Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  It was the first time in over two decades that Mandela’s own words had been heard publicly, linking his policies directly to the ANC and the UDF. The huge crowd was ecstatic. Terror Lekota, now released from Robben Island, watched the scene with wonder: “I recall several clusters of very old men, supported by walking sticks, shuffling with determination to the edge of the open-air stage,” he wrote to his daughter. After Zindzi had spoken, many of them walked away with tearstained faces: “They had heard what they wanted to hear.”57 Tambo was delighted with the speech’s reception, and wrote via Adelaide to Mandela in his code which called the ANC the “Church” and Mandela “Bishop Madibane.” He praised the Bishop’s “brilliant and stirring message which spread from congregation to congregation … it struck a powerful unifying note, and revealed a remarkable degree of identity of approach to the ever-changing terrain of the church-going world.”58

  It looked like a total deadlock. But Botha, it turned out, was not quite as intransigent as he appeared in public. Soon after Zindzi’s speech, he summoned the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, to his office and told him (according to Coetsee): “You know, we have painted ourselves in a corner. Can you get us out?”59

  In the meantime Mandela was still in jail, and the violence mounted. It reached a new climax in March 1985, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, when the police in Uitenhage killed nineteen protesters. At the ANC conference at Kabwe in Zambia three months later Tambo warned that the violence would escalate, and that the ANC would have more difficulty in distinguishing between “hard” and “soft” targets. He did not call for a general uprising (he explained afterward), because he knew he could not achieve it; but he warned that black policemen must prepare to turn their guns against their masters.60

  An ungovernable South Africa was looking much more credible, but also more alarming to both sides. Police terrorism and torture were countered by young black activists extending their own counterterrorism against black police and suspected informers, including the use of the notorious “necklace.” Pretoria described the violence as “black on black,” but many of the worst atrocities later turned out to have been engineered by government agents. One young woman, for example, Maki Skosana, was stoned and burned to death in July 1985, allegedly by ANC supporters. Years later her murder proved to be part of an elaborate government dirty-tricks operation which was responsible for hundreds of deaths.61

  The government was also still using Kaiser Matanzima to attempt to persuade Mandela to be released to the Transkei. Mandela found his nephew’s persistence “highly disturbing, if not provocative,” and warned him in December 1984 that if he continued it would cause an unpleasant confrontation: “We will, under no circumstances, accept being released to the Transkei or any other Bantustan.”62 Mandela was saddened by the break with the man he had once regarded as a hero. “We are still very close to each other,” he told Fatima Meer two months later. “But something snapped inside me when he went over to the Nats. Indeed, politics have split families, hero and worshipper.”63 In 1985 Mandela refused a visit from Matanzima, who complained that he was grossly insulted. But Mandela warned him again not to use their relationship to involve the ANC in Bantustan politics: “A public figure whether—as you would put it—he is ‘a dangerous revolutionary’ or a mere Bantustan leader, who allows his image to be so severely dented by recrimination, touchiness and intemperate language can be no model for my own approach to people and problems.”64 Four months later Matanzima wrote again in his huge handwriting from the Great Place, Qamata:

  I am happy to advise you that it will please me to meet you under conditions of strict confidency and secrecy. I shall be pleased also to hold the meeting away from the confines of your prison.

  Missing you. Yours Sincerely65

  By July 1985 many townships were becoming seriously ungovernable, as Tambo had called for, and around Johannesburg they were close to anarchy. Many black police had fled from their homes in the townships and were living in tented camps on the outskirts. The government warned that the ANC was planning a classic two-staged revolution, culminating in the seizure of power. “Law and order had virtually broken down,” recorded the well-briefed BBC correspondent Graham Leach, “with even the simplest burglary unable to be investigated unless an officer entered the township accompanied by armoured personnel-carriers carrying police and troops.”66

