Mandela was aware, however, that this move ahead of the flock would be riskier than his previous forays. The flock had no idea that contact had been made. If they heard the news from anyone other than himself, there would be big trouble in the pasture—that is, behind the table. Indeed, there was a significant risk that the government would try to place a wedge between Mandela and his colleagues by leaking the news itself. Mandela wanted to prevent this at all costs. Thus, after his hospital meeting with Coetsee, he sent for his legal advisor, George Bizos.15
As Bizos recalled, “He asked me to try to get to Oliver Tambo in Lusaka and assure him that nothing would happen without their approval.”16
In sending this message, Mandela was shading the truth. Something quite significant had happened. But he got away with it. Tambo, having only the “sketchiest idea of what was going on,” conferred with a small circle of ANC leaders and sent back the message that Mandela could go ahead and make contact.17 Having received this belated green light, Mandela wrote to Coetsee a second time, to “propose talks about talks.”
Coetsee did not respond, however, and violence continued to climb. In 1986, President Pieter Botha ordered air raids on ANC bases in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana.18 In response, the Commonwealth countries imposed sanctions on South Africa19 and the ANC leadership turned up the heat. “Oliver Tambo and the ANC had called for the people of South Africa to render the country ungovernable,” Mandela recalls, “and the people were obliging.” As black protests surged throughout the country, the government imposed another state of emergency.
Sensing an opportunity, Mandela requested another meeting with Coetsee. “In every outward way, the time seemed inauspicious for negotiations,” he writes. “But often, the most discouraging moments are precisely the time to launch an initiative.” This time Coetsee obliged. The two spoke for more than three hours and directly addressed the issues that separated the ANC and the government. At the end of the talk, Mandela told Coetsee that he would like to meet with President Botha.
Botha did not accept Mandela’s invitation, but he told Coetsee to keep the talks going and report back. This was another step in the right direction: Coetsee and Mandela were now meeting with the express permission of the president. They began to meet more frequently, and in May 1988, Coetsee suggested that their secret talks be expanded to include a Special Committee of senior government officials.20 Mandela agreed, thinking this was a favorable development.
But he had no control over the membership of the committee, and he was in for some unpleasant surprises. One member turned out to be Niel Barnard, the head of the secret police. To the ANC, Barnard was viewed as evil incarnate—a man who had personally committed evil acts. “It was like asking [Soviet dissident] Andrei Sakharov to talk to the head of the KGB,” Mandela thought.21 Another member was the director general of prisons, Fanie van der Merwe.
Mandela again pondered how much to tell his ANC colleagues. They would never approve of his meeting with a committee that included Barnard. And yet Barnard could prove helpful in persuading the prime minister.
Mandela resolved the quandary in the usual way, with partial (and misleading) disclosures to his ANC prison mates. He decided to “seek their counsel about the idea of having talks with the government without mentioning that an actual committee had been formed.” By working in this oblique way and withholding key details, Mandela received the qualified—if uninformed—support of his prison mates.22
No sooner had he covered his flanks on one side than he was exposed on another. He received a note from Tambo, who “thought I was making an error in judgment” in having further contact with the government at all. Mandela immediately wrote back and explained that he was talking to the government “about one thing and one thing only: a meeting between the National Executive Committee of the ANC and the South African government.”
Again, this assurance was truthful in one sense but evasive in another. Mandela would be talking about far more than some future meeting between the ANC and the government. As his autobiography makes plain, he had already discussed substantive political issues at length not only with Coetsee but also with two men with day-to-day responsibility for investigating and imprisoning black protesters. Ultimately, Mandela met with the Special Committee forty-seven times.
Mandela felt that these meetings were essential in earning the trust of the Afrikaners. He knew that the white officials were afraid of what he represented and of what the future might hold for them as a white minority. He treated them with respect and worked to make them comfortable. Indeed, by all accounts he dazzled them. At the first meeting between Mandela and Barnard, for example, the latter confessed: “I am not able to express myself in English as one is able to do in one’s mother tongue.” Mandela immediately put him at ease by saying, “I can follow Afrikaans quite well. If I don’t understand something, I will ask you.”23 He also tried to establish a “personal link” with each member of the committee. The commissioner of prisons, Van der Merwe, was surprised and flattered that Mandela remembered him from some thirty years before, when they had argued opposite sides of a case. The trust Mandela earned with these simple gestures “counted for far more than Mandela’s policy position on any particular issue.”24
The policy disagreements were profound. There were four central issues: “the armed struggle, the ANC’s alliance with the Communist Party, the goal of majority rule, and the idea of racial reconciliation.” Mandela made no concessions, but neither did he make threats. Instead he talked about peace, his interest in a negotiated settlement, his understanding of their concerns, and his commitment to racial reconciliation.
