Funding for this special Frontline series is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide,
and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Tonight on Frontline, Turmoil in South Africa.
An unprecedented five-part series explores over 300 years of segregation, repression, and white domination.
I practiced apartheid, I lived apartheid, and I enjoyed apartheid.
Last summer, a band of white Afrikaners left South Africa for an extraordinary confrontation with exiled black rebels.
We are here in the process of building a new nation, a nation of South Africans.
What does this meeting of old enemies tell us about the future of South Africa?
You can't reform apartheid. First shepherd.
History in the making on part five of apartheid.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston.
This is a special Frontline series with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening. Tonight we conclude our special five-part Frontline series on South Africa called Apartheid.
The first four programs traced over 300 years of racial history in that troubled land.
A history of white repression and black rebellion.
But South Africa's history is not a simple one. Not always just a story of blacks clashing with whites.
Tonight we present a very different picture of apartheid.
A story of South Africans, black and white, talking together about the future of their country.
In recent years there have been several meetings, most of them organized in secret, between white South Africans,
businessmen, and intellectuals, in the outlawed African National Congress,
the leading anti-apartheid organization regarded by many blacks as a kind of government in exile for a future South Africa.
We were interested in those illegal meetings. What was discussed?
Could they yield any clues about the future of South Africa?
Last summer we learned of secret plans for another meeting, the largest ever between dissident white Afrikaners and the ANC,
set for July in the West African country of Senegal.
Frontline producer Irv Draznin, who had contacts with the exiled ANC at their headquarters in Zambia,
traveled to Senegal to cover the conference.
This is his report on what he saw and heard.
Dakar, the capital of Senegal, on the northwest coast of Africa.
A marketplace of history, once known as the Paris of West Africa,
Dakar may one day be remembered for his place in the struggle for South Africa.
Traditional drumbeats celebrate the rights of statecraft, of high-level diplomacy.
On this day, Dakar is awaiting the arrival of black and white South Africans.
These are travelers from the last enclave of white power on a black-ruled continent,
members of South Africa's white tribe, Afrikaners.
For most of them, it's a journey into the unknown, to places they've never been,
to hold forbidden talks with an outlawed opposition they've never met, the African National Congress, the ANC.
They're not sure what South Africa would be like if it's governed by the ANC.
I mean, this is why they've come to talk. They've come to try and find out what it's all about.
And in that sense, if they are convinced, or let me put it this way,
if the ANC can convince them that there's a future beyond apartheid for them in an ANC South Africa,
they will not be afraid of it, certainly not.
Among them are academics and clergy, professionals and politicians,
an intellectual cross-section of Afrikanerdom that has no first-hand knowledge of the ANC or its leaders.
In South Africa, even possessing ANC writings is a crime.
This is the official magazine of the ANC. It's very poor. It really is.
I mean, the two of them together will get you locked up for, what, six years?
I think so. This is all right. That's published in South Africa.
What's published in South Africa, as shown in films like this on government-controlled television,
is the ANC, remote and menacing, marching on white South Africa.
Its leaders depicted not so much as political exiles as refugees from a police file.
Three of them, Paolo Jordan, Mack Maharaj, and Thabo Mbeki,
all members of the ANC's top leadership, would be in Dakar.
It's despite this government profile of the ANC that the Afrikaner delegation headed for Dakar.
They arrived in the belief that without the ANC, there can be no end to South Africa's racial strife.
But landing near midnight, these travelers didn't know what to expect, what they'd see or hear.
They couldn't have expected Thabo Mbeki's first words.
My name is Thabo Mbeki. I'm an Afrikaner.
Known to each other only by reputation as bitter adversaries,
these South Africans could for the first time at least introduce themselves.
I grew up in Cape Town, educated South Africa, United States, and Great Britain.
Now a full-time worker for the African National Congress.
I'm a young Afrikaner. I'm proud to be a young Afrikaner.
I'm a postgraduate student at Stellar Motion Engineering.
1960, the African National Congress was banned. 1961, I left the country.
I left South Africa in 1976 as a student at the University of Zululand
as a result of the participation and involvement in the so-called Uprisings of 76.
I'm a South African businessman. I'm the chief executive of a group called the Wiltrew Group of Companies.
And if I have to describe myself, I'd like to refer to various publications like Africa Confidential Sunday Times
and the biographies of the CIA.
