Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  The final week of the election campaign was seen still more as a contest between Mandela and de Klerk, both of whom were in the full glare of world publicity. De Klerk had seriously misjudged the ANC’s skills in presentation: he could muster only a handful of convincing spokesmen in English on television, while the ANC could offer a wide choice. And Mandela showed all his skills as a performer who could adjust his image according to his audiences and questioners. “He was overestimated as a statesman,” said one of de Klerk’s team, “but underestimated as a politician.” He would sometimes change his clothes three or four times in a day—from a suit for a business breakfast, to an open shirt for a village crowd, to a wooly cardigan for a visit to old people. He even appeared in camouflage battle dress alongside Joe Modise, to appeal to guerrilla voters. “But de Klerk would wear the same golfing jacket,” complained an aide.46 And de Klerk had an inevitable handicap in attempting to appeal to blacks. The American political consultant Stanley Greenberg reckoned that Mandela’s stock rose every time de Klerk lammed into him: “When the party of the oppressor attacks,” Greenberg noted, “you get a protective reaction from the people who were oppressed.”47 De Klerk had to restrain himself from all-out attacks on the ANC as a party which was not fit to govern, for he would have to work alongside Mandela in a coalition after the election—though it was not a prospect he relished.48 It was, in the end, a muted election, in which neither side said quite what they thought.

  The ANC would clearly be the victors in most of the nine provinces, but they were seriously challenged in the Western Cape, the stronghold of Coloured voters. Their local leader, Allan Boesak, the preacher who had helped to found the UDF, had lost much of his following after divorcing his wife to marry a white woman and leaving the Dutch Reformed Church; and many ANC activists found him too vain and fond of high living. Mandela remained stubbornly loyal to Boesak, and insisted he remain the ANC leader; but many of the Coloured voters were alarmed by the prospect of a black government, and preferred to vote for de Klerk and the local National Party leader, Hernus Kriel. “I lost track of the number of people who told me that they would ‘not vote for a kaffir,’ ” said one well-informed American observer, William Finnegan, “or ‘would never call a black man baas.’ ”49 The ANC’s setbacks in the Western Cape were a serious blow to their vision of multiracialism.

  Ten days before the election, Mandela debated with de Klerk on television, American-style. Mandela was coached by another ex-adviser of Clinton, Frank Greer, whose first rule was: “Be presidential.” Greer told him to talk faster, not to wag his finger—which would remind viewers of P. W. Botha—and to keep smiling.50 Mandela rehearsed the day before, with de Klerk played by the journalist Allister Sparks, who was worried about Mandela overrunning his two-minute quota: “He would go on for thirty minutes if left alone.”51

  In the actual debate, Mandela began with a wooden, unsmiling three-minute monologue which the moderator cut short, and de Klerk soon felt he was winning on points. But Mandela took de Klerk by surprise at the end when he reached out to take his hand, apparently spontaneously, but actually carefully rehearsed to embarrass de Klerk. “We knew his body language would not look good,” said one of Mandela’s advisers.52 “Suddenly what had been a certain points victory had been converted into a draw,” de Klerk later admitted. “It was a masterful stroke.”53 Mandela could conclude in the conciliatory style at which he excelled. “I think we are a shining example to the entire world,” he told de Klerk, “of people drawn from different racial groups who have a common loyalty, a common love, to their common country.” “He had all the moments,” Greer said afterward. “He was tough enough to energize his base, but then he was also able to reach out and appeal for reconciliation.”54

  For most of the last week before polling day the mood seemed miraculously peaceful. When Mandela held his final Johannesburg rally, in the stadium outside Soweto, the whole atmosphere was festive. Sixty thousand ANC supporters converged in teams, waving flags and banners, to listen to singers yelling through deafening loudspeakers, and to watch tribal dancers, drum majorettes and acrobats. Then a helicopter whirred overhead and landed outside, while the drums rolled, and young women in fur busbys led a procession around the stadium: at the end of it was the unmistakable tall figure of Mandela in a red shirt, beaming and shaking hands, then sitting among young children, smiling and clapping with them. Thabo Mbeki warmed up the crowd, and introduced Mandela to thunderous applause. Mandela reached out to all kinds of supporters, of all religions and ages, freely interpreted into Xhosa by Tokyo Sexwale, adding his own emotion and humor in his singsongy voice. The merriment suddenly vanished when gunshots went up from somewhere in the stadium: Mandela fiercely rebuked the crowd—“Nobody should come to a meeting armed”—and insisted the culprits be seized and removed. But it ended in harmony; and he already looked like a head of state as he was driven away in his car, while security guards stopped anyone from reaching through the window to shake his hand.

