Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  After three days of talks the government team agreed to create a peaceful climate for negotiations by releasing political prisoners, removing repressive laws and lifting the state of emergency. These decisions were proclaimed in the “Groote Schuur Minute.” De Klerk called it “a great step forward,” and Mandela said it was “the realisation of a dream.” “We went into these discussions in the spirit that there should be neither victors nor losers,” said Mandela. “We are all victors, South Africa is a victor.” But he had to remind the government that apartheid was not dead, and that he still did not have the vote.

  Mandela and the ANC leaders continued to feel the need to maintain an armed force in South Africa as a “reinsurance” policy if negotiations collapsed. The military unit of Operation Vula (see this page) had remained intact, run by Mac Maharaj and Siphiwe Nyanda (“Ghebuza”); they had maintained communications with Mandela in jail, and after the ANC was legalized they were joined by the buccaneering Ronnie Kasrils. But some of the Vula activists had become complacent since the ANC had been legalized, and were feeling ignored by their leaders. The underground comrades in Durban had been careless with security, keeping confidential files on their computer disks. The police arrested two of them by chance, and extracted information about a secret meeting place, where they ambushed others, and were soon raiding Vula houses in Johannesburg. Learning of the disaster, the Vula commanders quickly moved their arms caches and equipment to safer places. But on July 25 the police arrested Mac Maharaj and others, accusing them of plotting to overthrow the government. They released lurid details, reminiscent of the Rivonia trial, of an underground network designed “to recruit, train, lead and arm a ‘people’s’ or ‘revolutionary’ army to be used to seize power from the government by means of an armed insurrection.”10

  De Klerk saw it as powerful ammunition against Mandela, exposing the revolutionaries and communists as still a sinister force; and he hoped to drive a wedge between the ANC and the SACP. He read out the police reports to Mandela, and insisted again that Slovo must be excluded from the ANC team, claiming that he had been at a secret meeting of the Communist Party in Tongaat in May. Mandela was aware of Operation Vula, which had provided his communication links with Tambo, and he had met Maharaj one-to-one in secret meetings, but at first he was taken aback by the extent of the operations which de Klerk revealed. Slovo was soon able to prove that he had not been at the Tongaat meeting: his passport showed he had been in Lusaka at the time, and the “Joe” who was reported as being present was not him, but Siphiwe Nyanda. Mandela insisted that Slovo remain in his team, and argued that the ANC could not be disarmed while the government was deploying its own armed units against the ANC. The police continued to search for the other Vula suspects, including Kasrils, who was declared “armed and dangerous.” But the arms caches remained undiscovered. Eventually, by March 1991, Maharaj and others were granted indemnity, and the case against them fell away.11

  The affair had also given de Klerk crucial information about the ANC’s negotiating strategy. Just before the arrest of Maharaj, on July 19, Joe Slovo had proposed to the ANC National Executive that they should offer to suspend the armed struggle at the next meeting with the government. It was a historic compromise—all the more so coming from a leader of MK—designed to take de Klerk by surprise, and elicit major concessions. Mandela was at first dubious, but discussed it overnight, and after much soul-searching he agreed in the morning, and carried the National Executive with him unanimously. But the police found a handwritten document in Maharaj’s briefcase outlining the strategy, which gave de Klerk time to prepare his response.12

  Mandela and the ANC team met with the government in Pretoria on August 6. Mandela promised an immediate cease-fire. De Klerk on his side promised to release political prisoners and to indemnify exiles for political offenses. The two sides agreed on the Pretoria Minute, which proclaimed that the ANC was suspending all armed actions with immediate effect. But de Klerk, forewarned about the ANC strategy, inserted a reference to “related activities,” which would give him an advantage in later negotiations.13 Still, the ANC offer had achieved what Slovo and Mandela had hoped for: a break in the logjam.

  The ANC’s offer of a cease-fire was not quite as generous as it appeared. Back in January 1990 Alfred Nzo, the Secretary-General, had admitted in public that “we do not have the capacity within our country to intensify the armed struggle in any meaningful way.”14 Mandela as MK’s first Commander in Chief believed in the armed struggle’s symbolic importance, although he thought “it had a popularity out of proportion to what it had achieved on the ground.” “We have never been under any misconception,” he said later, “that we would be able to achieve a military victory against this regime.”15 But he would not exclude underground activity. He drew a confusing distinction between “action” and “struggle”: “We have suspended armed action,” he explained in July 1991, “but have not terminated the armed struggle, whether it is deployed inside the country or outside.” Slovo later explained that underground activities would be maintained until change was irreversible—a condition which de Klerk secretly accepted.16

  The militant young comrades were outraged by the suspension of the armed struggle in return for minor concessions; and a hard core could not accept the whole idea of negotiation. Twenty-five prisoners still on Robben Island had refused the offer of amnesty, and insisted they would leave only after a victory on the battlefield. Mandela had had to return to the island in April 1990 to persuade them with difficulty to accept the government’s offer.17 On the mainland the ANC made a great effort to convince their more revolutionary members to switch from shooting to talking: they proclaimed the slogan “Negotiations Are Struggle” on T-shirts and car bumper stickers, and published newspaper advertisements which stated that MK had not been dissolved.

