And Thank You For Watching

by Mark Austin

  Even the optimistic Desmond Tutu, who saw hope and possibility in the most desperate times, could not see a way out of the current darkness. ‘I have to say I am full of foreboding. It is as if a light has been extinguished. I am not sure even Madiba [the commonly used nickname for Mandela] can make this work.’

  But for once Tutu was wrong, Mandela did make it work.

  Just as South Africa feared the violence would intensify still further, what actually intensified was the talking. President F.W. de Klerk worked hard to bring Chief Buthelezi back into the fold, and urged the two sides to talk at a senior level. In the days before the election there were bombings and deaths, but the most significant event took place on 19 April… a week before the elections.

  We were summoned to a news conference in Pretoria held by Chief Buthelezi, Nelson Mandela and President de Klerk. They emerged smiling and joking, and it was clear something was up.

  In a last-minute turnaround that immeasurably increased hopes for a peaceful birth of democracy, the Zulu leader announced he was calling off the threatened boycott. At the same time, in Natal, the king of South Africa’s eight million Zulus, Goodwill Zwelithini, was endorsing the decision and called on his subjects to take part in the voting.

  It was never really clear why Buthelezi made the U-turn, other than, perhaps, a fear that he would become a political outcast in a successful new South Africa. Anyway, the main point was that the decision sent a wave of elation through a country that was fearful its transition from pariah state to rainbow nation would be scuppered by political violence. The miracle was happening before our eyes.

  And so the day arrived… the day the new South Africa was born. And what a day it was. A day of sunshine, of optimism and hope. A day of long, snaking queues of people waiting patiently to exercise a right so many other people around the world take for granted. They stood in line for hours in the burning sun. And they didn’t complain, because this was the day they had yearned for and fought for and looked forward to for decades. It was the first truly democratic election in South Africa, where the black majority could vote for the very first time.

  We were out at dawn to film in Soweto township. I didn’t want to miss a moment of a day it was a privilege to witness and record. We filmed the queues, we filmed a hundred thumbprints being applied joyously to ballot papers, we filmed the looks on the faces of the voters as they emerged from polling booths and we filmed their words. Those of one woman, a grandmother of seventy-one, I remember particularly well. ‘I have waited for this day all my life,’ she said. ‘I can now die happily because I know my children and my grandchildren will be able to decide who runs this country. The days of oppression are over. The days of freedom have arrived.’

  It was almost as if she had rehearsed it. She may have done, but somehow I doubt it. It just came from the heart. It spilled out with such unalloyed joyousness. She almost sang the words for our camera.

  The result was not in doubt. Twenty million people voted; nearly 63 per cent voted for the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela.

  The scenes on the day of his inauguration in Pretoria were breathtaking. South African Defence Force jets – part of the apparatus of apartheid era repression – led a flypast in honour of the new president who was once a prisoner. It was a jaw-dropping and momentous moment.

  But the euphoria post-election did not last long. While the political violence subsided, criminal violence seemed, if anything, to worsen. Many white professionals were beginning to fear that things were becoming simply too dangerous… my wife among them.

  For her, things came to a head in October 1995. A young Hong Kong Chinese doctor, Stephen Pon, was shot and seriously wounded by gunmen in the car park of the Johannesburg hospital. They made off with his BMW. Casualty staff heard the shots and rushed outside. Surgeons worked on Pon for ten hours but it was hopeless. They couldn’t save him.

  For many doctors and nurses Pon’s death was a breaking point. If a doctor doing his duty in a public hospital was not safe, then nobody was safe. There were memorial services, protest marches and the hospital’s trauma unit closed for a day.

  Catherine, then herself working as a doctor at Baragwanath hospital in Soweto, decided she wanted to leave. It wasn’t worth the risk. The violence was widespread, indiscriminate and growing.

  And things weren’t made any easier by an incident at the house when we had been woken by noises in the garden. The lights had come on outside and I’d seen dark figures prowling around the grounds. We did what we were told to do in these circumstances, and closed and locked the heavy steel door to the bedroom area. I don’t mind admitting it was terrifying.

  In the event, it turned out to be armed guys from the private security company we subscribed to. They returned the next morning to explain they had heard gunshots, and had found the gunman in the garage of a neighbouring house trying to steal a car that he’d already loaded with garden equipment. Again, it was unsettling.

  After considerable agonizing Catherine decided to stay… a decision reinforced by a remarkable encounter with Nelson Mandela that she will never forget.

  She had noticed posters on trees and municipal buildings in our area announcing a meeting for local doctors and nurses who were even remotely thinking of leaving the country.

  The African National Congress leadership was worried. They knew an exodus of the well-trained white doctors could be disastrous for the future of the country.

  Catherine went along to the meeting in a nearby church hall. A hundred or so other medics turned up and listened to the pleas of a local ANC politician. He was unconvincing. Then there was a commotion. The doors opened and in came a group of black women, singing, ululating and cheering. And behind them, walking slowly but deliberately towards the small stage, was an elderly, silver-haired, tall but slightly stooping figure. Emerging from the throng, it was unmistakably Nelson Mandela. My wife couldn’t believe what she was seeing. He walked past her and smiled.

