Dare Not Linger

by Nelson Mandela

  One part of the proceedings that had even some of the battle-hardened delegates weeping openly was the parading of a dozen men who had returned from Zimbabwean prisons. They had been in jail since the valiant though ill-advised joint Zimbabwe African People’s Union–ANC campaigns in Wankie and Sipolilo, in 1967 and 1969 respectively, where they had been captured after skirmishes with Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith’s British South Africa Police and South African security forces. Each of the inmates had been on death row awaiting execution before being reprieved when Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front took power in April 1980.

  The conference took place at a time of great violence, almost approximating a low-intensity war. It was therefore not surprising that the delegates called for the establishment of self-defence units.

  Significantly, two days later, on 18 December, the government finally gazetted legislation, publicising a long-awaited law to allow exiles to return to South Africa. This was a measure to satisfy one of the remaining obstacles to negotiation. Asked by the media two or three days after his release if he would agree to De Klerk’s terms on lifting the State of Emergency, Mandela had said, ‘The attitude of the ANC is perfectly clear. No negotiation will take place until the government has met all those preconditions because to get a mandate from our people is impossible with these conditions, without the State of Emergency being lifted and without political prisoners being released and without exiles being given the assurance that if they return they will be doing so under an amnesty and none will be prosecuted.’6

  The liveliness and diversity of the more than ‘fifteen hundred delegates from forty-five regions, from home and abroad’ gave Mandela a glimpse into the crazy-quilt make-up of the ANC community.7 A significant percentage of the delegates were the returned exiles, many of whom were part of the ANC’s diplomatic mission. The fact that these individuals had helped to ensure, as Mandela expressed it, that ‘almost every country in the world in due course shunned South Africa, and [ensured that] apartheid [was] condemned as a crime against humanity, was a measure of the success of their historic campaign. Those who lived in exile criss-crossed the five continents to brief heads of state and governments on our situation, attending world and regional gatherings, flooding the world with material that exposed the inhumanity of apartheid. It was this worldwide campaign, which made the ANC and its leaders, inside and outside the country, one of the most well-known liberation movements of the world.’8

  Mandela had already met with the general ANC membership in Lusaka, Zambia, earlier in March, but this was the first time such a meeting took place on home soil. The reality of the South African situation, the threat of violence hanging in the air, meant that the state had to keep an eye on the unexpected and, by implication, on its own over-exuberant zealots who might take issue with the ANC holding its conference in Nasrec. As a result, the venue’s perimeter bristled with antennae on official-looking sedans housing hard-faced security men; and, now and then, an armoured police car trundled along the street, its headlights, protected behind steel wire, probing the shadows cast by the late-afternoon sun. Standing in twos and threes a short distance from the tent, the ANC security detail kept its own vigil. Indoors, there were just too many people whose loss would plunge the country into turmoil; they were the lynchpins of the new dispensation currently being hatched.

  It was here, under the marquees on the sports ground and outside during breaks in proceedings, that Mandela saw the interaction of the delegates with the leadership, notably members of MK and their commanders. As a founding member of MK, his high regard for its members shines through.

  ‘The fighters of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) displayed exceptional courage and infiltrated the country on many occasions, attacked govern-ment installations, clashed now and again with the apartheid forces, and in several engagements put them to flight. Other freedom fighters worked inside the country, either above or underground, urging the masses to rise and resist all forms of oppression and exploitation. They braved the brutality of the regime regardless of what happened to themselves. For their liberation they were prepared to pay the highest price. Still others languished in apartheid jails fearlessly asserting their right to be treated as human beings in their own fatherland. They literally dug themselves in [in] the lion’s den, demonstrating once again the universal principle that evil men cannot smother the freedom flame. Some of these courageous fighters are still alive, helping to address national problems, and they now enjoy the fruits of their labour at last. Although many of them are old, frail and jobless, they become animated when we remind them of their historic achievement. Others have passed on, never to return. We acknowledge them all as men and women who have made [a] decisive contribution to our liberation.’9

  * * *

  The year ended but the violence continued. This, however, did not stop the first phases of negotiations towards a democratic outcome despite the serious attempts of the right wing to sabotage the process. Sydney Mufamadi, one-time general secretary of the General and Allied Workers Union and later on the ANC executive, remembers the earlier efforts at instigating a lasting peace in a country that was increasingly spiralling into uncontrollable violence.* He says:

  Now, before, the release of our senior political leaders, culminating in the release of Madiba, the UDF and COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions] started to reach out to Inkatha … for ways of ending the violence, particularly in Pietermaritzburg … where the violence was at its most intense. We … took trips to Lusaka to discuss that initiative because our interlocutors in Inkatha – Dr Mdlalose, Dr Madide and Dr Dhlomo – the three doctors, had an express instruction from [the president of the IFP, Chief Mangosuthu] Buthelezi to say to us [that] they will continue to deal with us if … our dealings with them have the support of Lusaka … [which] wouldn’t oppose any move that was intended to bring about peace.*10

