She continued to press Botha to release Mandela, but regarded his detention as an issue quite separate from recognizing the ANC, which she still refused to do. It was not until February 1986 that a British diplomat, John Johnson, had been allowed to meet three ANC officials (including Thabo Mbeki) in Lusaka.4 And it was not until September 1987 that Geoffrey Howe was permitted to talk to Tambo. The meeting took place at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s official country residence. Tambo, in a well-tailored suit, was polite and moderate, but Howe was very cautious, pessimistic about any change, and worried about offending the Tory party. They politely agreed to differ, as two lawyers, on the issue of violence.5
In July 1987 Mrs. Thatcher appointed a much more proactive Ambassador to Pretoria: Robin Renwick, who would play an intricate role over the next four years. A subtle and charming man with an enigmatic smile, he was well informed about Africa, having helped to negotiate Zimbabwe’s independence in 1979. Privately he saw the ANC as crucial to any settlement, and he kept discreetly in touch with it through intermediaries like Enos Mabuza.6 But Thatcher prevented him from publicly approving the ANC, and he went along with her support for Buthelezi. Renwick’s main task, Thatcher told him, was to press President Botha toward reform, but his first meeting was not encouraging. He was eventually received, as he put it, “in a study lit only by his desk lamp, conjuring up images of what it must have been like calling on Hitler in his bunker.” Botha appeared unworried by sanctions, but fearful of losing control of the country: he had no intention of releasing Mandela, he said, unless he was critically ill. Renwick thought Botha would fight to the finish, and saw little chance of influencing him.7
Mrs. Thatcher still set herself against the ANC. At the next Commonwealth Summit, in Vancouver in October 1987, the ANC representative Johnny Makatini provoked her with a question, and she snapped back that the ANC was “a typical terrorist organisation.”8 British diplomats were exasperated by her outburst. Geoffrey Howe complained that she had “once again set back the prospect of dialogue,” Renwick had to remind Downing Street that he was developing private contacts with the ANC—which he quietly continued to do—and British intelligence agents in Lusaka were befriending ANC leaders.9 Thatcher’s demonizing of the ANC helped Botha’s propaganda, while frustrating the moderates of the ANC, including Tambo, who wanted closer contacts with conservatives and business leaders in the West. “If she goes on calling them communists it will be self-fulfilling,” the conservative Jamaican Prime Minister, Edward Seaga, commented after the Vancouver meeting.10
In fact, the old Soviet menace in Africa, such as it was, was rapidly evaporating. “Southern Africa is, practically speaking, well outside the Soviet Union’s zone of primary interest, indeed of its secondary interest,” wrote Frank Wisner, the Deputy Assistant for African Affairs in Washington, in January 1984.11 After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 he soon realized that the Soviet Union could no longer afford expensive adventures in Africa, and at the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 he told Reagan that he wished to retreat from regional conflicts. In 1986 British Ambassadors in Africa first met their Soviet counterparts, and were struck by the new mood of détente and disengagement—which soon showed itself in hopeful cooperation toward independence in Namibia. As for South Africa, Moscow was withdrawing its previous support for revolution. “In the past it was always assumed that there would be a classical revolutionary overthrow of the white minority regime,” said Boris Asoyan, the deputy head of the Southern African Department in Moscow in 1988. “Now we accept that there will have to be a political settlement.”12
The South African Communist Party itself was rethinking its revolutionary policies. At its sixty-fifth anniversary in London in 1986, the Chairman, Joe Slovo, shocked revolutionary British comrades by warning against the “Pol Pot philosophy,” which held that you could “pole-vault into socialism and communism the day after the overthrow of white rule.” The next day he explained to me: “I’ve never believed it’s the job of a revolutionary to make a revolution; only to lead it.… I’ve never relished the escalation of violence.”13
From jail, Mandela had followed the prospects of détente with high hopes. He had long thought the Cold War was ending, as he had told his daughter Zindzi in 1978. He had been delighted by Gorbachev’s friendly meeting with Mrs. Thatcher in December 1984 and by the prospect of his meeting with Reagan, as he told Lord Bethell and Sam Dash. In 1987 he enjoyed a television program in which two professors who were visiting South Africa, Roger Fisher from Harvard and John Erickson from Edinburgh, discussed the changes inside Russia, though a South African academic, Dirk Kunert of Wits, “sounded much like the ghost of Senator McCarthy.”14
