Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  The biggest newspaper group—the Argus group, led by the Johannesburg Star—had been bought after the elections by the Irish tycoon Tony O’Reilly, with Mandela’s blessing, and renamed the Independent group. O’Reilly and other proprietors gradually began introducing some black editors as well as more black journalists. But Mandela was skeptical about such changes: “As long as the newspapers are owned by a white, conservative minority, those promotions are simply tokens without power,” he said on television in December 1997.27 He often sounded more impatient with black editors than white, including those of the Sowetan—whose Chairman was now his old friend Nthato Motlana, to whom he often complained about what he saw as the paper’s bias against the ANC.28 Nor was he satisfied when Motlana, together with Cyril Ramaphosa, took control of the TML group, which owned the popular Sunday Times. “Even if Ramaphosa and Motlana have a controlling share,” he explained in 1997, “there are many areas where power is not with them.”29 He suspected, with some justification, that black reporters’ copy was still being heavily edited by conservative white subeditors: “We all know what happens in the newsrooms.”30 But he also had occasional grievances against individual black journalists. The outspoken young columnist Kaizer Nyatsumba complained in the Star in October 1996 about the “Old Man’s wrath”: “The truth is out, and it is frightening: our saintly emperor has no clothes on!” Mandela was hurt, and his communications chief, Joel Netshitenzhe, accused Nyatsumba of “wallowing in invective.”31 Mandela complained when the black editor of City Press, Khula Sibiya, inaccurately criticized him for interfering in the appointment of the Chief Justice. Later he met twenty black editors, including Sibiya, and made peace; he told them that the ANC did not want “a lapdog press,” but that they could not expect him to fold his arms when they impugned his integrity.32

  He was angry when editors—like Brian Pottinger of the Sunday Times or Peter Sullivan of the Star—acquiesced with him in private, and then attacked the ANC in print: “They say they agree with you and later say the opposite,” he complained. “I’m an old man, and I don’t want to be taken for a ride by young people,” he told Sullivan. “Do you remember the article in the Star where you said there was nothing worthwhile Mandela had done except to dismiss his wife?”33 (Mandela later apologized to Sullivan, after failing to trace the comment.)

  Journalists worried that Mandela was seeking to muzzle opposition, like African governments elsewhere; but he tried to reassure them: “It is a mistake that some of our neighbouring countries have made to crush opposition parties. If you do that, the whole process of transformation will slip away.”34 But he saw himself as being entitled to a simple right to reply: “If you feel I am wrong, you will say so …” he told Jim Jones, editor of Business Day. “But give us the right to say what we think too.”35 He accused the media of double standards, defending their own freedom of speech while regarding any government counterattack as an attempt to suppress them.36 In fact, he remained personally averse to censoring anything, including pornography. The sleazy South African edition of Hustler magazine had already embarrassed his staff in 1996, when it showed one of his secretaries posing in the nude; she reappeared in a later issue as “Nelson’s Girl, in the buff … the horny secretary who rocked the Presidency.”37 Then, in February 1998, Hustler rudely featured Mandela as “Asshole of the Month.” Lindiwe Sisulu, the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, slammed the issue as “vile, outrageous and obscene,” and considered banning it. But Mandela laughed the matter off, and said he preferred that the magazine should use “its own sense of morality and values.” He surprised his Secretary of Cabinet, Jakes Gerwel, by asking: “Have you seen this month’s Hustler?”38

  Mandela continued to be wary about the more conservative press. In December 1997 he accused it of conspiring with counterrevolutionary forces to undermine the multiracial democracy.39 “The bulk of the mass media in our country has set itself up as a force opposed to the ANC,” he said at the fiftieth ANC conference at Mafikeng, to cries of “You tell them, comrade!” and “Paparazzi!” “The media uses the democratic order as an instrument to protect the legacy of racism.” But his main concern was to defend his mission of reconciliation, and he was equally fierce with black editors who complained that he was neglecting the underprivileged masses and was too preoccupied with placating whites. “It is about nation-building and reconciliation that senior black journalists attack me,” he told editors in November 1996. “We would have had bloodshed unless we had made these into fundamental policy. This country would have gone up in smoke.”40

