Invictus

by John Carlin

  The Zulu right-wing movement Inkatha and in particular its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi (“crazy like a fox,” as a foreign ambassador described him), were as fearful as the white right that if the ANC came to power it would exact dreadful retribution on them. For Buthelezi had gone along with apartheid, while pretending, when the occasion demanded it, that he did not. His rhetoric often aped the ANC’s, lashing the government’s racism and so forth, but the fact was that he had taken the apartheid shilling. Hendrick Verwoerd’s “grand apartheid” plan had been to divide South Africa into a series of tribal homelands, which he conceived of as internationally recognized sovereign states. The Dr. Strangelove of apartheid (“I never suffer from the nagging doubt,” Verwoerd once declared, “that perhaps I might be wrong”) imagined that each of South Africa’s nine tribal groups would have its own mini-state, while the white tribe would bag the mineral and farm-rich lion’s share, the big cities included. Buthelezi went along with the plan, accepting a little fiefdom financed entirely by Pretoria and named KwaZulu. Here he lived a grand life as “chief minister,” complete with a cabinet and ministers and a police force headed by an Afrikaner brigadier (in this terrain Pretoria called the shots) who was a former chief of white South Africa’s security police.

  Buthelezi’s statelet might have been comical had it not been a tool of Botha’s counter insurgency. Guided by Pretoria’s in-house brigadier, Buthelezi dispatched his impi (Zulu for “battalion”) forces against the town-dwelling, English-speaking, ANC-supporting half of the Zulu population, resulting in battles between the two sides that caused thousands of deaths. The ANC and its supporters came to detest Buthelezi as much as Botha, if not more. Buthelezi feared that if Mandela ever took power he would lose the political and economic privileges derived from his complicity with the apartheid state. He also feared bloody revenge, as the white right did, which was why neither saw any benefit in a negotiation process whose end was majority rule.

  Within six months of Mandela’s release, Inkatha’s spear-wielding warriors had extended their war beyond Zulu country to the townships around Johannesburg, mounting assaults on the community at large, knowing that the vast majority were going to be supporters of the ANC. Hundreds died—shot, speared, knifed, or burned—every month. In their attacks, which continued for the first three years after Mandela’s release, Buthelezi’s thugs counted on the overt assistance of the uniformed police, whose armored cars escorted the Inkatha impis in and out of battle. Covertly, elements of the security police and military intelligence were providing the Inkatha terrorists with guns. The objective was quite clear: to provoke the ANC into a series of mini-civil wars in the townships and render the planned new order ungovernable.

  For all Mandela’s calculation and charm, he had moments of towering indignation, in most cases precipitated by the slaughter in the townships and by De Klerk, whom he now regretted having called “a man of integrity” and accused of passive complicity in the violence. Tokyo Sexwale, the former Robben Island prisoner and now member of the ANC’s top decision-making body, the National Executive Committee (NEC), said that there came a moment when Mandela wanted to break off relations with the government. “So we remonstrated. ‘If we do that, what do we do? Go back to armed struggle?’ Mandela was an angry man, but we had to defeat him, and we did. But he was very affected by the amount of blood flowing throughout the country.” Mandela let off steam by denouncing De Klerk. “If it were white people dying,” he raged, “I know that he would be addressing the matter with a great deal more urgency.”

  Buthelezi, who knew that the limits of impunity guaranteed him by the apartheid state did not extend to killing white people, found himself drawn ever closer to the far-right Conservative Party and their assorted storm troopers, who cheered on the Inkatha impis, celebrated their massacres, and looked forward to the day when they might forge a Zulu-Boer alliance against the ANC. Mandela, meanwhile, was receiving more and more reports from his own intelligence people, as well as from friendly foreign governments, of right-wing mobilization.

