Mandela’s purpose, by comparison, was straightforward and unwavering, while his team was united. “I am a politician, and politics is about power,” he explained in July 1992. “I would like to see an ANC government.”38 He wanted one person, one vote in a unitary system. He remained aloof from the detailed negotiations, leaving them to the experts; but whenever they sought his advice, they found him a tower of strength. “He sets his mind on doing something and he becomes unshakable,” Ramaphosa said afterward. “We would never have been able to negotiate the end of apartheid without Mandela.”39 Mac Maharaj, a key negotiator, had learned by heart the crucial sentences of Mandela’s original letter to P. W. Botha in 1989, in which he insisted on the principle of majority rule, while assuaging the fears of the white minority. “His zigzags were always leading to the same object,” Maharaj recalled. “When I went to see him, he would ask, ‘Where does that take us towards majority rule? How long will it take?’ He was my compass, through all the talks. The Nats had no compass; in the end they became preoccupied with their selfish interests.”40
Both sides were now strongly pressed to resume talks. By September 1992 South Africa was racked by continuing violence and a growing economic crisis. Behind the scenes, constitutional experts and committees were trying to resolve the tensions between central and federal systems, under the aegis of the Constitutional Business Movement, which consulted with the political parties and business leaders. Mandela was persuaded that the deadlock could ruin the economy, making it hard for any future government to succeed. But de Klerk was under greater pressure. “De Klerk needed us more than we needed him,” Mandela reckoned later. “He desperately needed that summit.”41 De Klerk’s previous strategy had depended on an alliance with Buthelezi, but the Zulu leader was proving impossible to deal with, while the revelations about the third force had discredited the relationship. Roelof Meyer began to have some success in persuading de Klerk that the Afrikaners could live with majority rule, provided they could share some of the power.42 And de Klerk realized that he depended on the ANC for peace.
Mandela remained the key to any solution: “The search to get back on track,” as one ANC delegate said, “always led back to Madiba.” De Klerk claimed he invited Mandela to meet him, but Mandela said he took the initiative, by phoning de Klerk. It was Mandela’s turn to be patronizing. “He sounded a bit down,” he explained two days later in an “olive branch” interview with the Star which was seen by some as a turning point. “He is a very brave chap, you know, very bright and confident, and it was worrying.” De Klerk insisted that Mandela was climbing down, so “I could afford to be magnanimous.”43
On September 26 Mandela and de Klerk held their summit at the World Trade Centre, which soon led to another dramatic duel. Mandela thought de Klerk could not afford to let the talks collapse again. He stuck to three preconditions for resuming talks, of which the most contentious was the release of all political prisoners. De Klerk balked at letting out some, including Robert McBride, the maverick saboteur who was still in a death cell for having bombed Magoo’s Bar in Durban in June 1986, killing three white women. The ANC negotiators, including Ramaphosa and Maharaj, were prepared to concede the point, but Mandela felt a special loyalty to McBride, whom he had visited in prison in May 1990 to assure him that he was demanding the release of prisoners. Mandela had been tipped off that the government team were split on the question, and told de Klerk there would be no meeting unless McBride was let out. Maharaj warned that it might jeopardize the negotiations, but Mandela chuckled, as Maharaj recalls, and told his colleagues not to lose their nerve. He was dismissive of de Klerk: “This chap, I have had enough of him. We hold the line here today.”44 De Klerk wanted to turn Mandela down flat, and resented his “blustering and bullying tactics”; but he realized that his colleagues were now in favor of a far-reaching compromise, and reluctantly agreed to Mandela’s terms.45 The ANC team were very impressed. “Mandela has nerves of steel,” Ramaphosa recalled. “He can be very brutal in a calm and collected sort of way.”46
The ANC’s remaining two preconditions—the fencing-off of Zulu hostels and the banning of Zulu traditional weapons—were bound to antagonize Buthelezi. But de Klerk was being pressed to curb Zulu violence by others, including Cyrus Vance and Judge Goldstone, and he felt impelled to agree. The summit meeting ended with Mandela and de Klerk signing a Record of Understanding which accepted all three preconditions: but more important, it agreed on a constitutional assembly and a transitional government of national unity. De Klerk saw it as a victory over the ANC militants, while the ANC team saw it as a watershed on the way to democracy. “It prepared the way for one man, one vote,” said Maharaj, “and gave Mandela the ascendancy.”47 Mandela himself was exultant: “This is what our people want, this is what our economy needs, this is what our country yearns for.”48
But Buthelezi was furious, seeing himself excluded from the deal, and announced he would withdraw from the talks. He led a protest march through the center of Johannesburg, and the next month joined a strange coalition with the right-wing Afrikaner parties and two homeland leaders, called the Concerned South Africans Group (COSAG), pledged to abolishing CODESA. The Record of Understanding, in fact, produced a fundamental realignment. It not only ended de Klerk’s political alliance with Buthelezi; it also rapidly reduced the political violence outside KwaZulu-Natal, including train attacks, hit squads and massacres. The Truth Commission would later find circumstantial evidence that “the signing of the Record of Understanding led to a fall in the rate of random and anonymous attacks associated with ‘third force’ violence.”49 That clearly suggested that de Klerk was able to curb the violence when he wished to.
