Mandela
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His self-assurance seemed unassailable: even when low or exhausted, he would primp himself to greet a visitor. He remained instinctively aware of his image, with his aristocratic bearing and his well-tailored suits. “His clothes were not peripheral,” Masekela said: “they were central to his political life.” He still felt, as in the fifties, that “clothes make the man.” Once in Oslo he wanted a furry hat and was brought a selection, none of which he approved. Later he disappeared from his hotel to return with his own choice—a Russian-type hat which he was still wearing in 1999. His vanity helped to keep him going. He could fish for compliments (“I’m an ugly old man”), but he knew that his handsome presence could outshine most politicians in the world.39
Would Mandela develop into another African autocrat, accumulating power around himself? South Africans and foreigners watched anxiously for the signs. Certainly Tambo had a genuine humility which Mandela lacked, and was much closer to a saint. Tambo was more loved within the National Executive, more equable, more inclined to listen to everyone, never resentful of being opposed. “Tambo was a natural democrat,” as Albie Sachs put it. “Mandela had to learn.”40
Mandela’s style could offend some of his executive, and in August 1991, while he was traveling abroad, there was a reported plot to cut back his powers and put Ramaphosa in charge of the negotiations with the government. A neat organizational chart had been prepared, which put Ramaphosa as Secretary-General at the top, and Mandela below him; but it was a mistake, as Mandela explained it, based on a wrong analogy with communist parties abroad, where the Secretary was the most important leader. In fact, there was never a serious plot or threat, and the story was blown up by deliberate disinformation. Mandela made light of it afterward; but the executive found him more attentive.41
Mandela’s regal style still owed something to his chiefly background and to his childhood in the Transkei, watching the Regent dispensing judgments to his subjects. The Washington Post correspondent David Ottaway thought Mandela had “an authoritarianism typical of traditional tribal chiefs,” and that he “harbored a secret yearning to be treated as a chief.”42 Certainly he often seemed to fill a psychological need in others for a monarch: the sociologists Adam and Moodley detected a “clamor for royalty” when black car workers devoted overtime without pay to build a luxury Mercedes for Mandela.43 The regal style was often misleading: Mandela could sound autocratic, but he believed passionately in democracy. He remained the “loyal and disciplined member” of the ANC, and when he talked about his “bosses” he was not necessarily joking. His executive could put him down quite toughly, and his contradictory statements reflected their shifts more than his own. “Sometimes I feel they are very wrong,” he explained in 1994, “but I have to pay respect to the majority. I have to go to them one by one to try to persuade them.”44 He could be very forceful in persuasion: he had been stubbornly right on one supreme issue—like Churchill or de Gaulle—when so many were wrong, and had reason to believe in his rightness.
But Mandela faced many painful transitions as the ANC moved away from revolutionary policies toward moderation and compromise. The most difficult arguments were about public ownership and nationalization. The Robben Islanders had debated nationalization in theory for years, but now the National Executive had to agree practical policies which could soon be implemented. Mandela himself still saw nationalizing as the obvious means to reduce inequality and give economic power to blacks. Before he went to jail in 1962, he had seen how the British Labour Party embraced its constitution’s Clause Four, and believed in capturing the “commanding heights” through state ownership. And when in 1990 the British Ambassador, Robin Renwick, argued with him against nationalization he replied: “It was your idea. It was fashionable then.”45 In prison through the seventies and eighties Mandela had not been exposed to the disillusion with state ownership which was being felt around the world; and he could see how South African corporations were working in league with apartheid governments.