  On July 20 the government declared a state of emergency, allowing the police to detain and interrogate suspects without restraint; but the rebels did not appear to be cowed. Talking to black activists in Soweto a month later, I sensed a basic shift of mood: both schoolchildren and their parents now seemed confident of victory, while the collaborators were worried about being on the losing side. “The emergency is preparing conditions for a much more violent conflict,” said Tambo, “moving towards a real explosion.”67

  Revolutionary ANC leaders, including Govan Mbeki on Robben Island, now expected the rebellion to cause a “rolling revolution” which would bring the government to its knees. But the most serious blow to Pretoria came from a quarter where the ANC was least expecting it—from international bankers and investors. It was very rare for global capital to become associated with a moral crusade: “The markets aren’t sentimental,” the financier George Soros would often say. But in this case, he conceded, the markets moved against apartheid, though in a curious way.68

  The battles in the townships had attracted massive television coverage in Britain and America, which was rapidly undermining Botha’s assurances about the country’s stability, while antiapartheid protesters were pressing depositors and clients of the multinational banks to withdraw their custom, to force them to stop lending to and investing in South Africa. This had an immediate effect, as for two years Pretoria had been rashly relying on short-term foreign loans. One of the biggest lenders was the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York, with loans of $500 million. Twenty-five years earlier the Chase had been seen as a friend of apartheid, and it lent a large sum to the Verwoerd government soon after the Sharpeville massacre. But on July 31, 1985, eleven days after Botha proclaimed the emergency, the Chase quietly decided to stop rolling over its loans, and to recall its credits as they became due. It was not a political decision: the bank’s bluff Chairman, Willard Butcher, had little interest in South Africa, and only wanted to placate complaints from New York investors and depositors. But it was disastrous for Pretoria. Other banks began to withdraw credit, the rand began falling, and the South African Reserve Bank had to renew loans from Swiss and German banks, at much higher interest rates.69

  When Mandela heard the news in Pollsmoor he was surprised and delighted: “I must be frank: I did not expect such massive support from bankers,” he said five years later. “It was an indication of the impact which the ANC and other political organizations had made on the international community.”70 “We underestimated the importance of bankers,” said Sisulu. “They gave a signal to South Africa to be careful.”71 In Lusaka, Oliver Tambo declared that “the refusal of the banks to roll over their loans is an important victory in our struggle.”72

  President Botha could reassure the bankers only by making major concessions, which were expected to be announced at the next National Party Congress, in Durban on August 15. His Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, drafted a speech which promised to begin to dismantle apartheid and to release Mandela, and which included the phrase “today we have crossed the Rubicon.” Pik Botha personally reassured American diplomats, including Chester Crocker, that his President was “on the verge of momentous announcements.”73 Inside Pollsmoor prison, the five political prisoners waited expectantly for Botha’s speech. Winnie had just visited Mandela, who had reiterated that he would accept no conditions to his release, and suggested that Botha should visit him: Botha was “one man who has no problems whatsoever about seeing him in Pollsmoor.”74

  In the event Botha’s speech was a total anticlimax. He refused to take what he called the “road to ab
dication and suicide,” blamed the country’s unrest on “barbaric communist agitators” and wagged his finger as he threatened: “Don’t push us too far.” Mandela was a communist, he warned, who must promise not to plan, instigate or commit acts of violence before he was released. For the expectant world the speech was, as Pik Botha said later, “a bucket of iced water in the face.”75 *

  For a few weeks it seemed that anything could happen. A poll conducted by MORI in mid-August showed that 70 percent of South African blacks, and 30 percent of whites, expected civil war; but a majority of blacks and half the whites still thought that their country could be ruled by a joint government of blacks and whites. Ninety percent of blacks wanted Mandela released without conditions, though 57 percent of whites did not want him released on any terms.77 There was even speculation that Mandela might shortly be sharing power with Botha: on August 22 the conservative Johannesburg Star included a spoof issue purporting to be dated 1990, with the headline: “MANDELA THREATENS TO PULL OUT OF PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.”78

