Mandela
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Winnie’s visits and letters were still Mandela’s chief lifeline. “You looked really sparklingly attractive in your outfit during your last visit,” he told her in March 1983. “Your letters are more than a tonic. I feel different every time I hear from you.” He even enjoyed her stings, which “have come to be part of our life, our mutual love and our happiness.” “There are precious things worth dying for,” he told her two years later. “Right on the top of the list is my beloved country and my darling Mum.”26
But he also needed friends. “To appreciate just how very precious friendship can be,” he told his Indian friend Adelaide Joseph in London, “you must be in prison and cut off from your beloved wife and children.” When he could not help his family in their problems, he added, “life becomes torture in the proper sense of the term.”27 “In the final count it is a man’s inner resources, the certainty that you have a million friends, which gives you the faith and conviction that you are on duty even behind these grim walls,” he wrote to an American friend, Arthur Glickman, on his farm in Maine. “I wish I could be on that farm.”28 He always felt fortified by his memories of his country upbringing. “The country boy in me refuses to die, despite so many years of exposure to urban life,” he wrote to Effie Schultz in 1986. “The open veld, a bush, blade of grass and animal-life make it a real joy to be alive.”29
He lamented the death of friends, particularly those like Yusuf Dadoo and Ruth First who had sacrificed themselves to the struggle. “The world we once knew so well seems to be crumbling down very fast,” he wrote to Barney Ngakane’s son Lionel in London. “We were so busy outside prison that we hardly had time to think seriously about death. But you have to be locked up in a prison cell for life to appreciate the paralysing grief which seizes you when death strikes close to you.”30
He could now read more copiously, less restricted by political content. He had four volumes of J. D. Bernal’s Science in History, Schapera’s Government and Politics, Schurmann and Schell’s Republican China, and Samir Amin’s Neo-Colonialism in West Africa.31 In May 1985 he told a friend that he had been reading Tom Lodge’s Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, Eddie Roux’s Time Longer than Rope, and Karis and Carter’s From Protest to Challenge, which had been smuggled into jail by Kathrada.32 He was delighted to hear that Mary Benson was writing about ANC history: “We are still fascinated by Greek literature of ancient times, and a work on AJL [Luthuli] or Tshekedi [Khama] may arouse fresh interest after the harvest has been saved.… Twilight reading has become a phenomenon of our life, especially during the last thirty-seven years, so that the labours of all those who specialise on this theme have not been vain after all.”33 He needed relaxation, he told Adelaide Joseph, “in the form of novels and autobiographies.”34 But he preferred political novels. He enjoyed Nadine Gordimer’s 1979 novel Burger’s Daughter, which was partly based on his friend Bram Fischer, and was reassured by Gordimer’s growing political involvement: “She has turned out to be a forthright and formidable communicator whose message reaches far beyond the visible horizons,” he told Helen Joseph. “How such girls are so precious today!”35
But the more Mandela picked up about the outside world, the more frustrated he was to be cut off from any involvement as his country came closer to civil war; all the more so since the ANC was now at last flexing its muscles, invoking his own name and leadership.
The Free Mandela campaign which had begun in March 1980 was proving efficient at publicizing the ANC cause. It was, as Govan Mbeki said afterward, “the clear signal that the ANC was back at the very centre of the political stage.” Tambo had declared 1980 the Year of the Freedom Charter—twenty-five years after its first promulgation—and “Charterists” were reappearing, pledged to a nonracial democracy. The next year, an “Anti-Republic” campaign was launched for the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. Prisoners released from Robben Island were now playing key roles on the mainland. Before his assassination in Harare in 1981, Joe Gqabi had established a “study group” in Soweto that included many former Black Consciousness activists from Robben Island, among them Popo Molefe, Eric Molobi and Murphy Morobe. In Durban young Indians and Africans were planning mass action, encouraged by Mac Maharaj, who was now in charge of “political reconstruction” for the ANC in Lusaka. The rebellious spirit of the eighties came from disparate political groupings, including Black Consciousness, communists and churchmen. But Tambo in Lusaka was determined that the ANC must embrace the widest possible front, must “bring under its revolutionary umbrella all actual and potential allies, inspire, activate, conduct, direct and lead them in a united offensive against the enemy.”36
The revolt had been further provoked by a wrong turning taken by P. W. Botha in 1982, soon after Mandela arrived at Pollsmoor. Botha proposed to change the South African constitution to allow Indians and Coloureds to elect their own MPs to separate parliaments which would have voting powers over education, housing and welfare. But the reforms excluded Africans, who would still have no vote. It was a move clearly intended to divide the nonwhite population, but it had the opposite effect, leading to new calls for a united front from all races and parties, particularly from the ANC. Tambo declared 1983 the Year of United Action, and called for “one front for national liberation.”
