Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Mandela was facing his own learning curve. “It was more difficult to defend the freedom we have won,” he said in January 1996, “than struggling or fighting to gain it.”45 By January 1997 he was admitting that the ANC had made some “fundamental and serious” mistakes, including its response to funding from Sol Kerzner and the costly sequel to the musical Sarafina, intended to publicize AIDS, which was never produced. It was crucial, he added, to admit mistakes and learn from them. But he remained overwhelmingly loyal to old ANC colleagues—unless, like his ex-wife or Bantu Holomisa, they had publicly criticized the leadership. And he shrugged off the calls to reorganize his government. “I thought I had found a reason to reshuffle my Cabinet,” he said when he opened Parliament in February 1997. “I saw some members of the Cabinet dozing off as I was speaking.… But then I looked at the Premiers right in front of me here, as well as members of the opposition, and I saw the same thing happening here! I thought I should be fair and not discriminatory, so there will be no reshuffling.”46

  Mandela’s stubborn loyalties exasperated some colleagues as well as opponents, as he appeared to tolerate inefficiency and abuses of power. He was personally often shocked and disappointed by the new mood of financial ambition and the careerism of the younger political generation.47 But publicly he preserved an Olympian tolerance. His priority was building a new nation, and reconciling former enemies—which he saw as his overriding historical role.

  36

  Forgiving

  MANDELA HAD become famous above all as the man who forgave the enemies who had jailed him. It was not an obvious role for him to play. In his years before jail he had been quite aggressive, whether in his boxing or in his militant speeches. The younger Mandela enjoyed confronting enemies, whether Afrikaner bosses, Western imperialists or African sellouts; it was his colleague Tambo who was then the obvious conciliator: “When I want a confrontation,” Tambo told a colleague, “I ask for Nelson.”1 Mandela had learned his conciliation the hard way, in his years in jail: through his brains, as he put it, not with his blood. He changed his attitude to Afrikaners, with the help of a few warders, and realized that the future peace of South Africa would depend on forgiveness. It was his control of his aggression which gave his policies their special power: like George Washington (wrote Anthony Lewis), he was “a man of strong emotions who suppressed them in the interest of creating a nation.”2

  Mandela was the founder of a new nation, like Washington, Garibaldi or Bolívar, but he had not established it through military conquest or brute force; and he was very conscious of the consequence: “In nation building you sometimes need a bulldozer,” as he put it, “and sometimes a feather duster.”3 The previous South African nation—which was eight years older than Mandela—had itself been the result of a much-heralded reconciliation between ex-enemies, the Afrikaners and the British, who had come together after a bitter war. But the cost of that settlement had been the exclusion of Africans from government; and the idea of a multiracial South Africa was still young and fragile.

  Mandela still faced arguments about what multiracialism really constituted. He accepted the image of the Rainbow Nation, embracing all the colors, which had been popularized by Tutu and others; but he had never believed in “color-blind nonracialism,” as advocated by many left-wing theorists. He still recalled his long debates on Robben Island about the “national question” with Neville Alexander, who had since become a professor at the University of Cape Town. Alexander had now moved away from the extreme “assimilationist” model which assumed that racial differences would melt away; he now preferred the metaphor of a great river, absorbing tributaries from all over the country. But he still resisted emphasis on racial definitions.4 Mandela saw unifying South Africa as a more gradual process than Alexander did, in the ANC tradition. As Albert Luthuli had put it: “From the beginning our history has been one of ascending unities, the breaking of tribal, racial and credal barriers.”5 Mandela remained sensitive to the cultures of different races and tribes, and warned the ANC not to forget the minorities. “During the transition,” he said in March 1993, “minorities everywhere will say: ‘If the change comes, what is going to happen to me, to my spouse, to my children, to the national group to which I belong, to the values in which I believe, to my possessions?’ ” He hoped for a Government of National Unity under which everyone could say: “I am represented in that government.”6

  He was particularly concerned with conciliating the most dangerous minority, the Afrikaners with whom he was sharing government. He could not forget that they included, as he put it, “all sorts of people whose hands are dripping with blood.” But he had to make peace with them and make them feel part of the new nation: “We have to be alive to the sensibilities of the other group that has now lost power.” And his jail years had paradoxically left him with a special tolerance of the Afrikaners, and a belief that they could reverse their loyalties: “Once they change,” he would say, “they move 180 degrees.” Many of his friends were puzzled and skeptical. “He just seems convinced,” said one of them, “that the Afrikaners are a good thing.”

  But Mandela also had good political reasons to reach out to the Afrikaners—to deal separately with their different groupings. He had already defused some right-wing politicians, including the leader of the Conservative Party, Ferdi Hartzenberg. “He will soon realise,” Mandela said on the eve of the election, “that he either talks to us or disappears into the wilderness.”7 After the election Hartzenberg did have friendly talks with Mandela, and he did almost disappear. The more extreme Eugene Terre’Blanche of the AWB was left out in the cold, thoroughly discredited, and denouncing Hartzenberg as a traitor.

