Can Democracy exist on Barren Ground?

The invitation to attend MPD's conference whose theme was "In search of Democracy – majorities and minorities" - provided me with a most welcome opportunity to start my 30th or so research trip to South Africa. The conference was of particular interest to me as it was less than three months that Codesa had started its deliberations on a new constitutional and socio-economic order for South Africa.

I had my doubts since 1964, that one day the apartheid regime would be replaced by a non-racial, truly democratic order. White South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, since their arrival on the African shores more than three centuries ago, had never appeared to have an interest in establishing democracy. Black, "Coloured"/Indian South Africans had never been given a chance to develop a democratic political culture. So, with that history, one has one's doubts whether any of the key actors in the South African conflict (ANC, SACP, NP, CP, AZAPO, IFP) is a democratic party in the true sense of the word. Of course, all these parties in their official documents will state today that they are committed to the value system of a pluralistic society. But can it be taken for granted that more or less over-night the deeply divided undemocratic South African society where many of the important actors were banned and their leaders either murdered or put into prison or driven into exile will develop into a Western style democracy? There are far more questions than there are answers.

My scepticism of course is influenced by what we observe these days in the former Communist countries in Eastern Europe and todays's Commonwealth of Independent States. Did the German and the Latvian examples and those of all the other states in Eastern Europe with the exception of Czechoslovakia between the two wars not prove that a democratic order cannot exist on barren ground?

Those of course are the questions that accompany me on my trips to the townships, in my meetings with my White African friends and even in the bars in the Market Theatre where, by no means co-incidentally, I met some of my fellow "Dakar Boere", with whom in July 1987 I had such an exciting time meeting leading members of the then still banned ANC.

What a joy to take a mini-bus into Soweto or one of the other townships. Do I suffer from hallucinations or are those victims of centuries of discrimination really so friendly and co-operative with me the moment I show an interest in them? If only we in re-united Germany showed this preparedness to communicate, to forgive and to even forget. And what hospitality I find among people who live in shacks, who maybe have never known employment and who in all probability, because of lack of schooling and for other reasons, will never find employment? And will the unemployment rate go down? Hardly conceivable. Will the government of a new South Africa, if it wants to retain its credibility with the under privileged, have to follow a policy of redistribution? That of course will not attract local and foreign investors.

Will the lack of employment, of proper housing, of education and health services not lead to the increase in the already high crime rate? This question is to be asked even more loudly as political differences in the townships are often not fought by democratic arguments but by means of violence. No doubt, there will be a third force. But there's also this attitude of a commitment to political pluralism within the frame of "liberatory intolerance", expressed by an ANC leader in Dakar in July 1987.

Is that not the very real danger expressed by my fellow "Dakar Boer" Breyten Breytenbach who, about a year ago, warned that the Republic might soon go through a long period of indiscriminate acts of barbarism? As the UN played so prominent a role in the struggle against apartheid in SWA, it may have to station a peace keeping force in the new South Africa for

many years, so that a political culture of tolerance and compromise can develop.

It is a few days before the referendum of March 17 and these are impressions I share often with longtime interlocutors among white South Africans. Of course there are those who want to go back to a modernised version of the old order. I feel pity for them because I think their views are the safest way to achieve in South Africa what Germany was like in 1945, that is, total destruction and a general climate of hopelessness.

There are far more people who are prepared to support the Codesa process but who, being confronted on television with certain sad realities in the townships ask for "cast iron guarantees for their existence" for themselves in a new South Africa. These friends do not only talk about the necessity of a system of power-sharing in a regionalised post-apartheid South Africa. Their hope is also that after the NP will have won the referendum, Nelson Mandela and the other leaders represented at Codesa will show their preparedness to discuss the possibility of a "sacrificial petition" of the Republic (an expression used by Van Zyl Slabbert early in 1991) to get at least parts of the CP to the negotiation table. For apparently the ANC, NP and the other Codesa participants all realise that to get a stable new order, Codesa needs the CP's participation.

Another very important question, to which I have no answer at all, is what can be done to make PAC return to Codesa. Its participation in the Codesa process seems to be another absolute must.

Only if the ANC, PAC, Azapo, IFP, NP and CP sing the new constitutional refrain will there be a chance that the new South Africa will be a stable country. The outcome of their refusal to participate is to be seen in events in Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia and the former Soviet Union: the disintegration as a result of a civil war.

Klaus Baron von der Ropp
Cologne, Germany.