How Washington Okumu Became the Mediator Who Saved the 1994 South African Elections

Abstract

ABSTRACT Washington Okumu (1936–2016) went to South Africa in April 1994 as part of the Kissinger–Carrington team charged to mediate Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)-African National Party (ANC)/National Party (NP) differences on the interim constitution. A few days after the collapse of that effort he emerged as the individual broker for a behind-the-scenes agreement that brought the IFP back into South Africa’s democratic elections. His appearance was not a fluke. Rather, it was the culmination of a career with a conservative Christian network that was active in track-two diplomacy and constitutional theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. This article looks at this genealogy of compromise and mediation and treats it as a mode of politics in its own right, with interests, a constituency and a strategy. Okumu’s network envisioned South Africa as an interracial Christian society living under a Biblically sound legal system. They did not try to preserve apartheid, but held that federalism, free markets and protection for the heteronormative family were divinely ordained. These concerns provided essential context to Okumu’s appearance and signal a mode of politics that was not interested in either segregation or the project of deracialisation, but he was thoroughly conservative on social and cultural matters.