Invictus

by John Carlin

  He had a very different effect on those journalists standing before him on Archbishop Tutu’s lawn on the morning of February 12, 1990. All it took was those forty-five minutes for Mandela to wrap the world’s media in his astute embrace. The journalists did not quite realize it then, for they were too benumbed, but in due course they would understand that Mandela was a canny strategist, a talented manipulator of mass sentiment. His gift for political theater was as sophisticated as Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s. At that news conference, Mandela pulled off a coup that both Clinton and Reagan would have envied. The session ended with all two hundred assembled journalists doing something that they had never done before. The human being within all of them got the better of the journalist and they found themselves, to their confusion and surprise, breaking into spontaneous applause.

  Getting the Afrikaans press on his side was not quite so simple. Because whites generally and Afrikaners in particular were uncertain and afraid of the consequences of his release, they seized on the more alarming things he said—the policy on nationalization; the “armed struggle”; the ANC’s loyalty to its Communist Party allies—while failing to register the esteem he expressed for his prison guards or his desire to reach an accommodation acceptable to all. He faced a comparable challenge in keeping his own people on board, both at leadership level, where there had been some complaints about his unilateral decision to engage in secret talks with the government, and among the great mass of the population, for whom Mandela was a powerful myth but, as flesh-and-blood leader, an unknown quantity.

  To address both these challenges, Mandela flew up to Johannesburg, two hours away, on the morning of the news conference, and from there drove to Soweto, where that afternoon Arrie Rossouw went to see him at the small family home he had left when he had gone to prison. It was one of those drab little matchbox houses, identical rows and rows of which lined every township in South Africa, almost identical to the place where Justice Bekebeke had lived before he went to prison. Rossouw was the chief political reporter of Beeld, the newspaper of the Afrikaans establishment. He was one of five Afrikaner journalists invited to a joint interview inside that little faded red-brick house with the man that their papers had taught readers for decades to see as the incarnation of “swart gevaar,” the “black danger.” Rossouw himself was rather more sophisticated than the average member of the volk. Having had contact with the ANC in exile, aware of the need for white South Africa to strike a deal with black South Africa, sufficiently alive to the way apartheid was viewed around the world to feel awkward and ashamed when he traveled abroad, he was ahead of most of his readers—much as Niël Barnard was ahead of the people who voted for the National party. Rossouw, nevertheless, had reason to be nervous. It was still too early to declare the Ayatollah alert conclusively over (a mass rally, as the ANC called it, had been prepared in Soweto the following day).

  Instead, Mandela put the same spell on Arrie Rossouw as he had done hours earlier on his foreign colleagues at the news conference in Cape Town. “There he was in the tiny front room of his little brick home and he greeted us like a king, the most charming king imaginable,” Rossouw said. “He actually introduced himself to me. ‘Hello, I am Nelson Mandela, how are you?’ And then I introduced myself and he knew all about me. He knew exactly who I was. He said he had been reading me with great interest for some time and he actually remembered pieces I had written months earlier!”

  The Afrikaners were the first group of journalists Mandela saw in such small numbers—before the black press or the white liberal press or the international press. “He deliberately chose us to convey a message that all South Africans had a place in the nation of the future; above all that he was not emerging from prison with revenge in his heart. He saw, of course, that the Afrikaners were the key to a lasting peace, and he sought through us to address their fears literally from day one.”

  Rossouw was shrewd enough to understand that Mandela was doing a number on him. But he fell for it anyway. “You could see he had a feel for what made Afrikaners tick. Basically what he told us was, ‘Look, I know you and your people and I know Afrikaners have done much for this country and I know your fears, but let’s discuss them and be friends.’ And as he talked he would make self-deprecating jokes so that you would not feel overawed by him, but at ease. Suddenly I felt a tremendous sense of privilege to be in his presence. I just sat there, looking at this guy, and I remembered there were rumors flying about that he was ill, seriously ill, and I thought, ‘Please God let it not be true!’ Because I understood the vast importance this man would have for the welfare of our country.”

