De Klerk promised vigorous opposition to the government. He wanted, he told me, to ensure “a proper multi-party democracy, without which there may be a danger of South Africa lapsing into the African pattern of one-party states.”6 But within a few months the National Party was in growing disarray: Roelf Meyer had resigned, to cofound his own party; and de Klerk himself soon retired from politics. Later it turned out that he was in the midst of a passionate affair with Elita Georgiades, the wife of a great friend: “For once in my life,” as he put it, “my heart took control.” Soon after leaving government he divorced his wife, Marike, and married Elita, who had also divorced.7
Some ANC Ministers regretted the breakup of the coalition. “There was a camaraderie developing,” said one cabinet member. “Breaking it up was one of de Klerk’s greatest disservices to the country.” Mandela himself had hoped, he said at the time, that the partnership could have lasted longer. But he thought that de Klerk’s influence in cabinet had been declining, and saw the change as a “coming of age.”8 He certainly did not miss de Klerk’s presence; but he would pay tribute to de Klerk’s place in history, and his “wonderful work” in helping the transformation of the country: “We are grateful to him and others,” he said in 1999, “for having worked together with us to avoid a bloody civil war.”9
Mandela seemed confident that the ANC could govern without the National Party. He kept the ANC Ministers in their existing jobs, and filled the gaps with more ANC men. Thabo Mbeki was now the sole Deputy President, and was more decisively running the country as Mandela became increasingly aloof from day-to-day government. Mbeki had been worried that the ANC would lose its dynamism in coalition, and saw the break with the Afrikaners as inevitable and useful. He did not feel the need of Afrikaner Ministers to ensure the support of civil servants: he thought they would be loyal to whoever paid them.10 And the ANC were now much less worried about an Afrikaner revolt: “The time is passed when the right wing could be a danger,” Walter Sisulu said. “We have played our cards so well on this issue. Today we could work with the right wing better than with the Nationalists.”11
De Klerk had hoped that Buthelezi and his Inkatha party would follow him out of the government. “When are you going to leave?” he asked Buthelezi in his office soon afterward. But Buthelezi replied bluntly that he would not leave unless his party instructed him to, and he stayed on as Minister of the Interior.12 His relationship with Mandela noticeably improved, and blossomed when Mandela had to be briefly out of the country at the same time as Mbeki, and appointed Buthelezi as Acting President. “I hope the President will be able to come back,” joked a National Party politician. But Buthelezi seemed mollified by his temporary role, which was repeated several times afterward, and Mandela would sometimes call him “Mr. Acting President.”
At seventy-eight, Mandela was visibly more detached. “He really abdicated after the GNU broke up,” said one adviser. He enjoyed playing down his role, referring to himself as a mere decoration, or a ceremonial head of state. “If I wanted to see real progress in our country,” he said in Singapore in March 1997, “I should have stepped down three years ago. We have such capable young men and women.”13 Certainly he often behaved more like a constitutional monarch than an executive president, as he referred more and more problems and visitors—even the President of the World Bank—to his deputy, and left Mbeki to preside over cabinet meetings. But he still held on to many of the levers of power, including hiring and firing, and he could dominate his colleagues when he wished to. “It reminded me of the house cats on the farm where I spent my childhood,” said one close observer. “One older cat spent most of the day just sitting among them, not looking at them. But when he moved, they all cringed.”
