This, of course, did not mean that Mandela would let evil off the hook, nor was he wilfully oblivious to the excesses of the white apartheid regime. In his single-minded preparation for the future, which had started with the closing of the prison gates behind him, he knew he had to unburden himself of the clutter of resentment and concentrate on what lay ahead. Even if he had started his sentence as an individual, Mandela had been part of a committed fellowship called upon by the exigency of struggle to sacrifice the best years of their lives for a greater good.
Going out alone, with the rest of the Rivonia defendants and fellow prisoners having been released earlier, he knew there would be millions of eyes looking to see what he had become. For months Mandela had been meeting and conducting telephone conversations with a number of people from the ANC and the United Democratic Front (UDF), an umbrella organisation with a broad range of affiliates, including hundreds of youth organisations, scores of civic associations and student organisations. Hours before the actual release, he had consulted with members of the National Reception Committee,* a selection of battle-hardened activists and leaders of the mass democratic movement, which included Cyril Ramaphosa, Valli Moosa, Jay Naidoo and Trevor Manuel, all of whom would play important roles in the future government.† Almost all long-term prisoners have a heightened perception for situations and read them more quickly than others for the simple reason that their survival depends on it. Therefore, while excited at the prospect of being released, Mandela picked up on the anxiety of the ANC representatives who had received very little notice of the change in his release venue from Soweto to Cape Town.
‘The notice was less than twenty-four hours,’ said Valli Moosa. ‘We were quite shocked but none of us gave in to the temptation to ask that he be kept in any longer, though we wanted to ask that.’14
Mandela understood the dilemma that his release posed for both the government and the ANC as a measure of the complexity of the road ahead. On the journey out of Victor Verster he had already told himself that his life’s mission was ‘to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both’.15 This meant that he would have to try and straddle the gulf between the oppressor, represented by the government that had jailed him, and the oppressed: the majority of the people of South Africa in all their diversity. He had already accepted what it would take to achieve that goal. It was a goal that destiny had set for him.
‘The real test of a man,’ Václav Havel writes, ‘is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.’16
Much later, Barbara Masekela, a renowned writer and diplomat who was chief of staff in Mandela’s office, echoed this sentiment.* ‘Mandela,’ she said, ‘knew that being president was playing a role – and he was determined to play it well.’17
Playing it well was far from easy, however, and Mandela’s preparations had begun a long time before. In the mid-1980s Mandela had grasped the nettle and explored the possibility of initiating talks between the ANC and the National Party government of De Klerk’s predecessor, President P. W. Botha.† A cartoonist’s favourite, whose scowling countenance and finger-wagging admonishment graced national newspapers, President Botha was one of the last hard men, a hawk nicknamed ‘Die Groot Krokodil’ (The Big Crocodile) for his hard-line stance, who saw brute force as the answer to conflict. But even Botha had learnt from some of his most hawkish generals that the resolution of the South African nightmare could not be achieved through military force alone.
Mandela knew that the cycle of violence was taking its toll on the poorest and most marginalised sections of the population. The restive black majority had its expectations. The benefactors of the apartheid regime – many of them armed and possessed of a formidable capacity to wreak havoc – were also waiting with bated breath for a significant threat to the status quo.
In all this, Mandela had to signal that F. W. de Klerk was a man of integrity, if only to disarm the hardliners who would have chortled with glee if the South African president were further weakened by the ex-prisoner’s rejection. According to the right-wingers’ so-called logic, it was one thing for De Klerk to release the terrorist, and another for the self-same terrorist to call the shots while spurning the hand of his liberator.