It was the Coloured people based in Cape Town who provided the most surprising new protest. Traditionally they had always been conservative, looking toward the whites more than the blacks; and many of them were tempted by the new constitution. But the more farsighted Coloured leaders were determined to resist dividing the ranks of apartheid’s opponents, and to join the Africans. They included one surprising new recruit whose courage Mandela would never forget.
The Reverend Allan Boesak, a preacher in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, had recently become President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. A theologian of only thirty-seven, with a high-pitched voice, he would soon turn out to have expensive tastes and a dubious private morality; but he was a brilliant orator, often compared to Martin Luther King, and was eloquent in defending human rights. It was at a big meeting in Johannesburg in January 1983 that he first called for a “united front.” The phrase was originally an aside, but it set off an immediate response from activists, who formed a steering committee from all races and many different groups including the Release Mandela Committee. As P. W. Botha’s government pressed ahead with its plans for the tricameral parliament, they stepped up their protests. On August 20, 1983, a few days before the white Parliament debated the proposals, they held a mass rally in Mitchell’s Plain, the Coloured suburb of Cape Town, to launch a new organization, the United Democratic Front (UDF). The opening speaker was an ANC veteran, Frances Baard, who reminded them of Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech twenty years before, said she could now smell “the freedom air” sweeping through Africa, and called for the release of “our leaders.”37 A message was read out from Mandela in Pollsmoor, who was named as one of the movement’s patrons. But the most electrifying speech was by Boesak, who emphasized the “God-given rights” of the people: “We want all our rights, we want them here and we want them now.”38 Sisulu heard about the event with delight from his son Zwelakhe, who visited him on the same day: “It was a link between exile and the people in the country.”39
The ANC’s contribution to the UDF would often be debated, but it had a clear influence on the movement’s leadership.40 The three joint presidents were all ANC people: Albertina Sisulu, Walter’s wife, from Johannesburg; Oscar Mphetha, a released Robben Islander from the Western Cape; and Archie Gumede from Natal. Popo Molefe and Terror Lekota, released from Robben Island in 1982, had converted from Black Consciousness to the ANC, and respectively became General Secretary and Publicity Secretary before being rearrested.
The government put the new tricameral constitution to a referendum of white voters in November 1983. It was opposed by a few business leaders, including Harry Oppenheimer of Anglo-American, and by
some white liberal politicians, including Van Zyl Slabbert of the Progressive Party, who foresaw that it would antagonize Africans. But it was supported by most businessmen, and by the influential English-language papers the Sunday Times and the Financial Mail. Both the British and American Ambassadors, Ewen Fergusson and Herman Nickel, lobbied for a “step in the right direction.”41 In the event 76 percent of the voters said yes to the new constitution, a triumph for P. W. Botha. He was installed with his new title of State President, presiding over whites, Indians and Coloureds, while Africans felt still more shut out than before.