Mandela in his detachment was all the more determined to unify his people, and to take the long view. In July 1996, soon after de Klerk had left the government, Mandela gave a seventy-eighth birthday party in the grounds of the State House in Pretoria, for “veterans of the struggle.” He gave an impromptu speech without spectacles, and with no media present to report it. During the negotiations, he explained, he had always said that there must be no winners and no losers: the South African people as a whole must win. “You mustn’t compromise your principles, but you mustn’t humiliate the opposition. No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.” He had no regrets about the departure of de Klerk, but he wanted to bring in his old black rivals, Inkatha and the PAC (he had invited the widow of the late PAC leader Zeph Mothopeng to this lunch).14
Mandela was still acutely aware of how narrowly the country had avoided civil war two years earlier, and of his own scope as peacemaker. He was wary of a personality cult, and suspected that critics of the ANC were praising him in order to damn others: “It is particularly unacceptable that this strain of hero-worshipping should be coupled with a systematic campaign to denigrate other ANC leaders such as Deputy President Thabo Mbeki,” he had said five months earlier. It was “a campaign that is beyond any civilised norms of discourse, let alone objectivity.”15
Mandela was being pressed by colleagues and the media to reduce his workload, and to give up the presidency of the ANC, and by the time of the birthday party he had decided to stand down in time for the next ANC conference in December 1997, while remaining President of South Africa until the end of his five-year term in 1999. Would this not weaken his influence, I asked him, as head of state? He answered firmly: “You don’t lead by your position, but by the strength of your ideas.”16
When he made his decision public in August 1997, it inevitably opened up a political vacuum. It was clear that Thabo Mbeki would succeed him as the ANC President, but that would leave open the deputy presidency, a crucial step on the road to the top. Mandela could not prevent an embarrassing public leadership struggle.
Mbeki’s own position now looked much more secure; since the middle of 1996 Mandela had been more clearly treating him as his political heir. Mbeki’s chief rivals, including those who had appeared protégés of Mandela, were now out of the running. Cyril Ramaphosa, after pushing through the new constitution, left Parliament to become Deputy Chairman of the biggest African business group, New Africa Investments Ltd. (NAIL). He denied a serious clash with Mbeki: “We see eye to eye on many things. If we differ, it’s just in emphasis.”17 But he told friends that he would be back in politics in ten years.18 Tokyo Sexwale, the Premier of Gauteng, the Johannesburg region, had previously promoted himself as a contender: in his house he hung a cartoon showing Mbeki and Ramaphosa boxing while a newcomer, labeled “Tokyo,” was slipping into the ring. He could still dazzle crowds with his huge white smile and exuberant rhetoric, but he overreached himself with attacks on Mbeki, who quietly undermined him; and by May 1997 he too had decided to quit politics for business.
Mandela still demanded total loyalty to the ANC, as he had since the fifties, and some colleagues thought he carried this to excess. For a time he had seemed to favor Bantu Holomisa, his chiefly friend in the Transkei with whom he spent Christmases, and whom he appointed Deputy Minister of the Environment. Holomisa, with his boyish, direct style, was very popular with the masses—and close to Winnie. But in July 1996 Holomisa told the Truth Commission that his fellow Minister and rival Stella Sigcau had accepted a bribe from the casino owner Sol Kerzner. Mandela asked Holomisa to apologize, and when he refused promptly fired him from the government. Holomisa retorted that the ANC was in Kerzner’s pocket, and that Kerzner had paid two million rand into its election fund. The ANC reacted by calling him a “blatant liar”; but then Mandela admitted that Kerzner had indeed secretly paid him the money for the fund—he was in fact one of several equally generous donors.19 Mandela had to admit that the ANC had seriously mishandled the affair, but still he could not forgive Holomisa’s treachery. Holomisa dared not confront Mandela face-to-face, and eventually formed a new party, the United Democratic Movement, jointly with Roelf Meyer, the ex–National Party Minister. It failed to have much national impact, but caused
much trouble for the ANC.
There was no single obvious candidate for Deputy President. Joel Netshitenzhe, Mandela’s Director of Communications, was talked of, but was never a contender. The executive backed Jacob Zuma, the Party Chairman, a former Robben Islander who had helped to make peace in KwaZulu. The Premier of Mpumpalanga, Mathews Phosa, a lawyer and poet, was put forward by his province before he was persuaded to withdraw in favor of Zuma.
