Mandela was sometimes visibly exhausted by his crowded schedule, and was put out by the bodyguards who stopped him from talking to ordinary people. When he stayed with the Mayor of New York, David Dinkins, in Gracie Mansion, he tried to go for an early-morning jog alone, but the bodyguards insisted on accompanying him.37 But he was revived by California and a last rally at Oakland Stadium, decorated with ANC banners: “I feel like a young man of thirty-five. I feel like an old battery that has been recharged.” “The struggle against apartheid,” he said, “is the one issue uniting people with different political views in the U.S. and throughout the world.”
Mandela had put South Africa briefly onto the center of the American stage. He had, said the New York Times, been “transformed into a popular hero hailed by millions who a few months ago were probably giving scant attention to apartheid in South Africa.”38 Time magazine described him as a classic hero “who has emerged from a symbolic grave reborn, made great, and filled with creative power.… What Bolivar was to South America, what Lincoln was to America, Nelson Mandela is to Africa: the liberator.”39 But he disowned the mythology: “I am sorry if I am seen as a demigod.… I am a peg on which to hang all the aspirations of the African National Congress.”40
From America he traveled to Ireland, where he was soon in hot water: he could not believe that the problems of Ulster could not be resolved peacefully; he told a press conference in Dublin that “There is nothing better than opposites sitting down to resolve their problems in a peaceful way.” He flew on to London, but his words caught up with him. “There was a clear and pointless predictability about the mess Nelson Mandela got into in Dublin yesterday,” wrote the Guardian.41 He would be wryly amused when Sinn Fein did sit down to talk with the British government seven years later.
In London he met British Members of Parliament at Westminster Hall, where he was introduced by a brash Tory, Ivor Stanbrook, who immediately brought up the Ulster question but was sharply heckled by other M.P.s, including Dennis Skinner, with boos and cries of “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!,” which astonished Mandela: “It’s amazing what they say in the House of Commons.”42 He reminded M.P.s that “the ANC were outcasts only yesterday,” and asked them to support sanctions and “walk the last mile with us.” He went on to a small lunch given by the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, including people who had helped Mandela, like the Archbishop of Canterbury and Father Huddleston. Mandela quietly dominated, explained the case for sanctions, drank water and ate an apple instead of the rich dessert.43
This time he did see Mrs. Thatcher. Robin Renwick advised her that Mandela had been waiting for twenty-seven years to make his points, and she let him talk for fifty minutes without interrupting—a near record for her. He courteously thanked her for improving East-West relations, for achieving the independence of Zimbabwe and for pressing Pretoria to release him. He asked for her support in achieving a negotiated settlement, and explained the need for sanctions. She replied for half an hour, while Mandela remained motionless. She urged him to talk to Buthelezi, and to abandon the armed struggle and his plans for nationalization, and promised to keep in close touch. The meeting had been scheduled to last an hour, but went on for three.44
Mandela realized that he had still made no headway on sanctions, but he was surprised to find Thatcher warm and charming, while truly an “iron lady.” She found him “supremely courteous, with a genuine nobility of bearing” and no bitterness. She warmed to him, but found him still “stuck in a kind of socialist timewarp,” and worried that he would prove another half-baked Marxist, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe.45 Outside Downing Street a reporter asked Mandela how he could bring himself to talk to someone who had denounced him as a terrorist. He replied that he was working with South Africans who had done much worse things: “I didn’t even mention slaughters,” he said later.46 He finished his trip in July in Mozambique, where for the first time he met Graça Machel, the widow of the former President Samora Machel (see this page–this page).
