SOUTH AFRICA’S JOURNEY TOWARDS PEACE


Parliament Street, once a public thoroughfare named Grave Street because it was adjacent to a graveyard in the 1700s, is now closed to the public and forms part of the Presidential gardens in Cape Town.


Moving beyond the ANC The ANC was unbanned on 2 February 1990 and when the Constitutional Committee of the ANC met in Lusaka at the end of April 1990, we took the exciting decision that we would next meet in South Africa. The first ANC national conference to be held inside South Africa since 1959 took place in Durban from 2 to 6 July 1991. By the time of its first conference in South Africa, the ANC had formulated what was known as the Harare Declaration, which was adopted by the Organization of African Unity in 1989 and then, unprecedentedly, by the General Assembly of the United Nations. It listed the five minimum requirements that had to be met before


negotiations could begin: the release


of all political prisoners; the lifting of all bans and restrictions on people and organizations; the removal of all troops from the townships; the ending of the state of emergency and the repeal of all repressive legislation, and the cessation of all political executions. Only then, it was argued, could a climate suitable for negotiations be deemed to exist. The Harare Declaration was the bedrock of the ANC’s position regarding negotiations for a non-racial and democratic South Africa.


Formal constitutional negotiations began on 20 December 1991 and took place under the name of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, or Codesa. Delegations from 19 political organizations took part including, naturally, the ANC. The ANC’s Constitutional Committee


56 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One - South Africa


served as an advisory body to the party’s negotiation team, providing it with discussion documents, briefs and other assistance. By then it was a broader committee. Mandela had invited the prominent South African lawyers Nicholas (Fink) Haysom, Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos to contribute their renowned skills as leading anti-apartheid figures in the country. It continued to work on drafting a fledging constitution, which effectively informed the ANC’s negotiation team.


The debate on the negotiating process was not confined to the NEC and the Constitutional Committee. It was being played out all over the country. It is perhaps ironic that the two universities that occupied the greatest role in South Africa’s constitution-writing process were


the rather innocuous University of Potchefstroom, [the then president] De Klerk’s alma mater, which employed some advisers for the National Party’s negotiation team, and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), once a coloureds-only university created by apartheid, which had become a centre of resistance during the struggle.


The Community Law Centre at UWC became an engine room of lively debate and, drawing on a group of us UWC academics, we worked closely with the Centre for Development Studies and sometimes the Johannesburg-based Centre for Applied Legal Studies to run a series of countrywide workshops on the issues central to the negotiations at Codesa.


We thought at the time it was


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