This letter from Tom Sharpe was published in The Independent on 16 February 1990.
Sir: Anyone who knows or cares about South Africa must be shocked by the Prime Minister’s reactions to the release of Nelson Mandela. She has revealed either her ignorance of the horrors that are inflicted daily on millions of blacks under the system of racial totalitarianism that is called apartheid or her connivance in that vile system itself.
Her praise for President de Klerk’s so-called boldness and courage is as incomprehensible as her silence about Mandela’s years of imprisonment and hard labour is insulting. Her explanation for the latter, we must assume, is his refusal to renounce the ANC’s policy of armed struggle. If that is so, she should refer to the words of Judge de Wet when sentencing Mandela, Sisulu and the others to life imprisonment. The ANC leaders, the judge admitted, had given instructions “that care should be exercised that no person was injured or killed”.
The same could never have been said of the instructions given to the South African Police whose open terrorist treatment of the black population finally drove the African National Congress to adopt the “armed struggle” after 49 years of non-violent Gandhian protest. Anyone who lived in South Africa in the 1950s and saw unarmed men, women and children shot by the police or heard the screams of black suspects being tortured in police stations knows that a guerrilla war of liberation was, and remains entirely, justified and will continue until the process of dismantling apartheid legislation like the Group Areas Act is genuinely begun.
That time has not come. President de Klerk’s “courage and boldness” is the result of his government’s awareness that the South African economy is incapable of sustaining growth and of preventing a truly revolutionary situation developing as the black population is driven to suicidal despair by mass unemployment. This is partly the result of sanctions and the drying up of capital inflow, but it is also the economic logic of apartheid itself. Even so, de Klerk has done nothing more than make a partial move back to the political and economic conditions that drove the ANC to open revolt in 1961.
From past experience of Afrikaner Nationalist tactics, the leaders of the ANC and the other black organisations must expect prevarication upon prevarication and negotiations indefinitely prolonged. By her statements and her opposition to sanctions Mrs Thatcher has made herself a party to such delays. She is doing more. She is sacrificing long-term British interests and influence in South Africa. Already blacks and progressive whites in South Africa see her as apartheid’s greatest ally in the outside world.
It was such blacks and whites who called for sanctions in 1961. Had those sanctions been applied then, South Africa would have been spared almost 30 years of increasing tyranny. If sanctions are lifted now, the promise of Mandela’s statesmanship will be dissipated and the future will be handed to terrorists who believe in revolution by “necklacing”.
Yours,
TOM SHARPE
Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire
13 February