by John Carlin
He announced the end of his marriage at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. In a room far too small for the occasion, packed stiflingly with more than a hundred journalists from all over the world, Mandela sat down at a table, Walter Sisulu by his side, slipped on his reading glasses, and read out a brief statement. Then he looked up, grayer and graver than they had ever seen him, and said, Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will appreciate how painful this is for me. This conference is now over. Usually an announcement of this magnitude prompts reporters to fire a barrage of questions in hopes of provoking an unguarded, quotable outburst. But as he got up, slowly and stiffly, and turned toward the door with a mournful look on his face, the journalists stood, all of them, in silence.
Never before and never again would they be offered such a harrowing glimpse of the regret he felt at his failure as a family man. It was the only time he let the mask slip, allowing the world to see the sorrow written on his face; the cumulative sorrow of decades, for he felt responsible for the hardships that Winnie endured during his absence in jail, and for the drunken acts of criminality to which she was eventually reduced, unable to cope on her own with the combination of fame and relentless police persecution to which she was subjected. He felt just as responsible for the waywardness, and in some cases bitterness toward him, displayed by some of his children (two with Winnie, fourtwo of whom diedwith Eveline). He never shook off the idea that if he hadnt gone to prison his entire family would have been very different people, Jessie said.
But that was the risk he consciously took the day in 1961 when he founded Umkhonto we Sizwe. He had made his choice then to be father of the nation first, paterfamilias second. Partly to cover the pain of the choice he made, partly in a measure of how complete his dedication to the cause had been, the political mask became his real face; Mandela the man and Mandela the politician became one and the same.
Hanis death rivaled the divorce for the heartache it caused Mandela. He had lost a wife then; now he had lost a surrogate son. But this time he could not afford to let the mask slip. The audience, live on prime time, was the entire country, via the state-run channels of the SABC. De Klerk could have objected, but he did not because he grasped that in the light of the looming catastrophe he was powerless, irrelevant. He had as much ability to influence the angry black masses as Mandela had to influence the AWB, probably less. Mandela, not De Klerk, was now the keeper of the peace. It was as de facto head of state that he addressed the nation on TV and radio that night.
It was a father talking about a son who had just been murdered and asking people to be calm, Jessie Duarte said of Mandelas performance. Pitched in that way, how could anyone disobey? If the father himself was not baying for revenge, then what right had anybody else to go and seek it? For once, Mandelas flat public speaking style was of a piece with the message he sought to convey. This time the challenge wasnt winning over the whites; it was to persuade his own people. To do this he had to reroute the river of their anger, which was headed straight for hostile confrontation with white South Africa. To succeed he had to appeal not to their resentment, but to what remained of their generosity. That was why in his televised address he drew his audiences attention to the fortuitous fact that an Afrikaner had been, amid the tragedy, the hero of the hour. Janusz Walus was arrested almost immediately due to an Afrikaner woman, a neighbor of Hanis, who had the presence of mind to note down the license plate of the getaway car.
A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation teeters on the brink of disaster, Mandela said. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.
If Mandela exaggerated her heroism, he did it with a clear political purpose. This is a watershed moment for all of us, he said. Our decisions and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief, and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country, an elected government of the people . . . I appeal, with all the authority at my command, to all our people to remain calm and honor the memory of Chris Hani by remaining a disciplined force for peace.
It worked. Mass rallies erupted all over the country but the people did not allow their grief to spill over into violent anger. That time in 1993, it was really touch and go, Tutu reflected much later on those perilous days. What I know for sure is that if he hadnt been around the country would, in fact, have torn itself apart. Because it would have been the easiest thing to have released the dogs of war. That is what maybe many of the younger Turks would have wanted. It was one of the most devastating moments and the anger was palpable. Had Nelson not gone on television and radio the way he did . . . our country would have gone up in flames.
CHAPTER IX
THE BITTER-ENDERS
1993
For General Constand Viljoen, following events from his farm, the spectacle was exasperating. Throw what you might in its way, the Mandela juggernaut just kept going. Not that Viljoen had conspired in the assassination of Chris Hani. He didnt belong to the murderous wing of the SADF. But as a member of the volk and as a hard-nosed student of counterinsurgency warfare, hed figured that Hanis killing would have knocked the process of democratic change off course. Bill Keller, New York Times bureau chief in South Africa at the time, described the surprisingly steadying impact of Mandelas address, and the fact that the government had broadcast it, as signs of the tacit partnership that has developed between the Government and the African National Congress. Keller continued, It is a quarrelsome but remarkably durable working relationship that amounts almost to an informal government of national unity. As a result, the process of peaceful change has become, if not quite inexorable, at least amazingly resilient.
Viljoen understood this as well as Keller did, but he didnt like it at all. What was worse, he and the rest of the right-wing volk chose to interpret Hanis funerala massive affair that ended with a thrilling call for peace and unity from Desmond Tutuas a coming-out party for vengeful blacks. Rather than listen to the words of Mandela and Tutu calling for calm, they tuned in to the discordant messages emitted from the podium by young, third-ranking ANC officials who, doing the exact opposite of what Mandela always strove for, appealed to the crowds baser instincts by leading them in a song popular among the angry township youth. The drumbeat refrain, repeated in a rising, hypnotic crescendo, went, Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!