  By early 1992 there was no sign of the township bloodbath abating and every sign that the far right would violently show their hand. Danger loomed, and Mandela had to dispel it. He needed to appease whites’ fears, to give them some incentive to accept the impending new order. The NEC met and the idea came up to consider converting the political stick that sports had provided them into a carrot: offering to ease up on, or drop altogether, the boycott on rugby. Arnold Stofile, the man jailed in 1985 for his part in stopping an All Black tour, was an active participant in the debate. “This is no ordinary carrot we would be offering white South Africa,” the effervescent Stofile told his colleagues, not all of whom grasped the significance of rugby in the Afrikaner soul. “This is not politics. This is not ideology. It is something much more powerful and primal, and personal! Offering to restore the international rugby games is a way of saying to whites, ‘If you play along with us you will be able to go to Europe and the U.S. and Australia to visit your friends and not be seen at the airport when your passport is checked as pariahs. And they will see it as good for business too and, above all, it would mean being liked again. That’s the bottom line. That will mean so much to them. They’ll be able to exclaim, ‘They like us! They like us!’ In sum, comrades, white South Africa will be able to feel like human beings again, like citizens of the world.”

  One member of the NEC who understood exactly what Stofile was talking about was Steve Tshwete, a former Robben Islander who had also played rugby. In fact Tshwete had been arguing in favor of using sports more as a tool of positive change since the time of Mandela’s release. Arrie Rossouw, the political writer of the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld, described how early in 1990 he had flown to Zambia, the ANC’s exile base, and had long chats into the night with Tshwete, already the organization’s Mr. Sports. “Tshwete understood right from the beginning that the restoration of rugby internationals would prompt Afrikaners to rethink their preconceptions about the ANC,” Rossouw said. “He was passionately in favor of using rugby as an instrument of reconciliation.”

  He and Stofile argued the point before the NEC. Opinion was divided between the pragmatists who believed the time had come to reach out an undeserved hand of friendship and those who found the idea of rewarding the “Boers’ ” perfidy outrageous. It was the pragmatists who prevailed on Mandela. The idea of using rugby as an inducement for the Afrikaners to board the democracy train could not have been more in keeping with the approach he had rehearsed in prison, most obviously with Major van Sittert in the “hot plate” encounter, and deployed to such valuable political effect since. The whites had plenty of bread, but they had been denied the circus. The ANC would give it back to them; they would allow the Springboks to perform on the world stage once again.

  In August 1992 South Africa played its first serious international match in eleven years against New Zealand at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium. A deal was reached beforehand between the rugby authorities and the ANC. We’ll give you the game, the ANC said, so long as you stop the event from being used, as the phrase went, “to promote apartheid symbols.” There was an inbuilt problem, though: the green Springbok jersey itself. Still a potent apartheid symbol for blacks, it was inevitably associated in white minds with the two other symbols the ANC meant when they set out their conditions: the old South African flag, which was still the official national flag, and the old national anthem, “Die Stem,” which was still the national anthem. To ask rugby fans to dissociate one symbol from the others given the inevitable state of inebriation of many by the time they got into the stadium, and their political insensitivity, seemed too much to ask, too soon. And it was.

  The old flags flew all around the stadium and Louis Luyt, the big, brash president of the South African Rugby Union, flouted the rules sensationally by ordering the old anthem to be played. The crowd bellowed out the song like a battle cry, converting what the ANC had hoped to be a ritual of reconciliation into a ceremony of defiance. Rapport , the Afrikaans newspaper most anchored in th
e past, waxed sentimental about “the soft tears of pride” spilled by the volk at Ellis Park, before switching to heroic mode to applaud their uncompromising spirit. “Here is my song, here is my flag,” rhapsodized Rapport. “Here I stand and I will sing my song today.”

  Enlightened Afrikaners like Arrie Rossouw, the government’s chief negotiator Roelf Meyer, and Braam Viljoen, the brother of the general, hung their heads in despair. ANC officials lined up to express their indignation. Arnold Stofile felt betrayed. “We were never dogmatic about isolation,” he said. “We turned the stick into a sweet, juicy carrot. But not everybody chewed on it. So when the fans let us down the way they did, singing the apartheid anthem and all the rest of it, our people were really pissed off.”

