The crime wave was a challenge not only to the police, but to Mandela’s liberal policy based on human rights; and it soon produced a clamor for a return to the death sentence, from both whites and blacks (including his ex-wife). Mandela, who had his own sharp memories of the death penalty, was totally against it, seeing it as “a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.” What deterred a criminal, he insisted, was not the death penalty, but his knowing “that if I commit an offense I will end up in jail.” And he thought that the white minority had the idea in the back of their minds “that the death sentence is going to be used against blacks, not really against whites.”24 He rejected any pressure to bring it back: “This government,” he reasserted in February 1999, “is not about to join the chorus baying for the death sentence or to reverse our human rights gains.”25
As the crime wave continued, it was seen as the main cause of the growing white emigration from South Africa: one survey in 1998 found that 96 percent of emigrants gave crime as a reason for their departure, while in a later poll 74 percent of skilled whites said they were ready to leave South Africa because of it.26 The numbers emigrating were impossible to verify because many left the country as tourists, but did not return. According to the official figures of the Bureau of Statistics, only about ten thousand people left South Africa in 1997; but the real number was certainly larger, and it included doctors, accountants and computer experts, whose skills were seriously needed.27
Mandela, who had always urged whites to stay, reacted angrily to the complaints of potential emigrants. In September 1998 he made a speech in Mauritius suggesting that those who left were cowards: “The real South Africans are being sorted out.” He claimed that “fear over crime is mainly a white preoccupation, fomented by a white-owned press.”28 Some prominent Africans agreed that white emigrants showed a lack of patriotism: “If their first option when faced with a difficult situation is to leave the country,” said Murphy Morobe, “what does it say to us about the sacrifice we have made?”29 But many whites were indignant: Tony Leon of the Democratic Party accused Mandela of being racially divisive, and asked him to retract his words. The widow of the liberal novelist Alan Paton, who had suffered horrific burglaries, explained why she was returning to England in an article in the London Sunday Times headed “Fly the Beloved Country”: “President Mandela has referred to us who leave as ‘cowards’ and says the country can do without us. So be it.… We are leaving because crime is rampaging through the land.” But Paton’s son David publicly contradicted his “abrasive” stepmother’s “drab misleading picture,” and blamed the apartheid government.30 Mandela remained impatient with the preoccupation with crime in local right-wing newspapers. “The idea is to frighten investors not to come,” he said in January 1999. “It’s absolutely deliberate.”31
Certainly the white protests about crime brought out all the differences between the races: they seldom made any reference to the blacks who were the overwhelming majority of victims; and some of the complaints sounded like a replay of the scare stories of the apartheid years about black hordes overwhelming the strongholds of white civilization. For Mandela, as for most of the African majority, the problem of the crime wave was interlocked with the basic problem of transforming the country, and building up a police and a defense force with a common commitment and patriotism which would give equal value to black and white lives.
The basic security of the country still depended on the armed forces. Mandela remained worried about the loyalty of some Afrikaners in the military. Serious thefts of weapons and equipment from military arsenals showed signs of being inside jobs; and a wave of well-organized bank robberies and heists increased suspicions that the military were involved, with some ex-guerrillas from MK. “We’re not out of the wood,” Mandela told me early in 1998, “because some of the Generals who led the army are behind the criminal syndicates.”32 Two months later Thabo Mbeki warned that there were “enemies of change still among us.… Some structures set up by the former government to destroy the movement remain intact.”33 Mandela could not give the media evidence for such claims, but a strange story was unfolding behind the scenes.
On February 5, 1998, Mandela was handed an intelligence report by General Meiring, the defense chief, bypassing the Minister of Defence, Joe Modise. It suggested that senior black officers were unfit to command, including Sipho Nyanda, the former MK fighter who was expected to succeed Meiring the next year; and it described how a group of black leaders, including Bantu Holomisa and Winnie Mandela, had been plotting with Robert McBride, the ex-saboteur who had been condemned to death under the apartheid government but who had since been employed in the Foreign Ministry. The report claimed that the conspirators were planning to promote chaos in order to seize power after the next elections in 1999. Mandela was very skeptical about the report, particularly as it fingered black soldiers from the liberation movement, and suspected it was a diversion by old-guard officers who were defending the status quo.34 But he bided his time.
