Invictus

by John Carlin

  Few could withstand Mandela’s charm offensives—not even De Klerk, not even when they were campaigning against each other in the run-up to the April 27 elections, not even after they had gone head-to-head in a U.S.-style live TV debate. De Klerk, young enough to be Mandela’s son, proved sharper and better prepared than his adversary. Then, as the debate was reaching its conclusion, Mandela reached out and shook the president’s hand, praising him as “a true son of Africa.” De Klerk, flabbergasted, could only accept the handshake and put on his best smile, though he knew that in so doing Mandela was landing a knockout punch.

  “I felt, and everybody felt, that I was winning on points,” De Klerk would recall. “Then he really pulled up level again by suddenly reaching out, praising me, and taking my hand in front of all the television cameras. That might have been preplanned. I think it was a political move. But I do think that the majority of his media triumphs were an instinctive reaction from him. I think he has a wonderful talent in that regard.” A few days after the debate, De Klerk himself made a gracious public statement. During his very last press conference before the election, he was asked his opinion of his opponent. “Nelson Mandela,” replied De Klerk, spreading out his hands as if in surrender, “is a man of destiny.”

  As part of the election campaign Mandela went on a nighttime talk show on Johannesburg’s Radio 702 to answer callers’ questions live. Eddie von Maltitz, the first Volksfront warrior to enter the World Trade Centre during the raid, was down on his farm with some of his “kommandos,” listening to 702. Urged by his comrades to call in and give the “kaffir” a piece of his mind, Von Maltitz obliged. For a full three minutes he ranted and raved at Mandela—communism that, terrorists the other, the destruction of our culture, civilized standards, and norms. He ended with a brutally direct threat. “This country will be embroiled in a bloodbath if you carry on walking with the Communist thugs.”

  After a tense pause, Mandela replied, “Well, Eddie, I regard you as a worthy South African and I have no doubt that if we were to sit down and exchange views I will come closer to you and you will come closer to me. Let’s talk, Eddie.”

  “Uh . . . Right, okay, Mr. Mandela,” Eddie muttered in confusion. “Thank you,” and he hung up.

  At his farm three months later, while Eddie still wore a green military jumpsuit, light green camouflage boots, and a 9mm pistol tucked into his waist, he was a changed man, He had stopped training his kommandos; he had abandoned his preparations for war. The exchange on Radio 702 had changed everything. “That was what got me thinking,” he said. The new ANC premier of the Orange Free State, where he lived, was the man who pushed him over the edge. The premier’s name was “Terror” Lekota, known as such because of his lethal goal-scoring on the soccer field. Lekota, who had spent time on Robben Island during Mandela’s later years there, had many of Mandela’s instincts. He made it his first mission on coming to power to win over the Free State’s Afrikaner farmers. If he roped in Von Maltitz, he would go a long way toward corralling the rest. Lekota himself called Von Maltitz and invited him to his birthday party at his residence in the state capital, Bloemfontein. Von Maltitz said no, but Lekota insisted. He called again. “Please, Eddie, I’d really like you to come.” Von Maltitz said he would talk to his men and get back to him. “We talked and figured, what could we lose?” Von Maltitz recalled. “So when he called back the next time I said yes.”

  Von Maltitz turned up at what he called “the big house” in Bloemfontein fully armed. “I did not want to do a Piet Retief with Dingaan,” he said. He went into the house and joined the party, where black people predominated, without being searched. “Terror Lekota saw me across the room and he came over and gave me a big hug. He must have felt my guns but he said nothing. He just kept smiling. I liked him. He was genuine. Like Mr. Mandela, a genuine man. So that’s why I figured, Let’s give them a chance; they deserve it.”

  Why? Because Mr. Mandela, and his new friend Terror had treated him with respect—Walter Sisulu’s “ordinary respect.” “I never got that respect from De Klerk and the National Party, you know. But from Mr. Mandela, yes . . . I believe, I really do, that we must give them a chance.”

