Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Soon after the bush conference de Klerk agreed to Mandela’s request for a meeting. Mandela again carefully prepared a memorandum, updating his earlier one to Botha, welcoming de Klerk’s call for reconciliation and his commitment to peace. But he was concerned that the government was continuing apartheid by other means, by conspiring with black homelands and co-opting their leaders. The violent conflict, said Mandela, was draining the country’s lifeblood, and peace could be achieved only through talks with the ANC, without preconditions. As the first stage, in keeping with the Harare Declaration, he called for de Klerk to end the emergency, to lift all bans and to remove troops from the townships.69

  On December 13 he was driven again to the Tuynhuys to see the President—again with Coetsee and Barnard. The atmosphere was more relaxed than with Botha. De Klerk had studied the psychological profiles of Mandela’s personality, so was not surprised (he told me) by his courtesy and magnanimity; what impressed him was his comprehension of Afrikaner history and sufferings, as a parallel to those of his own people.70 Mandela knew something about de Klerk’s political pedigree, and had heard from black friends that he had a reputation as a decent lawyer. He tried to see the problems from de Klerk’s viewpoint, and was surprised to find de Klerk actually listening, and responding. Mandela criticized the National Party’s commitment to “group rights,” which the world would rightly see as an extension of apartheid. De Klerk explained that he was trying to allay white fears of black domination—which Mandela himself had told P. W. Botha the ANC must do. Mandela insisted that “group rights” would only increase black fears. In that case, said De Klerk, “we will have to change it.”

  Mandela then reiterated that he could not accept any conditions, and that the ANC must be unbanned. De Klerk made no promises, but Mandela left the meeting reassured. He believed (as he reported to Lusaka) that de Klerk was a genuine departure from his predecessors, someone with whom he could do business.71 De Klerk on his side seemed unmoved by the encounter, according to his aides. But he told his brother Wimpie that Mandela was “a man with tremendous style.… He is a politician to be reckoned with.”72

  Mandela was now being allowed to see all kinds of politicians in his prison-house—though no diplomats or journalists, for Pretoria was nervous that the UN or foreign governments might try to intervene. Robben Islanders still serving sentences, leaders of the Mass Democratic Movement, lawyers, clerics, trade unionists, academics and youth leaders all converged on the bungalow. It was now not so much a prison, said his lawyer George Bizos, as the office from which the leader of the ANC was conducting his business. “He held court like Peter the Great of Russia,” said his old friend Dr. Motlana.73 Mandela spent much time with his Cape Town lawyer, Dullah Omar, a Muslim with big soulful eyes who worked out the details of his likely release.

  Mandela caused some alarm within the ANC when in November he saw Richard Maponya, a rich black businessman and racehorse owner who had been accused of collaborating with the government. But Mandela recalled gratefully how Maponya had held a party for him and his friends in 1960.74 Mandela told him (as Maponya reported it) that he was concerned about the problems of running big businesses, and suggested that nationalization was not the best way to black empowerment: an independent South Africa must not, like some of its neighbors, become economically bankrupt.75 That disturbed many ANC leaders, who saw the Freedom Charter being betrayed. But two months later Mandela made a statement reaffirming the ANC’s commitment to nationalizing mines, banks and monopoly industries. That remained the official policy, but Tambo and others in Lusaka had been considering ideas about a mixed economy; and as in the British Labour Party’s old Clause Four, nationalizing was not to be taken too literally. (When businessmen asked Tambo about it, he would reply that the ANC’s policies were similar to Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe; and Mugabe, while preaching state ownership, had nationalized nothing.) Businessmen anyway were not too worried: by late January 1990 the Johannesburg stock market was reaching record highs.76

  Mandela was even allowed to telephone Lusaka and speak directly to banished friends who after nearly thirty years were now in closer contact with the country. Sisulu and his other released colleagues were given passports to fly to Lusaka, where they were received with ecstasy. Sisulu embraced his son Max after twenty-seven years, and Govan Mbeki was reunited with his son Thabo.77 The three strands of the struggle which had been separated for nearly three decades—exiles, prisoners and internal activists—were beginning to intertwine.

  But radical leaders, both outside and inside South Africa, still suspected that Mandela might be selling out, and betraying the revolution. When eighteen internal activists visited him in late 1989 some who had last seen him in prison clothes on Robben Island were shocked by his immaculate suit and conservatism, and his praise of de Klerk. “This man is finished,” Eric Molobi said to himself. Guerrilla fighters within MK were more worried that before they had even begun the real battles, Mandela’s negotiations would forestall their “seizure of power.”78 Within South Africa the ideological arguments were coming into the open, as the government relaxed its controls over protests and red flags; and the old debates on Robben Island reemerged in public as the prospect of power became more realistic. Govan Mbeki was working with a Marxist “collective” in the Eastern Cape which became more vocal, and remained uncompromising. “The aim of the working class,” Mbeki reminded his followers in early December, “is to take over the entire surplus value it has created.”79

  But Mandela took care to leak a copy of his ten-page memo for de Klerk to Lusaka, and to make clear that he was committing himself to nothing. “He is not negotiating,” said an ANC spokesman. “He is facilitating the process for the government to sit down with the ANC.” And Mandela was using his splendid isolation to unify rather than divide. “There is only one ANC,” Kathrada said on his behalf. “It has been in existence since 1912 and it still exists today.”80 Most of Mandela’s visitors saw him as a conciliator and peacemaker, seeking to patch up old quarrels. He remained, above all, the loyal member of the ANC, determined to maintain party unity, as all his statements and talks had made clear.

