Invictus

by John Carlin

  The Separate Amenities Act was the one that banned black people from stepping onto the better beaches and parks, and black nannies from traveling in white train compartments with the white babies of the “madams” they served. The other two laws Constand Viljoen enforced were equally unjust and absurd.

  The Population Registration Act compartmentalized the racial groups. There were four main categories. In descending order of privilege they were: Whites, Coloureds, Indians, Blacks. Once each South African had been placed into the corresponding racial box, all the other apartheid laws could follow. Without the Population Registration Act it would have been impossible to enforce, for example, the Immorality Act, whereby it was illegal not only for people to marry across the race barriers, but to engage in anything resembling sexual contact. It was in part to accommodate the amorous incontinence of a small minority of morally weak souls—in part to satisfy people’s desire for material improvement—that the government included a clause in the Population Registration Act allowing individuals the biologically perplexing right to try to change their race.

  What one had to do was apply to a body in Pretoria called the Race Classification Board and stipulate from which race to which race one wished to metamorphose. Interviews would be conducted and in the trickier cases petitioners would appear before the ladies and gentlemen of the all-white board. The board members would ask the race changees to walk up and down before them, allowing them to peruse their postures and buttock shapes. In the event that the matter remained unresolved, the pencil test was the most scientifically reliable dispeller of doubt. A pencil would be poked inside a person’s hair: the tighter the hair’s natural grip, the darker the classification. The Ministry of Home Affairs’s figures for 1989 show that 573 Coloured people applied to become White, of whom 519 were successful, and that 369 Black people applied to become Coloured, of whom 327 made it. In these cases the impulse was clearly the improvement of one’s material circumstances. But the record also shows that fourteen Whites applied to become Coloured, of whom twelve succeeded; that three Whites applied to become Indian and two to become Chinese, all five succeeding. Such miracles were evidently not wrought by cold reason, but by the Race Classification Board’s sympathy for the petitioners’ admirably self-sacrificial romantic impulses.

  The Group Areas Act was the law by which black and white people were legally prohibited from living in the same parts of town, that made physical apartness between white town and black township compulsory. But in the eyes of apartheid’s ideologues it was, in fact, more than that. It was divinely ordained. The God-fearing volk would never have set about anything as far-reaching as a system that condemned the vast majority of the inhabitants of their country to fourth-class citizenship had they not been quite certain that they had a biblical justification for what they were doing. Like other fundamentalists before and after them, they dug deep into the Old Testament and came up with theological arguments in support of casting black people into outer darkness. According to a book titled Biblical Aspects of Apartheid, published in 1958 by an eminent theologian of the Dutch Reformed Church, Group Areas legislation applied in the afterlife too. The book offered comfort to those white South Africans who might have feared they would have to mix with black people in heaven. Not to worry. Biblical Aspects of Apartheid assured them that the Good Book said that there were “many mansions” in “our Father’s house.”

  Constand Viljoen dedicated his life to defending these laws against the forces led by his enemy-in-chief, Nelson Mandela. Braam Viljoen, who from early on regarded the apartheid laws as an abomination, became one of Mandela’s unofficial foot soldiers.

  If Constand’s problem was that he thought too little, Braam’s was that he thought too much. A little bit of reassurance from the pulpit that the apartheid laws were all God’s work and Constand cheerfully threw in his lot with the defense of the fatherland. Braam, an astoundingly independent-minded teenager for an Afrikaner raised on a farm 150 miles from the nearest city, heard the same words as his brother from the local Dutch Reformed Church dominee and found them deeply troubling. On going to university in Pretoria to study theology, with a view to becoming a dominee himself, he became intrigued by the work of a subversive little group of theologians who were questioning the reigning orthodoxies. This prompted him in turn to take an interest in the ANC. He read their Freedom Charter (“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”) with keen attention when it came out in 1955, the year his brother completed university and became an officer in the army.

  While Constand eased up the ranks, impressing his superior officers, Braam was impressed by the Christian seriousness of Mandela’s predecessor as head of the ANC, Albert Luthuli. In the early sixties, by which time he had made the grade as a professor of theology, Braam signed a declaration stating that it was heresy to identify apartheid with the will of God. The wording of the declaration was solemn and respectful. In private, Braam seethed. “I came to detest the naďve, infantile biblical justification of apartheid, based as it was on a literal reading of Genesis,” he said. “I detested also that fundamentalist way of thinking, stating dumbly that this was the word of God, admitting of no debate. Naturally, I came into conflict with my family. With my brother, who was now a major in the SADF, we simply did not talk politics, full stop.” And into conflict he came too with the Dutch Reformed Church, who dubbed him a dissenter and prevented him from earning the salary due him as a theologically qualified dominee. He carried on teaching at the university until the 1980s, but was obliged for financial reasons to go back to farming part-time.

