Listening to the silent majority

[12]

A man whom I admire considerably, and who opposes sanctions, is the Chief Minister of KwaZulu, Mangosothu Buthelezi. I read his speeches and time and again noted his sharp intelligence and continued call to reason on the South African political scene. Not long ago he assured the Minister President of Bavaria, Dr HCM Streibl, that he realized that the cherished ideal of ‘one man, one vote’ brought terror to the hearts and minds of many white South Africans. ‘They are wrong in being afraid of real democracy, but it would also be wrong for me not to recognise that the rightness and wrongness of something does not create or destroy real fear.’ Buthelezi further recognized that, unlike whites from other former colonial African states, white South Africans had nowhere else to go and had to live or die where they were. ‘Nothing Africa could have ever produced by way of insurgents or revolutionaries could match the real damage that white South Africans could inflict on a government imposed on them by force.’ He stressed that blacks likewise would fiercely reject anything imposed on them. Therefore, neither party should impose on the other and both groups would have to compromise. ‘If we negotiate towards a multi-party democracy in which the “winner-

[p. 14]

[p. 15]

takes-all” principle is toned down in one way or another, there are prospects of success. It is with this in mind that I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I will have to keep my own cherished ideals somewhat suspended while I explore every possible constitutional form which maintains the basic principles of democracy. I am quite prepared to look at a federal or canton system in which there is the maximum devolution of power and in which consensus politics are enhanced.’

Here was a black leader, who makes so much sense, and yet his emotions apparently took over when the name Mavuso was mentioned to him. Here was a man who didn't miss a chance to stress the need of black unity, who condemned the South African Council of Churches for ‘Christian absolutism and adventurism’, but who apparently was unable to control himself in the face of a personal controversy with a former friend and colleague. On top of it all, on the very day I received Buthelezi's fax message, I read in the papers that the Chief Minister of KwaZulu had met the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, in Cape Town. Why would Buthelezi condemn Mavuso for talking to whites in the TPA, while he himself sits down with a white ‘baas’ in Cape Town? One does not have to have studied Immanuel Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, to understand at first glance, that Buthelezi's simplistic attitude in the case of John Mavuso remains inexplicable.