constitutional negotiations, a Polish right-winger named Janus Walusz shot and killed Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), in the driveway of his home on the East Rand, provoking fears of widespread unrest. Three days later, Nelson Mandela, then president of the recently unbanned African National Congress (ANC), made the following extraordinary appeal during an address broadcast on national television and radio:
Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves throughout the country and the world. … Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for – the freedom of all of us.[1]
On 17 June 1992, about ten months previously, 40 residents of the Joe Slovo informal settlement in the township of Boipatong in the Vaal Triangle had been hacked to death by hostel dwellers belonging to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a rival party to the ANC, resulting in the ANC suspending its participation in the constitutional negotiations. And on 28 March 1994, less than a month before the first democratic elections, 19 members of the IFP, many armed with spears and shields, were fatally shot outside Shell House, the ANC’s national headquarters in the Johannesburg central business district (CBD), prompting the government to declare a state of emergency across much of the East Rand and Natal. Indeed, my colleague at the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) Dr Anthea Jeffery estimates that about 20 000 people were killed in political conflict in the decade before South Africa’s first democratic elections.
South Africa seemed to face a dark and uncertain future. Even if the country managed to avoid a civil war, many doubted whether the ANC, a socialist liberation movement long supported by the Soviet Union, could possibly govern South Africa. Boardrooms and dinner parties were rife with fears that the new government would wreck the economy by expropriating land and nationalising key industries such as mining, thus destroying the middle classes.
Fast forward to the present, and we know that the ANC has not ruined the economy, or turned South Africa into a third-world basket case. Neither have we descended into civil war. In fact, life in the suburbs continues as it has done for decades, with braai smoke rising around swimming pools. Shopping centres have proliferated, and are more opulent than ever. Coffee shops have opened in Johannesburg’s CBD along the route of the 1994 Shell House march, and the high-end food and clothing retailer Woolworths recently opened a branch a few blocks away. The ANC government has abandoned many of its socialist ideals, and has built a high-speed rail link to ferry business people from the glittering business metropolis of Sandton to the newly refurbished OR Tambo international airport, bristling with shops and restaurants in sharp contrast with the stark concrete air terminal maintained under apartheid.
For years, suburban dinner parties were dominated by conversations about violent conflict and the spectre of socialism; today, the heat is provided by government’s attempts to instal an electronic tolling system on Johannesburg’s upgraded freeways. This is an extraordinary outcome, considering that some of our fellow countrymen stocked up on shotgun ammunition and tinned food ahead of the 1994 election.
Return to the night when Mandela begged the nation ‘from the very depths of my being’ to remain calm, and ask what it would have been worth to you – as the country teetered on the edge of an abyss – to know how things would actually turn out over the next 20 years. Go back further to the infamous Rubicon speech of 15 August 1985 when then State President PW Botha waved his finger at the world and declared that the apartheid regime would not bow to reformist pressures. The Cold War was at its height. White conscripts were patrolling the townships, and fighting Cubans in Angola. The notion that, 20 years later, the last leader of the National Party (NP) would be the minister of tourism in an ANC government was simply unimaginable, requiring a chain of events that almost every analyst would have classified as impossible.
But the impossible has happened. And South Africa is not unique. The recent upheavals in North Africa that led to the collapse of the governments of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt caught the whole world by surprise, bucking trends that had kept the governments in those countries in power for decades. The trouble, as the American scenario consultant Ian Wilson has put it, is that: ‘However good our futures research may be, we shall never be able to escape from the ultimate dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future.’[2] Put differently, we face the seemingly impossible challenge of developing an understanding of the future that is as sound as our knowledge of what has happened in the past.
Questions about our future
For even though we avoided the abyss 20 years ago, we remain concerned about the future. Perhaps it is the discomfort of living in a highly unequal society. Perhaps it is the fear that the transition of 1994 did not go far enough, and that the real revolution still lies ahead. Perhaps we believe that the uncomfortable truce struck between the (largely black) government and (largely white) middle class may not hold.
Over the past five years, my colleagues at the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA) – the Institute of Race Relations’ consulting arm – and I have made hundreds of presentations to corporations, government departments, and foreign diplomats on the likely evolution of South Africa’s future. In July and August 2013 alone, two major mining companies, one automobile manufacturer, a prominent chamber of commerce, and a European embassy asked us whether we thought South Africa had enough of a future to make it worth investing in. The word ‘disinvestment’ is being heard for the first time in 15 years.
The questions we increasingly confront in the course of our interactions with these sorts of role players are also asked by more and more ordinary members of our society. Will the increasingly angry poor rise up and seize land, homes, and businesses? Will we ever be free of the fear of violent crime? Will a desperate government sacrifice our democracy in order to help it cling to power? May middle-class South Africans have to flee the country, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs? Is there any reason we will not go the way of Zimbabwe?
Will the ANC survive three more elections, or will it be swept from power in events as dramatic as those in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya? Can the Democratic Alliance (DA) under Helen Zille defeat the ANC at the polls? What would life be like under a DA-led government? How seriously should we take Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)? Could people with these sorts of sentiments rise to power, and what would the consequences be?
Will the media remain free? Will property rights be respected, or will the state seize our farms? Will there still be good schools and universities to send our children to? What are the prospects for our children to find work and pursue careers? Will the services provided by the government improve, or will they go into terminal decline? If we have the chance to leave the country, should we take it and build new lives and careers overseas? Occasionally, a particularly insightful individual will ask whether growing socio-economic pressures may force the ANC government to adopt economic reforms that will place the country on a more prosperous economic trajectory.
These questions are not only being asked by members of the elite and middle class. One of the perks of my job is that I am called upon to present briefings on the future to a hugely diverse range of people and groupings, from khaki-clad farmers in Mpumalanga to militant youth activists in the Johannesburg CBD. While they view the country in very different ways, they all ask the same questions – although they seldom believe me when I say that their concerns are shared by those whom they see as the ‘other side’, and even as ‘the enemy’.
A decade hence, will our middle classes still be lounging around their braai fires and swimming pools, saying how silly it was to worry that we might go the way of North Africa or Zimbabwe? Or do we need to start making a