Soon afterward Botha achieved a diplomatic victory over the ANC by signing a nonaggression treaty with President Samora Machel, at Nkomati in neighboring Mozambique, that effectively excluded ANC bases. Photographs of the short figure of Machel beside the tall Botha seemed to symbolize the triumph of Pretoria’s bullying power, a crippling blow to the armed struggle which (as the ANC put it) “surprised the progressive world.” But the treaty helped to concentrate the ANC’s efforts on the internal revolt. “Its diplomatic defeat at Nkomati,” said the sociologists Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, “turned into a psychological victory at home.”42
Mandela heard about these setbacks with all the frustration of his detachment. He saw Botha pretending to reform apartheid while actually extending it by separating Indians and Coloureds from the Africans. He saw the new assemblies as new “toy telephones,” like the Natives’ Representative Council forty years earlier.43 But he was relieved by the small turnout of nonwhites for the tricameral elections in August 1984: only 31 percent of the eligible Coloureds voted, and only 20 percent of the Indians. And the new Parliament soon turned out to be unifying rather than dividing the militants. The UDF leaders were subjected to arrests, detentions and assassinations, but they held together; and their loose and decentralized structure soon showed its advantage, for as the top layers were removed, small local groups and clubs were constantly throwing up replacements. The formation of the UDF, Walter Sisulu reckoned later, “decisively turned the tide against the advances being made by the P. W. Botha regime.”44
From his jail isolation, Mandela was brought closer to developments, as he was allowed more frequent visitors. He suspected that Botha and his Cabinet were using these visitors to “test the waters,” but he himself could use them to show his strength and reasonableness to different constituencies, and to catch up with the world.
He could connect up with journalists when in August 1984 he was visited by Benjamin Pogrund of the Rand Daily Mail (Mandela visualized him as “a busy executive glued to some posh office in Main Street”), but he was not allowed to report the visit. Pogrund had not seen Mandela for twenty years: he was surprised to find his hair virtually all gray-white and his face very lined, with deep clefts running from his nose to his mouth, while his eyes looked rather dead. But his mind was very alert: he was interested in everything, from Robert Sobukwe’s widow to the computerization of newspapers. The Mail was closed down by its owners soon afterward, but Mandela wrote that he was confident its tradition would be kept alive.45
He could connect up with Christians when in October 1984 he was visited by Professor H.W. van der Merwe, a Quaker from the University of Cape Town who had befriended Winnie and who was dedicated to political reconciliation. Van der Merwe was amazed by Mandela’s sense of power, which manifested itself even through thick glass: “in his eyes, his features, the way he leans slightly forward as if to bring home his message, his voice, the inclinations and tone, the choice of words, intense warmth—the smile, the greetings, the repeated gratitude.” After the professor had praised President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia as a sincere Christian, he asked Mandela outright: “Are you a Christian?” “Very definitely,” he replied; and the warder James Gregory confirmed that he hardly ever missed a service. Van der Merwe left the prison inspired, and convinced that “This man will come out to participate in the government of this country in the near future. We must pray for it.”46
He could connect up with British conservatives when in January 1985 he had a visit from Lord Bethell, a portly peer (he reminded Mandela of Churchill) who the government clearly hoped would be sympathetic to their position. Bethell was surprised when “a tall man with silvering hair, in impeccable olive-green shirt and well-creased navy blue trousers, came into the room, shook my hand and greeted me in precise, educated English.” He could almost have been a general in the prison service: “Indeed, his manner was the most self-assured of them all. He was, however, black.” Mandela reassured him that the ANC was restraining the armed struggle, and deeply regretted a bomb which had killed innocent civilians in Pretoria two years before. He was interested in Margaret Thatcher’s success, and in Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader. He showed Bethell his vegetable garden—“like a landowner showing me his farm”—and praised one of the officers as “really an excellent gardener.” After their two-hour meeting Bethell “felt poorer at being so suddenly deprived of the man’s exhilarating company.” He reported back favorably to Mrs. Thatcher, but still she would not support calls for Mandela’s unconditional release. Mandela wrote to Bethell in April, inquiring about Mrs. Thatcher’s links with both Gorbachev and Reagan; but the letter was never delivered—Bethell had been told that “a response from Mr. Mandela could possibly experience delay.”47