  Mandela’s reconciliation could never be a simple question of forgiveness; and the tens of thousands of victims of torture and the families of dead comrades could not agree to sweep the horrors of the past under the carpet. Mandela believed that with the exception of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, “there is no evil which has been so condemned by the entire world as apartheid.”41 The ANC had to find a way to forgive without forgetting. The result was Mandela’s launch in February 1996 of his government’s most controversial innovation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

  The Truth Commission—as many of its critics forgot—originated as part of the hard bargain of the “negotiated revolution.” President de Klerk and his security forces had constantly insisted on a general amnesty, with a self-interest which exasperated Mandela; the ANC could not allow the apartheid regime “to grant amnesty to itself.”42 After fierce arguments de Klerk eventually agreed with Mandela on a formula: a commission would grant individual amnesties on condition that the perpetrators revealed the truth, and could prove that their actions had been politically motivated. Many ANC activists thought the bargain far too generous: “Now I know that my wife’s killers will go free,” said Joe Slovo, whose wife, Ruth First, had been killed by a letter bomb.43 His daughter Gillian would be appalled when she heard policemen callously testifying as to how they had murdered her mother, in order to gain amnesty. But, as she recognized: “The TRC was never supposed to be about justice; it’s about the truth.”44

  The ANC wanted to avoid a trial of “war criminals” like that of the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, which could create martyrs. ANC lawyers looked at other models in Eastern Europe, Chile and Argentina, and came up with their own solution, “between amnesty and amnesia.” The Truth Commission, unlike the Latin American investigations, would have quasi-judicial powers to grant individual amnesties, with subpoena powers and hearings in public. But applicants for amnesty would have to come out with the full truth. The Truth Commission was thus able to reveal a much more detailed and credible picture of torturers, murderers and victims than any previous investigations anywhere in the world. It also acquired a more religious character when Mandela appointed Archbishop Tutu as Chairman, with a Methodist preacher, Alex Boraine, as his deputy. De Klerk saw Boraine as “a zealot and an inquisitor,” and having first supported a Truth Commission, he argued angrily with Mandela about its membership.45 Tutu’s chairmanship turned the subsequent hearings into a mixture of trial, confessional and morality play, with an African dimension. Ubuntu (brotherhood) was actually written into the South African constitution: “a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation.”46

  The Commission was dedicated in February 1996 in the Anglican cathedral in Cape Town, before a mixed and colorful audience including Winnie Mandela. “I invite you to join in the search for truth,” said the motto written by the Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar, “without which there can be no genuine reconciliation.” Priests from several faiths, including Jewish and Buddhist, recited their blessings. Mandela gave a subdued address, repeating that “We can forgive but we can never forget,” and promising that the Commission would be free from all political interference. Tutu spoke with untypical brevity: “For once,” he said, “the Archbishop does not have too many words, thank goodness.” He would keep his distance from Mandela and the ANC: by November 1996
he was threatening to resign when the ANC resisted seeking amnesties on the grounds that theirs was “a just struggle.”47 But de Klerk and most Afrikaners would increasingly depict the TRC as an arm of the ANC government.

  Over the next two years the much-publicized hearings of the Truth Commission revealed more horrific stories than most politicians, including Mandela, had imagined, as both perpetrators and victims described the cold-blooded details of torture and assassinations, which were played out on TV, radio and the press. The ANC had its own dark history of political crimes, and eventually provided a report admitting that twenty-two members had been executed in camps abroad for offenses including mutiny, betrayal, rape and murder.48 But most of the evidence was inevitably about the atrocities committed by the forces of apartheid.

