On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa.

• Author: Tupy, Marian L.
• Position: Book review

On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa

Tony Leon

Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Bull Publishers, 2008, 766 pp.

On the Contrary is a seamless combination of a memoir of an influential South African politician and a well-researched modern history of his country. The author was the leader of the liberal Democratic Alliance, the leader of the opposition in Parliament.

Having entered politics in the mid 1980s, Leon saw firsthand the repression that accompanied the final years of the minority rule in South Africa. He provides a vivid account of a collapsing state beset by financial problems, growing radicalization, and violence. He offers a disturbing account of the out-of-control security apparatus, which increasingly ignored the civilized values it claimed to defend.

With great compassion, he describes the suffering and humiliation of his black countrymen, and the efforts of a minority of liberal-minded whites to bring about political reform through peaceful means. Reduced to its bare essence, Leon's tome is about liberalism, the people who kept it alive during the dark days of apartheid, and the struggle to sustain it in the post-apartheid South Africa.

Leon grew up in a liberal upper-middle class Jewish family with roots in tsarist Russia. His father, a high-court judge in Natal, was not afraid to rule repeatedly against the government of the day. Ramon and Sheila Leon taught their children to respect individuals irrespective of their race. They were told "never under any circumstances to refer to blacks as 'natives' or to Indians as 'coolies,' but to call them Africans and Indians." Leon and his brother Peter "were instructed to stand when any adult entered the room [original emphasis]."

Though later accused of being rather too comfortable with doing business in apartheid South Africa, South African Jews in fact were overrepresented in the fight against racial oppression. Among the leading lights of the struggle were Helen Suzman, whom Leon replaced in Parliament in 1989, and Joe Slovo, the former head of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Certainly, the small community had to tread lightly in the face of the often explicitly anti-Semitic Afrikaner government.

By the early 1980s, when Leon entered the University of the Witwatersrand, the campus was a hotbed of Marxism. South African liberals, who were used to being called "communists" by government sympathizers, were quickly labeled as "fascist" by...