Adam Hochschild, best known perhaps for his 1998 book on Congo’s colonial catastrophe, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, concluded a piece for the Boston Review back in 1987 on a visit the previous year to P W Botha’s South Africa with a poignant summary of his conversation with a dying man.

The terminally ill man – who died, in fact, before the piece appeared − was, as Hochschild describes him, “an old friend … a white anti-apartheid lawyer who has spent two stretches in prison”.

He was no ordinary man. His name was Ernest “Ernie” Wentzel.

In the liberal community, Ernie Wentzel is revered as a pillar of the latterly banned Liberal Party, and as a courageous and principled human rights lawyer at a time when such work came at sometimes grave personal cost.

Fittingly enough, his widow, Jill Wentzel, is no less a figure of substance in the liberal universe, having been prominent in the Black Sash during apartheid, and, after 1994, for combining insight and principle in warning in her 1995 book, The Liberal Slideaway, of “the “tyranny of ‘political correctness’” and the disheartening phenomenon of South African liberals “(losing) their pragmatism, their critical faculties and their willingness to court unpopularity in the pursuit of truth, and [succumbing] instead to the kind of romanticism they had always despised”.

Both are acknowledged as veterans of the Institute of Race Relations − and veterans of the optimistic liberal conviction in better ideas founded on liberty of the individual, and equality before the law.

We encounter Ernie Wentzel on his sick bed at the end of Hochschild’s account of his 1986 visit to the somewhat embattled, ever complex late-apartheid world of Total-Strategy-for-a-Total-Onslaught South Africa. It is a country snared in the web of an increasingly fearful and sinister Nationalist establishment, even as it reformed itself, perforce, under the almost unlikely pressure of ordinary people moved by the unrevolutionary stimulus of small daily needs and modest personal ambitions.

It is the very last lines of Hochschild’s piece that I want to get to, but it’s worth looking at the 250-odd words that precede them.

Vivid insights

Hochschild tells us that paying this call on Wentzel was “(o)ne of my last visits before leaving South Africa”, a visit that delivered to him, then – and us, today – some vivid insights.

“I see two changes in South Africa in the last twenty years,” [Wentzel] says. “The image the whites have of blacks has changed, and that that blacks have of whites has changed. Whites take blacks more seriously. They call them blacks or Africans now, not natives or Bantu. They regard them as a political force which somehow, unfortunately, has to be reckoned with. They regard them almost…almost as people.

“Blacks, on the other hand, have more pride in themselves, less respect for whites, less fear of white power. In one sense this is good; in another it may be a serious mistake, for it may cause them to underestimate white military strength and willingness to hang on here.”

Ernie is in a hospital bed. In a few weeks he will be dead of cancer. Around him are piles of books and newspapers. The phone rings repeatedly; one call is from Winnie Mandela to say that prisoners “on the island” (Robben Island, site of a major political prison for blacks) have heard he is sick and wish him well. As we resume our talk, Ernie displays no self-pity, and instead asks eagerly about whom I’ve seen. He wants to talk about the political situation, not himself.

In the final 50-odd words of his visitor’s account, Wentzel leaves us with a compelling image. Hochschild recalls:

 Only when I press him does he tell me that he is so weakened by tumors and the drugs used to treat him that he has hallucinations at night. “They are always the same. I see the front page of a newspaper, a South African newspaper. But then, I’m unable to turn the page.”

This seeming stasis was very true of the late 1980s, as liberals who lived through them will remember.

Maddening hallucination

But how familiar it seems all over again − the maddening hallucination of time standing still, of history, politics, life even, suspended in a kind of paralysing pause between this one thing and the next, and everyone just hanging in there, to slightly contort the idiom, without really knowing why or how long for, or how long they can keep it up for.

After the cautious expectation that came with Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as party leader at the end of 2017 (and the six-year slump that followed), the renewed optimism that greeted more than merely the ANC’s dramatic electoral collapse last year but the fact of its being a harbinger of the cooperative politics promised by the formation of a national unity government in June, seems today somewhat jaded, and almost false.