  Mandela climbed carefully onto the small stage at the front of the hall and pleaded with the stunned, largely white audience not to give up on South Africa. He asked how he could build a new country without them. He said they were fundamental to the success of the rainbow nation he was trying to create. He said he could not succeed if they left. They were the key to the miracle happening. He needed their help.

  He reached out with an emotional, powerful speech that reduced many of those listening to tears, including my wife. It was an extraordinary thing to do… It did not make him popular with many more radical colleagues, but he felt it was necessary.

  You would imagine that a man emerging from twenty-seven years in prison would be consumed with anger, bitterness and a thirst for revenge. But Mandela preached reconciliation, forgiveness and tolerance, and went out of his way to make a white population − wracked with fear and suspicion – feel that they were not only wanted, but also needed.

  It was another example of the remarkable character of Mandela. He was a politician like no other. But then, in so many ways, he transcended politics. He was often called a living saint. Mandela was no saint. He had personal foibles like everyone does, he helped oversee a deadly terrorist war against the racist apartheid regime, made opportunistic alliances with controversial leaders and never claimed to be anything more than human.

  He made mistakes, and, in some ways, came up short as a leader himself. He admitted he failed to tackle the spread of HIV, even as terrifyingly large numbers of South Africans became infected. It took him a long while to accept that Soviet-style economics didn’t work, though he was willing to switch and open up South Africa’s state-run industries. How he would despair now at the unemployment, poverty and neglect that still blights the lives of millions of impoverished blacks.

  Some South Africans also believe that Mandela sold out too readily in the negotiated settlement. He won political freedom for the black majority, but not economic freedom. They felt the dominance of the ‘white ruling class�
�� was not sufficiently challenged and dismantled.

  I am not so sure. Mandela’s overriding concern as the transition approached was to ensure that as many key people as possible in education, health, business, infrastructure, science and technology stayed in South Africa to help rebuild and reshape the nation. Many of those people were white. To have overstretched in tearing away all aspects of white privilege would have made it less likely those key people would remain. If there appeared to be a backlash, many would have gone. And that would not have been good for the economy, or the country. He knew that.

  One failing, in my view, is that he did not ensure the succession was in the best interests of South Africa. Thabo Mbeki was not the man to follow Mandela. I always thought the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, would have made a more natural successor. Ramaphosa came to the presidency too late, in my view.

  And one other point about Mandela. Questions, I am sure, will one day be asked about what he knew of the activities of Winnie Mandela, his second wife and the great love of his life. She died in 2018, still celebrated in the townships, but also under a cloud of suspicion over kidnappings and unexplained deaths in Soweto.

  So, no saint. Archbishop Desmond Tutu cackled out loud when I suggested it once. But when the time came, Mandela was a visionary leader who saw what was needed to make a miracle happen. And it was a miracle. South Africa’s transition looked doomed many, many times in the years running up to the election. Even in the months before, from my close-up view, I often felt a low-intensity, prolonged civil war was more likely than peaceful change.

  That I was wrong was down in large part to Mandela. He was a man of immense humanity and a politician who knew when to walk away. He realized that, after one term in office, he was into his eighties and his energy was decreasing. There are very few leaders in Africa who have shown this self-awareness. But perhaps Mandela was being politically smart as well.

  The euphoria after the elections would only last so long. It was inevitable, given the scale of the challenge, that disappointment and dissatisfaction would set in and the ANC leadership would come under pressure. Maybe Mandela wanted to avoid all that.

  After 1999, apart from occasional appearances or interventions, he slowly but very deliberately vacated the stage. The ANC did all it could to exploit his celebrity and star power, but in the months before his death he was reclusive and politically largely silent.

  During the soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010, I interviewed his wife Graça Machel. She said he was frail and tired and disengaged, but otherwise fine. In truth, by then he was struggling to remember much or recognize even famous guests.

  She also told me he was disappointed by the lack of progress in improving the lives of the black majority: ‘He knew it would take time, but he worries that people who voted back in 1994 for a better life are still not seeing things improve enough.’

  He was right. Millions of blacks were still living without electricity or a constant supply of clean water. They had the vote and their freedom and they could elect their chosen leaders, but their daily lives remained a desperately hard slog. Political apartheid had become an economic apartheid, with a rising middle class of wealthy blacks who belonged to a political and business elite where corruption was rife.

  In the end, South Africa was resigned to his imminent passing. But when it came in December 2013, it still shook the country to its core. Death in old age does not amount to a ‘tragedy’, I guess, but that is still how it was greeted when it happened. Millions grew up with him as either an out-of-reach, mysterious but all-pervasive backdrop to their lives, or, after his release, a constant and reassuring presence.

  I was about to go on air with News at Ten when it was confirmed that he had passed away. We were ready with a structure for the programme, which was extended to an hour while we were on air.