  Mandela went out of his way to conciliate his ex-enemies in a succession of symbolic visits with a high sense of drama. He went to see ex-President Botha again in Wilderness in November 1995. Botha appeared still to be fighting the Cold War: he told Mandela that after being a prisoner in jail, he was now a captive in his own Cabinet, encircled by a cabal of Indians and communists: “They will destroy you.” And he warned him that if Afrikaner Generals were prosecuted for acts carried out under the apartheid regime it could lead to disaster. “Mandela said nothing and looked me straight in the eyes,” Botha recalled, “like a Matanzima.”8 Botha wagged his finger in front of the cameras which recorded their meeting, while Mandela watched with amused tolerance: he knew that the old crocodile was now almost toothless.

  Mandela welcomed many old opponents from his jail years. When Niël Barnard retired as head of intelligence, Mandela gave a dinner party for him in Pretoria, with guests including General Willemse, the former commander of Robben Island. “It doesn’t happen in everyone’s lifetime,” said Willemse afterward, much moved. “It’s a wonderful experience to live through.”9 And Mandela made peace with the Afrikaner Churches. One Sunday he joined the congregation at a Dutch Reformed church in Pretoria, where he was delighted by his reception: “The men all wanted to touch me. The women all wanted to kiss me. The children all wanted to hang on my legs.” A few years earlier, he reflected, he would have needed guards to protect him from being assaulted: “This time they were there to protect me from being killed out of love.”10

  With the help of Amina Cachalia he met the widows and wives of both black and white leaders, not only veterans of the struggle like Albertina Sisulu and Albania Mothopeng, but also the wives of Afrikaner leaders, to “make them feel comfortable in the new set-up.”11 In August 1995 Amina flew with him to the bleak Afrikaner enclave of Orania in the Northern Cape—which reminded her of the Indian township of Lenasia, which apartheid planners had plunked outside Johannesburg—to visit the ninety-four-year-old widow of his old persecutor Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd. She gave Mandela tea, and made a short speech pleading for a Volkstaat, reading haltingly without spectacles until Mandela prompted her in Afrikaans. She showed him an unimposing sculpture of Verwoerd: “You’ve made him so small!” said Mandela. As they flew back, Amina argued with Mandela that Afrikaners
would never face up to the new South Africa; but Mandela insisted: “They will, they’ll come right in the end.”12

  Three months later he gave lunch in Pretoria to the eighty-four-year-old Percy Yutar, the prosecutor at the Rivonia trial who had infuriated the accused with his vindictive and hectoring tirades. Mandela flattered the frail little lawyer—“You still look young and fresh”—while Yutar marveled at his magnanimity: “It shows the great humility of this saintly man.”13 In seeking out his persecutors Mandela seemed like the legendary ex-convict who hunts down all the people who betrayed him; but instead of murdering them, he forgave them.

  Many ex–Robben Islanders balked at his more extreme acts of forgiveness, such as appointing General Jannie Roux—the prison chief who had been so callous on Robben Island—as Ambassador to Austria. And they were baffled by his leniency toward his former jailer James Gregory when he published his book Goodbye, Bafana, promoted with the help of a letter from Mandela thanking him for “the wonderful hours that we spent together.” Gregory had “hallucinated” in many of his accounts, Mandela said privately, and Gregory himself admitted that he had used “author’s license”; more seriously, he had abused his role by disclosing confidential personal details. Mandela was urged to sue him, but was satisfied when the prisons department distanced itself from the book.14

  Mandela remained adamant about the necessity to conciliate Afrikaners, which he saw as an act of courage, not of weakness. “We don’t need to remind ourselves about past evil,” he told me when I argued the point. “Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.”15 Reconciliation was certainly crucial to his political strategy. The more he reached out to individual Afrikaners, the more he could divide and disarm them. Forgiveness was an aspect of power, establishing a moral supremacy which reminded everyone that the balance had shifted. “You never quite know,” said one of Mandela’s colleagues, “whether he’s a saint or a Machiavelli.”

  But his reconciliation was also part of the basic optimism about human nature which Mandela had carried with him since his youth, and which was strengthened rather than weakened in jail. His close aides were still often exasperated by his willingness to support dubious friends, to see the best in unattractive opponents, and to welcome apparent charlatans. Ahmed Kathrada, who worked in the next office, wondered how far Mandela saw through the deceptions of false friends who came to see him, “of a superficial acquaintance of decades past suddenly elevated to ‘close friendship’; of opportunists ingratiating themselves in order to promote their dubious and even fraudulent agendas; of fair-weather friends who were nowhere to be seen when their friendship was most needed.” Mandela, Kathrada suspected, was simply too busy with other priorities to notice their machinations.16

  All these dramatic gestures of forgiveness were greeted by whites with surprise and relief, while arousing the anger and suspicion of some black militants who saw their President in league with their enemies. Mandela always insisted that reconciliation must be accompanied by transformation—a key ANC word—to enable blacks to share economic power and jobs with the whites; and he was becoming impatient with the absence of reciprocal concessions from the white side. “We can neither heal nor build,” he said at the opening of Parliament in February 1996, “with the victims of past injustices forgiving and the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude”—followed by loud black applause and a few white claps. Businessmen, he warned, could not simply continue business as usual, living in islands of privilege: they must think in terms of the rest of the population.17