  But, angry ‘at this brutalisation that was taking place’, activists on the ground ‘were not keen to negotiate’. If Lusaka was to be involved at all it had to be ‘by way of arming them to fight back. So we had all these difficulties of having to persuade our own people about the merits of negotiations.’11

  The confusion was deepened by the release from prison of the ANC leadership, especially the legendary, fiery and uncompromising Harry Gwala, aptly nicknamed ‘The Lion of the Midlands’, who ‘was not convinced about the usefulness of negotiations’.†12 Gwala regarded any meeting between the ANC and Buthelezi and King Goodwill Zwelithini, the head of the Royal Zulu Family, as an anathema.‡ (In those sentiments, Gwala was not alone. Mandela later told Richard Stengel, with whom he collaborated on Long Walk to Freedom, how when he visited Pietermaritzburg in 1990, the people wanted to ‘choke’ him when he mentioned Buthelezi.§13)

  ‘That,’ says Mufamadi, ‘did not help because we had made some progress on the ground in persuading the younger comrades,’ and this success was being jeopardised by ‘a comrade who is senior to all of us’. Madiba came out and ‘made a call on the people of KwaZulu-Natal to lay down arms … Initially there was some resistance, which we had to work to overcome.’14

  With more and more revelations of covert state involvement, which forced the state to take action, there was a marked decline in some of the more horrific violence, such as attacks on commuters on trains. These attacks had done much to disrupt and intimidate mass support for the ANC. The capacity of the growing right-wing parties to thwart progress by political means was diluted in 1992 when De Klerk called a referendum of white voters to endorse ‘continued negotiations’ and got a big majority voting ‘yes’, nearly 69 per cent of the voters. Smarting from this defeat, right-wing parties substituted their resistance for terrorism and mobilised for armed revolt. Different strands of the Afrikaner right wing yearned for a separate state and there was much sabre rattling.

  In a 1992 interview with Irish peacemaker Padraig O’Malley, Conservative Party (CP) leader Ferdinand Hartzenberg said that the CP
would help other parties by not participating ‘because [Mandela] wants us to participate and to admit that we will accept the outcome of the negotiations – and that we are not prepared to do.* We say if we get an ANC government in this country we will do the same that we have done at the beginning of this century when Britain tried to rule this country. We will resist.’15

  Three months after the referendum, on Thursday, 17 June 1992, in Boipatong, south of Johannesburg, Zulu-speaking men from a nearby hostel killed forty-five, and seriously injured twenty-seven, men, women and children in a cowardly massacre, using AK47s and their assegais (throwing spear). There was something especially chilling about the murders: twenty-four of the victims were women, one of them pregnant, and a nine-month-old baby was also killed. In the aftermath the police made few arrests. As happened in many such cases where the victims were ANC supporters, the investigation was botched, spluttering to an inconclusive end that yielded no significant arrests. Responding to writer John Carlin’s question about the massacre, Jessie Duarte, Mandela’s former personal assistant and now an ANC politician, recounted Mandela’s reaction: ‘I will never forget his face … He was a man who was deeply shocked by the fact that people will do this to each other … I had the view that Madiba hadn’t actually ever confronted the cold face of the violence during the twenty-seven years of his incarceration.’†16

  Following a muted response from President F. W. de Klerk about steps taken to curb violence and bring the perpetrators to book, Mandela announced the ANC’s decision to suspend the talks. The violence was leading to a growing sense of mass disillusionment with the ANC’s stance on negotiations. At a rally in Boipatong to mourn the deaths, angry people sang, ‘Mandela, you are leading us like lambs to the slaughter’.

  At Mandela’s insistence, the ANC took the issue to the United Nations in spite of a previous position that there would be no international involvement in the negotiations.

  Nonetheless, negotiations were resumed a few months later, mediated by a Record of Understanding fleshed out by a backchannel – a low-profile line of communication to avoid crises established between Cyril Ramaphosa and his counterpart from the National Party, Roelf Meyer – and encouraged by Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. When Mandela explained that the ANC’s withdrawal from the talks was due to the orchestration of violence by the apartheid state, Nyerere reminded him that the South African freedom fighters had always contended that the apartheid state was inherently violent. How, he asked, could it be cogently argued that violence would be totally eliminated before the apartheid state itself was abolished?

  The quibbling, wrangling, horse-trading and compromises among the negotiating parties came to an abrupt stop with the assassination of Chris Hani, undoubtedly one of South Africa’s most popular leaders,* on 10 April 1993, by a right-wing Polish immigrant, Janusz Waluś, at the behest of a Conservative Party member of Parliament, Clive Derby-Lewis.†

  Mandela writes that the killing of Hani, a man ‘who could have easily risen to the highest position in government’, almost precipitated a calamitous crisis.17 Hani’s popular following was outraged. Tens of thousands spontaneously poured out into streets throughout the country. Wide ranges of other South Africans were numbed with shock.

