On 17 November, while I was en route to Maputo an historic event took place. On that Thursday morning President Mandela signed onto the South African statute books the Land Rights Restitution Act, Act No. 22 of 1994 – eighty-one years and five months after the passing of the Natives Land Act, Act No. 27 of 1913, which, in Sol Plaatje’s words, ‘made the South African native not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’.

The Restitution Act looks like the brightest star in GNU’s legislative constellation. Yet in practice its efficacy will depend on numerous factors bristling with question marks. However, it does provide a morally and intellectually sound basis for immediate action on behalf of a minority of poor blacks. Prudently, President Mandela described it as ‘a real effort to ensure that those people who were deprived of their land in the course of apartheid are given back their property’.

Derek Hanekom, the ANC’s Afrikaner Minister for Land Affairs, has already worked wonders, winning the trust of both rich recalcitrant Boers and destitute impatient peasants. But Land Rights should be dealt with by members of the judiciary and the Restitution Act establishes a Land Claims Court and a Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights. Whenever possible, the Commissioners will settle claims; their failures will be referred to the Court. For three years from 2 December 1994 claims may be submitted, dating back to 19 June 1913. Henceforth, communities who return to invade land which they regard as their own, without reference to the Commission, will be regarded as illegal squatters.

This Act is designed both to ‘bring hope and justice to the victims of racially discriminatory laws’ and to reassure white farmers. Luckily, most disputed land is still state-owned. But some has been sold and where claims involve this private land the Constitution provides for the payment of full compensation, even to those who must be served an expropriation order. The President foresees such cases being ‘relatively rare’.

It is much too late simply to ‘give South Africa back’ to the (indigenous) South Africans. All along my way, since first crossing the Limpopo, I have noticed how seldom land ownership is discussed, even in circles eloquent about the many other national problems. Time sets its seal on events and that seal, however outrageous the circumstances of its setting, cannot be broken generations later without initiating another cycle of injustice. My own reservations about the new South Africa are partly rooted in this need to accept the ultimate ‘white supremacy’ – white ownership of most of the fertile land, the crucial supremacy in Africa.

 

On my return to Jo’burg, on 26 November, I lunched with a senior SACP official (let’s call him John) who knows President Mandela well and loves him dearly – regards him as a father-figure rather than an idol. Sadly he observed, ‘Now everyone can see Madiba’s a natural capitalist, willing to protect all vested interests – nobody needs to twist his arm.’

(How does an interest look without its vest? Is it then called ‘disinterest’?)

John and I agreed that South Africa’s most malevolent vested interest is Armscor, a vicious component of the old militaristic regime. John had brought a file of relevant documents, morbidly fascinating.

Pre-elections, the naive assumed that a Mandela-led government would withdraw from arms trading and divert Armscor’s massive subsidies to the RDP. As no external enemy threatens, and South Africa has no expansionist ambitions, the SANDF’s future role will be domestic: catching illegal immigrants on the border, providing emergency and security services – duties not requiring the back-up of a sophisticated arms industry. And yet, President Mandela opened the 1994 Dexsa Defence Exhibition in Jo’burg.

Then, as reported in The Star on 22 November, Defence Minister Joe Modise told a ‘defence equipment co-operation seminar’ that ‘the defence industry, which employs tens of thousands of people and brings in billions of rands in foreign exchange, is one of the key ingredients for peace in South Africa and on the African continent as a whole. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa have so far this year alone spent about US$1.3 billion on equipment not standardized with that of their neighbours and which would cost a lot to maintain and upgrade. Many smaller countries do not have knowledgeable buyers and are therefore being exploited. Co-operation on the continent could ensure that better value for money is obtained by larger orders and the use of the expertise of an organisation like Armscor.’ It seems Mr Modise imagines Armscor would not exploit smaller countries – which puts him in a minority of one.

The newly appointed Defence Secretary, Lieutenant-General Pierre Steyn, also addressed the assembled senior government and military officers from such countries as Gabon, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. ‘South Africa is ready’, he announced, ‘to challenge weapons manufacturers in the US and Europe if they attempt to prevent this country from selling armaments on the open market and particularly in Africa. Our weapons sales drives will spread South African influence across Africa.’

Reading as I ate, I almost choked. US$1.3 billion in less than a year! I have cycled through three of the above-mentioned countries and failed to get water from many defunct standpipes. I have visited rural clinics serving thousands of people yet lacking even an aspirin. I have listened to a despairing doctor in a 500-bed hospital equipped with three hypodermic needles. Arms trading and Third World poverty are so closely linked that no government can cope with the latter while the former continues.

‘Isn’t it odd,’ said John, ‘that that’s never emphasized at all those grand “macro-summits” about hunger and homelessness and disease?’

