Invictus

by John Carlin

  The revolution had finally come to Upington. Over the next two days, Monday and Tuesday, Paballelo residents engaged in running battles with the police, this time with Justice at the forefront.

  On Tuesday afternoon, police reinforcements arrived from Kimberley, the nearest city, 180 miles away. At the head of them was a certain Captain van Dyk, who proposed peace talks. That evening Justice and other local leaders met with him in the township. No resolution was reached, but they agreed to meet again the next morning, this time with the whole community present, at the dusty local soccer field. The idea, to which Captain van Dyk assented, was that the residents of Paballelo should air the grievances that had occasioned all the trouble in the first place. If the police captain were able to provide some sort of satisfaction, some sense that the matters raised would be addressed at a political level, then tempers might cool and they would avoid the violent confrontation that loomed. Justice and his fellow leaders were encouraged by Van Dyk’s reasonable manner. He was a different breed from the uncouth variety of policeman they had grown accustomed to in Upington.

  The next morning, November 13, thousands turned up at the soccer field. Again, the choreography followed a familiar pattern, replicating the sequence of events at thousands of other such protest meetings nationwide. Observed by a phalanx of riot police in gray-blue uniforms and a column of clunky yellow armored vehicles with huge wheels called Casspirs, an orderly crowd of black people gathered at the center of the football field. The proceedings began, as always, with the official anthem of black liberation, “Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika.” The words, in Mandela’s language, Xhosa, meant :

  God Bless Africa

  May her glory rise high

  Hear our pleas

  God bless us

  Us your children

  Come Spirit

  Come Holy Spirit

  God we ask you to protect our nation

  Intervene and end all conflicts

  Protect us

  Protect our nation

  Let it be so

  Forever and ever

  It was generous, mournful, defiant, and had the iterative power of an ocean wave. To black South Africans and those who sympathized with their cause, it was a call to courage. To the apartheid authorities, and in particular to the young white policemen whom the anthem had in its immediate sights, it was a menacing expression of the vast black sea that might rise and engulf them.

  After “Nkosi Sikelele” came a Christian prayer. While the thousands addressed themselves to their God, heads bowed, and before anyone had even begun to broach the political matters at hand, a local police officer, Captain Botha, wrested command away from Captain van Dyk. Botha was from Upington.

  To Van Dyk’s dismay, Botha lifted a bullhorn to his lips and announced, in a cry familiar to all veterans of black protest in South Africa, that the crowd had “ten minutes to disperse.” The only thing that was unusual about the warning was that it should have come quite so early on, before the prayers had even finished. Captain van Dyk might well have reached the same point himself, but he would have observed the religious decencies a little more, and might have at least gone through the motions of seeking a negotiated outcome.

  Captain Botha didn’t wait for the full ten minutes to tick by. Before two minutes had passed he ordered his troops to open fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, to let loose their snarling dogs. Some of the younger blacks hurled stones, but most of the crowd ran off, the screams of the women drowned out by the fearsome revving of the pursuing Casspirs. Most routes had been blocked off by policemen carrying guns, stroking truncheons, or cracking sjamboks, thick leather whips, on the stony ground. Seeing a gap, Justice led a group of about 150 people—men and women, young and old—down Pilane Street, leaving the white policemen behind them.

  Suddenly, from one of the small gray-brick houses on the street, shots rang out. A child fell, seriously wounded. Then a man charged out of a house with a gun above his head. Straight into the anger, the fear, the chaos ran the man who had fired the shots. His name was Lucas Sethwala. He was that peculiarity in apartheid South Africa, a black policeman; he and other “collaborators,” the butt of the rioting on Sunday night. Somewhere at the back of Justice’s mind, driving him on, were the images that had shaped him, Robben Island and the suffering of “our leaders,” the transient joy of watching the All Blacks murder the Upington rugby team, the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas, the schooling that ended at age fifteen, the thrilling example of the hero who stabbed the white policeman to death . . . all those memories and more ate away at him. But at that moment, as he broke away on his own and chased after police constable Lucas Sethwala, the foremost sensation was frenzy; the sole purpose was revenge.

