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By Root 1055 0

barely six weeks away, Viljoen responded to a call from one of his black allies in the Freedom Alliance. It was not Buthelezi this time, but the leader of another of the tribal statelets that the ideologue-in-chief Hendrick Verwoerd had devised as part of his “grand apartheid” strategy, a man by the name of Lucas Mangope, whose rule over Bophuthatswana was under threat from the majority of his ANC-supporting citizens, who found his dependence on Pretoria offensive. Viljoen mobilized a force of over a thousand men to go to the capital of “Bop,” a town called Mmabatho. The whole thing turned into a fiasco when Eugene Terreblanche’s AWB entered the fray and went on what the Afrikaans papers were to describe as a “kaffirskietpiekniek”—a kaffir-shooting picnic. Mangope’s security forces revolted, turning their guns on the Volksfronters, and when the SADF arrived late in the day in a column of armored vehicles, Viljoen’s forces fled the field in disarray.

What happened at Mmabatho is often given as the sole reason why Viljoen decided to abandon the Boer resistance struggle. He confided that there was more to it than that. Once rid of the AWB hooligan element, it would have remained within his means to carry on leading an effective “military” campaign, even if everybody else would have described it as terrorism. “We had a plan in place. We could have stopped the elections from taking place, and not with the SADF, but on our own. We had the means, we had the arms, we had the tactics, and we had the will. Not to take power, not to defeat the SADF, but yes, to prevent the elections from taking place successfully, no doubt about that.”

Arrie Rossouw, perceived four years after Mandela’s release as a heavyweight of Afrikaner journalism, a man who would go on to become editor-in-chief of both Beeld and Die Burger, agreed. “No question, he could have caused terrible damage to this country,” Rossouw said. “He could easily have placed four hundred highly trained former members of the Reconnaissance regiments [Special Forces] under his command, and with them, well armed, he could have blown up airports, train stations, bus stations, assassinated people. They would not have managed to overthrow the government—that was the lesson of Mmabatho—but they could have paralyzed the economy and caused absolute political chaos. And they could have gone on for years and years.”

They could have done, in other words, what the IRA did in Northern Ireland for thirty years, but with far more catastrophic impact. This was partly because they disposed of more arms and more men with more sophisticated military experience, but mainly because South Africa was a fragile, volatile, infant democracy, with a brittle economy, susceptible in a way neither Ireland nor Britain had been to chaos and collapse. The alarming thing was that it fell not to a collective but to one man to decide which of the two it would be, peace or war.

“Yes, it was entirely my decision. Entirely.” Viljoen solemnly confirmed. “During those final weeks before the election, opinion was divided in the Afrikaner Volksfront, fifty-fifty between those who wanted the violent option, disrupting the elections and the whole democratic process in South Africa, and those who wanted a negotiated solution.” So how did he reach his decision? “I always took the view that war or violence is not an easy option. I know war. So I told my supporters that I would take it upon myself whether to go to war or not to go. It was the most difficult decision I had to take in my life.

“In the military you must understand that before making up our minds on a question like this we weigh up all the factors, we evaluate, we think hard, and it is only after a long process that we decide. I considered that the right option was negotiations, and participation in the elections. I considered that it was best for the country, and best for the Afrikaner people.”

But what was the decisive factor? Was it the AWB rabble? Was it Mmabatho? He replied without hesitation, “The character of the opponent—whether you can trust him, whether