De Klerk still hoped for Buthelezi’s support as a counterweight against the ANC; but he was finding him a very awkward ally, a “jumble of contradictions” who could be “tenaciously obstinate and frustratingly sullen.”19 De Klerk’s Ministers, too, were often finding Buthelezi intransigent. “We wanted an alliance with Inkatha, but he was impossible to deal with,” recalled the former Minister of Finance Barend du Plessis. “One week he would agree to something, the next there’d be a fiasco.” “Buthelezi was causing us a lot of trouble,” said the Foreign Minister, Pik Botha. “It was the Europeans and Americans who were building him up.”20
Certainly Buthelezi’s ambitions were being openly encouraged by right-wing groups overseas. In America the Heritage Foundation and other anticommunist groups were still welcoming him as the scourge of ANC communists; while in Germany he was supported by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and some rich businessmen. But it was Britain which provided his most enthusiastic backers on his frequent visits. Mrs. Thatcher had seen him again early in 1990, against Foreign Office advice, and had praised him as “a stalwart opponent of violent uprising in SA while the ANC had been endorsing the Marxist revolution.”21 But British policy toward the Zulus was confused. Mrs. Thatcher still argued for some kind of tribal confederal solution which would give more autonomy to Zulus and other tribes, while her more right-wing friends were encouraging a warlike defiance which seemed aimed at secession.
Zulu tribalism had a special appeal to a group of rich British right-wingers, including Sir James Goldsmith and his friend John Aspinall, the casino and zoo owner who had bought a big estate outside Cape Town and called himself a “White Zulu.” In July 1990 Buthelezi was the key speaker in London at a meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies, Mrs. Thatcher’s favorite think tank, where he warned that the revolutionaries of the ANC were determined to “shoot themselves into power” and told the British they had “an unfinished job to do in South Africa.”22 British speakers were even more inflammatory. The Tory journalist Bruce Anderson complained that the Zulus were not being violent enough, while Aspinall said that South Africa should be divided into over thirty tribal components—which went too far for Buthelezi.23
Four months later Aspinall gave a banquet for Buthelezi in London, ostensibly to discuss wildlife, attended by rich conservatives including Goldsmith, Jacob Rothschild and Marc Gordon of the International Freedom Front, which was championing Buthelezi’s policies.24 Aspinall continued to play the White Zulu: in May 1991, when the King of the Zulus addressed 40,000 people in Soweto, Aspinall made a speech warning the ANC that “they have wakened the Zulu giant.”25 Buthelezi had become a mascot of the far right in Britain and America, like Jonas Savimbi in Angola; but his patrons did not obviously seek to restrain him, and they had no visible plan to bring peace to the bloody battlefields.
Back in South Africa, Mandela had at last met Buthelezi personally on January 29, 1991, a year after leaving jail. Buthelezi maintained a chiefly respect for Mandela, deferring to him as an older person, in the African tradition.26 They talked at the Royal Hotel in Durban for eight hours and agreed to promote peace, to stop “killing talk” and to set up a joint monitoring committee; but Mandela thought afterward that Inkatha “never made any effort to implement the accord.”27 In the first three months of 1991, four hundred people were killed, most of them after the Durban meeting. Inkatha’s attacks on the ANC were increasingly provoking bloody reprisals, and both sides were retaliating with vendettas: the Truth Commission would later hold the ANC responsible for over a thousand deaths in KwaZulu-Natal and the Orange Free State, while Inkatha was blamed for nearly four thousand.28
Mandela and Buthelezi had much in common: both from proud chiefly backgrounds, both educated at Fort Hare, both with an articulate charm which could disarm white visitors. But Buthelezi remained much more the tribal leader, preoccupied with Zulu traditions and formal speech making: he had never had to submit to the disciplines of party democracy, while his backers overseas had encouraged his tribalism. He was becoming increasingly erratic, with signs of paranoia, reacting furiously to critics, including journalists, who began to turn against him (“probably the most unpleasant politician on the African continent,” judged David Ottaway of the Washington Post).29 And Mandela was losing patience with Buthelezi’s unpredictable moods: after a friendly man-to-man meeting, he would return to KwaZulu to deliver a ferocious attack in his tribal regalia. Mandela put it down to Buthelezi’s insecurity: he had been deprived of parental love and care as a child, Mandela explained, so that he became unsure if you were still his friend after he had left.30 It was now the turn of colleagues like Sisulu to persuade Mandela to conciliate.
