Melanie Verwoerd helped Nelson Mandela rid South Africa of apartheid. Then she became her country's ambassador to Ireland. So how has she ended up selling wine? She tells Catherine Cleary about an eventful life
There it sat in the diplomatic diary. It was her first engagement as South Africa's ambassador to Ireland, and Melanie Verwoerd needed to muster all her powers of diplomacy. On paper, a cocktail party with some of her country's most successful wine growers looked like a piece of cake. But a few years earlier she had been a persistent thorn in the sides of these rich white men. As an MP with Nelson Mandela's ANC party, she had taken workers' rights into the heart of their farms. She brought journalists into their lush green vineyards, to reveal exploitation, and encouraged the workers who came to her constituency clinics to seek fair pay and conditions.
Some of the farmers set their dogs on her. There were times she was shot at. (She throws this nugget in so casually you might think she was talking about receiving a piece of junk mail.) They were good shots, so she assumes they were only trying to scare her.
At that first function at the embassy, in 2001, the South African sense of humour prevailed. She knew all the farmers, and they knew her. "It was hilarious. It was typical - the best of South Africa, in a way. They all had a good laugh about it. I threatened them all with fair-trade agreements, and we drank on it and moved on."
After four years as a diplomat, Verwoerd has emerged out of the world of careful words and cocktail receptions with strong views on her country's future and her adopted country's attitudes to race, prosperity and women in politics. As a broadcaster - her radio programme, Spectrum, is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday evenings - her work with the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and a business consultancy has been combined with a return of sorts to the South African vineyards. She has set up Drinkingwines.ie, an internet firm to sell South African wine online.
Her husband, Wilhelm, works with what she calls the ex-combatants of the Northern Ireland conflict, through Glencree Centre for Reconciliation, in Co Wicklow. It is his work and their two children, a 15-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, that will keep Verwoerd here in Ireland for the foreseeable future.
In the early 1990s the Verwoerds, whose story has a film-script flavour, were the poster boy and girl of South Africa's journey from apartheid to democracy. One of Wilhelm's grandfathers was Hendrik Verwoerd - commonly referred to as the architect of apartheid - who was prime minister of South Africa from 1958 until he was assassinated, in 1966.
The Dutchman, whose heavily-jowled profile is stamped on commemorative medals, could never have imagined that his grandson would come to work alongside the people he built his career on suppressing.
Melanie grew up in a comfortable academic household, moving to Stellenbosch, the prosperous university town in the wine heartland, when she was a teenager. Her childhood was an all-white world; its only black faces belonged to the people who worked in their house. "I had a sense from my mother always that something wasn't quite right in South Africa. My mum would sometimes remark . . . something would happen, and she would say: 'God, that isn't right.' "
Wilhelm was her tutor at Stellenbosch University, in the mid 1980s. When she told her mother he had asked her to a dance, her mother told her: "You need to be really careful, because they're very conservative." So Melanie asked what his politics were. "He said, 'To the left of the National Party,' which was good enough at that stage." Wilhelm, who went on to study at Oxford, soon veered completely off the Verwoerd road map. He posted banned books and documents back to Melanie from England. The political awakening had begun. They married at the end of 1987, travelling together back to Oxford, so he could finish his studies, a year later. When they returned to South Africa, Mandela had been released and the ANC was legalised.
Melanie began working in the townships and going to ANC meetings. They knew their activities would meet with family disapproval, but the decision was sealed when they met Mandela for the first time. "It was at a cocktail function in Stellenbosch which was set up by some of the establishment people to introduce Mandela to the intellectual community. Wilhelm went to speak to him and apologise to him, because of course Mandela was put into jail under his grandfather, and it was his grandfather who banned the ANC.
"But Mandela wouldn't have any of it. He just said: 'No, no. We're looking forward now. We're not looking back.' And then he asked Wilhelm whether his grandmother was still alive, and how she was doing. He asked us to send her his regards and say that he was happy she reached a good old age. That just shook us so much. He's an amazing man."
They quietly joined Mandela's party, working below the radar for about a year. Then a line about their involvement appeared on the back of a magazine. The world media seized on the fact, and overnight they went from being a young couple trying to follow their instincts to symbols of enormous change.
