The much-debated swimming excursion of the late Rev Allan Hendrickse

A picture of mentioned swimming excursion is on the cover of Richard van der Ross's In Our Own Skins.

The much-debated swimming excursion of the late Rev Allan Hendrickse and his Labour Party (LP) at the then “white” King’s Beach in Port Elizabeth in January 1987, much to the chagrin of the late former President  PW Botha, to this day causes division, especially among coloured people, regarding the Reverend’s alleged apology for the incident.

Approximately 30 years ago this controversial dip into the ocean, which flowed from the political struggle of Allan Hendrickse, erstwhile LP leader, on behalf of the then still downtrodden so-called coloured people in the apartheid regime, catapulted him into the international spotlight as a colourful politician, only to be followed in later years by his rejection by large sections of the coloured community.

This negativity towards Hendrickse among coloured people manifested itself both in the political arena and in the church.

So, did Hendrickse, who was chairperson of the Ministers’ Council in the House of Representatives at the time, and also a member of the Botha cabinet, really apologise to Botha for the swim, as is widely believed?

To answer this difficult and controversial question I studied Hendrickse’s so-called letter of apology to Botha dated 21 January 1987.

Maybe it would be more circumspect and fair first to sketch the tension and political insecurity that characterised the circumstances under which the LP was established and operated, as well as the developments that gave rise to the swimming incident.

After the banning of the ANC, PAC and other political organisations in the early 1960s, a political drought besieged the country, especially in the coloured community.

This gave rise to the establishment of the LP by Richard van der Ross, then vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, Sonny Leon, MD Arendse and union leaders in 1965 to serve as a political voice for those opposed to the NP’s apartheid policy.

Subsequently, the LP contributed significantly to the creation of political awareness among the coloured people and helped them in the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s to obtain clarity on political issues and therefore to formulate and articulate political points of view.

Even the parents of former Minister Trevor Manuel were die-hard LP supporters. In his biography Choice not fate, Manuel reminisced that he accompanied his parents to LP meetings as a child. This kindled a sense of political awareness in him. People like the late Benny Alexander, later known as Khoisan X, in later years secretary-general of the PAC, attended LP meetings in Kimberley.

The LP positioned itself as the voice of the oppressed and also tried to fill the vacuum left by the banning of the ANC and other liberation movements. The Party’s 1977 national congress saw the adoption of a resolution in terms of which the LP committed itself to promoting the aims and objectives of the ANC.

In later years, and especially in the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994, Peter Hendrickse, then LP national public relations officer and the son of Allan Hendrickse, defended the party’s decision to participate in the elections under the ANC banner as a reconfirmation of the Congress resolution of 1977.

When I interviewed him in 2009, Peter Hendrickse stated that the LP’s participation in structures such as the Coloured Peoples’ Representative Council (1969) and subsequently the Tricameral Parliament (1984) had been motivated by a desire to find solutions to the country’s constitutional challenges.

“White people feared black majority rule. So, irrespective of what you thought of white people, their fears were a reality and we had to find ways to arrive at a solution. It was a case of white fears against black aspirations, and vice versa.”

As early as 1966, Van der Ross stated that the LP should participate in the election process to prevent a situation where “the field is left clear for pro-Government groups to gain ground”.

Hendrickse said at the time that Nelson Mandela’s pronouncements underpinned the LP’s participation in the tricameral system. Hendrickse therefore based his political strategy partly on, as he called it, “Mandela’s points of view”.

Mandela’s essay “Our struggle needs many tactics” was published in 1958. Madiba expressly referred to the decision of the South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO) in 1957 to participate in the pending election of four whites to represent coloureds in parliament, insisting that that was the right decision.

(A note about SAPCO: SAPCO managed to forge a political cooperation with other liberation movements to form the Congress Alliance, which culminated in the drafting of the Freedom Charter in 1955. In comparable fashion, the LP joined the then Patriotic Front (PF) formed by organisations such as the ANC, AZAPO and the PAC in October 1991. The formation of the PF was to seek broader consensus for the democratisation process, and to advance the debate on negotiations. The strategic objective of the PF was to win over as many organisations as possible – including organisations that formed part of the apartheid Bantustan system and those that collaborated with the apartheid government – in the negotiation process and to strengthen the democratisation process in favour of the people.)

