The Birth of the Accord on Afrikaner Self-determination

The Key Role of US Ambassador Nathan Princeton Lyman

A German View – by Klaus Baron von der Ropp, Dr. jur.

At the very beginning of my speech – believe it or not - I must tell you that in Southern Africa I never had any official function. For the past 60 years I have been a mere observer. This has provided me with a maximum of political freedom I would never have had if I had had any official status. To mention just two examples in this regard: I could support my two dear friends, Van Zyl Slabbert and later Breyten Breytenbach, to organise the historical meeting of top representatives of the still banned ANC/SACP alliance and a group of mainly Afrikaans-speaking, mostly white South African dissidents in Dakar, Senegal, in July 1987. And, furthermore, I could critically discuss often with outstanding British- and US diplomats, among them Sir Robin Renwick and US Ambassador Nathan Princeton Lyman, and later also with Soviet/Russian officials not only the developments in South Africa and its neighbouring countries, but also the amateurish policies in the southernmost part of Africa of my own country, i.e. Germany (West). I am grateful for the fact that quite a large number of these foreign representatives were surprisingly frank with me. Most of them would have known that after October 17th, 1978, my government had been excluded by the British and US governments from the negotiations on the future of Namibia and then South Africa.

I do not want to talk to you about the role of the most outstanding British ambassador, Sir Robin Renwick, the main architect of the South African transformation process. Renwick was supported totally by his US counterpart Bill Swing. But Swing had to be satisfied with the role of a junior partner. Correctly the Johannesburg Sunday Times of April 21st, 1991, contained an article entitled “Sir Robin Renwick – his Excellent Excellency”.¹ And the Financial Times on June 1st, 1991, on the eve of his departure to Washington, called Renwick the “host with the most in South Africa”. Renwick indeed was a very successful “interventionist” ambassador. But, as I already said, he lacked an understanding of the fully justified fears of the Afrikanervolk to be overpowered in a new South Africa by a huge black majority, the latter culturally totally alien to it. Perhaps Renwick would not have understood Slabbert’s warning to the ANC/SACP alliance in our meeting in Dakar that “revolutionaries must convince white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, that there is life beyond apartheid”.²

However, Slabbert’s remark would have been perfectly understood by Renwick’s successor as the by far most influential diplomat in Pretoria in the very early 1990s, namely US Ambassador Nathan Princeton Lyman. His previous postings as US ambassador to Columbia and Nigeria, two partially imploded states, provided good preparation for the assumption of his new position at the Cape. When meeting Lyman I was always very impressed by his profound knowledge of his new host country. And other than Renwick, he was a modest man! I was also fascinated by his knowledge of West Germany’s dilettante but politically correct role in South Africa. On such occasions I was proud to tell him that there were also a few constructive voices in Bonn, for instance, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s remarks to US Vice President Walter (“Fritz”) Mondale during a meeting on May 21st, 1977, in his office in Bonn. Mondale, having had an argument with Prime Minister John Vorster the day before in Vienna, remarked that the West must do everything in its power to force Pretoria to abolish Apartheid. Schmidt’s reaction was the laconic question “And replace it with what?” Furthermore, I could provide Lyman with the text of an interview with Egon Bahr, another leading Social Democrat. In 1977 Bahr had stated that as a system of “one man one vote” was not feasible in South Africa, “a hitherto unknown solution of peaceful co-existence with special protection for minorities had to be developed.3 I could also inform Lyman that Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the powerful chairman of the German liberal party (FDP) and, like myself, a member of a very old and forcibly resettled German Baltic family4, had pleaded for “copper bottomed guarantees of existence” for white and brown Afrikaners in a paper published in 1986.5 Taking Schmidt’s question and Egon Bahr’s interview as starting points he proposed a “toevlugsoord” in the sense of a “boerestaat”, a type of Afrikaner Israel for those Afrikaners who did not see a future for themselves and their children in the black- dominated post-Apartheid South Africa. Needless to say, I had to tell Lyman that Schmidt’s question as well as the papers by Bahr and Lambsdorff were ignored by the Pretoria government and also by its embassy as well as by the PR organisation “South African Foundation” in Bonn. Asked by Lyman on the view of the West German opposition parties CDU and CSU I had to reply that the closeness of the ANC and the SACP in the days of the Cold War had lead these parties to try to develop a political alternative to the liberation movement, in this case to Inkatha.