  Yet once the Ellis Park dust had settled, Mandela argued forcefully at NEC meetings for persisting with rugby as an instrument of political persuasion. The case was difficult to make among a group of strong-minded people who had had it with indignities at the hands of white people. But he made it anyway. “Up to now rugby has been the application of apartheid in the sports field,” he told his ANC colleagues. “But now things are changing. We must use sport for the purpose of nation-building and promoting all the ideas which we think will lead to peace and stability in the country.”

  The initial response was “very negative,” Mandela recalled. “I understood the anger and hostility of the black population because they had grown up in an atmosphere where they regarded sport as an arm of apartheid, where we supported the foreign teams when they came to play against South Africa. Now suddenly I come out of jail and I’m saying we must embrace these people! I understood their reaction very well and I knew I was going to have a tough time.” The ANC leadership thrashed out the matter over several meetings. Mandela’s most powerful argument was that rugby was worth, as he put it, several battalions. “My idea was to ensure that we got the support of Afrikaners, because—as I kept reminding people—rugby, as far as Afrikaners are concerned, is a religion.”

  In January 1993, just five months after the fiasco at the game against New Zealand, Mandela gave white South Africa the biggest, best, and least-deserved gift they could have imagined—the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Not only would South Africa be allowed to take part for the first time, but South Africa would stage the competition. Walter Sisulu headed a small delegation that met at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg with the top people of the International Rugby Board. All emerged from the meeting to declare their “elation” at the ANC’s decision unconditionally to support a proposal unthinkable only three years earlier, when Mandela was still in jail.

  But instead of responding with the gratitude that Mandela had expected, the white right stepped up their resistance rhetoric and their plans for war. They saw that negotiations between the ANC and the government were inching toward democracy. De Klerk had announced just a few weeks later that he had set a target date for multirace elections, April 1994. The fears that prospect held outweighed Mandela’s sporting blandishments.

  Within days of the rugby announcement, all the talk in political circles was of civil war. Even President de Klerk, a lawyer who generally tried to keep noise levels down, felt compelled by the intelligence information he was receiving to declare that the alternative to negotiations was “a devastating war.” A member of his cabinet said, “We are concerned by events in Yugoslavia—more so than most people realize.” So was the ANC. Mandela and his lieutenants openly worried about their dreams of democracy “drowning,” as Mandela himself put it, “in blood.”

  On April 10, 1993, they nearly did. An odd couple emerged from the motley far-right crew to carry out the closest thing to regicide South Africa had seen since the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966, but with incalculably more dangerous consequences. Verwoerd had been stabbed to death by a half-mad parliamentary messenger. It was a shock to his family and supporters, but not to the political system, which carried on regardless. The assassination of Chris Hani was something else altogether.

  Hani was, next to Mandela, black South Africa’s greatest hero. Had Mandela never been born, or had he died in prison, Hani would have been the leader of black South Africa by acclamation. Like Mandela, his myth preceded him. In exile for nearly thirty years, his face was unknown to the general public until the ANC was unbanned and he returned home shortly after Mandela’s release. The myth rested on two powerful arguments: he had led the two organizations the white regime feared most, Umkhonto we Sizwe and the South African Communist Party. The general rule among black militants was that the more an ANC leader was reviled by the government, the more he was admired. Hani, Mandela’s heir as “terrorist-in-chief ” in white eyes, had been a legend whose dimensions were compounded by tales of derring-do and survived assassination attempts that filtered back to the townships; by the rumor—entirely true—of the extreme poverty into which he had been born in the black, rural Eastern Cape.

  The photographs and TV images of April 10, 1993, foreshadowed big trouble: the fallen idol lying facedown in a pool of blood, the spontaneous nationwide demonstrations and the forests of black fists raised in anger, the burning barricades, the torched cars, the white riot policemen clutching their shotguns protectively to their chests. The scale of the peril was contained in the words Archbishop Tutu used to restrain the blacks from doing what natural justice demanded. “Let us not allow Chris’s killers success in their nefarious purpose of getting our country to go up in flames,” Tutu pleaded, “because now it could easily go up in flames.”