Wilhelm's family was furious, and he was cut off. His father, who refused to speak to him for a decade, only recently relaxed his stance a little, after recovering from cancer. "We made sure his grandchildren saw him, but it meant dropping them off and leaving. So when we had a little baby I'd be sitting in a cafe, waiting for the call to say: 'Come and breastfeed him.' "
With her relationship with her in-laws fractured seemingly beyond repair, and her own young family to care for, she began campaigning to win a seat in the 1994 elections. Her face glows when she remembers the run-up. "It was an amazing time. There was so much hope and so much determination, and, for me on a personal level, we had a small baby and a three-year-old." There were death threats from right-wing extremists. It was often too dangerous to bring her children on the campaign trail. They resisted the idea of security and wanted only to ensure that the children were safe. All the hatred was directed at them from the white community.
"Not once did I get any resentment or anger or suspicion while campaigning. Sometimes people needed to ask questions in a very careful and polite way. People would tell you things like: 'I know it's horrible to say this, but the day Verwoerd was assassinated we danced in the streets.' It was like reclaiming a country that I didn't know existed."
She was duly elected, becoming South Africa's youngest woman politician. She served for seven years, until she "was a bit cheeky" and asked Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor as president, for a diplomatic posting - and then pushed it further by asking for Ireland.
She is hopeful about South Africa's future, and says there are distinct differences between her country and the volatility of neighbouring Zimbabwe. "Ours was a negotiated settlement, and agriculture makes up very little of our GDP, only 6 per cent. So the whole issue about Zimbabwe is that they were more than 20 years down the line and most of the economic power was still not in the hands of black Zimbabweans." The result, she says, was tinder just waiting for a match. The redistribution of land in South Africa is not happening fast enough, she concedes. "We should be doing it faster. You can't expect people to stay patient: they can't eat a vote." But the process is handled through the courts, to remove it from the political sphere, and therefore takes time.
In her four years as ambassador, Verwoerd concentrated on promoting tourism and wine, the two industries that could create most employment at home. Tourism grew by 300 per cent, and sales of South African wine doubled.
Now the old passion of the activist has stirred. She recently found her diplomatic skills deserting her when an Irishman (who she later discovered was a judge) proudly told a South African judge that 6 per cent of Irish politicians were now women. She tried to bite her tongue but failed. "I said, 'How can you even say that that is good?' and then he made the usual kinds of arguments that you hear around the world - 'You just can't find competent women, but if women want to be in politics they'll be there,' which is, of course, nonsense. It's [ like] saying that, under an apartheid regime, if black people wanted to be in government they'd be there. It's slightly different, obviously, but not quite."
She believes that if political parties really want to see women in Leinster House they will have to put female candidates into safe constituencies or introduce quotas into the selection process. The challenge then will be to retain those women. During her first year in government in South Africa, 48 women ANC MPs got divorced: juggling family and work was made more difficult by the working hours of a traditional parliament.
Is she hopeful that Ireland can become a multicultural society? "At the moment you can cope with diversity, because there is economic prosperity. The moment that doesn't happen it becomes much harder for people to be gracious, so it becomes much more urgent to do it now."
She is concerned that recent Irish legislation on work permits is divisive, drawing a line between skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled workers will invariably come from the developed world, the unskilled from the developing, she believes. Then there is the diplomatically tricky issue of overseas recruitment.
"Everybody knows that Ireland went and recruited high-skilled workers even in South Africa. Obviously, we weren't too happy about it. It was never formally said, but we [ in South Africa] need the high-skilled people. In any of the hospitals in Dublin there's a huge percentage of South African nurses, doctors and radiographers. And we trained those people. We need them desperately in our healthcare system. It's good for anyone to go overseas, but manage it in a way so that after a certain period of time they need to go back. Allow them to come here for a brief period of time, pay them well, treat them well and then allow them to go back. And then it's a good exchange for the country."
Back on South Africa's wine estates, the fair-trade system that she helped to champion in parliament has been implemented by her successors. She is ready for new challenges, proud of her time as ambassador but happy to close the chapter. "In my heart I'm an activist and not a diplomat. Diplomats sustain and activists change, and I like to change rather than just maintain."
Spectrum is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sundays at 9pm.
See also www.drinkingwines.ie (01-2845248)
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS
"The whole idea is to keep it fun, because sometimes wine can get so deadly serious," Melanie Verwoerd says about Drinkingwines.ie, her internet wine company. "I know from Stellenbosch that people can take themselves so deadly seriously when it comes to wine. I only really started learning about wine - and drinking it - when I came to Ireland. Go figure.
"Most off-licences might have five estates of South African wine, but we are a one-stop shop for South African wine in Ireland. We sell by the case and buy directly from the producers. As we don't have shop overheads we're fairly competitive in the higher end of the bracket. We aim to deliver next day. One customer recently got his order in two hours. He hadn't even logged off the computer when the wine arrived.