by John Carlin
Viljoen was amazed at Mandelas ability to get past the surface caricatures and reach such a deep understanding, as he saw it, of the true nature of the Afrikaner. Just how many black farm laborers Mandela might have found to validate his assessment of the baas is another matter. The point was that Mandela knew that his portrait of the Afrikaner as rugged Christian would conform absolutely with Viljoens own vision of his people.
Viljoen was as intrigued as Botha had been when Mandela proceeded to point out the similarities between the histories of the blacks and the Afrikaners, both of whom had fought freedom wars. And, of course, Mandela was doing something that Viljoen had not expected. He was doing the general the courtesy of speaking to him in his own language.
Mandela had gauged the mood just right, establishing his bona fides with Viljoen as a man with whom he could talk and expect to be understood. But the real substance of the encounter came at the end of their conversation over that same cup of tea. Braam and Niehaus were eavesdropping at just the right time.
I hope you understand how difficult it is for white people to trust that things are going to go right with the ANC in power, Constand Viljoen said, adding, I am not sure if you realize it, Mr. Mandela, but this can be stopped.
By this, Viljoen meant the peaceful transition to black rule. He stopped short of saying it in so many words, but he was clearly indicating to Mandela that there would be military intervention and the right wing, aided by the SADF, could take over if the Afrikaners were not given a chunk of sovereign territory inside South Africas borders.
Gravely, Mandela replied: Look, General, I know that the military forces you can muster are powerful and well-armed and well-trained; and that they are far more powerful than mine. Militarily we cannot fight you; we cannot win. If, however, you do go to war, you assuredly will not win either, not in the long run. Because, one, the international community will be totally behind us. And, two, we are too many, and you cannot kill us all. So then, what kind of life will there be for your people in this country? My people will go to the bush, the international pressure on you will be enormous and this country will become a living hell for all of us. Is that what you want? No, General, there can be no winners if we go to war.
This is so, General Viljoen replied. There can be no winner.
And that was it. That was the understanding on which the far right and the black liberation movement built their dialogue. That first meeting in Houghton laid the basis for three and a half months of secret talks between delegations of the ANC and the Volksfront. The Volksfront wanted to establish the constitutional principle of an Afrikaner Israel, to which the ANC never quite said no, and never quite said yes, their main concern having been to keep Viljoens people talking, dangling before them the possibility of future talks on the constitution of their own longed-for Boerestaat.
These contacts continued apace despite a potentially destabilizing sequence of events during the last three months of 1993. First, negotiators at the World Trade Centre announced that South Africas first all-race elections would be held on April 27, 1994. Then they set up a committee to decide on a new national anthem and flag. Then Mangosuthu Buthelezi unmasked himself by forming a coalition with the white far-right, a body incorporating the Volksfront and Inkatha that called itself the Freedom Alliance. (Viljoens followers, impressed by Inkathas willingness to back up their rhetoric with force, cheered this development). Then Chris Hanis killers, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, were condemned to death. Then a black woman was crowned Miss South Africa for the first time. Then, rubbing still more salt into the wound, Mandela and De Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, most important of all, Mandela and De Klerk presided over a ceremony at which the countrys new transitional constitution was solemnized. The outcome of three and a half years of negotiations was a compromise whereby the first democratically elected government would be a power-sharing coalition, lasting five years: the president would belong to the majority party but the configuration of the cabinet would reflect the proportion of the vote each party won. The new arrangements also provided guarantees that white civil servants, the military included, would not lose their jobs and that white farmers would not lose their land. Neither would there be any Nuremberg-style trials.
Despite the fact that he made this historic deal with De Klerk, Mandela always had more personal regard for Constand Viljoenand indeed for P. W. Bothathan for the president who had let him free. In Mandelas eyes, Viljoen was, like him, a patriarchal leader who, within the confines of his unworldly Boerness, had a big heart. Mandela saw mirrored in Viljoen qualities of his ownhonesty, integrity, couragethat he liked.
In De Klerk, by contrast, Mandela saw little that he would wish to emulate. Never forgiving him for what he perceived to be his disregard for the loss of black life in the townships, he came to see the president as a lean-souled, slippery lawyer who dwelt in detail and lacked the temperament and conviction of a true leader. This was unfair in the view even of some of his own colleagues in the ANCs National Executive Committee, but if there was one thing the proper Victorian gentleman in Mandela detested it was the sense that someone had betrayed his good faith.
Yet it was with De Klerk that Mandela received his joint Nobel Prize. This infuriated him, not because he judged it to be premature, which it was since nobody knew yet what the outcome of the race between peace and war was going to be, but because he believed, according to his old friend and lawyer George Bizos, that De Klerk did not deserve it, that it should have been awarded to Mandela and to the ANC as a whole. When De Klerk gave his acceptance speech, said George Bizos, who traveled to Norway with the Nobel delegation, Mandela expected him to acknowledge that an injustice had been done by the cruelties of apartheid to the people of South Africa. There was no such statement in De Klerks address. As if believing the propaganda, as if buying into the evenings tacit half-truth that he had earned a position of moral equality with Mandela, all De Klerk said was that mistakes had been made by both sides. I looked at Mandela. He just shook his head.
