What Thabo Mbeki, the Broederbond and a minister from Montagu can still teach us

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

Over the past few days I have had several conversations with Dirk Marais about a visit he made to the United States in 1986. Marais now has to think back almost 40 years, and some of the details have returned gradually, with him sometimes phoning me again because he had remembered something or wanted to correct a detail.

I have found this process fascinating because what initially seemed an interesting story about community work in Montagu gradually became part of a much bigger story about a time when deeply divided South Africans were beginning to talk to one another.

Marais arrived in Montagu in 1978 as a minister and became closely involved with the Montagu and Ashton Community Service, known as MAG, which had already been established through cooperation between churches and people in the community.

He had experience in community development and this became an important part of his ministry, bringing him into contact with a South Africa that could quite easily remain outside the experience of a white congregation at the time because, once you entered communities and started listening to people, poverty, inequality and the consequences of apartheid were no longer political ideas that could be discussed at a distance but realities encountered in peopleâs homes, working conditions and in the very different opportunities available to children growing up only a few kilometres from one another.

It was this work that eventually led to David Bonbright of the Ford Foundation inviting Marais to the US in 1986 to speak about the community development work being done through MAG. Marais went there to talk about what was happening in a relatively small community in the Western Cape and could hardly have imagined that he would find himself among people who were beginning some of the conversations that would eventually help South Africa find a way out of apartheid.

The gathering brought together South Africans from remarkably different political backgrounds, including people associated with the ANC, people from the liberal political tradition and, perhaps most surprisingly when one considers the political climate of the time, members of the Afrikaner Broederbond. Among those present were Thabo Mbeki, Mac Maharaj, Seretse Choabi, Charles Villa-Vicencio, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Pieter de Lange, who was at the time chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond, while Peggy Dulany, a US philanthropist from the Rockefeller family, was also involved.

An improbable gathering

The political context is important because the ANC was still banned, Nelson Mandela was still in prison, and South Africa was experiencing escalating political violence, while the Afrikaner Broederbond was regarded by many opponents of apartheid as one of the secret centres of Afrikaner nationalist power. Looking back from where we are today, it is difficult to appreciate just how improbable it must have seemed that people from these worlds would sit in the same room and begin listening to one another.

There is another part of this history that I think we sometimes overlook because we tend to remember political change among Afrikaners as though it suddenly happened when FW de Klerk stood up in Parliament in February 1990 and announced the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations.

The Broederbond was certainly not a liberal organisation, and there is no reason to rewrite its history or its deep involvement with Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, but by the middle of the 1980s something was beginning to shift within parts of Afrikaner society, including among people in institutions that very few black or English-speaking South Africans would probably have expected to question the political order from which Afrikaners had benefited.

Pieter de Lange was one of those people and, by 1985, he had already argued within Broederbond circles that the old defensive strategies would not provide an answer indefinitely and that Afrikaners would have to find a negotiated way forward while they were still able to help shape what that future might look like. This makes what happened at the 1986 gathering particularly interesting because historical accounts confirm that Mbeki and De Lange subsequently spent about five hours talking to one another, with their discussion dealing, among other things, with the future position of Afrikaners in a democratic South Africa and what Afrikaners feared they might lose.

Marais was not part of that conversation and has never suggested that he was, but he remembers the significance attached to it and believes that something important happened when people who had understood one another largely through the political categories of the time actually began talking.

De Lange spoke about concerns around Afrikaner identity, language, education and religious freedom, and accounts of the encounter suggest that Mbeki discovered that what he was hearing was more complicated than simply an attempt to preserve white political power, while De Lange came away with an understanding of the ANC that was different from the picture many Afrikaners had been given.

A weakening of preconceived ideas

I find this part of the story particularly interesting because preconceived ideas were beginning to weaken on both sides, not because the differences between them had suddenly disappeared or because anybody had forgotten the history that had brought South Africa to that point, but because people had started encountering one another rather than simply talking about one another.

There were difficult and sometimes angry exchanges in these encounters and there is no reason to romanticise what was happening, but perhaps that makes them even more significant because the process did not begin with everybody agreeing; it began when people who profoundly disagreed became willing to enter the same room and discover that the person sitting across from them was more complicated than the picture they had carried into that room.

We know what happened afterwards and can easily read inevitability back into these events, but the people sitting in those rooms in 1986 did not know that Mandela would be released four years later, that the ANC would be unbanned, that negotiations would follow or that South Africans would vote together in 1994. They were beginning conversations without knowing where they would lead, and I think there is something important in remembering that, because so much of what eventually becomes possible starts with people being prepared to cross boundaries before there is any guarantee that anything will come from doing so.

When the gathering was over, Marais returned to New York with Mbeki and a small group of the other participants. The Broederbond members who had attended the larger gathering were not part of this smaller group. They stayed at the New York Helmsley Hotel and had dinner together that evening. Marais remembers Peggy Dulany being at the dinner, but was quite insistent that it was not another political meeting, and the participants simply shared a meal after the conference.

A question of community work

During the evening, Marais approached Mbeki to ask him something and, interestingly, his question had nothing to do with the Broederbond, negotiations or what the political future of South Africa might look like. Marais and others involved in community work were working under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and at times questioned whether what they were doing actually made any difference, because against the enormity of apartheid and the political conflict taking place in the country the work of a community organisation in a town such as Montagu could understandably seem very small.

Mbeki agreed that they could speak the following morning and, after breakfast and before Mbeki and Charles Villa-Vicencio left for the airport, Marais joined them in their hotel room. Marais asked Mbeki whether there was really any value in the community work they were doing in South Africa and, although he does not claim to remember every word of a conversation that took place almost four decades ago, Marais remembers the substance of Mbekiâs response very clearly: they should go back and continue because there was an enormous amount of work that needed to happen on the ground in South Africa and the kind of work in which Marais and others were involved was part of what was needed.

