Kader Asmal – Politics in my Blood: A Memoir
by Kader Asmal and Adrian Hadland with Moira Levy
(Jacana, R249,95)
KADER ASMAL never lived to see the publication of this memoir. He died with the last chapter unfinished.
A week before his death he had called on the ANC to scrap the secrecy bill. This was but the last of a number of public statements voicing his acute concern about retrogressive trends in the ANC which, he felt, were slowly destroy-ing the movement he had served loyally for most of his life.
Yet he has not used this memoir to launch an all-out attack on the ANC. This is a measured account of a life in politics, celebrating the ANC’s historic – if now-neglected – values of non-racial democracy, freedom and equality.
Asmal, small in stature, was a voluble and larger-than-life actor on the political stage.
Yet readers who expect Asmal-style fireworks may be disappointed. Instead, this is a well-crafted and thought-provoking memoir of a life dedicated to an ideal.
Readers are given an insight into the internal politics of the ANC and a new appreciation of the greatness of Chief Albert Luthuli, South Africa’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Son of a poor shopkeeper in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, Asmal was a sickly child and began school late, at the age of nine.
A meeting with Luthuli when he was 14 changed his life and put him on a road to academic success and a brilliant career in exile as a lawyer, anti-apartheid activist, and advocate of human rights.
In a chapter recalling his interactions with Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, Asmal sees them as outstanding leaders of moral courage and integrity.
Readers will inevitably draw comparisons with the current leadership, much to the disadvan-tage of the latter.
Asmal recalls Mandela as a man of extraordinary humility, whose eyes would invariably glaze over when his praises were sung in his presence.
Both Tambo and Mandela insisted the ANC was a non-racial movement.
At the Kabwe conference, which opened ANC membership and its National Executive Committee to all South Africans, and which Asmal attended, it was Tambo whose firm and measured leadership ensured that non-racialism was entrenched as fundamental to the ANC.
Mandela’s statesmanship was in evidence when there was a move-ment in the NEC to challenge the 1994 election results.
As Asmal says, few people know that the Inkatha victory in KwaZulu-Natal and the ANC’s loss of the Western Cape were disputed in the NEC.
But Mandela disagreed, saying the new Parliament had to be as representative as possible, even if it meant a loss to the ANC in some parts of the country.
The priority was to put a stop to the violence. He gave instructions for a planned press conference to be cancelled.
“We will not do anything to make the election illegitimate. The ANC will not say that the election was not free and fair,” he said.
Asmal readily admits his own lapses in judgement. Although he was the first ANC leader to put forward the idea of a Truth Commission, he had earlier started planning for South African “Nuremberg trials”, which would indict the apartheid leaders for crimes against humanity.
In 1987 Asmal had put his thoughts to Oliver Tambo.
“Tambo replied in his quiet but persuasive way that if apart-heid was to be defeated at the negotiating table, there could not be Nuremberg-style trials…
“Negotiations were unlikely to begin, let alone succeed, if the regime knew they faced Nuremberg trials once they had given up power.”
Yet Asmal and his colleagues felt it was essential that South Africa face up to the atrocities of the past.
Asmal suggests that the TRC gave South Africa an opportunity to come to terms with the past, provi-ding a foundation for rebuilding the country on the basis of a human rights culture.
There are fascinating glimpses into the meetings of the first Mandela cabinet in the Government of National Unity.
President Mandela and FW de Klerk, deputy president, couldn’t stand each other.
Asmal and Trevor Manuel were always well prepared, and always read the cabinet briefing documents.
De Klerk and Thabo Mbeki read everything thoroughly and in detail, while Jacob Zuma and a number of other ministers never read anything.
Asmal’s account of Mbeki and the Aids debacle sheds further light on this tragic episode in our recent history.
Successful in his ministerial tenure in Water Affairs, Asmal was less successful in Education.
In higher education his efforts to merge historically white and black universities were not always welcomed by all concerned.
There is much wisdom in this memoir and acceptance of the need to balance non-racialism with due recognition of cultural justice.
The reader is left with a sense of South Africa’s lost opportunities.
l Shaw is a former assistant editor of the Cape Times.