De Klerk’s First Cabinet Bosberaad

On 3 December 1989, apartheid President F.W. de Klerk boarded two Hercules transport planes at the Waterkloof Air Force Base with his Cabinet and fifty advisers on a trip to D’Nyala Game Reserve near Ellisras in the northern Transvaal.

During the discussions, the following morning, Defence Minister Magnus Malan spoke out against adding the South African Communist Party (SACP) to the list of organisations that were earmarked to be unbanned.

After the departure of P.W. Botha, it was a foregone conclusion that the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela, would be released in the immediate future. The apartheid regime was however concerned about how it was going to happen. Understandably by releasing the leader of the national liberation movement he championed, it also implied that the organisation had to be unbanned.

However, the biggest challenge was that the ANC had a strong relationship with the Communist Party, which for the apartheid establishment was regarded as the “rooi gevaar” (the red danger). Within the apartheid security establishment, the “hawks”, who were represented by leaders of the defence force and the police in the State Security Council (SSC), had devoted the rest of the career lives to fighting communism, as they were indoctrinated through the “Total Onslaught” Doctrine.

The doctrine maintained that the “total onslaught” was formulated and documented by the ANC for the first time at its Morogoro Conference in Tanzania in 1969. According to this doctrine, “their struggle, they resolved, would in future be conducted with strategy and tactics based on the following four ‘pillars’: armed struggle, internal mass mobilisation, a viable political (subversive) underground, and the diplomatic and economic isolation of South Africa from the international community”.

The belief within the apartheid establishment was that this was a “total onslaught”, which required a formidable counter-strategy, a “total strategy”. The total onslaught was said to be developed by the communists within the ANC, as part of the aggressive expansion of Soviet Communism.

In 1977, PW Botha, then Minister of Defence, mapped out the way his department’s analysis of the threats facing the country: “The resolution of the conflict in the times in which we now live demands inter-dependent and co-coordinated action in all fields: military, psychological, economic, political, sociological, technological, diplomatic, ideological, cultural, etcetera.”

Botha continued to say that, “We are today involved in a war whether we like it or not. It is therefore essential that a total national strategy (is) formulated at the highest level.” As it became obvious that apartheid in its original form was no longer working, the ideological void was filled by PW Botha with the concept of a “Total Onslaught”.

Considering the decades-long propaganda campaign against the SACP, the resistance from the apartheid soldiers and policemen was fathomable, as both Malan and Adriaan Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order, had sworn to be uncompromising on this matter. According to their logic, the “unbanning of the SACP was as good as letting the devil loose in South Africa”.

Anti-communist sentiment was embedded in emotions that extended beyond politics and included cultural and religious dimensions, especially of the Afrikaans churches and Afrikaner cultural organisations that South Africa was a “Christian (read Calvinist) State”.

It was the Director-General of the apartheid National Intelligence Service (NIS), Niël Barnard, who saved the day, by arguing, “Why would we want to drive the SACP underground again? Communism has already disintegrated elsewhere in the world. Let the SACP take part in open democratic processes and shoot themselves in the foot. Then we can at least see all of them, who they are and what they do.”

“But more importantly,” according to Barnard, “Mandela will never accept it. He will refuse to walk out of jail. What then? We will have no choice but to unban the SACP after all – with red faces.”

Castro Khwela
Good evening fellow Compatriots!