But a nightmare candidate was emerging: Mandela’s ex-wife, now called Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, had bounced back to the political front line. Through all her disgraces she had remained a heroine to many ordinary underprivileged people, who loved her forthright views and superhuman courage, even her extravagance: like Evita Perón in Argentina or Imelda Marcos in the Philippines she offered an escape from the drabness and squalor of the townships. She was again championing the revolution and criticizing the complacency of the leadership, without compromise. “We didn’t know that the transition would be this bitter,” she said in 1997. “Democracy is much more expensive than we thought.”20 By April 1997 she had been elected President of the Women’s League, which later nominated her as Deputy President of the ANC. At meetings of the National Executive she was very silent, but in mid-November she gave a long, provocative interview to her friend Newton Kanhema in the Johannesburg Star, lashing into the ANC leadership. She complained that the “criminals are in control,” criticized the Truth Commission—with “Desmond Tutu hugging Pik Botha”—and urged a return to the death penalty, to which the leadership were firmly opposed.21
The ANC were outraged. “I can’t recall a challenge to the movement by one so senior,” said Steve Tshwete, the Minister of Sport—except, he added, from people on the way out. Tshwete wrote a devastating reply to Winnie’s interview in the Star three days later, attacking the muddled thinking and armchair criticism of populists who “may sound radical but are in fact right-wing.” He called Winnie “an individual who does not respect rules and regulations,” and complained that she had tried “to denigrate the person of the President, after the terrible pain she has caused him.” And he restated the difficult realities of government: “We achieved a victory that has got many limitations and constraints.”22
Winnie’s past excesses were again being unearthed, this time by the Truth Commission, which was looking into the misdeeds of the ANC as well as those of past governments. New accusations were made that Winnie might have been responsible for the murder of Abubaker Asvat, the Soweto doctor who examined Stompie Seipei in 1988 before he died. In September 1997 new horror stories appeared in a sensational television program, shown on the BBC and SABC and initiated by a passionate British crusader, Lady (Emma) Nicholson, and produced by a maverick journalist, Fred Bridgland. It was accompanied by a book, Katiza’s Journey, based heavily on interviews with Katiza Cebekhulu, a young man who had worked for the police and then joined the Mandela United Football Club, and who gave an eyewitness account of Winnie attacking Stompie with a knife or scissors just before he died: “I saw her lift her hand and stab Stompie twice.”23 The program also claimed—without evidence, and without Nicholson’s approval—that Mandela himself had personally arranged for Katiza later to be deported to Lusaka, where he languished in jail.24 The program and book caused a furor within the ANC; but the fact that they had originated from right-wing foreign sources appeared to boost Winnie’s popular image rather than damage it. Winnie dismissed Katiza as a “lunatic,” and Nicholson as a “mad cow.”25
All eyes were now on the Truth Commission, which in late November began hearing witnesses’ testimony about the murder of Stompie Seipei and others, in front of TV cameras and the world’s press. The murderous events in Soweto ten years before were replayed, with bloody and contradictory accounts of abductions, tortures and murders, further implicating Winnie and also her daughter Zindzi as apparent accomplices. The Commission’s Chairman, Archbishop Tutu, occasionally interrupted; Winnie listened, apparently unmoved. Mandela was pained by the evidence, but did not try to intervene.
On the ninth day Winnie herself gave evidence, brazen and defiant. When her TRC questioner, Hanif Vally, told her not to play around with the facts, she replied: “I will not tolerate you speaking to me like that,” whereupon Tutu threatened to clear the hall. Winnie insisted that “most of the witnesses who testified here were lying.” Her own evidence was thoroughly evasive, and Tutu complained that one witness had been intimidated in the ladies’ lavatory by members of the ANC Women’s League. Winnie expressed regret, but not remorse, for the killings.
Tutu finally averted the questioning with a passionate interjection, explaining how he had lived in the same street as the Mandelas, and that Winnie was godmother to one of his grandchildren. She was “a stalwart of our struggle, an icon of liberation.… Everything was done to seek to break that spirit.” He appealed to her to apologize: “You are a great person and you don’t know how your greatness would be enhanced if you were to say: ‘Sorry. Things went wrong. Forgive me.’ ” Winnie thanked Tutu as a father, and said she was deeply sorry to Stompie’s mother and Dr. Asvat’s family—“It is true that things went horribly wrong”—but made no further apology.26 Tutu’s sympathy raised some doubts about his neutrality, while Winnie’s defiant attitude did not visibly disqualify her as a potential Deputy President.