  The ANC had won the elections with just under two-thirds of the national vote, and nearly 89 percent of the black one. Of the rest, one percent went to the openly antiwhite PAC—whose “one settler, one bullet” slogan ANC supporters jeeringly translated into “one settler, one percent”; and 10 percent went to Inkatha. (Abandoned by Viljoen, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was left with no option but to join the election process.) The National Party got 20 percent, which meant four seats in cabinet, including the deputy presidency for De Klerk, in the new coalition government over which Mandela would preside. And Viljoen’s party, which he named the Freedom Front, got 2 percent of the vote, which meant a not unrespectable nine seats in the new, multicolored parliament.

  No sooner had the results come in than John Reinders, chief of presidential protocol under both De Klerk and P. W. Botha, contacted his former employers, the Department of Correctional Services. Botha had dragged him out of the prison bureaucracy in 1980, when he had occupied the rank of major, but Reinders found to his relief that, yes, they had a job for him.

  His last job before leaving was to organize Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration on May 10, 1994. It was a logistical nightmare compared to De Klerk’s inauguration, to which no foreign delegation—save locally based diplomats—had thought fit to travel. This inauguration would be quite different. Four thousand people gathered at Pretoria’s seat of power, an early-twentieth century pile called the Union Buildings atop a hill overlooking the city. Among the guests were figures otherwise unimaginable in the same room, such as Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro, Prince Philip, Yassir Arafat, and the president of Israel, Chaim Herzog. The two national anthems—“Nkosi Sikelele” and “Die Stem”—were played side by side as the brand-new national flag fluttered. It was the most multicolored flag in the world, a sort of crazy quilt in black, green, gold, red, blue, and white, combining colors associated with black resistance with those of the old South African flag. Mandela took his oath of office before a white judge flanked by his daughter Zenani, and surrounded by black former prisoners and white SADF generals standing to attention in full-dress uniform. (“A few years earlier they would have arrested me,” he joked later.) The ceremony closed with the spectacle of South African Air Force jets soaring overhead painting the colors of the new flag in the sky.

  Mightily relieved that the ceremony had passed without catastrophe, John Reinders arrived at his office in the Union Buildings early next morning, May 11, with a couple of large cardboard boxes under his arms. He was a large man, but he had the deferential manner of someone much slighter, as well as the good judgment to know when he was beaten.

  “I came in early that morning to collect my things,” Reinders recalled. “All we whites had applied for jobs elsewhere, sure we would be asked to leave. Quite a few meant to go and work for Mr. de Klerk in the deputy presidency.”

  Reinders was packing away his mementos of seventeen years spent running the presidential office, organizing ceremonial dos, bumping into famous people on official trips, when suddenly he was startled out of his reminiscences by a knock at the door. It was another early riser. Mandela.

  “Good morning, how are you?” he said, stepping into Reinders’s office with outstretched hand.

  “Very well, Mr. President, thank you. And you?”

  “Well, well, but . . .” Mandela said, puzzled, “what are you doing?”

  “I am collecting my things and getting ready to go, Mr. President.”

  “Oh, I see. And may I ask where you are going?”

  “Back to correctional services, Mr. President, where I used to serve.”

  “Mmm,” said Mandela, pursing his lips. “I was there twenty-seven years, you know. It was very bad.” He grinned as he repeated, “Very bad!”

  Reinders, flummoxed, offered him a half-smile back. “Now,” Mandela continued, “I would like you to consider staying here with us.” Reinder
s examined Mandela’s eyes with astonishment. “Yes. I am quite serious. You know this job. I don’t. I am from the bush. I am ignorant. Now, if you stay with me, it would be just one term, that is all. Five years. And then, of course, you would be free to leave. Now, please understand me: this is not an order. I would like to have you here only if you wish to stay and share your knowledge and your experience with me.”

  Mandela smiled. Reinders smiled, wholeheartedly now. “So,” Mandela continued, “what do you say? Will you stay with me?”

  Amazed as he was, Reinders did not hesitate. ‘Yes, Mr. President. I will. Yes. Thank you.”

