Fergal Keane was appointed Southern Africa Correspondent of the BBC in 1990, having covered the region since the early 1980’s. He was named Amnesty International’s Human Rights Reporter of the Year in 1993 and also Reporter of the Year in the 1994 Sony Awards. He won the Reporter of the Year Award at the New York Festival of Radio in 1994.

His book on his South Africa experiences — The Bondage of Fear: A Journey Through The Last White Empire — has just been published by Viking (Price £17 hardback). The following are Fergal’s thoughts on some of the major issues and personalities he has encountered in his work.

Nelson Mandela

“On the road, people say to me: Is Mandela a saint? And what I generally say is that he’s not a saint; he’s something much better than that. He’s what I would call heroically mortal. In other words, he has all the flaws, the temptations that every single one of us has as human beings. But he, almost uniquely I think for a modern political leader, has managed to transcend those, and actually put the country before himself. I once asked de Klerk what he thought of Mandela. His reply was that what he found astonishing was his fundamental lack of bitterness.

“I’m not saying he hasn’t flaws; he does. One of them is that he has got a quite authoritarian streak in him, and a tendency to wag the finger and lay down the law. When you see him in operation, he’s very much like the village elder.

“I think one thing though . . . the emotion I get very strongly from him when the guard drops is sadness. There’s a definite sadness about what happened to his personal life. I think he feels an immense guilt about going to gaol so early in their married life, leaving Winnie Mandela to look after the kids. And also vulnerable to a lot of wolves. Not just the government; there were a lot of wolves circling around.”

Winnie Mandela

“She’s a tragedy, an African tragedy. I think that people, again, in analysing her, haven’t gone back far enough. One of the things that struck me when I was writing the book was her own childhood. She had an appalling childhood, where she suffered regular beatings.

“So, when you take that childhood, and add to it the harassment and torment that she put up with for years by the government, then you have the makings of a really dangerous and unstable personality, and that’s what she is. I mean, I have met her a few times and she has really put the fear of God into me. She has that mixture of charisma and menace.

“When I talk about her being an African tragedy, it is the tragedy of her being a lost leader. Because she is a person of immense charisma. She is a person who, when the security forces were doing their best to destroy her and her family, she kept her head. The tragedy is that the people she hurt most through her actions, such as with the Mandela United Football Club, were black South Africans, not whites.”

ANC

“The ANC reminds me of the Fianna Fáil of the 1930’s. In the sense that you had a really broad national movement that was trying to take in many different constituencies. You can’t look at the ANC and say that it’s a left wing, a right wing or even a centrist organisation. It’s many things. It’s Christian, it’s communist, it’s capitalist, it’s atheist, it’s African nationalist. I think what gives it its strength is that it is genuinely a movement of the people. It has legitimacy in the way that very few other organisations have, because it has stayed in touch with the grassroots.

“I think the major fault the ANC has is arrogance. Because it’s the biggest, there’s definitely a tendency towards arrogance. And it has become a slick machine. For the election campaign there were slick American PR men moving in. The whole streamlining of the way Mandela was packaged – a lot of that had very little to do with how people felt in squatter camps.

The Trade Unions

“The trade unions had I believe the key role in forcing people like de Klerk to recognise that the writing was on the wall. Because once you had organised black labour muscle, which was willing to bring the country to a halt, then the myth that South Africa could continue to be an economic powerhouse, and provideing whites with endless privilege, was destroyed.

“What I think will be interesting though, is to see how their relationship with the new government develops. And I think that there’ll be trouble. I remember a very interesting conversation I had with a top union official — it’s not in the book — and I said to him, ‘You guys are going to be in power with the ANC in a few years. How are you going to deal with it when it comes to disputes over paying wages?’ And he looked at me and said: ‘We’re going to squeeze them by the balls, the way we did with the Nationalists’.”

Chief Buthelezi/The Zulus

“I think too many people bought into the idea of him representing all the Zulu people. He wasn’t the Zulu leader. He was one of a number of leaders. And I think people bought into this mystical vision of the Zulu warrior race preparing to rise up and fight again; the people who took on the British Empire were now going to take on the ANC. That’s simplistic nonsense. The Zulu tribe is deeply divided, in as much as it ever saw itself as having a tribal identity. There were many, many Zulus who supported the ANC.

“That being said, Chief Buthelezi was also an immensely fascinating character. He was someone who always struck me as being extremely able. Very bright. Very sharp. He could have gone a long way. Had be been able to maintain his relationship with the ANC I have no doubt he would have a much bigger role to play than he does now.”