Tambo had been encouraged in Moscow in 1986 by a talk with Gorbachev, whom he found very well informed and open to argument: more like Kissinger than Brezhnev. Tambo did not feel at all pressurized to pursue Marxist policies: a year earlier a key Soviet official had commented for the first time on the ANC’s economic policy, by advising him—to his great surprise—to put less emphasis on nationalization. Tambo himself never believed that black South Africans would embrace communism. “Our people will decide,” he said privately in New York in January 1987, “and they’re not very interested in a socialist state. The communists know they’re only one group among many.”15
Pretoria’s rhetoric about the “total communist onslaught” was looking very hollow. But Reagan and Thatcher continued to play up the communist bogey, which both encouraged President Botha’s ruthlessness and helped to scare off Western businessmen and politicians from any contact with the ANC. The ban was more tragic in view of the ANC’s obvious need for management and professional skills, a need which became more urgent as they faced the likelihood of coming to power. Tambo’s wish to provide training and work experience for young ANC people, to equip them for government and business, led to the setting up in late 1986 of the South African Advanced Education Project (SAAEP). It was funded by some farsighted donors, including the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, David Astor and Shell (which ironically the ANC were then boycotting). But the British and American governments offered no help.
In fact, the apparent noncontact between the ANC and the Afrikaners was not as complete as it seemed. While Botha and Thatcher kept up their attacks on the communist revolutionaries, a few enterprising nongovernmental bodies were building secret bridges which promised to change the political scene. The Ford Foundation in New York, under its black President, Franklin Thomas, was responsible for a dramatic breakthrough. In June 1986 it had arranged a discreet meeting between Afrikaners—including Pieter de Lange, the Chairman of the influential society the Broederbond—and ANC leaders including Thabo Mbeki, Mac Maharaj and a fiery freedom fighter, Seretse Choabe. When Choabe encountered de Lange he leaped to his feet and shouted, “I’ll shoot you, Broederbonder.” Maharaj tactfully asked the Afrikaners to understand the roots of Choabe’s anger; the conference ended emotionally, with Choabe apologizing and embracing de Lange. Thabo Mbeki subsequently had a long private dinner with de Lange which left the Afrikaner, as Mbeki put it, with a “normalised perception of the ANC as human beings.”16
Another bridge was built by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the former leader of the liberal opposition, who had left Parliament in February 1986, when he called for a negotiated settlement. “He has broken with a tradition of Afrikaner and white leadership which has sanctified racism,” said the ANC Secretary-General, Alfred Nzo. In August 1987 Slabbert organized a meeting in Dakar, Senegal, where fifty Afrikaner intellectuals met with ANC leaders. They issued a joint communiqué calling for a negotiated settlement and the unbanning of the ANC. President Botha responded with apparent fury: “The ANC is laughing up their sleeves at the naïveté of ‘useful idiots.’ ” But in fact the National Intelligence Service had discreetly assisted the meeting. As its Director, Niël Barnard, later explained: “We believed there could be no political solution without the ANC.” And Botha explained that he was happy for t
hem to “burn their fingers.”17
Some big companies were also feeling a need to reinsure themselves. Gold Fields, Cecil Rhodes’s old mining company, still cultivated a reactionary style under its London Chairman, Rudolph Agnew: it celebrated its centenary in 1987 with a history by the right-wing historian Paul Johnson, who lambasted the ANC for its “systematic violence.”18 But behind the bluster Agnew had agreed in June 1986 to finance secret meetings, organized by his political adviser Michael Young, to bring the ANC together with Afrikaners. In November 1987 a team of Afrikaner intellectuals met with an ANC group at the Compleat Angler hotel at Henley, in Oxfordshire. Over the next two years further meetings established trust between the groups, which soon included Thabo Mbeki.19 While Thatcher was denouncing the ANC as terrorists, hardheaded Afrikaners were learning to do business with them.
