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Dr Frene Ginwala (1932 to 2023), former parliamentary speaker, confidante of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, and admired ANC campaigner, has died aged 90.
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Dr Frene Ginwala (1932 to 2023), former parliamentary speaker, confidante of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, and admired ANC campaigner, has died aged 90.
I first got to know Frene in 1985, when she was attached to the Commonwealth Institute and the ANC’s London office. In those days, there was quite a bit of discreet “toenadering” between the South African business and academic community and the ANC, and she was a leading figure in this regard. There were various platforms like the Southern Africa Study Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Royal Africa Society, UK-SA business groups, and sundry bodies representing East and West Africa. To this seething mix of informed opinion (where South Africa was always very high on the agenda of topics) can be added the venerable anti-apartheid movement, visiting academics and a large contingent of extremely knowledgeable journalists, writers and scholars – people like Merle Lipton, Anthony Sampson (active with Drum magazine in the old Sophiatown days), Stan Uys (doyen of the South African press corps in London), John Battersby, Denis Herbstein, Fleur de Villiers and a host of others. The list is long. I recall Johan Degenaar arriving to drink from the well. Writers included Justin Cartwright. The South African mining houses and other interested parties active in the financial city also had extremely well-connected executives and public relations specialists who were well plugged in with most of the important political actors on the South African scene, including with the ANC. Mike Spicer comes to mind, and Peter Carlton-Jones. And, of course, we mustn’t forget the South African embassy, the largest then abroad, with a phalanx of talented diplomats like Denis Worrall and Rusty Evans, who missed very little of the evolving relationship between Britain and South Africa. They knew as well as anyone that big change was in the wings. This was an astonishing interlude of "reaching out" between protagonists who only months before had been “enemies” to one another, and ironically it was Thatcher’s London that provided the neutral ground on which to conduct these seminal discussions and put out feelers. Her closest advisor on South Africa was the amazingly effective Robin Renwick, and he was also a frequent attendee at these political soirées.
Many were the meetings I attended at Chatham House and various London clubs, as well as the Africa Centre in Covent Garden, at which Frene was present with captains of industry – both Afrikaans and English speakers – from South Africa and Britain, participating on a “no names, no pack drill” basis. Some of them even enjoyed the confidence of PW Botha, “die Groot Krokodil”, and bravely stood up to him when challenged on what they thought they were doing on these visits abroad.
Involved South Africans living in London acted as go-betweens and fixers when the occasion demanded it. The first meetings between the ANC and what used to be called “big” business took place from January 1985 onwards, and they were largely exploratory. The discussions generally centred on differing interpretations of the ANC’s “Freedom Charter” and whether, in the event of an ANC government, wholesale nationalisation would follow. Frene’s line, powerfully argued, was that the ANC was committed to a modern democratic state which would respect persons and property, but would not compromise its principles in the process and would not accept halfway measures. There were still voices in the South African business establishment supportive of some kind of confederal constitutional set-up that fell short of one-man-one-vote majority rule; but one by one, after meeting Frene, they accepted the inevitability of the future. That was my impression, in any event.
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Frene, elegant and always immaculately dressed, was appointed by the ANC as its diplomatic “point person” to meet visiting senior executives from Johannesburg, and her intelligent feedback to ANC president Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki (both then living in the UK) and others was widely regarded as an important contribution to the expansion of the discussion.
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Frene, elegant and always immaculately dressed, was appointed by the ANC as its diplomatic “point person” to meet visiting senior executives from Johannesburg, and her intelligent feedback to ANC president Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki (both then living in the UK) and others was widely regarded as an important contribution to the expansion of the discussion. Later that year (1985), this involved a meeting at the highest level led by Gavin Relly of the Anglo American company, with top representatives of organised business in South Africa on the one side, and a top representative of the Afrikaans press, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki (son of ANC veteran Govan Mbeki) and advisors on the other side. The meeting was held in Lusaka and showed a courageous stance by the business community, since contact with the ANC was illegal at the time: it was still a “banned” organisation.