It was a dramatic curtain-raiser to the fiftieth conference of the ANC, which would elect the new officials, and which took place at the end of 1997 in Mafikeng, near the border with Botswana. Mandela presided over his party for the last time. He emphasized again beforehand that his withdrawal from office would not mark a sudden break in leadership: “Thabo Mbeki is already de facto President of the country. I am pushing everything to him,” he said on television. “My stepping down will be very smooth.” But it was still a watershed.
The conference was on a much grander scale than the meeting forty-six years before, when African delegates had gathered in a bare hall in Bloemfontein to approve the passive resistance campaign which first launched the struggle. Now the great university hall was draped with yellow flowers, huge slogans reading “All Power to the People” and a blown-up color photograph of Mandela with his fingers clasped as in prayer. The 3,500 delegates surged into the hall, wearing yellow ANC T-shirts and green baseball caps, singing ANC songs. On the platform sat the National Executive, made up of all races, sizes and generations, including African veterans—Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni—who had been in prison with Mandela; and the youthful-looking Winnie in a purple dress, who swayed to the music.
A huge praise singer in tribal costume pranced into the hall, chanting extravagant compliments with long vowels which slowly expired like a siren. In the silence that followed the lean figure of Mandela appeared in his yellow shirt, walking slowly onto the platform. A row of interdenominational priests blessed the conference, including veterans of the struggle like Carl Niehaus from the Dutch Reformed Church and the Catholic Father Mkhatshwa, who said that “Christians and Marxist-Leninists expound the same values.” Then the Chairman, Jacob Zuma, warmed up the hall to introduce the President.
Mandela’s speech took nearly everyone by surprise. He spoke, standing up, for four and a half hours in the stifling hall, with only a short break for lunch: “I’m the only one perspiring,” he said as he mopped his face, but he seemed inexhaustible. He criticized nearly everyone, except his old rival Buthelezi. He warned his own party—to loud applause—of the dangers of corruption and greed: he pointed to other African countries with “predatory elites that have thrived on the basis of the looting of national wealth,” and called for a moral renewal to achieve an African renaissance. He warned against the “careerism” of politicians who sought to use their positions to make money. He told the ANC to spend more time in attracting white voters, and not to surrender them to the white parties. He criticized white businessmen for the slow pace of transformation and black empowerment, which had only just begun. He blamed the media for perpetua
ting old hierarchies and neglecting black viewpoints. He criticized nongovernmental organizations who were working “to corrode the influence of the movement.” He warned that a “counterrevolutionary network,” run largely by Afrikaners, was deliberately trying to erode confidence, subvert the economy and use crime to make South Africa ungovernable. He claimed that the National Party aimed at “the total destruction of our organization,” while the leaders of the new United Democratic Party, Meyer and Holomisa, owed “their political origins to a common apartheid home.”
It was a wide-ranging, bewildering speech which bore the marks of many contributors, most notably Thabo Mbeki. It was far from a radical tirade: it quoted the American archcapitalists George Soros and David Rockefeller to describe the dangers of the global marketplace. But it was quickly presented by the white media as an attack on white enemies, and a clean break with Mandela’s earlier conciliation. The speech destroyed much of the sympathy Mandela had built up since he took office, said the conservative Citizen.27 “Mandela is naïve,” warned Business Day, “if he thinks whites will voluntarily take a drop in living standards to help the poor.”28 It marked Mandela’s low-water mark, said the Democratic Party.29 British papers took up the attack, calling the speech a “depressingly paranoid tirade” (Daily Telegraph), “meaningless dogma” and “antiquated gibberish” (Independent). Even the Observer, Mandela’s long-standing ally, called it a “profoundly depressing assault.”30 The speech was certainly out of keeping with Mandela’s earlier statesmanlike surveys; but it was not a policy statement. It was an analysis of the problems of three years of government, and a rallying call for the election in sixteen months’ time.
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