Denis Worrall: Secrets of the top Apartheid-era diplomat

This is The Rational Perspective. I'm Alec Hogg. In this episode, Denis Worrall shares the secrets of an apartheid-era diplomat. One of the cardinal rules in biographies is not to be put off by the first few chapters. More so, in autobiographies – those books where the life of the story is being written by the subject themselves. It was a good thing I remembered this when tackling South African politician and diplomat Denis Worrall's autobiography, which he's called "The Independent Factor". The first few chapters are dry. They're a testament to his diplomatic side with 60 years of diaries being chopped to produce a laundry list of people he wanted to be sure weren't offended by being left out but true to the genre's form, this biography turns lively around a quarter of the way in. Worrall starts sharing a host of insights that even now, you might have expected would remain unsaid.

Among the more interesting was the optimistic lead-up to and subsequent fallout after Prime Minister PW Botha's watershed Rubicon speech on the 15th of August 1985. More of that later but in his talk at South Africa House last week, Worrall omitted to share the backstory of how South Africa managed to escape total meltdown after that 1985 moment. In his book, Worrall reminds us that in the wake of Botha's middle finger to the world; just two weeks after the Rubicon speech, South Africa had closed its Foreign Exchange markets and declared a unilateral moratorium on all of its debt repayments. On the 27th of August, Worrall got a call from Botha's office instructing him to fetch Reserve Bank Governor Gerhard de Kock from Heathrow and go with the man who looked after South Africa's Central Bank to Rothschild's Bank in the city of London.

This fabled, privately owned financial institution which PW Botha apparently believed was able to sort out the mess. Worrall writes that after de Kock had said his piece in the meeting, Rothschild Chairman (Sir Evelyn) called in four young executives and in a couple of hours they'd returned with a debt standstill proposal that was duly accepted; not just by Sir Evelyn Rothschild but also by South Africa itself. That proposal – a schedule of debt repayments that lasted five years – turned the country into a capital exporter, forcing the regime to face the reality that it could no longer afford its dysfunctional approach. It's an untold story of how it might have been Rothschild and the global banking community which actually brought down apartheid. For his part, Worrall regards himself as a liberal inside a rotten system – the globetrotting academic who was roped in by the politicians to urge the rest of humanity to give South Africa time to change its trajectory.

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