For Mandela, conducting the dialogue with the Pretoria regime was like negotiating a route through volatile traffic. He had to act as a buffer between the group of negotiators led by De Klerk and two vehicles coming from different directions – one driven by the expectations of a black majority who would wait no longer, and the other by the right-wing hardliners, influenced by fear and a misplaced sense of righteousness. For Mandela, the derailment of the negotiations before they even started would have been the greatest tragedy. In this regard, he went against the counsel of the representatives of his own organisations, who were uncomfortable about his intention to call De Klerk a man of integrity. When his colleagues bristled at his accommodation of De Klerk he always insisted that he would continue to accept De Klerk as a man of integrity until he was presented with facts to the contrary. Until then, De Klerk was going to be his future negotiating partner.
Mandela was able to see and make a distinction between F. W. de Klerk the man and De Klerk the representative, if not the victim, of a repressive and all-powerful state machine. Perhaps Mandela’s one wish was to work on his political counterpart and wean him from the influence of the political party that espoused apartheid as a policy, a stance he found wholly repugnant.
On this, he would comment later: ‘The apartheid regime, even during the period of negotiations … still believed that they could save white supremacy with black consent. Although the apartheid negotiators tried to be subtle, it was clear right from the start of the talks that the overriding idea was to prevent us from governing the country, even if we won in a democratic election.’
He’d had a foretaste of this stance when he first met President de Klerk while still a prisoner at Victor Verster, on 13 December 1989. He writes:
‘Shortly before that meeting, I had read an article written by the editor of Die Burger, then the official mouthpiece of the National Party, under the pen name of Dawie in which he sharply criticised the concept of Group Rights which was being peddled by that Party as the best solution for the country’s problems. This meant that each population group after the first democratic elections would retain permanently the rights and privileges it had enjoyed before such elections, no matter which political party had won.’
This deception would mean that the ‘white minority would continue to monopolise all the important rights of citizenship. The revolutionary changes demanded by the liberation movement, and for which martyrs across the centuries had paid the highest price, would be stifled. The new government would be unable to provide shelter for the people and quality education for their children. Poverty, unemployment, hunger, illiteracy and disease would be rampant. Die Burger criticised this pseudo policy as introducing apartheid through the back door.’
Mandela pointed out to De Klerk that ‘if their own mouthpiece condemned this idea, he could well imagine what we thought of it. We would reject it out of hand.’18
‘It was at this point that the president impressed me,’ Mandela writes. ‘He conceded that if our movement would not even consider the idea, he would scrap it. I immediately sent a message to the ANC leadership in Zambia in which I described the President as a man of integrity with whom we could do business.’19
Mandela might have been impressed with De Klerk, but it was another matter to sell the proposition to the ANC. The ANC, as has been noted countless times, is another animal altogether, at once a broad church, a liberation movement and a way of life for millions of South Africans. It has been in certain families for generations, passed down from one generation to the next like a family heirloom. Such an organisation inevitably becomes hidebound to tradition, viewing any innovation with suspicion. In its seventy-seven years of existence at the moment when the talks between Mandela and aparth
eid presidents reached their acme in 1989, the issue of negotiations had never been detailed in its policy. But in exile, the ANC had had to make a realistic appraisal of the situation and the balance of forces. The relentless assault by the South African military machine against Frontline States, an alliance of southern African countries united in opposing apartheid from 1960 to early 1990, for harbouring the ANC, changed the geopolitical character of the region.
