The disappointment at the speech betrayed ignorance about Mandela’s relationship with the ANC, and his true political importance: he would be powerless if he could not carry his movement with him, and his secret talks in jail made him all the more determined to show his solidarity with the ANC now. As a lone ranger, he would soon have been forced off the political stage, like Gorbachev. But as the acknowledged leader of the black majority he could use all his authority for a peaceful settlement. He could not yet abandon the armed struggle and sanctions, which provided his most effective leverage.
Mandela showed a more conciliatory and intimate aspect the next day at his first press conference. It was held in the garden of Bishopscourt, Archbishop Tutu’s grand mansion in Cape Town, where he was staying: he had been worried about its associations with white grandeur, but was assured that it had now become “a people’s center” for township blacks. He walked in, holding Winnie’s hand, looking strained with his mouth turned down, and sat on a throne to face a barrage of reporters and television cameras. He had been interviewed for television only once before, in 1961. Now he was bewildered by the furry cylinders, which he did not recognize as microphones, and had no experience of rehearsed sound bites or photo opportunities. But journalists were surprised to find him unfazed by the cameras, talking much more intimately than in his stiff speech from the City Hall. He spoke in complete sentences, said one correspondent, “as though he spent twenty-seven years practicing to address press conferences.”8 He knew the names of reporters from their bylines, and thanked the press for having been a “brick” to him in jail, keeping his name alive: “It was the interest of the government that we should be forgotten. It was the press that never forgot us.” He insisted that the armed struggle was merely defensive. He reiterated that de Klerk was a man of integrity, though with an implied warning: “He seems to be fully aware of the danger to a public figure of making undertakings which he fails to honour.” Most important, he emphasized his own lack of bitterness:
It is not a nice feeling for a man to see his family struggling, without security, without the dignity of the head of the family around, but despite the hard times that were had in prison we have also had the opportunity to think about programmes … and in prison there have been men who are very good in the sense that they understand our point of view, and they do everything to make you as happy as possible. That has wiped out any bitterness which a man could have.
It was, said the Financial Times, “the first sign that black South Africa’s reverence for Mandela—and faith in him as a leader—may not be misplaced.”9
He flew up to Johannesburg a few days later to address a crowd of 100,000 at the Soweto stadium, Soccer City. It was a tense test of the ANC’s ability to control the crowd, employing a hundred of their own marshals since they would not tolerate the presence of the police. Walter Sisulu introduced Mandela to thunderous applause: “This is a man who has sacrificed his life.” Mandela spoke more like a pedagogue than a demagogue: “It is the policy of the ANC that the entire educational system is a site of struggle. All students must return to school and learn.” And he deplored the crime statistics: “The level of crime in our country must be eliminated.” The crowd listened spellbound, without any outbreak of violence, and dispersed quietly.
Mandela left by helicopter to avoid the crowds, and descended from the sky near his old “matchbox” house, 8115 Vilakazi Street in Soweto, awaited by the world’s journalists and TV vans which clogged the rough street outside. In front of the house was an ANC poster: “MANDELA IS COMING!” Next door was a slogan: “SOWETO IS NO ZOO FOR WHITE RACIST TOURISTS.” It was like a village homecoming. At home he appeared happily domesticated, with Winnie as the loyal housewife. Together they received an endless procession of visitors, who waited their turn in the little garden with an ANC flag flying over it, supervised by a reception committee including Zwelakhe Sisulu and Murphy Morobe. Winnie prepared meals in the kitchen, answered the door and hugged old friends before showing them through; her photographer friend Peter Magubane snapped them. Mandela looked as formal as a head of state in a gray double-breasted suit, cozy in this small house, greeting friends with the ANC thumb grip, sitting in the small dining room with his big boxer’s hands on the table. He was obedient to his strict timetable (“Have you arranged with my colleagues?”); only his tailor, Yusuf Surtee, was able to jump the queue, arriving with a new pair of trousers on a hanger. Mandela’s talk seemed relaxed and intimate, and his memory sharp: the three decades in jail appeared to have slipped away. “I remember Tony as a bright young man,” he told my wife, Sally. “He didn’t tell me about you. He’s kept things from me.”
