support economic sanctions against the regime in Pretoria. As a result she was soon even more embattled within the Commonwealth than she was in Europe, portrayed by much of the rest of the world as a friend and protector of apartheid – whereas she saw herself as its most practical opponent.
There is no clearer example of Mrs Thatcher’s refusal to acquiesce in a fashionable consensus than her stubborn resistance to sanctions against South Africa. She became the focus of all the frustration and hatred of the anti-apartheid movement not only in Britain but around the world. As with her perverse support for nuclear weapons, progressive opinion could not understand how anyone could be against such an obviously virtuous cause. Once again her insensitivity to others’ passionately held beliefs, her certainty that she was right and her appearance of revelling in her isolation seemed wilfully provocative.Yet again there is a good case for maintaining that she was proved right by the eventual outcome, and her critics wrong.
Mrs Thatcher understood South Africa, like every other regional problem, as just another battleground in the global struggle between Western freedom and Soviet Communism. She regarded white South Africa, despite apartheid, as part of the West – Christian, capitalist, subject to the rule of law and in principle democratic – threatened by a Soviet-backed black liberation movement which aimed to destabilise the economy, destroy those liberal traditions and move South Africa into the Soviet camp. She opposed the principal black party, the African National Congress (ANC) – led by Oliver Tambo and a largely exiled leadership from outside South Africa while Nelson Mandela and other leaders served indefinite jail sentences – first as socialists, the tools of Communists if not actually Communists themselves; and second as terrorists, devoted to victory through ‘armed struggle’. Making no allowance for the fact that so long as they were denied the vote the ANC had no legal outlet for political struggle, she was adamant that a precondition of any settlement in South Africa must be the cessation of violence.
She was certainly influenced by the scale of British business interests in South Africa. The UK was the biggest outside investor in South Africa, which was Britain’s fourth-biggest trading partner. British industry – and particularly the defence industry – was heavily dependent on South African minerals. Sanctions, she constantly reminded the left, would damage not just British profits but British jobs. Moreover, around 800,000 white South Africans would be entitled to come to Britain if they were forced to flee South Africa, just as Portugal had been obliged to take an influx of ex-colonials from Angola and Mozambique. Other countries which jumped on the sanctions bandwagon did not have the same direct economic interest at stake.
Altogether she thought there was a lot of hypocrisy and easy moral outrage in the anti-apartheid movement. Her object – as she explained in an interview in the
We do not want to see a future South African Government which really does represent the majority of South Africans inheriting a wasteland… In far too many countries in Africa ‘liberation’ has been followed by economic disaster and has brought few practical benefits to ordinary people. This can and must be avoided in South Africa.
The way to avoid this outcome was not less trade, but more. ‘What the country needs is opening up to the outside world. The last thing it needs is to close in on itself even more.’15 The policy of demonising South Africa as if it was uniquely wicked, she believed, was not only unfair, but positively counterproductive. ‘Insofar as sanctions did work,’ she declared on a visit to Norway in 1986,‘they would work by bringing about starvation and unemployment and greater misery amongst the immense black population…I find it morally repugnant to sit here or anywhere else and say that we decide that should be brought about.’16 Some of the most prominent South African opponents of apartheid agreed with her, which only strengthened Mrs Thatcher’s suspicion that the ANC demanded sanctions precisely because its aim was to destroy South Africa’s capitalist economy.
Convinced of the rightness of her analysis, Mrs Thatcher set herself to block the imposition of further Commonwealth and EC sanctions beyond those already in place, like the ban on sporting contacts, while working behind the scenes to try to influence the Pretoria Government from within. Casting herself as President Botha’s candid friend – ‘probably’, as she claimed in her memoirs, ‘the only helpful contact he had with western governments’17 – she invited him to Chequers in June 1984, provoking inevitable demonstrations, and treated him (in Bernard Ingham’s words) to some ‘very plain speaking’. She urged him to release Mandela, to stop harassing black dissidents, stop bombing ANC camps in neighbouring states and grant Namibian independence. She kept up the pressure in a sustained correspondence over the next five years. But all this was in private: she refused publicly to join the clamour for the release of Mandela, so she earned no credit with the anti- apartheid movement. Botha was grateful for her friendship but ignored the candour. There was no significant movement in South Africa so long as he remained in power.
Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to South Africa was much more principled and honourable than her critics recognised. At the same time she was less constructive than she could have been because she badly misjudged the internal opposition to apartheid. First, by insisting on classing the ANC as Communist terrorists, she completely failed to appreciate that Mandela and the rest of the ANC leadership were as deeply rooted in Western democratic values, liberal humanism, the Bible and Shakespeare as she herself was. Mandela was brought up as a Methodist on the very same hymns and prayers and poems as she was – though after his enforced leisure on Robben Island he had a rather deeper knowledge of English literature and history.
Then she compounded her reluctance to recognise the ANC by seeking a more ‘moderate’ and pro-Western alternative which she could promote instead. She pinned extravagant hopes on the Inkatha party led by the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The more the world’s attention focused on Mandela the more stubbornly she championed Buthelezi as ‘the representative of the largest group of black South Africans’18 and ‘the head of the biggest nation in southern Africa’.19 She praised him as a friend of free enterprise and ‘a stalwart opponent of violent uprising’ – unaware that Pretoria was secretly arming Inkatha to fight the ANC.20 In taking sides in this way Mrs Thatcher was playing with fire.
It was in 1985 that she first set herself in direct opposition to the conscience of the world. That summer, as violent uprisings in townships all over South Africa brought the country close to civil war, President Botha declared a state of emergency. Alarmed, American and Swiss banks called in their debts and refused to make further loans, causing a devastating run on the rand. Under pressure from American public opinion, Reagan felt reluctantly obliged to tighten US sanctions before Congress passed a tougher package; and France and other European countries began to press for concerted EC action. In September Mrs Thatcher successfully vetoed the proposed EC sanctions; so when the Commonwealth heads of government assembled at Nassau in the Bahamas in October it was already clear that she was going to be isolated.
The only way she managed to delay further sanctions was by proposing to send a group of ‘eminent persons’ (EPG) to South Africa to assess the situation on the ground. President Botha let the EPG into the country in the spring of 1986, and allowed them to meet ANC leaders, including Mandela. They were impressed by Mandela and were close to negotiating a formula for his release when Botha wrecked their efforts by bombing ANC bases in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. They immediately abandoned their mission and soon afterwards submitted a gloomy report concluding that there was ‘no genuine intention on the part of the South African government to dismantle apartheid’ and advocating strengthened sanctions.
Privately Mrs Thatcher warned Botha that by falling back on a policy of ‘total crackdown’ he was making it hard for her to hold the line against sanctions. Behind the scenes she was urging him to do all the things the opponents of apartheid around the world wanted him to do: release Mandela, unban the ANC and start negotiating before it was too late. Having committed herself so vehemently against sanctions, she needed him to show some willingness to embrace reform voluntarily; but this he was refusing to do.
Publicly Mrs Thatcher revelled in her isolation. She had one important ally in the White House. ‘As you,’ President Reagan wrote to her, ‘I remain opposed to punitive sanctions which will only polarise the situation there and do the most harm to blacks.’ But Reagan too found himself under pressure to give ground:
You noted you may be forced to accept some modest steps within the European and Commonwealth contexts to signal your opposition to apartheid, and in all frankness we may be faced with the same situation if Congress, as expected, passes some sanctions Bill later this summer or fall.21