  At which point his new boss gave him his first task: to gather together all the presidential staff, including the cleaners and the gardeners, at the cabinet room for a meeting. The new president walked among them, shaking hands with each one of the hundred or so people assembled, saying a few words to each, in Afrikaans where appropriate. Then he addressed them all. “Hello, I’m Nelson Mandela. If any of you prefer to take the [severance] package, you are free to leave. Go. There is no problem. But I beg you, stay! Five years, that is all. You have the knowledge. We need that knowledge, we need that experience of yours.”

  Every single member of the presidential staff stayed.

  Two weeks later, on May 24, four hundred newly elected delegates converged on Cape Town for the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament, held at the very same National Assembly building where the whites-only parliament used to gather. Until now it had been a dull, heavy, monochrome sort of place. On the May morning when the same chamber opened its doors to Mandela’s non-racial democracy the scene underwent a Technicolor transformation. The sight from high up in the visitors’ gallery suggested a cross between the United Nations General Assembly, a pop concert, and an end-of-term college party. A glance at the roster of new members of parliament told it all. Before they were called Botha or Van der Merwe or Smith. Now they were called those names, but also Bengu and Dlamini and Farisani and Maharaj and Mushwana and Neerahoo and Pahad and Zulu. And a third of the MPs, including the new speaker, Frene Ginwala, were women. More striking was the proportion of MPs who had spent time in prison, or had been on the run from the police. Practically every ANC MP had broken the law; now they would be making it, led by the longest-serving prisoner of them all, the last man in today, Mandela.

  As word spread of his arrival, the MPs rose to their feet, the buzz gave way to a roar, to freedom songs and swaying dances from the younger, more exuberant members of the ANC contingent. Amid the Rainbow Nation hurly-burly, General Viljoen cut an anomalous figure. Sober as ever, in a dark suit and tie, he stood in the middle of the oval chamber at ground level, as befitted the leader of the honorable Freedom Front opposition. Mandela emerged, also at ground level, straight-backed and beaming, to a cheer from the assembly.

  Viljoen was staring at Mandela with a mixture of awe and affection. On seeing him, Mandela broke parliamentary protocol and, crossing the floor, shook his hand and said with a big smile, “I am very happy to see you here, General.”

  Some voices from high up in the gallery shouted, “Give him a hug, General! Go on, hug him!”

  In recalling the moment, Viljoen let a small smile pass his lips, nodded, then turned solemn again. “But I did not do that. I am a military man and he was my president. I shook his hand and I stood to attention.”

  And that could have been the end of that: order restored, old enemies reconciled, the good king crowned, all players exeunt—exuberantly—stage left. But it was not the end. It was not over yet, neither for Mandela nor for General Viljoen. There was still one more act to be played out before Viljoen could hang up his sword with peace of mind, one final set of challenges to be overcome before Mandela could consider his life’s quest complete.

  As Viljoen pointed out, “Forty or fifty percent of my people did not take part in the voting.” Some of them placed bombs at bus stops and other places where black people gathered in large crowds during the week before the election. They also set off a bomb at Johannesburg International Airport. Twenty-one people were killed and more than a hundred badly injured. Mandela’s speeches during his first month in power were consistently upbeat, deliberately trying to set an optimistic, energized mood. But he could not refrain from pointing out at the closing of that first session of parliament that the security forces would have to remain on full alert. “The problem of politically motivated violence is still with us,” he said.

  Mandela had a lot on his plate during his five-year term in office: providing houses and schools, water and electricity for black people. But his overwhelming priority was to cement the foundations of the new democracy, render it bombproof. He knew that attempts would be made to subvert the inevitably fragile new order. It could not be that all of white South Africa would surrender its ancient powers, and a fair number of its privileges, without a fight.