  “ There was no time to stop and think. There was no rational choice made. It was pure emotion,” Justice remembered.

  The fact that Sethwala still had the gun in his hand and Justice carried no weapon, that Sethwala turned around as he ran down the road and fired at Justice, showed just how irrational Justice’s response was. But the shots missed and Justice caught him, forced the gun out of Sethwala’s hand, and beat Sethwala over the head with it. He only hit him twice, but twice was enough. He lay still, dead. Justice got up and kept running, but the group behind him, who had celebrated Sethwala’s capture and pummeling with a cry, did as black South African crowds ritually did too often in such circumstances. They kicked Sethwala’s inert body and then someone ran off to get a can of gasoline. Justice did not see this; he was told about it later. About a hundred people gathered round the body, whooping with delight. It was a victory at last, or something that in the madness of the moment felt very much like it for Paballelo. They doused the body with gasoline, scratched a match, and set it alight.

  Justice fled across the border to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. But then it was not yet an independent country; it still belonged to South Africa. Six days later, on November 19, he was arrested and brought back to Upington, where he and twenty-five others were jailed and charged with murder. The law of Common Purpose, as it was called, allowed for the prosecution not only of the person or persons directly responsible for a crime, but also of all those who might have shared in the desire to commit it, who had lent their moral support. Given such a loose definition, the police could have rounded up two people, or five, ten, twenty, or sixty-two. They opted for twenty-six, charging them all with the murder of the one man. Among the defendants was a married couple in their sixties who had eleven children between them and no criminal—or even mildly political—record. The police investigators made no effort to distinguish between the old couple’s degree of guilt and Bekebeke’s. They didn’t know that Bekebeke had been the one who had administered the decisive blows. Nor would they find out in the course of the long trial that followed. If found guilty, the “Upington 26” would face the same sentence Mandela had prepared for when he had stood at the dock in Pretoria twenty-one years earlier: death by hanging.

  CHAPTER IV

  BAGGING THE CROC

  1986-89

  Kobie Coetsee had succumbed more quickly than either he or Mandela would have expected. But Mandela doubted his next target would roll over quite so easily. His ultimate goal—a meeting with Botha himself—could only be attained after, or if, he won over the man guarding the presidential door, the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard. Barnard, who had studied international politics at George-town University in Washington, D.C., acquired a reputation in his twenties as a boy genius. Botha first heard about him when Barnard was a lecturer in political science at the University of the Orange Free State. Impetuously, Botha hired him out of the university, aged thirty, to head up the NIS. That was on June 1, 1980. Barnard was to remain in the job until January 31, 1992, serving Botha for nearly ten years and his successor, F. W. de Klerk, for two.

  No one in the apartheid state apparatus knew more about what was going on in South African politics than Barnard, who had informers everywhere, some of them deep in the ANC. H
e was shrewd and discreet, a civil servant to the marrow, with a powerful sense of duty. During the twelve years he remained as head of the NIS, an organization that the likes of the CIA and Britain’s MI6 came to respect, if not love, his face was as unknown to the general public as Mandela’s had been in prison. There was no man Botha trusted more.

  Barnard was a tall, sleek, dark-haired, humorless fellow. An Afrikaner Mr. Spock, he spoke in a monotone and his features were so blankly set that if you were to run across him a day after meeting him you would probably fail to recognize him. But the workings of his mind were crystal clear, and while he had a stilted way of talking, years later his memory remained sharp regarding the political mood and the fights within government in the 1980s.