I'm one of those growing band of young Afrikaners who I'm told have been co-opted by the ANC,
the communists, the total onslaught, and one other group I haven't heard of.
In 1963, I left South Africa to study in East Germany.
I studied history. I'm now in the process of making history.
Even outlawed, the ANC by all accounts represents the strongest, most popular black movement in South Africa.
On our shoulders rests the task of removing the racist Pretoria regime,
dismantling the apartheid system, and transforming South Africa into a united, democratic, and non-racial country.
First Thabo Mbeki, then the Afrikaner leader, Frederik van Seel Slaabert, set the agenda.
Some of you have traveled far and suffered much pursuing freedom for your country.
Some of you have ended up adopting strategies and supporting ideologies,
which some of us have difficulty in supporting or understanding, but which we want to find out more about.
Despite that, and despite whatever differences there may be,
we have come to talk to you because we realize your critical role in finding a resolution to our tragedy.
In South Africa, tragedy is often a study in contrasts of two worlds, white South Africa and black,
separated by custom, by law, by force, and by history.
The tragedy is apartheid, a separation of the races,
the domination of a white minority over a black majority, which made an institution of racism.
The signs may be mostly gone, the regulations may change, but the fact remains,
apartheid still dominates the way people live and think.
There are no black voices heard here in the white-controlled parliament,
where the Afrikaner's nationalist party has ruled since 1948.
There's no room for negotiation in the appeal of President P.W. Bota,
because in the minds of most Afrikaners, there's only one answer to the question he asks of an all-white constituency.
Do you want to be in the company of the African National Congress?
To get this far, to be in the company of the African National Congress,
these white South Africans have defied their government and misled families and friends about their destination and purpose.
To get this far, members of the ANC have traveled from Lusaka in London,
from Stockholm in America, from more than a quarter century of exile.
The fortunes of history which drove them apart have brought them together
for what in South Africa would be an illegal gathering punishable by law.
Their mission, begun in secret for reasons of security, was carried on in secret for reasons of diplomacy.
The formal meetings were closed to the press.
Starting with the daily news briefings, we began to learn what happened when antagonists from a country so deeply divided
gathered in a room to discuss their future. Where did they begin?
The question that demanded almost all our attention was,
how can we ensure a new South Africa free from apartheid,
but one which is free from being torn apart by polarizing forces?
And as a consequence of this discussion, obviously a number of questions were posed.
Is there a place in a new South Africa for the maintenance, preservation of minority rights?
What is the distinction between rights and privileges?
Now a critical issue was not black rights under white rule,
but the rights of the minority, of whites, and of future South Africa.
We are not willing to make any concessions to their desire for special privileges,
special rights, or to their racist prejudices.
We cannot concede those. I mean, that is not acceptable to us.
But as for their right to live in South Africa, it is enshrined in the very preamble of the Freedom Charter.
South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
For South Africans, it was a change of course.
Afrikaners looking to the ANC for answers.
We found their questions on our adhering to the armed struggle.
Their questions as to whether we are prepared to entertain a negotiated solution.
Their questions with regards to our efforts to unify all democratic forces in our country
who are opposing the apartheid system.
Serious questions.
The questions and the need for answers couldn't be confined to a meeting room or press conference.
A tour of local industry became simply another place for them to talk,
but a place for us to overhear the give and take, to collect fragments of the debate and its intensity.
In the armed struggle, you don't just claim victory one day.
You go and you get a liberated zone.
For most of them, ANC and Afrikaner alike, it was their first opportunity to confront one another face to face.
Whatever answers we give you may not necessarily be the absolute answers in relation to the general concerns of our own people.
A negotiated settlement is taking place in so many diverse ways throughout the world.
So many diverse.
Somebody says to us, can you declare the truth?
Two leading Afrikaner intellectuals, Andre de Toy and Herman Giloume,
have heard of the ANC's Maqmaharaj, but never from him directly.
What PW wants to say to us, first you lay down your arms and I keep my arms in operation.
That's saying he's not interested in that.
And what needs to be said is that people need to say to him, both arms.
You don't want it.
You are not serious.
You cannot put this condition.
It's not a necessary condition.
Here you have the white people cocooned in a certain position of fear.
Psychologically it's extremely difficult for them to get out of it.
And now when you start talking about the real...
Two South African lawyers discussing politics.
Not something they could talk about in South Africa.
Not to each other.
