Litnet

https://ujonlinepress.uj.ac.za/index.php/ujp/catalog/book/289

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert: Soekende profeet
Albert Grundlingh
UJ Press: Johannesburg, 2024
ISBN 978-0-906785-27-0

During my twilight years as a history lecturer, I used to start a third-year undergraduate module on modern South Africa by asking students to write – anonymously – on a scrap of paper a single word that they thought best summed up the country. Over roughly a decade, virtually everyone put down “apartheid”, except for a commendably thoughtful and witty handful who plumped for “diamonds”, “gold”, “biltong” and “melktert”. What better illustration to have wished for as confirmation of the caustic view of the Natal English poet and satirist Roy Campbell. In his 1928 mock-epic, “The wayzgoose”, he concluded that South Africa was “a land renowned both far and wide/ For politics and little else beside”.

Almost inevitably, then, the notable life of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert is a story stamped by the rough and tumble of South African politics. Yet, the author of this astute and intriguing biography is too good a scholar not to explore the significance of what ingredients beside the public political persona shaped his subject into the historically significant figure he became. And his portrait of Slabbert is made all the more intriguing on account of his complex and independent character, which, as this book rightly concludes, made his life resemble something of a “mosaiek” (286), not easily pinned down to one or two dimensions. It is, as Albert Grundlingh shows, this that fashioned his fate – that of being an important but essentially subordinate Afrikaner liberal, often on the brink of bigger things, but never getting there and never being accorded a spot in the “heldergalery” of contemporary South African politics.

First published in English as Slabbert: Man on a mission by Jonathan Ball in 2021, Albert Grundlingh’s biography has already been reviewed favourably, including in a lengthy and detailed appreciation on LitNet itself three years ago. Here it is again, in an Afrikaans-language version which has Slabbert as a “Soekende profeet” – a more telling subtitle than its predecessor’s “Man on a mission”. That implies a singleness of purpose, which can scarcely be seen as having been a strong point of his life.

Although it is at the risk of going over the same ground covered by earlier reviewers, it is still worth recording the basic Slabbert story. After matriculating from a dual-medium high school in 1958, he enrolled at Stellenbosch University with both theology and rugby in his sights. But when religion lost its spell, he switched to sociology, the academic holy grail of others of a very different stripe, most obviously HF Verwoerd. Drawn into the academic world early, he landed a junior lecturing post at Stellenbosch while still working on his doctorate, before subsequently stretching his legs and moving to Rhodes University, which Slabbert found to be a mixed bag. While finding it positive initially, it gradually lost its shine, not least because he felt that there was “te veel dooie hout in die departement” (27).

An individual with itchy feet, he was then lured back to Stellenbosch for a couple of years, before UCT dangled the prospective prize of head of sociology. Slabbert failed to get that, but found favour with students because of his personable manner. It was Johannesburg’s turn next in the early 1970s, when the University of the Witwatersrand appointed him professor and head of department at the precocious age of 33. Even though – or possibly because – it was in sociology, Slabbert soared like a campus comet. Whether or not it was too much too soon, it was not enough for a man with a twitchy nose and pressing missionary instincts in his humanitarian approach to the world.

As Grundlingh teases out skilfully, Slabbert was a prominent figure in fringe, free-thinking Afrikaner circles in the 1960s and 1970s, searching for an alternative home to what he terms “die nasionalistiese kraal” (47). Throwing in his lot with the opposition Progressives, in the 1974 general election he stood as the party’s candidate for Rondebosch and won. This time, it was a bold Slabbert move into parliamentary politics which came off well. A mere five years later, he ended up as leader of the Progressive Party and of the parliamentary opposition. Established as a figurehead of white anti-apartheid politics, he was even able to draw some electioneering blood from the National Party, becoming something of a Jan Smuts of his day – only without the silly khaki shorts, gallery of British and Commonwealth medals, and philosophical mumbo jumbo.

But these few years of promise and progress ran into the sand in the early 1980s. In opposing PW Botha’s doomed tricameral parliament shenanigans, which Slabbert denounced as a dish of “vrot eiers” (106), the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) found itself in the same boycott camp as the far right. Backed into an unenviable corner, it was hit hard. Having worked vigorously for the party, Slabbert found the reversal a bitter pill to swallow. It also signalled that the end of his foray into parliamentary politics was looming.