  By manipulating the media, the government did its best to depict Mandela as a violent terrorist. After Botha’s speech Mandela was visited by two right-wing American journalists from the Washington Times, John Lofton and Cal Thomas, who had come out to South Africa with the fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell. Mandela tried to explain to them why he had had no alternative to taking up arms, and how a Christian had “the right to use force against evil.” America, he said, had a deeply entrenched democracy, while black South Africans had no vote, and were ruled by “a colonial power crawling on crutches out of the Middle Ages.” The resulting Washington Times article proclaimed “Mandela Urges ‘Violent’ Revolution,” and began: “Nelson Mandela, the South African terrorist and revolutionary, sees ‘no alternative’ to violent revolution.”79

  Western investors were now losing confidence in Botha, and they faced a new shock two weeks after his speech. The eloquent preacher Allan Boesak was due to lead a march on Pollsmoor demanding Mandela’s release and promising to “turn South Africa upside down.” But just before the march Boesak was arrested, and more riots broke out. In the Johannesburg stock exchange, which I visited on that “Black Tuesday,” foreign confidence collapsed, and the rand started plunging. By the close of business the rand was down to half its value against sterling compared to a year before. Most stockbrokers, including Afrikaners, saw Mandela’s release as the only solution. It was an extraordinary alliance: international capital was now siding with Mandela, the old communist bogey.

  The South African economy, which relied on foreign investment and loans, was now crippled. A small group of business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the new Chairman of Anglo-American, took the bold step of flying to Zambia to meet Tambo and his ANC colleagues. Harry Oppenheimer, Relly’s predecessor, felt “twitchy” about the expedition, but the businessmen were surprised by the ANC leaders’ sensitivity and intelligence: “A more attractive and genial group it would be hard to imagine,” said Tony Bloom of the Premier Group. Tambo explained that he hated violence and suffering—“I even take insects out of the bath”—but that the ANC had to counter the state’s violence. Releasing Mandela was the only way to begin negotiations. But Relly took fright soon after the visit when another ANC bomb exploded. Tambo was puzzled by this reversal: “It was because of the violence that Relly came to Zambia.”80

  The financial crisis worsened. The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gerhard de Kock, toured the world’s bankers to try to raise loans, but he was treated as a pariah. P. W. Botha then brought in a negotiator, Fritz Leutwiler, the former head of the Swiss National Bank, who tried to make a deal with the lenders: but he refused to meet Mandela or Tambo, saying: “I’m reluctant to shake hands with a communist without counting my fingers afterwards.” Eventually Botha convinced Leutwiler that he would produce new reforms, and Leutwiler negotiated for debts to be temporarily rolled over. But foreign bankers would never regain their confidence in South Africa’s future under apartheid. Western conservatives continued to argue that sanctions would not bite; but the bankers’ withdrawal would exert decisive pressure on Pretoria to reach a settlement.81

  Antiapartheid lobbies in America and Europe stepped up their demands for sanctions and for Mandela’s release, using more sophisticated leverage. American campaigners were compelling pension funds to withdraw their investments in South Africa, while the Black Caucus in Congress was mobilizing its political clout. But the American and British governments firmly resisted the popular pressure. President Reagan told Mrs. Thatcher that he was content to leave it to her.82 She had her own convictions. She was impressed by South Africa’s thriving free-enterprise economy compared to the chaos in Marxist black states elsewhere in Africa; and she kept warning that a million whites were entitled to British passports, and would leave South Africa if the country collapsed, like the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique.83 Her right-wing advisers continued to stress the communist menace from the ANC and the tribal divisions among South African blacks.