On April 1, 1991, Mandela met Buthelezi again. He warned him that the government had a hidden agenda to divide the blacks, but Buthelezi rejected the idea, as he explained in a confidential letter to Mandela two days later: “I just do not believe that Mr. de Klerk presides over cloak-and-dagger stuff in the employment of security forces in order to increase the white man’s chance of continuing to dominate us.… Do you really distrust Mr. F. W. de Klerk and the SA government?”31
But Mandela did distrust de Klerk, with some reason. On April 5, after Mandela warned his executive, the ANC wrote to de Klerk threatening to pull out of the talks unless the government purged the Ministers and police chiefs responsible for the violence. “In no other country,” Mandela said at a press conference, “would the government keep Ministers whose departments were responsible for the death of thousands of people.” When de Klerk refused, the ANC announced that they would break off the talks and embark on mass action, culminating in a general strike. De Klerk then organized a conference on violence which Mandela refused to attend, arguing that de Klerk already knew how to end the violence. “He was still operating under the illusion, cherished by so many revolutionaries,” complained de Klerk afterward, “that possession of the levers of government enabled those in power to achieve whatever goals they wanted.”32
Mandela’s image at home and abroad was now seriously dented, as he appeared incapable of controlling the “black-on-black” violence. “The image of the great deliverer has gone, perhaps forever,” wrote the liberal journalist Shaun Johnson in September 1990. “Everything the poor man says is interpreted in the worst possible light,” wrote Business Day, “without the slightest consideration for the fine political line he must draw or for the inherent weakness of his position.” De Klerk, by contrast, was seen abroad as a statesman with growing authority. “De Klerk’s international standing,” the political scientist Stephen Ellis reckoned later, “was higher than that of the head of any South African government for fifty years.”33 He seemed thoroughly in control, and in April 1991 made a successful European tour, proclaiming that his government had reentered the civilized world by dismantling apartheid and appealing to businessmen to start investing again. In London Mrs. Thatcher, he said, “did everything she could to support me.”34 At dinner at Number Ten the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was impressed by “an amazingly wise and brave man” who had “almost run out of aces.”35 “What the blacks need,” wrote Hugo Young in the Guardian, “is a leader as competent as de Klerk.”36
But there were growing accounts in the more adventurous “alternative press” in South Africa of secret conspiracies, particularly in the Afrikaans weekly Vrye Weekblad. And in June 1991 a disillusioned ex–military intelligence officer, Captain Nico Basson, claimed that his former bosses had planned to destabilize the black opposition with violence and dirty tricks as they had done in Namibia, masterminded by the chief of the defense forces, Kat Liebenberg.37
Basson’s allegations could not be proved, but in July 1991 there was a spectacular breakthrough. The South Africa correspondent of the Guardian, David Beresford, obtained some top secret documents from an ex-officer in the security police which showed clearly that the police had been financing Inkatha, through a secret bank account in Durban, with the knowledge of Buthelezi. The Guardian publishe
d the story jointly with the Weekly Mail in Johannesburg, which splashed it on July 18: “POLICE PAID INKATHA TO BLOCK ANC.” Rarely has any news story had such an immediate impact on a government. The Minister of Police, Adriaan Vlok, was forced to admit the payments, and ten days later de Klerk removed both Vlok and Magnus Malan, the Minister of Defence, from their jobs—though keeping them in his Cabinet. In the following weeks the Weekly Mail produced still more damaging revelations about the defense forces’ secret training of assassins for Inkatha.38
The disclosures vindicated all Mandela’s suspicions about a third force. De Klerk’s authority was weakened, and he would admit that “our credibility had been seriously damaged.” Belatedly he “began to suspect that some elements in the security forces might be dragging their feet.”39 Two weeks later he appointed a new commission under Judge Richard Goldstone, which after a slow start uncovered much more serious conspiracies. The ANC wanted to press home their advantage by stepping up mass action. But Mandela still wanted to negotiate, while churches and business leaders were clamoring for conciliation.
