Although civil war and violent disruption of the first democratic elections by proponents of Afrikaner self-determination had been averted, undercurrents of dissent still raged on, undiminished, when the new government took office. Even these lost their sting with the establishment of the Volkstaat Council, which helped to persuade the Afrikaner community that they had a home in the broader South Africa. Afrikaner self-preservation in the face of an inexorable tide of change was a much more compelling motivation for the hardliners’ decision to participate in the process. Seizing the moment, Mandela, who always pursued an accommodation with those who might be disaffected, ensured that agreements were inviolate, thus minimising the risk of anyone taking destructive action, which would bring ruin to the country.
He spared no effort in his determination to avoid anything that would destabilise the country. Most of the wreckers were motivated by emotion. Much later, he would articulate the need for a leader to subject emotions to rational thought. He told Oprah Winfrey: ‘Our emotions said, “The white minority is an enemy. We must never talk to them.” But our brain said: “If you don’t talk to this man, your country will go up in flames, and for many years to come, this country will be engulfed in rivers of blood.” So we had to reconcile that conflict, and our talking to the enemy was the result of the domination of the brain over emotion.’14
If De Klerk had earlier faced opposition from the hawks of the apartheid security services when he broached an accord with the newly freed Mandela, there was a certain irony, which Mandela must have appreciated, in his having to face headwinds from various quarters opposed to the volkstaat. As always, Mandela had to be mindful of the uncompromising attitudes held by some within ANC ranks, who could not abide any territory being hived off for the benefit of a special interest group; the ANC policies commit to a unitary South African state. Mandela was also aware that, even at the time when he was still in exploratory talks with apartheid officials in prison, there had been attempts to delink him – and thus alienate him – from his political base, the ANC. There was always the feeling in the higher councils of the ANC, that the regime – in its time-tested wish to divide and rule and sow confusion among the ranks of the liberation movement – had strived to give an impression that Mandela had been ‘compromised’.
There were hotheads within the ANC who still bristled at the transition, which was limping peacefully along. Those imbued with the spirit of Harry Gwala or even Chris Hani, would have preferred an armed takeover by MK, free from the constraints of negotiation politics. But, for Mandela, these were the crucial rounds in a boxing bout where the opponent, who’d delivered telling blows at the beginning of the fight, was beginning to wobble at the knees. Therefore, for the sake of seeing the project of reconciliation through, Mandela would press on and not be stampeded into reneging on previous commitments towards the volkstaat as a sop to certain elements within the ANC. In June 1995, following the Volkstaat Council submitting its first report – in which it abandoned the idea of an Afrikaner homeland and opted for a Cultural Citizens’ Council, an economic development subregion and a share in the Pretoria area – Mandela responded in the Senate to the arguments regarding the volkstaat. He said:
‘On the more general question on the report of the Volkstaatraad [Volkstaat Council], I wish to reiterate that my organisation, and I personally, will study the report with sensitivity. We will do so, taking into account the cooperation by these leaders in the peaceful transition. At the same time, we remain firmly committed to the principles of democracy, non-racialism and equality.’15
He felt it necessary to remind the assembly of the fires that had been put out. ‘Many do not know what dangers faced this country just before the elections,’ he said. ‘However those of us who negotiated as far back as 1986, and especially shortly before the election, know that we were on the brink of a catastrophe, which could have plunged this country into bloodshed … It is easy for you to say that there will be no volkstaat in this country. That is easy for you because you did not do the work. You do not know what dangers we have averted.
‘I am not going to play cheap politics with the future of this country. If people have been turned round and are now cooperating, we as responsible leaders must sit down and see how we can meet them. I have said before, and I wish to repeat it, that the decision on the question of the volkstaat is going to lie with the people of South Africa. They have to tell us whether or not they want a volkstaat. It is not a question that is just going to be dealt with in an opportunistic manner.’16
While thinking he had given short shrift to the naysayers, Mandela was presented with another conundrum when, in March 1996, a sports commission recommended that the Springbok symbol be dropped. Invoking the threat of the right wing, Mandela criticised people both inside and outside the ANC who ‘are not aware that there are still powerful elements among whites who are not reconciled with the present transformation and who want to use every excuse in order to drown the country in bloodshed. That is the reality of the situation. But many people do not appreciate this.’17
Another touchy issue was the national anthem. Before the 1994 election, the use of both ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (Lord Bless Africa) and ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’ (‘The Call of South Africa’), to be sung in sequence, was agreed upon by the ANC and National Party in the Transitional Executive Council as an interim arrangement. On becoming president, Nelson Mandela assigned a team to produce a much shorter and less awkward version, which combined elements from the two diverse anthems.18
However, during the drafting of the final constitution, in September 1996, the National Executive Committee of the ANC made two decisions about the anthem before Mandela arrived at the meeting. The first one was that the new constitution should not specify the anthem but provide that it be determined by the incumbent president. The second was that the national anthem should be ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ translated into four languages. Mandela only learnt of this after the meeting. He told his colleagues in the National Working Committee that such a decision should not be taken in his absence and demanded that the NEC review it.19 The question of the anthem was left as it had been in the interim constitution, and in October 1997, when the team had completed its work, Mandela proclaimed the hybrid composition to be the national anthem.