  The Pretoria Minute produced a wave of speculation about Mandela’s apparent collaboration with de Klerk, and Mandela admitted on television: “We have started some form of alliance already.” He was even rumored to be joining the Cabinet.18 But the optimism was short-lived and premature. Mandela was becoming more distrustful of de Klerk, who clearly had his own strategy to weaken the black opposition, and could play up Mandela’s serious problems within his own alliance; he would complain that “the ANC had a very limited ability to ensure that its supporters and cadres honoured the undertakings it had given.”19

  The ANC was still to some extent a revolutionary party. It was still allied with the SACP, which just before the Pretoria meeting had been triumphantly relaunched as a legal party, at the Soweto stadium on July 29 with a crowd of about 50,000. The white press saw the relaunch as all the more sinister in the light of the revelations about Operation Vula (which was depicted as a communist plot, though Vula was the creation of the ANC, not the SACP). Mandela addressed the crowd, welcoming the SACP as “a dependable friend who respected the ANC’s independence and policy,” and insisted that the Party had never in his experience “sought to impose its views on the ANC.” It was a spectacular resurrection: in the next fifteen months the SACP’s membership would shoot up to 25,000—at a time when most communist parties around the world were on the wane. The SACP’s ideological commitment was now hazy: someone dubbed them the “Sheepish about Communism Party.”20 But they had a heroic record of confronting apartheid—they were more genuinely multiracial than any other Communist Party in the world—while they provided a revolutionary cause for young militants in the townships. The SACP’s rebirth as a popular party inevitably brought them into rivalry with the ANC, after their more discreet influence and exchanges in the past; and Mandela would soon become increasingly critical of them. “They made a huge mistake,” said Ben Turok, a former Party insider, “in trying to become a mass party.”21

  The government, and much of the white press, continued to play up the communist menace; but it was much harder to believe in the worldwide “total onslaught” since the collapse of the communist regimes in Russia and East
ern Europe. And Mandela warned Pretoria not to try to impede negotiations by “whipping up anticommunist hysteria.” In fact it was simplistic to equate communism in South Africa with hard-line resistance, as Joe Slovo had shown. “It has been communists,” claimed Mandela later, “who have come out as the most moderate.”22

  Mandela still faced great problems in unifying the ANC, and in bringing them around to negotiation and compromise. His personal leadership remained unassailable, and awesome: his friends had to encourage younger members to argue with him.23 But he faced his most difficult task in trying to forge a unified party out of the many strands which had been separated by the thirty-year ban; and he took time to establish his own relationship with the National Executive, as an elder statesman who kept his distance while intervening on crucial issues.

  All the complaints about the ANC’s moderation came to the fore when it held a “consultative conference” of 1,600 delegates in Johannesburg in December 1990. Tambo had returned to South Africa, still debilitated by his stroke, to formally open the conference as President. He made a bold speech, which had been approved by the National Executive, arguing that the ANC must modify its support for total sanctions: he warned that the Western countries were already retreating from sanctions, and that the ANC could not afford to be marginalized abroad. But the militants would not accept it, and the conference insisted on sanctions, even if they were not being enforced.

  Mandela paid tribute to Tambo’s leadership of the ANC through its darkest years. But it was left to him to hold the conference together. He tactfully praised all the different components: the guerrillas of MK, “steeled by years of combat experience and sacrifice”; the long-term prisoners, educated in perseverance and patience; the exiles with their “high level of political training”; and the leaders inside the country, with their experience of mass mobilization, “probably the most attuned to the popular mood.”24 But the tensions were obvious: the younger internal activists resented the domination of the older exiles from Lusaka, while each section claimed credit for victory.

  Mandela was already showing himself as a more conservative and moderate leader than the young comrades had expected, a very different man from the raw revolutionary who had been jailed as the leader of a guerrilla army. And he faced outspoken criticism from the delegates, particularly for having failed to consult them during his talks with the government. In his closing speech he promised that “the leadership has grasped the principle that they are servants of the people.” But he was hurt that there was “hardly a word of praise” for the National Executive, and he dismissed critics who thought he could negotiate without any secrecy, saying they “do not understand the nature of negotiation.”25

  Six months later, on July 2, the ANC’s policies came under fiercer fire at its full national conference in Durban—the first inside South Africa for over thirty years—with over two thousand delegates. Mandela’s chief aim was to prepare the way for compromise and a peaceful settlement, to channel the energies of the militants into talks, not war. He depicted negotiations as “a continuation of the struggle leading to our central objective: the transfer of power to the people.” He warned that the coming period of transition would be “one of the most difficult, complex and challenging in the entire life of our organisation.”

