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Lange described a long discussion he had had with Thabo Mbeki at a conference in New York in 1986. ANC president Oliver Tambo also had been asking to see him. De Lange was scathing about Dr Andries Treurnicht and the Conservative Party (CP), whose members had been trying to paralyse any thinking about the future in the Broederbond. His view was that the Group Areas Act and the Separate Amenities Act would have to go. PW Botha thought exclusively in terms of Afrikaner interests; he would not allow Mandela to die in jail, but would go on insisting on an absolute renunciation of violence. De Lange’s conviction was that there would have to be ahistoric compromise between Afrikaner and black nationalism and that this would have to come sooner rather than later.
    I said that it seemed to me that the one encouraging feature of the situation was the intensity of the debate within Afrikanerdom about the direction reform should take. Although not numerically strong, people like Hermann Giliomee, Willie Esterhuyse and FW de Klerk’s brother, Wimpie, represented an important fraction of the intellectual elite in a society which paid more homage to professors than we did in Britain!
    There followed a meeting with the head of the Dutch Reformed Church, Professor Johan Heyns. I was to spend many hours with him at his modest bungalow in a suburb of Pretoria. Professor Heyns had declared apartheid a heresy, thereby splitting his church and provoking the fury of the conservatives. He was to prove the most effective of allies in a series of tight corners over the next four years. He was assassinated in November 1994 by a right-wing gunman while playing cards with his granddaughter in the house where he had received me with such kindness.
    The Bank of England had impressed upon me the high regard in which they held the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Gerhard de Kock. I found him pessimistic about South Africa’s economic prospects. He was predicting 2 per cent growth in the economy for 1987 and 1988 – not enough to keep pace with the increase in population. This weakness he saw as the result of PW Botha’s stop/go attitude to political reform. He was determined that South Africa must honour its debts. But the refusal of the Western banks to extend any further credit meant that the country was obliged to export capitalto pay down its debts, rather than importing capital to fund its development.
    When I arrived in South Africa, relations with the leaders of the UDF were strained because of the British government’s opposition to sanctions. It was obvious that greater efforts needed to be made by us to get much closer to the future leadership of the country. Some of the younger members of the embassy and consulates had good contacts in the townships. I encouraged them to give an over-riding priority to developing these. It was difficult and sometimes hazardous but very rewarding work, which they did to such effect that they became known as the ‘township attachés’.
    It was not possible to send young members of the embassy into the townships, still less to visit them myself, as I aimed most weeks to do, without doing more to help the people living there. First Chris Patten and then Lynda Chalker, as the ministers in charge of overseas aid, allocated the relatively modest sums needed to enable us to support, eventually, over three hundred projects in Soweto, Mamelodi, Crossroads, Gugulethu and many of the other townships and squatter camps in the Cape and the Transvaal. These projects, amazingly, were controversial at the time, as it was argued by various anti-apartheid campaigners outside South Africa that this was merely ameliorating apartheid and, therefore, postponing the day of reckoning. This doctrine of ‘worse is better’ did not appeal to me. Above all, it did not appeal to people in the townships, who desperately needed help and support. Virtually all the projects we supported were