R.W. Johnson

When I was a child we were taught to sing a hymn whose last lines were:

The voice on the phone was terrified and tearful. ‘I’m in such trouble, such trouble.’ It took me quite a while to get Josephine to say what had happened. She is the 18-year-old daughter of my domestic servant here in Johannesburg. Josephine, like her two sisters, is a boarder at a school near Pietersburg, 350 kilometres away. In the school holidays the three girls come and stay with their mother, Doris, who lives in a cottage in my garden – I had waved them off back to school only a few weeks before, Josephine, the eldest, shepherding her smaller sisters.’‘

On 5 October 1990, Britain entered the ERM: on 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, Britain left the ERM. These two events and the years between them were crucial in recent British politics. They are the source of the divisions in the contemporary Tory Party and all the leading participants are obliged to state and restate what they said and did then in much the same way that the members of an earlier Tory generation had to spell out the position they’d taken over Munich. And just as Chamberlain’s deal at Munich was immensely popular for a short time and then reviled, so the conventional wisdom in October 1990 was that the ERM was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black Wednesday. But when the conventional wisdom shifts so fast the temptation for a politician to retouch his (or her) biography must be close to overwhelming.

No book in recent South African history has attracted such venom as Anthea Jeffery’s analysis of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has been accused of wanting to defend the apartheid past, of having a desire to hurt and humiliate black people and of much else besides. Yet none of her attackers has dared to take issue with her on the basis of fact or evidence – Jeffery’s scholarship is beyond reproach. She is one of the few people who have actually read the five volumes of the TRC Report and is probably the only one who has tested it against the evidence uncovered by the various judicial inquiries, special investigations and court cases which had – in far greater detail – covered much of the same ground as the TRC and their findings. Jeffery has, moreover, done something of the sort before. The Natal Story: Sixteen Years of Conflict (1997) displayed the same impressive scholarship and, with almost painful evenhandedness, sought to put forward the opposing interpretations of every incident in which Inkatha and the ANC had been protagonists, leaving the reader to make up his own mind. This was, in current South African terms, a brave thing to do, but it is as nothing compared to the courage required to lay bare the procedures of the TRC.’