You tell them it could be a multi-party state, it must be democracy, it must be majority and that sort of thing.
They will ask you very straightforward questions like,
would you permit white people to form an exclusive white party?
Would you permit white people to form white schools if they violated themselves?
No.
White private schools you're saying, that sort of thing?
This is it. No.
In other words, you see, that's an apartheid prescription.
White residential areas, white schools,
white churches and so on.
We are here in the process of building a new nation.
A nation of South Africans.
We really feel that it would be very arrogant for us to say it is going to be exactly like this.
We would like the people of South Africa to themselves define what they want.
And this can't...
Once upon a time dozens are right for that sort of conversation.
Absolutely, but the expectation seems to be that we have this kind of blueprint.
We've all got it down mathematically.
This one will move this way. We don't.
For instance, what will happen to the house that you live in today,
which your parents spent money to build?
Is the state going to take it? No. Why take it?
Why take it?
We're not going to go into South Africa and say,
get out of the beautiful houses, go into the townships,
because the townships were built by your own government.
This is not going to happen.
This is not going to happen at all.
And I want to own three or four houses.
Well, you see, that problem will have to be resolved again in discussion
by the people themselves, including the whites.
They had come intending to talk about strategies for changing South Africa,
about future political and economic structures.
But first they had to learn to talk to each other.
For Afrikaners especially, it was an unfamiliar role,
a search for common ground.
The challenge that comes back to them is,
well, if you accept that the future has to be a nonracial democracy,
and that means that it involves the majority of people,
how do you become part in the struggle for that majority to get to that democracy?
I think this is the challenge that faces these people,
and that's what they're talking about, you know,
and that's why there's a certain agony involved in the whole thing for them as well.
The major theme that I see all the time is still an ingrained, I think,
fear that the blacks would do to us what we've done to them,
that we are not willing to trust and accept the fundamental nonracial nature
of the black philosophy.
And so what is being spoken about is,
but how do we convince the people back home,
and I think very often they want to project it to the people back home,
and very often saying, how do I convince myself that I can trust you?
It seems to me that where the ANC has in my eyes to prove itself
is whether it is prepared to allow right of dissent,
right of opposition within the democratic opposition at this stage,
and that's where the question of precisely what the role of the ANC
in relation to other groupings, what the critical issues are there.
Have they satisfied you on that point?
I don't think entirely.
I think that we can go back to South Africa
and that we have got a certain space for moving and defining our own objectives,
but that we will go back with unresolved anxieties
about just where the ANC's position is.
Is it possible to come away someday with a situation that everyone can live with,
Afrikaner and ANC?
I hope so, but I don't think so.
I sometimes get very pessimistic about, especially when I hear the ANC speak,
and I know the type of built-in resolution to maintain political power
in the ranks of the Afrikaners.
The ranks of the Afrikaner are formidable.
No army in Africa can challenge the military power of P.W. Bota.
Behind the strident voice of Afrikaner nationalism
lies the power of the state and the government's willingness to use it.
The South African Armed Forces are celebrating their 75th anniversary.
It's no small irony that it's also the 75th anniversary of the African National Congress,
the oldest black nationalist movement in Africa.
For its first 50 years, the ANC sought nonviolent change
through peaceful protest, demonstrations and petitions.
The government responded with force, then by banning the ANC
and sending many of its leaders to prison.
That's the historical perspective of those who were there and who were imprisoned
and who came to Dakar, like Mack Maharaj.
And yet, when you confront the question and they say the armed struggle, could you suspend it?
It'll make it easier to mobilize people.
And you say, wait, let us show you how we have sought for a negotiated solution
when we did not use armed struggle.
When we used our millions to go to prison voluntarily,
8,500 went in the defiance campaign.
We had the Freedom Charter formulated.
We invited even the Nationalist Party.
We wrote letters to the prime minister, each prime minister at the time,
saying we are launching this campaign, we have this grievance.
And they ignored us.
The ANC's response was the armed struggle, aimed first at strategic targets.
Inevitably, the violence has spread, violence that often seems impossible
for either the ANC or the government to control.
In the Afrikaner view of history, they fought the British for their political and cultural rights,
and they would fight again to preserve them, even if against other South Africans.
There's no escaping the violence and its consequences, not in South Africa,
not more than half a continent away, in Dakar.
The causes of violence and who's to blame were a major issue here,
an issue the government of South Africa would like to make an ideological battle as well.