  Officials and politicians who declined to apply for amnesty could still be prosecuted through the normal legal processes; the former Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan, was charged with others with conspiring to order massacres in KwaZulu, in a sensational trial. The ANC faced a setback when Malan was acquitted, but Mandela immediately accepted the judgment. And the Truth Commission soon afterward achieved a breakthrough when senior officers of the apartheid security forces began implicating others, including Eugene de Kock, known as “Prime Evil,” who ran the notorious Vlakplaas camp, where death squads were organized; he fingered de Klerk as his ultimate boss. Soon, in a flood of confessions, police and army officers revealed systematized torture and murder. Victims’ bodies were cut up or burned to ashes; documents called for “elimination,” “neutralisation” and “removing from society”; the assassins of Steve Biko described in gruesome detail how they murdered him.49

  The commissioners tried to trace the responsibility to the top, and to persuade politicians to admit their mistakes. Some ex-Ministers made partial apologies: Pik Botha admitted that all Cabinet Ministers at least suspected that the police were killing or torturing opponents, but failed to take steps against it: “I deeply regret this omission. May God forgive me.”50 Adriaan Vlok, the former Police Minister, at first would only admit: “We at the top took certain decisions and used certain terminology without thinking about it.”51 But he later made clear that de Klerk himself had given orders. De Klerk remained evasive. He said that “the National Party is prepared to admit its many mistakes of the past and is genuinely repentant”; but he insisted that the government’s “unconventional” strategies “never included the authorisation of assassination, murder, torture, rape, assault or the like.”52 After further revelations de Klerk still denied that the government had given the security forces a license to kill: Tutu replied with emotion that he could not understand his denial, in the light of the “avalanche of information.”53

  The ultimate responsibility for many atrocities in the 1980s lay with the State Security Council (SSC), which had been chaired by President P. W. Botha; and the Commission insisted he should testify. But Botha denounced the TRC as a circus, attacked its religious basis and refused to appear. Botha’s friends warned Mandela not to make the mistake of turning him into a martyr, as he had turned Mandela into a martyr in prison.54 Both Mandela and Tutu tried to avoid a showdown: Mandela even offered to accompany Botha to the hearings. Botha still refused, after being charged in court with defying the summons. But the Commission released documents which showed how the SSC under Botha’s chairmanship had instructed that opponents should be “neutralised,” and had listed people who might require “methods other than detention.”55 The Commission’s eventual report, after listing the “gross violations” under his leadership, found that “Botha contributed to and facilitated a climate in which the above gross violations of human rights could and did occur, and as such is accountable for such violations.”56

  The Truth Commission completed its report in October 1998, with five volumes of careful analysis and findings, which included serious accusations against the ANC. The report aroused furious reactions from both sides. De Klerk, who was accused of covering up bombings, successfully appealed to the Cape High Court to suppress the Commission’s judgments on him, which were blacked out in the printed volume.57 More worryingly, the ANC, having seen only part of the report, demanded a special hearing: the commissioners were divided, and Tutu cast his deciding vote against the ANC.58 The ANC then decided to go to court in their attempt to stop publication, against the advice of Mandela, who spent an hour arguing with the party’s Secretary-General on the phone. But the ANC application, unlike de Klerk’s, was dismissed.59 Tutu was furious at the ANC’s “abuse of power,” and warned that “yesterday’s oppressed can quite easily become today’s oppressors.… We’ve seen it happen all over the world and we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens here.”60 Tutu may have overreacted, but the ANC certainly made a serious blunder: when the five volumes of the report were duly published the news reports gave the ANC little credit for having originated the investigation, and instead concentrated on their attempt to suppress its findings. “In casting a pall over the truth and reconciliation process,” said the Washington Post, “the party may have raised more questions about its own credibility than that of the Truth Commission.”61

