Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  There was nothing new in Africa about prisoners suddenly coming to power: from Nkrumah in Ghana and Kenyatta in Kenya to Mugabe in Zimbabwe—all had faced unfamiliar problems. Mandela still saw himself in the African tradition, proud that his people had accomplished their own liberation, and determined to identify himself with them. “I matured politically within the ranks of a movement and a leadership that were critical in shaping my outlook,” he explained later. “I am the product of the mire that our society was. On occasion, like other leaders, I have stumbled; and cannot claim to sparkle alone on a glorified perch.” He was determined to show that Africans could govern effectively: “Yes, Africans, with their supposed venality and incompetence, have achieved this feat!” And he resented insinuations “that I do not belong to these African masses and do not share their aspirations.”3

  But he also knew he was taking over a much more complicated industrial nation than any other in Africa; and that it would be some time until black South Africans could govern without support from white managers, technicians and professionals. He had seen other African states devastated by a sudden exodus of whites—particularly Mozambique, whose first President, Samora Machel, had warned fellow Africans to avoid the same fate. And South Africa was much more dependent on white expertise. From the beginning Mandela faced the balancing act of pacifying the white elite without alienating the black masses.

  Mandela soon occupied the presidency as if he had been born to it. He moved into the grand mansions and offices—“the places where the most diabolical policies were hatched”—at first feeling unsure of his reception by white bureaucrats. He liked to recall how he arrived in the President’s office in Pretoria looking forward to the smell of coffee, which he had enjoyed when he visited de Klerk; now he could smell no coffee, and found no staff around. In the late afternoon he summoned a senior civil servant and asked him to assemble the staff the next morning. He shook hands with them, reminded them that a new government had taken over, and assured them that no one would be thrown on the streets.4 Soon he established excellent relations with the white staff he had kept on. Afrikaner secretaries and servants became totally loyal to the genial old man who remembered their names and their families. “Look at the lady who brought in the tea,” Mandela told one visitor. “It is really unbelievable the way they have adjusted to their new position.”5 When de Klerk later accused the ANC of having dismissed scores of Afrikaners from government jobs, Mandela retorted angrily that he had two white secretaries from the old regime who were “typical Boeremeisies,” and that he had retained an Afrikaner Major on his staff even though the security service had warned him that he had helped to bomb an ANC building. “So what?” he had replied. “I work in government with people who have done worse things than that.”6

  In Cape Town, Mandela took over the President’s office in the elegant old Tuynhuys, where P. W. Botha had poured him tea as a jailbird in 1989. He made only a few changes, putting up pictures of his mother’s kraal and of himself as a boxer in the fifties. He moved into the secluded Groote Schuur estate—the legacy of Cecil Rhodes—where Afrikaner ministers had long lived in private privilege; but he allowed de Klerk to remain in the official presidential residence, the historic Groote Schuur mansion, and himself occupied Westbrooke, an elegant but gloomy Cape Dutch mansion—soon renamed, in Afrikaans, Genadendal (Valley of Mercy), the name of the first Christian mission in the Cape. He worked in the small and cheerful Elephant Room opposite his bedroom at the end of a long corridor upstairs, which had been the powder room for women guests; he could relax there with his feet up. He still often got up at 4:30, made his own bed, and walked around the grounds before breakfast.

  In Pretoria Mandela caused more resentment when he decided to take over Libertas, the official mansion where the de Klerks had been living, while the ANC also used the Presidency, the other traditional residence, for entertaining and formal occasions. De Klerk was interested to watch the old man who had spent three decades in a tiny cell being “conducted through the echoing halls of the sprawling mansion.” De Klerk himself had to move into a third official house, Overvaal, which he found delightful; but his wife, Marike, was offended by the chopping and changing, which she saw as “a calculated effort by Mandela to humiliate us.” Her resentment, de Klerk reckoned, was “a very real factor in the growing tension between Mandela and me.”