That sentiment was always there among the politically energetic black youth. The obvious thing would have been to seize on that energy and transform it into scorched-earth, Ayatollah revolution. The fear and prejudice and guilt in white hearts was such that it was impossible for many to conceive of the changes Mandela had in mind in anything other than vengeful terms.
The cries of Kill the Boer, which Mandela tolerated as a means of allowing the youth to blow off their anger, were the sideshow, not the main event. Failing to understand that, Constand Viljoen decided that he had been seething silently in his farm long enough, that the time had come to answer the call of nationalist duty. On May 7, 1993, he entered the fray, turning up at the biggest right-wing rally to date in Potchefstroom, a town seventy-five miles southwest of Johannesburg. There, a mini-Nuremberg was enacted, complete with flags, imitation Swastika insignias, parade drills, long-bearded Boer bitter-ender warriors in brown shirts, and barking orators like Eugene Terreblanche of the AWB. An ample and varied host of malcontents gathered there, united all by their expectation that on the day the blacks came to power they would treat the whites as the whites had treated them. An AWB offshoot called the Boer Resistance Movement (Boere Weerstandsbeweging, or (BWB) was there, an outfit called Resistance Against Communism, the Afrikaner Monarchist Movement, the Foundation for Survival and Freedom, Blanke Veiligheid (White Security), Blanke Weerstandsbeweging (White Resistance Movement), the Boer Republican Army, Boere Kom
mando, Orde Boerevolk (Order of the Boer People), Pretoria Boere, Volksleër (Peoples Army), Wenkommando (Victory Commando), the White Wolves, the Order of Death, and even the Ku Klux Klan. They might have been dismissed as a bunch of wackos in fancy dress, were there not 15,000 of them, and were this not the mental swamp that had spawned Hanis murderer, Janusz Walus.
Constand Viljoen was treated with reverence by the first Boer patriots to spot his arrival. At the pageants climax, he was called up onstage and invited to assume the leadership of the volk. He did as he was bade, Eugene Terreblanche ushering him up the steps and declaring that he would be proud, proud to serve as a corporal under a Boer hero like Viljoen. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, Viljoen denounced the unholy alliancethat had emerged between Mandela and De Klerk and declared himself ready and willing to lead the Boer battalions. The Afrikaner people must prepare to defend themselves, the general cried. Every Afrikaner must be ready. Every farm, every school is a target. If they attack our churches, nowhere is safe. If we are stripped of our defensive capacity we will be destroyed. A bloody conflict which will require sacrifices is inevitable, but we will gladly sacrifice because our cause is just.
The crowd roared their approval. You lead, we will follow! You lead, we will follow! they chanted. Terreblanche offered good theater but the serious-minded Viljoen, who still commanded much respect within the officer class of the SADF, was the redeemer the volk had been waiting for. The leaders of the AWB, the BWB, the Wenkommando, and all the rest of them took turns to pledge their fealty, as Terreblanche had done, to the general, who was anointed there and then the leader of the new Boer Peoples Army.
A political wing was created too that day, the Afrikaner Volksfront, a coalition of the Conservative Party and all the other assorted militias. The Volksfronts platform: the creation of an independent Afrikaner statea Boerestaatcarved out of South Africas existing borders. An Israel for the Afrikaner, Viljoen called it, making almost explicit a new vision of himself, shared by his ecstatic followers, as the Boer Moses.
Journalists were sometimes tempted to mock these Old Testament naysayers. But the arrival of Viljoen, who brought in four other retired generals as his aides-de-camp, made the white right a serious threat. Within two days of the Potchefstroom rally De Klerk sounded his strongest warning yet, declaring that the possibility had increased of a bloody Bosnia-like civil war.
Viljoen set about his new mission with the dedication and thoroughness that had characterized his military operations in Angola. Within two months he and his generals had organized and addressed 155 clandestine meetings nationwide. We had to mobilize the Afrikaners psychologically, start our propaganda campaigns, Viljoen would later reveal. But as importantly, we had to build a massive military capability. In those first two months the Volksfront recruited 150,000 secessionists to the cause, of whom 100,000 were men-at-arms, practically all of them with military experience.
That still left another three million-plus Afrikaners, and a total of five million white South Africans if you included the English, who were not openly aligned with the separatist cause. Where were they? There was a Lubowski minority that actively supported the ANC. There was a large minority, about 15 percent of the whites, who might not vote for the ANC in an election but were sufficiently alert politically to see apartheid for what it was and give their support to the Democratic Party, the new offshoot of the Progressive Federal Party for which Braam Viljoen had stood in the 1987 election. Roughly 20 percent of whites, mostly Afrikaners, quietly went along with the general thinking of the Volksfront, or at least with its fears. And then there was the rest, the large rump of middle-class white South Africa to which François Pienaar and his family belonged, about 60 percent of whom tended to believe that the long-ruling National Party could be relied upon to look after their interests. They did wake out of their torpor, but only sporadically, when events like Hanis assassination caught their eye and the thought ocurred that there might be consequences for their daily lives.