That evening Mandela and De Klerk were standing by Oslo Cathedral watching a torchlit procession. Part of the ceremony involved a rendition of Nkosi Sikelele. Mandela noticed that, as the liberation anthem was sung, De Klerk chatted distractedly with his wife. Mandelas patience finally snapped at a dinner hosted that night by the prime minister of Norway before 150 guests, members of his government and the diplomatic corps. Bizos was as shocked as everyone else present by the venom that left Mandelas lips when he stood up to speak. He gave the most horrible detail of what had happened to prisoners on Robben Island, Bizos recalled, including the burying of a man in the sand with his head out and urinating on him . . . he told the story as an example of the inhumanity there had been in this system, though he did actually stop short of saying, Look, here are the people who represented that system.
Clearly, Mandela retained some residue of bitterness toward his jailers, contrary to his own claim in the press conference on the day after his release, and to the perception that his admirers worldwide wished to have of him. He was human after all; he was not a saint.
CHAPTER XI
ADDRESS THEIR HEARTS
1994
A simple, low-fat diet, vigorous exercise, fresh sea air, plenty of sleep, regular hours, practically zero stress: prison did have its compensations. It helped explain why Mandelas doctors confirmed the evidence of those who watched him in action during his spectacularly eventful seventy-sixth year: he had the constitution of a fit man of fifty.
Nineteen ninety-three had been eventful; 1994 was shaping up to be more arduous still. Mandela was getting up at 4:30 every morning as a matter not only of routine, but of necessity. The black and white right were still refusing to sign up for the elections, and threatened war if they went ahead without them; in the event that the first ever multiracial vote did go ahead on April 27, as scheduled, there
was the matter of a national election campaign to occupy himself with, and assuming that passed off successfully, he would then have a country to runone that would present all the usual problems faced by countries everywhere, plus the certainty that the fundamental problem of stability, the prospect of counterrevolutionary terrorism of some sort, would not be going away.
The good news was that Constand Viljoen was losing his enthusiasm for war. Since his call to arms at Potchefstroom he had developedwith Mandelas proddinga sharper sense of the bloodbath he might unleash, and he was beginning to see that a black-led government mightnt be as apocalyptic as he had first imagined. Yet Viljoen continued to urge his people to mobilize for war. If you want to argue with a wolf, make sure you have a pistol in your hand, was his motto. The problem was that he was not entirely certain anymore whether the wolf was a wolf, or a hound that could be tamed. He liked Mandela but had his doubts about the ANC; he worried that the leaders he was meeting with, like the ANCs wily number two, Thabo Mbeki, might be abusing his bona fides, might seek to trick him into selling out his people. And there was another thing. If the ANC was playing an elaborately deceitful game, if they really did mean to convert South Africa to communism and exact terrible vengeance on whites but were pretending not to, the SADF high command had fallen for it completely. General Georg Meiring, Viljoens successor as head of the armed forces, had come out with a speech just before Christmas 1993 in which he had pledged his support for the new constitution. (One inducement to do so was a threat from the progressive-minded chief of the air force that he would bomb him if he turned the army against the new order.) Viljoen now knew that if the Volksfront went to war they would probably face the might of the same military he had served with such distinction and pride. Certain sectors of the SADF might still be relied upon to fight alongside the Boer resistance, but short of a progressively less likely coup at the top, the institution appeared to be aligned with Mandela and De Klerk.
General Viljoen felt more uncertain and uncomfortable than ever before. As the chances of victory for the Volksfront became more remote, his soldiers clamored more loudly for war. Mandela heard those cries too, and felt for Viljoen. He knew that Viljoens constituency needed something to cheer. The rest of the ANC leadership were not so clear on this point. At a meeting of the movements National Executive Committee early in 1994, the issue on the table was, what should the position of the new government be on the delicate question of the national anthem? The old anthem was clearly unacceptable. A part of Die Stem, a sombre martial tune, was an acceptably neutral entreaty to God to guard our beloved land; but another part of itand this was the part black people heardcelebrated the triumphs of Retief, Pretorius, and the rest of the trekkers as they drove upward through South Africa in the nineteenth century, crushing black resistance, their creaking wagons cutting their trails into the earth. The unofficial anthem of black South Africa, Nkosi Sikelele, was the richly soulful expression of a long-suffering people yearning to be free.
The meeting had just gotten started when an assistant walked in to inform Mandela that he had a phone call from a head of state. He left the room and the thirty or so men and women of the ANCs supreme decision-making body carried on without him. The consensus was overwhelmingly in favor of scrapping Die Stem and replacing it with Nkosi Sikelele. The NEC members were reveling in their decision and all it symbolized for the new South Africa when Mandela returned. They told him what theyd decided and he said, Well, I am sorry. I dont want to be rude, but . . . I think I should express myself on this motion. I never thought seasoned people such as yourselves would take a decision of such magnitude on such an important matter without even waiting for the president of your organization.
