Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Coetsee arrived at Mandela’s bedside unannounced. He was amazed to be greeted as if Mandela were a host welcoming an old friend. “He came across as a man of Old World values,” Coetsee said later, “an old Roman citizen with dignitas, gravitas, honestas, simplicitas.” Coetsee was struck too by Mandela’s interest in Afrikaans and Afrikaners. Mandela found Coetsee far more polite than his predecessor, Jimmy Kruger, and realized that he was subtly putting out feelers: Mandela suspected that he might want to make some kind of deal, but did not let on. He asked Coetsee for help in allowing Winnie to live in Johannesburg. Coetsee invited Winnie to his official mansion and offered to allow her to return provided she was not disruptive: Winnie made no such promise, but returned to Johannesburg anyway, more militant than ever.89

  Mandela took a robust interest in his prostate operation. “The surgeons tore up my abdomen mercilessly,” he wrote to a friend. “They cut the pubis open, removed a vital organ, dug a deep hole just below the navel and inserted a thick pipe. There was a second one through the front, and a needle as long and dangerous as a javelin was embedded in the forearm.” But he “came to love and respect all the nurses in that unit. If I was wealthy I would adopt all of them as my children.”90 The nurses in the intensive care ward, he noticed, “treated each person as if they were the only patient.” If he were to die, he reflected, he would prefer to be in the open veld, surrounded by the bush and wildflowers; but if he died in the city he would leave with a broad smile among such nurses.91

  Mandela’s illness, and the resulting flurry of official activity, produced a new wave of rumors that he would soon be released, and crowds gathered outside the jail. The Johannesburg Sunday Times urged President Botha to “seize the opportunity of Nelson Mandela’s illness—before the man dies and all hell breaks loose—and ship him out of the country on a one-way ticket to medical treatment abroad.”92 The Ministry of Information ascribed the rumors to “a continuing campaign of disinformation by propaganda experts behind the Iron Curtain.”93 The prisoners themselves had seen enough hopes come and go. “The only people who remain unconvinced and thankfully unperturbed by the excitement,” wrote Kathrada in February 1986, “are ourselves.”94 Mandela reminded Winnie of their hopes back in 1964. He still visualized his homecoming and recalled Winnie’s delicious meals, warning her: “If I don’t get that dish when I return some day I will dissolve the marriage on the spot.” But by April 1986 he was writing to her: “There is not a living soul in South Africa today, no matter how highly placed he may be, who knows when we will be released.”95

  *“Necklacing,” the practice of placing a tire filled with gasoline around a victim’s neck and setting it alight, came to be the most infamous characteristic of township violence.

  *P. W. Botha’s successor, F. W. de Klerk, was later rumored to have told Botha to toughen the speech, although he strongly denied this to me. Botha insists that he wrote the speech himself, with some ideas contributed by Ministers, and that when he read it to them beforehand “none of them complained.”76

  24

  Ungovernability

  1986–1988

  Your logic frightens me

  How coldly you disdain legerdemains!

  “Open Sesame” and—two decades’ rust on hinges

  Peels at the touch of a conjuror’s wand?

  —Wole Soyinka1

  AFTER HIS operation Mandela was not taken back to rejoin his colleagues on the top floor of Pollsmoor, but to a separate section on the ground floor. His new quarters were spacious, with three big cells, one for sleeping, one for exercise, one for studying; but they were damp, dark and bleak, with little view, and there were still fifteen locked metal doors between him and the entrance.2 He now had no roof terrace to exercise on, only a yard surrounded by prison cells, from which the ordinary prisoners would shout abuse at the old man in a straw hat—“Hey kaffir, why are you ignoring us?”—until the commanding officer had blinds put on the windows.3