Six weeks later Robert McBride was arrested in Mozambique and charged with gunrunning: the charge sheet alleged that he had been involved in supplying bombs, pistols and rifles to conspirators, including Winnie Mandela, eighteen months before.35 The government at first refused to comment, declaring that they would not feed the “ill-intentioned frenzy and offensive.” In fact, Mandela at first thought McBride’s arrest gave credence to Meiring’s report, but then he began to suspect that McBride had been framed.36
Then, on March 27, Mandela revealed that he had received the report seven weeks earlier, and that it alleged “organized activities with the aim to overthrow the government.” He asked three judges, headed by the Chief Justice, Ismail Mahomed, to investigate how the report was prepared and verified. The judges, after questioning Meiring and others, decided that the report was “without substance,” that it was based on a single unreliable source, a spy who had been arrested with McBride, and that it had never been checked for its veracity.37 General Meiring asked to be retired early, which Mandela agreed was “appropriate and honorable,” and soon afterward Mandela appointed General Nyanda as his successor.
Some ANC colleagues who had never trusted Meiring thought that Mandela should have moved against him much earlier. But Mandela had handled the crisis shrewdly and characteristically. By leaving the decision to the law he had avoided a direct political clash with the Afrikaner old guard, and by discrediting them he had eased the succession of black commanders. It was a remarkable transition: eight years earlier Nyanda had been in charge of the secret military force Operation Vula; now he was in command of all South Africa’s defense forces.
There were still serious military threats from other quarters. Political killings had fallen sharply—from 3,794 in the peak year of 1993 to 470 in 1997.38 But there were ominous alliances among criminals, politicians and religious groups. And Mandela still suspected that a residual third force was at work in some areas, destabilizing the country by arming local warlords, and in league with criminal groups which could finance it. During 1998 the country town of Richmond in KwaZulu-Natal, which had a long history of faction fights, became a battleground between rival warlords; the trouble flared up again in January 1999, when the notorious warlord Sifiso Nkabinde was gunned down in broad daylight, quickly followed by the murder of eleven people in reprisal. Nkabinde was the Secretary of Bantu Holomisa’s party, the UDM, and his assassination was blamed on the ANC, to which he had earlier belonged; but Mandela suspected that the “third force” was engineering the killing to destabilize the region. And more murders of UDM and ANC leaders in the Western Cape in March 1999 aroused similar suspicions.39 Certainly the encouragement of “black-on-black” violence under the previous government had created lethal alliances between criminals and politicians which would be hard to obliterate.
South Africa was still far from peaceful by comparison with most European or North American countries. But compared to the predictions of bloodshed five years e
arlier, as Mandela would often recall, the transition from minority to majority rule had been relatively painless.
After all his fierce arguments, Mandela could still rise above party politics, as the father of his country’s democracy. On March 29, 1999, he made his farewell speech to Parliament, before it adjourned to prepare for the elections of June 2. He depicted himself as one of the generation “for whom the achievement of democracy was the defining challenge,” and recalled how South Africans “finally chose a profoundly legal path to their revolution.” And he ended with the words: “The long walk continues.”40 Thabo Mbeki praised him as “our nearest and brightest star to guide us on our way.”
But Mandela’s opponents also competed to pay tributes. Marthinus van Schalkwyk, de Klerk’s successor as leader of the National Party, called him “everybody’s President,” and promised that his party would be cobuilders of the new nation. Constand Viljoen of the Freedom Front said that “Mandela has always acted as a lord to me.” Tony Leon of the Democratic Party, Mandela’s most acerbic critic, saw him as a leader, like Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, “born with a special kind of grace who seem to transcend the politics of their age.”
