Sunday Times, 16 January 2000
Alfred Nzo died after a stroke this week. As RAY HARTLEY writes, most South Africans saw only the tail end of a substantial career in which Nzo held the exiled ANC together through trying times
IT WAS a balmy Pretoria evening somewhere towards the end of the summer of 1997, and Alfred Nzo, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was holding court at the Union Buildings at his annual off-the-record gathering with journalists and diplomats.
Nzo had just come through a particularly bad year in the media. He had been caricatured as sleepy, out of touch and directionless. Critics had been particularly harsh about his cosying up to Libya, Cuba, Iran and other pariah states.
Through all of this he had smiled benignly, projecting an amiable insensitivity to the flood of criticism.
But at the Union Buildings gathering, the facade of diplomacy briefly slipped and Nzo showed his mettle.
For half an hour, perhaps a little longer, he spoke with vigour, an acerbic wit and more than a hint of sarcasm. Visiting each criticism of his policies one by one, he showed his hurt and defended his decisions.
In essence, the point he made that evening could be summed up in the sentence: "You people think you know so much, well, you know nothing."
Looking back now, he was right. Nzo's friendship with Libya, far from alienating South Africa from the West, was part of a strategy that produced the country's biggest foreign relations coup in decades when the Lockerbie bombers were handed over for trial.
By the time Nzo left office last year, South Africa was the pre-eminent nation of the developing world, holding the chairmanship of the Non Aligned Movement and about to assume the leadership of the Commonwealth. And in the US, where Nzo was supposed to have made us pariahs, we were about to assume the chairmanship of the IMF's influential Group of 20.
Nzo did not accomplish these things alone, but, in his unspectacular, plodding way, he engineered South Africa's diplomatic return to the centre of the African stage - the cornerstone on which our country's international prestige is now being built.
But the little that most South Africans saw of Nzo since his return from exile in the '90s was the tail end of a long political career.
From 1969 until 1991, Nzo served as ANC secretary-general and number two to then ANC president Oliver Tambo - without question the most important years of his political life as the ANC moved through armed struggle to the popular insurrection of the '80s and, finally, to the negotiating table in the early '90s.
Nzo joined the ANC in 1945 while a student at Fort Hare University, where he was registered for a science degree.
After two year's of involvement in student politics at the campus, he returned to the then Transvaal, where he had grown up, to become a health inspector in Alexandra township north of Johannesburg.
Sendiso Mfenyana, now secretary of Parliament, remembers a story told by Nzo about his introduction to muti on the eve of taking part in the ANC's defiance campaign.
Nzo's more superstitious colleagues persuaded him to visit a sangoma who made them strip naked at midnight while he lashed them with twigs dipped in a bucket of muti. Nzo spoiled it all when he was unable to contain his laughter.
Nzo became chairman of the ANC's Alexandra branch in 1956, taking a seat on the organisation's national executive committee in 1958 after leading the Alexandra bus boycott - the most high-profile political campaign of the time.
Nzo lost his job as health inspector along with his permit to live and work in Alexandra for his political activities. He was eventually sentenced to five years in jail for not having a residence permit, and in a stroke of irony was incarcerated in Modderbee Prison - in the office in which his father had once worked as a clerk before the Modder B mine was converted to a prison.
In 1964, after Nzo had been placed under house arrest and detained for 238 days, the ANC ordered him into exile.
He took up posts for the ANC in Egypt, India, Zambia and Tanzania before being elected secretary-general at the organisation's Morogoro conference in 1969, a post he held until his return from exile in 1991.
Nzo, president Oliver Tambo and treasurer Thomas Nkobi formed the core of the ANC's exile leadership.
Tambo saw in Nzo not so much a dynamic leader as a modest and ascetic journeyman who would keep the organisation on the straight and narrow and free of the frenzied ambition which was tearing the exiled PAC apart.
In exile, Nzo was a voracious reader of thrillers, biographies and political books. National Assembly Speaker Frene Ginwala remembers him as "extremely well read" and a more than competent scrabble player - when they played, he won.
She recalls that he wrote his own speeches and statements.
Nzo also took an interest in calligraphy, carrying with him a box of pens which he would produce when he felt the occasion demanded.
When Nzo's leadership was challenged at the Kabwe conference in July 1985, it was Tambo who saved him by circulating an influential "recommended list" for the leadership posts, which included Nzo.
The ANC president underscored his support for Nzo by congratulating him on his 60th birthday and delivering a speech tracing what the ANC internal report on the conference describes as "his rise to the position of secretary".
Crucially, the Kabwe conference also decided that the secretary-general would "act on behalf of the president in his absence from headquarters". This meant that when Tambo suffered a stroke in 1989, Nzo became a non-controversial "acting president", dampening potential succession battles.
In the mid-'80s, Nzo was the face of the ANC that greeted academics and businessmen travelling to its headquarters in Lusaka. His customary greeting was: "Welcome to those who have come to meet the terrorists," which immediately defused tension.
Nzo only rarely offended, and even then with an air of genial naivety which was easily excused. In 1986, he was quoted as saying: "Whatever the people decide to use to eliminate enemy elements is their decision. If they decide to use necklacing, we support it." There were few who took this sort of statement from Nzo seriously.
Nzo was ousted as secretary general in a bitter electoral battle with Cyril Ramaphosa at the Durban conference after accusations of "bad organisation at head office" and claims that he had failed to re-establish ANC branches within South Africa effectively after the return from exile.
Surprised by his defeat, Nzo retreated into the background until 1994, when President Nelson Mandela appointed him as democratic South Africa's first foreign minister. Nzo was chosen for his vast experience representing the ANC in Africa, a signal that the continent would be the new government's foreign policy priority.
However, Nzo was ageing and he played a limited role in Cabinet, leaving much of the cut and thrust of his portfolio to his deputy, Aziz Pahad.
To Roelf Meyer, who served as an NP minister in the Government of National Unity, Nzo nonetheless exuded the aura of elder statesman: "He was a dignified person. One had the impression that he was really a stalwart, one of the ANC's most senior wise men."
As foreign minister, Nzo's largest diplomatic crisis flared up while he was accompanying Mandela to a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in New Zealand, when Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha executed opposition leaders despite assuring South Africa that it would not harm them.
Mandela and Nzo between them drove through the Commonwealth's most far-reaching censure measures against a member state, culminating in the expulsion of Nigeria and an international campaign to end military rule in that country.
Nzo and Mandela's director general, Jakes Gerwel, often found themselves travelling the world to see through a Mandela foreign policy initiative.
In Indonesia, Mandela surprised his hosts by casually asking for a meeting with Xanana Gusmao, the East Timorese leader who was then in prison. Nzo and Gerwel later travelled to Indonesia to follow up the discussions.
When they received a frosty reception at the hands of the Indonesian government, it was Nzo who defused tensions.
"He was very polite and deliberate without giving offence. People respected his sagacity," says Gerwel.
But the remark that most impressed Gerwel was Nzo's comment on how the times had changed the way politics was conducted.
Said Nzo: "In these changed days, it's not the level and nature of commitment that counts as much as the ability to project charisma."
Perhaps it was Nzo's destiny to belong to the former category and to be one of the perpetually underestimated.
Nzo is survived by his wife, Regina, and a son.