While the eminent persons were talking, South African forces were striking, with raids on Lusaka, Harare and Gabrone—all Commonwealth capitals which the eminent persons had recently visited. The raids confirmed their worst forebodings about not being able to trust the South African government; and Pik Botha later admitted that they were “just one provocation too much.” In London Mrs. Thatcher saw them as “an unmitigated disaster.” In Washington Chester Crocker reckoned that President Botha had “turned decisively toward the road of repression.” In Pollsmoor, Mandela was convinced that the raids had “utterly poisoned the talks.”35
The eminent persons gave up. They had lunch with Winnie Mandela and flew back home that evening, knowing that their four-month mission had collapsed. Ten days later they heard from Pik Botha that the government had rejected “the threat of violence as a bargaining counter,” and was “not interested in negotiating about the transfer of power.” They replied that they saw no merit in further discussions. The Commonwealth Secretariat prepared an outspoken report (which Lord Barber very reluctantly signed, to Mrs. Thatcher’s disgust) concluding with a somber warning: “If the government finds itself unable to talk with men like Mandela and Tambo, then the future of South Africa is bleak indeed.”36
President Botha was now determined on a total crackdown; and on June 12 he imposed a nationwide state of emergency, giving the police much more drastic powers. They surrounded the townships, blocked main roads, searched houses and detained 4,000 blacks in three weeks. P. W. Botha warned that he had still not used a tenth of the force available to him, but it was enough to create terror. Visiting Johannesburg at that time, I found that all the black leadership was either in hiding or in jail. The only gatherings permitted were in churches: the Bishop of Johannesburg, Desmond Tutu, preached a militant sermon in the cathedral, asking with his arms outstretched, “Why are we allowing this country to be destroyed?”37 All hope of talks seemed to have crashed.
It was just then that Mandela decided on a new approach. He was not put off by Botha’s use of brute force. “The most discouraging moments,” he insisted, “are precisely the time to launch an initiative.” He was encouraged that the eminent persons had believed there was enough common ground for negotiations.38 Niël Barnard, the head of the National Intelligence Service, would later maintain that he had already prepared the way for talks, and that from the early eighties the NIS had advised the government that “there was no answer in trying to fight it out.”39 But it was Mandela who took the first step—as he would often remind his opponents.40 He asked to see the Commissioner of Prisons, General Willemse (the former commander of Robben Island), “on a matter of major national importance.” Four days later Willemse flew down from Pretoria to meet him in his official house at Pollsmoor. Mandela told him he wanted to see P. W. Botha to discuss a meeting between the ANC and the government. To his surprise Willemse immediately rang Coetsee, who offered to see him straight away.
Mandela was driven quickly to Savernake, the Minister of Justice’s official residence in Cape Town, where Coetsee was waiting for him. The Minister listened carefully and asked searching questions for three hours: Could Mandela speak for the ANC? Under what conditions would the ANC suspend the armed struggle? Would they give constitutional guarantees for minorities? What was the next step? About that, Mandela had no doubts: he must see President Botha. Coetsee promised to pass on the request, and shook hands warmly. Mandela was driven back to his cell. He told no one about the meeting, but prepared for further talks, still confident that his colleagues would accept a fait accompli. But for months he heard nothing.
There were signs that the government was preparing him for more freedom. The deputy commander of the prison, Lieutenant Colonel Gawie Marx, offered to drive him through Cape Town, where he had his first glimpse of ordinary life for twenty-four years, feeling like a tourist in a strange land: “It was absolutely riveting to watch the simple activities of people out in the world: old men sitting in the sun, women doing their shopping, people walking their dogs.” But he noticed too that the whites were enjoying a much richer and more luxurious life after his quarter century of imprisonment, while the black townships were poorer than ever. When Marx briefly left Mandela in the car while he went to buy a Coke Mandela was tempted to escape into the woods, but soon realized the risk.41
Mandela’s warder James Gregory also took him on several excursions outside Cape Town, followed by a police car with four guards armed with machine guns. They looked at the gardens of Kirstenbosch from the car, visited the salt town of Langebaan, and even walked along the beach near the seaside town of Paternoster, while guards watched along the road. After Mandela had urinated behind the rocks, a group of German tourists walked past him. Gregory recalled him saying: “They’ve just missed the scoop of the century.”42 Mandela thought the excursions were designed to acclimatize him—and perhaps to make him long for freedom, and therefore look for a compromise. But he was prepared to wait.