In October he was off again for a tour of Asia, with his friend Ismail Meer among his party. India was the most important destination, as the traditionally ally of black South Africans, and he was received there with the pomp usually reserved for a head of state, including a twenty-one-gun salute and a state banquet in Delhi. The President, Ramaswamy Venkataraman, promised to press for continued sanctions, and to support the ANC: later the Congress Party helped the ANC buy Shell House, their Johannesburg headquarters.47 In Calcutta Mandela addressed a vast crowd, and thanked India for originating the South African struggle by sending them Gandhi. He drank holy water from the Ganges, slightly worried by seeing the carcasses of dead cows floating in it. He enjoyed Indian food, and publicly thanked Meer for having taught him to love curry.48
Other Asian countries were also generous, but more controversial politically. In Indonesia Mandela was so regally received by President Suharto that he asked him for $10 million for the ANC, which he received in front of the media. But Mandela kept quiet about the Indonesians’ campaign against the East Timorese, who accused him of “hypocrisy and opportunism.”49 In Malaysia President Mahathir, having briefed him about economic development, gave him $5 million in cash. In Australia—where he failed to see his cricketing hero Donald Bradman—he steered clear of disputes about Aborigines and canceled a visit to an Aboriginal community in Sydney, which led to more accusations of hypocrisy. But Aborigines still proclaimed an alliance with the black people of South Africa.50
He was offended by his experience of Japan, where just before his arrival the Minister of Justice had been quoted as making a racist remark about America, where “the neighborhoods go to the dogs when blacks move in.” Mandela was shocked that the Minister had survived, which “showed just how lukewarm Japan remained about fighting racism.” He was given a standing ovation in the Japanese Parliament, but was disappointed when the Prime Minister turned down a request for $25 million for the ANC. “The contribution made by the Japanese government,” he said afterward, “is absolutely insignificant.”51
One country was notably missing from Mandela’s journeys in the aftermath of the Cold War: the Soviet Union, which had loyally supported the ANC and had supplied arms and money for the last quarter century. Gorbachev had invited him to Moscow in a message to Lusaka just after he was released; and Mandela had had a friendly meeting with the Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, at the Namibian independence celebrations in March. But the plans kept being postponed. In fact, Moscow, just when it might have reaped rewards from its long support for the ANC, was cozying up to de Klerk. Gorbachev’s government, battered by economic crises, was desperate for immediate commercial opportunities. In 1990 it signed a direct marketing agreement with de Beers diamonds, and soon Gorbachev, breaking promises to the ANC, was establishing direct contacts with Pretoria, and stopped providing free training for ANC guerrillas. De Klerk paid a state visit to Moscow in June 1992, when the new Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, assured him that he would not receive Mandela as the ANC President, only as an international fighter for human rights. Behind these rapid changes (said the Soviet expert Vladimir Shubin) lay an upsurge of Russian xenophobia and racism which saw white South Africans as victims of black majority rule. It was not until 1993, when the ANC was coming closer to victory, that their relations with Moscow improved.52
Mandela still befriended enemies of the West like Muammar Qadaffi, Arafat and Saddam Hussein. He had visited Libya in May 1990, when he gave early warning that he would remain loyal to Qadaffi. In his tent he thanked Qadaffi for providing the ANC with military training: “We consider ourselves comrades in arms.” When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 Mandela accused the Europeans of hypocrisy: they had not objected to the U.S. invasions of Grenada or Panama, “but now the whole of the West is screaming and sending armies because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.” He did not condone Iraq’s aggression, but suggested that Iraqis were treated differently because they were “brown-skinned.” When the West eventua
lly launched the Gulf War, President Bush courteously phoned Mandela, who “agreed to differ.”53
Mandela showed a special fondness for Fidel Castro, who had inspired the ANC radicals with his daring revolution in 1959; on Robben Island he had been thrilled to hear that Cubans had intervened in Angola. He visited Cuba in July 1991 and gave an emotional speech thanking Cuba for helping the ANC, and recalling how Cuban troops had helped to defeat the South African invaders in Angola in 1988. That defeat, he said, “enables me to be here today.” Castro replied by calling Mandela “one of the most extraordinary symbols of this era,” explaining that “apartheid is capitalism and imperialism in its fascist form.” Castro spoke for three hours without a piece of paper, to Mandela’s amazement, and no one left except to go to the toilet. Mandela found Castro “a very happy chap”: when they drove through Havana, “he just sat down, folded his arms, and I was the person waving to the crowd.”54
Despite such embarrassing friends, Mandela was embraced by Western governments with an enthusiasm which amazed him after their previous coolness toward the ANC. It was partly of course because of the geopolitical transformation: the global communist bogey had evaporated, and the West no longer had to fear a hostile black South African government backed by Moscow. Cold Warriors who had built up Mandela as a communist ogre were disarmed—sometimes with pangs of guilt—to meet the genial old man with a conservative style and a close interest in Western democracies. And Western governments began competing belatedly to make friends with a possible black president.