  One difference between politically astute white South Africans like Rossouw and the average black South African was that the latter didn’t have to process Mandela’s release through the logical part of the brain to understand the happy enormity of the moment. Save for a dangerous redoubt of conservative, time-warped Zulus in the east of the country, no one disputed Mandela’s automatic right to leadership. Not even Justice Bekebeke, who might have felt forgotten or bitterly out of sync with the times. Despite nine months and forty hangings in Death Row, he too suspended all reason, forgot about his own plight, and celebrated as if Mandela’s release had been his own. “We used to have one hour of exercise every day but on that day we all stayed in our cells to listen to the radio. They played a song as we waited and waited. ‘Release Mandela,’ by Hugh Masekela. We sang along, we danced. The moment the radio announced that he was walking out with Winnie, that moment was freedom for us. We forgot where we were.”

  Everywhere Mandela went became a mob scene. But he did not speak the language of the mob. He set off on a long march around South Africa in the weeks immediately following his release, and everywhere he went vast numbers of people turned out, hungry to catch a glimpse of him, dreaming they might receive a smile, touch a fingertip when he reached out—from the start he was a bodyguards’ nightmare—into the crowd. Black South Africa reacted to him as if he were a cross between Napoleon and Jesus Christ. Yet while the subtext of what he said was interpreted by Christians like Archbishop Tutu as an entreaty to “love thine enemy,” his arguments were hard-nosed.

  To convince the militants who provided the ANC with its political energy, he had to appeal to more than morality; he had to use the tough language of political necessity, and leave sectors of his audience to believe, if they so chose, that there was nothing he would like more than outright revolution the Castro way. So he spoke of the need to reach an accommodation with white South Africa, not its desirability, and he did so in uncompromising language that acted persuasively on the militants, reiterating the nonnegotiability of basic principles. He reminded the government that if they did not accede to full-on, one-person-one-vote democracy, if they thought—as De Klerk did think for a while—that they could come up with some legalistic compromise that continued to entrench white privilege, then they would have a fight on their hands. Nobody of the millions who saw or heard Mandela in those first days after his release would have mistaken him for a Gandhian pacifist.

  Mandela had been famous but faceless for many years, but now his image had spread to every corner of the world, and in South Africa he seemed to be everywhere at once. His long march had the air of a giant party, a royal pageant that went from city to city. The first of these mass rallies was two days after his release at Soweto’s “Soccer City” stadium before 120,000 people. It was Mandela’s coronation as king of black South Africa. At every stop from then, the same ceremony was reenacted. In Durban, the biggest city in Natal Province, a similar number of Zulus paid homage to him. In Bloemfontein, the seat of South Africa’s highest court, 80,000 turned up. In Port Elizabeth, capital of the Eastern Cape region where Mandela was born, 200,000.

  In each case the frenzy of a pop concert and the passion of a sports final combined with the solemn fervor of high mass. Raptures accompanied his first appearance onstage flanked by Sisulu and other high priests of the struggle. But then a strange order would descend on the proceedings, and the
re would follow a liturgy whose rituals everybody knew.

  First came the cry from the master of ceremonies onstage, “Amandla!” which meant “power” in Xhosa. To which the assembled throng replied, “Awethu!”—“To the people!”—repeated three or four or five times, in crescendo.

  Then came what black leaders had always called the “national anthem,” “Nkosi Sikelele,” whose dirgelike cadences the audience infused now, right fists raised, with a triumphant note never quite heard before. They sang this anthem with the polish of a professional choir, as if they had been practicing for the event all their lives, which in a sense they had, in one protest rally after another for years. Not only did everyone, all 120,000 or 200,000 people, know all the words, but the men knew where to keep quiet and let the women sing, and the women knew when to let the deeper voices of the men ring through.

  Then more “Amandla! Awethus!” then “An injury to one!” which brought the reply, “Is an injury to all!” followed by “Viva ANC, Viva!” “Viva!” and “Viva ANC, Viva!” and then “Long live Nelson Mandela!” “Long live!”