  Mandela amazed the staff and servants by shaking hands and chatting with all of them, including the gardeners. “He had an exceptional ability,” de Klerk noted, “to make everyone with whom he came into contact feel special.”7 He became friendly with his Afrikaner bodyguards, whose loyalty could be seen in their anxious faces as they watched his movements. “I used to do it for the money, now it’s for him,” said one of them. “I’d take the bullet for him.” On the presidential plane or helicopter he chatted with the crew and pilot, concerned about their meals and accommodation. In Pretoria he gave a new intimacy to Libertas, which was renamed Mahlamba Ndlopfu, which means “washing of the elephant,” or dawn of a new era, in the Shangaan language. But he was still living in the house in Houghton, where he could remain a private person.

  His physique and stamina amazed his physicians, including his old family doctor Nthato Motlana, who was always urging him to slow down. He still had trouble with his eyes, which were not cured by an operation in 1994, and photographers were forbidden to use flashlight when photographing him. He felt more pain from his knee, which had not recovered from his fall on Robben Island, but which could not safely be operated on: eventually he could not walk upstairs without help. Sometimes he suffered from exhaustion, and his doctors insisted on total rest. But he would recuperate quickly, and treated his long flights in the presidential plane as a rest—he appeared unaffected by jet lag. At seventy-six his energy and vitality, doctors agreed, were like those of a man twenty years younger.8

  In his offices Mandela conveyed both intimacy and authority, closeness and distance. He would greet visitors by springing up from his armchair or from behind his desk, looking them in the eye, remembering where they came from, recalling mutual friends. His style was always homely and earthy, like a countryman, still with his open smile. “He wants to see you because he loves you,” his secretary would say. But he seemed equally glad to see new faces. He made dramatic entrances, often already welcoming a guest as he walked into the room, creating immediate rapport. Once, when a British television crew were filming him, he ruined the footage by walking straight up to the cameraman to shake his hand. When he arrived at 10 Downing Street the door was opened as always by the policeman inside: he immediately shook his hand, and remembered him when he returned, asking about his family.

  Mandela never seemed to lose his courtesy or self-discipline. “The man and the mask were one,” said Richard Stengel, the American journalist who collaborated on his autobiography; diplomats waited for the mask to slip, but it never did. His personal feelings seemed to have been subsumed by his political life, infusing warmth and energy; like a celibate priest he seemed to relate to people more closely, lacking the intimacy of a home. He always preferred to deal with politics and diplomacy through one-to-one contacts, bypassing bureaucracies; and he still loved the long-distance telephone as a newfound toy, using it to surprise friends on the other side of the world—sometimes waking them up early in the morning. His secretary Mary Mxadana, a tall, commanding woman who conducted choirs in Soweto, tried to prevent him from transacting all his business personally: “I’ve just tried to stop him from walking downstairs,” she told a visitor, “to call someone to the phone.”

  But behind his courtesy, his secretaries knew, Mandela could be moody and dejected. “He’s not always as glad to see people as he says,” as one of them put it. “His body language and facial expression indicate his different moods,” said Mary Mxadana. The word would sometimes go around the office: “Madiba’s in a bad mood today.” Once alone, he could suddenly show a sadder face. One sculptor who had portrayed many world lead
ers spent hours watching his expression. He found him uniquely charismatic, but also uniquely hard to represent: in company he lit up with every visitor, but by himself he would suddenly look exhausted, as his welcoming smile turned into a grim circumflex. Which mouth should the artist show?9

  Mandela as President was more cut off than ever from old friendships: the greater his fame, the more lonely his isolation. “The sad thing is that nobody realizes that my father is very lonely,” said his daughter Zindzi.10 He was much older than most of his colleagues. Tambo was dead, and Sisulu was outside the Cabinet. “It was excruciating to see him sitting alone at his big table at home,” said one close colleague, who recalled how Mandela had once told him: “I have no friends.” “He guards against emotional friendships,” his observer went on. “If you raise a question with emotional overtones he can look stony: you know you won’t get anywhere. He has developed a total politicization of being. It was a price I wouldn’t like to pay, but it gave him a remarkable integrity in political life.”11

  It was partly the legacy of prison. Most Robben Islanders had become accustomed to communing with themselves. “We all found afterwards we needed space between ourselves and others,” said Eric Molobi, “to reflect and regain ourselves, which made life difficult for our families.”12 Mandela had been separated from his family for over a quarter of a century, and they now found him still less accessible as President. He was acutely conscious of his loss, but could do little about it.

