'When the lights go out, there is the temptation to rewrite history'

“When the lights go out, there is the temptation to rewrite history,” Lord Robin Renwick is telling a small crowd on the patio of the British high commissioner’s Cape Town residence. The gathering is to celebrate Renwick’s new book, Mission to South Africa: Diary of a Revolution – a terse, riveting account of his time as British ambassador to SA during the waning days of apartheid. FW de Klerk replaces him behind the microphone.

“This should be required reading for the ANC,” he thunders, taking aim at the suggestion that only the ANC was responsible for the dismantling of apartheid. The former state president softens as he describes the book as being a “praise song” for Mandela. “I felt close to him while reading it.” A few days earlier I had met Renwick at the Cellars-Hohenhort Hotel to discuss the book.

Though he emphasises that the negotiated transition to democracy was very much conducted “between South Africans”, he’s proud of the role – often behind the scenes – he played in helping to facilitate dialogue between the major players: indeed, some of the first encounters between ANC apparatchiks and their National Party counterparts were at functions hosted by the embassy.  

When he arrived in the country as Margaret Thatcher’s personal envoy in 1987, “the situation was really desperate,” he recalls. Then state president PW 
Botha’s security apparatus was “taking out opponents by whatever means necessary”; there were an estimated 2 500 people being detained without trial; the ANC’s leaders were in prison or exile. “Most people firmly believed you were heading for disaster – for ever-greater internal conflict and isolation. What we wanted to do was to try to encourage, in various ways, both sides to embark on negotiations.” 

While supportive of arms and nuclear embargoes, both Renwick and Thatcher were against “general sanctions”. The latter received flak for this stance both abroad (at Commonwealth conferences, for example) and from her political opponents at home. “The Labour Party used to say to Thatcher, ‘You’re opposed to general sanctions, therefore you’re supporting apartheid.’” 

Renwick is adamant that this assertion was wrong. In meetings, Thatcher had told him she believed the system was a “monstrous piece of social engineering”. She regarded it as “quite profoundly unBritish,” he says.

Publicly she had shocked the South African government by telling a British MP that “if all people’s ambitions are frustrated, you must expect them to take up arms”. General sanctions would have made a bad situation worse, both she and Renwick felt.

“It would have put hundreds of thousands of black South Africans out of work, rendering their families destitute without any social safety net whatsoever.” Sanctions would have been “catastrophic”, too, for the whole of Southern Africa “because the economies of the neighbouring countries would’ve crashed before this one did”.

Renwick says that Thatcher also believed “that total isolation would just contribute to a siege mentality and would play into the hands of the securocrats” and embolden Andries Treurnicht, the leader of the right-wing Conservative Party, which was gaining support from whites who were horrified by Botha’s scrapping of laws such as the Mixed Marriages Act.

While world leaders frequently denounced apartheid in their parliaments, Renwick suggests that Thatcher was the only one to put direct, frequent pressure on Botha’s government to reform. “She kept bombarding Botha with messages about the need to release Mandela, to get rid of apartheid laws, stop forced removals and so on.” I ask him why Thatcher took such a keen interest in SA.

“If she started trying to deal with a problem, she dealt with it wholeheartedly,” he says. She was “by nature an activist” who had successfully overseen Rhodesia’s transformation into democratic Zimbabwe – a process that, as head of the Foreign Commonwealth Office’s Rhodesia Department in 1979, Renwick had been intimately involved in. In the late 1980s, the South African problem was proving more intractable.

“She found it extremely frustrating that she was unable to make much impact on this obdurate old Afrikaner,” despite there being 1-million UK passport holders in SA, and the British being the biggest foreign investors in the country. Renwick describes Thatcher’s approach as “good cop, bad cop”.

Although she hoped that keeping channels of communication open would help to coax Botha towards reform, if he had ignored the “serious warnings” Renwick had delivered from her about the bombing of neighbouring capitals and the death sentence of the Sharpeville Six (which was cancelled at the last minute thanks to intense lobbying), there would have been serious ramifications.

Renwick recalls telling Thatcher that she shouldn’t expect Botha “to do the right thing – he’s far more likely to do the wrong thing. She said ‘Yes, I know, and we have to identify some successor who we can do business with – and that’s your job.’” That successor – De Klerk – struck Renwick as “open, friendly and impressively self confident” when he met him for the first time in 1987.

De Klerk was to have a far more productive relationship with the British, agreeing to Renwick’s entreaties that the 1989 Peace March in Cape Town, organised by church leaders and the United Democratic Front, be allowed to proceed, despite police chiefs being against it. This, along with his successful campaigning to get many of the Rivonia trialists – including Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu – released, Renwick counts among his proudest achievements. But he stresses that “none of this would be possible unless there had been a lot of people within the system doing this”.

Mission to South Africa is published by Jonathan Ball and is available from leading bookshops.

April 2015