More crucial was the ANC’s forced removal from various strategic zones, the most important being Mozambique after President Samora Machel signed the non-aggression pact with South Africa, the Nkomati Accord, on 16 March 1984. This meant that the ANC had to pursue its armed struggle without the benefit of bases in neighbouring states. This put pressure on the leadership to start thinking about what to do with the thousands of displaced cadres in Zambia and Tanzania. In that same year, a mutiny that broke out in the MK camps in Angola shook the leadership, especially as its raison d’être was impatience on the part of MK soldiers who wanted to return home to fight the enemy, instead of being embroiled in the domestic conflict between Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (‘The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola’) (MPLA) troops and the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) (UNITA)) bandits, who were backed by South Africa.* Similar pressure had forced the ANC to assign the Luthuli Detachment of MK into the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns in what was then Rhodesia from 1967.* In the camps, in most areas where there was a significant community of exiles, people sang songs invoking a pantheon of heroes and martyrs, including the names of Nelson Mandela or Oliver Tambo. They sang to dedicate themselves to the struggle and of how they were going to march on Pretoria. Sometimes the revolutionary songs were about the perfidy of agents of the South African regime, some of them one-time comrades who had crossed to the other side. But the most reviled figures, looming large in the collective imagination of the fervent singers, were the succession of apartheid leaders, especially Botha and De Klerk.†
Even before Mandela had actual contact with Botha and De Klerk, rumours of the talks and Mandela’s imminent release had been doing the rounds. In early July 1989, a group of exiled ANC writers on their way to meet with Afrikaner writers and academics at the Victoria Falls stumbled on a whole battery of red-eyed South African and international journalists and TV crews camped outside the Pamodzi Hotel in Lusaka. Acting on what was obviously gross misinformation, the media were keeping vigil outside the airport and at the gates of the ANC headquarters on Chachacha Road downtown, on the off-chance that they would get a scoop if Nelson Mandela were released into the custody of the ANC in Zambia as they had been told. More disturbing, however, were the charges from some youthful firebrands at home and in exile that ‘the old man had sold out’. There was even talk of threats on Mandela’s life.
Notwithstanding this, however, the ANC has consistently possessed an unerring political instinct, seeking, through the years, to find a solution to its problems. Even the men and women under arms, in camps or operating in the underground inside the country, were guided by political principles. There were members of the NEC, the highest decision-making body between conferences, who were hugely uncomfortable with the possibility of a rapprochement with Pretoria. But there was Oliver Tambo, the president, whose credo was decision-making by consensus, who insisted that each aspect of a difficult problem be discussed and analysed, no matter how long it took, until an agreement was reached.
Inevitably, any liberation movement comes to a crossroads where crucial decisions that have a bearing on people’s lives have to be made. OR, as Tambo was affectionately called, made them. Untiring and scrupulous to a fault, he consulted leaders in his own party as well as ensuring that leaders of the Frontline States were briefed on the developments.
Ultimately, it was quite clear to all that talking with the enemy was an idea whose time had come. To strengthen this, representatives of various trade unions and political and civic organisations flew into Lusaka to confer with the ANC and to start mapping out strategies for dealing with the unfolding scenario. The arrival in Lusaka of the grand old men – Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki (who had been released two years earlier), Wilton Mkwayi, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi and Ahmed Kathrada – and their interaction with the membership, made everything real. It also acted as an escape valve for the pent-up emotions of MK comrades, mainly members of Special Operations working underground, who had grievances about the heightened casualty rate among MK members infiltrating inside the country. It was Walter Sisulu who told the ANC members congregated in Mulungushi Hall, Lusaka, that they should get ready to go home.20
CHAPTER TWO
Negotiating Democracy
On 11 February 1990 it was at last time for Nelson Mandela to go home. A sizeable percentage of the world community watched live that afternoon as Mandela stepped out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison.
Almost two years earlier, on 11 June 1988, an estimated television audience of 600 million people from sixty-seven countries had watched a concert broadcast, a popular-music tribute to Mandela’s seventieth birthday at Wembley Stadium in London. Described by the BBC presenter Robin Denselow, in 1989, as the ‘biggest and most spectacular pop-political event of all time’, it was organised by the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) under the guidance of its president, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston.1 The concert once again proved how present Mandela could be by his very absence.
But now, here he was, a living embodiment of the failure of prison and of the apartheid regime, walking into the Western Cape sunshine, now and then saluting the crowds, smiling.
