The majority of newspapers, catering to a panicked readership, made an issue of high levels of crime but ignored those police statistics showing that the crime rate was beginning to decline.46 Mandela would have none of it. He writes:
‘Opposition parties, some of whom created or inherited that authoritarian and repressive force, and others who condemned white supremacy, but opposed every legitimate action used by the oppressed to liberate the country, now accuse the government of being soft on crime. Hardly do they ever praise the government and business for their excellent performance and for the efficient and devoted SAPS [South African Police Service] now bequeathed to our country.
‘The reason for this peculiar attitude on the part of some South African politicians is not far to find. As pointed out in a previous chapter, the white minority has ruled South Africa for more than three centuries.
‘Some of them, drunk with power and without vision, never imagined that they would in their lifetime, suffer the trauma of losing that political power to a majority they were taught from birth to despise.
‘Even in the face of the far-reaching peaceful transformation that has taken place, plus the zeal with which the ruling party has promoted and implemented the policy of reconciliation, the background, education and political training of some sections of the opposition make them deaf and dumb to what is currently happening in our country.
‘We have shown in a previous chapter that since April 1994 our voter support has increased considerably in both the general and local government, as well as in the mega cities. All this information has made no impression whatsoever to some members of the opposition. They still harp monotonously on false propaganda which nobody else, except themselves, believe[s] in. They criticise the government for lack of delivery, predict a split in the Congress Alliance and accuse the government for being soft on crime. If there were a grain of truth in all these accusations, why then would our support continue to grow as it has done over the last seven years?
‘The so-called New National Party is on the way out, never to return.* They have no leader of the calibre of former President De Klerk who had the courage and vision to take the right turn when he reached the crossroad.
‘But, South Africa has produced great liberals who courageously condemned apartheid. Although they disagreed with our methods of political action, and insisted that we should confine ourselves to purely constitutional forms of struggle, they were far less arrogant and destructive than some of their heirs.’47
However, the crime problem fed into larger issues. Addressing religious leaders at the Morals Summit called by the National Religious Leaders Forum in 1998, Mandela made the point that ‘the inhuman system under which we lived so long undermined and eroded respect for one another and for life itself. That apartheid was a sin and encouraged sinful behaviour is no longer a matter of debate.
‘The symptoms of our spiritual malaise are only too familiar. They include the extent of corruption in both [the] public and private sector, where office and positions of responsibility are treated as opportunities for self-enrichment; the corruption that occurs within our justice system; violence in interpersonal relations and families, in particular the shameful record of abuse of women and children; and the extent of evasion of tax and refusal to pay for services used.’48
Coming from a past where authority was resisted, where state structures were fair game and the mantra of the day was ‘We shall support everything the regime opposes and oppose everything it supports’, there was a need for a mental switch. Mandela said, ‘It was to be expected, given our past, that we would encounter problems of this kind, but not, I believe, how great they would be. Nor that it would be as difficult to mobilise our society in a united effort to eradicate the problems.’49
* * *
Even at the time when he committed to leading his country, in May 1994, Mandela must have been hearing the echoes of words from some of his most trusted colleagues. One of them, Gill Marcus, then deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, had summarised the complexity of an emergent South Africa. Talking to Allister Sparks, she said: ‘There was a feeling that if you dealt with apartheid, a lot of other things would ultimately fall into place, but that has not been the case. It is much harder than we expected; a lot of problems are much more deep-seated.’ She continued: ‘So much is expected of us simultaneously that there is no room for sequencing. There is too much to do and we are trying to do it all.’50
For Mandela, ‘to do it all’ meant aligning the skewed past with the realities of the day. For that to happen, though, the requisite change had to be driven by people of integrity. He was concerned about the potential of power to corrupt former freedom fighters and the reluctance of those who had benefited from the past to use their ill-gotten privilege towards the effort to build the future. He called for a change in attitude and values, a paradigm shift in thinking to engender a new patriotism. He urged people to work for the common good rather than narrow personal interest.