  For the first time in his twenty-four years in jail Mandela was alone, while the crisis outside bore down on him. He insisted that he did not see himself as the chosen leader: “He never called himself a man of destiny,” said George Bizos, who often visited him. “He always speaks in the plural.… I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say ‘I did this.’ ”4 But the government had now put him into this Olympian isolation, and he was convinced that the time had come for him to play a leading role. When his old friend Amina Cachalia visited him, she sensed he was on a new peak: “I have a feeling that the change came then. He had to take responsibility and try to make a breakthrough. He realized that he would get out, and that he could make a democracy. That’s why he took the initiative.”5

  Mandela was alarmed by the escalating violence in the country, which he feared could soon become uncontrollable by anyone. “If we did not start a dialogue soon,” he reflected, “both sides would soon be plunged into a dark night of oppression, violence and war.” He respected the government’s armed strength: he did not, like many younger prisoners, believe that the ANC could seize power through a rolling revolution or a military victory. But he thought that the enemy were beginning to see themselves as being “on the wrong side of history.” He believed, having once been a herd boy, that “there are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock.”6 But dare he move without consulting his colleagues? It was his most difficult decision. “I knew that if I asked their permission they would say no,” as he put it to me. “If I continued they could take action and expel me. But I was confident that the enemy itself wanted a retreat, through a silver bridge.”7

  After a few days of lonely reflection Mandela was allowed to meet with the other four ANC prisoners, led by Sisulu. They had planned to protest on the day he was separated from them, rightly suspecting that the government was trying to divide him both from them and from the Robben Island revolutionaries like Harry Gwala. “I knew that it’s the strategy used the world over by rulers, to divide and rule,” said Sisulu, who correctly assumed that the intelligence service had bugged the prisoners’ conversations on Robben Island. But he had confidence in Mandela—“You must be a very powerful man to dictate your terms to Nelson,” as he said later—while he knew he could repudiate Mandela if he blundered. Mandela himself did not complain about being segregated. He told his old comrades with deliberate vagueness that the government would find it easier to approach him alone—not that he planned to approach the government. He only told them: “Something good may come of this.”8

  Mandela first had to reassure Tambo, so he enlisted George Bizos to make the journey to Lusaka. Bizos, having first informed Kobie Coetsee—who questioned him carefully about Mandela—made two visits to brief Tambo about Mandela’s discussion with Coetsee, assuring him that Mandela would not commit himself without the ANC’s approval. Tambo consulted his colleagues, who approved the principle of preliminary talks, and sent back the message to Mandela to carry on. Bizos then reported to both Mandela and Coetsee that Tambo had no differences with Mandela. That was not good news for the government. A few weeks later Mandela wrote to Coetsee to suggest “talks about talks.” There was no reply.9

  But in the meantime a new opening had appeared. In February 1986, just before Bizos’s second visit to Tambo, three of the Commonwealth’s seven “eminent persons” had arrived in South Africa to try to find ways of beginning a political dialogue. They found widespread evidence of police intimidation and provocation. “We came to a country in turmoil,” they reported later.10 But the Nigerian member of the group, General Obasanjo—a big, bulging chief wearing robes and open sandals in which he wiggled his toes—quickly gained the trust of the Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, who saw him as a realist: Obasanjo depicted the conflict, Pik Botha later wrote, as “between two nationalisms, both wishing the best for their country, but fighting each other for power.” The General was allowed to see Mandela in Pollsmoor, and was much impressed. He assured Pik Botha that Mandela was no communist, simply an African nationalis
t leader.11

  President Botha was now appearing more conciliatory, and seemed to be looking for a way to release Mandela. He had already lifted the state of emergency by the time the eminent persons arrived, and soon afterward the government abolished the hated pass laws, which Washington hailed as a “major milestone.”12 “Mandela is of more use to the ANC inside prison than outside,” Botha admitted. “Then why keep him in jail?” retorted Helen Suzman.13 He told the sympathetic British Conservative Lord Wyatt, a friend of Mrs. Thatcher, that he had good information that Mandela would be killed if he was released, and that he, Botha, would be blamed.14