By the time of his release in 1990 he was aware that South Africa desperately needed foreign investment to provide economic growth and more jobs, and he promised to campaign for investors as soon as sanctions could be lifted. “Once the situation is settled,” he said in February 1990, “investment in the country is the normal development—which we will want.”46 But he was slow to see, as he admitted later, that the threat of nationalization would scare away long-term investors. He reminded businessmen how Afrikaner governments had used nationalized industries, including railways, steel and South African Airways, to empower and enrich their own people. Why should blacks now be prevented from taking the same advantage?47 But each time he called for nationalization, the Johannesburg stock market turned down: a single speech drove the all-gold index down by 5 percent.48
He became more flexible. He proposed that the ten big conglomerates which dominated the stock exchange need not be nationalized, but could be broken up by antitrust laws. He harked back again to his own interpretation of the Freedom Charter, which would allow African business to “flourish as never before.” He became friendly with business leaders, including Harry Oppenheimer, the archcapitalist. He asked Helen Suzman, his old Robben Island friend, to arrange a lunch with tycoons where (she noted) he “charmed the bloody lot of them.”49 They warned him that nationalization was not the way to wealth creation, and several ANC colleagues including Thabo Mbeki pressed home the point. But his Marxist colleagues were still watchful; and the young comrades in the townships continued to equate capitalism with oppression.
Mandela’s views could be confusing. He seemed more at ease with bankers than trade unionists, and to foreign visitors he did not sound like a socialist. “He’s one of the most conservative people I’ve ever met,” said the playwright Arthur Miller, who spent time with him in late 1990. “Had he been born into a peaceful society he would have been a judge.”50 But Mandela still believed in a classless society, while “painfully aware” of the opposite trend.51 He looked for ways to reduce inequality. In September 1991 he told businessmen that only nationalization could redress the imbalances, though he would welcome an alternative. The confusing signals reflected arguments within the ANC which were more extreme than those that had raged through the socialist parties of Europe; for South Africa had long been an extreme case, both of inequality and of dependence on international capital.
It was not until February 1992, when Mandela went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he finally turned against nationalization. He was lionized by the world’s bankers and industrialists at lunches and dinners. He argued with them that other industrial countries, including Britain, Germany and Japan, had needed nationalized industries to restore their economies after world wars. “We are going through a traumatic experience of war against the people,” he explained, “and therefore we need nationalization.” But he sounded, as one economist complained, like an early Fabian socialist; and he was outgunned by both de Klerk and Buthelezi, who made their own arguments for free enterprise at the conference.
He was finally turned by three sympathetic delegates from the left. The Dutch Minister of Industry was sisterly and understanding, but smashed his argument. “Look, that’s what we understood then,” she explained, “but now the economies of the world are interdependent. The process of globalization is taking root. No economy can develop separately from the economies of other countries.” Leaders from two Asian socialist countries—China and Vietnam—told him how they had accepted private enterprise, particularly after the Soviet Union collapsed. “They changed my views altogether,” recalled Mandela. “I came home to say: ‘Chaps, we have to choose. We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.’ ”52
He still faced battles at home. When the ANC held an economic conference soon afterward he proposed abandoning the option of nationalization, but he was accused of betraying the Freedom Charter and he had to withdraw the proposal. The passionate old a
rguments were still raging through the executive and the townships. It was not until 1993, when the ANC was looking toward an election, that they accepted a more moderate policy of privatizing some industries, and replacing nationalization with the new Reconstruction and Development Programme. Mandela still stuck to his belief in a classless society; but he and his party had accepted that South Africa could not opt out of the global marketplace—which turned out to be more ruthless than they expected.
30
Third Force
WHILE MANDELA was trying to unify and moderate his own party, and prepare it for power, his prospects were being undermined by a terrifying escalation of political violence. The wave of killings through the late eighties surged rapidly after his release, and his inability to prevent them seriously damaged his credibility as a future leader. But the heart of the violence was impossible to penetrate, and the layers of evidence would only gradually be uncovered: it was not until eight years later that the truth became clearer.
At first most of the killings were concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, the beautiful but impoverished heartland of the Zulu people, where the horrors seemed all the worse in the peaceful rural surroundings. Between July 1990 and June 1993, an average of 101 people a month died in “politically related incidents” in KwaZulu-Natal, reaching a total of 3,653 deaths.1 The violence was depicted by most whites as a straightforward tribal conflict between Zulu patriots and Xhosa interlopers seeking to dominate the nation through the ANC. The key to peace appeared to rest with Chief Buthelezi and his Zulu party, Inkatha, which was extending its power. And Inkatha could hold the balance in the upcoming negotiations, for de Klerk’s National Party clearly hoped to bring it, with other tribal groups, onto their side to outvote the ANC.