  Then followed more singing and then dancing, a teeming mass disco, and then more “Long live Nelson Mandela!” and then finally the man himself would stand up, seeming taller than his six feet one inch, raise his fist high, and necks would crane and elated faces would turn toward him as if in worship and he would cry, “Amandla!” and receive in reply the loudest “Awethu!” roar of the day and people would point and exclaim and scream, because they had glimpsed him, at last, in the distance, which was what they had come for. And then he would speak. But he was not a good orator, his voice had a metallic monotone quality that never captivated his audiences the way the naturally histrionic Archbishop Tutu did. And in time the crowd would start to fidget, as they did during sermons in church, but when he finished they sprang once more into life, belting out the “Amandlas!” and the “Vivas!” back to another devastatingly moving rendition of “Nkosi Sikelele” and then back home, the coronation over. But the feeling lasted beyond the ferment of the mass rally. Mandela embodied the predicament of all black South Africans. In him they invested all their hopes and aspirations; he had become the personification of an entire people.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE TIGER KING

  “Hang Mandela!” and “Mandela Go Home—to Prison” and “Traitor de Klerk” were some of the politer banners on display at a rally of the white right in Pretoria five days after Mandela’s release. The setting was Church Square, a quadrangle in the heart of South Africa’s capital city dominated at its center by a gray, bird-spattered statue of the Boer patriarch Paul Kruger, dressed up in presidential sash, coat, top hat, and cane. Some 20,000 people attended, as big a percentage of the white population as the 120,000 gathered in Soweto had been of the black.

  Feelings were as intense as they had been at Soccer City four days earlier, but the mood could not have been more different. In Soweto the smell of victory had been in the air; at Church Square, quiet despair underlay the defiance. These people feared they were about to lose everything. They were government bureaucrats who feared they would lose their jobs, small businessmen who feared they would lose their shops, farmers who feared they would lose their land. And all feared they would lose their flag, their anthem, their language, their schools, their Dutch Reformed Church, their rugby. And beneath that, coloring everything, was the dread of a vengeance commensurate with the crime.

  They had gathered in the South African capital at the behest of the Conservative Party, the political branch of right-wing extremism. The CP, the main opposition party in the all-white parliament, was an offshoot of the National Party, from which it had broken eight years earlier because its leaders considered P. W. Botha to be suspiciously left-wing, and now viewed De Klerk as the devil himself.

  The Afrikaner right has its own liturgy, if not quite as elaborate or practiced as the ANC’s. They began by shutting their eyes, opening their hands in supplication, bowing their heads, and raising a prayer. Then they sang “Die Stem,” the lugubrious official national anthem, which praises God and celebrates the triumphs of the Boers as they marched on their wagons northward in the mid-nineteenth-century Great Trek, eating up black-owned land along the way. Brownshirted men mingled among the crowd like school bullies. They were members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), the best known of a fragmented collection of far-right-wing groups. Better known as the AWB, their red-and-black insignia consisted of three sevens arranged in such a fashion as to resemble the Nazi swastika.

  But it was not the brownshirts, this time, who defined the event. More sinister, and a more ominous measure of the challenge that lay ahead for Mandela, was the outward normality of most of the people, a cross section of the human spectacle you would see any day of the week in the center of Upington, or Vereeniging, or anywhere else in white South Africa. There were youths in jeans and Springbok jerseys, eager-eyed young couples with babies, potbellied men in khaki shorts and long socks, old gentlemen in tweed jackets, and ladies dressed as if they were going to the annual bowling club dance. They were the white middle class anywhere in northern Europe or Middle America. And they did not want blacks to rule over their lives. They all shared the nightmare of a black hand emerging from under the bed in the middle of the night, of gangs of marauding young black men crashing into their homes.