He renewed this call at the Congress of South African Trade Unions conference in September 1994, following a strike by public sector workers. He said:
‘There are at least five million people who are unemployed; who don’t know where to get a meal during the day; who don’t know where to sleep; who don’t know how to clothe their children; how to pay for their school fees. That is your problem to solve. In striking, don’t look at your own personal interests, or just the interests of your union; you must take a broad approach. You must create conditions where business can actually expand and absorb these five million people who are unemployed. It is your task to do so. You must also know that, although we are entitled to fight for better living conditions, we must pace ourselves; the higher the cost of production, the more business want to retrench people and increase the army of the unemployed – bear that in mind.’51
He would make a similar call for high standards five years later, in Parliament. Society, he said, had also to bear in mind the need to maintain the ‘balance between freedom and responsibility. Quite clearly, there is something wrong with a society in which freedom is interpreted to mean that teachers or students go to school drunk; warders chase away management and appoint their own friends to lead institutions; striking workers resort to violence and destruction of property; businesspeople lavish money in court cases simply to delay implementation of legislation they do not like; and tax evasion turns individuals into heroes of dinner-table talk. Something drastic needs to be done about this. South African society – in its schools and universities, in the workplace, in sports, in professional work and all areas of social interaction – needs to infuse itself with a measure of discipline, a work ethic and responsibility for the actions we undertake.’52
Delivering the State of the Nation Address in the last year of his presidency, Mandela’s impatience shone through the speech, as did his frustration. But he sounded composed when he touched on issues that were close to his heart. This was when he spoke of the ‘reconstruction of the soul of the nation, the “RDP of the Soul”’. He explained, ‘By this, we mean first and foremost respect for life; pride and self-respect as South Africans rather than the notion that we can thrive in senseless self-flagellation. It means asserting our collective and individual identity as Africans committed to the rebirth of the continent, being respectful of other citizens and honouring women and children of our country who are exposed to all kinds of domestic violence and abuse. When I say Africans, I mean everybody [who regards the] continent of Africa [as] their home. It means building our schools into communities of learning and improvement of character. It means mobilising one another and not merely waiting for Government to clean our streets or for funding allocations to plant trees and tend schoolyards.
‘These are things we need to embrace as a nation that is nurturing its new patriotism. They constitute an important environment for bringing up future generations. They are about the involvement of South Africans in building a better life. Thus we shall take
not just small steps, but giant leaps to a bright future in a new millennium.’53
On the day he bade farewell to Parliament in March 1999, Mandela was in a more forgiving frame of mind. He took a long backward look at the overall goals the government had set itself and itemised the challenges:
‘Those challenges were: to avoid the nightmare of debilitating racial war and bloodshed and to reconcile our people on the basis that our overriding objective must be together to overcome the legacy of poverty, division and inequity.
‘To the extent that we still have to reconcile and heal our nation; to the extent that the consequences of apartheid still permeate our society and define the lives of millions of South Africans as lives of deprivation, these challenges are unchanged.’54
* * *
In contemporary South Africa, progress has been made but society still has to grapple with the periodic reappearance of the old fault lines. It happens when organisations and their leaders sense advantage in stirring up or playing to fears and vestigial prejudices, or where communities and social groups feel vulnerable to attack. The challenges remain in direct proportion to the extent to which the reciprocity essential to reconciliation was withheld. Nonetheless, South Africans can now never hear the word ‘reconciliation’ without associating it with Nelson Mandela.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Negotiating the Media
There is an old Afrikaans proverb normally used for someone whose story or testimony beggars belief: ‘Hy lieg soos ’n koerant’ (‘He tells lies like a newspaper’). With his conscious rehabilitation of the Afrikaans language from its dishonoured status as the oppressor’s tool, Nelson Mandela had likely heard of the saying. However, his attitude to newspapers – and the media at large – was born of practicality. From the early 1990s when he sat in his office at ANC headquarters at Shell House being briefed by Jessie Duarte about his schedule, the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld would be well within his reach on the desk.
From the moment he took the oath of office, Mandela accepted that, as president, he embodied the Constitution and all its provisions, including section sixteen with its guarantees of the right to freedom of expression, which also embraced the press and other media. He was a lawyer, first and foremost, and read with interest some of the judgments involving the media, especially the ruling by Justice Cameron that ‘a defamatory statement which relates to “free and fair political activity” is constitutionally protected in the Interim Constitution, even if false, unless the plaintiff can show that the publisher acted unreasonably’.1
The media in South Africa had never been busier than in the build-up to the 1994 elections, a situation that lasted all the way to the end of Mandela’s presidency. The locus of all their coverage of events in South Africa was Nelson Mandela. Emboldened by its newfound freedom, the media covered cases of wrongdoing or virtuousness among public officials with equal enthusiasm. A rash of columnists passed their verdict on the emergent democracy, mainly holding Mandela up as a model of integrity while casting aspersions on the government’s handling of issues such as crime.