In many ways - but especially in his understanding of the complexity of the South African dilemma - Lyman was a unique diplomat. I am sure that he was absolutely loyal to his government’s wish to overcome Apartheid. But, other than probably all his colleagues in Pretoria, he never insisted on white South Africa’s, particularly the Afrikaners’, unconditional surrender. In his numerous and intensive talks with General Constand Viljoen⁶ he always made it clear that he respected Viljoen as a man of honour, as a patriot. Typical for Lyman’s respect for Viljoen are the last sentences of the chapter “Courting a troubled general”” in his book. “His dream of a Volkstaat was all but dead. But he played his role on the magnificent plain of South Africa’s transition. And, in my view, he played it heroically.”⁷ What a contrast to the existing “world opinion” of that time which saw the new hero of the Afrikanervolk as a racist, as a mere troublemaker on South Africa’s promising journey away from 350 years of an often brutal system of white minority rule to a western style democracy. In one of our talks Lyman asked me how German media saw the general’s role. My answer was that the highly respected liberal weekly “Die Zeit” had recently called Viljoen a “bloodhound”, and that this viewpoint was, of course, totally in line with contemporary “world opinion”, or, to use the new buzzword, “woke”! But Lyman would have nothing of it, immediately got up and shouted at me “What nonsense, the general is a patriot!” By the way, I have always had the impression that Mandela, who, as we all know, looked down on FW de Klerk as a weakling, could well have made a similar statement on Viljoen.

Lyman’s and Viljoen’s discussions must have concentrated on the issue of the Afrikanervolk’s survival in a post-Apartheid South Africa. Viljoen for very good reasons insisted on “copper bottomed” guarantees of existence for his volk. Continuously Viljoen made the point that Afrikaners (hopefully including brown Afrikaners or Afrikaners of colour) must get their own state, politically independent from today’s South Africa. I had the privilege of informing both Lyman and Viljoen that in his aforementioned paper the powerful Otto Graf Lambsdorff saw this as a very possible outcome of the South African drama. It is hardly known that before publishing his paper Lambsdorff had consulted his friend Van Zyl Slabbert and Gavin Relly, the CEO of Anglo American. By the way, Slabbert, upon reading Lambsdorff’s paper, spoke of “sacrificial” partition.

There must have been endless debates on Lyman’s point of view that such a solution was no longer feasible as even in the Western Cape the economic development had made South Africa an ethnic melting pot.

When Viljoen realised thar Lyman was not able to agree to the creation of an Afrikaner volksstaat, he made it clear to his American interlocuter that big parts of the SADF were loyal to him and were prepared to fight for Afrikaner survival. You will understand that I, being a mere outsider, have absolutely no idea what else might then have been discussed by the two protagonists. But of course, simply to mention one point, Lyman was familiar with the fact that South Africa possessed six complete nuclear bombs of the Hiroshima type with a seventh one being under construction⁸ - “nukes” are not only military, but also political weapons!

Few people in South Africa and abroad apparently know that a meeting between Viljoen and the US Assistant Secretary of Defence, Charles Freeman, and the latter’s team of senior American military officers took place in the US Embassy on February 11th. In these discussions the Americans warned Viljoen to look for a UDI-style solution by pointing to the existence of their huge and mysterious airbase Thebephatshwa close to Molepolole in the southernmost part of neighbouring Botswana. After the meeting Viljoen declared the preparedness of his party, the Vryheidsfront”, to participate in the first general elections. But this only on the (most understandable) condition that a way was found to make sure Afrikaners in the new South Africa had a chance to keep their right of self-determination. The following deliberations between the ANC, Viljoen’s Vryheidsfront and the De Klerk government lead to the conclusion of the “Accord on Afrikaner Self-determination” between the Freedom Front, the African National Congress and the South African government/the National Party. One of Lyman’s collaborators – I never learnt her surname – told me later that general Constand Viljoen and Cyril Ramaphosa, Secretary-General of the ANC, were immediately prepared to approve it. On the other side the De Klerk government hesitated to do so. Upon being informed of De Klerk’s “No”, Viljoen informed Lyman that now he had no other choice than to take up arms. But Lyman could convince de Klerk to give in. Consequently, the Accord was signed by Generaal Constand Viljoen and Thabo Mbeki, the national chairman of the ANC, and Roelf Meyer, Minister of Constitutional Development and Communication, in the West Wing of the Union Building, Pretoria.

Present at the ceremony were, among others, US Ambassador Nathan Princeton Lyman, UK Ambassador Sir Anthony Reeve⁹, Walter Sisulu, Aziz Pahad, Abraham Viljoen, junior diplomats from different embassies, and Minister of State Martin Cullen (Ireland) and myself as EU observers. Being German there were two facts that struck me in particular: the German ambassador, Hans Christian Uberschaer, had turned down the official invitation to attend the meeting. He was pretty conservative but did not want to be seen in the “company of racists”. On the other hand, in the company of Viljoen I met the Russian Ambassador, Jevgeni P Gusarow. He wholeheartedly congratulated the Generaal on having signed the Accord.