  On April 26, the day before the election, Mandela gave his last press conference in Johannesburg. He remained reticent about his emotions—“certain things can’t be expressed in words”—and insisted that “no single individual can be elevated above others.” But he granted that “It is a very exciting moment,” and wished he could awaken the dead heroes like Tambo and Hani to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Afterward he talked proudly about the ANC’s unification: “There used to be twenty-six parties pulling in different directions,” he said on election day. “Now we will have a government of unity.”55

  In the last few days several bombs exploded in and near Johannesburg, including a car bomb which went off outside the ANC regional office. Twenty people were killed altogether.56 All the bombs turned out to have been placed by an AWB cell intending to scare voters away. But black voters were undeterred, determined to participate for the first time in their hard-earned democracy. Before dawn on Wednesday, April 27, they started lining up at the polling stations, sometimes to wait for five hours before voting. “After nearly three hundred and fifty years,” someone said, “three hundred and fifty minutes is nothing.” The patient, expectant voters seemed to show much more faith in the democratic process than did apathetic electorates in America or Europe; and on that hot morning the violence had almost disappeared, as if drained away by the democratic process. But they showed few signs of unreal expectations: when one BBC correspondent was asked to provide sound bites from voters expecting cars and houses after the election, he could find no one to oblige. It was not money, but the vote, so long denied them, that they were lining up for.

  Walter Sisulu, Mandela’s old mentor, spent the day with voters in Soweto: he felt that his whole life had been geared toward this victory of peace over civil war. “What makes our revolution one of the greatest,” he said later, was that “the people were determined only on one thing, to make their cross.”57 Mandela took special pleasure in seeing Afrikaner farmers lining up next to their African laborers: “You can see a new South Africa has arrived.” He himself went down to Durban to vote at Ohlange High School, near the grave of John Dube, the cofounder of the ANC in 1912—chosen with characteristic care for the symbolism, to recall the dead heroes who had enabled him now to vote for the first time: “It was as though we were a nation reborn.”58

  The world watched tensely. No election had ever been so closely monitored: an estimated 200,000 officials and volunteers were observing the 23 million voters. The Special Envoy from the UN, the suave Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi, supervised an army of young UN volunteers with blue armbands or caps scattered around the townships. Many polling booths were nevertheless chaotic. Forms, ink and papers failed to arrive. Reports flowed in—particularly from KwaZulu, which had only a week to prepare—of blunders or rackets, votes duplicated or lost. Mandela was quick to see a conspiracy: “It is clear to me that there has been massive sabotage,” he said on television on election day, which was “totally unacceptable.” The organizers feared t
hey would need a third day of polling, and de Klerk dreaded that South Africa would look like “just another African country.”59

  But the broad verdict was clear. “Every party has committed itself to change,” said Brahimi, “and the result will be roughly what they can accept.”60 The political parties eventually cobbled together a rough-and-ready result which provided an acceptable compromise. “It was an impressionist election,” as de Klerk said. De Klerk’s National Party had a majority of 53 percent in the Western Cape—where as many as 69 percent of Coloureds voted for him. Buthelezi’s Inkatha had a majority of 51 percent in KwaZulu-Natal. In the other seven provinces the ANC had a majority, and across the country as a whole they had 62.6 percent of the votes, giving them 252 seats out of four hundred in the new Parliament. The PAC, which had once been such a formidable rival, had only 1.25 percent. The ANC was just short of the two-thirds majority which would allow them to change the constitution; but Mandela sounded genuinely relieved that they “could not do what they like.” Such an overwhelming victory, he said later, “would have created tremendous problems; de Klerk would have applied to the court to declare the result null and void.” And he was already concerned with reactions after the elections: “We have to be very careful not to create the fear,” he told the Guardian, “that the majority is going to be used for the purpose of coercing the minorities.”61

  De Klerk magnanimously conceded defeat in Pretoria, praising Mandela as a man of destiny who knew that beyond this hill lies another and another: “The journey is never complete. As he contemplates the next hill, I hold out my hand to Mr. Mandela in friendship and cooperation.” Three hours later in Johannesburg Mandela, exhausted with flu, came to the ANC victory celebration at the Carlton Hotel and returned the compliment. He congratulated de Klerk on the “good fight,” and described how they could still after harsh words “shake hands and sit down to drink coffee.” It was time, he concluded, to drink a toast “to the small miracle.” The world would continue to proclaim the “South African miracle,” but the phrase was misleading. As Albie Sachs said later, it had in fact been “the most predicted and consciously and rationally worked-for happening one could ever have imagined, and certainly the most unmiraculous.”62

  Mandela faced immediate and difficult choices. As President he would have two deputies; and under the terms of the constitution one would be de Klerk, as leader of the second largest party. But Mandela had to choose the senior one from within the ANC. The choice would be crucial, because Mandela intended to serve for only one five-year term, until he was eighty. His deputy would be well placed to succeed him, although the NEC would have to endorse him. Mandela had to decide between two able rivals from almost opposite backgrounds. Thabo Mbeki, at fifty-one, was the most obvious heir among the “aristocracy of exile,” the favored protégé of Oliver Tambo. He had shown himself a masterful fixer and negotiator, with the training in economics and diplomacy which Mandela lacked, and with the intellectual flexibility to adapt from revolutionary to administrator. As Govan’s son he had links with the Transkei and radical politics; but he was not close to his father—who had left his upbringing to others—and he had abandoned his Marxist beliefs. His political father figure had been Tambo.

