents of the ANC.
Perhaps as David Dyzenhaus tucks into his morning bowl of Wheaties, he would care to reflect on Hitler’s comment on the plan to resettle the Ukraine with 100 million Volksdeutsche farmers: ‘When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.’
Neil Wilson
Cape Town
From Paul Trewhela
The real problem with Anthony Sampson’s ‘authorised biography’ of Nelson Mandela is that the discussion which has been taking place in the letters pages of the LRB should have taken place in his book. Sampson records that when Mandela’s notes were seized by the police in 1963, they were found to contain, in addition to ‘titbits’ about war from Field Marshal Montgomery and about political leadership from Harry Truman, 62 pages of Stalinist Marxism, including a passage from Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. Sampson quotes Mandela’s own comment: ‘Under a CP government, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey … There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease.’ What Sampson does not do is discuss this. There is no serious effort to get into Mandela’s mind, or his life, at the time he wrote these words. Whether or not Mandela had actually joined the South African Communist Party, or was contemplating doing so, or was trying to gain a deeper understanding of his political allies, or had some other motive – these were questions for a biographer to explore.
Sampson does Mandela, and Southern Africa, and his readers a substantial disservice with this hands-off approach. There is no reference in his book to the prison camps set up in exile by the ANC and the SACP to house their own dissident members although there were a substantial number of them, especially after the mutiny in the ANC army in Angola in 1984, another subject not raised by Sampson. Yet after his release from prison in February 1990, Mandela had a largely honourable role in this matter. When I visited Johannesburg a few weeks later, I was told by Eddie Koch of the Weekly Mail that Mandela had in his presence defended the right of the magazine to publish details of abuses in prison camps run in exile by the Namibian nationalist party, Swapo, despite angry recriminations against Koch and the Weekly Mail from young ANC militants who were meeting Mandela. Two months later, in April, the first publicly verifiable report of torture and executions in ANC camps, particularly at Quatro camp in Angola, appeared in the now defunct Sunday Correspondent. Shortly afterwards, Mandela made the first public acknowledgment by an ANC leader that torture had indeed taken place in exile. In September 1991 Mandela, on behalf of the ANC, appointed a three-person commission of inquiry, headed by a barrister, Thembile Louis Skweyiya, into abuses that had taken place within the organisation in exile. As I reported in the exile magazine Searchlight South Africa in April 1993, Mandela’s action was the outcome of a ‘very sharp conflict’ within the National Executive Committee of the ANC between ‘internal’ leaders who wanted to know what had happened in exile in order to avoid scandal in the coming election campaign, and exile leaders who wanted to keep this secret. Decisively, Mandela ‘gave his support to those in favour of holding the inquiry and, later, of publishing its report; and this grouping prevailed’. Nothing on this topic appears in Sampson’s book, despite the report of the Skweyiya Commission (August 1992), a report by Amnesty International in December 1992 and the report of a further ANC inquiry headed by Dr Sam Motsuenyane (August 1993), and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which Mandela’s successor, President Mbeki, one of the leaders in exile, tried to suppress.
Paul Trewhela
Aylesbury
Vol. 22 No. 6 · 16 March 2000
From John Kane-Berman
David Dyzenhaus’s attack on Anthea Jeffery for her book, The Truth about the Truth Commission, and its predecessor, The Natal Story: Sixteen Years of Conflict, abounds in distortions and misrepresentations (Letters, 25 November 1999). His allegations about The Natal Story have zero foundation in fact. The book’s objectivity was widely acknowledged by reviewers. Mondli Makhanya, writing in the Star, described it as an ‘unbiased account’. Z.B. Molefe wrote in City Press: ‘The book’s strongest feature … is providing both the ANC and Inkatha equal platforms to state their positions.’ Graham Linscott, in the Mercury, described the book as a ‘meticulous and scrupulously objective catalogue of horror’. Mokgadi Pela, writing in the Sowetan, said Jeffery had ‘used her skills to unravel this complex low-intensity war in a strictly non-partisan way’.
As for her analysis of the TRC’s report, all manner of invective has been levelled at her by various critics. They have not, however, defended the charges made by Jeffery, which still stand uncontroverted.
John Kane-Berman
South African Institute of Race Relations
From Christine Sypnowich
Neil Wilson (Letters, 20 January) implies that Canada’s treatment of aboriginal people means that Canadians have no right to comment on the injustices of South Africa. Apartheid looks pretty good, apparently, in contrast to the genocide of indigenous populations elsewhere in the New World, as though we should applaud South Africa for not having eliminated the black population altogether. The letter accuses David Dyzenhaus – a resident of ‘nice, safe and overwhelmingly white and wealthy Canada’ – of not knowing what he is talking about. But Dyzenhaus is also a South African whose writings on the South African justice system prompted the TRC to ask him to appear as an expert witness. Last year he published a book on the TRC and the role of judges in South Africa.
Inaccuracies also abound in the claims about Canada: far from being overwhelmingly white, it is in fact one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world and, far from restricting immigration, has an immigration policy so ambitious that 16 per cent of its population is foreign-born.
Christine Sypnowich
Kingston, Canada