  “Some people, specifically in the military, but in the police as well, deep down believed that we had to fight it out in some way or another,” he recalled. “We at the NIS believed this to be the wrong way to go about things. We took the view that a political settlement was the only answer to the problems of this country.” That was a very hard message indeed to sell to the South African government apparatus. Barnard had no illusions about that. “But the important thing was that P. W. Botha, who was more or less born and bred within the security establishment, firmly believed that in some way or another we had to . . . how should I say . . . stabilize the South African situation, and then from there try to find some kind of political solution.”

  Botha summoned Barnard to his office one day in May 1988, and told him, “Dr. Barnard, we want you to meet Mr. Mandela now. Try to find out what you have been advocating for some time. Is it possible to find a peaceful settlement with the ANC, with this man Mandela? Try to find out his views on communism . . . and then try to find out, are Mr. Mandela and the ANC interested in a peaceful settlement? For we also have deep suspicions about what they would be interested in.”

  Barnard’s first meeting with Mandela was held in the office of Pollsmoor’s commanding officer. As Barnard remembered it, recalling Kobie Coetsees first impressions, “Mr. Mandela came in and I saw immediately that, even in an overall and boots, he had a commanding kind of presence and personality.” The two men sat down, both understanding that the real purpose of this meeting was to become acquainted, to develop a relationship that could sustain the political negotiations that might follow. They made some small talk—Mandela asking him what part of South Africa he was from and Barnard inquiring after his health—and agreed to meet again.

  Before they did, however, Barnard ruled, just as Coetsee had done, that Mandela should be kitted out in clothes more befitting a man of his stature. As Barnard explained, “Talking about the future of the country in overall and boots: this was obviously not acceptable. We arranged with Willie Willemse, the commissioner of prisons, that at any future meeting he would be clothed in such a way that it serves his dignity and his pride as a human being.” It was not only on the matter of clothes that Mandela should be accommodated, Barnard decided. A more fitting meeting venue was required. “Mr. Mandela had to be on a par, as an equal, at any future meeting, this much was clear to me. I remember saying with Willie Willemse that we could never again hold such a meeting within the prison building. That would not create an equal situation.” From now on, Barnard and Mandela would meet in Willemse’s home on the Pollsmoor grounds rather than in his nondescript office.

  This began with the second meeting, at which Mandela turned up for dinner at the Willemses’ dressed in a jacket. “He was a wonderful guest,” Barnard recalled, his natural reserve thawing at the recollection. At these meetings, Willemse’s wife cooked delicious meals, wine flowed, and the two men talked for hours about how to end apartheid peacefully.

  For his part, Kobie Coetsee came to the conclusion that keeping this prisoner in prison was as improper, and as unhelpful to the talks’ broader goal, as dressing him in prison clothes. Not that he was being treated badly at Pollsmoor. Compared to the claustrophobia he had learned to endure on Robben Island, his cell in Pollsmoor felt like the open sea. But where he went next was a cruise luxury liner.

  The worse the Botha regime treated the blacks out on the street, the better it treated Mandela. He could have protested. He could have raged at Barnard, made demands, threatened to call off the secret talks. But he did not. He played the game, because he knew that while his power to intervene in contemporary events was practically nil, his potential to influence the future shape of South Africa might be immense. And so when in December 1988 General Willie Willemse, the top man in the South African prison service, informed him that he would be moved from his big lonely cell in Pollsmoor to a house inside the grounds of a prison called Victor Verster in a pretty town called Paarl, an hour north by road in the heart of the Cape wine country, Mandela raised no objections.

  He traded his cell for a spacious home under the supervision of—or rather, looked after by—another Christo Brand, another Afrikaner prison guard who had been with him both in Pollsmoor and on Robben Island. His name was Jack Swart and his job was to cook for Mandela and to play the butler, opening the door to his guests, helping him organize his diary, keeping the house tidy and clean. The kitchen was ample and fully equipped, including devices technologically unimaginable when Mandela went to prison. He was allowed to receive visits from other, still incarcerated political prisoners. One of them was Tokyo Sexwale, an Umkhonto we Sizwe firebrand who spent thirteen years on Robben Island on terrorism charges. Sexwale was one of a small group of young ANC Turks who had gotten close to Mandela on the island, who not only listened to him talking politics but relaxed with him, engaging him in games of Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly before Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor. Recalling that visit to Mandela at Victor Verster, Sexwale laughed. “We saw one television set in the house. That was bad enough. But then we saw another. Two television sets! This, surely, was definitive proof, we thought, that he had sold out to the enemy!”

