Lessons from the fringe politics of South Africa’s past

Two things happened this week which stirred up memories of a surreal, yet fascinating, day in my life as a journalist more than 30 years ago.

The first was the row about AfriForum’s Ernst Roets and his interview with right-wing American podcaster Tucker Carlson, where the idea of “self-determination” for the Afrikaner (code for a Volkstaat, if you ask me) was tossed around.

The second was the death of GaRankuwa medic Dr Gomolemo Mokae, once a leader of the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo), which espoused the Black Consciousness (BC) ideology.

In the early ’90s, most of the press corps in this country were covering what they thought was the only political show in town – the National Party and the ANC negotiating an end to apartheid – and I gravitated towards the politics of the fringe, both on the left and the right.

And that’s how, on that interesting, illuminating, yet weird day, I came across BC and the Volkstaat concepts as expressed by two of their leading proponents.

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In both cases, looking back, it was probably risky in some aspects covering the outer limits of SA politics. BC adherents didn’t exactly trust ignorant white journalists and the “Boere” had a similar dislike for, and distrust of, a “soutie” journalist.

Yet both Mokae and the Boerestaat Party’s Robert van Tonder had one thing in common: They were both gentlemen and intellectuals and prepared to have a deep and unemotional conversation about their beliefs.

Mokae kept me spellbound at his surgery in GaRankuwa while he gave me a quick tour of BC ideology and its roots and connections in the burgeoning black intellectual ferment which began happening in the 1940s and 1950s.

I heard names like Touissaint Louverture, black former slave turned general who led the revolution in Haiti and who was one on the inspirations for the movement which became Black Consciousness.

Mokae spoke also about Steve Biko, whom he met briefly once… enough to inspire a lifetime’s activism, however.

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Mokae made me understand that BC was about being pro-black and not anti-white. When I read further into the life of Biko, I found confirmation of that.

Van Tonder was probably one of the country’s leading intellectuals and at his house in Randburg – completed with a flagpole flying the flag of the Transvaal Republic, wrapped in barbed wire so nobody could scale it and pull down the flag – he told me passionately about the Boers and their desire for freedom.

By Boers he meant those who left the Cape Colony in 1838 to get away from those Afrikaners he scathingly called the “Cape Dutch”.

The desire for a “Boerestaat” was no more, in his eyes, than a yearning to have restored the land stolen from the Boers by the British.

And, indeed, the Transvaal Republic was internationally recognised before Perfidious Albion decided to get its hands on the country’s mineral riches.

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From that day, I realised that South Africa, in common with the rest of the continent, cannot be understood in simplistic black-and-white… and by that I do not mean race.

I mean the truth lies in the shades of grey, the nuances which our increasingly polarised society refuses to acknowledge.

I believe that were they both alive today, Mokae and Van Tonder would, as people destined to be buried in their African homeland they would never abandon, have sat down and had a civilised and erudite conversation over a cup of coffee.

And they would have listened to each other… as we should be doing now.