  My co-presenter Julie Etchingham was incredibly gracious that evening. It was her turn to lead the programme, but in the minutes leading up to ten o’clock she saw me busily typing away on my desktop computer. She knew I was putting together the main introduction to the programme and she was aware it was a story I knew well and which was close to my heart. ‘You lead tonight,’ she said. ‘This is your story.’ Not many presenters would do that.

  And in a way, I did feel it was my story. I spent three years very close to it, at an emotional time. My first daughter Madeleine was born in Johannesburg in the year Mandela became president. So it was with a heavy heart and even perhaps a tear in my eye that I delivered the news that night. The hour went very quickly. There is so much to say about Mandela.

  The next day I flew out to Johannesburg, and for the following week we broadcast the news each night from Soweto. There were days of mourning, but it also became a celebration of a man who had become like a much-loved grandfather to his country. His loss was keenly felt.

  Suddenly, even though Mandela had not been president for well over a decade, it was as if the country had been robbed of its founding father, its guiding hand – and its sense of self seemed damaged. This young, fragile, vulnerable democracy now stood alone.

  The Guardian writer David Smith made an interesting observation just after Mandela’s death. He wrote: ‘Mandela was truly loved in a way that can seem quaint in the post-heroic age of politics. Buildings, bridges, streets and squares were named after him in life, commonplace in a dictatorship but remarkable in a democracy.’

  It was certainly remarkable, the way Mandela was loved around the world.

  His passing was a real test of President Zuma, who was already under pressure for allowing a sense of drift to take over the country. Unemployment and inequality still plagued South Africa. And Zuma’s personal reputation was suffering terribly from allegations of corruption, racketeering, fraud and incompetence. The previous year it had emerged that he’d spent almost £15 million on upgrading his residence in Nkandla in KwaZulu-Natal province. His eventual ousting was long overdue.

  There were fears Mandela’s death would lead to violence; some, more fanciful, reports circulated that black radicals were waiting for him to die before embarking on an orgy of vengeance against the white population… a sort of post-apartheid and post-Mandela ethnic cleansing. It proved to be no more than rumour and urban myth. There was no such reaction.

  South Africa and the world are incalculably poorer for his passing. It would be a betrayal of his sacrifice if those who follow him do not do more to right the wrongs of apartheid. The country remains one of the most unequal societies on the planet, where tin shacks lie in the shadow of multimillion-pound mansions. I’m afraid that, soon, casting all the blame on apartheid will no longer suffice.

  But South Africa has much to celebrate. It successfully ended an iniquitous and brutal form of government, without the disastrous civil war or mass chaos that afflicted so many other African countries transitioning from colonial to democratic control. That is quite something.

  The challenge now for Mandela’s successors is to tackle corruption and create economic and political conditions that will spread wealth throughout the population. South Africa has the chance to provide a shining example to the rest of Africa and the world. I hope it can pull it off. Nelson Mandela deserves to stop turning in his grave.

  To witness the elections in South Africa was quite simply one of the most uplifting experiences of my lifetime. Little did I realize that just weeks later, in a different part of Africa, I would be cast into a world of unique grimness. A world of darkness and grotesque violence, where man’s inhumanity to man was impossible to comprehend. A world where pure evil had taken hold.

  I was flying into Rwanda, where genocide was taking place and no one was doing anything to stop it.

  RWANDA

  IF THE ELECTION of Nelson Mandela was the most inspiring story I ever covered, there is no question about which was the most depressing. Once – sometimes twice – in the life of a foreign correspondent, you will get sent to a place to cover a story that you will never be ab
le to forget. Rwanda was that story for me, and for many others.

  I have covered wars where human depravity beggars belief, where brutality and violence subsume any sense of human value or morality or dignity. But never, ever, have I reported on such blind savagery as that which befell Rwanda when the Hutu majority turned on the Tutsi population in week after week of tribal slaughter. The numbers are startling: nearly a million people – men, women and children – slaughtered in 100 days. But such bald statistics, horrific though they undoubtedly are, do little to convey what happened there. Numbers can’t do it. As I write this, I am not sure whether words can either. I just hope they can, because I want you to know what took place and why.

  As a correspondent in far-flung places I could normally separate what I was witnessing from my ‘normal life’. I could mentally check out when I left. It was a useful trait to have, and in a way I was quite proud of it. But there was no filing away anything from Rwanda. There was no compartmentalizing. There was certainly no forgetting. It lived with me for years, and still lives with me now. Not only the appalling sights I saw, but the things people told me about what they saw. And then there’s the smell. You could never really escape the smell of death. Of corpses rotting away in the African sun. At the side of the street, in forests and fields and people’s homes. And, yes, in churches. Let me tell you first about the church.

  The killing had lasted nearly two months when it subsided enough for us to get into the capital Kigali, at this time in the hands of the Tutsi army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

  On our second evening in the city, I encountered a Canadian aid worker called Jim who was drinking whiskey in the hotel bar. ‘It’s bourbon,’ he told me. ‘They get it on the black market. It numbs the senses and right now I need it.’