  Mrs. Thatcher still rejected sanctions, and insisted that she could influence P. W. Botha in private, as a sympathetic friend. They had first met when she had visited South Africa as Minister of Education in the early seventies, when Botha, then Minister of Defence, had shown her around Cape Point. Now she met him again in June 1984 when he lunched at Chequers, her official country house, along with the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe. She did not warm to him, she said: her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, thought Botha appalled her. But she still felt she had a special influence on him. She listened to him sympathetically before telling him to release Mandela and to stop forcibly removing blacks from their homes and bombarding neighboring states. Botha, however, came away reassured: “I know from the good-byes of her and her husband that they respected me.” And he was struck that “she did not deny that Mandela was a communist.”84

  When Botha declared the state of emergency a year later Thatcher was more seriously worried, and in September 1985 she held a special seminar on South Africa; it was attended by academics, diplomats and politicians, but no one sympathetic to the ANC. The next month Tambo visited London to talk for the first time with businessmen and bankers as well as politicians—a major breakthrough. But Thatcher forbade anyone in her government to talk to him or any other leaders of the ANC, whom she still described as a group of communist terrorists: anyone who thought the ANC could ever form a government, she said, was “living in cloud-cuckoo land.” It was not surprising that Mrs. Thatcher should be suspicious of terrorists: she had nearly been killed by an IRA bomb in Brighton the year before. But the ANC never resorted to that kind of terrorism, and unlike the IRA they had no votes to bring about peaceful change.

  In October Thatcher faced her toughest challenge over South Africa, at a Commonwealth Conference in Nassau which Mandela saw as a key event. She was determined to stand out against the “gadarene rush” toward sanctions, and succeeded in limiting them to “a tiny little bit,” as she triumphantly put it. With those four little words, Geoffrey Howe complained afterward, she “humiliated three dozen other heads of government, devalued the policy which they had just agreed, and demeaned herself.”85 But she did agree to the idea that a group of “eminent persons” should visit South Africa in search of a settlement; and rather grudgingly President Botha agreed to let them in.

  A team of seven was selected, including Lord Barber, the ex-Chancellor from Britain; Malcolm Fraser, the former Australian Prime Minister; and General Obasanjo, the ex-President of Nigeria. They were determined to visit Mandela in jail. The prisoner in Pollsmoor was now much more famous than ever before, both in South Africa and throughout the world. “You all must be wondering what it is like to live with a ‘celebrity’ like Uncle Nelson,” wrote Kathrada in September 1985. “Not a single day goes by without something about him in the papers or radio.” He “unfailingly makes a great impression upon people,” Kathrada explained, yet he “has the ordinary, normal interests, desires, hopes, likes,
dislikes etc.”86 With all the world’s expectations resting on him, Mandela appeared in total control over his emotions—sometimes exasperating his fellow prisoners. “No matter how affected or excited he may be about a particular incident or event he still manages to display a calm which is unbelievable,” Kathrada told Fatima Meer’s daughter Shehneez in February 1986. “We are convinced (and we have told him) that if he were to be called to the office and told that he would be released tomorrow, he would return to his cell and tell us after an hour or so … nothing in his talk or demeanour gives us the slightest hint that he is the man about whom there is such an upsurge of feeling throughout the world.”87

  It was now difficult to imagine any settlement that did not involve Mandela, and his survival was crucial. At sixty-seven he appeared to be in unusually good health. But late in 1985 a medical examination at the Volks Hospital showed an enlarged prostate gland—a common ailment for men in their sixties—which the urologist Dr. Willem Laubscher insisted required surgery. Cabinet Ministers were alarmed at the thought that they might be blamed if anything went wrong: the commanding officer of Pollsmoor, Brigadier Munro, warned that civil war would break out if Mandela died. Three more doctors converged on the hospital to give their opinions: Nthato Motlana, the Mandelas’ family doctor, and two specialists from Switzerland and Johannesburg. They all agreed an operation was necessary—but who should perform it? To Motlana’s surprise, Mandela insisted on the Cape Town Afrikaner Dr. Laubscher.88

  Winnie flew down to visit him the day before the operation. On the same plane, as it happened, was the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, who already knew much about Winnie through his friend in Brandfort Piet de Waal. He was in the first-class section, but he recognized Winnie and stopped to reassure her about the government’s concern for Mandela’s health. Later Winnie firmly walked into the first-class section and sat beside him, talking for most of the two-hour flight. Mandela had earlier asked to see Coetsee, but had received no reply. By the time the plane reached Cape Town, Coetsee had decided to visit him in hospital.