Those who haven't met the ANC, those who have relied, who have depended
on what the regime says about the ANC,
they think they know that the ANC is an organisation of killers, anti-white murderers,
controlled by some cunning, scheming, ruthless, Moscow, KGB, somebody.
And they believe that.
One of the first questions that was asked from the white delegation
was the relationship between the communist and African nationalist factions within the ANC.
Again, to my own perspective, it was answered adequately,
in that historically speaking, the so-called South African Communist Party,
and you must understand the word communist and communism in the South African context,
is an extraordinary flexible terminology.
Anything that is for non-racialism has historically been quoted as being communist.
The question of communism isn't new to South African politics.
The government has long used it to discredit opposition to apartheid.
The ANC has long acknowledged its alliance with the South African Communist Party
in the fight to end apartheid.
This is an alliance where both organisations are independent.
The Communist Party, from the point of view of the ANC,
has committed itself to our aims enshrined in the Freedom Charter.
It has done so, in our view, without any hidden agenda,
because it has said that it is interested in the achievement and realisation of the Freedom Charter,
because it believes that this will create the conditions for the people
to be mobilised by the Communist Party in order to build a socialist society.
But they are committed to that stop with us.
How's that going to play back home?
It's one of the more difficult ones.
We've been bombarded with so much indoctrination,
most of it coming from America, by the way,
about the real face of Marxism and the real face of the Communists.
You can just never trust them.
Of course these guys... This is the whole argument.
I know. I'm going to get back in.
I think my argument will be, go and talk to these guys and look at them.
Do they look like Communists? Do they talk like Communists?
I don't know them. Maybe they're Marxists.
Maybe they believe in Marxist analysis.
No skin of mine knows. I'm scared.
And what South Africa should really be scared of is Soviet imperialism or whatever.
And I mean, these guys, that's outrageous. They're not into that.
The delegates move from issue to issue, from place to place,
their expectations becoming as important as the formal discussions.
Even here, each was being tested against the images and expectations of the other
as enemy or potential ally.
But even a diplomatic reception couldn't hide a fundamental disagreement
over the strategy of violence and bringing about change in South Africa.
One of the major questions focused on the armed struggle,
the violence which is endemic in South Africa,
the violence by the state and the counter-violence.
And it would be, I think, just dishonest to argue that or to say
that this was not an issue that occupied the minds very deeply and seriously
of all the participants and there were certain very clear divisions
on this particular point of view.
There was no simple solution, but in the course of their debates
something unexpected happened.
While rejecting violence as a means for change,
Afrikaners accepted the reasons for an armed struggle and why it would continue.
And in our debates, we have, I think, also accepted and put it so to the ANC
that we cannot but accept as a historical reality
the ANC's commitment to the armed struggle.
It is impossible to ask the ANC at this stage to renounce the armed struggle.
Which to me is a remarkable thing.
I think it's the most remarkable thing of the entire conference
is that people from these two backgrounds could find that common ground
that this group from inside South Africa could,
trying to be radical or out-radicalise anyone else,
or whatever, be radical, shick, or any of that nonsense,
sincerely accept that there was a reason why the ANC started the armed struggle.
And there is probably, I think, for most of the guys,
a realisation that it would be unrealistic for the ANC
to end off the armed struggle straight away with no counter-performance on the other side.
That, I found, was amazing.
That was the most explosive issue, and it didn't explode.
It's not a question of that we have worn on them over to become armed combatants
or to join the ANC,
but I think that they have begun to understand what drives a black man to struggle,
what sort of commitment underlies it, what determination underlies it.
What does it mean when you address yourself to the question of freedom?
What price freedom?
The group listened to and closely questioned perspectives, goals, strategies, and tactics of the ANC.
The main area of concern arose over the ANC's resolve to maintain and intensify the armed struggle.
And in a joint communique, the Dakar Declaration,
the ANC agreed that armed struggle was not the only way out.
The conference unanimously expressed preference for a negotiated resolution of the South African question.
Participants recognised that the attitude of those in power
is the principal obstacle to progress in this regard.
Before this final news conference ended, a sharp reminder of such obstacles,
word of an assassination, reached Dakar and Thabo Mbeki.
We've just been informed that a colleague of mine, a member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC,
was killed in Switzerland on Wednesday.
So I'm saying that death is part of the actuality of all the people who are here.