  Hani’s assassin, the man who gunned him down outside his home in the previously all-white working-class suburb of Dawn Park, in Johannesburg, was a Polish immigrant, a foot soldier of the white resistance struggle, a member of the AWB called Janusz Walus whose anti-Communist zealotry was matched only by his desire to be admitted into the right-wing Boer fold. Walus’s comrade in arms, the nearest thing to a brain behind the plot, shared the Pole’s need to be welcomed into the volk’s embrace. He was called Clive Derby-Lewis and he looked and sounded exactly as one would expect someone with a name like that. A member of parliament for Dr. Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, he wore blue blazers and cravats, sported an exuberant mustache, and spoke English with a plummy upper-crust accent: he looked and sounded like an actor playing the part of a British pantomime cad.

  These two wannabe Boers brought South Africa closer than ever to race war. Beeld understood it perfectly. The paper of the Afrikaans establishment warned, “One rash outburst now, one stray bullet, one act of vengeance can bring down the delicate structure of negotiations and unleash satanic forces.”

  Mandela received the news by phone in Qunu, the village in the Transkei, by the Eastern Cape, where he was born. Richard Stengel, who co-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, was with him at the time, watching him have his typical breakfast of porridge, fruit, and toast. Mandela’s face turned to stone—or, as Stengel put it, fixed “in the frown of tragedy.” He was devastated. He felt a father’s affection for Hani as a man, huge respect for him as his political heir. Yet, weighing up instantly the gravity of the moment, he saw that he couldn’t afford to indulge his own feelings now. He switched instantly from grieving father to calculating politician.

  “He put the phone down,” Stengel recalled, “his mind was already spinning and working, and thinking what’s going to happen? What would this do for the nation? What would it do for the peace? What would this do for the negotiations? And he began a series of phone calls to aides and he saw immediately this could be the match that ignites the tinder, the revolution, God knows what. And he was completely the master of the political moment. And I almost felt I could see inside of this head and see all of these different gears whirring. He was the consummate political animal, thinking through all of the consequences of this and what it meant.”

  What it meant was that he had never had greater power than in that moment to define the course his country took. The easier option would be to make war. The difficult one was the call to restraint, an appeal to the angry masses to set aside the emotions of the moment in
favor of the bigger goal.

  Jessie Duarte, his personal assistant, had phoned him with the news, and she greeted him, after he had traveled to Hani’s village to offer the family his condolences, when he arrived that afternoon at the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg. “He was so sad,” Duarte recalled. “He really loved Chris. Yet he knew also that there was not time to lose, that this was no time to give in to his private feelings. The assessment he made was that the potential for violence around Chris’s death was immense, and as difficult a time as this was for everybody, the responsibility that he carried was to calm people down.”

  Duarte worked with Mandela for four years. They shared an office and he rarely traveled anywhere without her. She was a short, intense, bundle of energy whose fiery political activism had earned her a reputation in ANC circles as an angry young woman. But Mandela brought out a cheery side in her and she became, among many other things, a sort of surrogate daughter to him. As such, she was one of the few people whom he let see his sad face, before whom he occasionally let slip his composed politician’s mask. Jessie Duarte understood as well as anyone that his life had been happier, richer, and generally more satisfying in politics than in the personal sphere, which had been filled with failure, disappointment, and tragedy.

  Duarte was close by him on the day in April 1992 when he decided to announce his separation from his second wife, Winnie. She was struck by the black gloom that descended on him as he took on board the enormous disappointment Winnie had been to him. She had carried on an affair with a much younger man even after Mandela left prison, she never shared his bed when he was awake, she swore with a vulgarity that Mandela could not stomach, and she drank to ugly excess. As he would say in the divorce trial three years later, describing his two years of post-prison marriage, “I was the loneliest man,” all the lonelier for the dream of love that had sustained him in prison, and that she had helped nourish on her visits to him. A letter he wrote to her early on in his time in prison revealed the longing, as well as his perception of the need not to let those around him detect his vulnerability. “My Darling Winnie,” Mandela wrote, “I have been fairly successful in putting on a mask behind which I have pined for the family alone, never rushing for the post when it comes until somebody calls out my name. I am struggling to suppress my emotions as I write this letter.”