Halifax never rebutted Churchill’s argument that if the negotiations failed, British morale would have been undermined. By refusing to negotiate, Churchill signaled his determination that Britain would fight on. This signal was sent not just to Germany and other countries but, most importantly, to the British people themselves. He understood that entering into the negotiation process itself is not costless and can create risks. Wise decisions must take these into account.
Let me conclude by coming back to the subject of heroism. I must confess that there is something deeply appealing for me about the way Churchill resisted Hitler. And something disturbing about Chamberlain and Halifax’s prior policy of appeasement. Churchill is one of my heroes. Chamberlain and Halifax are not. Even I, a strong proponent of negotiation, am not immune to the notion that fighting evil is heroic—and sometimes even thrilling.
What, after all, is a hero? A hero is someone who acts on behalf of a principle greater than himself, without regard to his own well-being. Consider the legends in every culture: A hero doesn’t negotiate. He fights. To the death if necessary! A hero is willing to risk it all.
Negotiating with an evil enemy, by contrast, doesn’t seem very heroic. It may be prudent to negotiate and make concessions, but it is rarely romantic or thrilling. It doesn’t get the blood going. Nor, I must admit, is the process of negotiating typically exciting. It is often slow and tedious. It drags on and on.
But such simple dichotomies can be misleading. The very word appeasement now automatically evokes the story of Chamberlain and Halifax, and the moral of that story is plain: Never try to placate an enemy. The example of Churchill evokes a different narrative: It is heroic to resist evil, especially when standing alone. These are two very powerful narratives, but they can be dangerous because they invite knee-jerk reactions, not careful thought.
Can it be heroic to negotiate with evil? I think it can, and the next chapter explains why.
SIX
Nelson Mandela: Apartheid in South Africa
Sitting in his isolated prison cell late in 1985, Nelson Mandela asked himself: Is it time to change my strategy? For nearly forty years, as a leader of the African National Congress (ANC), he had been fighting the South African government and its apartheid regime. By the time our story opens, he had been sitting in prison for twenty-three years, serving a life term for treason. Nominally sidelined from the struggle, he had, in fact, become the most famous political prisoner in the world. He was seventy-one years old, still thinking deeply about strategy and tactics, often a step ahead of his more cautious colleagues. In the solitude of his cell, he pondered: Should I try to initiate secret negotiations with the Devil?
There were signs that the time might be ripe, that perhaps it was time to talk. The ruling National Party was under increasing pressure to change its racist policies. The ANC had succeeded in discrediting apartheid throughout the world. An international trade boycott was crippling the country’s economy. Within the black townships, the ANC was making good on its threat that black South Africa would become ungovernable without deep reform. Every year, the clashes with police were getting uglier and deadlier. An outright civil war would cause “both sides to lose thousands if not millions of lives,” Mandela thought. He felt that some within the government understood this as well.
But after so many years of conflict, he knew that his initiating a “talk” would be a momentous step. Both sides viewed negotiation as a sign of “weakness and betrayal.” Both sides had declared that they would not “come to the table until the other made significant concessions.” This is a classic problem in prolonged conflicts. Adversaries establish preconditions to negotiation that require the other side to sacrifice most of its bargaining power before talks can even begin. Naturally, neither side agrees to this and the conflict simply persists. This was the case in South Africa.
Throughout his time in prison, Mandela had refused on principle to negotiate with the regime. He often received feelers from the government offering to release him from prison if he would renounce the use of violence. But, much like Sharansky, Mandela had refused to compromise any principle that would weaken the movement. And he was very public about it. For example, in rejecting the government’s latest offer of freedom, he had written a defiant speech that had been smuggled out of prison and read aloud at an ANC rally. In it, Mandela had vowed not to negotiate, saying, “Only free men can negotiate. … I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free.”
The government’s precondition for talks was that the ANC renounce violence. Mandela had already staked his reputation on saying no.1 The ANC’s preconditions were that political prisoners be released, exiles be permitted to return, and the ban on the ANC be lifted. The government, of course, was nowhere near agreeing to these demands.
So how in good faith could Mandela offer to negotiate? If he reached out to the enemy, he would essentially be waiving his own side’s preconditions—a colossal betrayal of the cause and his closest friends.
He faced other pitfalls behind the table. What authority did he have to make such a momentous decision on behalf of the ANC? None. The ANC was run collectively; no single leader could make decisions by fiat. Moreover, Mandela wasn’t even the president of the organization. Oliver Tambo was. And Tambo was one of Mandela’s oldest and closest friends—the last person he would want to betray. Tambo had been leading the ANC from exile for some twenty-five years; its headquarters were in Lusaka, Zambia.
So Mandela pondered his dilemma. Should he send a note to Tambo? Over the years, Mandela and Tambo had developed ways to communicate with each other by passing messages through intermediaries. But this process was difficult and slow. Mandela knew it might take months to communicate with Tambo—and he couldn’t be sure that Tambo would agree with him.