And so when they say, we're ready to act together, we're ready to meet again,
in order to reinforce this process of common action, different strategies, no doubt,
but common action for a common goal, I think that's a very important action.
What happened in Dakar wasn't a negotiation. Neither side had such a mandate.
But there emerged something without which there can be no negotiation.
I think more myths and misunderstandings had been exploded in the last four days
than probably the last three decades in South Africa, on both sides.
And I think people will be unrealistic to expect the ANC to move ten steps to the right,
as from next week, or 50 Afrikaner delegates going back to Jan Smuts Airport and say,
I'm Mandela Awetu. It's not the kind of stuff we're talking about.
It's more subtle. It's far more important than that, I think.
The close personal contact over so many days, under different circumstances,
I think has convinced them that the ANC means what it says,
because clearly nobody could be on guard every day for 18 hours, for so many days,
such that if you were deceiving them, nothing would slip out.
Let me state my position clearly. I have not the slightest problem
in Thabo Mbeki being prime minister of my country, or my president.
I mean, I have problems with him as a person.
But I have no problem in being prime minister.
What had become important was not only the substance but the spirit of the meeting.
After four days in Dakar, the press left.
We stayed to record a private meeting, unlike any that had ever taken place in front of cameras.
Leaders of their delegations, Afrikaners and ANC, kept talking.
What some of us are saying in this discussion is take what may be what has been called a quantum leap.
Imagine yourself outside of these current processes of white politics.
Now imagine a situation, imagine a situation where Fansel Slabert stands, he joins the ANC.
I hope one day he will do that. He joins the ANC,
and he stands as an ANC candidate in Wetterkloof in Pretoria.
He's white, he's Afrikaner, and he says to this constituency,
we want a non-racial and a democratic South Africa.
We want a South Africa where you'll have the right to use your Afrikaans language.
You'll have the right to belong to the Dutch Reform Church.
Nobody's going to despise you. Nobody's going to nationalise your house.
You'll have a situation where there will be peace,
where there will no longer be a need to put a policeman at every street corner, armed.
That's the kind of future we want to build up.
And here I stand representing this organisation which says those things, vote for me.
I think he would stand a very, very strong chance of being elected.
What I'm thinking is, how do we get to that stage?
It could be that you, through various means, get the government to the negotiating table,
and they say, OK, we form a government which is genuinely democratic.
It could also be that it wouldn't come about that way,
and that we could then say, but how can we then win acceptance for you coming into the country?
In confronting South Africa's future, they discovered again the need to confront their past.
Just take the question of history, history teaching in syllabus.
Wouldn't it be better, wouldn't it be easier for whites, if whites could feel, OK,
we've got these whites still in control of state schools, or you could be semi-private schools,
and they'd rather sort of preside over the transition where we change the history
so that whites don't get quite a quick shock and say, oh, hell, I never knew such a history existed.
Maybe the best thing for our country, maybe the best thing is that the quantum leap
that Thabo is speaking about needs to have our people catapulted into it.
Herman, look, what has been wrong with South African history
is not that all the heroes were white and all the villains are black.
What was wrong with South African history is that it was falsified.
I mean, the very notion that South African history commences with the landing of Jan van Rivik,
I mean, that is falsification, you see.
Now, if you start from that premise, you are bound to end up with that sort of lie, you see,
which is in the history books.
I'll never forget the first time I went to the Kango Caves, they switched off the lights,
and they put on nice glowing lights and soft music there in Oatswerm,
and there was a voice that boomed through this huge cavern saying,
the history of South Africa started with the arrival of the white man in...
The most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life, oh, heard in my life.
But you see, that is what the average young Afrikaner is conditioned to,
that you are not part of his history.
You see, for instance, Herman says, I mean, what are we going to do now?
History at the moment has got white heroes.
The future history will have black heroes.
That's not, that's not, that's...
You see, again, it's taking, as I'm saying, this frozen race is fast.
There are white heroes.
There are very many white heroes.
Afrikaner white heroes.
And there are black villains.
And there are tremendous black villains.
Reverend McKenna, you know.
And there must appear there as villains.
And that's the context in which this future has got to operate.
Does the real resistance to change not lie in the civil service?
You know, that's where the real, the army, the bureaucrats,
who actually depend on the continuation of that state for their subsistence,
for their livelihood, for their privilege.
