Anatomy of a Miracle

"I think that now that we’re fifteen years into the post-apartheid era and the ANC, which has been in power since the end of white rule, is somewhat fallen away from its high ideals, I think it’s easy to forget how amazing the transition was. It’s easy to forget that in the eighties, when the fight against apartheid was at its height and there were hundreds of people dying in the townships, everyone was saying: This is going to end in a race w And it was very hard to see how the Afrikaner nationalists, who had been in power since 1948 and led by hard, tough men, were going to give up power – why should they? They were in power, they had a very powerful military, and even in the eighties – even as in Britain and in the US people were campaigning against it – the fact remained that despite all the opposition protests and so on, the white military could easily have defeated any number of incursions from the ANC. They could have stayed in power far longer than they did, and Patti’s book brilliantly describes this extraordinary seduction routine that Nelson Mandela in particular played on the Afrikaners. She also brilliantly describes the mindset of the Afrikaners, and how many of them were desperately trying to find some way of retaining a sense of modernity, even decency, while wanting to hang onto power, and eventually that got sort of whittled away. It was an astonishing achievement. Of course there were other factors – it was the end of the Cold War, so the white minority’s great fear of a Communist takeover was diminished. In 1990 when Mandela was released it was a time of great hope throughout the world and everything seemed to be changing. The fundamental, if you want, was that a minority that was entrenched in power relinquished that power voluntarily. They weren’t forced from power down the barrel of a gun, they negotiated themselves from power, and Patti’s book describes that process magnificently. Whatever happens under the ANC, however badly they rule, nothing can take away from South Africa the transition and the brilliance with which it was carried out."