  Hopes for Mandela’s release rose and fell over the New Year of 1990. On January 8 Winnie, after visiting him for three hours, emerged to say: “I don’t think we are talking about months … this is the real thing.” But three weeks later there were still some problems, she explained, about the unbanning of the ANC. “The price of his release is the change of history in this country.”81

  The future of the country now rested on two lonely men. President de Klerk had kept to himself through the long Christmas summer holiday, preparing for the decision he could not avoid. The pressures from abroad were still building up and the economic crisis was becoming acute. “Internationally we were teetering on the edge of the abyss,” de Klerk later told his brother Wimpie.82 Mrs. Thatcher, through her Ambassador, Robin Renwick, promised de Klerk that when he released Mandela she would reciprocate by rescinding sanctions, including the ban on new investment.83 By mid-January, de Klerk was writing by hand the speech he would make at the opening of Parliament on February 2. He consulted only his close advisers, not his party caucus or his wife, Marike, a conventional Afrikaner who was perplexed by his silence and his policies, and who compared Mandela to the Nazi prisoner Rudolf Hess.84 When the British Minister for Overseas Development, Lynda Chalker, congratulated him on his courage, he replied that he had trouble persuading “another woman”; in fact, it turned out, the marriage was already in trouble.85 On the day before his speech de Klerk had another row with his Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, about legalizing the Communist Party; but de Klerk insisted that maintaining the ban would only perpetuate political campaigns. At midnight on February 1 he sent Mrs. Thatcher a message that she would not be disappointed by his speech.86 * At last Parliament assembled for the speech. Despite all the predictions, it astonished almost everyone. In a few minutes de Klerk reversed nearly all his predecessors’ pol
icies over the past three decades. All political organizations, including the ANC and the South African Communist Party, would be legalized. All political prisoners not guilty of violent crimes would be released. All executions would be suspended. And the government had “taken a firm decision to release Mandela unconditionally.”88

  Mandela had won, while he was careful to give his people the credit. Winnie read out a message from him to a crowd in Johannesburg. “You are the ones who have made the government give in to your pressure.… It is not President de Klerk.” But he added: “It is partly the international community which has forced these concessions.” The ANC’s position was instantly transformed. It issued a statement from Stockholm (where Tambo was recuperating) saying that de Klerk’s speech went “a long way toward creating a climate conducive to negotiations.”89

  South Africa suddenly became a new country. The underground came overground, banned people proclaimed themselves, the ANC and red flags waved and the papers published photographs of Mandela. Everyone speculated about his health and abilities, and when he would be released. There were rumors that he himself was delaying, but he told Bizos: “Open the door, and see which way I walk.” Inside his prison-house he was making his last preparations for facing the crowds and the press: his photographer friend Peter Magubane gave him a booklet produced by Time magazine on how to handle the media.90

  A week after his speech de Klerk summoned Mandela to his office and told him he would be flown up to Johannesburg to be released the next day. A tense argument followed. Mandela wanted another week for the ANC to prepare the reception (with good reason, as became clear), but the security forces feared it would create “unrestrained tensions.” In fact Niël Barnard, the intelligence chief, was very worried that the ANC would organize mass demonstrations which would disorganize the whole country, like the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini when he returned to Iran in 1979.91 Mandela also insisted that he must walk out of the gates of the prison, alongside Winnie, and speak to the people of Cape Town. De Klerk was strongly against any postponement: he was fearful of demonstrations being stirred up by news items like the headline in the Cape Times that morning: “MANDELA ASKS RELEASE FROM PAARL.”92 He consulted twice with colleagues, who said it was too late to delay; but he agreed to release Mandela at the prison gate. When Mandela returned to the prison his warder Gregory thought his mouth was harder, his eyes colder. He was determined to be released with dignity: as Kobie Coetsee noted, “Dignity is a key word for Mandela.”93

  The ANC had already appointed a Reception Committee to make the plans; and that night they came to his house to make final changes to his speech. Mandela wrote on the imitation-leather writing board which prisoners had made for him; but the speech was the collective work of the ANC, as was all too clear from its style. His Cape Town attorney Dullah Omar spent two hours with him, and found him “subdued, quiet, deep in thought. He knew everything that was happening.”

  The next morning Mandela got up at 4:30. After breakfast and a medical checkup he again met ANC colleagues, including Cyril Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel, to finish the speech. He packed his books and papers, accumulated over the Pollsmoor years, into a dozen crates, and said his good-byes to his warders. It was the most exciting moment of his life, he told Omar, who noted, “he showed no emotion. He was very composed.”94 Mandela was too preoccupied with detail, he explained, to realize how momentous was the occasion.

