Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  But the negotiations progressed, and by early September de Klerk was giving more ground: he agreed to a Transitional Executive Council (TEC) to prepare for elections. It was the cue for Mandela to finally agree to the lifting of sanctions. He flew to the UN in New York to deliver a historic speech to the General Assembly, with deadpan delivery. He warned that South Africa was still not out of the woods, and that “the very fabric of society is threatened by a process of disintegration.” But the transition to democracy was now enshrined in the law, and he asked the UN “to take all necessary measures to end the economic sanctions you imposed.”74

  The negotiators agreed on an interim constitution which many saw as a model document, incorporating a strict separation of powers, a bill of rights on the American pattern and also a constitutional court. But it made compromises which would prove very expensive: there would be over four hundred Members of Parliament; and nine provinces would be created, each with its own premier and civil service; one would be the Eastern Cape, which embraced two of the most corrupt former homelands, the Ciskei and Transkei. Establishing nine provinces in place of the previous four was a concession to the federalists, but they would strain the future administration beyond the limit.

  The most crucial clause was the last, about majority voting and safeguarding minorities. Mandela and de Klerk argued through the final night of November 17–18. De Klerk still insisted that the winning party must have a two-thirds majority for crucial issues, but Mandela argued that he could not govern anyway without the support of de Klerk (“Whether I like him or not is irrelevant. I need him”).75 Some ANC negotiators were prepared to concede a 60 percent majority, but Mandela stood firmer than any: he told de Klerk that he could not run a cabinet without a simple majority of 50 percent. De Klerk by now was more willing than many of his colleagues to accept simple majority rule, and he gave way, putting his hopes on the “consensus-seeking spirit” mentioned in the constitution. “It was something I thought we should never win,” said Joe Slovo. “Majority rule will apply,” said Mandela. “We just hope we will never have to use it.”76

  The next day de Klerk’s Cabinet colleagues were close to mutiny. “You’ve given South Africa away,” the negotiator Tertius Delport had told him beforehand.77 But eventually de Klerk persuaded them to accept, and at midnight both sides passed the new constitution. The ANC celebrated into the small hours—it was also Ramaphosa’s birthday. But there remained ominous absentees from the feasting, including both Inkatha and the Conservative Party, who would not recognize the agreement.

  The agreement certainly marked a fundamental retreat by de Klerk. “The decision to surrender the right to national sovereignty,” he said in London three years later, “is certainly one of the most painful that any leader can take … we had to accept the necessity of giving up the ideal on which we have been nurtured.”78 But he could claim that it marked an almost equal retreat for the ANC militants who at the beginning had appeared to dominate their party. “In a sense Mandela and his negotiators sold out the ‘National Democratic Revolution,’ ” wrote Adam, Slabbert and Moodley, “whereas de Klerk and his negotiators sold out Afrikaner minority domination. The one sacrificed ideological purity and correctness, the other political power.”79

  Certainly the ANC had come a long way from the radical economic policies they had proposed in 1990. Although Mandela had rejected nationalization at the world forum in Davos in February 1992, the ANC had retained hopes of ambitious state planning. They set up a Macro Economic Research Group (MERG) under their economic adviser Vella Pillay, with strong support from the trade unions and the communists, which made bold plans for expansion. But Pillay soon became conscious of unseen pressures. ANC leaders including Trevor Manuel and Tito Mboweni visited the International Monetary Fund in Washington; tycoons from the Brenthurst Group—first set up by Mandela and business friends—met with the ANC to discuss economic problems; while the British and American Ambassadors kept inquiring about MERG’s plans. Many former ANC communists, including Joe Slovo, were disillusioned with Marxist economics after watching the collapse of the Soviet Union. And as ANC leaders faced the prospect of power, they were worried about state spending in the face of galloping inflation and a growing deficit under de Klerk’s government. By the time Pillay launched the MERG document “Making Democracy Work” in November 1993 Mandela had withdrawn his offer to write a foreword—just when the ANC negotiators at the World Trade Centre were agreeing on a secret “Letter of Intent” which committed them to reducing the deficit, to high interest rates and to an open economy, in return for access to an IMF loan of $850 million, if required.80 The settlement with international capitalism was almost as important as the settlement with de Klerk. “Just as the ANC saw power within its grasp,” wrote the journalist John Matisonn, who analyzed the changes, “globalisation was taking away some of the sovereignty of all governments.”81