But the ecstatic welcomes could not be explained by political science. Mandela’s basic appeal was not as a man of power, but as a moral leader who had stood out for fundamental principles and who gave hope for the future to all oppressed people and all countries torn by racial divisions. His dignity and wish for reconciliation gave him an influence beyond ordinary politics, which was the more surprising because he was not religious. He had never offered himself as a spiritual leader, and he dismissed the label of saint: “I’m just a sinner who keeps on trying.” “I am not particularly religious or spiritual,” he told the professor of theology Charles Villa-Vicencio. “I am just an ordinary person trying to make sense of the mysteries of life.”55
He seemed to enjoy and adjust his own icon, while not being fooled by it, as though he were watching a play with himself as the hero. He liked to tell stories about being cut down to size: about the American tourist in the Bahamas who recognized him but then asked: “What are you famous for?” Or about the two white women in South Africa who asked for his signature and then said: “By the way, what is your name?” His aides tired of the repeated anecdotes, but they were part of Mandela’s determination to remain an ordinary man, and they delighted his audiences, particularly children. He loved telling stories about being put down by children. “You know what the kids at school say about you?” a girl of thirteen asked him. “That when you were young you were handsome. They say you are now old and ugly.” When a girl of five asked him why he spent so long in jail, and he explained, she replied, “You must be a very stupid old man.” With children everywhere—despite or because of his own family problems—he could descend from his towering image to rediscover his own simpler self. But while he could sound like an innocent abroad, his instinctive ability to relate to all kinds of people made him a master politician.
29
Revolution to Cooperation
AS A POLITICAL leader at home, Mandela had one overwhelming advantage: he had descended as if from the clouds, with all his principles intact, unsullied by intrigue or squalid maneuvers, with no sense of his having climbed “the greasy pole.” His unequaled period in jail had protected him from criticism and abuse, and earned him credentials which no one dared question. He had no serious rival in sight.
But in between his triumphant foreign tours he was soon facing more skeptical audiences at home. Like many world heroes—like both Churchill and Smuts after the Second World War—his global acclaim did not necessarily help his domestic career. Many white South Africans complained that he was too aloof, and could not control his own people’s violence, while a few blacks thought he was forgetting the grass roots. And he faced a huge task in leading his disorganized party toward political power. He still had no vote, and no official status except as a rebel leader. His only effective levers against the Afrikaner government were sanctions, which depended on world support, and the threat of armed force, requiring guerrilla troops who were still ineffective. While he was acclaimed throughout the world as the great liberator, the new Moses or Messiah, he had no tangible power inside his own country, and no convincing liberation army.