And in South Africa, it's a fact that there are about 600,000 whites
who are totally dependent on the continuation of the state structure for their survival.
And that's where the real resistance lies.
How do we cope with that?
That, to me, is the crunch of transition in South Africa.
We have, we've just bureaucratized ourselves into a position of impasse.
This point is very central to how we move from here to there.
We've got to battle very, very hard
to move as much of white South Africa as possible
to understand that the security, talking about Afrikaners,
the security of the Afrikaner people lies in a democratic South Africa.
The thing that was produced apartheid
to ensure the security of the Afrikaner people
is the thing that's produced this crisis.
That's anti-apartheid.
You see, we've got to get this message across.
It's not easy. We can't pretend it's easy.
It's very difficult.
We've got an opposing force which is going to resist this.
But it's a very important process of how we get from here to there
to get white South Africa to understand
that they've got a place in this future
and that even in terms of self-interest,
you know, let's have democracy.
The one thing that should not happen
is to consolidate those people, to strengthen them,
to assist in the extension of patronage
and the extension of co-option.
And this is a new area for us.
In fact, I think it's an area which somehow is different
to the kind of struggles in Russia in 1917
or in China or in France.
There are elements that we can take there and learn from.
But we have a problem here that...
You mean we can learn something from the Russian level?
We can certainly learn something from the Russian revolution.
How to avoid the mistakes they make.
The conference had ended, but not the journey.
In the 40-year history of apartheid,
Afrikaners had never taken such a journey.
It wasn't merely a matter of geography, but of identity.
They'd broken ranks with Afrikaner rule
to find out for themselves about the ANC.
They'd broken out of their isolation,
traveling from the heart of Afrikanerdom
to the heart of Africa, to see it for themselves.
The journey had begun years earlier for some,
like Bayer's Nordea, whose father was a founder of the Bruderbund,
the secret and powerful brotherhood of Afrikaners,
who himself became head of the Dutch Reformed Church,
the ideological backbone of Afrikaner rule.
I was a typical Afrikaner.
I subscribed to the policy of the Nationalist Party.
I preached apartheid.
I practiced apartheid.
I lived apartheid.
And I enjoyed apartheid.
It was only after that that a fundamental change came into my life.
My brother, to this day, is a constituency chairman for the National Party.
So is my mother, father, I'm still very much members of the National Party.
Oh, they are?
Yes, I didn't have a tradition of being in so-called white opposition.
I lived the full catastrophe of Afrikaner nationalism.
People like my father, people like my grandfather.
My grandfather was actually a policeman, a very senior policeman.
He was general.
He had different problems with discussing South African realities
with communists and radicals and whatever.
And you see, this is the problem with Afrikaners and with young white people.
You have to make a choice between what you know and the security you have
and the appreciation you have within your own community.
And you have to make a choice that would imply a choice of conscience.
One Afrikaner who made that choice is Max Dupriah, a journalist and still an Afrikaner.
I don't want to suggest that the Afrikaners would have to stop being Afrikaners.
I will never stop being an Afrikaner.
I mean, my friends in the right wing would probably not agree with me.
I think I'm a very good Afrikaner.
I'll tell you about my impeccable credentials later.
I mean, from the World War and the Great Trek right through.
But they don't accept that.
I think the Afrikaners, it's OK. Let them be a group. Let them be a group.
I mean, there's nothing wrong.
They've got a wonderful history, a history that I'm immensely proud of,
until not too long ago, until the Anglo-World War.
I mean, my people's history is really something to be proud of.
The language is one that I love with a passion.
It is a stunningly beautiful, young, vibrant language,
and incidentally one in which you can preach revolution so beautifully.
So, no, we don't want Afrikanerdom to deny their being Afrikaans.
But to get from here to where we've got to be,
a hell of a lot of people will have to do what we've done,
is to shake it off, not being Afrikaans, but the ideological part of it.
After Senegal, one of Africa's few multi-party democracies,
the South Africans were introduced to another ideology,
the revolutionary military dictatorship of Burkina Faso.
Here in Ouagadougou, 3,000 miles from home in a country most of them had never heard of,
they discovered that apartheid and P.W. Bota are issues on the lips of schoolchildren.
For any South African, there was cause for reflection
in the equatorial heat of the world's third poorest country,
about to have its fourth coup d'etat in seven years.
Certainly for Afrikaners like Bram Wiljon,
whose identical twin brother was once chief of the South African Defense Force,
there was a growing awareness of how their presence here would be seen at home.