  As for General Viljoen, he was torn, the way Niël Barnard had been four and a half years earlier on the morning of Mandela’s release. Despite having met Mandela sixty times in prison, Barnard could not entirely dispel that alarm bell going off deep inside his head, warning him, however irrationally, of the Ayatollah factor. Viljoen felt similar misgivings, as if he could not quite believe that life could be as good as Mandela made it seem, as if he had not been able entirely to shed his ancestral misgivings about the black man. A part of him worried as he sat there on that opening day of parliament, and throughout the year ahead, that he might have done the right thing by himself—Mandela always had the door open to him, always treated him with respect—but not the right thing by his people. He confessed that his conscience nagged at him. “I was troubled. Very troubled,” he said. “A lot of fine things had been said, but where was the proof that I could show my people once and for all?”

  The answer lay in Mandela’s proving to Viljoen’s people that they were his people too; in widening his embrace beyond Constand Viljoen and John Reinders and Niël Barnard and Kobie Coetsee to include all Afrikaners. Mandela’s legal adviser and close confidant in the presidential office, a white lawyer called Nicholas Haysom, who had been jailed three times during the anti-apartheid years, defined the mission in appropriately epic terms.

  “We called it nation-building. But Garibaldi has a quote that exemplifies it more eloquently,” said Haysom, referring to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the soldier-patriot who unified Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. “When he had finished his military mission Garibaldi said, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’ ” Actually, the challenge Mandela faced was tougher than Garibaldi’s. “Italy was divided but homogeneous. South Africa in 1994 was a country that was split historically, culturally, racially, and so many other ways,” Haysom added. “No amount of negotiations, speeches, constitutions would suffice in themselves to ‘make South Africans.’ You needed something else to bring people together. You needed Mandela to do what he did best: rise above our differences, be bigger than those things that divided us and appeal to that which bound us together.”

  CHAPTER XII

  THE CAPTAIN AND THE PRESIDENT

  1994-95

  “You looked at him,” Mandela said, recalling his first meeting with François Pienaar, “you considered where he came from, and what you saw was a typical Afrikaner.”

  Mandela was right. If the apartheid ideologues had had the same inclination for putting art to political use as their Soviet counterparts, they would have chosen Pienaar to depict the model specimen of Afrikaner manhood. Six foot four, he carried his 240 pounds of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo’s David.

  If then, as Mandela said, you considered where he came from, you pictured a boy growing up to manhood in Vereeniging in the seventies and eighties and what you saw, with almost cinematic clarity—as Mandela did—was a faithful representation of 90 percent of the Afrikaner volk: a people conditioned by the particular time and place in which they happened to be born to be straightforward, uncomplicated, hard-working, tough, secretly sentimental, churchgoing rugby fanatics w
ho related to their superabundant black neighbors with a mixture of disdain, ignorance, and fear.

  Yet if there was one thing Mandela had learned in his dealings with the Afrikaners it was to see past appearances. “He did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society,” Mandela said. “I found him quite a charming fellow and I sensed that he was progressive. And, you know, he was an educated chap. He had a BA in law. It was a pleasure to sit down with him.”

  Pleasure was the last thing on Pienaar’s mind as he stood on the stone steps of the giant Union Buildings on June 17, 1994, preparing to go inside for a meeting to which President Mandela had invited him. Pienaar, now twenty-seven years old but suddenly feeling an awful lot younger, confessed to waiting reporters that he had never been more nervous in all his life; that the prospect of meeting the president was more daunting than any rugby game.

  Dressed in dark suit and tie, Pienaar entered through a small door at the buildings’ west wing, ducked through a metal detector, and presented himself before two policemen waiting for him at a desk behind a green-tinted window of thick bulletproof glass. Both being Afrikaners, they immediately started engaging him animatedly on rugby. One of them led him out into a courtyard and down a corridor lined, though he barely noticed the anomaly, with watercolors of scenes from the Great Trek, ox-wagons and men on horses against a background of brown, yellowy veldt. The policeman dropped him off at a small waiting room, bare save for a table and some leather chairs, into which stepped Mandela’s personal assistant, a tall, imposing black lady called Mary Mxadana who asked him to take a seat and wait a moment. He sat in the room alone for five minutes, his palms sweating. “I was incredibly tense as the moment arrived when I would meet him,” he recalled. “I was really in awe of him. I kept thinking. ‘What do I say? What do I ask him?’ ”