  It was never immediately obvious, but if you looked closely you found that there was a vulnerable softness at the core of white South Africa, among Afrikaners and English speakers, city and country people, poor and rich. The difference lay in the degree to which each individual managed to disguise it. But because acknowledging that vulnerability did not fit with the rugged survivor image that Afrikaners, in particular, chose to have of themselves, some strove to mask their fears behind the rhetoric of resistance. Which was not to say that they did not believe what they said. Fear made them dangerous. Dr. Andries Treurnicht, the Conservative Party leader, got the biggest cheer of the day at the Church Square rally when he cried, “The Afrikaner is a friendly tiger, but don’t mess around with him!” The hard, simple certainties of the past were beginning to crack, but here was a truth, they chose to believe that neither Mandela nor the now legalized “Communists” of the ANC could ever dent. The Afrikaner was a tiger and any beast that tangled with it was doomed. “As long as the ANC operates as a militant organization, we will hit them as hard as we can,” roared Treurnicht, a theologian and former minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. “As far as we’re concerned, it is war, plain and simple.”

  Some in the ANC still believed they actually could beat the tiger. Mandela knew they could not. The enemy had all the guns, the air force, the logistics, the money. Mandela’s chief principle of political action was the one he had come to understand in prison a long time ago: that the only way to beat the tiger was to tame him. These people snarling under the shadow of Paul Kruger’s statue were the same people he had subdued to his will on Robben Island.

  Mandela’s first priority was to prevent civil war. And not just between whites and blacks, but between whites and whites too. The liberal Dr. Woolf types, who had gotten where they did after swimming courageously against the currents of white orthodoxy, would be in the sights of the right-wing warriors. They already were. Dr. Woolf himself had received threats from right-wing organizations after the story of his family’s encounter with Mandela was published in a Durban newspaper. They put him on a death list. The Arrie Rossouws of the Afrikaans press also paid a price for having run ahead of the times. Poison mail poured into the Johannesburg office of his newspaper, Beeld, and the switchboard was jammed with abusive phone calls. At a right-wing rally in the Orange Free State two weeks after Mandela’s release a white Beeld photographer was beaten up.

  No two people better encapsulated the rift between South African whites than the Viljoen twins. The story of Braam and Constand Viljoen is not quite Cain and Abel, nor the Prodigal Son, but it has elements of both. Indistinguishable physically, the brothers set off on radically di
vergent paths, in their late teens and then barely communicated with one another for forty years. When they did eventually reconnect, destiny played a hand. If the brothers hadn’t made peace, South Africa would have made war.

  Born in 1933 into an upper class rural Afrikaner family that traced its roots back to the seventeenth-century settlers, among the first to arrive from Europe in Africa’s southern tip, the Viljoens (pronounced “Fill-yewn”) had a reason other than politics to live their lives apart. Together they ran the risk of being seen as the identical twins of stage farce, but separately each was imposing. They were both grave men, who took themselves and their roles in society seriously, and were taken seriously by others. The only other things they had in common were their religious devotion and their love of farming, to which Constand dedicated himself on and off in the family farm in the Eastern Transvaal, and Braam—more on than off—on another farm 250 miles away in the Northern Transvaal.

  In terms of temperament and worldview they could not have been more different. Braam, the reflective type, embarked on a career in the church. Constand, the man of action, joined the army. But whereas one course might have seemed more placid than the other, it was Braam who struggled and, in strict career terms, failed, while Constand rose, with admirable smoothness, to the pinnacle of his profession. While Braam took on the system and lost, Constand not only joined the system, he became it. He made it not just to the rank of general, not just to head of the army, but to overall commander of the South African Defence Force—navy and air force included. P. W Botha appointed him to the job after he became prime minister in 1980. Viljoen remained there, apartheid’s last line of defense, until his retirement in 1985. He commanded the force in whose absence apartheid would have crumbled overnight. He risked his own life and he took the lives of others in support of a political system based on and defined by three of the most perverse laws ever devised: the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act, all of them passed in parliament when he and his brother were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old—when each was deciding which course to take in life.