  Smiling broadly, Mandela assured them that this was not a television set. He explained to his openmouthed guests that this machine could boil water. He took a cup of water, and gave them a triumphant demonstration, placing the cup inside and pressing a couple of buttons. A few moments later, Mandela removed the cup of steaming water from the microwave—a device his guests had never seen before.

  With Jack Swart ever in attendance, Mandela would entertain dinner guests as varied as Barnard, Sexwale, and his lawyer George Bizos at his new “home.” Before the guests arrived, Swart and Mandela would discuss such matters of etiquette as which might be the correct wine to serve first. As for the vegetables, some came from Mandela’s own garden, which had a swimming pool and a view of the magnificently craggy mountains surrounding the lush valleys of the Cape winelands. Paradise for Mandela wouldn’t have been complete without a gym, furnished with exercise bike and weights, where he toiled diligently every day before dawn.

  The idea, as Barnard explained it, was to ease his transition, after what was now twenty-six years of hibernation, into a brave new world of microwaves and personal computers. “We were busy creating a kind of atmosphere where Mr. Mandela could stay and live in at least as normal a surrounding as possible,” Barnard said. The deeper purpose, or so Barnard claimed, was to help him prepare for government and a role on the world stage. “Many times I told him, ‘Mr. Mandela, governing a country is a tough job. It’s not like, with a lot of respect, sitting in London in a hotel and drinking Castle beer from South Africa and talking about government. [Barnard was aiming a barb at the ANC’s exiled leaders.] I told him, ‘Government is a tough job, you must understand that it is difficult.’ ”

  Barnard also bore the more difficult task of preparing President Botha, the “krokodil,” to meet with Mandela. The initial pressure for such a meeting came from Mandela himself, who began to express some impatience with the pace of progress. He wanted these talks to pave the way for a negotiations process involving the ANC, the government, and all other parties that wished to take part, aimed at ending apartheid by peaceful means. When 1989 came around, after
more than six months of meetings between prisoner and spy, Mandela had had enough. “It is good to have preliminary discussions with you on the fundamental issues,” Mandela said to Barnard, “but you will understand that you are not a politician. You don’t have the authority and the power. I must have a discussion with Mr. Botha himself, as quickly as possible.”

  In March 1989, Barnard delivered a letter from Mandela to his boss. In it Mandela argued that the only way a lasting peace could be reached in South Africa would be via a negotiated settlement. He said that the black majority had no intention, however, of accepting the terms of a surrender. “Majority rule and internal peace,” he wrote, “are like the two sides of a single coin, and White South Africa simply has to accept that there will never be peace and stability in this country until the principle is fully applied.”

  Perhaps more significant than this letter was the fact that Mandela had already convinced Barnard of the argument it contained. Barnard would convince his boss, even if the letter could not.

  “Yes . . . ,” Barnard said, a fondness creeping into the steely flatness of his voice, “the old man”—he meant Mandela—“he is one of those strange individuals who captivates you. He has this strange charisma. You find yourself wanting to listen to him . . . So, yes,” continued Barnard, “there was, in our minds, looking from an intelligence perspective, never the slightest doubt. This is the man—if you cannot find a settlement with him, any settlement will be out.”

  That was the point he argued before Botha. But there were other arguments he recommended the president consider too. The world was changing fast. The anti-communist Solidarity movement had come to power in Poland; demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were calling for Chinese reform; the Soviet army ended its nine-year occupation of Afghanistan; the Berlin Wall was tottering. Apartheid belonged, like communism, to another age.