Mandela in jail had been careful to keep on good terms with Buthelezi, and before his release he had sent him another long letter, urging him to meet Tambo in London. “In my entire political career,” he wrote, “few things have distressed me [as much] as to see our people killing one another as is now happening.”2 Tambo and Sisulu, like other ANC leaders, were very wary of Buthelezi after his past turnabouts, but Mandela had retained his chiefly relationship: he had defended Buthelezi for resisting the government’s pressure to turn KwaZulu into a separate Bantustan, and believed he could persuade him to cooperate with the ANC. “I don’t think there was anybody who was more favorably disposed to Buthelezi than Madiba,” said Sisulu later.3
Mandela hoped for a personal rapprochement with Buthelezi, as chief to chief. He phoned him a week after he left jail, thanking him for refusing to negotiate with Pretoria until he came out and asking to visit him. A week later Mandela boldly went into the lion’s den, to the Zulu stronghold of Durban, to address a rally of 100,000 people, nearly all Zulus, at King’s Park. He wanted Buthelezi to share his platform, but his colleagues opposed this, to Buthelezi’s fury. Mandela suggested a future joint meeting, but the crowd gave “an ominous rumble of disapproval.”4 Mandela appealed to them: “Take your guns, your knives and your pangas and throw them into the sea!” But his appeal, he lamented, “fell on deaf ears.”5 And soon afterward, it turned out, the police secretly provided a grant of R120,000 to Inkatha to fund their own counterrally.6
Mandela had hoped also to deal directly with the King of the Zulus, Buthelezi’s nephew Goodwill Zwelithini, with whom he had his own connections as a former lawyer to the Zulu royal house; but the ANC would not agree to his meeting him without colleagues, as the King insisted. And any meeting with Buthelezi was vetoed by the local ANC leaders led by Harry Gwala, the old Zulu Stalinist from Robben Island, now half paralyzed but still intransigent. “The ANC wanted to choke me,” Mandela would often recall, “when I mentioned Buthelezi.”7
De Klerk would always criticize Mandela for not meeting Buthelezi, which he blamed on Mandela’s “high-handed approach.”8 Could the two leaders have stopped the massacres? “History would have been quite different if Madiba had had his way,” said Buthelezi afterward.9 And Jacob Zuma, the ANC Zulu leader in Natal (who had also been on Robben Island), believed that the ANC was making a serious mistake: “It was important for Buthelezi to feel welcomed, embraced and part of the process.… You could have had absolutely the end of the problem.”10 But the violence on the ground already had its own momentum, and many ANC leaders thought the conflicts could be resolved only further down. Thabo Mbeki was making discreet contacts with local Inkatha leaders, who met the ANC in September, for the first time since the break between the two groups in 1979. Mbeki insisted that Mandela and Buthelezi should not meet until they were part of the process; and it was Mbeki who would in the end produce agreement.11
The killings still escalated, coming closer to civil war, while the police appeared oddly reluctant to intervene. “The attacks were launched blatantly in full daylight,” said a report by Amnesty International, “and often in the presence of the police and in some cases with their active participation.” They spread further in July 1990, when Buthelezi launched the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), intended to bring the Zulu party onto the national stage. “We will not allow the ANC and its SACP partner,” he proclaimed, “to crush all opposition and emerge as the only viable party.” The IFP claimed to have recruited 300,000 members in its first few months, and would soon claim a membership of 1.8 million.12 Shortly afterward political killings erupted in the Transvaal, particularly in the urban areas embraced by Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vereeniging: 4,756 people would be killed in “politically-related violence” in the PWV region over the next three years, according to the Truth Commission’s later report—more than in KwaZulu-Natal.13 It was hard not to connect the violence with the IFP’s national ambitions.