In all these circumstances of reconciliation, Mandela was willing to take risks, knowing that his actions could be subject to misinterpretation. This wasn’t new. In the heady times of post-election South Africa, it was possible to forget the risks that had been taken, the gambles, to bring the country to where it was. Mandela had started out as volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign, eventually becoming commander-in-chief of MK in 1961, during a period where – as with the contemporaneous Freedom Riders of the American civil rights movement in the Deep South – a black person risked death for proclaiming his or her right to be treated like a human being. To be a volunteer then was to be, in the eyes of a police force that itched for action, a troublemaker.
Mandela took risks when he became the commander-in-chief of MK; when he went underground; and, certainly, when he stood at the dock and made a speech of defiance, knowing full well that the judge passing sentence on him had the power of life and death over him. If the overhaul of an unjust system had called for courage, Mandela was fated to know that bending the selfsame system to the service of democracy would require even greater determination – and shrewdness.
He found that he had to call upon his inner reserves of strength and skill – and his powers of persuasion – to deal with the concerns arising from the black community. These were the people who had routinely been deceived by racist power. Although, when he came out of prison and told the expectant multitudes that he was coming ‘not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people’, it’s unlikely – given the highly combustible period in South African history – that the people took his disclaimer seriously.20 His release, symbolising liberation from the burden of oppressio
n, violence, poverty and pain, was for them a fulfilment of a prophecy. He personified the pledges made in countless political campaigns that there would be peace, freedom and prosperity. Even though the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance partners were largely non-racial, no one had prepared the masses for the fact that their march onward would be rerouted towards reconciliation.
Mandela had embarked on the path of reconciliation, which meant addressing himself to white fears and coaxing the timorous into acceptance of the road to peace. If Mandela had won admiration for listening to people with opposing views, as psychologist and anti-apartheid activist Saths Cooper said when recalling his time with him on Robben Island, he now had to cater to a constituency, which, while agreeing with him on almost everything, was unhappy with Mandela’s preoccupation with reconciliation.21 In this instance, Mandela found himself increasingly having to defend the charge that his brand of reconciliation meant addressing white fears at the expense of black needs. This accusation persisted, even though he explained the dialectical connection between reconstruction and development on the one hand and nation building and reconciliation on the other – and that the beneficiaries of consequential stability would be all South Africans, most importantly the black majority. It had been a feature of his presidency from its earliest days. Replying to a question from an ANC member in the Senate budget debate in 1994, he went to great lengths to clarify the issue, saying:
‘The socio-economic programme which we have set ourselves, requires immense resources. We cannot face these problems if there is instability in our country.’ He said that the government ‘was faced with a problem, which some of us have raised from time to time. I refer to the difficulty of the White minority in this country, with its background of privileges, which excluded the Blacks, not only from the centres of power, but also from enjoying the resources of this country.’
The white minority, he said, ‘now faces the possibility of a partnership with a majority, which has been excluded – and that has led to the feelings of insecurity that the democratic changes … might lead to the domination of Whites by the Black majority. That attitude is lacking in their approach to problems by our White counterparts in the country.’
The obverse of this related to black people from the liberation movement who had internalised resistance to a point where it had become a tradition ‘at a time when they are required to build, and who feel they should oppose anything which will result in eventual reconciliation and nation building’.
To illustrate the point, Mandela told a characteristically self-deprecating story about a conversation he’d had ‘with a leading Afrikaans-speaking personality … [who] said I had no idea what I had done for their people, the Afrikaners. He felt that this was his country too. According to him, it was not only I who was liberated, but that he was liberated too. He was prepared to serve South Africa and this was due to my strength.
‘I was beginning to swell with pride when he turned around and said this was also a sign of a grave weakness on my part. He said that I was concerned with assuring whites and neglecting my own people who put me in power. I was quick to tell him about the President’s Project, which I had dealt with in Parliament.* He knew all about those projects and he stated that the perception that had been created – and which was more dangerous than facts – was the one he had put to me.
‘He went further and informed me that the press and mass media were not interested in the things which I was telling him. He knew that I had not abandoned my people but the perception fostered by the mass media was that I was not attending to the affairs of the country. What strikes them is that a man who has spent a long time in jail should now adopt this conciliatory approach. They have created this perception that this is all that I am concerned with. It would appear that even my own comrades, who know my activities amongst our own people, have been caught up in this propaganda fostered by the mass media.’
Mandela then turned to the question put to him by his ANC interlocutor: ‘My comrade has now warned me that there is an element of truth in the saying that I have neglected our people and that I am now concentrating on whites. However, I appreciate the spirit in which this has been said, because people are angry, impatient and they have suffered for centuries and they are still suffering today … the Reconstruction and Development Programme is there to address the basic needs of the masses of the people in this country. These needs are those of Blacks – that is, Africans, Coloureds and Indians. This is the purpose of the RDP.