PW Botha, then president, was said to be apoplectic, but did nothing. The ice had been broken and the rest, as they say, is history, with newly emboldened Afrikaans academics and journalists, led by Van Zyl Slabbert, travelling to Dakar for a ground-breaking meeting with the ANC in 1987. By then, PW Botha was on his way out and FW de Klerk was taking over as president. Within a couple of years, he felt politically able to unban the ANC entirely.
Frene’s contribution to these historic years was always known to the cognoscenti, and she has been garlanded with appropriate honours from universities and institutions around the world. But the general public, I have always felt, never fully appreciated the bridge-building note she struck in her interactions with all South African actors. She radiated optimism that “all would be well”, and in this respect she and Nelson Mandela, with whom she was on the closest of terms, were completely ad idem. It would not be over-egging it to say that it was a relative handful of articulate ANC activists like Frene, during the build-up to the release of Mandela, who formed such an atmosphere of confidence in the outcome of what would happen, once democracy was achieved and indeed recognised in the international corridors of power where the key decisions on such matters as sanctions were decided.
Frene was at home in the sophisticated world of British academia, with its tradition of Socratic debate (she gained an LLB from the University of London and degrees from Oxford, where she was an honorary fellow at Linacre College), and she was adept at keeping conversation, even on the most contentious political topics, at an unheated level. However, she also had a steely will, and never hesitated to make clear that the ANC would take whatever steps were necessary to secure democracy for South Africa.
She regarded herself as a soldier of the ANC, and her young life was lived at a high-octane pitch of adventure. She might have been the original inspiration behind the popular framed saying on many a teenage girl’s wall today: “She believed she could, and so she did.”
From early on, Frene was forged in the furnace heat of the South African liberation struggle. Born into a South African Parsi Indian family, she became involved in ANC politics and the Indian Congress at a very young age in KwaZulu-Natal. She read law at the University of London and returned to South Africa to train as a lawyer.
After 1960 when the ANC was banned, she went into exile, helping senior members of the ANC like Oliver Tambo to avoid arrest and escape abroad. Tambo settled in London as ANC president in exile. Employing her writing skills, Frene then worked as a broadcaster in Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania, where she achieved much to help the ANC establish itself as an effective organisation in exile. Later, she moved to the UK, where she contributed articles on steps, including sanctions, to be taken to free South Africa from apartheid.
She was soon promoted to head of the political research unit in the office of Oliver Tambo, and served as ANC spokesperson in the UK on sanctions, the nuclear programme and the arms and oil embargo of South Africa. She returned to South Africa after the ANC had been unbanned by FW de Klerk, and took up her role as speaker of the first democratic parliament after the election in 1994.
Her personal strengths, quite apart from her years as speaker of the house, led to her serving as chair of a number of committees, including the Global Coalition for Africa, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (SA), the Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum, and the International Parliamentary Union (SA). She is a former member of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Advisory Panel of High-Level Personalities on African Development, and she served as a commissioner of the International Commission on Human Security.
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Frene Ginwala was a loyalist to the bone and to the end. With hindsight, one may recognise that the golden years of South Africa’s rainbow period were to be seen in the presidential era of Nelson Mandela and, perhaps to a lesser extent, thereafter in the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Frene stood down as speaker after ten years, to fulsome praise from all parties for the dispassionate professionalism she had displayed.
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Frene Ginwala was a loyalist to the bone and to the end. With hindsight, one may recognise that the golden years of South Africa’s rainbow period were to be seen in the presidential era of Nelson Mandela and, perhaps to a lesser extent, thereafter in the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Frene stood down as speaker after ten years, to fulsome praise from all parties for the dispassionate professionalism she had displayed. Since then, the country has entered troubled waters, and Frene, in her principled manner, must surely have despaired at times when the new democracy seemed to be losing its way. But if she did, she never said as much. Dignified to the last is how she will be remembered.