THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK began in my favourite coffee shop in Kalk Bay soon after I moved there in 2008 after resigning from government as the minister for intelligence services. That portfolio has nothing to do with high IQ but rather the murky world of ‘spies’ – the derogatory term normally used by one side to describe the other. (All spy agencies always call their own spies ‘agents’ and the other side’s agents ‘spies’.) At the coffee shop the engaging Jacana Media trio – Bridget Impey, Maggie Davey and Russell Martin – tried to persuade me that I would be the ideal author of a book about South Africa’s spies or, rather, agents.
I was flattered but not keen then. It was far too soon into retirement – although I came to call my new status ‘refirement’, as I soon got busy making more enemies for myself by raising awkward questions in the media about the increasing secrecy and corruption in government. I also needed time to reflect and relax a bit with my companion of forty-eight years in our new abode overlooking False Bay. Tragically, Eleanor died within a year, and in tribute I wrote a book about her, The Unlikely Secret Agent, which Jacana published and which won the Alan Paton Sunday Times award for the best non-fiction of 2011.
Almost a decade after the coffee shop meeting Bridget Impey asked whether I was ready to write a book, not simply about spies, but about what had brought the country from a hopeful beginning in 1994, and impressive achievements to the brink of ruin under Syndicate Zuma and the Guptas. Much mud had passed under the bridge, which actually served to clarify things by the accumulation of clues in the sewage, and I was more than ready to take up the pen. In fact, the book had been writing itself in my subconscious all those years. I wanted to answer the question put to me by many friends: what were the factors that transformed Zuma the freedom fighter, and ostensibly a simple man of the people, into a corrupt and disreputable figure who surrounded himself with a load of creepy kleptocrats? But I also wanted to understand more than that. For our problems have not started with Zuma or Zupta, for he is a consequence of errors made during the transformational arrangements of the early 1990s – what I have previously called the Faustian pact. How to make sense of all this?
At the time of writing, what appeared to be a settled political post-apartheid transition, albeit one marked by the profound persistence of racial inequalities inherited from the past, was rapidly unravelling not least with irreconcilable conflicts bursting out within each element of the liberation movement’s Tripartite Alliance (ANC, SACP and Cosatu) and across it as a whole. It is apparent that this has been provoked and particularly expressed through the corrupt presidency of Jacob Zuma and the hopes some placed on it, culminating in the current bizarre pretence that he is the champion in the fight against ‘white monopoly capitalism’ (WMC) for radical economic transformation (i.e. anything that favours him and his cronies must be for the public good even though it is ultimately and even immediately dependent upon a system based on WMC).
Yet this is not just a momentary episode or a single grossly flawed administration but an outcome of the path followed over the entire post-apartheid period – the Faustian pact – with danger signs at earlier points but bursting into the open with the 2012 Marikana Massacre. This means that the present must be traced through its journey from the past, even over such a short, if complex, period, which has too much detail to be covered in a single book. I was party to these events and I strive to bring that journey to life through select accounts from my own experience, enriched by post facto reflection and research, and thereby forge the connection between where we are and how we got here, within my book.
The reader may be interested to know how I am able to recount the past with any degree of accuracy and how reliable my memory is. As any visit to my archive at Wits University will reveal, I have always maintained copious and scribbled notes, diaries, news cuttings, letters and photographs. These are essential items for the reconstruction of the past. My main weapon, however, is a facility to recollect experiences in visual form. This I put down to the thousands of hours I spent at the local Yeoville bioscope when I was growing up. I suppose it is a little like the photographic memory some people have who can reel off page after page of printed matter. I cannot do that. My memory sparks off a mental image, which I am able to recall, and then a hidden button in my mind begins to unreel the happening. Once I have achieved a fairly good recall of events, I check my version with others who might have been present and also through interviews where possible. Research is necessary, but most of all I revel in being able to write from the mind.
One factor I have had to take into account is ensuring that I have not fallen foul of the Secrecy Act. That has required care, and I have therefore avoided the use of classified documents. The purist will claim this means that my narrative consequently cannot provide a completely accurate account of anything in the field of secrecy. My own intention, however, is to provide no more than an honest account of events, as I have seen and experienced them, without revealing classified information. What I seek to offer readers is a narrative from my own viewpoint, focusing on important details that may not have been noticed and connecting the dots. This cannot be a definitive account of the past. More recently, a number of role players, such as Vusi Pikoli, Frank Chikane and Khulu Mbatha, once close to the action, have provided their own personal accounts, which can be read alongside mine. Researchers in the future will find these – and, I trust, my own book – of value. Hopefully, classified information will also be available to them too – unless a police state curtain of secrecy clangs down.
Readers will ask why I did not reveal some of this material, especially my doubts about Zuma, in Armed and Dangerous. That memoir came out in 1993 at a point in history when it did not seem appropriate to reveal all, owing to the attacks and smears we were then facing from our enemies. Neither was it apparent that Zuma could become so powerful and do so much damage to the democratic project. It is always a question of judgement and timing. In this book I do not hold back but tell the story – warts and all. The time is long overdue not only to deal with such leaders as Jacob Zuma but equally to analyse, where things have gone so terribly wrong. My intentions are not personal or malicious, and I do not spare myself from sharing the blame.
The situation is dire but I refuse to bow down to the worst. This book points out the nightmare that may await us all if the thieves and racketeers get their way. But I believe in the possibility of people’s power and the abiding hope that the gathering momentum will become decisive sooner rather than later. I am neither an optimist nor pessimist in this regard although I subscribe to Gramsci’s dictum ‘pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will’. The corollary of that is Fidel Castro’s urging that in these challenging times what is vital is to keep alive the spirit of revolutionary hope.
The reader will ask, ‘What is to be done?’ I do not claim to know the answers, which must be found by a younger generation. I believe veteran fighters have a duty to keep a flame burning for developing ways of thinking about the human condition. A way of understanding its nature and genesis, learning from the lessons of the past in constant changing conditions. By maintaining the flame, and passing it on to the next generation, we can do our best to ensure that a form of understanding survives. This is a hope that by analysing where we have come from we may shine some light on the path ahead.