Grundlingh paints a full picture of the ferment in which Slabbert found himself as the 1980s unfolded, with the birth of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and a daunting tally of other touchy issues which landed on his plate, including dealing with Inkatha, the dilemma of sanctions, agitation over conscription, the deceit and fiddling of the National Party and an increasingly over-mighty security apparatus. Increasingly troubled by such affairs, in 1986 he threw in the towel, having concluded that the parliamentary route was a road to nowhere. It was not a happy ending for Slabbert, nor for many of his prominent fellow travellers, who felt they had been betrayed by a brainy associate who lacked the guts to stay the course for his party.

Although a parliamentary casualty, Slabbert had not lost his appetite for anti-apartheid causes. He took these up in the flourishing realm of NGO activity, setting up the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (IDASA), assisting the Open Society Foundation and involving himself in several educational and think tank initiatives concerned with nonracial democracy and common citizenship. He also facilitated under-the-table encounters with the still-banned ANC, the most prominent of which was the showy 1987 meeting in Dakar, Senegal, between noteworthy Afrikaner dissidents and representatives of the exiled movement.

Though in later years Slabbert grew wise to the rapacious nature of the ANC, at first he was rather wide-eyed in his view of what it promised. The author quotes the Die Burger journalist Chris Louw, who concluded two decades after his trip to Dakar, “Die ANC se doelwit was bevryding, nie demokrasie nie …. Demokrasie was maar net die onvermydelike newe-produk, nooit die doelwit nie” (205).

Unsurprisingly, there was no place for Slabbert in the post-apartheid negotiations of the 1990s, a regrettable absence from a table at which he deserved to occupy a reserved chair. Still, he kept himself busy, dabbling in philanthropy and business, and never losing his independent intellect and critical edge, sniping at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as mostly a political pantomime, and doing service on an Electoral Task Team charged with reforming South Africa’s laughably unaccountable parliamentary system to try to make it more directly answerable to fed-up voters. At the time of writing, that has yet to bear any fruit. It was, in its way, a return to Slabbert’s parliamentary beginnings, when in earlier decades he was elected to be an MP by constituency voters and not because he had been favoured for a seat by party bosses. Almost equally circular, if far more poignant, was a move back to Stellenbosch when he was appointed as the university’s chancellor shortly before his death at the fairly young age of 70.

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In tackling the hopscotch existence of a complicated man who has generated competing and conflicting opinions, Albert Grundlingh has produced a meticulously researched, highly readable and very well-rounded portrayal of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert.

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In tackling the hopscotch existence of a complicated man who has generated competing and conflicting opinions, Albert Grundlingh has produced a meticulously researched, highly readable and very well-rounded portrayal of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. There is a striking cover portrait that exudes a brooding romanticism. Near the end, there is a nice little selection of rather grainy photographs. What these nine chapters miss, though, is an index – surely essential for any biography.

But this is a tiny reservation when set against this volume’s achievement. Instead of presenting Slabbert in the slightly hackneyed way in which he has sometimes been depicted – as an enigma, a talented failure, a tragedy of unfulfilled political promise – the author goes to considerable lengths to explain why and how he turned out to be the fidgety figure he became. The title of chapter one, “Herwaarts en derwaarts”, sums him up perfectly. A troubled childhood can have played no small role in accentuating his drifting qualities, sustained by his broad capabilities. With his parents either absent or hitting the bottle, a dysfunctional early domestic life was surely an insecure personal base from which to build a major career in public life. Along with chopping and changing between this and that was Slabbert’s idealistic, missionary-minded sense of a calling to right what was wrong with a racist South Africa, and the disillusioning frustrations in being repeatedly thwarted.

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The notion that Frederik van Zyl Slabbert may have been the best leader South Africa never had has to be wide of the mark, as any reader of this empathetic and clear-sighted biography would understand. If anything, he was more of an anachronism in the crass world of South African politics – simply too intellectual, sceptical, uncertain and independently critical.

.........

The notion that Frederik van Zyl Slabbert may have been the best leader South Africa never had has to be wide of the mark, as any reader of this empathetic and clear-sighted biography would understand. If anything, he was more of an anachronism in the crass world of South African politics – simply too intellectual, sceptical, uncertain and independently critical. Academic detachment and a questioning brain meant that the blood in his veins remained “immer soekend” (286). It was a temperament that was never going to be easily reconciled with the blind loyalty, conformity and partisanship required of party politics. In many ways, it appears that Van Zyl Slabbert was not only too intellectual and too searching in his impulses; he was also too decent for his country’s political circus.

Also read:

Slabbert: Man on a mission. A biography by Albert Grundlingh: a review

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert (1940–2010) en die kwessie van Afrikaneridentiteit