Being part of the new, emergent South Africa meant that Mandela had to enter into the bustle and hustle – and confusion – of the country and the people he meant to lead. Mandela’s journey from the prison gates to Cape Town’s Grand Parade, where thousands of supporters stood waiting to hear him speak, was marked by detours and trepidation, auguries, perhaps, of the twists and turns the country was fated to take on its journey towards democracy. There was a little drama when Mandela’s driver, intimidated by the throngs lining the road close to the City Hall, first drove to the nearby suburb of Rondebosch, where the convoy waited in a quiet street. There, Mandela saw a woman with her two babies and he asked to hold them. After that, one of the activists present, Saleem Mowzer, suggested his house in Rondebosch East. Later, a concerned Archbishop Desmond Tutu tracked them down and urged Mandela’s party to head to the City Hall, or there would be a riot.*
Eventually, in the early evening, Mandela was able to speak to the people. He greeted the expectant multitude in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all:
‘I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people,’ he said. ‘Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I, therefore, place the remaining years of my life in your hands.’2
Writing in the New Yorker, Zoë Wicomb captures the moment well: ‘Mandela looked nothing like the artists’ renderings of an aging boxer, which had been circulating. That day, a tall, handsome stranger strode into the world. His face had been transfigured into sculpted planes that spoke of bygone Xhosa-Khoi relations, and the awkward hair parting was gone. Supermodels and philosophers sighed alike.’3
Even though Mandela was still first among equals, he was now as aware of danger as everyone else. He was also conscious of the violence that was wrecking the country. Every province had its tale of woe, with Natal bearing the brunt of brutality. This is where the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), backed by covert elements within the South African Police Force, waged war on the ANC and its supporters.† The Natal Midlands and many parts of urban Natal became no-go zones both for law enforcement and the ANC.
One of the memorable, chastening moments for Mandela came two weeks after his release, during an intense period of fighting in Natal, when he addressed a crowd of more than a hundred thousand people at Durba
n’s Kings Park Stadium.
‘Take your guns, your knives and your pangas, and throw them into the sea!’‡ Mandela pleaded. A low rumble of disapproval started off somewhere in the crowd and rose into a crescendo of catcalls. Stoically, Mandela continued; he had to deliver his message. ‘Close down the death factories. End this war now!’4
The war that didn’t end with Mandela’s plea had its roots in the past and sought to frustrate the emergence of the future. Slowly, ineluctably, Mandela’s dream towards a democratic South Africa was being realised. The last few stumbling blocks were being knocked aside like skittles. A notable development was the return, on 13 December 1990, of Oliver Tambo, who had left South Africa in 1960 on a secret mission to rebuild the banned ANC in exile. Returning to a tumultuous welcome after three decades as external leader of the liberation movement, the seventy-three-year-old ANC president seemed frail but happy as he acknowledged the greetings of a throng of ANC leaders, foreign ambassadors and miscellaneous dignitaries. Standing with his one-time law partner, Nelson Mandela, Tambo waved from the balcony of the Jan Smuts International Airport, near Johannesburg, to some five thousand supporters, who cheered and sang and danced. Nelson Mandela, then the ANC deputy president, told the crowd: ‘We welcome him with open arms as one of the greatest heroes of Africa.’5 Then the two men disappeared into a sedan as their motorcade departed with a police escort.
Two days later, the ANC held its first national consultative conference at Nasrec, near Soweto. It was an emotional moment when Tambo gave his report, effectively handing the ANC back to the people of South Africa. The singing was electrifying, the songs from exile in counterpoint to ditties and dirges and chants of mainly young people who would be manning the barricades in restless townships of the East Rand before the night of the following day. A carnival spirit among the delegates intermittently leavened the solemnity of the occasion. Comrades fresh from prison, some toting prison-issue duffel bags, were meeting relatives and friends after long years of separation. Someone, pointing to the concentration of many echelons of ANC leadership – from Mandela and Tambo and the old men from Robben Island, hoary-haired luminaries, veterans and NEC members down to the kursanti (rookies) in faux-battledress attire – quipped that the whole consultative conference idea had been hatched up by the enemy to eliminate the ANC with one powerful bomb.
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