  Mandela saw sport as a critical area for both reconciliation and transformation, and he reached out to white sportsmen, who were thrilled by the new opportunities: they had been cut off from international competition by antiapartheid boycotts, and now saw their world opening up again. Rugby more than any other game had been associated with apartheid, and with Afrikaner thuggery toward blacks: one Robben Islander recalled his police torturers kicking him around the cell, saying, “Now we’re playing rugby.”18 The name of the South African team, the Springboks, had symbolized white arrogance, and many blacks wanted it changed; but Mandela insisted that it should remain, and went out of his way to identify with the Springbok team, who were all Afrikaners except for one Coloured. In June 1995 the Springboks celebrated their reentry into international rugby with a triumphant match against New Zealand in the World Cup final in Johannesburg. Mandela watched the close-run game with absorption: “It almost shattered my nerves,” he said afterward.19 When the Springboks won Mandela walked onto the field wearing the green Springbok jersey, to present the amazed captain, Francois Pienaar, with the trophy. The crowd around the stadium, mostly Afrikaner, went wild, chanting “Nel-son! Nel-son!”; that evening boozy Afrikaners were embracing blacks in the streets and in hotels with spontaneous welcomes. “Mandela won the hearts of millions of white rugby fans,” admitted de Klerk.20

  It seemed to promise a new era of multiracial sport, in which black players would soon come through to be selected for the Springboks. But the euphoria was premature. The Chairman of the South African Rugby Football Union, Louis Luyt—an Afrikaner businessman who had been a front for the government’s dirty tricks in the seventies—was set against black pressure. Two years later, when the National Sports Council sought to hasten the process of integration, Luyt took legal action against them, and the judge subpoenaed Mandela himself to appear in the court. Mandela was advised by his lawyers not to go, but he insisted on attending, to show respect for the rule of law—only to hear the judge find in Luyt’s favor.21 When the Sports Council threatened to bring back the international boycott of South African teams, Luyt dug in his heels until his colleagues finally forced his resignation, in an atmosphere of racial acrimony which recalled the era of apartheid rugby. The slowness of other sports bodies to encourage the selection of black players in national teams continued to exasperate the ANC: Lulu Xingwana, the head of the parliamentary committee on sport, complained in December 1998 that the government was “tired of apologising internationally for all-white teams that are supposed to represent South Africa.”22

  A gulf still yawned between the symbolic gestures of reconciliation and gratitude at the top, and the realities below. Most white businessmen remained resistant to any real changes in the racial balance in their offices, recreations or daily lives, and saw black promotions in terms of lowering standards and risking corruption.

  The most exposed and visible frontier of transformation was the media. Mandela saw them as the crucial windows through which South Africans saw each other; and nearly all the media before 1994 had been controlled by whites. Television had been tightly supervised by Afrikaner governments since they first allowed it into the country in 1976. The ANC had appointed Zwelakhe Sisulu, Walter’s son, as Chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), with a mission to cut it down and transform it; the corporation sold off many radio stations, and brought black faces and opinions to the screens.

  But most newspapers remained white-owned, and Mandela observed the press more closely than television. He had learned in the fifties how desperately the ANC depended on newspapers to report its protests, and had tried to influence reporters and editors then. When he was released in 1990 he warmly thanked liberal journalists who had kept the ANC cause alive: “It was the press which never forgot us.”23 Through the negotiations with the Afrikaner government and the election campaign which followed he cultivated and charmed journalists, who helped to present a shining image which most other world leaders would envy. But once in office, like most politicians Mandela became touchy about criticism of his government, and soon laid into the press for its reluctance to transform itself, its white-centered viewpoints, and its relentless reporting of scandals and setbacks, particularly its reporting of crime. For a time the ANC considered starting up their own daily newspaper to ensure fair coverage, and Mandela had discussed collaborating with the British-based tycoon “Tiny” Rowland. But he was warned that such a
paper would be “hammered” by competitors and advertisers.24

  Mandela was eloquent in favor of a free press, at a time when it was being threatened throughout Africa. Before the elections he had told the International Press Institute in Cape Town that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of democracy.” But he also pointed to the overwhelming influence of white editors and owners: “With the exception of the Sowetan, the senior editorial staffs of all South Africa’s daily newspapers are cast from the same racial mould. They are white, they are male, they are from a middle-class background, they tend to share a very similar life experience.” Or, as Thabo Mbeki told editors: “You are all sons of the same mother.”25

  Mandela still continued to champion press freedom after coming to power: “I don’t want a mouthpiece of the ANC or government,” he said in 1996. “The press would be totally useless then. I want a mirror through which we can see ourselves.” But he was soon distressed by the lack of change: “There is a perception among the population that the mass media is controlled by a minority section of the population,” he warned editors in November 1996. “It is a totally unacceptable situation in terms of our vision.… I seem to feel that the conservative press is trying to preserve, one way or another, the status quo.”26