*I wrote this in an article on crime for the magazine Drum in October 1951, and discussed the problem in my book Drum in 1956. The Survey of Race Relations in South Africa in 1957–58 showed that the number of convictions of Africans in 1956 amounted to a fifth of the total African population, but that only 4.7 percent of those convictions were for serious crimes.
† The annual number of murders reported to the police increased from 15,109 to nearly 26,832 in the four years of de Klerk’s government (1990–94), but was down to 24,588 by 1997, and fell again in 1998. Serious robberies, after falling, went up from 151 per 100,000 people in 1996 and 1997 to 188 in 1998.
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Image and Reality
HOW LASTING and deep is Mandela’s achievement, behind his dazzling image? A contemporary biographer cannot hope to provide a definitive historical judgment: he can only try to make the most of available sources and portray his subject against the background of his own time. It is easy to overestimate the importance of a living hero with a universal charisma, on a stage whose bright lights can fade soon afterward. Africa has seen many short-lived saviors who have later been toppled from their pedestals, while Mandela’s stature is harder to assess at a time when the world feels a desperate need for great men to admire.
Mandela, like most great leaders, has always been a master of images who knows how to project himself, whether as the Defiance Campaigner, the “Black Pimpernel” or the guerrilla leader. His great occasions—like his long speech at the Rivonia trial or his inauguration as President—have been grandly operatic. Behind the scenes he has always owed much to modest colleagues: the liberation of his people, as he points out himself, was achieved while he was in jail. How far, then, did the imagery connect with the reality of Mandela’s leadership?
Certainly he had to establish his own mythology as part of his challenge to a racist regime: for he was confronting powerful myths—of black inferiority, white invincibility and incompatibility between races. He had to give confidence to a people who had been conditioned into submission, and to personify African dignity and self-respect. And he did that with panache: when he faced an all-white court, buttressed by the whole panoply of the law, he deliberately dressed up in tribal regalia, “carrying on my back the history, culture and heritage of my people.”1
In that kind of showmanship Mandela seemed at first to be following the style of other postwar African nationalist leaders like Kwame Nkrumah or Jomo Kenyatta, who had been imprisoned before taking power in a blaze of glory, and presenting themselves as redeemers or fathers of their people. The fifties were years of heady optimism and illusions, before Africa had to face the difficult realities of government and economics; and many foreign observers as well as black South Africans had expected the apartheid government to crumble rapidly in the face of moral condemnation and the prevailing retreat of European empires.
Mandela, like his colleagues, took some time to realize that he faced a much more testing struggle than his predecessors, and more ruthless opponents than the British colonists to the north. His Afrikaner oppressors were not temporary expatriates, but entrenched landowners who had built up a powerful military and economic structure, supported by Western Cold Warriors, and who were determined to root out black opposition. With hindsight, Mandela was not a very realistic military commander: he seriously underestimated his enemy’s strength, as his political writings make clear, and made careless mistakes which led to his own arrest. But the amateurishness was part of the false optimism of the time.
Some recent critics have judged Mandela’s early career more harshly. The British television commentator Brian Walden accused him in 1998 of being first duped by the communists with whom he allied himself, then embarking on a military campaign “with unbelievable amateurism and fecklessness,” and leading the “most useless and incompetent guerrilla army in history.” Walden argued that Mandela lacked the true ruthlessness of a great leader like Churchill, and that apartheid was brought down in the end not by the ANC, but by Afrikaner tycoons who realized it was bad for business.2
This critique does not stand up to the historical evidence. Mandela, like most shrewd politicians, was always more pragmatic than he sounded. He needed the communists at a time when they were the only available allies, and when white liberals and Western governments were scared away from supporting the ANC. The confidential dispatches of British diplomats show how easily they were intimidated and duped by apartheid governments into joining their anticommunist crusade; while in the end Mandela used the communists, as he foresaw, more than they used him.
