Special Hearings — Political Party Hearings — 1996-08-20

SEN SELF: Chairperson, thank you very much Tony.  As Tony has said my task is to describe to you the context of the times in which we operated and which we tried to fulfil the roles which we set for ourselves.
 In order to do that, it is necessary for me to move back before 1960 and in fact to the 1948 general election.  Chairperson the National Party was elected as the government of South Africa in 1948 on a programme of Afrikaner domination.  The party's election platform and subsequent policies were directed to advance and promote white Afrikaner interests, but over the years were broadened to include the protection and promotion of the interests of whites generally.
 Central to promoting white interests, was depriving blacks, coloureds and indians of their basic human rights, including political rights, rights of permanent residence, educational rights, family rights, labour rights, rights of citizenship.  Initially the National Party government's policy was described generically as "baasskap", which Prime Minister Strydom once defined as mastery, domination and compulsion.
 The policy became far more sophisticated as time passed and it was described by a variety of different names, particularly during the premiership of Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd, who sought to promote apartheid as a philosophy granting freedom and equality within the context of separate development.
 This notwithstanding, the elements of mastery, domination and compulsion remained central to its operation and the policies and legislation which gave it substance.  The parliamentary opposition for much of this time, the United Party, had policies which differed in style but not in substance  from those of the National Party.
 Described as white leadership with justice, the policy of the United Party sought to (indistinct) some of the harsher consequences of apartheid, but not to change its basis power relationship.
 The dominant political ethos of the white establishment at that time, was that black majority rule was unacceptable.  This ethos was also reinforced by whites' perception of isolation and international disapproval.  The government skilfully portrayed South Africa as central to the East West conflict and fed the white electorate with stories of the strategic importance of the country in the cold war.
 Black resistance to the policy of apartheid was presented not as a struggle for liberation, but as a consequence of Soviet manipulation aimed at undermining the bastion of the defence of the West, the total onslaught syndrome.   This had at least two results.
 First it provided justification for ever more punitive, secretive and restrictive security measures and secondly it portrayed opposition to the government as disloyal and even traitorous.
 During the 1980's Mr P.W. Botha who had succeeded Vorster as Prime Minister in 1978 embarked on his process of reform away from the rigid apartheid ideology of Verwoerd.  His adapt or die speech in Upington in August of 1979 heralded a number of reforms in the socio-economic  and political fields.
 Amongst the former were the relaxation of job reservation provisions and the scrapping of pass laws.  Political reform focused on the tri-cameral constitution of 1983.  At a special congress of the National Party in 1986, Mr Botha persuaded the delegates to accept the fact that a constitutional solution have to be found within the framework of a single as opposed to a fragmented South Africa.
 Mr Botha realised that demographic changes combined with the socio-economic reforms that were taking place in South Africa, would inevitably have political consequences.  However, his obsession with the total onslaught manipulated by Moscow, and his inability to come to terms with the concept of a black political majority, resulted in him becoming locked into a strategy which combined incremental socio-economic reforms with strict National Party government control and the management of the process of black political "liberation".
 By bringing coloureds and indians into the Parliamentary process via the tri-cameral constitution, Mr Botha helped to undermine the concept which had persisted since 1910, of white exclusiveness in South Africa's national legislature.
 At the same time, be deliberately excluding blacks from the parliamentary process, Mr Botha sowed the seeds of the destruction of his own constitutional model and contributed to a massive increase of both internal and external pressure for a fundamental change away from apartheid.
 The more his government tried to control and manage the process of black political "liberation", the more his government was met with black resistance, supported increasingly by the international community.
 The more the resistance, the more the repression.  The more the repression, the more the resistance.  Until on the 12th of June 1986, his government declared a nation wide state of emergency, resulting in a spate of bannings, detentions and restrictions which continued until after Botha had resigned as State President in August 1989.
 During the whole period of the existence of the Democratic Party and its predecessors, dating back to the founding of the Progressive Party in November 1959, the politics of the ruling National Party and the apparatus of the State which it controlled, was geared to prevent black citizens of becoming a political majority in South Africa.
 No price, whether it was in the field of government, or of human rights, or of the rule of law, or of human dignity, was to be too high a price to pay in order to achieve this negative objective.

MR LEON: Thank you James.  The next part of our presentation, Mr Chairperson, on the formation of the Progressive Party and the (indistinct) the face of apartheid, and parliamentary opposition to it, will be presented by Mrs Suzman.