Another alternative was to consult with his fellow ANC prisoners. Three senior colleagues were serving terms in the same prison, including Walter Sisulu, Mandela’s mentor.2 Their cells were just three floors above Mandela’s and there were reasonably frequent opportunities to meet and communicate. But actually … Mandela didn’t want to consult with them, either. He knew what they would say. “[M]y colleagues upstairs would condemn my proposal, and that would kill my initiative even before it was born.”
So Mandela decided to take the first step toward negotiations on his own. He would write to South Africa’s minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, offering to meet with him in secret to discuss how negotiations between the ANC and the government might begin. “I chose to tell no one what I was about to do. Not my colleagues upstairs or those in Lusaka,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.”
When I think of Mandela at this moment of decision, frankly, I don’t think of bucolic metaphors involving shepherds or flocks. I think of a man standing alone at the edge of a chasm, deciding to toss a steel cable across the divide, hoping that by some miracle someone will catch it and secure it on the other side. In this case, on one side of the chasm were the political aspirations of the black majority. On the other was a terrified white minority with a death grip on political power. Mandela understood this and tossed the cable, and by some miracle Coetsee caught it. Within a matter of months, the two men began a clandestine conversation that would continue for four years and lay the groundwork for building a bridge across the abyss.
Nelson Mandela’s journey began in the tiny South African village of Mvezo, far removed from white society. The year was 1918, and the ANC was already six years old. But in the vast Transkei region where Mandela was born, there were hardly any white people and the ANC was largely unknown. As Mandela later wrote, “I thought little if at all about the white man in general or relations between my own people and these curious and remote figures.” Life in the village was essentially controlled, as it had been for centuries, by tribal custom. But tw
o seeds—advantages planted at Mandela’s birth—would shape his identity and help him move far beyond the tribe.
Mandela’s father was a chief, and his family was closely connected to the Thembu royal house, a tribe that was part of the Xhosa nation. When Nelson was nine, his father died of tuberculosis and the Thembu regent became his guardian. Nelson moved into the royal residence, called the Great Place, and was raised as a brother to the regent’s son and heir, named Justice. By custom and blood, Nelson was expected someday to counsel the rulers of his tribe. From his earliest days, he was treated as someone special and he understood that he was being groomed to be a leader.3
The second advantage was planted by his mother, a Christian convert, who arranged for him to receive a British missionary education. He was baptized as a Christian and sent to a succession of ever more demanding schools established by British colonials hoping to cultivate a native black elite who held Western values. Nelson first attended a mission school near home,4 then two elite boarding schools farther away, and finally the super-elite University College at Fort Hare. “For young black South Africans like myself, it was Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one.”
Both the tribe and the mission schools were powerful influences. “My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court,” he writes. The regent presided over tribal meetings that lasted for hours. He would open the meeting, thank everyone for coming, explain the issue at hand, and listen in silence until everyone else had spoken. Then he would summarize the points made and search for a consensus. Mandela followed these principles for the rest of his life. “I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion.” He was particularly impressed by the regent’s pastoral metaphor for leadership, which he would later adapt to suit his own style. “I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
As for white people, he heard nothing positive about them. Within the tribe, they were demonized. One elder told him that the white men, with their “fire-breathing weapons,” had “shattered … the fellowship of the various tribes” and been “greedy for land.” Another elder tried to explain the racial situation in terms the young Nelson could understand. White people believed that the “true chief” of black South Africans was “the great white queen across the ocean,” the elder said, but in truth, the white queen “brought nothing but misery and perfidy to the black people, and if she was a chief she was an evil chief.”
It was through the missionary schools that Mandela first came to understand that whites could offer benefits to blacks through education. He appreciated these benefits and began to develop a lifelong fondness for British culture. In fact, he may have been well on his way to becoming a “black Englishman”—a pejorative term used by South African blacks to describe a member of the black elite who held British values and wouldn’t make trouble. But when he was about nineteen, in his last year of boarding school, his universe became more complicated. “An event occurred that for [Mandela] was like a comet streaking across the night sky.”
A great Xhosa poet came to visit the school. The entire school, including both black and white members of the school staff, gathered in the dining hall to hear the great man speak. All eyes turned to the end of the hall, where a door led to the home of Dr. Wellington, the white headmaster. As far as the students knew, the only person who ever stepped through that door was Dr. Wellington.
Suddenly, the door opened and out walked not Dr. Wellington, but a black man dressed in a leopard-skin kaross and matching hat, who was carrying a spear in either hand. Dr. Wellington followed a moment later, but the sight of a black man in tribal dress coming through that door was electrifying. … It seemed to turn the universe upside down.
Even more stunning to Mandela was what the poet said in mixed racial company. The poet drew a sharp distinction between African culture, to which Mandela had not given much thought, and European culture. He informed the boys that the former was “indigenous and good,” while the latter was “foreign and bad.” Then he declared: “We cannot allow these foreigners who do not care for our culture to take over our nation. I predict that one day, the forces of African society will achieve a momentous victory over the interloper.”