To the majority of Afrikaners at home, it amounts to high treason.
It amounts to Afrikaners here coming, selling out the cause of the white man in South Africa,
the cause of the Afrikaner culture, and identity, so-called identity.
This is what it will mean in South Africa, unfortunately.
In South Africa, most Afrikaners see no future in one of their own.
Here's Nordea, who might have stood as prime minister in Pretoria,
standing instead with Thabo Mbeki in Ouagadougou,
laying the cornerstone of a monument against apartheid.
Most Afrikaners take no comfort in white South Africans entering the gates of a presidential palace
in the company of the ANC.
For ten days in three African countries,
they were welcome where they had never been welcome, not by heads of state.
It would be misleading to exaggerate the importance of these events,
but in Africa as elsewhere, perceptions can mean as much as reality.
Even the possible significance of a handshake from Jerry Rawlings, the leader of Ghana,
wasn't lost on an Afrikaner thinking of home.
We've all presented this as the Afrikaner ANC summit.
I'm not sure if that's true. It makes a nice copy.
But what is important is that the kids in the townships also saw it like that.
They have this very, very dark future.
Now we've seen all over the world what people do who are desperate, who have no future.
And this is what we've been seeing in South Africa.
Senseless violence.
I mean, what kind of person would necklace, would put a tie around someone and burn him to death and laugh?
And I mean, this is not trying to excuse the necklace. I mean, that's horrible.
But I ask myself the question, how can nice people, ordinary kids,
what drives them to do that kind of thing?
It's hopelessness. It's just seeing no hope in the future.
Maybe we helped a little bit to give them a little bit of hope
because they saw this is an Afrikaner ANC summit.
A meeting in Accra, Ghana, had the appearance of a summit,
but the atmosphere of an open hearing on the politics of apartheid.
Here, where 20 years earlier, African nations had considered a war of liberation against South Africa,
the South Africans were met by a curious and critical audience.
We like to call on the two delegations to try to address themselves to the suspicions that we have
and the misgivings that we have of this meeting.
We think that there is an attempt to play up what the media is calling liberalism
as against revolution, which is demanded by the situation in South Africa.
Side by side in this public forum, they were faced with the challenge of African skepticism.
What I'd like to say from the point of view of ANC is that we have no suspicions.
There's a standard test, which I don't use it only for white people.
There's a standard test that we use for anybody who says we are against apartheid.
We say act against it. Act against it.
I think this is a common suspicion, that whites want to protect their skins
now that the things are changing and they're coming from the ANC.
I can assure you the whites who are trying to maintain the state of emergency
are busy full time protecting their skins at the expense of the majority of people in that country.
If I really wanted to protect my skin as a white man, maintain my privileges and so on,
then I would obviously join the South African Defense Force and support Guetta,
because that's what he believes he wants to do.
We believe as whites that the only way you can participate in South Africa is to abandon racial domination,
is to seek common cause with your fellow citizens there and build a new society.
Whatever their differences about a new society,
Afrikaner and ANC agreed that a real summit, real negotiations, remain a long way off.
The real negotiations are going to be about, first of all,
a recognition that in the South African situation,
no group which has been historically conditioned to see itself as a racial group or an ethnic group
should ever have the space to dominate all the peoples of South Africa.
Black or white? Black or white.
It's about power. It's about central power. Who is going to call the shots in South Africa?
That's why these guys in the ANC and I truly go for that,
say that there is no reforming apartheid and it's impossible.
You can't reform apartheid. You've got to scrap it.
You've got to scrap it and share power. That's also become a South Africanism, which is not real.
We don't want to share power in their sense. We want to share power in your sense, maybe.
We want to really share power. We want to have the power in the hands of the majority of the people.
That's a process of allaying white fears.
Which is black power?
Which will be predominantly black, I suppose. Yes.
How do you allay white fears of black vengeance under majority rule in South Africa?
In reality, in reality, I don't think this problem exists of white fears of black vengeance.
In reality, I don't think it exists. Because white South Africa lives with black South Africa every day.
They work together and they rub shoulders every day.
And white South Africa knows very, very well that there isn't even an instinct among our people to slaughter white people.
Occasionally, some crazy white person will say, watch out for your black maids. They might put poison in your tea.
White South Africa doesn't believe it.