Even President Botha’s attacks on Mandela were not what they seemed. In 1987 the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, at last responded to Mandela’s request for talks, by inviting him to his official residence in Cape Town. The meeting was kept secret from the other four prisoners in Pollsmoor, but their friendliest warder, Christo Brand, could not resist talking to Kathrada, mentioning Mandela’s secret excursions. “I can’t tell you who Mandela saw last night,” he teased them, but eventually revealed that it was the Minister of Justice.20 Coetsee was not altogether trusted by President Botha. “He was a funny little man,” Botha said later. “I always felt after talking to him that it was a case of confusion worse confounded.”21 But Botha needed Coetsee to get him out of his corner, and they kept in touch.
Thus began the loneliest stretch of Mandela’s ordeal. It is common enough in world history for heads of government to maintain apparently intransigent attitudes to their enemies, while holding clandestine talks with them: as Nixon had done with the Vietnamese, or as John Major would soon do with the IRA. But Mandela was in an especially exposed position. He was facing the government alone, knowing that they were trying to split him off from his colleagues, with whom he could not come clean. From his cell he was now caught up in intricate talks, interlocking with other talks in Pretoria, Lusaka and Britain, of which he could not be properly informed. One false move could destroy his leadership.
Coetsee was now clearly looking for a way to release his famous prisoner: between 1987 and 1990 he would have twelve meetings with Mandela in jail.22 Mandela pressed him to let out his colleagues as a first step, beginning with Govan Mbeki, who was now seventy-seven and in poor health on Robben Island. The government, worried that Mbeki might die in jail, eventually released him without conditions in November 1987, supposedly on “humanitarian grounds,” but also to test the public reaction. Mandela had advised Mbeki to act with restraint, but he was greeted by ecstatic crowds at big rallies, and openly presented himself as an ANC leader. Three weeks later he was put under twelve-hour house arrest, and confined to Port Elizabeth. The Commissioner of Police complained that he was encouraging young people to continue the struggle, and providing the ANC with a platform.23 In Lusaka the ANC realized that “something went wrong,” and that the regime appeared to have taken fright—which could put them off releasing Mandela. But as Tambo said: “If Mandela were released, he couldn’t agree to say nothing.”24
The government clearly hoped that Mbeki’s release would help to drive a wedge between the Marxist wing of the ANC and the moderates; and there was certainly more tension. Before Mbeki left Robben Island Mandela had told him only that he was talking with the government, without giving any details;25 Mbeki’s release was soon followed by a spate of rumors that Mandela was selling out, which reverberated over the next two years. Even Tambo in Lusaka seemed shaken. But Mandela kept talking to the government, confident that Tambo would understand; and Tambo held the party together.