  On the farm, he stepped up his political involvement as he began to become aware of what apartheid meant for the lowest of the low: black people in the rural areas. By the early 1980s, as black protest escalated all over the country, he became actively involved with what he found himself describing as “the freedom struggle,” conspiring with the very same black political leaders that his brother, as head of the SADF, was committed to defeating. He was also up to his neck with the South African Council of Churches, a body that the security forces considered a front for the terrorists of the ANC. The more powerful his brother became, the keener Braam’s understanding of the brutal methods that Constand’s boss was sanctioning. He had known the system was evil, but he had not realized until now how murderous it could be. “I was shocked and horrified. My brother’s very own people killing and torturing people!” In fact, Braam was lucky not to be tortured and killed himself. After Mandela’s release, he discovered that he had been on the hit list of the CCB, the secret military intelligence unit that had assassinated Anton Lubowski.

  “I do not think my brother knew about that,” he insisted with conviction. But Constand must have suspected that something was up. “He got a message to me via our mother,” Braam recalled, “warning me that ‘if I knew what was good for me’ I would quit the committees of the South African Council of Churches.”

  Braam did not quit. Throughout the eighties, he continued to work with the SACC. In 1987, he even went with fifty other open-minded Afrikaner intellectuals to Dakar, Senegal, for a pioneering meeting with the exiled leadership of the ANC. One of the key figures behind that meeting was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, Morné du Plessis’s first political hero. After Braam Viljoen returned from Dakar, Niël Barnard’s NIS interrogated him, but still he kept going, That same year he joined the small but plucky Progressive Federal Party (another link with Morné du Plessis, for this was the party Morné supported). He even stood for parliament for the PFP, before throwing in his lot with a borderline legal anti-apartheid think tank called the Institute for Democracy in South Africa that Van Zyl Slabbert, who had now quit active politics, had set up.

  Despite their profound disparities (“we lived in different worlds” was how Braam put it), Braam and Constand shared many qualities. Both were honest and scrupulously dedicated to their work. Constand was an upright, no-nonsense, soldiers’ soldier who spent his professional life inside a moral bubble, convinced that it was as honorab
le to serve in the SADF as in the army of New Zealand. He was greatly admired by those who’d served under him, as millions of white South Africans had during his long tenure as head of the army and then all the armed forces. He cemented his reputation during the mid-seventies as the senior officer in charge of South Africa’s expeditionary Angolan war, fighting on the side of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA guerrillas against Angola’s Marxist government. It was one of dozens of proxy Cold War conflicts going on around the world. The Angolan government received help from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and UNITA from the United States. South Africa joined the fray because its rulers were as anti-Communist as the ones in Washington, and because the Angolan government gave help to the ANC.

  On taking over as head of the SADF in 1980, Constand found himself obliged to pay more attention to the ANC itself, now active in neighboring countries like Zambia and Mozambique, and to their increasingly rebellious surrogates whom his brother was associating with inside the country. A government document a year earlier had said that the political and military threat against South Africa was intensifying at “an alarming rate.” Determined to couch the war against the ANC in more internationally palatable geopolitical terms, the document described the enemy’s “total onslaught” as part of a plan by Moscow to use South Africa “as a stepping stone to world conquest.” The language convinced American conservatives and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who publicly agreed with President Botha that the ANC was a Communist-inspired “terrorist” organization. Encouraged, Botha ordered the army into the townships. Viljoen thus became the first head of the South African Army to see his remit expand beyond the protection of the country against a foreign enemy to protection of the state against its own people. The army suddenly found itself working hand in hand with the security police, carrying out joint raids in neighboring Mozambique, Botswana, and Lesotho that killed as many innocent civilians as ANC operatives.

  Constand was never comfortable in this role. His moral vision may have been less ample than his brother’s, but he was not without scruples. In May 1983 an SADF raid inside Mozambique mistook a number of private homes, a nursery, and a fruit juice factory for an ANC missile site, training center, and logistical base. Six people were killed, none of them ANC personnel, prompting a furious internal memo from Viljoen to the chief of the army in which he declared himself not just disappointed, but shocked. “If we were to analyse our operational effectiveness and to make the results public we would be ashamed,” Viljoen wrote.

  The results were not made public and, with the aid of a pliant press, the best possible gloss was put on the exploits of the SADF. A raid on Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, in which South African soldiers killed a boy of six and a man of seventy-one, was reported in glorious terms in the South African press, one newspaper headlining the epic “the Guns of Gaborone.” When Constand retired, after a military career spanning thirty-one years, he had become a living legend—in the Afrikaner popular imagination, almost a white Mandela—and, more to the point, a brave, principled, no-nonsense general in keeping with a nineteenth-century Boer tradition of soldier-politicians like Andries Pretorius and Paul Kruger—the perfect antidote, in other words, to that distinctly un-Boerish shifty, slippery, deal-making F. W de Klerk. Constand Viljoen’s decision to do the time-honored Boer thing and go back to farming only increased the devotion of his admirers. He imagined back in 1985 that he was returning to the land for good. Five years later, as he sat stewing in front of the television watching Mandela’s release, he would not have guessed that the volk would soon call on him to abandon his farm and lead them in their last great freedom war.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MASK