He was now allowed more visits from friends and family—even “contact visits,” during which he could kiss Winnie and hug the children. But there was no relaxed setting where he could get to know them again. His children, all now parents themselves, had grown further away from him after twenty-five years. His son Makgatho (or Kgatho) had given up visiting him in 1983, having opted out of school and university. After his marriage to Rennie broke up he married again, then went to stay with his mother, Evelyn, in the Transkei—taken there by Kaiser Matanzima—where he helped her run the trading store. Mandela was more ambitious for Mandla, Makgatho’s eldest son, who was doing well at school in Swaziland. He thought Mandla should move to Johannesburg, where he could pick up languages more easily and “be free from religious indoctrination which can discourage clear thinking, which is so necessary to one’s progress.”43 (Was he thinking of Mandla’s grandmother Evelyn?)
Mandela’s eldest daughter, Maki (Makaziwe), had married a school principal in the Transkei, Isaac Amuah, whom she brought to the prison in July 1985. Soon afterward they both went to America to study as postgraduate students. “I’m concerned, but I’m not a political person,” she told the New York Times.44 She was more assertive than her brother Makgatho, and felt undervalued by her father. “What’s wrong, is old age setting in, or is your health failing you, that you are in no position to write to your beloved daughter?” she wrote to him in January 1987. She asked him not to interfere with her children, and defended her brother’s autonomy: “You have to give him the opportunity to exercise his privilege and right as a father,” she wrote in February 1988. “I suspect that Kgatho feels neglected emotionally by both his parents.”45 Their relationship was complicated by Winnie, who complained that her stepchildren were ungrateful. “Why don’t you have the courtesy to thank Mum Winnie for the funds?” Mandela asked Maki.46 But Winnie was a more difficult stepmother than Mandela in jail could know.
He felt more confident about Zeni, his elder daughter by Winnie, married to her Swazi prince, who now had three children. Zeni began studies with her husband at Boston University in 1987, arranged by the neoconservative President Silber. She was amazed by the Americans’ ignorance of her country: “Some think it is somewhere in the Caribbean,” she wrote to her father. “Others think it is stuck somewhere near Nigeria. I really think it is unfair when we know so much about America.” She still half longed not to have a famous father: “If I had it my way I probably would have been a very ordinary person living an ordinary life somewhere in nowhere land. I always fantasised about being a model.… I think you would have had a fit.”47
Mandela was concerned about Zindzi, who was headstrong and dashing like her mother, and who could not face university. “I was more than disappointed when Mum told me that you have not moved to Campus,” he wrote to her in a mood of exasperation in May 1987. “Of all the unspeakable errors you have made in your life,” he told her six months later, “what you have done during the last nine months is the most disastrous.”