De Klerk was still in command of a formidable military machine, police force and intelligence system: and he had no intention of giving way to a black majority unless he was compelled to. “No government anywhere in the world,” Mandela said later, “will surrender power without a tremendous amount of pressure.”1 De Klerk was rapidly making his government acceptable to the West; and he was encouraged by Western leaders, including Mrs. Thatcher in Britain and Helmut Kohl in Germany, to look for alternative federal or confederal systems which would prevent domination by any single party—that is, by the ANC. The Afrikaners had long looked to Europe for models of separate development: back in 1984 President Botha had said that Switzerland and Yugoslavia had “found the key to cooperation and harmony.”2 De Klerk still clung to a policy of “group rights” which could play tribes against each other. Mandela had already argued with him before leaving jail that group rights really meant apartheid through the back door, and de Klerk’s brother Willem, among others, soon persuaded him that “group rights based on race or colour are unacceptable.” But de Klerk still supported “the inalienable right of each cultural and language group to fulfill the imperatives of its identity”: a right which could easily be stretched to encourage tribal divisions.3
Mandela quickly realized that de Klerk was in no hurry to begin negotiations, and suspected he was playing for time, hoping Mandela would “fall on his face.”4 And he was soon suspicious of the role of the police: on March 26, 1990, they attacked a crowd of ANC demonstrators in Sebokeng, south of Johannesburg, killing twelve. He complained angrily to de Klerk that the President could not “talk about negotiations on the one hand and murder our people on the other,” and postponed the first talks. He thought de Klerk was looking for ways to retain a minority veto, to frustrate the majority.
South African military intelligence officers had their own secret plans for dividing the blacks. They had done so in Namibia, using “dirty tricks” to weaken the majority black party, SWAPO, and build up a loose coalition of ethnic parties, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA). Now they planned to weaken the ANC in the same way. They hoped to delay the transition long enough to allow the government to create an alliance with other black parties, including Inkatha, which could beat the ANC at the polls.5 The South African security forces in Namibia were not demobilized, but moved back into South Africa. “To all intents and purposes, then,” the Truth Commission later found, “operatives and soldiers moved from one theatre of war to another.” And many members of military intelligence had a very crude notion of their role after the ANC was legalized. As one of them told the Truth Commission: “We all thought: this is it, fuck the kaffirs, this is the time to sort them out.”6
Mandela urgently needed to rebuild and unify the ANC after its thirty-year ban, to bring together its scattered elements into a disciplined party, in order to begin negotiations with de Klerk. The leaders in exile were soon able to return, after talks with the secret service to ensure their safety. Most of them expected to come to power within five years. But they knew that the negotiations would be arduous, and set about selecting a team for the initial talks. Mandela was determined to include his old friend Joe Slovo, the Secretary of the Communist Party, now white-haired and mellowed: de Klerk at first absolutely refused, but he eventually agreed that each side must be free to choose anyone i
t wanted.7
On May 2, 1990, the ANC and government teams met to begin preliminary talks at Groote Schuur, de Klerk’s official residence. It was a unique gathering: black leaders had, as Thabo Mbeki said, “been striving for more than a century to sit and talk with the government.” Mandela and de Klerk stood in the garden in front of their delegations of eleven. They showed a striking racial contrast. All the government team were white male Afrikaners; while the ANC eleven included two whites, one Indian and one Coloured with the seven blacks: two of the team were women.
Both leaders made eloquent nonpartisan statements. Mandela hoped they would “engage in this sacred exercise without seeking advantage for their particular political organisation.… All those of us who are hostages of the past must transform ourselves into new men and women who shall be fitting instruments for the creation of the glorious new South Africa which is possible and necessary to realise.” He talked briefly in Afrikaans, and gave his own account of Afrikaner history, which impressed the Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, who was meeting Mandela for the first time.8 De Klerk talked about “the irreversible process of normalisation which has already started.” The two teams exchanged reminiscences and jokes: Afrikaner ministers were visibly surprised by the fluency and knowledge of the black leaders, and both sides felt foolish (said Thabo Mbeki) that they had not had discussions years before, and surprised that “nobody in the room had horns.” They were all in the same boat, said Pik Botha to an ANC delegate, surrounded by “sharks to the left and right.” De Klerk was impressed to find Mandela a good listener who argued his case as a trained lawyer, though he would later complain that Mandela would “admonish us with long monologues full of recriminations”; he would decide that Mandela had been “scarred” by his experiences, and had no real vision of the future.9
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