The Constitutional Committee met in the old House of Assembly chamber of Parliament. This room, with its heavy wood paneling and green leather seating, had been the citadel of white power for ninety years. “It was the bull-ring, the cockpit of all the political struggles,” explained Colin Eglin, an opposition MP under the old order for thirty years. “It was the very room in which Dr Verwoerd was assassinated; the room in which the old United Party split and Hertzog and Smuts parted ways on the war issue; the room Malan walked into in May 1948 as the new National Party Prime Minister of South Africa. It is where Vorster, Botha and then later De Klerk governed from.” It was now to become the space where all the important decisions regarding the new Constitution would be taken.

Leon Wessels admitted that the National Party (NP) carried the burden of their history in this chamber and were more challenged than the other parties to some extent: “The NP had to transform itself and make a claim on issues which were not part of their armory in the decades that preceded that. The party is still coming to grips with its own past and, in doing so, projecting itself into the future. The ANC and DP had more of a history with some of the issues of federalism and individual rights.”

Piet Marais who had taken part in the Tricameral Parliament as a member of a separate chamber preserved for representatives of people classified as ‘Coloured’, added that the NP also had to get used to a completely new modus operandi: “In the past, the debates tended to be worthless because the majority party made the decision somewhere in Cabinet. Even we, as ordinary members of Parliament, were not much more than rubber stamps. We listened in our caucus to what Cabinet decided and then we came in here and we supported that. Now the whole situation is much more transparent and there’s a lot more participation, also from the public at large.”