And then Mandela sternly set forth his point of view. This song that you treat so easily holds the emotions of many people who you dont represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the verythe onlybasis that we are building upon: reconciliation.
The ladies and gentlemen of the National Executive Committee of the ANC cringed with embarrassment. Mandela proposed instead that South Africa should have two anthems, to be played one immediately after the other at all official ceremonies, from presidential inaugurations to international rugby matches: Die Stem and Nkosi Sikelele. Quickly convinced by the logic of Mandelas argument, the freedom fighters unanimously caved in. Jacob Zuma, who had been chairing the meeting said, Well, I . . . I . . . I think the matter is clear, comrades. I think the matter is clear. There were no objections.
The NEC capitulated in the face of Mandelas wrath because they realized that his response to the anthem question was the correct one in tactical terms. He had in fact lectured the NEC on the business of winning over the Afrikaners, on showing respect for their symbols; on going out of ones way, for example, to employ a few words of Afrikaans at the beginning of a speech. You dont address their brains, he told them, you address their hearts.
With Constand Viljoen, Mandela addressed both head and heart, but it was the heart that won out in the end. It helped a huge amount that on March 11 the Volksfront met its Waterloo, shoving the general in the direction toward which Mandela had been gently pushing him.
With the elections barely six weeks away, Viljoen responded to a call from one of his black allies in the Freedom Alliance. It was not Buthelezi this time, but the leader of another of the tribal statelets that the ideologue-in-chief Hendrick Verwoerd had devised as part of his grand apartheid strategy, a man by the name of Lucas Mangope, whose rule over Bophuthatswana was under threat from the majority of his ANC-supporting citizens, who found his dependence on Pretoria offensive. Viljoen mobilized a force of over a thousand men to go to the capital of Bop, a town called Mmabatho. The whole thing turned into a fiasco when Eugene Terreblanches AWB entered the fray and went on what the Afrikaans papers were to describe as a kaffirskietpieknieka kaffir-shooting picnic. Mangopes security forces revolted, turning their guns on the Volksfronters, and when the SADF arrived late in the day in a column of armored vehicles, Viljoens forces fled the field in disarray.
What happened at Mmabatho is often given as the sole reason why Viljoen decided to abandon the Boer resistance struggle. He confided that there was more to it than that. Once rid of the AWB hooligan element, it would have remained within his means to carry on leading an effective military campaign, even if everybody else would have described it as terrorism. We had a plan in place. We could have stopped the elections from taking place, and not with the SADF, but on our own. We had the means, we had the arms, we had the tactics, and we had the will. Not to take power, not to defeat the SADF, but yes, to prevent the elections from taking place successfully, no doubt about that.
Arrie Rossouw, perceived four years after Mandelas release as a heavyweight of Afrikaner journalism, a man who would go on to become editor-in-chief of both Beeld and Die Burger, agreed. No question, he could have caused terrible damage to this country, Rossouw said. He could easily have placed four hundred highly trained former members of the Reconnaissance regiments [Special Forces] under his command, and with them, well armed, he could have blown up airports, train stations, bus stations, assassinated people. They would not have managed to overthrow the governmentthat was the lesson of Mmabathobut they could have paralyzed the economy and caused absolute political chaos. And they could have gone on for years and years.
They could have done, in other words, what the IRA did in Northern Ireland for thirty years, but with far more catastrophic impact. This was partly because they disposed of more arms and more men with more sophisticated military experience, but mainly because South Africa was a fragile, volatile, infant democracy, with a brittle economy, susceptible in a way neither Ireland nor Britain had been to chaos and collapse. The alarming thing was that it fell not to a collective but to one man to decide which of the two it would be, peace or war.
Yes, it was entirely my decision. Entirely. Viljoen solemnly confirmed. During those final weeks before the election, opinion was divided in the Afrikaner Volksfront, fifty-fifty between those who wanted the violent option, disrupting the elections and the whole democratic process in South Africa, and those who wanted a negotiated solution. So how did he reach his decision? I always took the view that war or violence is not an easy option. I know war. So I told my supporters that I would take it upon myself whether to go to war or not to go. It was the most difficult decision I had to take in my life.
In the military you must understand that before making up our minds on a question like this we weigh up all the factors, we evaluate, we think hard, and it is only after a long process that we decide. I considered that the right option was negotiations, and participation in the elections. I considered that it was best for the country, and best for the Afrikaner people.
But what was the decisive factor? Was it the AWB rabble? Was it Mmabatho? He replied without hesitation, The character of the opponentwhether you can trust him, whether you believe he is genuinely for peace. The important thing when you sit down and negotiate with an enemy is the character of the people you have across the table from you and whether they carry their peoples support. Mandela had both.