Late in 1987 Coetsee had proposed that Mandela should begin more serious discussions with a team of four, chaired by himself and including the two top prison officials—who could pretend to be talking about jail conditions. But the key member would be the head of the National Intelligence Service, Dr. Niël Barnard, only thirty-six, who was close to the President. The NIS had already made a tentative contact with the ANC in Geneva in 1984, and had kept sporadically in touch, with Botha’s approval. Barnard was convinced that a deal must be struck with the ANC “before our backs were against the wall.”26 Mandela knew that Barnard’s joining the talks would be raising the stakes; but he did not want to alienate the President, who was his eventual target. So he agreed to meet the “Team,” as they were called, while insisting on first consulting with his four prison colleagues upstairs. He asked them separately, one by one, what they thought about talking to the government, without mentioning Barnard and his team. Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni were delighted: they had wanted talks long ago. Sisulu wanted to wait for the government to make the first move, and suspected a subtle plan to use Buthelezi and others against the ANC; he told Mandela he hoped he knew what he was doing. Kathrada was more worried: he thought the ANC might appear to be giving in. But Mandela never thought he was talking from a position of weakness, and went ahead.27
Mandela’s desire for talks was partly echoed by new thinking from the ANC in Lusaka, and from the Communist Party. “I believe that the transition in South Africa is going to come through negotiation,” said Joe Slovo in a thoughtful interview in March 1987. “If there was any prospect of settling it peacefully tomorrow, we would be the first to say ‘Let’s do it.’ ”28 But the ANC were worried that the Western powers as well as Pretoria had hidden agendas, and they saw indications that America, Britain and Germany were preparing their own plan which they would try to force the ANC to accept; they had also had visits from previously unknown intermediaries, including Allen Weinstein, a conservative professor from Boston University (which had CIA links), who proposed informal talks with Botha’s Cabinet. In October 1987 the ANC produced its own document: “Possible Response to Negotiations Initiative.” It restated their overriding aim: “The defeat of the apartheid regime and the transfer of power to all the people.” But it stressed that they must “prepare, on time, for the eventual possibility of negotiations, initiated by forces other than ourselves.”29
The ANC in exile were now making closer contacts with their UDF colleagues inside South Africa. In September 1987 a Children’s Conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, provided the first opportunity for Tambo and the Lusaka leaders, including Joe Slovo, to meet with activists who flew up from South Africa. The atmosphere was more Christian than communist: it was presided over by Father Huddleston from London, with the church activist Frank Chikane from Johannesburg as the star. Huddleston had conceived the conference to draw attention to the suffering of black children; but it also provided unique contacts between the external and internal leadership. Tambo spoke optimistically, encouraged by his get-together with Afrikaners at Dakar, but he saw no signs of movement from P. W. Botha, who was still branding the ANC as Marxist murderers.30
Behind the scenes Tambo now for the first time showed himself worried by Mandela’s actions. He knew that he enjoyed Mandela’s complete trust: when his wife, Adelaide, compiled a book of Tambo’s speeches Mandela smuggled out an introduction in his own handwriting, praising the “brilliant exposition” of ANC policy which Tambo had given in an interview with Tony Heard of the Cape Times, and explaining how his commitment had “inspired us beyond words.”31 But Tambo was concerned to hear about Mandela’s secret talks, and smuggled a message into jail asking him what he was up to. “The tone was quite hostile,” Mandela recalled, “so I decided to be very firm.… I just added a sentence: ‘a meeting between the ANC and the government.’ ” “I felt,” Mandela told me later, “that this had reached a point where we had to be very strong.”32
In May 1988 Mandela met the Team for the first time, in the comfortable surroundings of the officers’ club within the Pollsmoor compound. They met almost once a week over the next months, sometimes for seven hours at a time. Mandela prepared carefully for
each meeting, turning his cell into an improvised office. Niël Barnard was clearly the government mastermind, tougher and cleverer than the others, cold and smooth. But he developed an admiration for his opponent. He was moved to see Mandela relishing the sandwiches: “I felt deep down a sense of sympathy for this man in prison overalls and boots. And he was thin.” Mandela was impressed by Barnard’s “controlled intelligence and self-discipline,” but surprised by his misconceptions about the ANC, gleaned from biased police and intelligence files.33 There were still negative reports about Mandela’s state of mind. In May 1988 Colonel J. G. Lourens reported that his emotional condition remained stable, with no indications of mental illness (geestesiekte); but “his attitude towards the S.A. government is still unchanged and dismissive. He will not be prepared to disavow violence.”34
Mandela and Barnard went over the old arguments. Barnard reiterated that President Botha could not meet Mandela until he had agreed to renounce violence; Mandela explained once again that the state had begun the violence, and that the ANC would respond peacefully to peaceful methods. Barnard complained that the ANC wanted to nationalize everything; Mandela once again quoted his 1956 article in Liberation, which looked forward to African business flourishing as never before. Barnard insisted that the ANC was controlled by communists, and the government could not negotiate until the ANC broke with them. Mandela explained that the ANC’s communists were far from any “evil empire,” and that he would never be turned by any outside body. The Team must realize that, he suggested, since they had failed to change his mind: “What makes you think the communists can succeed where you have failed?”35
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