As the poet continued in this vein, Mandela writes,
I could hardly believe my ears. His boldness in speaking of such delicate matters in the presence of Dr. Wellington and other whites seemed utterly astonishing to us. Yet at the same time, it aroused and motivated us, and began to alter my perception of men like Dr. Wellington, whom I had automatically considered my benefactor.
In the aftermath of this event, Mandela found himself disturbed and confused. “I saw that an African might stand his ground with a white man, yet I was still eagerly seeking benefits from whites, which often required subservience.”
How was he going to reconcile these ideas? Such questions incubated in his mind for three years. In the meantime, he started college at Fort Hare, the best possible “passport” for an ambitious black in South Africa. He aspired to be a civil servant, “a glittering prize for an African, the highest that a black man could aspire to.” With a secure income, he hoped to buy his mother a comfortable house and “restore to [her] the wealth and prestige that she had lost after my father’s death.”
But when he was twenty-two, about halfway through college, this inner conflict seemed to demand action. In a very short span of time, he rebelled against both British and tribal authority.
The first rebellion took place in college and foreshadowed many political decisions he would make in later life. The catalyst was hardly an issue of great significance: the quality of the food in the Fort Hare dining hall. Mandela had been nominated to the student council but, along with many other students who found the food “unsatisfactory,” he decided to boycott the election as a protest. Six student representatives (including Mandela) were elected, but most in the class had refused to vote. All six “elected representatives” immediately resigned on the grounds that most of the students had not voted and that the election was illegitimate.
This set off a battle of wits between the principal, Dr. Kerr, and the student rebels. The next day, Dr. Kerr called a second election—this time in the college dining room at dinnertime, to make sure all the students attended. (Mandela saw this as a “clever” attempt on Kerr’s part to legitimate the election.) Once again, most of the students boycotted and only a small number of students submitted ballots. The same six students were elected.
But this time, the other five representatives were willing to take office. Mandela was not. Most of the students still hadn’t voted, he argued, so “it would be morally incorrect to say that we enjoyed their confidence.” He was the only one who resigned.
Kerr called Mandela into his office and asked him to reconsider. Kerr was “a greatly respected man,” Mandela writes, “virtually the founder” of the college. Kerr warned that if Mandela insisted on resigning, Kerr would be forced to expel him. “He told me to sleep on it and give him my final decision the following day.”
Mandela did not sleep that night. He was torn. Should he stand on principle or stay in college? He believed that his stand was “morally right.” He felt he had an “obligation” to the students who had boycotted the second election. He was acutely aware of his reputation with his peers: “I had taken a stand, and I did not want to appear to be a fraud in the eyes of my fellow students.” On the other hand, were these concerns important enough to throw away his academic career?
Mandela returned to Kerr’s office the next morning and said that he could not “in good conscience serve.” Kerr reluctantly expelled Mandela in November 1940.
Now here was a question for Spock. Was this a wise choice on Mandela’s pa
rt? Spock surely would have questioned Mandela’s decision-making process. Even Mandela later called it a “foolhardy” decision. But this choice at the age of twenty-two bears all the trademarks of the later Mandela: an acute self-consciousness about himself as a leader, an obsession with legitimacy, a passion for moral rectitude, and a flair for martyrdom—with a dash of sanctimony and self-importance. It also presages later decisions in which he would demonstrate courage and integrity. “[A]t the moment I needed to compromise, I simply could not do so,” he writes. “Something inside me would not let me.”
In that spirit, he went home for the summer to the Great Place at Mqhekezweni. The regent was “furious” when he heard what Mandela had done. In fact, the regent decided that both Nelson and his own son, Justice, needed to settle down. A few weeks later, the regent called both young men to a meeting. “[B]efore I journey to the land of the ancestors,” he said solemnly, “it is my duty to see my two sons properly married. I have, accordingly, arranged unions for both of you.” The ceremonies were scheduled to take place shortly. (Mandela was to marry the daughter of the local Thembu priest.)
Mandela was horrified, and Justice was no happier with the situation, so they plotted an escape—they would run away to Johannesburg. They financed their trip by selling two of the regent’s prize oxen. The regent and his minions pursued them for many days but never quite caught them. After a series of hair-raising adventures, they arrived in Johannesburg in April 1941.
In Johannesburg, Mandela learned how to deal with the white power structure. Walter Sisulu, a black estate agent, got him a job as a clerk in a progressive white law firm.5 The job brought him into “regular contact with whites for the first time.” It also introduced him to black role models who were assertive with whites. Mandela was greatly impressed by the firm’s only other black employee, a clerk named Gaur Radebe, who was a member of both the ANC and the Communist Party. “Gaur was his own man,” Mandela recalls. “He did not treat our employers with exaggerated courtesy, and often chided them for their treatment of Africans.”
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