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sp; He had more sympathy for the next generation, including Zindzi’s daughter Zazi. “It is quite reasonable for Zazi to be puzzled by my refusal to leave prison,” he told Zindzi in March 1985: “but she will soon be able to appreciate the reasons.”48 His multiplying tribe helped to compensate him for his inactivity in other fields. Writing to Mary Benson in London about his benefactor David Astor, he boasted: “I have twelve grandchildren and he and Bridget only have five.”49 A year later he was telling Fatima Meer about his two great-grandchildren: “At last, I have something which puts me head and shoulders above you.”50
Mandela’s horizons were opening up further, through more visits, newspapers and films. He was delighted when Frieda Matthews, the eighty-year-old widow of his old mentor Z.K., visited him in November 1986 “with an entire library”; and she in turn felt uplifted by his lack of bitterness or regrets. “I could not help thinking that Christ must have had the same attitude after his crucifixion,” she wrote to him afterward.51
He often took solace in movies. He did not much like westerns, which were shown frequently in the prison, but he could now order his favorite films from outside. In 1986 his choices included Shaka Zulu, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the football World Cup in Mexico, The Pirates of Penzance, and the 1975 world heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in Manila. He was particularly keen to see Bernardo Bertolucci’s Chinese epic The Last Emperor, and was eventually given a 16-mm copy of the film by the Italian Ambassador for his birthday.52
But movies were no substitute for the reality outside, where the turmoil continued. For four years President Botha kept renewing the state of emergency, and his “securocrats” established a more thorough police state, with soldiers permanently stationed in the townships, reinforced by new municipal black police and vigilante thugs. The UDF was effectively crippled after 25,000 people were detained in six months, while 50,000 more activists were said to be in hiding.53 “This time we have arrested all the right people,” the head of the security police, General van der Merwe, told the British Ambassador, Robin Renwick.54
Despite the level of repression, there was still vigorous resistance. The UDF threw up new leaders and devised protests which were harder to suppress, including boycotts of shops and rent payments. The newly formed Congress of South African Trades Unions (COSATU) was feeling its muscles: and in August 1987 the mine workers, under their leader Cyril Ramaphosa, launched a three-week strike. It was a show of strength, although it failed to achieve its demands. As Ramaphosa said afterward: “We felt the power surging in our veins.”55 In the same month a militant youth organization called SAYCO was formed, led by the young militant Peter Mokaba, a Robben Island graduate. Church leaders were becoming increasingly vocal, led by Desmond Tutu, who became the first black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. And the ANC guerrilla fighters were now having more success, with 231 attacks within South Africa in 1986, and 235 in 1987, according to police figures.
But the UDF had been seriously weakened by the detentions. In August 1987 their chief spokesman, Murphy Morobe, was arrested after a year on the run. In February 1988 the UDF and seventeen other organizations were banned. The government publicized the “black on black” violence to show that the ANC had been responsible for anarchy. White businessmen who had been fearing a major upheaval decided with relief that the government was in control after all. Many observers, including the respected political scientist Tom Lodge, thought the revolt had been crushed.56
The ANC also now appeared to be seriously challenged by Chief Buthelezi’s Zulu Inkatha party, and the rivalry between the two organizations led to escalating murders and atrocities on both sides. Buthelezi still portrayed Mandela as a friend and publicly called for his release, but he had condemned the Release Mandela campaign as a gimmick, and privately warned the military that it would be “irresponsible” to let him out.57 In 1986 Buthelezi announced that he had been given permission to visit Mandela in Pollsmoor. Mandela tactfully but firmly replied through his lawyer Ismail Ayob that it would be best to meet after he had been released.58
Inside South Africa, Buthelezi was being built up as a serious rival to Mandela. He was given access to television and the press, and was free to travel abroad. He hired public relations advisers, invited conservative journalists to his Zulu capital, Ulundi, and welcomed rich foreign supporters. He sent a glossy magazine called Clarion Call around the world, publishing his marathon speeches. His publicity machine was much more effective than that of the ANC, whose embattled officials in Lusaka could exasperate the most sympathetic foreign journalists, who found it hard to get through to them: even the New York Times was once kept waiting in Lusaka for three days.59 The ANC’s magazine Sechaba, printed on shabby paper in East Germany, was addressed only to the left. The fitful communications of the ANC led many foreign journalists and politicians to underestimate its real popular support.
Buthelezi became the favorite of Western conservatives. In America and Germany he was welcomed as the desirable alternative to Tambo and Mandela, while in February 1985 he had been received by President Reagan. But it was Margaret Thatcher who, after meeting him with her mentor Laurens van der Post, became his most influential overseas ally, welcoming him as a champion of free enterprise and encouraging businessmen to put their hopes in him. She praised him as a “stalwart opponent of violent uprising,” while her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, thought him “extremely clear-sighted but firmly independent.”60
It was not until years later that the full truth emerged: that the Pretoria government had been systematically arming Zulu forces against the ANC. Buthelezi (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 1998), had conspired with President Botha and his Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, to “create an unlawful and offensive paramilitary force to be deployed against the ANC.” In early 1986, it emerged, Buthelezi had selected two hundred Inkatha soldiers for secret training near the Caprivi Strip in the remotest part of Namibia, where they were taught by the South African army how to use rockets, mortars and hand grenades and to terrorize communities; including how to attack houses with the aim of killing all the occupants.61 While the government was publicly deploring the violence, its own security forces were fanning the flames, by arming and encouraging the Zulus to attack ANC supporters.