At the end of 1988, to facilitate these meetings, the government moved Mandela to plush new quarters at Victor Verster Prison. He was given his own small cottage on the prison grounds, complete with furnishings, a swimming pool, and a personal cook. Naturally, some members of Mandela’s own party, especially the younger and more radical ones, began to get suspicious.25 What was Mandela promising the government? Was he selling out?
To allay these fears, Mandela occasionally invited young black leaders to his cottage for a meeting or a meal. “They came in pilgrimage to their legendary leader, and he made each of them feel special. He knew the names of wives and children; had followed the career of each one with attention; he awed them with his grasp of the South African political situation. They left under the same spell of seduction as their enemies.”26
But the person Mandela most wanted to seduce was Botha. Mandela spent months writing a detailed memorandum that spelled out what he saw as the terms of an honorable peace. He felt that peace would only come with democratic majority rule, but he acknowledged that this goal would have to be reconciled with white fears of black domination. This subject would need to be addressed through negotiations.
On July 5, 1989, shortly before Botha resigned as president, the two men finally met in the presidential office. This meeting, too, was carried out in the utmost secrecy; Mandela was “smuggled” in. They did not discuss the substance of Mandela’s talks with the Special Committee. Botha treated Mandela with great courtesy and poured the tea. Mandela drew “parallels between their rival nationalisms”—the Afrikaner nationalism and its rebellions, which pitted white brother against brother, and the ANC’s nationalism, which involved a struggle “between brothers who happen to be different colours.”27 “While the meeting was not a breakthrough in terms of negotiations, it was one in another sense,” he writes. “Mr. Botha had long talked about the need to cross the Rubicon, but he never did it himself until that morning. … Now, I felt, there was no turning back.”
In August 1989, Botha resigned as president of South Africa. The following day, F. W. de Klerk was inaugurated to fill the empty seat. De Klerk had not been involved in the secret talks and Mandela had no idea what to expect of him, but there was little reason for optimism. According to the journalist Patti Waldmeir, de Klerk was “almost genetically predestined to defend white rule.” Hi
s father and uncle had been important NP leaders, and de Klerk himself had never “knowingly strayed from the party line.”28
Although de Klerk did not immediately respond to Mandela’s request for a meeting, he proved to be an altogether different leader from Botha. He was “a pragmatist,” Mandela discovered, “a man who saw change as necessary and inevitable.” Mandela began to use the Special Committee as a channel for sending direct messages to the new president. For example, Mandela urged de Klerk—through the committee—to prove his “good intentions” by releasing senior ANC prisoners unconditionally. In return, Mandela guaranteed that his men would display “disciplined behavior.” Within weeks, de Klerk announced the unconditional release of eight high-profile political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu. This move was praised both at home and in the international community and signaled a significant step toward reconciliation. (Through the committee, Mandela sent his thanks to de Klerk. In effect, the two leaders were already negotiating.)29
When Mandela finally met with de Klerk in late 1989, he was impressed. “Mr. de Klerk listened to what I had to say,” he remembers. “This was a novel experience. National Party leaders generally heard what they wanted to hear in discussions with black leaders, but Mr. de Klerk seemed to be making an attempt to truly understand.” Among the topics they discussed that day was the issue of Mandela’s free-dom. Mandela knew that his imprisonment was a stain on the National Party’s reputation and that his release could help the NP. He was in a strong position to negotiate the terms of his own release and he drove a hard bargain. It made no sense, he told de Klerk, to release him while the ANC was still officially illegal. Mandela had no intention of going into retirement, so the government would just have to arrest him again. The best plan, he said, was for the government to release the remaining political prisoners, allow exiles to return, lift the official ban on the ANC and other political organizations, and end the state of emergency. Then it could free Mandela.
De Klerk made no promises, but Mandela was heartened by his visit. He told his colleagues that de Klerk “was a man we could do business with.”
About a month later, on February 2, 1990, de Klerk stunned the country by announcing a set of decisions that met most of Mandela’s conditions for release. He lifted the ban on the ANC and several other political organizations, freed prisoners arrested for nonviolent activities, suspended capital punishment, and lifted many of the restrictions associated with the state of emergency. As de Klerk told the South African people, “The time for negotiation has arrived.”
He neglected to mention, of course, that the two sides had been secretly negotiating for four years.
“It was a breathtaking moment,” Mandela writes, “for in one sweeping action he had virtually normalized the situation in South Africa.” Mandela knew it would not be long before he too would be free.
But the logistics of his release sparked tension between the two men. De Klerk had not yet learned with whom he was dealing. On February 9, just a week after his speech to Parliament, de Klerk informed Mandela that he would be released the next day. De Klerk had mapped out the entire plan without consulting Mandela, who was not pleased. Mandela wanted to leave prison as soon as possible, “but to do so on such short notice would not be wise.” In true Spockian fashion, he wanted to think it through. He wanted to prepare his family and the ANC leadership—and no doubt himself—for this momentous occasion, which he rightly feared could degenerate into chaos.