Whatever white South Africa believes, the reaction to Dakar was a chorus of resistance,
orchestrated by the far right of Afrikaner politics, the AWB, a response shared by many Afrikaners.
You don't speak or discuss the future of your country with a communist-inspired bunch of terrorists.
You fight them. The government is a people, my friend.
The future government of this country is Afrikaner people, the Boer people.
Awaiting the delegates in South Africa was a charge of treason,
a clear sign that negotiations with Afrikaners in Pretoria aren't the same as talks with dissonant Afrikaners in Dakar.
After Dakar, the delegates would go their separate ways, back home or back into exile.
But first they came here, to the island of Goree.
For some 200 years, millions of Africans were brought here, before being sent to the New World as slaves.
With chains around the arms and the necks.
Together they stood in a place where slavery and apartheid are treated equally,
a fact not lost on a historian who studied at the University of Wisconsin.
We have always been hopeful that the struggle to abolish apartheid would not be as costly in human life
as was the Civil War in the United States.
But just as it required war to bring about the end of slavery in the States,
if that's what it takes to bring about the end of apartheid, we have to do it.
Not because we want to, but because humanity requires that it be done.
And of course, yeah, in the middle there used to be a heavy iron ball that the slave had to carry.
For black and white South Africans, all of them dissidents, it was a place to reflect on where they'd been
and on where they were headed, knowing full well the journey wasn't over yet.
We are part of Africa. We should seek the fellowship of Africa.
We should share in the hardships of Africa.
We should bring about hope and not despair in Africa. Fellowship, but not apartheid.
What will it take to get the majority of your fellow Afrikaners to share that belief and conviction with you?
It will take time. It will take effort.
It may take a form of holocaust, and let's hope it's not going to be that.
The South African government says it's going to step up its campaign against the ANC.
The ANC says it will intensify the armed struggle. What happens next?
Well, that's what will happen next. The ANC has to intensify the struggle, the armed struggle, the political struggle has to.
And I think it's natural that the regime must hit back as hard as it can.
I think it's clear we are into a continuing process of a sharpening confrontation.
They had come as old enemies, looking for ways to turn confrontation into compromise, hoping to leave behind the legacy, if not the memories, of their past.
We have come here not because we agree on everything.
Our past histories have trapped us into misunderstandings and conflict.
But we have come here in a sense to escape the worst of that history and to build on what is good in it.
One of the phrases that I read in the slave quarters was a prayer.
It said, God, let my people who have suffered much be great.
We have experienced some of the greatness of the people of Senegal, who have transcended that past.
I think the prayer of Goray should become the prayer also of South Africa.
It would be tempting to end this story here, with God Bless Africa, the South African hymn the ANC has made its anthem.
Dakar seemed an important break in the tragic history of South Africa, an affirmation that all South Africans share a common humanity as well as a common homeland.
But the story doesn't end so easily, not inside South Africa.
In a black township less than a month after Dakar, the leaders of the Afrikaner delegation joined this procession of mourners.
They came here to help bury a black co-worker, killed in the fight against apartheid.
There's no telling how far in this journey they've come or have yet to go, only that for black and white South Africans, the message is the same.
The struggle was his life.
And the struggle was his death.
We have got to follow him.
The struggle continues.
The meetings in Dakar made headlines in South Africa, but the Bota government denounced the Afrikaners who attended and then dismissed the importance of the talks.
No one was surprised.
The ANC members returned to exile where they live under constant threat of attack by the South African government as they coordinate what they see as a continuous war of liberation in their homeland.
Afrikaners flew back to South Africa, some to face anger and reprisals, bitter family fights, and lost jobs.
For those who went to Senegal, black and white, the meetings were a dramatic personal journey of human contact and discovery.
But these forbidden talks are not necessarily significant to South Africa's political future, except in one way. As the pressures increase inside the country, more whites may seek genuine exchanges to begin to talk substance and to look beyond the opening dialogue that took place offstage in Dakar.
For whatever else happens, it is clear that one day South Africa will need leaders, black and white, who know what it takes to move beyond history and talk about the future.
I'm Judy Woodruff. Good night.
For a transcript of this program, please write to Frontline, Box 322, Boston, Massachusetts 02134.
Frontline is produced for the Documentary Consortium by WGBH Boston, which is solely responsible for its content.
Funding for this special Frontline series was provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
This program was produced by WGBH Boston, Massachusetts 02134.