  Mandela and de Klerk were both praised around the world for averting catastrophe and making peace at a time when killings were continuing in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. Where, it was asked, was their Mandela, or their de Klerk? So it was not surprising when, at the end of 1993, they were proclaimed joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize put Mandela in the tradition of Luthuli and Tutu, both earlier laureates. But some militants were outraged. “It was an insult to give it to him jointly with his jailer,” Winnie Mandela said afterward. “It was a bribe, part of a gigantic plot to make him an instrument of peace for the white man.”82

  The Nobel ceremony in Oslo in December did not reveal much reconciliation between the two leaders. De Klerk told the Norwegian assembly that both black and white had “repented” the past, but he made no apology himself, while his wife, Marike, objected to Mandela sitting next to the Norwegian Prime Minister. When the two prizewinners appeared on the hotel balcony a crowd of Norwegians gathered below, holding candles according to the tradition. But de Klerk was put out when he heard ANC slogans and shouts of “Kill the Boer!”; and when the crowd sang “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” he went on talking to his wife, and soon withdrew from the balcony.83 Mandela described the occasion as “a milestone for two former enemies building a new South Africa.” But they still sounded rather like enemies. When Mandela was asked on Norwegian television whether de Klerk was a political criminal, he replied: “Almost everybody in government is a political criminal.” And in Stockholm soon afterward, Mandela gave a combative impromptu speech in which he blamed de Klerk for being involved in the continuing violence. De Klerk bit his tongue, he recalled later, “with the greatest self-control.”84

  Back in Cape Town, de Klerk was still angered by the ANC’s “derogatory utterances”: they showed, he said, that “the ANC has no political message for the future.” Mandela explained why his relations with de Klerk were strained: de Klerk had allowed “the slaughter of innocent people because they are black. It will remain a stain against him.” De Klerk would note the irony that they were both receiving the world’s highest accolade as peacemakers while their relationship “was characterized by so much vitriol and suspicion.”85

  De Klerk was convinced that Mandela was overwhelmingly responsible for the vitriol. He was exasperated by the contrast between Mandela’s global charisma as the man of peace and forgiveness, and his unforgiving attacks on himself and his party. Certainly Mandela often seemed harsh with de Klerk. De Klerk’s wife, Marike (whom he later divorced), was “dumbfounded” by the humiliations: “Whenever Nelson Mandela telephoned him to say that evidence of a third force had been found, or that police had discovered some sinister activity or other, he had to decide: is this enough reason to put an end to negotiations?”86

  But Mandela had to be the “man of steel” through the negotiations: the more he made compromises and retreated from the armed struggle, the more he had to show his militant followers that he was being tough with the enemy. More important, he still felt personally betrayed by de Klerk. The more facts that emerged about the third force and secret p
olice plots, the less convincing he found de Klerk’s protestations that he knew nothing about them. Meanwhile the deadly results became still more apparent.

  Who deserved the most credit for the settlement? The debate still continues. De Klerk, having inherited the process begun by P. W. Botha, had seen the historic necessity and followed it to its conclusion, taking risks without losing his nerve, and narrowly keeping his fractious party together. Mandela had more able lieutenants, and a clearer goal to unify his movement. But it was doubtful whether anyone but Mandela, with his unique credentials and history of sacrifice, could have persuaded revolutionaries to abandon the armed struggle and the “seizure of power” without a violent political backlash. “Without Mandela South African history would have taken a completely different turn,” said Joe Slovo in 1994, despite his Marxist’s skepticism of the role of any individual in history:

  And that is not just because of his charisma or his status, but basically because of his leadership and initiative from Robben Island. It is a fact that it was he who triggered the negotiations.… Tambo was absolutely irreplaceable: he kept the organization going, he kept the people together. But when it came to facing the post-1990 period, the role of Mandela is absolutely unique.87

  33

  Election

  MANDELA WAS fighting his first general election in 1994 at the age of seventy-five—two years older than Ronald Reagan during his second U.S. presidential campaign in 1984; the same age as William Gladstone in his last campaigns as British Prime Minister in 1894 and 1895. They were at the end of their electioneering; Mandela was at the beginning. But the opportunity for equal political rights had been his chief demand for the past fifty years, for which he had sacrificed much of his life; and his whole career had been leading up to this election.

  The ANC set up a professional campaign through a hundred offices, organized by three veterans of UDF campaigns in the eighties, Popo Molefe, Terror Lekota and Khetso Gordhan. They hired Stanley Greenberg, a fast-talking American expert with a humorous mustache who had worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. He advised them to listen to the grass roots and to set up People’s Forums all over the country.1 But everyone knew that their crucial asset was Mandela himself, who personified his party and whose bright aura had recovered from all the blows of the past four years.

  His previous varying images—Mandela the chief, the showman, the revolutionary, the guerrilla leader, the prisoner, the statesman—were now subsumed by Mandela at the hustings, who could play a different role to each audience. He sometimes addressed four People’s Forums a day: they reminded him of the Chief’s meetings he had watched as a boy. And he still enjoyed seeing new faces after his prison years, particularly young faces. “I want to put you all in my pocket,” he would say again and again. “I am seventy-five, but among you I feel like a young man of sixteen,” he would repeat. “You are the people who inspire me every day of my life.”

  Mandela had his own team traveling with him, including Barbara Masekela; Joel Netshitenzhe, who wrote some of his best speeches; and Carl Niehaus, who looked after the media. The campaign was often exhausting and lonely. “The private meetings could be horrible,” said one of the team, “with little genuine about them; each person wanted a little bit of him.” But in public Mandela showed respect for all kinds of people: when spectators laughed at a group of Griqua chiefs who were singing tribal songs, he was furious. “He had a sense of his own image,” said Carl Niehaus, “but in public life the icon never seemed separate from the human being. Madiba was the campaign.”2

  Mandela’s public speaking was far from thrilling: Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times judged him “one of South Africa’s most boring speakers. By the time he has finished, he has often lost half the crowd.” He could sometimes sound like a headmaster reproving young people: “I make my own bed every day,” he told a crowd of six thousand in a Cape Town township. “I can cook a decent meal, I can polish a floor. Why can’t you do it?”3 But once he mingled with the crowds and talked to individuals, particularly with children, he projected all the concentrated charm of a born politician. His card-index memory could identify names and faces he had last seen half a century ago; while like other lonely leaders he seemed to gain warmth from the crowds that he lacked at home. “Was it real human feeling, or was it brilliant PR?” his aide Barbara Masekela wondered. “You will never know, but does it matter?”4 Mandela seemed much more at ease than when he first left prison: he often abandoned his suits to relax in the bright-colored, loose-fitting shirts which President Suharto had first introduced him to in Indonesia, when he gave him six. When a child asked him why he wore them, he replied: “You must remember I was in jail for twenty-seven years. I want to feel freedom.”5

  His rapport with young people had led him into a stubborn one-man crusade to reduce the voting age from eighteen to sixteen, or even fourteen. “They say that a person under eighteen can’t think correctly and make a wise choice,” he said in May 1993. “We reject that, and demand the voting age should be from fourteen.” “I am going to fight and win this battle,” he said two months later. It gave useful ammunition to his critics: “an aging, erratic black liberation leader,” the London Sunday Times called him, while a newspaper cartoon showed a baby in nappies putting a ballot paper into the box—which Mandela much enjoyed.6 And the ANC executive refused to endorse the proposal. Only sixteen countries gave the vote to sixteen-year-olds, Albie Sachs pointed out—including Albania and North Korea, which were worse than none.7 “The organisation gave a resounding no,” recalled Maharaj, “and the matter was never raised again.”8