In September 1991 a national peace conference was held at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg, attended by twenty-four political bodies and including the three main leaders: de Klerk, Mandela and Buthelezi. Three days before, de Klerk had a fierce meeting with Mandela, accusing him of outrageous public attacks and complaining that Operation Vula was still infiltrating weapons. At the Carlton meeting the atmosphere was ominous, with hundreds of Inkatha supporters armed with “traditional weapons” demonstrating outside without interference from the police, stamping their feet and smacking their shields. At the end of the conference all the parties agreed to a National Peace Accord. It promised to “actively contribute to a climate of democratic tolerance, refrain from intimidation and agree that no weapons … may be possessed, carried or displayed at any political meeting.” But the warlike crowds outside were not encouraging. At the televised press conference afterward, Mandela furiously denounced de Klerk for not having them dispersed, while Buthelezi refused to join in a three-way handshake with the other two.40 The killings went on, with three mass shoot-outs a few days later. Mandela continued to talk privately with de Klerk, but he was now much less trusting. At the Commonwealth Summit in Harare in October 1991 he said that de Klerk “turned out to be a totally different man from what he was initially,” and admitted: “Perhaps there was a little bit of naïveté on our part.”41
Over the next year more evidence would emerge of secret conspiracies and hit squads. In November 1992 Judge Goldstone uncovered more details of illegal acts by security forces, and the next month General Pierre Steyn would report to de Klerk that units of the army had secretly worked to attack and disrupt the ANC, and had probably been involved in the train massacres. De Klerk responded by retiring six top-ranking officers, but then appointed three generals to investigate who had themselves been implicated by Steyn, an act which the Truth Commission would later call “a serious error of judgement.”42
Much more evidence about a third force trickled out later, showing how the army had secretly trained assassins for Inkatha, how the police had encouraged the massacres in Sebokeng and promoted tribal battles. But the full story never emerged. The Truth Commission, as it reported in 1998, “did not make significant progress in uncovering the forces behind the violence in the 1990s.” It saw little evidence of a centrally directed, coherent or formally constituted third force. But it found that
a network of security and ex-security operatives, acting frequently in conjunction with right-wing elements and/or sectors of the IFP, were involved in gross violations of human rights, including random and targeted killings.43
It was clear that groups of army officers and policemen had their own programs for instigating violence, often using the same lethal tactics they had employed in destabilizing neighboring countries in the eighties, in order to divide the black opposition and weaken the ANC. After 1992, when the government clamped down on them more seriously, many of them would be effectively privatized, financing themselves through selling weapons or drugs, sometimes working with criminal gangs. And while the major parties began negotiating a peaceful settlement, the underground groups would establish their own network of corruption, which became a breeding ground for criminal activity, and would provide Mandela with his biggest problem in the following years.
*The expression “third force” had been used by President Botha’s State Security Council in November 1985, when they discussed setting up a separate paramilitary unit to enforce internal security. The police and defense could not agree about the control of the unit, and both later created separate organizations which effectively did the job. Ministers could thus claim that no “third force” existed. But Mandela was talking about a less formally organized body.
31
Exit Winnie
IN HIS first two years of freedom, Mandela had taken many sharp knocks, as he appeared helpless to control the violence which had caused far more deaths than in any year of apartheid. Sometimes he seemed too weary to take the country into a new era. At the same time he was up against a domestic crisis which was even more stressful, and which was painfully being revealed.
Through all his public encounters and world travels, Mandela appeared to have the ideal consort. Winnie in her fifties was still strikingly beautiful, with the same powerful eyes and warm presence. To many people she had almost equal credentials in the struggle as her husband, in spite of the accusations over the murdered Stompie Seipei; while she could reach out further than Mandela, to younger and more radical spirits, and to the homeless and leaderless on the edges of society. The famous couple seemed mutually supportive: Winnie could tactfully guide Mandela to political friends, while he was attentive to her needs. He still felt guilty that she had borne the brunt of the family burdens and political persecution, and was grateful to anyone who had stood by her.