The ANC on their side made a historic concession, as de Klerk recognized: they agreed to “sunset clauses” which would safeguard the jobs of white civil servants and allow for a coalition government between Afrikaner Nationalist and ANC Ministers. The idea was not new: Thabo Mbeki had quietly slipped it into the discussions some time before.50 But it was surprisingly relaunched by the communist Joe Slovo in the African Communist for August. Slovo argued persuasively that “we are not dealing with a defeated enemy,” and that white soldiers and civil servants could still destabilize a democratic government—so the ANC should get them on their side by offering safeguards and sharing power. It was the more persuasive, as de Klerk said, coming from “a communist with impeccable revolutionary credentials.”51 It certainly seemed extraordinary for the left to suggest sitting in the same cabinet as the enemy. To many fellow communists it seemed a betrayal: “The only thing that is red about Slovo,” it was said, “is his socks.” The Marxist Pallo Jordan accused Slovo of being “charmingly ignorant of the history of the twentieth century,” and Ronnie Kasrils feared with some reason that the policy would allow the Afrikaner Generals to entrench themselves.52 Mandela was at first skeptical of the plan, but he came around to it. He was becoming more worried by “the already incipient counter-revolutionary movement,” and he saw a coalition as a means to hold the country together, and to avoid deadly challenges like Savimbi’s in Angola.53
In November the ANC executive debated the “sunset clauses” for two days: sixty-two of the eighty members spoke, with much feeling from the grass roots. But Mandela argued strongly that all democratic parties should have a stake in government, and that a coalition would defuse the threat of civil war.54 On November 18 the ANC endorsed Slovo’s proposals. There were still fierce critics. “The National Party elite is getting into bed with the ANC,” said Winnie Mandela, “in order to preserve its silken sheets.” And Harry Gwala would not accept the “drastic departure from what we have always known the ANC to stand for.”55 Certainly the limitations and compromises of the sunset clauses would prove much costlier than many of their proponents realized, as Afrikaner bureaucrats and military officers dug themselves in. But the huge compromise did turn the key to a democratic settlement.
By December 1992 the ANC was negotiating with the governmen
t in a more hopeful atmosphere, culminating in five days of bush conferences where black and white leaders worked and relaxed together. De Klerk was giving way to the idea of simple majority rule, which Mandela tried to soften by promising him a continuing role in government. “You will notice there has been a sobering up of the politicians,” Mandela explained, in his most conciliatory style. “All of us have made mistakes in the past.”56 By February 1993 the two sides had agreed in principle that elections would be followed by a five-year government of national unity, whose members would include all parties polling over 5 percent of the total vote cast. In March they convened a negotiating council with twenty-four other parties to work out the details.
On March 23 de Klerk made a dramatic announcement, which seemed to many ANC leaders to presage the abandonment of white domination. He told Parliament that over the previous nine years the government had secretly developed seven nuclear bombs, similar to the Hiroshima bomb, to provide a credible deterrent, but that they had now been effectively dismantled and destroyed. South Africa, de Klerk said, was thus the first country to renounce and abandon its own nuclear weaponry.57 But to the ANC the overriding reason was clear: to prevent it passing into black hands.
Then, on April 10, the whole process of negotiation was threatened. Chris Hani, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and former commander of MK, who was widely seen as the second most popular black leader, was shot dead in Boksburg, near Johannesburg. By an amazing chance an Afrikaner woman noted the assassin’s license-plate number. She immediately reported it to the police, and fifteen minutes later they stopped the car, driven by a Polish immigrant who still had a smoking gun with him. The murder seemed bound to precipitate race riots and abort any talks. De Klerk, on holiday in the Karoo Desert, issued a statement of condolence, but he knew that only Mandela could calm his own people: as he wrote later, “This was Mandela’s moment not mine.”58 In Johannesburg Tokyo Sexwale went to the SABC with a police brigadier to demand that they televise a statement Mandela was preparing.59 Mandela flew back from the Transkei to make one of the most crucial speeches of his career. It was cut back by the SABC, but later, at Mandela’s insistence, repeated in full. It began:
A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.
Mandela’s statesmanlike speech, set against de Klerk’s silence, suggested that he was already the real leader, and the protector of peace.
