Jannie Momberg

Increasingly concerned about the South African political situation – partly as a result of trips to the United Kingdom, where he could read uncensored media reports – Momberg resigned from the NP in 1987 and became a founding member of the liberal Democratic Party (DP) the following year.[3] In the 1989 general election, he was elected to the House of Assembly, representing the DP in the constituency of Simonstown in Cape Town.[3]

Momberg was a member of a wing of the DP which advocated for closer ties to the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC), a majority-black movement then banned inside South Africa.[2][10] In 1990, around the time that the ANC was unbanned, he was part of a DP delegation to the movement's headquarters in exile in Lusaka, Zambia; in his memoirs, he recounted the significance of meeting personally the ANC leaders whom he had been led to believe were terrorists.[3]

In April 1992, Momberg and four other parliamentarians – David Dalling, Pierre Cronjé, Jan van Eck, and Robert Haswell – were suspended from the DP after the party's leadership learned that they had recently held a private meeting with ANC President Nelson Mandela.[10] The following week, the group announced that they were defecting from the DP to join the ANC. In a joint statement, the group said that they were responding to a call made by Mandela shortly after his release from prison in 1990, for "all our white compatriots to join us in the shaping of a new South Africa".[11] Momberg said that they had concluded that "working toward a democratic transition cannot be done from the comfortable sidelines of minority politics".[10] They said that they regarded their constituencies as consisting of all the residents of their areas, not only the enfranchised white citizens.[11]

Momberg and the others remained in Parliament as independents for the rest of the legislative term.[11] At the same time, later in 1992, Momberg was elected to the executive committee of the ANC's new Western Cape branch.[6] Explaining his defection to the ANC, Momberg's colleague in the DP, Dene Smuts, later said:

He had traversed the entire political terrain from the old establishment to the incoming new and he did so from the personal conviction that it was, for him, the right thing to do. It is not that he didn't work through the ideological considerations that normally drive defection... He did take the ANC's nonracist, nonsexist ethos under review. He said he understood the nonracism, but he could not understand what you had against sex. [Laughter.] However, the reason that it was for him the right thing to do to join the ANC was that he felt that he had a historic debt.[2]

According to his wife:

He just felt that it was the only way to atone for the fact that he had supported the National Party in the past. Although he had to endure abuse [from white conservatives], he did not for one moment, till the day he died, doubt that he had done the right thing and he received huge support from the real majority of the people of South Africa.[2]

In the 1994 general election, South Africa's first under universal suffrage, Momberg was elected to represent the ANC in the new National Assembly.[12][6][1] He served in his seat until 2001, gaining re-election in the 1999 general election, and he served as the ANC's programming whip, initially under Chief Whip Arnold Stofile.[6][1] After his death, his colleagues recollected the lengths to which he had gone to facilitate meetings among influential people of different political and socioeconomic backgrounds, with ANC representative Mosiuoa Lekota saying, "if there is a little equanimity in this House, it has quite a bit to do with the work that he did".[2] He resigned from his seat with effect from 26 June 2001 and his seat was filled by Joyce Moloi.[13]