What Thabo Mbeki, the Broederbond and a minister from Montagu can still teach us

In 1986, a community worker from Montagu found himself among ANC leaders and members of the Afrikaner Broederbond who were beginning to discover that some of what they believed about one another was not as simple as they had thought. Almost 40 years later, there may be something in those encounters that South Africa needs again.

Deon Snyman is the MD of the Goedgedacht Trust, a rural development organisation in the Western Cape. He holds a PhD in Old Testament, an MA in Ancient Languages, and an MPhil in Political Studies, and has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of social justice, community development and leadership formation, with a focus on children, youth and families in vulnerable communities.

Over the past few days I have had several conversations with Dirk Marais about a visit he made to the United States in 1986. Marais now has to think back almost 40 years, and some of the details have returned gradually, with him sometimes phoning me again because he had remembered something or wanted to correct a detail.

I have found this process fascinating because what initially seemed an interesting story about community work in Montagu gradually became part of a much bigger story about a time when deeply divided South Africans were beginning to talk to one another.

Marais arrived in Montagu in 1978 as a minister and became closely involved with the Montagu and Ashton Community Service, known as MAG, which had already been established through cooperation between churches and people in the community.

He had experience in community development and this became an important part of his ministry, bringing him into contact with a South Africa that could quite easily remain outside the experience of a white congregation at the time because, once you entered communities and started listening to people, poverty, inequality and the consequences of apartheid were no longer political ideas that could be discussed at a distance but realities encountered in people’s homes, working conditions and in the very different opportunities available to children growing up only a few kilometres from one another.

It was this work that eventually led to David Bonbright of the Ford Foundation inviting Marais to the US in 1986 to speak about the community development work being done through MAG. Marais went there to talk about what was happening in a relatively small community in the Western Cape and could hardly have imagined that he would find himself among people who were beginning some of the conversations that would eventually help South Africa find a way out of apartheid.

The gathering brought together South Africans from remarkably different political backgrounds, including people associated with the ANC, people from the liberal political tradition and, perhaps most surprisingly when one considers the political climate of the time, members of the Afrikaner Broederbond .