A white liberal's last stand

Open Letter to Thabo Mbeki from Koos Kombuis

(Translated from Afrikaans by the author. Click here to read the original Afrikaans version.)

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Dear President Thabo Mbeki

This is my third open letter to you. I have not yet received a reply to the first two. Why not, I can't imagine. After all, we have so much in common. Like me, you are an author, and you love expressing yourself in words. Like me, you are almost completely incompetent when it comes to anything else. What a shame that an irritating little thing such as running a country should come between you and your true calling! I know the feeling, Thabo; I am also quite useless at performing three-dimensional tasks. Gosh, you should see me trying to change a light bulb or drill a hole!

Maybe I should explain why I keep on writing you all these open letters. Wouldn't it be more politically correct to drop you a private line? Everyone knows how you hate it when people criticise you in public. The masses should know better than that! The problem is, Mr President, I really don't have your address. I have no idea where you are at any given moment. I only know it's somewhere abroad. Sending a letter to another country, even if I knew which country to send it to, would be quite costly. I would prefer donating that money to the tsunami victims fund or to the suffering farmers (there isn't a fund for them yet, but I am sure you are about to announce one any moment now).

Of course, I could send you an e-mail - you probably take a laptop along with you on your plane (by the way, did you get that new jet you ordered?) - but I'm not really sure how private that mode of communication is, bearing in mind that, during one of your first speeches after becoming President of the country, you yourself quoted from a supposedly personal e-mail which wasn't even addressed to you - it was intercepted. So maybe it's safer, after all, simply to publish this letter in the newspapers. Newspapers and the internet may be the only free media we still have now that the SABC has declared itself morally bankrupt.

Anyway, just for the record: I am pro-ANC. Yes! In spite of all the cover-ups, all the scandals, all the rumours of money-laundering and cheating, etc, etc, I think the ANC has improved of late. (I don't like their website, but that's because of all the stuff you've been writing there, some even under your own name.) I am very enthusiastic that the RDP housing scheme is getting off the ground, I'm thrilled with the fact that the rand is stabilising and the economy improving. Like other white liberals, I am not, in theory, opposed to land reforms and affirmative action and stuff like that. Whereas other white liberals might attempt to wiggle out of the practical implications of these policies, though, I'd like to see them implemented as fast as possible so as to get it over and done with. I want this country to finally get to the point where we know which pieces of countryside belong to whom, and who is promoted on merit, irrespective of race, colour, or creed. And as long as the Springboks win, I don't even care whether all fifteen members of the team, including the reserves, are black. They could even be members of an extreme leftwing urban terrorist cell, if that is what it will take to beat the English.

Speaking of the English, recently I read in an editorial in a Sunday newspaper that you weren't here at all during the Struggle. You were in England. Hell, how did you manage that? I would have given anything to get out of the country during those terrible times, but my parents refused to buy me a ticket! According to Boetman's book, there was a historic clandestine meeting between yourselves and some leading Afrikaner intellectuals near the end of the Apartheid era. It was in a townhouse in Bath, I think. Did you drink tea, or something stronger? It must have been something stronger, because during that meeting everyone suddenly realised that black majority rule would actually be quite nice. Wow! History suddenly took off in a new direction. Shortly afterwards, Nelson Mandela was released from jail and you returned to South Africa. Glory, glory! What a pity you sidestepped the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (don't worry, I still hold that against FW de Klerk as well).

This brings me to my real reason for writing this letter. You know, in spite of my growing animosity towards your personal philosophies I have been able to handle almost everything you've said and written since becoming President. I've hardly ever agreed with you, but I could sort of manage, by means of strenuous mental acrobatics, to at least partially understand your point of view. I could handle it when you made your famous "two nations" statement (though it seemed like a bit of an anti-climax, especially after everyone had finally agreed to become one rainbow nation). I could handle it when you downplayed the AIDS pandemic (I'd never seen one of those darned HIV viruses under a microscope myself, anyway). I tried to believe you when you refused to condemn Mugabe's actions because you were so terribly busy with what you called "quiet diplomacy" (I have often tried "quiet diplomacy" with my bank manager, too, and sometimes it's actually worked). I could even handle it the other day when you said there was a "Cold War" between blacks and whites. It wasn't the sort of thing Mandela would have said - it seemed a rather morale-damaging sort of statement - but of course it wasn't entirely untrue either. Racism in South Africa is far from dead! Anyone who doesn't believe it has not yet heard my sister-in-law swear when she watches Ntini missing a catch on TV! So I handled all this negative stuff you were writing and saying because I, too, hate racism, and because I, too, understand that the New South Africa is still a dangerous place. I know - and so do you, as you have been here yourself (albeit for only short intervals) - that this is a place full of cruel and conflicting realities. But the one thing I could not handle, Thabo Mbeki, the one thing I simply refuse to accept, is the way you treated Bishop Tutu. That whole incident pissed me off, and still pisses me off in a big way.