  Cyril Ramaphosa was ten years younger, the son of a Soweto policeman; but he had been through testing ordeals—as a lawyer, as the miners’ leader, as Secretary-General of the ANC and as the chief negotiator who had brought the ANC to power. He had both the charm and the ruthlessness to outwit experienced opponents. But he was outside the mainstream of the ANC: he had begun with the Black Consciousness movement, and came from the relatively small Venda tribe. He was detached from the networks of the Transkei, the exiles from Lusaka and the guerrillas of MK.

  It was a very difficult choice. Mandela appeared often to favor Ramaphosa, and saw the advantage of having a non-Xhosa as his deputy, who could be neutral among the ANC tribes and groupings. But he consulted closely with the top ANC leaders, with the trade unions through COSATU, and with the Communist Party, “without indicating his own feelings.” Their consensus was clearly for Thabo Mbeki.63 Ramaphosa was put out, and refused a Cabinet job; but he still appeared to be in the running to eventually take Mandela’s place as leader. It was not until two years later that Mandela would make clear to his colleagues that Mbeki was his chosen successor.

  On May 10 Mandela was inaugurated as President in a resplendent ceremony outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, organized by the outgoing government. It was introduced by Barbara Masekela, and was watched by an estimated billion viewers around the world. It was a triumphantly international occasion, unlike de Klerk’s inauguration five years earlier, which was attended by only four “foreign” delegations—one from each of the South African homelands. This time there were four thousand guests, some of them incompatible, including Hillary Clinton and Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and President Chaim Herzog of Israel, Prince Philip and Julius Nyerere; but also old friends, including Bishop Huddleston and three of Mandela’s prison warders. In his presidential speech Mandela stressed regeneration and reconciliation: “Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.” He went on to promise: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another, and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world.”

  The Generals and police chiefs saluted and pledged loyalty: a few years before, Mandela reflected, “they would not have saluted but arrested me.”64 Jet fighters which had been bought to defend the country against black insurgents roared overhead in tribute to the black President—though some ANC guests seemed to flinch, as though expecting to be gunned down. But the four thousand armed police were preoccupied with protecting Mandela against assassination (a hit man from the AWB had in fact been approached to kill him, but had backed out). The crowd sang the two national anthems, “Die Stem” and the ANC’s “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”: “Neither group knew the lyrics of the anthem they once despised,” Mandela reflected, adding hopefully: “They would soon know the words by heart.”65 * But there was still a powerful sense of the new nation rallying behind the new President.

  It was essentially a tribute to one man. “We all see ourselves reflected in his glory,” said Thabo Mbeki. “A glory that arises in his humility, his sense of forgiveness.”66 And it was a solitary glory. Mandela was accompanied by his daughter Zeni, under a huge black hat, but Winnie—under a still bigger green hat—was placed among the less important guests until she made a fuss. Mandela’s first wife, Evelyn (who had not voted), was not invited. His only surviving son, Makgatho, was absent, preparing for his law exam in Durban. Mandela was painfully aware that his political commitment “was at the expense of the people I knew best and loved most.”67

  The outside world reported the inauguration with romantic euphoria, as the triumph of democracy, each country influenced by its own memories of past liberations. “It was like being alive in the time of Lincoln,” said the New York Times. For Africa it had a much deeper significance. It was, as de Klerk wrote, “the last manifestation of white rule—not only in South Africa—but on the whole continent.”68 The process of colonization which had begun in the Cape in 1652 had finally ended in Africa. There were a few skeptical warnings about African democracy, recalling how many black states had first gone to the polls over the previous forty years with similar enthusiasm. “Dawn of freedom, my foot!” wrote the conservative Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph. “Black majority rule in South Africa should send a shudder round the world.”69 But the doubts were drowned in the prevailing relief. The predictions of a civil war and a bloodbath had been disproved, and it was difficult not to give Mandela credit for avoiding disaster.

  *Mandela would have to wait. Four years later, at a memorial service for Trevor Huddleston in Johannesburg Cathedral, he angrily criticized the congregation for not singing the words of “Di
e Stem,” and insisted on the full version.

  34

  Governing

  The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded.

  —Edmund Burke, 1790

  WHEN MANDELA became President of South Africa, four years after leaving prison, the world saw it as the end of the fairy tale, requiring him to be happy ever after. In fact, it was the beginning of a quite different story, with bureaucrats and exchange rates instead of heroes and villains, against a background which was new to Mandela: “We have no experience of elections, of parliamentary practice, and of state administration,” he had already told British M.P.s.1 The suddenness of power took most of the ANC by surprise: “We were taken from the bush, or from underground outside the country, or from prisons, to come and take charge,” Mandela said four years later. “We were suddenly thrown into this immense responsibility of running a highly developed country.”2