There was an outburst of rioting and looting in the Cape and Natal, which left seventy dead; and in the prevailing panic hundreds of whites made plans to leave the country. Mandela appealed to them to stay. But the bloodbath did not happen. “At the time of Chris’s death prophets of doom predicted that our country would go up in flames,” Mandela said two years later at the unveiling of Hani’s tombstone. “They said that the leadership of our people could not control ‘young militants.’ The political maturity of our nation has disproved them.”60
It was a lonely time for Mandela. Two weeks after Hani’s murder, his closest friend, Oliver Tambo, died of another stroke. Mandela said he had “kept up a life-long conversation with him in my head,” and now felt again “the loneliest man in the world.” The ANC gave Tambo their own kind of state funeral, with a huge rally in Soweto. Mandela was moved by the presence of high-level foreign delegations; but the British Ambassador was noticeably absent: he was in London, accompanying Buthelezi on a visit to the Prime Minister, John Major.61
Mandela and de Klerk now seemed, said one foreign observer, like “two exhausted heavyweight boxers at the end of a long title bout, both bloodied and badly bruised.”62 But Mandela was more secure in his own party. “He had been elevated to a new lofty status,” wrote David Ottaway of the Washington Post, “above the day-to-day administrative concerns and internal squabbles of the NEC. He was now the distinguished elder statesman of the movement.”63 The ANC were determined to press their advantage. “After Chris Hani died,” said Ramaphosa, “we went for the kill.”64 When the parties met again at the World Trade Centre in late April, Mandela insisted on setting a date for an election—even before agreeing on an interim constitution. De Klerk stalled, but Mandela realized that his Afrikaner colleagues were now quarreling openly among themselves. Mandela mobilized all his authority, at home and abroad. In early May he addressed British M.P.s in London, asking them to use their influence with the Afrikaners “to persuade them to abandon their selfish and sectarian positions.” “History demands,” he said, “that you help us.”65 By June 3 most of the parties had agreed to hold South Africa’s first fully democratic elections on April 27, 1994. Mandela saw the signal for which he had been waiting. “The countdown to the democratic transfer of power to the people has begun,” he told black Americans in the United States a month later.66
But there were still serious obstacles, for two disruptive parties had kept out of the negotiations. The Conservative Party, mostly Afrikaner, was threatening de Klerk, while Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party was threatening Mandela. In KwaZulu-Natal the Zulu gangs were still killing, provoking bloody reprisals from ANC supporters; and Mandela accepted that the ANC must share some of the blame. When twenty people, including six schoolchildren, were massacred near Table Mountain in March 1993, Mandela admitted that all parties had made mistakes, and condemned the people responsible for mass slaughters: “Whether they are members of the ANC, members of the IFP or members of the state security services,” he said, “they are no longer human beings. They are animals.” “I am not going to blame the IFP and the government only,” he said at Mamelodi in April. “We must find the truth—our people are just as involved in violence.”67 Mandela was prepared to stake his leadership on the question of talking to the IFP. “Do you want me to be a leader or do you want me to stand down?” he asked. When they said they wanted him to be a leader, he replied: “You will have to listen to me, to talk to the IFP. If not you can ask me to resign: I will do so.”68
But Mandela now saw Buthelezi moving toward regional autonomy and possible secession, which he could not accept: “Any threat to force conclusions down our throats, that we will reject without any reservation.”69 De Klerk, too, was becoming increasingly worried by Buthelezi’s plans to establish a separate state. Mandela again tried a personal appeal to Buthelezi; in June 1993 he met him for the first time in two years. Buthelezi remained intransigent, while he was still supported by conservative friends in the West: the month following his visit to John Major in London he was the guest of Prince Charles at his country house, Highgrove.70 Right-wing journalists continued to build up Buthelezi: “Preparing for Civil War,” headlined The Times above an article by William Rees-Mogg in October: “A unitary state probably means a civil war. The Zulu people would fight for their independence, probably successfully.”71
But the election deadline spurred on the talks to settle the constitution, while the intricate technical discussions helped to disguise the drastic implications of a transfer of power. Negotiators on both sides would often find it harder to persuade their own colleagues than their opponents: as Frene Ginwala said, “A camaraderie develops when your constituency is seen as your enemy, and the enemy is your ally.” By the end, observed van Zyl Slabbert, “De Klerk’s negotiators were really part of Mandela’s team in facilitating the transition to majority rule.”72
As a settlement came closer, extremists on both sides became more violent. On June 25 three thousand Afrikaners converged on the World Trade Centre, carrying banners with the swastika-like symbol of the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging), and led by their potbellied leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche. An armored car smashed through the plate-glass entrance, followed by a rowdy crowd who surged into the building, shouting insults against kaffirs and urinating in the conference chamber. General Constand Viljoen, the leader of the new right-wing Freedom Front party
, tried vainly to restrain them. After Terre’Blanche had delivered a fiery speech, the invaders retreated outside to light barbecues and drink beer.
A month later there was a deadlier outrage, when on July 23 five masked black men rushed into St. James’s Church in Cape Town and fired into the packed congregation, killing eleven and maiming many others. The massacre was blamed on a local branch of APLA, the military wing of the PAC which had boasted of earlier murders of whites; an eighteen-year-old APLA member was later sentenced to twenty-three years for his part in it. These and other murders provoked further panic among whites; but they also gave a new urgency to a settlement.
While their teams negotiated, Mandela and de Klerk were still barely on speaking terms. They were both in America in July 1993, where they were each received by President Clinton, but de Klerk found himself being escorted out of the White House by a roundabout route, to avoid meeting Mandela who was on his way in.73 The next day in Philadelphia they were both presented with the Liberty Medal; and Mandela effectively snubbed de Klerk at a press conference: “We don’t regard him as the President of South Africa but as a leader put there by only 15 percent of the population.”
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