He could connect up with Americans when Professor Sam Dash of America’s Georgetown University visited him soon afterward. Dash too was surprised by his dignity: “I felt that I was in the presence not of a guerrilla fighter or radical ideologue, but of a head of state.” Mandela, “in a soft British accent,” very openly criticized the government’s promised reforms, including the repeal of the law against mixed marriages: “You are speaking about pinpricks. Frankly, it is not my ambition to marry a white woman or to swim in a white pool.” He assured Dash that the ANC accepted that whites belonged to South Africa: “We want them to live here with us and to share power with us.”48 He was clearly longing to be involved, and worried (as he wrote to Dash afterward) about the unprecedented loss of life: “I am prepared to play my role in the effort to normalize the situation, and to negotiate over the mechanics of transferring power to all South Africans.”49 But the South African police were closely watching Mandela’s correspondents: even when Professor Dash wrote harmless thank-you letters to Helen Suzman and John Dugard for their hospitality, they were intercepted discreetly (op ’n delikate wys) by the Special Branch, and forwarded to the Minister with a top-secret minute from the Commissioner, General Willemse.50
The protests and violence were now escalating, driven by a new mood of defiance. The exclusion of blacks from the tricameral elections had provoked resistance in the townships—particularly against Bantu education and the payment of rents. The protests were stimulated by the UDF, but spontaneous local outbursts of anger were spreading across the country. The old ANC idea of the stay-away was revived with some success, particularly in the Vaal Triangle south of Johannesburg. The government appeared to be rapidly losing any black support, and had to call in troops to control the townships. “Things are cracking up,” Winnie Mandela said in the New Year. “They are losing control.”51 But she herself would soon prove to be one of the most uncontrollable elements.
The ANC leaders in Lusaka could not afford to lag behind the masses, as they had done in the past, and they were watching developments closely. In early January 1985 Tambo issued a dramatic New Year message—“Render South Africa Ungovernable”—and claimed that the ANC had already “taken impressive strides” toward this goal.52 The prisoners in Pollsmoor fully endorsed Tambo’s message, but there were obvious dangers in such a policy for a party which, it now appeared, might itself have to govern before long. As Sisulu recalled: “It did worry me, the strategy of ungovernability: the negative aspect—and people were also having necklaces* and things like that, which I thought was very negative and dangerous.… I think Madiba shared that.”
At the time, though, the prisoners saw
no real alternative to the policy of rendering South Africa ungovernable. “The position internationally was very much in our favor,” Sisulu recalled. “If we played our cards well there would be no reason why we should not succeed.”53 The strategy was criticized by white liberals and businessmen: Harry Oppenheimer, the former Chairman of Anglo-American, would come to regard it as the ANC’s most serious mistake.54
Meanwhile, the campaign to release Mandela gathered momentum. President Botha felt pressed to make some response, and seized an opportunity to project himself as a peacemaker. While touring Europe he had been encouraged by a group of right-wing German leaders including Franz Josef Strauss—a good friend of the Afrikaners—to offer to release Mandela provided he renounce all violence. This was a brilliant solution, he told the Cabinet on his return, “because if Mandela refused the whole world would understand why the South African government would not release him.” Kobie Coetsee and Louis le Grange, the Ministers of Justice and of Law and Order, warned him that Mandela could not give up his strongest bargaining chip.55
On January 31, 1985 Botha told Parliament that he was offering Mandela his freedom, provided he “unconditionally rejected violence as a political instrument.” Mandela was called to the office at Pollsmoor to be given a copy of Hansard reporting it. He was determined to make a public response, and the same evening he carefully prepared a speech which rejected the offer while keeping open the option of negotiation and dispelling any suggestion of a division within the ANC. He gave it to Winnie when she next visited him, and on February 10 his daughter Zindzi read it out at the huge Jabulani Stadium in Soweto, beginning with the words “My father says …” The speech firmly reasserted Mandela’s loyalty to the ANC and to Tambo, “my greatest friend,” and insisted that it was Botha who must renounce violence, by dismantling apartheid and unbanning the ANC, before Mandela could accept freedom: “I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when you, the people, are not free.”56