Related to that silence is the arms traders’ abuse of language, designed to exclude from view all who are, in various ways, their helpless victims. The very phrase ‘defence industry’ is tendentious. In South Africa’s case, could Mr Modise specify defence against whom or what? Little striped men from Jupiter? Less tendentious, because clearly absurd, is his claim that the ‘defence’ industry is ‘one of the key ingredients for peace …’ Tell that to the people of Rwanda; in October 1992 their government bought from South Africa US$4 million-worth of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, machine-guns and ammunition. Or to the people of Iraq. In July 1994 a Palestinian sued Nimrod, Armscor’s international marketing subsidiary, for unpaid commission – and papers presented to the Pretoria Supreme Court revealed that South Africa had sold US$4.5 billion-worth of armaments to Saddam Hussein.

Yes, the arms industry employs hundreds of thousands of First World workers – in Britain, for instance, one-tenth of the manufacturing workforce, since the UK ‘enjoys’ some 20 per cent of the global arms market.

‘Jobs for whites, destitution for the rest,’ said John. ‘In our so-called defence sector, not many blacks are employed by Armscor, Denel and the private companies.’

Denel – a parastatal arms manufacturer, offspring of former Armscor subsidiaries – claims to be ‘the armourer of the Persian Gulf’, quoting as proof a recent artillery sale to Oman worth US$ 120 million.

‘In September ’93,’ said John, ‘after the “defence” budget was cut, Armscor lost R172 million of tax-payers’ money in cancellations and contracts costs. They’d been forewarned about the cuts but their forward-planners didn’t allow for them. And over the years they’ve lost billions of rands through myopia, muddle and ignorance – and mixing with too many cosmopolitan crooks smarter than the home-grown variety!’

The ANC’s pre-election policy document stated: ‘The standards of responsible global citizenship and the requirements of South Africa’s wider foreign policy goals will have priority over considerations of the armaments industry within the South African economy.’ ‘Not a model of lucidity,’ commented John, ‘but it did give us some hope. Now it seems GNU has no foreign policy – only arms salesmen.’ We wondered then precisely what pressures have been applied to persuade the ANC to abandon ‘responsible global citizenship’ – and to whom have they been applied? The immoral argument, ‘If we don’t do it someone else will’, could also be used to justify government-run drug-smuggling, child-prostitution, financial scams. Now some ANC politicians are talking nonsense about ‘regulating’ the arms industry, making it ‘more accountable and transparent’, restructuring Armscor, sacking its ‘Total Onslaught’ unconvertibles – and so on. But no armaments industry anywhere can be regulated, by anyone. It can only be dismantled. And in South Africa, as John pointed out, that process need involve no waste of human and material resources. Always the arms industry has been able to monopolize the best and the brightest of scientists and technicians, and to afford the choicest manufacturing equipment, leaving the civilian sector seriously short of such assets. Post-dismantlement, there would be no lack of opportunities for the brightest and the best in non-lethal industries.

The arms industry has become so powerful – its tentacles wrapped around the whole world – and so corrupting for those engaged in it, because it is indifferent to all laws or embargoes, national or international, and uninhibited about removing individuals who get in the way. Armscor has gagged many employees and associates. Some were sacked and smeared, some hastily emigrated. John’s file held a list of recent deaths. In January 1988 the Armscor Director of Finance, Helmie Snyman, was shot through the head in Pretoria and his safe emptied of all files and tapes relating to Armscor’s secret foreign procurements.

‘Suicide!’ said the police, very promptly.

‘Murdered to silence him!’ said the Snyman family.

In 1991 the dismembered body of the international sales director of Thor Chemicals, Alan Kidger, was found in the boot of his car. A few weeks later the managing director of Wacker Chemicals, John Scott, was found gassed in his car; nearby his wife and two children had been stabbed to death. Immediately the police announced that he had murdered his family before killing himself. Much later they admitted that his death was linked to the trade in ‘red mercury’, a mysterious substance much sought after by arms manufacturers. Since then the deaths of three other men – Don Lange, Dirk Stoffberg, Wynand van Wyk – have been associated by the police with the ‘red mercury’ trade. In July 1994 Tielman de Waal, Armscor’s executive general manager, denied ever having had dealings with Lange, Kidger or van Wyk. Two months later it was proved that he had done at least one major deal with Lange – illegal, of course, or it would have been unnecessary to deny it.

Closing his file, John said, ‘And this is the industry some fatuous politicians imagine they can “regulate”!’

*

My Mozambican week was overshadowed by Rachel’s bilharzia. It has proved resistant to the biltricide treatment and her debilitated condition reactivated my maternal instinct (long dormant: she will soon be 26). So instead of enjoying peaceful post-elections Maputo I was most of the time engaged, with Andrew’s invaluable support, in persuading the patient to be sensible and fly immediately to London.