You (or one of your cronies) are claiming, on the ANC website, that Bishop Tutu is the icon of the white people. What utter bullshit!

This ridiculous statement came just a few weeks after Bishop Tutu warned you that you were trying to create a generation of yes-men in your party. After Tutu admonished you because you don't care enough for the poor. Tutu never once said anything about whites. Tutu was concerned about poor people, people who are afraid to say what they think, people who still feel like strangers and outcasts in their own country. The colour of their skin had nothing whatsoever to do with his argument.

If there is one utterly non-racial person in this country, if there is somebody who makes no distinction between black and white, it is Bishop Tutu. You might be unaware of this, but up to this day, this is the reason why many conservative Afrikaners still hate him. His white support comes mainly from liberals, ex-activists and people who are genuinely interested in reconciliation. Admittedly, your friend's attack was not so much an attack on Bishop Tutu himself, but on the whites who support him.

Even taken in that context, it is a nonsense argument - for the simple reason that neither you, Mr President, nor anyone in your close circle of admirers, are worthy to tie Tutu's shoelaces. What are you guys going to claim next? That Mandela is an honorary white? I know of only one black man in the world who is truly white: Michael Jackson.

By attacking white liberals, you are alienating hordes of potential supporters. By attacking white liberals, you are ignoring the contributions of hundreds and thousands of people who voiced their protest, who suffered, who toiled side by side with the ANC masses for a free South Africa. By attacking white liberals, you are painting a dark picture of that which you call the "African Renaissance" - you are depicting it as a building without windows, a dark place, a club reserved exclusively for certain blacks. By attacking white liberals, you are promoting a way of thinking which might, in future, pave the way towards a policy of increasing polarisation and even officially sanctioned ethnic cleansing. By attacking white liberals, you are making enemies of exactly the same people who were enemies of the old National Party, and for exactly the same reasons.

Of course not all white liberals are sincere. Of course there are those among us who are naïve, those who think they "love blacks" when they actually patronise blacks, those who have a paint-by-numbers vision of how the rainbow nation is supposed to work. But if you do away with this entire diverse group of people with one sweeping statement, you also destroy the philosophical base of liberalism as a whole. You discard huge and noble concepts like humanism, glasnost, and tolerance. In a dangerous time like the present, in a time when previously enlightened countries such as America, France, the Netherlands and England are slowly sliding once more towards fascism, can we afford to allow the last few pockets of goodwill to be eroded? If South Africa becomes as divided as those countries, how are we ever going to point the way back from the abyss? If we cannot be the shining example to stop mankind in its tracks, to make people pause and think, to encourage nations to pursue peace and not engage in a Third World War, who will? Is the African Renaissance not supposed to be the best thing that has happened to this planet since … well, since the first Renaissance? Or at least since the Beatles?

Mr President, this is probably my last open letter to you. If you don't reply to me, I will not bother you again. In fact, you don't have to reply to me. But you have two options: either you can become the great statesman and international hero you already think you are, or you can retire and simply become an author, like me. Or Jeffrey Archer.

If you choose the first course of action, I will be very glad. My children will also be very glad. There will be hope for this country, this continent, this world.

If you choose the second option, there might still be hope for this country, this continent, and this world, but that hope, if it comes, will be provided by other people, younger leaders, a new generation of visionaries. These people might not be white liberals like myself; they may be members of Cosatu! Gosh! Anyway, when these people take over, you and your second-generation dictator cronies will be discarded on the rubbish dump of history. You will probably return to England and spend the rest of your days shopping in London if you still have any money left.

In fact, that's a very good idea. Why don't you retire and go to England right now? England is a great place for retired old useless politicians. Maggie Thatcher is there, and Ian Smith too (or is he dead by now? I'm not sure). Oh, and soon Tony Blair will be retired as well. I have heard a rumour that Tony Leon might also head that way once he loses the leadership of the official opposition to Patricia de Lille. I know you'll find his presence irritating, but then again, there's always Trafalgar Square and the pigeons. You'll find it easily: it's close to South Africa house. South Africa is that country you sometimes visited during your term as President … I think … oh, bugger that, why don't you just write articles for Private Eye?

Mr President, you have this one last chance, this golden window of opportunity to start talking sense. Mind the gap.

Yours sincerely

Koos Kombuis

• Koos Kombuis is an acclaimed South African columnist, protest folk singer, cultural icon, and author of the critically acclaimed international paperback novel The Secret Diary of God, aged Nine and a Half Billion Years.

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LitNet: 26 January 2005

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