  Winnie had played no part in Mandela’s social life since they separated: “It was as if they did not exist for each other,” said their daughter Zindzi.13 But she still caused political problems. After campaigning vigorously and successfully as an ANC candidate at the election she had become a prominent Member of Parliament. Mandela unwisely appointed her Deputy Minister of Arts, but she soon became involved in financial scandals: shady diamond deals, a dubious tourist project for black Americans, and an antipoverty program which allowed her huge expenses. Mandela made no move until she became openly disloyal: she accused the ANC of being preoccupied with appeasing whites, and challenged them to show they were in power.

  When Mandela insisted she apologize Winnie reluctantly signed a formal apology, but then complained she had done so under duress, and that the ANC were restricting free speech. Then, in March 1995, while she was visiting West Africa against Mandela’s instructions, her house in Soweto was raided by the fraud squad, backed by armed police, who seized documents. Returning the next day, Winnie exploded against the “diabolical vendetta” by “charlatans and cowards,” and soon attacked the government again for ignoring the poor: “Your struggle seems much worse than before,” she told an African crowd. Mandela finally dismissed her from government—though because of a legal oversight she had to be reinstated before she was properly sacked. Winnie still claimed she was in the right, and that other M.P.s were anyway more corrupt than she was. “We must expect Comrade Winnie to fight back,” Mandela explained sadly. “But we have the situation under control.”14

  It was the end of the marriage. They had formally separated three years before, and in August 1995 Mandela began divorce proceedings, hoping for a friendly settlement to avoid family recriminations. But Winnie blamed her enemies, including Ramaphosa, for creating the rift, and insisted they could be reconciled through tribal customs; she even asked Mandela’s nephew K. D. Matanzima, still paramount chief of West Tembuland, to mediate.

  In March 1996 President Mandela appeared in the Rand Supreme Court, only a few feet from his wife, to plead for his divorce: a unique public display of his painful private life. He had delayed it, he explained, because he did not wish it to be linked to Stompie Seipei’s murder. He rejected any mediation by Matanzima, who had once been Winnie’s suitor, and whom he regarded as “a sellout in the proper sense of the word.” “Can I put it simply, my Lord?” he told the judge. “If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile with the defendant, I would not. And least of all from Matanzima.… I am determined to get rid of this marriage.” He sadly described his misery when Winnie would not share his bedroom while he was awake: “I was the loneliest man …”

  Through her lawyer, Winnie described her own past sufferings. Mandela accepted this, but insisted that there were others, like Albertina Sisulu, who had suffered more, and asked the lawyer not to compel him to reveal the “even more serious reasons why I left home.” When the judge refused a request by Winnie’s lawyer for a few days’ adjournment to gather witnesses, Winnie dramatically sacked her lawyer. Mandela waited grimly until the judge returned to the courtroom to grant him a divorce, ending the marriage that had once seemed so crucial to his political morale. But Winnie still imagined herself as his wife: “To hear him saying in a white man’s court that I was pretending to love him was the greatest betrayal of the century.”15

  Mandela remained quite alone on his “glorified perch,” and sought relaxation with quite unpolitical people at weekends. “His weekends are none of our business,” said one of his Ministers. Like many other master politicians—such as Jack Kennedy or Harold Wilson—he relished the undemanding company of show business people or the rich. After his bleak isolation in prison he seemed dazzled by Hollywood figures like Whoopi Goldberg or Gregory Peck, not realizing that he was more of a celebrity than any of them. However busy he was with government, he would shock his more austere colleagues by making time for visiting pop stars like Michael Jackson or the Spice Girls, being photographed with them and greeting them with flattery (“I’m only here to shine her shoes,” he said of Whitney Houston). “I won’t wash this hand for a long time,” he said after shaking hands with Peter Ustinov, whom he had seen in a movie while in jail.