Mandela could not avoid committing himself to an armed struggle without losing his black support, when every other avenue of protest was closed; but he never thought it could by itself liberate South Africa. He knew that a truly ruthless military campaign of urban terrorism would have destroyed his country, as it nearly destroyed Algeria; and when from jail he saw South Africa facing chaos, he sought to negotiate—while looking to international pressure and sanctions to bring down apartheid, which they did. The belief that white politicians and businessmen would have put an end to apartheid without the threat of violence is not sustained by the facts. It was only because of the violence, as Oliver Tambo realized, that businessmen became seriously worried. The very limited “armed propaganda,” backed by sanctions, was effective without a major armed confrontation, and Mandela resisted the clamor from the militants for the seizure of power. His lack of military ruthlessness was the key to achieving the transition to democracy without a bloodbath.
Certainly Mandela had an overoptimistic view of the struggle before he went to jail in 1962; but his prison ordeal transformed him into a much more reflective and influential kind of leader, as this book has tried to show. He was cut off from mass audiences, public images and television cameras, stripped down to man-to-man leadership and to the essentials of human relationships, away from the trappings of power. He learned about human sensitivities and how to handle the fears and insecurities of others, including his Afrikaner warders. He was sensitized by his own sense of guilt, both about his family and about friends he had used during his political career; but he was acquiring a deeper confidence, feeling himself “master of my fate,” like a classical hero. Unlike most politicians, in midcareer he had time to become much more thoughtful and questioning, reading biographies and histories. And he deepened his interest in the law, which, though it had put him in jail, he realized provided the only basis for a lasting settlement: the law, not war, was the basis of his hopes for his country’s future.
Mandela’s unpublished essays and writings from jail, as he watched the South African stage as a spectator, showed far more intellectual depth and originality than his early anticolonialist clichés; and he was persistent in getting to the truth, however uncomfortable. He still understood the
importance of his own image as he wrote his autobiography in jail, hoping that it would inspire others—though it was to be suppressed by colleagues abroad. He saw his own icon being built up across the world, quite separately from himself. But he was not fooled by it, and he was very aware of the dangers of the personality cult which had misled other African countries. He talked less about “I” and more about “we,” and was determined “to be looked at as an ordinary human being.”3
The fortitude and resilience of the Robben Island prisoners were a communal achievement, and Mandela might not have maintained his strength without his colleagues. His closest friends like Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada reinforced his courage, and his commitment to reconciliation and forgiveness. But in the end his personal leadership was decisive. When he took his most critical decision—to propose talks with the government—he took it alone. Joe Slovo was probably right in judging that “without Mandela South African history would have taken a completely different turn.”4 His conciliation emerged from his personal development: he had learned how to control his aggression, to “think with his brains, not his blood,” and to channel his energy into the goal of a negotiated victory. He became a much more formidable politician by subordinating his emotions and feelings to his central purpose: even an intimate colleague like Kathrada found him impenetrable. He had been “steeled and hardened,” as Mac Maharaj observed, and his underlying toughness was essential to the success of the negotiations which followed.
But the Mandela who emerged from jail surprised most people who had known him before (including myself), not so much by his political shrewdness as by his humanity and simplicity. He had lost his defensiveness and arrogance as he became more confident of his powers, and he appeared at ease with himself, with a warmth and humor that gave him immediate rapport with all kinds of people, particularly children—which was all the more attractive in contrast to the superhuman images of him in the world outside. He sometimes projected an almost childlike innocence as he insisted on speaking his mind. He showed no signs of the familiar deformities of power: the egomania, pomposity or paranoia which had afflicted so many leaders in the developing world. His mistakes came from the opposite direction: from being too trusting, and seeing the best in everyone, however unworthy. But he could also bring out the best in unexpected people, and his ability to convert past enemies proved essential to his policy of reconciliation.
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