  On March 12 all seven eminent persons were allowed to visit Mandela. Kobie Coetsee, who accompanied them, was gratified to see their amazement at finding Mandela in such powerful form. “For me it was a moment of glory. I felt that I had trumped them: they expected this emaciated person, and there he was completely in control.” Coetsee himself discreetly left the room, despite Mandela’s entreaties, leaving an official to take notes.15

  The eminent persons found Mandela “isolated and lonely,” but they were surprised by his immaculate appearance and commanding presence. He was wearing a three-piece gray pinstripe suit, which a tailor had hurriedly made for him, and matching gray shoes. “You look like a prime minister now,” commented Brigadier Munro, the Prison Commander. “He exuded authority,” said the eminent persons’ report, “and received the respect of all around him, including his jailers.”16 Lord Barber, the most conservative member of the group, was struck by Mandela’s self-confidence and humor, and was delighted when one of his first questions was about cricket: “Is Don Bradman still alive?” (he was). Barber promised to send Mandela a copy of his book about escaping from Colditz during the Second World War.17 But what most impressed the visitors was Mandela’s lucid analysis of the crisis. “There is nothing like a long spell in prison to focus your mind,” he explained, “and to bring you to a more sober appreciation of the realities of your society.”18

  The eminent persons were shocked by the growing violence in South Africa, as terrorism was met by counterterrorism, and judged that “events had increasingly passed out of the government’s control.” The ANC seemed to be achieving its aim of making South Africa ungovernable, which provided its main weapon against the government; but it was a dangerous and two-edged weapon. Obasanjo had helped to draft a carefully worded “negotiating concept” which would link the government’s release of the prisoners with the ANC’s suspending violence. Mandela quickly accepted it as a starting point, without consulting his colleagues (which impressed Barber), while explaining that they must give their consent. Pik Botha was encouraged by the concept, which embodied (as he later conceded) all the elements which the government would accept four years later. But the hawks in the Cabinet balked at the ANC agreeing only to suspend violence, not to terminate it: they dreaded (according to Pik Botha) that the ANC would use violence as a bargaining counter: “Keep talking … or else.”19

  The danger of uncontrolled violence seemed to be personified by Winnie Mandela. She now showed two very different faces. On the one hand she was emerging as an international heroine, “the Mother of a Nation”—the title of a book about her in 1985.20 She insists now that she never called herself that: “I couldn’t stand on the platform and say, ‘Don’t call me that because I am not so.’ I have never competed with the mother Albertina [Sisulu] or mother Lilian [Ngoyi].” But she was confident of her unique role as Mandela’s representative. “I would proudly say, ‘I am the African National Congress,’ because I was the lone voice, and my people were killed for even mentioning the name.… In order to save Nelson, in order for his name to stay on the lips of babies on their mothers’ breasts, I had to expose myself deliberately to all the harshness.”21 Winnie was now still more outspoken, overwhelming nearly everyone who saw her. She appeared to sail into dangerous storms like a ship in full sail, towering over both her acolytes and her adversaries. And she could show clear-sighted judgment about the developing crisis. When I telephoned her in Brandfort during her banning, she would comment sharply on visiting politicians, from Teddy Kennedy to Malcolm Fraser. Her criticism of the government was vivid: “The Afrikaners make blunder after blunder,” she told me in September 1985. “We thank them for unifying us. Botha said he had crossed the Rubicon; but it is we who crossed the Rubicon.” Six months later she reported: “The government are now the prisoners, and the prisoners are the jailers.”22

  But she was also acquiring a taste for violence, which the police could exploit and manipulate. She seemed wilder when she returned to Soweto in 1984 after her exile in Brandfort. She had taken to wearing a khaki military outfit, with soldier’s boots and a beret. “I think I will get her a toy gun and a holster,” joked Zindzi, “for her to walk round and appear in court like that.”23 But her show of combat was becoming all too real. On April 13, 1985, at Munsieville near Johannesburg, she made her most provocative statement, with fire in her eyes: “We have no guns—we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol. Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”24