Is the ANC ever going to get serious about its promises? When will it wake up to its fate? Will the GNU turn out to be the watershed the country is counting on? How much more do South Africans have to put up with before they can finally turn the page?

We might take some comfort from knowing that time is relentless, and that as the hours and weeks and years pass by, a day does come when the page turns. But we shouldn’t imagine that it happens on its own.

Just last week,  Mandla Hlwatika, an online guest at the webinar at which the IRR launched its first Blueprint for Growth paper of 2025, Arming SA’s Pro-Growth Forces, put a question to author of the report and CEO of the Institute, Dr John Endres, whose answer helps explain a critical feature of the liberal mission, and the endurance of its devotees.

“What keeps the IRR optimistic,” Hlwatika asked, “and pursuing and propagating good ideas when we know that the ruling party does not actually care? The president has proven on many occasions that the party’s unity (ANC) matters more that his responsibilities to the country.”

Endres replied: “We have a very long view. The IRR was founded in 1929, when racial discrimination was rife in South Africa, and it was around in 1948 when the National Party won the election and started introducing apartheid; the IRR kept plugging away, even in those dark days when it seemed nothing would change … putting out the message about non-racialism and treating people as equals, fairly and without discriminating against them on the basis of race.

“Playing a long game”

“So, for an organisation that is over 90 years old (we know that) political parties come and go and that’s what keeps us optimistic … we know that we are playing a long game, here. We know that what we promote is in line with what most South Africans care about. In our polling, we see that most South Africans are not in favour of race discrimination, and we think there’s not a huge amount of racial tension, that people are motivated by wanting to have a job, to provide for their family, wanting a good education, wanting good public services, feeling safe and not being threatened by criminals or the corrupt. It’s really basic things.

“And these are the things that the IRR is working to achieve for the country. We know that this is what people want and we know that that is what will ultimately prevail. We know that a political party like the ANC, which is currently in charge, and has been in charge for 30 years, will not be in charge forever, and ultimately – as long as we remain an open, democratic society – those in charge are going to be people who deliver the basic things that people are looking for. And that’s what keeps us optimistic.”

You could say there’s nothing obvious, here, to provide any clarity about when the page turns – except, perhaps, that key conditional phrase that everything else hinges on; “as long as we remain an open, democratic society”.

Whatever else we achieve, the process itself, every incremental step, is paramount.

In the July 1986 edition of Reality magazine (self-described as “a journal of liberal and radical opinion”), Ernie Wentzel is remembered in a tribute by no less a figure than Alan Paton as someone who “would not have objected to being called a democrat, or an out-and-out opponent of Apartheid and any other form of racialism. He would have jibbed at being called a socialist, because although he condemned the excesses of capitalism, he was totally opposed to any kind of centralised control of human society, whether it was political or social or economic. There was only one name that he would have accepted without reservation, and that was the name of liberal.”

“Ordinary people”

An editorial in that same edition of Reality says of Wentzel: “Most of all he loved ordinary people. Least of all he liked ideological dogmatists. There was a correlation between the two attitudes.

“He saw clearly that the unbending pursuit of dogma ended up hurting ordinary people who got in the way of the dream. He had seen how the pursuit of the apartheid dream had destroyed so many of them and he suspected that the unrelenting pursuit of the Utopian dreams of the left would do the same.

“The only dogma Ernie Wentzel subscribed to was an old-fashioned belief that the end does not justify the means.”

It is worth steeling ourselves to remember that, however strongly we long for the page to turn and deliver this or that decisive outcome, more important, ultimately, is recognising that the way we do things is the essential condition of remaining an open, democratic society capable of changing itself.

[Image: By Theo Coggin, front cover of Reality magazine of July 1986, Alan Paton and Ernie Wentzel at the 1985 Hoernlé lecture (Federation or desolation? by Paton)]

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IRR head of media Michael Morris was a newspaper journalist from 1979 to 2017, covering, among other things, the international campaign against apartheid, from London, and, as a political correspondent in Cape Town, South Africa’s transition to democracy. He has written three books, the last being Apartheid, An Illustrated History, and has an MA in Creative Writing from UCT. He writes a fortnightly column in Business Day.