During the negotiations on the Accord both Lyman and Viljoen had intensive talks with, inter alia, my friends Van Zyl Slabbert and Breyten Breytenbach, and with me in the capacity of an advisor, particularly on the key issue of the protection of ethnic minorities by them. They both knew that all of us had been at the Dakar conference and had met the ANC in follow-up meetings. In separate sessions they discussed the situation of the German-speaking communities in southern Tyrole and eastern Belgium. But these two cases did not convince me. For other than the Afrikaners in South Africa, these two communities exist in established constitutional states (“regstate”), in established democracies. Instead I discussed with Viljoen, and later Lyman, the constitutional status of the so-called “Russlanddeutsche”, more precisely the “Sowjetdeutsche”, a German-speaking community originally numbering 2.5 million living in Czarist Russia and later in the USSR for more than two centuries. Lyman knew perfectly well¹⁰ that between the two World Wars they had inhabited their “Volga Republic”. However, only some 20-25% actually lived in this Volga Republic, the remainder had settled in “language islands” spread all over the large country (Russia and later the USSR). Even for the latter though the “Volga Republic” provided schools, educational institutions of all levels, publishing houses, etc., i.e. provided them with a way to maintain their German identity in an often not necessarily hostile but nonetheless foreign environment. This partially very promising development of far-reaching (internal) autonomy only came to an abrupt end in the final act of grandeur in June 1941 when Germany attacked the USSR.

Thirty years after the signing of the Accord, and for reasons that are hardly understandable, it has not been implemented. And it is only now that the Constitutional Court is being asked to commence with the implementation thereof by by instructing the installation of a Volkstaatraad. The latter of course will only make sense if the Afrikaners of Solidariteit/AfriForum and your group of presumably more conservative Afrikaners manage to overcome your totally incomprehensible differences. Is it not interpreted as such that by fighting each other, Afrikaners are all scoring an own goal and cause political opponents to overlook even the most modest interests/demands? The pursuit of the latter course may well lead to a civil war and destroy the country. And given today’s extremely serious tensions between the Western World and Russia/China, that, for its part, might, as Egon Bahr, the eminence grise of German foreign politics, mentioned in his aforementioned interview in Allgemeines Deutsches Sonntagsblatt, lead to a third world war! Perhaps the former German Ambassador to South Africa, Gustav Adolf Sonnenhol, was right in his reaction to Jürgen Blenck’s and my paper¹¹ on “sacrificial“ partition that the latter was in all probability the most plausible solution for the South Africa drama but was only a post-catastrophe answer.¹²

The author dedicates this paper/speech to Lieutenant-Colonel (“Kommandant”) Peter Stark, who together with an endless number of other black and white South Africans and Namibians on December 13th, 1975, at 11:45 local time saved him from dying of thirst and exhaustion in the Namib desert after having been lost for 92 hours.

1. Many details on these subjects can found in my papers published on my website www.africanquestions.org
2. Only due to the support of Slabbert and Breytenbach could I publish my unconventional reports on the Dakar meeting in the “progressive” media in South Africa. Die Suid Afrikaan, April 1988, pp 34-36; Democracy in Action, July 1989, pp 14-15; Vrye Weekblad, October 27th, 1989.
3. “Ohne Verhandlungslösung ist die Gefahr des dritten Weltkrieges ständig gegenwärtig“ in Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, July 10th, 1977.
4. Those families who refused to be resettled in October 1939 were later relocated in Siberia.
5. “Teilung Südafrikas als Ausweg” in Quick, July 31st, 1986, p32. See furthermore Robert von Lucius „Lambsdorff kritisiert die Südafrika-Politik der westlichen Länder / Teilung des Landes als letzter Ausweg?“ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 8th, 1986, p 5.
6. Nathan Princeton Lyman: Partner to History, The US Role in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy, Washinton, 2002, pp 167 -188.
7. Lyman, op. cit., p 180.
8. Compare Thomas Sheen “Das Kap und die Bombe“ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25th, 2015, p 2.
9. I did not see Sir Anthony. But much later during an official meal in his then High Commission he told me that he had been present.
10. Lyman’s profound knowledge of Russian/Soviet history is to be explained by the fact that his own family had emigrated from the USSR (Ukraine) to the US in the 1920s.
11. „Republik Südafrika: Teilung als Ausweg?” in Aussenpolitik 3/1976, pp 308-324; reprinted by The South African Journal of Foreign AƯairs 1/1977, pp 21-32. Among many international reactions to this paper refer to Jacob Zollmann, “Negotiated partition of South Africa – an idea and its history (1920s – 1980s)” in South African Historical Journal, 2021.
12. Compare Gustav Adolf Sonnenhol „Südafrika ohne Hoffnung. Wege aus der Gefahr“, 1978.