Only a few close friends saw the truth behind the façade, which he revealed in 1996 when he told the divorce judge that since he left jail “not once has she ever entered my bedroom whilst I was awake.” He would have liked them to discuss their most intimate and personal problems, he would tell the judge, “but she always refused. She is the type of person who fears confrontation.”1 “They never could talk things over,” their daughter Zindzi confirmed. “From the day my father was free, we had to share him with the rest of the world.”2
Mandela’s idealized Winnie (or “Zami,” as he called her) shone out from his prison letters; but that ideal soon faded in real life, while his own public image looked very different in the home. “Zami married a man who soon left her,” as he said himself. “That man became a myth; and then the myth returned home and proved to be a man after all.”3 “While together in their separation,” as Fatima Meer put it, “in their togetherness they began to discover how apart they had become.”4
Mandela was still visibly fascinated by Winnie: he was always looking at her, and when he was away he would frequently ring her up. Visitors to their house would see them together, romping with their grandchildren on the king-sized bed. Mandela, said Fatima, “needed Winnie desperately to be with him, to love and be loved by her, to be at home when he arrived, in short to be a wife in the ordinary sense.”5 But Winnie had no intention of settling down to a quiet domestic life, or giving up her liaisons with other men.
Winnie’s unfaithfulness was very obvious to the press. “How long can Winnie’s demure image last?” asked the Star a week after Mandela’s release. When a reporter from the London Daily Mirror interviewed Mandela in April 1990 in Soweto she noticed how affectionate he was toward Winnie, and how unresponsive and impatient Winnie was toward him; but the Mirror only published an idyllic version of their life together.6 Winnie lived by a quite different clock from Mandela, who could not break his jail habit of rising very early and retiring early: on their very first night together in Soweto, one friend noticed, Winnie left the house at 10 p.m., returning in the early hours. And Win
nie still kept open house to young people, who were constantly rushing in and out. Mandela was trying to pull her away from her connections with guerrilla fighters and MK, realizing that many of her contacts were suspect. But he could not control her activities.7
It was not just with Winnie that Mandela had strained relationships. Behind his public accessibility, he had built high walls around his private personality while in jail; and he appeared an extreme case of the public leader who had left his private life behind: “He combined extreme heartiness with impenetrable reserve” (as Arthur Schlesinger described Franklin Roosevelt).8 He found it hard to relate casually to old friends and family, while his demanding schedule left little time for him to adjust and wind down. “He had forgotten how to communicate,” said Amina Cachalia. “At first he talked to me like a warder.”9
His children found him aloof, and his two younger daughters were much closer to their mother. “Mummy, you know we were better off with Daddy in prison,” Winnie recalled Zindzi telling her a week after Mandela’s release. “We had access to him, we could talk to him as a father. Now that all has gone.” Six years later Winnie would still complain: “My children still wait for the return of their father. He has never returned, even emotionally. He can no longer relate to the family as a family. He relates to the struggle which has been his lifetime.”10
Mandela’s two eldest children, by his first wife, Evelyn, had never become close to their stepmother. His son Makgatho, now in Natal, was still having difficulty with studying, in his forties, and saw his father only rarely. His eldest daughter, Maki, was bitter about not having had a father, she told the Washington Post in an interview just before Mandela was released: she suggested that he had deliberately chosen to be arrested in 1962.11 It was not until she visited him on his seventy-first birthday in prison that she had felt his inhibitions fall away, and “for the first time he opened to me as a father.” Maki was living in Boston in 1990, and was understandably hurt when Mandela visited the city and asked to see his grandchildren, but not her; though she blamed Winnie. After Maki returned to South Africa in October 1990 she saw her father occasionally, but she felt he did not know how to talk to her. “It was easier with letters,” she said, though their letters were also strained.12 Mandela recalled to Joe Slovo’s daughter Gillian—who had likewise suffered from her father’s commitment to the struggle—how he had tried to hug Maki, who had flinched away from him. “You are a father to all our people,” she had told Mandela, “but you have never had the time to be father to me.”13
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