Marais has remembered that conversation for almost 40 years, and I think I understand why: within the space of those few days two very different dimensions of South Africaâs future had somehow come together.

People representing political worlds that had regarded one another as enemies were beginning the difficult process of discovering that some of their assumptions about one another might not be as certain as they had thought, and, in a much quieter conversation, there was this other question about what would have to happen in ordinary communities if South Africa succeeded in changing its political system.

South Africa needed both because apartheid had to be dismantled politically and this eventually required negotiations between people who had regarded one another as enemies, but a political settlement, however remarkable, could never by itself undo what generations of apartheid had done to communities and relationships.

Our Constitution could create equal citizenship, remove racial laws and provide an extraordinary framework based on dignity, equality and freedom, but it could not automatically overcome poverty and inequality, rebuild relationships between people or ensure that children born into very different circumstances would have equal opportunities in life.

An unintended consequence

When I shared Maraisâ story with a prominent South African community development practitioner, she raised something that has stayed with me, because she believes that one of the less-discussed consequences of the transition was the weakening of community organisation after 1994. Much of the leadership that had been active in communities moved into Parliament and, from 1996, into local government, while she also remembers an argument at the time that community organisation was no longer needed in the way it had been before, something which many of those working in community development at the time found very difficult to understand.

I think this deserves more reflection because perhaps one of the unintended consequences of our remarkable political transition was that we came to expect the democratic state to carry responsibilities that communities and civil society would still have to carry alongside it. We understandably invested enormous hope in the new state and in the institutions that had to be built, but, in the process, we may have underestimated how important strong communities, local leadership, community organisations and relationships between people would continue to be.

This makes Maraisâ conversation with Mbeki in 1986 even more interesting because, as Marais remembers it, Mbeki said there was an enormous amount of work that had to be done on the ground and community work was part of it. Almost 40 years later I wonder whether we have fully understood how important that observation was, because the state can build schools, provide grants, employ social workers, deliver services and establish the policies within which a more just society becomes possible, but it cannot manufacture the relationships that hold a community together or replace the neighbour who notices that a child has stopped going to school, the community worker who knows that a family is struggling before the situation becomes a crisis, or the local organisation that has earned enough trust for people to walk through its door.

There is another part of Maraisâ story that speaks directly to South Africa today, because we have become very good at talking about one another and increasingly struggle to talk to one another. Race remains an easy way of mobilising fear and anger, foreign nationals can quickly become scapegoats for social and economic problems with much deeper causes, and social media makes it remarkably easy for us to surround ourselves with people who already agree with us while rewarding certainty, anger and humiliation much more readily than listening or the difficult attempt to understand why another person sees the world differently.

Talking to one another does not mean avoiding difficult arguments or pretending that profound differences do not exist, and Mbeki and De Lange certainly did not enter their conversation without history because they represented worlds separated by apartheid, exile, political struggle, nationalism and profound mistrust. What interests me is that they were prepared to enter the room and apparently came out of it understanding something about the other that they had not understood before, which seems particularly relevant at a time when we increasingly decide what other South Africans think before we have spoken to them.

The need for humility

I find myself wondering what the equivalent rooms are that we are no longer prepared to enter today and who the South Africans are whom we think we understand so well that we no longer feel the need to listen to them. Perhaps one of the lessons from those unlikely encounters in the 1980s is that talking across a divide does not require us to surrender our convictions or pretend that history does not matter, but it does require enough humility to accept that the person on the other side may not be exactly who we have decided they are.

There is also the other question Marais asked in 1986, and perhaps this is the one that has stayed with me most, because almost 40 years later there is still an enormous amount of work to do on the ground.

In the rural communities in which I work, children do not experience poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, violence, struggling schools and family stress as separate social problems because they often occur together in the same household and sometimes in the life of the same child, with consequences that accumulate over years and cannot be addressed through a once-off intervention or a programme that disappears when the funding cycle ends.

Working in communities requires patience and relationships, and it requires people who are prepared to remain involved long enough to understand what is happening, to notice when children begin falling through the cracks and to support families before difficulties become crises. Young people need opportunities through which they can begin imagining a future different from the circumstances into which they were born, and none of this happens quickly, which is why those involved in this work still sometimes ask the same question Marais asked Mbeki in that New York hotel room in 1986: Does what we are doing actually make a difference?

Two takeaways

Perhaps there are two things worth remembering from Maraisâ story, that South Africaâs political transition required people who were prepared to cross enormous political divides and discover that the people on the other side were sometimes more complicated than the pictures they had formed of one another, while building the society that was supposed to follow that transition required something much less visible and more enduring: people prepared to remain on the ground, organise, build relationships, support families and accompany communities over time.

Our political settlement was an extraordinary achievement, but it was never going to complete the work of building a different society, and perhaps somewhere along the way we expected too much from the political transition and underestimated how much of the work would still have to happen between people, in families and in communities. That work was already happening in places such as Montagu before 1994, and it has continued, often imperfectly and with many disappointments, throughout the years of our democracy.

Almost 40 years after Marais sat with Mbeki and Villa-Vicencio in a New York hotel room, his question remains as relevant as it was then because South Africa still needs people who are prepared to enter rooms with people they think they already understand and discover that things may be more complicated than their assumptions, while at the same time we need people who are prepared to remain in communities doing the much less visible work of building relationships, supporting families and creating opportunities for children and young people. There is still a great deal of work to be done on the ground and every reason to continue doing it. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.