Thus began a negotiation that might have been amusing had it not been so serious. Mandela demanded to stay in prison for another week; de Klerk insisted that he be released immediately. Mandela wanted to walk out the prison gates and thank his guards personally; de Klerk wanted to fly Mandela to Johannesburg and preside over a huge media event there. Ultimately they reached a compromise. The release could not be postponed, de Klerk said, because the foreign press had already been told of the plan. But the release would take place at the prison.
The following day, after twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela ended his long confinement. As biographer Tom Lodge explains:
By the end of 1989 it was obvious to South Africa’s rulers that only their most famous captive could render any settlement legitimate. This realisation was very substantially the product of Mandela’s diplomacy. In “talking to the enemy” he had become more than the master of his fate, because he could now profoundly affect the political destiny of his compatriots.30
With his release, Mandela had obviously scored some important points in his boxing match with the National Party. He’d won some early rounds. The government had acknowledged the need to negotiate. Everyone knew that apartheid was dying and would soon be buried. The ANC had won a dominant political role in South Africa and, as far as the world was concerned, Mandela was its leader.
But Mandela’s task was far from over. In fact, in some ways it became more difficult. Apartheid might be dying, but what political and economic structures would replace it? On the big issues, the ANC and the National Party had irreconcilable differences. Behind the table, there were deep divisions, not just within the two major parties but more broadly within the black and white communities. For the next four years, Mandela and de Klerk would struggle—and often fail—to control the interplay between the action across the table and the action behind it. I will not attempt to describe the full complexity of the peacemaking process.31 Suffice it to say that it was violent and often out of control.
Mandela’s immediate task behind the table was to consolidate his authority among his colleagues and prove that he hadn’t sold out. Two weeks after his release, he met with the ANC leadership in Lusaka. “I could see the questions in their eyes,” he recalls. “Was Mandela the same man who went to prison twenty-seven years before, or was this a different Mandela, a reformed Mandela? Had he survived or had he been broken?”
Candor was the only way out. For the first time in five years, Mandela told the leadership everything he had done in his secret talks with the government. His colleagues responded positively and elected him deputy president of the ANC. (Actually, they had little choice. Oliver Tambo had suffered a stroke the year before and was not in good health. As Tambo’s successor, Mandela was so revered that he had no real competition.)32
Across the table, there were profound problems. The central political dispute was how to distribute power between the 80 percent black ma-jority and the 20 percent white minority. To Mandela, the principle of “one man, one vote” was not negotiable. But the NP could not conceive of ever making this concession. De Klerk assured his constituents that “[w]e are not sellouts of anyone”33 and promised a political system that would retain either a white veto or “group rights” to protect the white community from black rule.34 “Group rights” was seen as essential for the survival of the Afrikaner community and culture. Gerrit Viljoen, the NP’s minister of constitutional development, told an interviewer during this time, “Those who want to live, worship, work, or play in specifically defined communities should have the right to do so in the new South Africa, but without laws making [integration] compulsory.”35
Economic questions also loomed. If the ANC came to power, what would happen to private property, most of which was owned by whites? The National Party had spent decades lambasting the ANC as a communist front. By 1990, these fears had largely ebbed—the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and de Klerk could see that a South Africa, even if governed by the ANC, was not going to become a communist satellite.36 But the whites were still worried about their property. The ANC had an openly socialist agenda: it had consistently called for nationalization of the mines, greater governmental control of the means of production, and substantial redistribution of property.
The first official talks between the ANC and the government, held in May 1990, did not tackle any of these fundamental issues. Instead the parties focused on simply getting to know each other. To Mandela, the sight of long-standing enemies shaking hands was “extraord
inary.” The ANC delegates explained that historically their party had always wanted to negotiate with the government, and de Klerk made another of his astonishing statements. As Mandela recalls, “Mr. de Klerk, for his part, suggested that the system of separate [racial] development had been conceived as a benign idea, but had not worked in practice. For that, he said, he was sorry, and hoped the negotiations would make amends. It was not an apology for apartheid, but it went further than any other National Party leader ever had.”
These talks, which lasted three days, had a powerful psychological impact on the participants. It was a first step in reversing their mutual demonization: as an ANC participant later told reporters, “each side had discovered that the other did not have horns.” In a modest and very carefully worded agreement, both sides pledged a commitment to the peaceful process of negotiation. Mandela did not explicitly end the ANC’s armed struggle; he walked right up to the line but could tell his constituents he had not stepped over it. In return, the government promised to lift completely the state of emergency.
Outside the meeting room, however, this conclave had little impact. In fact, the summer of 1990 was a disaster for the peace process. The black community was being ravaged by internal warfare. Within the Zulu community, the ANC and a rival organization, Inkatha, were embroiled in mutual slaughter, particularly in the region of Natal.37 Mandela wanted to meet with the other group’s leader and negotiate peace, but militant members of his own party would not allow such a meeting.
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