THEPOLITICALTRANSITION
realities. Since the ANC was the most popular and most effective of the
banned black political organizations-the
prospects of its principal rival,
the Pan Africanist Congress, were blighted by poor leadership-white
business people, intellectuals, clergy, and sports administrators made pil-
grimages to open dialogues with the ANC leadership in exile. In September
1985, a group of businessmen, led by no less a figure than Gavin ReIly,
Harry Oppenheimer's successor as chairman of the giantAnglo American
Corporation, met with ANC president Oliver Tambo in Zambia. In 1986,
Pieter de Lange, chairman of the elite Afrikaner Broederbond, had a long
discussion with Thabo Mbeki, the ANC information director, after attend-
ing a Ford Foundation conference in Long Island, New York. In August
1987, sixty-one white South Africans, most of them Afrikaners, led by
Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, founder of the Institute for a Democratic Alter-
native for South Africa and a former leader of the Progressive Federal
party, went to Dakar, Senegal, where they held three days of talks with
seventeen members of the ANC. In meetings such as these, Mbeki, a suave
and intelligent graduate of Sussex University with the style of a stereotyp-