Mandela further contended: “The parliamentary forum must be exploited to put forth the case for a democratic and progressive South Africa.

“Let the democratic movement have a voice both outside and within Parliament … through Parliament we can reach the masses of the people and rally them behind us.”

As the intellectual and academic Hein Willemse correctly summarised it, the decade of the ‘80s was “a time of defiance and militancy, of reform and co-option.”

Those years of protest demanded visionary leadership – especially in poor communities, in which social and political power had been unilaterally embedded for centuries – but the LP clearly read the times incorrectly and in the midst of the turmoil decided in January 1983 in Eshowe to participate in the Tricameral Parliament.

That decision heralded the beginning of the alienation of the LP and created fertile ground for the establishment of the UDF and other militant groups – who labelled Hendrickse and the LP collaborators and opportunists.

Some political analysts warned that the constitutional system that had created the 1983 constitution was a total failure.

The historian Roy du Pré summarised events as follows: “Hendrickse thought it was the beginning of reform, but it turned out to be white domination in another guise. The NP replaced overt white domination with covert domination by using coloured and Indian surrogates to do its work.”

During the parliamentary session of 1986 the relationship between the LP and NP deteriorated to such an extent that young LP MPs, such as Peter Hendrickse and Desmond Lockey, were often openly scathing towards Botha in debates. The Big Crocodile was often well and truly chased back to the river!

In addition, the dilemma of participation – of a puristic political stance versus participation in an unacceptable system to secure the upliftment of an impoverished community – became increasingly difficult to articulate analytically and convincingly.

By the end of 1986 the LP was in political exile; other strategies had to be found to lend credibility to the party’s participation in apartheid structures.

A dispute about the failure to scrap apartheid legislation, notably the Group Areas Act, led to major discord between Botha and Hendrickse.

This culminated in the LP’s much-debated swim at the then still “white” King’s Beach after the LP’s national congress in Port Elizabeth in January 1987.

Botha was furious and repudiated Hendrickse in typical finger-wagging style on national TV, resulting in the so-called letter of apology from the LP leader to Botha.

There was also discord among the LP leadership and the parliamentary caucus about the strategy to be followed against the NP, and specifically Botha.

Various versions exist of who really made the decision to go swimming. One version is that Peter Hendrickse grabbed the microphone at the conclusion of the congress and announced the swimming excursion, to the surprise of his father.

The decision, according to various sources, was taken neither by the LP’s national executive committee nor the congress, and Allan Hendrickse subsequently paid a heavy political price.

The discord or confusion within the LP was later evident in the way in which Hendrickse handled the situation. His letter to Botha was on the letterhead of the Ministers’ Council, but should in fact have been on a party letterhead, because the swimming incident was a party issue. According to Peter Hendrickse, his father wrote the letter, “because as you can see and read, it was written in my dad’s style”.

Two key extracts from Hendrickse’s letter are:

• I write this letter to you in a spirit of resolving the dispute in the best interest of the country. I ask that you accept that whatever I have done, I have done in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and the policy of the Labour Party (…). For this I believe no apology is necessary.

• The swimming event was not intended by my colleagues, or me, as an act of civil disobedience and we regret any conclusion to that effect. Furthermore, in nothing that my colleagues and I have done have we ever intended an affront to your person in your personal capacity and your capacity as State President, nor did we intend to challenge your authority as State President. In as much as any impression might have been created to that effect I offer, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, our apologies.

According to Peter Hendrickse, his father did not apologise. “The letter was interpreted incorrectly. We explained that if our swimming excursion had been interpreted as an attack on the office of the State President, we apologise for that. It was never our intention to insult the office of the State President. Our protest was against whites only beaches; for that, we do not apologise. Also not for the swimming excursion.”

The inevitable question is whether Allan Hendrickse apologised for his and the LP’s objection to whites’ only beaches. The answer is evidently no. Did he offer an apology that the incident could have been interpreted as an attack on the office of the State President? That was clearly the case.

Did Hendrickse apologise for the swimming excursion?

The content of his letter in no way suggests this. However, interpretations thereof, especially by the then NP-controlled SABC and Nasionale Pers (now Naspers) papers, did suggest this.

• Jason Lloyd is a former journalist, columnist and social commentator

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