The single-sex hostels for Zulu workers in the towns provided hotbeds of violence, and a hideous massacre occurred in Sebokeng, south of Johannesburg, on July 22, when hundreds of Zulus from hostels were bused in for a mass demonstration. Anticipating trouble, the ANC tipped off the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, who took no action, and the resulting battle left thirty dead, mostly ANC. Mandela visited Sebokeng the next day, and saw the dead bodies in the morgue, hacked and disfigured. He blamed de Klerk rather than Buthelezi, and asked why he had done nothing; he received no proper reply.14
The killings were especially sinister because they seemed timed to upset the negotiations. Three days after Mandela signed the Pretoria Minute with de Klerk in August a new wave of violence swept through the Transvaal townships, killing a thousand blacks in a month. While Mandela was talking with the government, his credibility was being undermined by massacres which he evidently could not control, and white South Africans were pointing to “black-on-black” violence as a sign that the ANC were incapable of government. The plans of military intelligence officers to divide the black opposition appeared to be succeeding: many ANC leaders now seemed to regard Buthelezi as more of an enemy than de Klerk.
The police appeared still more ineffectual as armed gangs began to attack the packed trains which carried black commuters between Soweto and Johannesburg. In the most lethal battle, on September 13, a band of gunmen rampaged through the carriages, killing twenty-six people and injuring a hundred. In all, 572 people would be killed in train violence over the next three years—for which the Truth Commission would later blame Inkatha, the police and the army.15
The ANC responded to the violence by creating their own paramilitary bands, called Self-Defence Units, or SDUs. They claimed to be based on local communities in response to “grassroots demands for protection against the onslaught.” But the ANC authorized the supply of weapons, organized by Ronnie Kasrils, a member of the executive; and the SDUs, which were intended for self-defense, were not closely supervised: “It was a very problematic situation,” Kasrils explained later, “at times extremely confusing.” The Truth Commission would later partly blame the ANC for “contributing to a spiral of violence in the country through the creation and arming of SDUs.”16
Mandela was now convinced by ANC i
ntelligence that the attacks were not simply the work of Inkatha supporters, but were instigated by what he called a “third force” inside the security services which was deliberately trying to prevent talks with the government.* He was becoming less sure about giving up the armed struggle: in September he told a press conference that the ANC might have to start fighting again. In October he warned de Klerk that people perceived that “there are forces close to you, Mr. President, with a double agenda.” De Klerk had in fact already been warned in January 1990, by the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, about a murderous secret organization within the defense forces, with the Orwellian name of the Civil Co-operation Bureau: de Klerk had commissioned an investigation by Judge Louis Harms, who reported in November 1990; but it was a whitewash, dismissing evidence of a death squad based in Vlakplaas outside Pretoria which later turned out to be perfectly true. Mandela found Harms’s report unbelievable, and thought that de Klerk and others in government “chose to look the other way or ignore what they knew was going on under their noses.” By the end of November he was accusing intelligence agencies of orchestrating “the slaughter of our people.” Western intelligence was also concerned: when de Klerk visited the White House in September 1990, President Bush soon said, “I am concerned about evidence … on a ‘third force.’ ”17
The rift widened between Mandela and de Klerk. Mandela kept telephoning de Klerk with new allegations, and often disbelieved the explanations he was given. De Klerk accused Mandela of hypocrisy, since the ANC had its own troublemakers, and resented his tirades: “Mr. Mandela, I did not telephone you to be insulted. Goodbye!”18 Mandela felt all the angrier since he had earlier called de Klerk a “man of integrity,” against the advice of Sisulu and others, for which he was often criticized by the militants. “When he felt betrayed,” said Sisulu, “it was impossible to keep him on that line.” Sisulu was less surprised by de Klerk’s behavior, having always seen him as part of the National Party’s intrigues; but Mandela had given de Klerk his personal endorsement, which he now withdrew. In fact, he had never respected de Klerk, as he had P. W. Botha: now he thoroughly distrusted him.