  But most of Mandela’s electoral instincts were shrewd; and he was uniquely able to muster militant blacks while also reassuring white voters. He kept urging young whites to stay in South Africa, where they were needed; while he warned black audiences that they could not do without the whites. “Those who do not know how useful whites are,” he told a crowd in the shack town of Khayelitsha, “know nothing about their own country.” He took special pains with his speeches in Afrikaans, which he rehearsed with his adviser Carl Niehaus, though he still spoke with a strong Xhosa accent. He was far from a demagogue, and was easily outbid by fiery young populists—and particularly by Winnie, who had bounced back into politics when she was elected President of the ANC Women’s League in December 1993. She was a tireless campaigner, visiting remote, impoverished voters whom other politicians avoided, and telling them she would ensure that the ANC would deliver on its promises. But most ANC speakers avoided crude demagogy, and Mandela still could not be seriously challenged as the people’s hero.

  Mandela was determined to show that the ANC was a responsible party, ready to rule. He warned his colleagues to be cautious in their policy making: “The Third World is littered with the relics of liberation movements which have successfully liberated their countries from the yoke of colonial oppression,” he said in May 1992, “only to be defeated at the polls in the first post-colonial elections.” The ANC had worked out an ambitious Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which promised “a better life for all.” The program, which aimed to build a million houses over the next five years, to extend electricity and water, and to provide free education for everyone, was discussed with industrial tycoons, including Harry Oppenheimer. Mandela explained that it had “not a single reference to nationalisation … not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology.”9

  Mandela knew he depended heavily on the media, and he had learned much about handling journalists after his three decades away from them. He knew how to adjust to each medium, when to be discreet or indiscreet, when to put his hand in front of the tape recorder. He recognized and related to individual journalists—particularly attractive women—with his instinct for flattery, or “Xhosalization.” They found it hard when writing about Mandela, said the BBC correspondent Fergal Keane, “to exercise anything remotely resembling real detachment.” “We are completely, hopelessly, charmed by Mandela,”
admitted John Carlin of the London Independent.10

  But the white South African editors and owners were not seduced: the English-language Argus group (except for the Johannesburg Star), together with the Johannesburg Sunday Times and Business Day, supported the small, white Democratic Party; most of the Afrikaans papers supported de Klerk’s National Party; only the Weekly Mail and the New Nation endorsed the ANC. The conservative press thrived on doomsday stories about the inevitability of bloodshed between the ANC and both Zulus and right-wing Afrikaners—which were taken up by the conservative media overseas. In London the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times competed with scare stories, encouraged by the Zulu lobby including John Aspinall and Laurens van der Post: “BLOOD SET TO FLOW AS ZULUS TALK WAR,” announced the Sunday Times in December. “CHAOS LIES AHEAD, SAYS ‘WHITE ZULU,’ ” it headlined in February above an interview with Aspinall (“It’s all going to break up. Then it will be a loose confederacy like Switzerland and it will work very well”). And it quoted van der Post (“a confidant of Prime Ministers and royalty”) as saying: “The world has become hypnotised by the mythological figure of Mandela even as South Africa slides into chaos.”11 The ANC compiled its own report on the Sunday Times stories. Mandela would never forget the “prophets of doom who thought there would never be changes in this country without bloodshed.”12

  Mandela was especially valuable to the ANC as a fund-raiser, showing a mercenary persistence which surprised colleagues. He was not fastidious about his contacts with businessmen like Sol Kerzner, the gambling tycoon of Sun City, who expected favors in return. He seemed to enjoy extracting money from old supporters of apartheid, like a chief expecting tribute; and he had no compunction about rejecting inadequate gifts. After one big company with a proapartheid record had given the ANC R250,000 they invited Mandela to lunch; he pulled out their check and told them it was an insult: he expected seven figures.