To old friends he seemed more at ease with himself than thirty years before, without defensiveness or arrogance. He looked softer and gentler, with a warm, humorous smile instead of the flashing grin. “He’s blossomed into a different personality, warm with everyone,” said Amina Cachalia.10 “He knew exactly who he was,” said Ismail Meer. “He has gone through this period of fire and purified himself and emerged as a person who can hope to bring about change in this country.”11 Many of his supporters had dreaded a letdown: the poster hero commemorated around the world could turn out to be a frail, bewildered old man. But he did not seem trapped in the past. He soon became (as Nadine Gordimer put it) the “personification of the future.”12
He was more sympathetic and human than the prison icon. “We worried how Mandela could come out and match up to his saintlike image,” said Cheryl Carolus, the Cape activist who later became High Commissioner in London. “Then he showed he had morality, integrity and value for human life.”13 Like Ronald Reagan, he had a relaxed charm which made almost anyone feel better after meeting him; but his magnanimity and lack of bitterness conveyed a moral seriousness, particularly to white South Africans, as if he were a priest at confessional, forgiving sins and giving his blessing.
He was not alone in forgiving. “Almost all the comrades I served with in prison have come out without any sense of bitterness,” he explained. “If you were in our position you would never find the time to be bitter, because you are looking at problems.”14 “Bitterness would be in conflict with the whole policy to which I have dedicated my life,” said Sisulu later.15 But Mandela went further than any of his prison colleagues, and would upset some of them when he reached out to his most ruthless former persecutors.
Mandela had his own sense of guilt at having neglected people who had helped him on his way up, and he now sought them out to thank them—from his first white employer, Lazar Sidelsky, to the friends who had helped him in jail. “It clears my conscience,” he explained, “to be able to say: ‘Do you remember that this is what you did for me?’ ”16 But after prison he seemed excited by all kinds of new faces, like Miranda in The Tempest: “O brave new world, that has such people in it!” And he often seemed keener to meet enemies than friends. He looked for support from unlikely white politicians, diplomats and businessmen. When Robin Renwick, building British bridges to the ANC, gave Mandela lunch at the fashionable restaurant Linger Longer, he was apprehensive about the right-wing business lunchers, but Mandela made a point of touring the dining room, shaking hands and co-opting them to his cause. “It was a bravura performance,” said Renwick.17
Mandela seemed instinctively aware of the power of his icon: he could provide “a symbolic expression of the confused desires of the people.”18 But he guarded against the personality cult which had bedeviled so many young African states; he was careful to avoid the word “I.” He realized, as Frantz Fanon had warned: “The magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”19 He was always stressing that he was the servant of the ANC. “They may say: well, you are a man of seventy-one, you require a pension; or, look, we don’t like your face, please go. I will obey them.”20 “His life was never the struggle,” as Mac Maharaj said. “The ‘I’ never supplanted the organisation.”21
With his glittering image, Mandela set out on his travels. He would spend
more time abroad than at home over the next half year, but he had an urgent purpose: to rally support and funds for the ANC, translating his reputation into cash, and to maintain sanctions until negotiations were completed. He was also an old man in a hurry to see the world. He had been outside South Africa only once before, just before he was jailed. When Bob Hughes, a British Labour MP, urged him to take more rest, he replied, “I have twenty-seven years to catch up.”22 Now he was in the midst of a high-speed world he had never seen before, of jumbo jets, computers, direct-dial telephones and global television, which made constant demands. And everywhere he had to live up to the media’s legend, to connect the myth to the man.
He was also opening up South Africa to the world, which for years had treated it as a pariah state. Mandela could draw his own map of friends across the globe—beginning with Africa. Two weeks after his release he flew up to Lusaka in Zambia, to meet his ANC colleagues in exile, while Presidents of neighboring countries and other leaders converged there to meet their hero. He embraced Yasser Arafat, who kissed him on both cheeks, and compared the Palestinian struggle to the ANC’s. He was greeted ecstatically by huge crowds and old friends, and reiterated that he was merely the ANC’s servant: “If you tell me to sweep the streets, I will do so.” His first meetings with the ANC in exile were prickly, for many still suspected he had been selling them out in his talks with the government. But he soon reasserted his leadership and again committed himself to the armed struggle, despite arguments from Zambia’s President, Kenneth Kaunda.23 Tambo, still formally ANC President, was slowly recovering from his stroke in Sweden, and Alfred Nzo, the veteran Secretary-General, was elected Acting President. Mandela himself became Deputy President; but to most ANC members he was the clear leader.