  An ANC delegation, including Winnie and Sisulu, had arranged to fly down from Johannesburg in two chartered planes: Winnie would meet her husband at the jail, and walk out with him at 3 p.m. But the second plane arrived late, and it was not until after four that he and Winnie emerged from the prison gate, to face a scene which took him completely by surprise.95 At the age of seventy-one, after over ten thousand days in jail, he was rejoining a country which had grown up without him.

  *When I revisited him in Soweto after twenty-six years he warned me to lock my car: “Remember how Patrick Duncan had his coat stolen there.”

  *There were later claims that the draft of de Klerk’s speech was negotiated with the British government, which Renwick emphatically denies.87

  PART III

  1990–1999

  28

  Myth and Man

  Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

  The other powerless to be born,

  With nowhere yet to rest my head.

  —Matthew Arnold, “The Grand Chartreuse”

  MANDELA WALKED out of the prison gates on February 11, 1990, holding hands with Winnie. It provided the most powerful image of the time, even in an era of charismatic heroes overcoming tyrannies in Eastern Europe and Russia: of Gorbachev, Walęsa, Havel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Mandela embodied a more elemental and universal myth, like a revolutionary opera or The Odyssey, depicting the triumph of the human spirit, the return of the lost leader. And his long isolation had allowed the myth to take off from the man, leaving everything to the imagination: a dotted outline within which anyone could fill in his own detailed picture of a hero. Only a few lawyers and visitors knew what he really looked like. Huge sums had been offered for his photograph to be smuggled out; and the old pictures had been endlessly recycled, turning into heraldic emblems. The first contemporary picture had been published only two days before, showing Mandela standing stiffly and smiling blandly alongside de Klerk. The world’s journalists and television crews who converged outside the prison still did not know whom to expect.

  When he finally appeared on the television screens, they showed scenes of confusion. The deliberately short notice, compounded by Winnie’s late arrival, ensured a muddle. Crowds milled around the prison entrance, climbing up trees, clinging to wires and standing on tiptoe, waiting for his long-delayed exit. Television teams nervously tried to locate him. “If we can just spot Mr. Mandela …” said the normally unflappable David Dimbleby. At last his blurred shape appeared, unsmiling alongside a cheerful Winnie, wearing a light gray suit, looking tense and grim. “Only when I saw the crowd did I realise,” he admitted later, “that I had not thought carefully enough about the events of the day.”1 One correspondent, John Battersby of the Christian Science Monitor, who was waiting inside the prison grounds, suddenly saw Mandela looming in front of him, and shook his hand. “I lost all sense of ego,” he recalled. “I saw history and legend merging with reality.”2 Outside the gates, Mandela found his bearings and held up a clenched fist to the crowd. But two minutes later he had disappeared into a waiting Toyota. It was a tantalizing glimpse for the millions who were watching across the world; but the symbolism remained as powerful as if he had walked out in orderly triumph. “We clapped, cheered and cried,” wrote Roger Wilkins in Washington, “at the sight of a king—our cousin, the king, walking in the sunshine.”3

  The Toyota motorcade drove off to Cape Town. Along the road spectators, black and white, waved or clenched fists in the ANC salute. Once Mandela stopped the car to get out and chat with a white couple with two children by the roadside. But in the city the progress turned into chaos. Mandela was trapped inside his car by the seething crowds; the driver panicked, lost his way, and turned back to take refuge in the suburb of Rondebosch. The welcoming party at the City Hall tried to placate the waiting crowds who filled the square, but they were impatient. A shot rang out, and hooligans began looting shops and robbing spectators. Some whites saw it as a warning of black anarchy: “an early example of the policy of appropriating other people’s property,” wrote Ken Owen in the Cape Times, “to which Mandela immediately gave his support.”4

  Mandela eventually arrived at the City Hall in twilight to make his first public speech since his long statement from the dock in 1964. But this too was an anticlimax, read out in a deadpan style without rhetorical flourishes, as if he had not seen the text before. It was a more serious disappointment to white politicians and diplomats. Both de Klerk and Thatcher had expected Mandela to hold himself aloof from the ANC, and to distance himself from the ar
med struggle and the communists. But he insisted that he was totally identified with the ANC:

  I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.

  He thanked many white liberals, including the women’s Black Sash movement; and—to the dismay of close colleagues—paid tribute to de Klerk as “a man of integrity.” But he presented himself as “a loyal and disciplined member of the African National Congress,” and gave profound thanks to the ANC, the Communist Party and the soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe. He had not been negotiating in jail, he assured his audience, only pressing to meet with the government. The ANC must keep up the armed struggle: “We have no option but to continue.”

  The total commitment to the ANC and the armed struggle alarmed the politicians and diplomats. De Klerk was shocked by Mandela’s solidarity with the communists, and thought his speech had been written by hard-line ideologues: “For once, Mandela completely failed to rise to the occasion.”5 The British Ambassador, Robin Renwick, thought the speech had been written by the ANC. Mrs. Thatcher was dismayed by the “old ritual phrases,” and canceled a planned statement.6 Her Afrikaner adviser, Laurens van der Post, himself a former prisoner of war, said he was disappointed that Mandela had not learned from the “school of suffering.”7