  Mandela worried the left more by enjoying the company of the very rich. Harry Oppenheimer, the archcapitalist of Anglo-American, who had met Mandela once before he went to jail, was now glad to entertain him in his luxuriant Brenthurst estate, close to Mandela’s house in Houghton (though Mandela was reminded to wear a tie). Mandela became especially close to Clive Menell, the Vice-Chairman of the rival Anglo-Vaal mining group, who had been a patron of black drama, including the musical King Kong, in the fifties. He spent his first Christmas as President at the Menells’ secluded Cape mansion Glendirk, below Table Mountain. When in 1996 Menell was dying of cancer, Mandela sat silently with him, holding his hand; and at his memorial service he read a tribute to the generosity of a man “born into privilege of a kind that few people can ever know.” But Mandela maintained his austere regime; when Menell came to his bedroom early one morning, he found that the President had already made his bed and was folding his pajamas.16

  Mandela was not always fastidious in his friendships. After he was separated from Winnie he stayed for a time in the showy mansion of Douw Steyn, a brash, self-made insurance tycoon; and his daughter Zindzi’s honeymoon was partly financed by the casino king Sol Kerzner, who was soon to be charged with bribery. But Mandela kept his distance from the values of the rich. When he was staying in a luxurious enclave in the Bahamas surrounded by expatriates, he gave a talk to pupils at a nearby black school which appalled his white neighbors by its militancy. He sometimes seemed to regard successful businessmen as fellow chiefs: in Johannesburg he surprised a group of them by saying: “You are the traditional tribal leaders in this area.”17

  Part of him was still an African chief; and it was at his newly built house in Qunu, in the Transkei, that he was most obviously at home. The house is always described as being modeled on the prison-house where he spent his last year in jail, which it was; but it gives no hint of a prison. It is a long, cheerful redbrick house—with no stairs to trouble Mandela’s knee—with round arches and a wide, low roof, set back from the main road from Umtata and surrounded by a well-kept garden and trees to provide privacy. It looks across the beautiful Transkei landscape, with a few mud-walled, grass-thatched huts, which was so familiar from his childhood. The Transkei is even poorer, and much more densely populated, now than in the
1920s, with very few trees or birds, and the towns have suffered from the corruption of the Bantustan years. But the open views still have their timeless splendor. “This is really home, where my roots are,” Mandela says. “It becomes more important, the older you get, to return to places where you have wonderful recollections.”18

  At Qunu he would sometimes walk for five hours in the morning, recapturing his childhood memories around the Great Place at Mqhekezweni, greeted by children on the way. He was pained to see their poverty, rags and skinny bodies, but encouraged by their cheerfulness. At his house he would enjoy providing open hospitality for neighboring families. Once he presided over a two-day feast for six hundred guests, prepared by his friend Bantu Holomisa, with ten cauldrons, sixteen sheep and a whole ox slaughtered for the occasion, and brandy for the elders afterward. Many colleagues worried that he was never left alone, but Sisulu noticed that he was most at ease when surrounded by people.

  On his home ground Mandela loved being involved in tribal politics, settling local disputes about chickens or cows. He took a close interest in road building, pressing the case for women road builders and ensuring that a road was diverted to the former home of the paramount chief, Sabata. He would even sometimes see his nephew Matanzima, now quietly retired in his Great Place near Queenstown, in a spacious modern house in its own estate. Mandela still saw Matanzima as a sellout, and Matanzima talked of Mandela patronizingly as a jailbird who had broken the law, though explaining that “Nelson is free to come here at any time.”19

  Mandela was on much easier terms with Bantu Holomisa, the youthful General who had deposed Matanzima; he came from another chiefly family nearby, and helped organize Mandela’s house at Qunu. He seemed to regard Holomisa as a reminder of his own impulsive youth: “When I was your age,” he told him, “I was impatient with old men.”20 But Mandela’s tribal feelings did not appear to influence his patronage: the inhabitants of Umtata, the former capital of the Transkei a few miles from his house, complained that he did little to help them.21 His overriding loyalty was not to grand neighbors, but to the ANC; and Holomisa learned to his cost that he could not defy the ANC without forfeiting Mandela’s trust.