Fleur de Villiers, who has died in London at the age 85 was a legendary Sunday Times journalist and political editor who brokered the first secret talks between SA’s ruling establishment and the ANC, and helped stop the trade in blood diamonds that was funding Unita’s war against the MPLA government in Angola.
In 1979 she broke one of the biggest stories of the day, that state president John Vorster had not voluntarily stepped down in the wake of the Information Scandal as had been officially announced but was ruthlessly shafted by prime minister PW Botha.
She reported in the Sunday Times how Botha had “forced” the “unwilling” state president to go during a “dramatic three-hour meeting” at Groote Schuur, the prime minister’s official residence.
“He was compelled to leave office by an obdurate Mr Botha who would accept nothing less than his immediate resignation,” she wrote in a dramatic three-column front page story.
“Cabinet ministers witnessed a monumental clash of wills between the man who has dominated the SA political scene for 13 years and his estranged successor who finally toppled him from the highest political office in the land.”
She reported that Vorster asked that the findings of the Erasmus commission, that as prime minister he had covered up the Info scandal, be referred to a judge for review. “Mr Botha refused.”
He then asked that they be referred to a parliamentary select committee. “Mr Botha refused.”
Finally, Vorster asked that his resignation be postponed for a month. “Again, Mr Botha refused.”
Less than 24 hours later the guard was withdrawn from his presidential residence in Cape Town, and the once “towering” but now “fallen” Vorster left Tuynhuys for the last time, she wrote.
She revealed that relations between the two giants of SA politics, which were “never excessively cordial”, had “cooled dramatically” soon after Vorster became state president. Botha kept him out of the loop politically, which led to a “bitter estrangement”.
Botha vowed to track down whoever leaked details of the meeting. When she refused to disclose her sources, terrified cabinet ministers pleaded with Sunday Times editor Tertius Myburgh for a sworn statement that they were not the leaks.
Her sources did sometimes let her down.
After Vorster announced his retirement as prime minister in 1978 there was massive speculation about his successor. De Villiers confidently reported on the front page of the newspaper that the country’s next PM would be Pik Botha.
De Villiers was a liberal who believed that any small movement forward would eventually bring political transformation in SA, even PW Botha’s ill-fated tricameral parliament which she supported at the cost of many friends in the progressive opposition.
De Villiers was born in December 1937. Her father, a professional soldier, was one of the few survivors of the First World War battle of Delville Wood in which almost an entire SA battalion was wiped out.
After obtaining a BA at the University of Pretoria she became a journalist with the Argus Group before joining the Sunday Times where she won the Pringle Prize for theatre criticism, became a parliamentary correspondent, political editor, opinion page editor, leader writer and assistant editor.
She covered UN Security Council sessions, reported on the Nixon Watergate scandal and the 1980 and 1984 US presidential elections.
In 1981 she spent a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow studying international politics at the Kennedy School.
De Villiers was a liberal who believed that any small movement forward would eventually bring political transformation in SA, even PW Botha’s ill-fated tricameral parliament, which she supported at the cost of many friends in the progressive opposition.
She left the Sunday Times in 1986 and moved to London, where she became an editorial consultant and leader writer on Southern African issues for the Times, a frequent commentator for British and American television and radio, a visiting speaker at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard and various international conferences in the US and Europe and visiting fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, whose executive committee she subsequently chaired.
In 1987, after joining the London offices of Anglo American and De Beers as a public affairs consultant, she asked politically well-connected Broederbonder Willie Esterhuyse, known for his relatively progressive political views, to bring a delegation to meet the ANC in London. He wrote the story of their secret meetings with an ANC team led by Thabo Mbeki and brokered by De Villiers, in a book called Endgame, which was made into a Hollywood movie.
In 2011 she was made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George in recognition of her services to the democratic transition in SA.
She advised De Beers when it was setting up the Kimberley Process, a mechanism to stop “blood diamonds” contaminating the mainstream rough diamond market 75% of which was controlled by De Beers.
De Beers had been asked by the UN to tackle the problem after the MPLA — with some justification, De Villiers thought — said that Unita leader Jonas Savimbi was financing his war against the Angolan government from the sale of diamonds mined in his area of the country.
In a sense she read them the riot act on ethics and transparency, advising them to play open cards with the media and ensure their reputation was above reproach at all times if they wanted to avoid diamonds going the way of fur.
Through her work with Anglo and De Beers, she also played a significant role in helping the World Health Organisation eradicate polio in Angola, the last African country where it survived.
A formidable and straight-talking media personality, De Villiers, who died after suffering a stroke, was described by her colleagues as “a strong woman in a man’s world who reduced any man patronising her down to size, or smaller”.
She never married and is survived by a cousin.
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