MICHAEL MORRIS | Bozell’s letter exposes ANC’s crippling insecurity - Business Day

Michael Morris
Perhaps the worst that could be said of US ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III’s querulous note of January 1987, balking at the “terrorist” ANC’s imminent official engagement with the Reagan administration, is that it betrays the then president of the National Conservative Political Action Committee’s lack of confidence, limited political imagination and doubtful sense of moment.

It was, and probably remains, the fate of many conservatives to be blind to the common pattern in human contests of belligerents eventually becoming fraternal partners in a project the responsibility for whose realisation their earlier conflict foisted on them jointly.

On the other hand, there is nothing better to be said of ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula’s faintly juvenile hawking of Bozell’s 39-year-old letter last week as a supposed indication of the US ambassador being “an unrepentant racist and a pathological hater of black liberation” than that it betrays a crippling insecurity, a dumbfounding lapse of political wisdom and a chronic misappreciation of the moment.

It is the fate of many progressives to mistake a history of struggle, on its own, as a reliable authority of their claim to be of the people, for the people — or the guarantor of succeeding in being either. Sensibly appraising any occasion of historical import calls for recognising the links between “moment”, “momentous” and “momentum”.

In his excellent online dictionary of etymology, Etymonline, Douglas Harper traces “moment” (“very brief portion of time, instant”) to the 12th century Old French moment and further back to the Latin “momentum”, being a contraction of movimentum, from movere “ to move”, cautioning “in careful use, a moment has duration, an instant does not”.

It is not a small thing. Had the ANC secretary-general paused for an instant he might actually have drawn some lessons from the late 1980s and perhaps have seen that what is momentous is not that history goes on, but how it does so.

If Bozell was mistaken in 1987 — a whole 15 months after the first breakthrough engagement in Lusaka between South African business and the exiled (poorly understood and all but bogeyman) ANC — the lessons of that time, by the choicest irony, resonate with piercing clarity in ours.

Part of what made those early encounters so important, no less for the wary and doubtful, was poignantly captured by the leader of that very first deputation, Anglo American chair Gavin Relly, Harry Oppenheimer’s successor, who said at that juncture: “What business needs to do most of all is to make the world realise that you can’t have sensible reform without economic growth ... they need to understand that we are not capable in the long run of creating an even moderately stable society unless we can develop economically as a nation, giving jobs to people and creating new services.”

This is almost breathtakingly indistinguishable from the warnings levelled at the ANC these days, three whole decades after its ballot-box triumph gave it the power to serve. As 2026 is not 1987, we might claim for ourselves the maturity, at least, of seeing that ambassador Bozell’s conservative credentials of 39 years ago are somewhat less relevant to our present condition than what he has had to say in recent days as the representative of the biggest economy in the world.

The ANC does not have to love Bozell, but it might profit from listening when he says: “We want partners who also dream great dreams and that is South Africans’ signature. Let us do all in our power to make this relationship thrive.”

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-03-16-michael-morris-bozells-letter-exposes-ancs-crippling-insecurity/