Julius Malema, leader of the ANC's Youth League, has featured in several Insights over the past few months and, to be consistent, I should say something about what happened after President Zuma had chastised him in public. As the President promised, Malema's circumstances were referred to the ANC's Disciplinary Committee which in football parlance yellow-carded him. He continues in his position but with a cautionary: Don't do it again or you could face expulsion! - something neither Malema nor the ANC Youth League appear to take seriously. What is also evident to ANC-watchers is that the Malema issue is at the centre of a major division within the ANC alliance. So, for now we can leave Julius because I'm sure we'll be coming back to him in time.

At this point I'd like to write about Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, a very gifted person and an impressive leader, who died over the week-end at the age of 70 after a serious illness. In focusing on Slabbert I not only wish to pay a personal tribute, but I think his career raises an issue of wider significance: the role of intellectuals in politics.

For the benefit of our overseas readers - because for some time Van Zyl or "Van" as he was known to his friends - has been out of the political limelight. Slabbert was an academic trained in South Africa as a sociologist who taught at several South African universities before he was persuaded to stand in a Cape Town constituency for the Progressive Party in the 1974 general election. Against heavy odds, he won the election, and went on in 1979 to be elected leader of what had become, as a result of break-aways and mergers, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). He was therefore leader of the official opposition in the South African parliament.

His speeches in Parliament were superbly analytical and on platforms well-reasoned and seldom highly emotional. Not to say that he could not be brutal at times. I remember a debate in Parliament when he turned on a Government frontbencher who was continually interrupting him, and said in Afrikaans: "if that Honourable Members' brain was dynamite, and it happened to explode it would not even dislodge his glasses". However, his politics were not without perplexities.

Numerous have been the glowing editorials, columns, and articles praising his career - both for his role in Parliament but perhaps more for his role in extra-Parliamentary politics - because in February 1986, on the eve of the Parliamentary session, Slabbert precipitately resigned from Parliament and as party leader. The reason he gave was that Parliament as constituted had become irrelevant in an increasingly violent and polarised country. And shortly afterwards, with funding from George Soros, he formed an extra-Parliamentary initiative aimed at establishing bridges between politically relevant South African elites and the outlawed African National Congress and others who were in exile. His resignation, however, left his supporters and the PFP representatives bewildered and angry. Colin Eglin, whom Slabbert had succeeded as leader, once again - one gathers much against his will - took up the leadership. But that thes e events had a profoundly negative impact on voter perceptions of the PFP, was evident in the party's poor performance in the 1987 general election.

In his memoirs 'Crossing the Borders of Power', Eglin offers what I think is the most detailed description of Slabbert's resignation, which Eglin says was "complex and controversial... at no stage did Slabbert lay down any markers that would define reasons for his resignation". Eglin also writes that "there was no way I could justify Slabbert's resignation on political grounds."

Van Zyl Slabbert was an intellectual - a genuine intellectual with a mind open to the truth; and his role and contribution to South African politics highlights the role of genuine intellectuals everywhere. Hannah Arendt of 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' fame, wrote that "intellectuals generally have trouble thinking clearly about politics because in large part they see ideas that work in everything.... Intellectuals risk becoming trapped in their own ideas". She illustrates this with the experience of top-flight German scholars during Nazi times and East European scholars under communism. The point also applies to Western intellectuals who, during the Cold War period, justified the actions of tyrants or "as was more common, denied any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies in the West."

Arendt's point may be illustrated also in South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, the man who did more to formulate the concept and policy of apartheid than anyone else, was reputed to be a brilliant academic. However, he seized on a single truth, namely that politics, without detracting from the place of the individual, and whether turning on social or class differences, ethnicity or language and religion, is a group activity. This he grasped, but absolutised in a way no genuine intellectual would; and secondly, corrupted it by introducing a 19th century racial superiority dogma.

Slabbert was too much the intellectual to be trapped by any idea. As I said, his mind was always open to the truth. I believe this also explains his lack of a political vocation. To begin with, Slabbert drifted into politics and, as Eglin says, was "never entirely comfortable with operating in the Parliamentary system". That he was too much the intellectual to ever develop a political vocation is evident from his resignation - or more specifically the manner of his resignation.

It is also illustrated in the idea he took to Eglin in January 1986. He proposed that all PFP members should resign from Parliament and then contest their seats again - on the basis that those that were re-elected would not take their seats in Parliament until the government had repealed the Population Registration Act - the law that classified each South African in terms of race. Eglin comments: "I was filled with despair at what Slabbert intended - and disbelief that a person as adept as he was could have produced such a flawed and fanciful scheme." If adopted, Eglin told him, "It would achieve nothing of value for either the country or the party. On the contrary, it would divide and weaken us, leaving us with fewer seats and less influence than before." Slabbert was persuaded to drop the idea. The point is to expect persons, some of whose life-long ambitions were to be in Parliament, to stand down in that way reveals a lack of understanding of politics and of the commitment to politics. As Bernard Crick in 'The Defence of Politics' - a little book that most political science majors in Western countries in the second half of the 20th century would have come across - said: "Politics is a vocation. It is not a career. It is a calling and an arduous calling in the absence of which you will neither enjoy politics or survive politics". 
Every democratic society, whether developing or mature, has its share of politicians not driven by material gain or fame but by the idea of politics as an end in itself. But fortunate are those societies who have a good sprinkling of men and women with ideas and minds open to the truth - as exemplified by Frederick van Zyl Slabbert.

Travel well, my friend!

Denis Worrall,
Chairman,
Omega Investment Research
Cape Town, South Africa

www.omegainvest.co.za