  Thabo Mbeki as President of the ANC was ultimately responsible, and his office boldly claimed that no ANC member could ever concur with “scurrilous attempts to criminalise the liberation struggle.”62 But Mandela did not conceal his disapproval: he agreed that the ANC had committed gross violations, and thought that Mbeki had been too hasty. If they had read the whole report, he said, “perhaps the response of the ANC would have been totally different.”63 Mandela continued to be totally supportive of the Truth Commission: “We must regard the healing of the South African nation as a process, not an event,” he said next month. The TRC, he said, “helped us to move away from the past to concentrate on the present and the future.”64 As head of state he saw himself as having loyalties which went beyond the ANC, of which he was now no longer President. “I am President of the country,” he told me in January 1999. “I have set up the TRC. They have done not a perfect but a remarkable job and I approved everything they did.”65

  In the aftermath there was much discussion about granting a general amnesty in order to forestall divisive prosecutions—particularly against members of Buthelezi’s Inkatha party, who were now coming closer to the ANC. But Mandela had opposed a general amnesty ever since de Klerk had first offered it to the security police in 1994, and he still insisted that amnesties should only be given on individual bases: “There is no question as far as I am concerned of a general amnesty,” he said in November 1998, “and I will resist that with every power that I have.”66

  Mandela’s attitude was a reminder of his ability to override short-term party pressures, and of his fixed belief that the unity of the nation depended both on forgiveness and on facing up to the truth on all sides. And in spite of Mbeki’s blunder, Mandela’s attitude was shared by large numbers of Africans, including many ANC members who complained about the attempt to suppress the report.

  How far was the forgiveness special to Mandela, and how far was it a characteristic of the African people? Samora Machel’s widow, Graça, who was now closer to Mandela than anyone else, had her own experience of atrocities and reconciliation in Mozambique. She saw the South African forgiveness as widespread, and part of a pattern through Africa: “It is there in our culture. When we are faced with such a challenge we draw from that culture which is very deep inside ourselves.” But she also believed that attitudes could have been very different without Mandela’s leadership:

  He symbolizes a much broader forgiveness and understanding and reaching out. If he had come out of prison and sent a different message, I can tell you this country could be in flames. So his role is not to be underestimated too. He knew exactly the way he wanted to come out, but also the way he addressed the people from the beginning, sending the message of what he thought was the best way to save lives in this country, to bring reconciliation.… Some people criticize that he
went too far. There is no such thing as going too far if you are trying to save this country from this kind of tragedy.67

  37

  Withdrawing

  THE COLLABORATION between Mandela and de Klerk in the same government was a historic achievement, and the Government of National Unity was working better than most members had expected. But the two leaders were never easy together. De Klerk not surprisingly found it hard to accept that he was no longer president, and felt that Mandela deliberately humiliated him. Mandela found de Klerk unnecessarily provocative in cabinet, as did de Klerk’s National Party colleagues Pik Botha and Roelf Meyer. Mandela sometimes flared up; but he tried to settle questions amicably afterward, he insists, and appreciated de Klerk’s role.1

  The tension was revealed very publicly in September 1995, after Mandela had made a speech in Johannesburg criticizing the National Party. De Klerk was angry, and tried to avoid Mandela, but Mandela asked to see him, and they eventually found themselves arguing fiercely in the street, waving their fingers at each other in front of the cameras, before Mandela was driven away. Mandela was sorry that they had argued in the street, as he told de Klerk afterward, but he did not apologize. De Klerk felt that Mandela was more bitter, more scarred by his prison years, than he had publicly revealed.2

  De Klerk was having troubles with his own party caucus. He was accused of neglecting the party while being part of the government; the complaints reached a peak in May 1996, when the ANC and other parties agreed on a new constitution which did not provide for the National Party to share power at the executive level before 2004, as they had wanted.3 Many members of the party’s executive committee, particularly from the Western Cape, objected strongly: and on May 9 de Klerk announced that the National Party would withdraw from the Government of National Unity. Most of his six Afrikaner cabinet colleagues were shocked: Pik Botha, after being in the Cabinet for nineteen years, suddenly found himself without a ministerial house, office or job. Leon Wessels, a more recent Minister, thought de Klerk had not tried hard enough to make the GNU work: “He negotiated for it, but didn’t work for it.”4 Roelf Meyer, who had become General Secretary of the party in February, felt betrayed.5