"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 3)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 614

On Saturday 7 August 1993, Thabo Mbeki slipped out of an ANC meeting, accompanied by Jacob Zuma. It was a full year after Joe Slovo had published his ‘sunset clauses’ outlining shared rule, and four months after the assassination of Chris Hani by renegade right-wingers had shocked both sides into resolving their outstanding differences and setting an election date of April 1994. But if consensus had been reached inside the tent of negotiations, there were still major problems in the wilderness beyond, and Mbeki – who had become a movement’s outrider – had been tasked to deal with them. Now, on a warm spring afternoon, he and Zuma were to met Jurgen Kogl, who whisked them off, in a hired Fiat Uno, to a pigeon racing club in Lynnwood, east of Pretoria.

Kogl was connected by marriage to Afrikaner military establishment, and –in the aftermath of the Hani assassination – had volunteered to connect the ANC to the saber-rattling right wing. He had arranged a secret rendezvous at the pigeon club with three prominent leaders of the Afrikaner secessionist movement, including the military hero and former head of the South African army, General Constand Viljoen. Like an Old Testament prophet, Viljooen had come out of retirement to lead the Afrikaner people to freedom. Leaving his Standerton farm to stump across the country, he commanded huge numbers and corralled strong emotions, and boasted of the force of fifty thousand men he would be able to muster in the name of Afrikaner self-determination. He formed the Afrikaner Vryheidsfron (AVF), or ‘Freedom Front’, to mobilize the Afrikaner population in favour of a volkstaat- an independent Afrikaner state.