But behind the scenes, Western governments, and President Botha himself, were beginning to accept that there could be no solution without coming to terms with the ANC—and releasing Mandela.
25
The Lost Leader
1983–1988
AS SOUTH AFRICA came ever closer to civil war, the clamor to release Mandela resounded across the world. Antiapartheid boycotts were spreading, campaigns for disinvestment and sanctions were biting. And the cause of black South Africans was receiving more publicity, through television programs, films and stage shows, including Richard Attenborough’s film about Steve Biko, Cry Freedom (1987), and the Broadway hit Sarafina (1988), about a girl student who worshiped Mandela.
Mandela was the world’s most famous prisoner, all the more romantic because hardly anyone had seen his face for a quarter of a century: no new picture of him had been published since 1965. The Mandela icon was free to develop as a symbol of heroic resistance to oppression, quite independent of physical reality. His generalized image seemed to transcend all the sectarian and national rivalries of Africa, and came to represent the universal black leader, the last great freedom fighter. The icon is expressed in the larger-than-life bust unveiled by Oliver Tambo beside the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1985: its big-lipped, thickset head is quite unlike Mandela’s sensitive face. A whole generation of children had been told about Mandela as the lone champion of freedom, celebrated by Mandela streets, songs and concerts. They knew nothing about the actual man in Pollsmoor, grappling with complex realities. Could the real Mandela, if he ever emerged, possibly live up to the myth?
The antiapartheid campaigns in the West, particularly boycotts of banks, h
ad done much to extend sanctions. The British and American governments were still reluctant to have a showdown with Pretoria, and were strongly influenced by conservative lobbies which continued to denounce the ANC as terrorists or communists. But divisions were appearing.
In Washington the Secretary of State, George Shultz, and his African expert, Chester Crocker, were losing patience with Pretoria; but they were frustrated by Ronald Reagan’s White House and by CIA chief William Casey, who was friendly with President Botha and who worked closely with South African intelligence. When Crocker prepared a strong antiapartheid speech for Reagan in July 1986 it was rewritten by his right-wing aide Pat Buchanan so as to emphasize the sacrifices made by white South Africans and to blame the emergency on “the calculated terror by elements of the ANC.” The State Department had effectively lost control over U.S. diplomacy. Crocker called it the “Great Foreign Policy Robbery of 1986,” and Shultz had to be restrained from resigning.
But it was Congress, not the White House, which was soon making foreign policy. In August 1986 the Senate voted eighty-four to fourteen for a comprehensive sanctions bill imposing bans on new investment, loans, airport landing rights and exports of oil. It was a body blow to Pretoria, closing off future international trade. When at last Shultz saw Tambo for the first time, in January 1987, he told him he did not want the ANC to become isolated like the PLO. He reassured him that Pretoria would eventually have to deal with the ANC, and warned him that the Soviets were “sure losers.” Tambo asked Shultz for joint action from Washington and Moscow against Pretoria.1 News of the meeting brought fresh encouragement to Mandela in prison.
The confusion in Washington put more emphasis on the role of Mrs. Thatcher; she was in a stronger position than Reagan to influence Botha, but remained determined to resist sanctions. In spite of the “unmitigated disaster” of the eminent persons’ mission, in July 1986 she had insisted on sending her reluctant Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, representing the European Community, to South Africa to try again to conciliate. But the ANC, including Mandela and Tutu, refused to see him; and President Botha was bad-tempered and offensive, haranguing Howe that he “would not force South Africans to commit national suicide.” When in August 1986 Mrs. Thatcher faced a special Commonwealth meeting in London, the deadlock was obvious: “The Botha government had still not made the quantum leap for which we all looked,” wrote Howe afterward. “Mandela and his colleagues were still in jail, and the ANC and its parallels were still banned.”2 Mrs. Thatcher still resisted sanctions, encouraged over dinner beforehand with Laurens van der Post, and insisted that apartheid was “if not dead, at least rapidly dying.”3 But she had to accept a set of sanctions endorsed by the European Community which included a ban on new investment.
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