  1990-93

  Mandela was back in prison within a month of getting out. Of his own free will, this time, he visited the place where he feared in 1964 that he would end up, Death Row in Pretoria. He went to see the Upington 14 and other prisoners who were inside for what he believed to be political reasons. Justice Bekebeke missed him. By a perverse sequence of circumstances related to an unfortunately timed visit by a family member, he was unable to see Mandela. “I didn’t want to die on Death Row but I wanted to kill myself !” Justice half-joked. Mandela reassured the Upington contingent that, with his release, things in South Africa had changed forever. Not only would he persuade the government to accept a moratorium on executions, but he would do all he could to help them gain their freedom. They believed him. In the eyes of the black faithful, Mandela was a miracle worker. “Even though I was not there with him, I shared in the excitement of the others,” Justice told me. “We knew then for certain that we would be out.”

  South Africa had taken a new course, and while De Klerk was formally in control, Mandela was doing the steering. Talks did begin between the ANC and the government. The process that Mandela had started in secret in jail continued openly now. The right wing growled but the ANC and the government got to know each other, discovered to their surprise that, as one senior ANC official put it, neither side had horns, and set about building the mutual confidence on which progress in negotiations always depends. “The process,” as insiders called it, began formally in May 1990 and advanced as well as Mandela could reasonably have hoped. One of the important concessions Mandela secured early on was, as promised to the Upington 14, a cessation of all legal executions. Political prisoners started to trickle out as part of the horse-trading of negotiations. The Upington group, none of them officially members of the ANC, did not enter into those calculations, however. The law would take its course and they would wait to be exonerated on appeal.

  Delegations of the government, the ANC, and various smaller parties met Monday through Friday, gathering in smoke-filled rooms, like rival lawyers, at a conference building near Johannesburg Airport known, with exaggerated grandeur, as the World Trade Center. Some of the delegates got along so well after a while that they began to wonder whether they were racing too far ahead of their constituencies; whether there would be problems, especially for the government, when the time came to ask their people to go along with the deals they had struck. The chief negotiator of the ANC, a former trade union leader called Cyril Ramaphosa, and the chief negotiator of the government, Defence Minister Roelf Meyer, became such good friends that they often debated the issues during weekend fishing trips. Mandela and De Klerk never got on as well, but while they had their tense moments, they stayed in permanent touch, sometimes meeting late into the night. There was no longer any need to beg for a meeting: the former prisoner could get the president on the end of a phone line any time he chose.

  In this rapidly changing climate, in May 1991 the highest appeal court in South Africa overturned twenty-one out of the twenty-five original murder convictions in the Upington case, and dismissed all fourteen death sentences. Bekebeke was one of the four whose convictions stood. He would leave Death Row, but the court had ruled that he had a ten-year sentence to serve. He took the news with good grace, responding to the verdicts by reaching out and embracing the old man Gideon Madlongolwana who, with his wife Evelina, was free to go. Within eight months, having served a total of six years and one and a half months in prison, he too was free. On January 6, 1992, he rejoined his family and friends and his girlfriend, Selina, in Upington. It was a happy time but Bekebeke was impatient. He had a lot of time to make up, and a pledge to keep. He had made it to himself and to his fellow inmates on the day when Anton Lubowski was killed.

  Until then, he had been clear about his life’s ambition. He wanted to become a doctor. “But that day I changed my plan. From that day on I knew there was only one thing I wanted to be: a lawyer. I would pick up his spear. I would follow in his footsteps. I would fill the vacuum he had left. I would become another Anton.”

  It was an amazing thing for an angry young black man like Bekebeke to say, but prison had mellowed him as it had mellowed Mandela. Within two weeks of his release he had acted on his grandiloquent rhetoric. Down in Cape Town, the place where he had had his inspirational child’s fantasy
of visiting Mandela and the other “leaders” in their island prison, he was now going to start, aged thirty-one, his university career. Bekebeke excelled at the University of the Western Cape. He got top marks in his exams and obtained a scholarship. He was, he said, a student possessed. “All along the spirit of Anton drove me and I knew that however tough it got I would never wilt, I would never fail him. I told my comrades in Death Row that this is what I would do. I made a vow, and I fulfilled it.”

  Mandela was well on the way to fulfilling his old vow to bring freedom to South Africa, but there were storms ahead, phenomena of political nature that he had not anticipated and that initially escaped his control. For, with the negotiations at the World Trade Centre proceeding at their stately pace, the right-wing war to scupper them was already under way. It was a war that took different forms, and one of them—the bloodiest—had a black face. For there was not only a white right wing in South Africa but also—far more difficult for an outsider to understand—a black right. And their interests converged.