He visited Zimbabwe, where he spoke on March 4 at the National Sports Stadium, introduced by Robert Mugabe, who had become the country’s President ten years before, in a similar atmosphere of reconciliation and expectation. But the two leaders already seemed very different. Mugabe introduced Mandela with a self-serving and hectoring speech denouncing his rivals, while Mandela, as one reporter described him, “spoke with the quiet, dignified assurance of a great leader and appeared decidedly calm beside the sweating, twitching Mugabe.”24
He visited other states, including the brand new Namibia, where he joined the independence celebrations on March 21 and met world leaders. Namibia’s black government under Sam Nujoma was a further sign of the irreversible pressure for a democratic South Africa. The star visitor was Mandela, who showed all his diplomatic skills; when he was reported to have snubbed the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, he quickly sent a message to assure him that it was not intended.25
He revisited Algeria, where he had been shortly before his arrest in 1962: he called on one Minister whom he had meant to see then, apologizing for being twenty-eight years late. He ended with a visit to Sweden—the ANC’s long-standing ally—staying at the beautiful small royal castle of Haga outside Stockholm, besieged by visitors from all over Europe. He had an emotional reunion with Tambo, who he believed had suffered and achieved more than he, and who was still speaking haltingly after his stroke. Mandela realized that at seventy-two Tambo might never completely recover. Tambo implored him to take his place as President of the ANC, but Mandela refused: it would be misunderstood, he thought, for a leader to take over having just left prison.26
A few weeks later he went to London. Mrs. Thatcher had sent an invitation, but his colleagues dissuaded him from seeing her, and instead he gave priority to loyal friends of the ANC. The Commonwealth Secretary, Sonny Ramphal, gave a reception in Mayfair, at which Mandela and Winnie worked the rooms like monarchs, shaking hands, while Jesse Jackson tried to steal the show. Mandela also addressed a packed ANC meeting, where he thanked and briefed party workers. “While we were sitting comfortable in jail,” he told them, “you were the people in the front line.” He warned that without a settlement, South Africa would witness a “conflagration which has never been seen in Africa.” He dominated the meeting, but again said that he was only their servant: “I’ve got bosses here today. Already I have a note passed to me: ‘You are long-winded.’ ”27
His chief British date was a huge concert in Wembley Stadium on April 16 to thank the antiapartheid campaigners for the earlier concert celebrating his seventieth birthday. The blend of pop music and radical politics was again televised live by the BBC: the Thatcher government warned them to avoid ANC propaganda or fund-raising, and the BBC2 controller, Alan Yentob, had to exercise “sensible discretion,” anxiously monitoring the pop stars’ speeches.28 Seventy-five thousand young people filled the stadium, singing and swaying with rhythmic waves. International stars performed free, including the Manhattan Brothers, Mandela’s friends in Soweto in the fifties—watched by an estimated billion viewers around the world. In a crowded reception room Mandela received old campaigners, tactfully prompted by Winnie, but he seemed more excited by pop singers than political leaders like Neil Kinnock. At the finale, Mandela strode up and down the platform with a clenched fist to thunderous cheers, and paid tribute to Tambo and Father Huddleston, the Chairman of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. “You elected not to forget,” Mandela told the crowd. “Even through the thickness of the prison walls … we heard your voices demanding our freedom.”