‘The Government of National Unity in this country will stand or fall on the basis of delivery in regard to all the schemes that are involved in the RDP. Our Ministers are working 24 hours a day to ensure that we better the lives of our people, that there are sufficient jobs, sufficient schools, educational facilities and houses, electricity, transport and the introduction of clean, healthy running water. All these are intended to serve the interests and the basic needs of the masses of the people in this country.’22
The changes wrought by the new democracy reduced the National Party, once a bastion of Afrikaner political expression, to a minority partner in a transitional government. The heads of the security forces, public service and Reserve Bank had been retained temporarily in the name of stability, and the arch-conservative Freedom Front had agreed to pursue its objectives by legal and constitutional means.
But reduced representation did not translate into a diminution of power in white society. White people had had a head start in controlling economic resources, to the detriment of the black majority, who bore the brunt of centuries of structural inequality, the effects of which could not be summarily erased. Black people might have had the numbers but South Africa’s cultural, educational and religious institutions, even its agriculture, provided the basis of white power. And Mandela had said as much at a reception hosted by the mayor of Pretoria on 26 August 1994.23
Reconciliation, therefore, had to transcend formal institutions and engage directly with the different sectors of society. Typically, it was Mandela who set about confounding expectations, especially in the appropriation of quintessentially Afrikaner symbols. His dramatic – and unexpected – show of support for the national rugby team in the 1995 Rugby World Cup was one of the earliest examples of this. Soon after, he gave a tea party for widows of leaders from both sides of the struggle at his official residence in Pretoria. In addition, he visited those who were too infirm to attend, including Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of the hated architect of apartheid, Dr H. F. Verwoerd, in her home in Orania in the Northern Cape.* After P. W. Botha had a stroke, Mandela visited him at his retirement home in George in the Western Cape. The fact that the media covered these poignant moments – a grey-haired Mandela patiently listening to P. W. Botha lecturing on the consequences of government policies, or helping Betsie Verwoerd read a demand for a volkstaat in Afrikaans – ensured that inclusiveness was given a national profile. But so, too, was the fact that Mandela was in command.
A few days after the Rugby World Cup victory, Mandela met representatives of twenty mainly right-wing or conservative organisations, an interaction organised by the leader of the Freedom Front, Constand Viljoen. When a journalist asked on one such occasion what the reasons behind these meetings were, Mandela explained that it was all about nation building and reconciliation. It was important, he said, ‘to keep lines of communication between such organisations and the government open, to remove any misunderstandings that could lead to tension’.24
Speaking to the Afrikaanse Taal-en Kultuurvereniging, known as ATKV (Afrikaans Language and Cultural Association), Mandela said he understood their fears of a language policy that would prejudice Afrikaans. He assured them that the protection and promotion of all the country’s languages, Afrikaans included, was an unshakeable policy of both the government and the ANC.25
In 1996, the Ruiterwag, the youth wing of the Broederbond – a powerful and secretive organisation, whose main aim was to advance Afrikaner culture, economy and political power �
� invited Mandela to a conference of young Afrikaner leaders. Mandela urged them to lead their communities in becoming active agents of reconstruction and development.26
Still fired up from his meeting with the young Afrikaner leaders, and wishing to spread the message to society as a whole, Mandela dashed to the packed First National Bank Stadium in Johannesburg, where the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament was starting. There he was drowned out by the overflight of planes as he ran over the allotted time, explaining to the soccer fans that he had just come from the meeting with the Afrikaner Ruiterwag.
Mandela also ventured into universities such as Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Potchefstroom – historically Afrikaans in language and culture – and spoke at churches, usually by invitation, but on occasion uninvited, to the delight of worshippers. Wherever there was a pulse of Afrikanerdom, he spoke. His message remained constant throughout.
‘For me,’ he wrote, ‘it is of the utmost importance that we all engage in serious discussion about our common future in this country … When I last spoke of the testament of reconciliation and national unity, which I want to leave behind me, the markets almost crashed. I hope it won’t happen again. But I do want to repeat today that I see it as one of my most important tasks to work for national reconciliation, and to leave behind me a country in which there is lasting peace because all the people and groups in the country live together in mutual acceptance, respect and national consensus.’27
Knowing that Afrikaners had concerns about Afrikaans education and Afrikaans schools, he distributed copies of the Freedom Charter to his audiences. He told them that the Freedom Charter, drawn up and accepted in 1955 at the Congress of the People, ‘is the basic policy document of the ANC. Today it is still the basic guideline for the organisation. So, when I speak reconciliation and respect for all the languages and cultures of our land, it is not, as is often claimed, simply an individual position. It is a position contained in the basic policy of the ANC, the majority party in the Government of National Unity. I am saying this so that you will know that respect for the variety of our society has deep roots in the political organisation that is in office in our country today …
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