  But some younger members were impatient with his conservatism, or felt he was betraying the revolution. And he did not always welcome criticism. When he proposed a quota of 30 percent of the executive for women, Terror Lekota, his old ally on Robben Island, argued boldly against “tokenism.” Mandela responded quite angrily, and said he could have discussed the matter on Robben Island. “Mandela taught us that argument is not a sign of disrespect or defiance,” Lekota said afterward, “though he wasn’t easy to argue with.”26

  Mandela had to deal with a disorganized political party which was under attack once again for incompetence. “Does the ANC actually exist—as an organisation—beyond the rhetoric and the headlines?” asked the Johannesburg Sunday Times.27 And Alfred Nzo, the retiring Secretary-General, gave his own devastating critique, which was accidentally leaked: “We lack enterprise, creativity and initiative. We appear very happy to remain pigeonholed within the confines of populist rhetoric and cliché.”28 Mandela insisted that they must be “absolutely brutal” about their shortcomings, and was especially worried about the lack of effective communication between the ANC and the minority groups. But he promised “to build our organisation into a strong and well-oiled task force.”29

  The ANC was still dominated by the old guard, including Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu: the last elections for the National Executive had been in 1985. But three formidable younger contenders were competing for the future leadership, each from a separate theater of the struggle: Chris Hani, the head of MK; Thabo Mbeki, who had been Tambo’s key adviser in exile; and Cyril Ramaphosa, the head of the Mineworkers’ Union. When delegates voted for the Secretary-General to succeed Nzo, they surprised many people by choosing Ramaphosa, who had outspokenly criticized Winnie and who was not then close to Mandela: before Mandela was released Ramaphosa had said that his status was “no different from the status of any other member of the ANC.”30 As a trade unionist he had shown both courage and skill as a negotiator. He could charm his opponents with his soft voice, friendly eyes and wide smile, while he never lost sight of his objective; and he created his own drama—he had been inspired to become a trade unionist by seeing Sylvester Stallone in the movie F.I.S.T. Mandela thought him “very assertive but a born diplomat”; and he proved indispensable in the negotiations that followed.31

  The ANC reestablished itself, despite all the media predictions of splits. It was, Sisulu claimed, “a unity of leadership unheard of anywhere, in any part of the world.”32 The new executive of fifty contained a cross section of the races, including seven Indians, seven Coloureds, and seven whites. White liberals complained that they were excluded and that the white members were all communists; but it was only the communists who had stood by the ANC through the whole struggle.

  Tambo stood down as President, and Mandela was unanimously elected as his successor. “I didn’t see myself as leader until I was elected,” he said later. “Now it was something that had to be done.”33 Most people in fact already saw him as the real leader, and there were worries that he might become autocratic without Tambo’s counterweight. But Mandela paid eloquent tribute to Tambo as the crucial unifier of the party: he had “paved the way forward with gold, the gold of his humanity, his warmth, his democratic spirit, tolerance and above all intellectual brilliance, which in the end outwitted the racists in this country.” And Mandela remained deeply influenced by Tambo’s legacy of reconciliation and consensus.

  Mandela was presiding over a much bigger organization than predecessors like Luthuli or Xuma had dreamed of: later in 1991 the ANC moved into Shell House, a tower block in central Johannesburg. Mandela insisted on having Sisulu and Tambo next door to him, and the three septuagenarians regularly slipped in and out of each other’s offices, apparently as close as during the Defiance Campaign forty years earlier. Tambo still reflected more philosophically than Mandela about ANC policy, while Sisulu still assessed Mandela like a teacher with a pupil (“He’s doing better than I expected”).34 But they were both backroom advisers, and Mandela was the star performer, the personification of policy. To run his own office he chose three strong women: “It is no use for a leader to surround himself with yes-men.”35 Frene Ginwala helped to set up his organization before running the research department, while Barbara Masekela ran the Office of the President together with Jesse Duarte. They ran a punishing schedule: “I sometimes think I had more freedom in jail than at the office,” Mandela joked. He found it difficult to operate within a bureaucracy, and treated his office more like a home, with his staff as daughters. He would often order lunch in the office, carefully counting out the coins, munching corn on the cob with childlike pleasure. He was a stickler for punctuality after his jail regime, dete
rmined to rebut jokes about “African time”: he insisted that “lateness is a sign of disrespect for others.”36 But he would sometimes evade his secretaries when he met old friends in the corridor and stayed talking, or gave visitors his secret home phone number. After his years of seclusion he enjoyed new faces, and he seemed to pay special attention to those who did not push themselves forward: at meetings he would seek out quiet people at the back.37

  His staff were more worried by his continuing determination to see the best in everyone, as in jail. If they warned him that a visitor was incorrigible, he would feel all the more challenged to disprove it. Colleagues kept complaining that “Madiba is too nice.” It could make him a bad judge of character, too easygoing with plausible exploiters and wheeler-dealers. But his generosity could often make other people more generous, and could turn hostility into loyalty. His sudden bursts of anger—whether real or assumed—were all the more alarming. He could flare up if his dignity was offended, or if he felt patronized. But he remained a consummate politician with a long-term perspective and unbreakable nerve. He seemed undeterred by bad news: he would make a joke of it, his secretaries noticed, and stand taller.38