The Townships

“I was terrified by the capacity of townships, which were peaceable when you walked into them, to suddenly erupt into violence. I was very conscious of my white face. At the same time I found them infinitely more vibrant, more exciting and more warm than the white suburbs could ever be. One of the things I noticed most was the humour. The white suburbs had so many people who were just so anally retentive, whereas in black South Africa, the sense of humour is very akin to the Irish sense of humour.”

F. W. de Klerk/The Nationalist Party

“He had the courage, not only to see the writing on the wall, but to actually do something about it. Letting Mandela out of prison and unbanning the ANC was, for whites, a massive leap in the dark.

“However, when you analyse why he did it, I don’t think it’s because he was a visionary or an idealist. I think he did it because he was a pragmatist. And that’s what South Africa needed. De Klerk abandoned the idea of politics as ideology and got down to pragmatism.

The Nationalist Party . . . It’s an extraordinary party. Again, like the ANC, they represent a broad constituency. Once apartheid went there was no ideology for them. So, they found themselves defined by the pragmatic way forward. I don’t think they really stand for anything except preserving that place in the sun for their mainly white supporters.

The Poor Whites

“They reminded me of the people you read about in Steinbeck. The folk memory of intense poverty for them is still very prevalent. They would have heard grand-parents and even parents talk about it. Now they find themselves with apartheid gone, and they’re into a situation where they know damn well that whatever a new government’s priorities are, it won’t be looking after the whites who have fallen through the net.

“I think you’re looking at 25/30% of white families who are on the breadline or below it. And everybody who I meet in Ireland thinks that all white South Africans have swimming pools and servants. But that ain’t the case. They depended on apartheid to give them their place in the sun. And when that disappeared, and when they were forced to compete on their own terms with blacks, they found that blacks were willing to work harder and longer and for less money. And their place in the sun disappeared.”

Terre’Blanche and the AWB

“I feel about them the way I feel about all fascists and bullies. They’re the kind of people who are very good at picking on unarmed, defenceless black people in the middle of the night. They’re good at making threats. They’re good at getting drunk. They’re good at beating up journalists. But when it came to fighting a war they turned their tail and ran.”

The Coloured Population

“That was a strange situation in the election, where you had people who were amongst the most discriminated against during apartheid, who lined up to vote for de Klerk. I asked a coloured journalist about this. He said that whatever they thought about whites was nothing in comparison to their fear about being dominated by blacks. And de Klerk and The Nationalist Party played very cleverly on that and ran a racist campaign.

Apartheid in Ireland

“The way we treat Travellers is something to be ashamed of. I always believe that oppression of one person is a shame on all of us. Certainly, fear of people who are different from us is one of the root causes of racism. But that can’t excuse it.

“South African whites were very blunt about apartheid; they wrote it in their constitution. What I have found in other societies, whether it’s Britain, the United States or here, is much less honesty about it. But when you scratch beneath the surface, there’s a lot of resentment against minorities.”

South Africa and Northern Ireland

“I think where it is like South Africa is where fear is concerned. If you look at the things which propel people into stupid acts, and acts of national self-destruction, fear is one of them. And the problem with the North is that political leaders have done nothing really to arrest that question of fear. It strikes me that a lot of them have worked hard at whipping up fear. There is a terrible reluctance in relation to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and trying to imagine it from their perspective.

“I think when you travel into rural areas of Northern Ireland you definitely get the sense of the Nationalist population which looks at Protestants in the same way that blacks looked at whites in the rural areas of South Africa. In other words, the dispossessed natives looking at the settlers. And certainly among Protestants a sense that they are besieged.

“But I think in one way Northern Ireland is much more troublesome. Because I think it runs much deeper. The suspicions, the hostilities are much more ancient, much more difficult to deal with. In Africa you get a sense of momentum and of love. You don’t get that dreary steeples and squinting windows feeling I get everytime I go to the North.

The Future

“I would be broadly optimistic. That’s sounds like a fierce cliché but you can only talk about optimism in broad terms in South Africa. Because I think it’s still too unclear what will happen with the economy in particular.

“In judging progress in Africa you have to do it incrementally. Do not expect dramatic, overnight change because it’s not going to happen. But if it means that this time next year there are 5,000 more houses than there were this year. If there are 5,000 more jobs than there were this year, that is something.

“For the first time you have a government whose raison d’être is improving the lot of the majority and not screwing them into the ground.”