  ‘As the country teetered, [I] was given airtime on SATV [South African TV] to broadcast to the nation, appealing for discipline, and to avoid giving way to provocation. Many commentators of our negotiated transition were later to observe that the effective transfer of power from the National Party of De Klerk to the ANC occurred not with the elections in April 1994, but in this critical week one year earlier.’18

  South Africa does not lack for examples when it has had to pull back from the brink of self-destruction. Among them would be Sharpeville on 21 March 1960; Soweto, Nyanga, Langa and Gugulethu after June 1976; and, of course, the countless instances of insanity under the cloak of a succession of States of Emergency. At no time, however, had the collective rage – and despair – been so concentrated that all it needed was a spark for the powder keg to blow up as in the aftermath of the fateful Easter weekend of Hani’s assassination.

  The spark was dampened by Mandela’s timely intervention on television on 13 April 1993. His tone carrying exactly the right mixture of indignation and moral strength, he addressed the South African people:

  ‘Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being.

  ‘A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster.

  ‘A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.*

  ‘The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves through-out the country and the world. Our grief and anger is tearing us apart.

  ‘What has happened is a national tragedy that has touched millions of people, across the political and colour divide.

  ‘Our shared grief and legitimate anger will find expression in nationwide commemorations that coincide with the funeral service.

  ‘Tomorrow, in many towns and villages, there will be memorial services to pay homage to one of the greatest revolutionaries this country has ever known. Every service will open a Memorial Book for Freedom, in which all who want peace and democracy pledge their commitment.

  ‘Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for – the freedom of all of us.

  ‘Now is the time for our white compatriots, from whom messages of condolence continue to pour in, to reach out with an understanding of the grievous loss to our nation, to join in the memorial services and the funeral commemorations.

  ‘Now is the time for the police to act with sensitivity and restraint, to be real community policemen and women who serve the population as a whole. There must be no further loss of life at this tragic time.

  ‘This is a watershed moment for all of us. Our decisions and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country – an elected government of the people, by the people and for the people.

  ‘We must not let the men who worship war, and who lust after blood, precipitate actions that will plunge our country into another Angola.

  ‘Chris Hani was a soldier. He believed in iron discipline. He carried out instructions to the letter. He practised what he preached.

  ‘Any lack of discipline is trampling on the values that Chris Hani stood for. Those who commit such acts serve only the interests of the assassins, and desecrate his memory.

  ‘When we, as one people, act together decisively, with discipline and determination, nothing can stop us.

  ‘Let us honour this soldier for peace in a fitting manner. Let us rededicate ourselves to bringing about the democracy he fought for all his life; democracy that will bring real, tangible changes in the lives of the working people, the poor, the jobless, the landless.

  ‘Chris Hani is irreplaceable in the heart of our nation and people. When he first returned to South Africa after three decades in exile, he said: “I have lived with death most of my life. I want to live in a free South Africa even if I have to lay down my life for it.” The body of Chris Hani will lie in State at the FNB Stadium, Soweto, from twelve noon on Sunday 18 April until the start of the vigil at 6 p.m. The funeral service will commence at 9 a.m. on Monday, 19th April. The cortege will leave for Boksburg Cemetery, where the burial is scheduled for 1 p.m.

  ‘These funeral service and rallies must be conducted with dignity. We will give disciplined expression to our emotions at our pickets, prayer meetings and gatherings, in our homes, our churches and our schools. We will not be provoked into any rash actions.

  ‘We are a nation in mourning. To the youth of South Africa we have a special message: you have lost a great hero. You have repeatedly shown that yo
ur love of freedom is greater than that most precious gift, life itself. But you are the leaders of tomorrow. Your country, your people, your organisation need you to act with wisdom. A particular responsibility rests on your shoulders.

  ‘We pay tribute to all our people for the courage and restraint they have shown in the face of such extreme provocation. We are sure this same indomitable spirit will carry us through the difficult days ahead.

  ‘Chris Hani has made the supreme sacrifice. The greatest tribute we can pay to his life’s work is to ensure we win that freedom for all our people.’19

  Hani’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Nomakhwezi, had witnessed the incident. The full horror of Hani’s murder, which could easily have changed the history of South Africa, was counterpoised by the quick action of Retha Harmse, Hani’s Afrikaans neighbour, who rang the police with Waluś’s licence plate number, helping the police capture Waluś with the weapon still in his possession.

  Mandela had a special regard for Chris Hani. Some will say it was due to the younger man’s exemplary leadership, which endeared him to the membership, especially of MK, who sought to emulate him as much as possible. He was brave and charismatic, and leading from the front he was as unafraid to lead MK cadres infiltrating inside South Africa as he was of ANC authority when he penned his famous memorandum to the ANC leadership.