As a result, there was a paradox at play, a tension between how Mandela saw himself and how the public – the world – saw him. Knowing the delicate nature of the new South Africa and his place in it, he approached the media institutions gingerly, much like a boxer sending out light jabs at an opponent, sizing him up and, at the same time, not being entirely surprised at the opponent’s hefty uppercut. ‘We have had good fights with the media,’ he said. ‘Such differences cannot be suppressed or avoided in a democracy.’2
Like all leaders, he had mixed feelings about the media, seeing it as a necessary evil. As Thami Mazwai, a doyen of black journalism in South Africa, recalls, ‘He respected the independence of the media as an institution. That was Mandela the statesman. But then Mandela the politician tended to react very forcefully where he thought there was an unfair interpretation of the ANC or the government, or himself.’3
There had long been a close relationship between the media and the liberation struggle, dating from the nineteenth-century colonial days when leading African thinkers had aired their views in the press. This helped to articulate black unity and resistance that gave birth to the ANC in 1912.4
Mandela himself admitted that in the 1950s, when he was banned and restricted to Johannesburg, he had depended on the press for information. However, he also said, ‘Although I read a variety of newspapers from around the country, newspapers are only a poor shadow of reality, their information is important to a freedom fighter not because it reveals the truth, but because it discloses the biases and perceptions of both those who produce the paper and those who read it.’5
On 29 March 1961, when the Treason Trial ended, with all the accused acquitted, Mandela went underground soon after. Clandestinely, he met with the editors of the more liberal of the newspapers, briefing them on the ANC’s campaign towards a national convention. He created news to ‘feed the mythology of the Black Pimpernel by taking a pocketful of “tickeys” (threepenny bits) and phoning individual newspaper reporters from telephone boxes and relaying stories of what we were planning or of the ineptitude of the police’.6
If he played a cat-and-mouse game with the police, he was, however, straight in his dealings with the media, imploring, to no avail, English-language newspaper editors to support a publicised stay away in opposition to South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth and the impending arrival of the republic.* The newspapers discouraged the strike and downplayed its impact, adopting a role which Mandela deemed ‘thoroughly shameful’.7
Later, in prison, he found that, his ambivalence notwithstanding, the newspapers were ‘more valuable to political prisoners than gold or diamonds, more hungered for than food or tobacco; they were the most precious contraband on Robben Island’. They were more important for disseminating news to the outside world about the struggle of the prisoners. ‘In order for a hunger strike to succeed,’ Mandela said, ‘the outside world must learn of it. Otherwise, prisoners will simply starve themselves to death, and no one will know. Smuggled-out information that we were on a hunger strike would elicit newspaper stories, which in turn generate pressure from support groups.’8
The ambivalence was reflected in his farewell briefing to a select group of editors and opinion makers on the fifth anniversary of his inauguration in May 1999. He said, ‘We have made repeated statements, especially in the run-up to the 1994 general elections that we regard a free press as a pillar of democracy and that we have no intention whatsoever of restricting that freedom of the press.’
He acknowledged that the government and the press had not always seen eye to eye. ‘We have had our differences,’ he said, ‘because when the press criticises us and we reply then the press says, “Well, the freedom of speech is threatened,” which suggests that they are the only ones who can exercise the freedom of speech – when we are criticised we must keep quiet. We don’t accept that and we’ll never accept it. If you criticise us, you must also give us the right to criticise you … We do not want lapdogs; we want watchdogs. And you have played that role and I think that it is proper that you should continue to be fiercely independent. All that we want is that even when you criticise and we don’t agree with your criticism, there should be integrity in what you say.
‘And many of you have that quality in dealing with issues, especially when you are dealing with a government such as ours where each individual has never had the experience of governance before he or she became a cabinet minister. There are many mistakes that we have committed, and so this debate in the country, this national debate must go on. And there will be differences. The important point is that the press is there to be used by us as a mirror in which we can see our own performance and we have changed our attitude on a number of things because we realised from the way in which the press reacted that we were either wrong or we did not make sufficient preparations for the nation to accept the point of view that we have taken …
‘
Nevertheless,’ he concluded, ‘at the same time, we must not be too much in a hurry, because you cannot change some of the issues that we face overnight. It’s a process to change them. And I am satisfied that within that context, the press is playing an important role.’9
An expression of this conviction about the media’s inalienable right to perform its role free of the fetters of state control was made when Mandela addressed the Congress of the International Press Institute in 1994. He said: ‘It is only such a free press that can temper the appetite of any government to amass power at the expense of the citizen. It is only such a free press that can be the vigilant watchdog of the public interest against the temptation on the part of those who wield it to abuse that power. It is only such a free press that can have the capacity to relentlessly expose excesses and corruption on the part of government, state officials and other institutions that hold power in society.
‘The African National Congress has nothing to fear from criticism. I can promise you we will not wilt under close scrutiny. It is our considered view that such criticism can only help us to grow, by calling attention to those of our actions and omissions which do not measure up to our people’s expectations and the democratic values to which we subscribe.’10
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