  Winnie was clearly inciting the crowd to violence. Even to report such words was a serious offense under the emergency laws, but after the overseas press and television recorded her speech, the government was glad to publicize this example of the ANC’s brutality. South African papers were outraged: the Johannesburg Star called Winnie’s words “irresponsible in the extreme”—though the paper’s commentator Rex Gibson explained that at other times she had said much that was “better, warmer, more helpful.”25 The ANC felt ambivalent in the face of the government’s own violence, and Oliver Tambo was reluctant to criticize the speech publicly. “We are not happy with the necklace,” he told a summit meeting of nonaligned nations in Harare, “but we will not condemn people who have been driven to adopt such extremes.”26 Privately Tambo was appalled, and in London he asked Winnie’s neighbor and friend in Soweto Dr. Motlana to shut her up.27

  Winnie did back down slightly, claiming the speech had been quoted out of context, but she did not withdraw it. “The statement was not necessarily an approval of the method,” she claims now. “It was to say that we are now exposed to situations such as this because of the harshness of apartheid.” She was aware, however, that she was defying the party line. “The ANC was beginning to speak a language of reconciliation, and extreme people like myself were beginning to be an embarrassment to those who were pulling the strings, the machinery, trying to put into place a peace process.”28 And she was herself embarking—as it emerged later—on still more violent adventures with her bodyguards.

  Mandela himself, as he told his lawyers George Bizos and Ismail Ayob, was shocked by any encouragement of necklacing, as were the other prisoners in Pollsmoor: “We wanted ungovernability, but not necklacing,” said Kathrada.29 On the battlefield, the line was harder to distinguish.

  When the eminent persons returned to South Africa in May they were struck by the escalation in violence, particularly by vigilantes who, encouraged by the police, were attacking UDF supporters in Crossroads, the squatter camp outside Cape Town. The need for an agreement seemed all the more urgent: and Pik Botha seemed optimistic. He said later that the eminent persons “came closer to success than most people realise.”30 There were new rumors that Mandela would be let out. “Talk of impending release has been on the lips of everybody,” Mandela wrote to a friend on May 12. “But the plain truth is that we are still here.”31

  On May 16 Mandela was again visited by the eminent persons, in the comfortable prison guest house, where savories were served. He asked them whether President Botha was taking their “negotiating concept” seriously. They were not sure, and Mandela suspected that Botha simply wanted to delay negotiations. He assured them that he could control the violence if he was released; but he wanted to be sure that the government would withdraw troops from the townships and allow him to travel freely.

  The
eminent persons were encouraged, and flew up to Lusaka to tell Tambo about the concept. He too suspected Botha of employing delaying tactics, and doubted his good faith; but he thought the concept would command the support of his ANC colleagues. The visitors returned to Cape Town on May 19 to put their proposals to a committee of Cabinet Ministers. The hawks again insisted that the ANC must renounce violence altogether, not merely suspend it; but the eminent persons replied that they could not reasonably ask the ANC to “forswear the only power available to them should the government walk away from the negotiating table.”32 It was a classic deadlock.

  Mandela, however, saw a real chance of peace. On that same morning he asked permission to see his colleagues to discuss the proposal, and later he talked to his attorney Ismail Ayob and to Winnie. He was puzzled that his people were hesitating. Ayob explained that they needed time to consult others, including the ANC executive and the UDF.33

  But President Botha, Kobie Coetsee believed, was now torn: he realized that he must soon release Mandela; but he did not dare appear weak. He felt hurt that the British and Americans did not appreciate the extent of his concessions, and his aggressiveness was encouraged by the recent American air strike on Libya: “Crocker forgets that his own country made use of cross-border attacks,” he told me later. Botha now suddenly turned tough. When the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, proposed that the military should strike at ANC bases in neighboring countries, Botha approved the suggestion without discussing it with either the Cabinet or the State Security Council.34