Back in South Africa he was soon down to earth, revisiting his home village of Qunu in the Transkei. He arrived in a dark suit and a black Mercedes to a scene of total contrast to London, a few round thatched huts in the bare countryside which seemed even poorer than before he went to jail, and was now defaced by plastic litter which clung to the fences. He was glad to see the children politicized, singing songs about Tambo, but was distressed that “pride in the community seemed to have vanished.”29 He visited his mother’s grave, still remorseful that he had not properly cared for her, and was welcomed to a banquet, for which a nephew had slaughtered a precious ox, by local chiefs and Mandela relations, including his sister Mabel. He relaxed with a grandchild, pulling funny faces, and made a speech in Xhosa which he translated into English: “My heart is very sore indeed on account of the poverty.” He shared the feast until a helicopter dropped down—to general amazement—to take him away.30
A few weeks later he was abroad again, to Europe and North America. He was on a serious mission to maintain sanctions and raise funds for the ANC, but he appeared more like a prophet, and South African embassies watched him closely as he visibly eclipsed their own head of state, de Klerk. In France he was received royally by President Mitterrand, whose wife, Danielle, had backed the crucial Dakar meeting in 1987. In Rome he was received by the Pope. A Vatican official, Monsignor Menini, leaked confidential details of the audience to the South African Ambassador, assuring him that the meeting had no political significance, since the Pope saw all leading political visitors, even Arafat. The Pope, he said, had taken no notes, as he did with more serious visitors, and he had declined Mandela’s request to endorse sanctions. The positive publicity, Menini claimed, “fell short of [Mandela’s] expectations.”31
Mandela stopped for two days in England to meet Tambo in a “safe house” in Kent provided by the government, and had a long early-morning phone talk with Mrs. Thatcher, urging her, without success, to maintain sanctions. But he was touched by her concern for his health and his overcrowded schedule, which she said was too heavy for a man half his age: “If you go on like this,” she scolded him, “you won’t come out of America alive.” He realized she was “a very powerful lady … one I would rather have as an ally than an enemy.”32
In America Mandela visited eight cities and was pulled between rival hosts, from African Americans to churches and showbiz. In New York he was compared to Moses more than to Martin Luther King. He rode in a car with bulletproof glass in a forty-car motorcade up Broadway: computer printouts and twenty-five kilometers of ticker-tape—thought to be a record—showered down from the skyscrapers, with hundreds of thousands of spectators cramming
the narrow streets. In the evening the Empire State Building was lit up with the ANC colors of green, black and gold. “I have seen rallies, I have seen parades, I have seen huge crowds,” said New York’s Governor, Mario Cuomo, “but this was something I have never seen before.” Mandela addressed the UN, thanking them for their Declaration on South Africa the year before. But in every speech he warned that the “wall of sanctions” might crumble too soon. In Harlem he addressed a packed Africa Square, warning that the cancer of racism was still eating away. Mandela’s visit, said the New York Times, “touched and energized black Americans as much as anything since the height of the civil rights era.”33 His quietly confident dignity was seen as a welcome contrast to the aggressive rhetoric of many African-American politicians, and he was hailed as providing the kind of leadership that was desperately needed; but he had the assurance of a black majority behind him, which black Americans could never have.
In Washington he was welcomed by President Bush, who had been the first head of state to congratulate him on his release. Bush criticized the ANC’s use of violence against the apartheid regime, and Mandela replied that throughout history it was the oppressors who determined the method of political action: if they use brute force to suppress all the people’s aspirations, and refuse all dialogue, they send the message to the oppressed that they must resort to force if they want liberation.34 Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, were impressed by Mandela’s willingness to compromise and negotiate seriously. Two days later Bush assured de Klerk by phone that Mandela was not trying to undercut him; but when de Klerk visited Washington three months later he would be anxious to show that he was more important than Mandela.35
In Washington Mandela also addressed a joint session of both houses of Congress, preceded by a three-minute standing ovation. He praised the black heroes like Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and W. E. B. Du Bois alongside Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson: “The day may not be far when we will borrow the words of Thomas Jefferson and speak of the will of the South African nation.” He annoyed the right by defending sanctions, but they did not walk out as they had threatened, and he received another standing ovation, while effectively postponing the lifting of sanctions. Conservatives continued to complain about his support for Cuba and Libya, but some accepted that he had to find friends where he could in time of need. As Charles Krauthammer wrote: “We Americans, who once made an alliance of necessity with Stalin, should have no trouble understanding that.”36
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