But this very same rump was also susceptible to Mandelas appeals. Unfixed in their views, their identities less dependent on ancient prejudices than those of the Volksfront faithful, they responded with pleasant surprise to Mandelas praise of the Afrikaner lady who noted down the license plate of Hanis assassin. And they liked his position on rugby, the first fruits of which they would taste on June 26, 1993, when the Springboks kicked off their long and deliberate preparations for the World Cup, still two years away, by playing an international at home against France. It was the game in which François Pienaar made his Springbok debut.
Pienaar, then twenty-six, reacted to the news of his selection as if he were living in a normal country. In his autobiography, Rainbow Warrior, he makes no mention of the charged political context against which he achieved the over-riding ambition of his life. The continued killings in the townships, the preparations for right-wing war, the possible imminence of all-race elections: none of it impinged seriously on his consciousness, none of it had any more bearing on his life than the Sharpeville blacks had done when he was growing up. A new era was dawning in South African rugby and the national team needed a new captain. Pienaar was overwhelmed to learn at his first Springbok training session that, in a break with all precedent in all sports, he would be leading South Africa out onto the field against France in his debut game. The game was to be played on a Saturday at Durbans Kings Park Stadium. On the Thursday before, Pienaar arranged for his parents to fly to Durban, the first plane flight of their lives, and in the evening he drove around to their hotel in a Mercedes-Benz the Springboks sponsors had loaned him. As he posed for family photographs in his green Springbok uniform, fit and ready for battle, he was as happy as any Afrikaner had ever been.
That very evening thousands of Volksfront soldiers were polishing their weapons in preparation for the first military action since General Constand Viljoen had been made bitter-ender-in-chief. In a well-organized logistical operation, they began converging overnight by road on Johannesburg, aiming to arrive at dawn at the gates of the World Trade Centre, the site of negotiations between the ANC and the government. They came from all over South Africa, from the Western Cape and the Northern Cape, the Eastern and the Northern Transvaal. Eddie von Maltitz headed a contingent from Ficksburg in the Orange Free State, five hours away. We organized ourselves a bus and we crammed into it, strong men only, all heavily armed, as he would recall. We expected blood. We didnt just have to stop the ANC, we had to stop De Klerk. We had to stop those negotiations. They were leading us to Armageddon. It was the storming of the Bastille all over again; the start of a revolution, we thought.
Von Maltitzs bus was composed mainly of members of the AWB, which he had joined back in that eventful year, 1985. Why did he join? God spoke to me, he replied. He urged me to fight to stop the Communists from taking over my country. A dedicated Christian, Von Maltitz was of German origin but considered himself an honorary Boer. The AWB manifesto struck a chord with him. It defined the resistance movements mission as assuring the survival of the Boer nation that came into being through Divine Providence. To this end they proposed secession and the creation within South Africas boundaries of a free Christian republic.
The biggest draw for most of the AWB brownshirts was not the manifesto, however, so much as their leader, Eugene Terreblanche, whose speeches contained such pearls as We will level the gravel with Nelson Mandela! and We will govern ourselves with our own superior white genes. Even better was how he said it. The beefy, white-bearded Terreblanche was a rousing public speaker. His rallies could always be depended upon to stir the passions of Boers, anxious to mask their fears in blustery defiance. He was good in part because he was a natural actor, whose most treasured prop was the white horse he rode, in part because he had a poetically rich sense of the cadences of language, in part because a propensity for drink loosened his tongue, and
in part because he had made a point during his youth of studying the oratorical techniques of Adolf Hitler.
Von Maltitz was less of a demagogue than Terreblanche, but he was just as driven. His zeal saw him rise quickly in the AWB to become Terreblanches chief lieutenant in the Free State, South Africas geographical heart. If he was not Boer by blood, he was one in spirit. His grandfather had fought alongside the Afrikaners in the war against the British, but, more important, he felt as pure and passionate an attachment to the land as any of the volk. Raised on the family farm, which he inherited from his father, he saw himself as a true son of Africa, proud of having milked his first cow at the age of three. Militarily, he felt he brought a measure of Prussian professionalism to Boer ranks that some of Terreblanches blowhards lacked. He had done his military service in the elite paratroop regiment, knew how to handle all sorts of weaponry, and had a black belt in karate.
But he became disaffected with Terreblanche, in particular by his heavy drinking. (More than once the leader, drunk, fell off his white horse, to the delight of journalists and black passersby.) Terreblanche, alert to the possibility that he might lose his best man in the Free State, phoned him one night and said, Herr von Maltitz, are you with me or against me? Von Maltitz replied ambiguously, I am with you in the cause.