In the evening the ANC put on a cultural tribute to Mandela, now relaxing in the audience. Frenzied drummers introduced a troupe of nubile girl dancers swinging their leather skirts; a team of Zulu war dancers, with fly whisks and furry costumes, kicked their legs up to their chests. The Deputy Speaker recited a poem: “Let Life Flow in Our Land.” The musician Abdullah Ibrahim, in a loose black suit, played old songs on the piano, and the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, a veteran of the fifties, blasted wild jazz. Most of the Cabinet came to the front to jive, to the amazement of Japanese diplomats.
Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Mandela and his veteran colleagues, including his father, Govan, who were now retiring “to tend to the cultivation and domestication of the flowers of the veld.” He quoted W. B. Yeats on Ireland in 1916, adding that the African leaders “refused that the sacrifice should make a stone of their hearts.”31 Mbeki presented Mandela with a sculpture, and a woman singer sang in his praise: he came up from the audience to the stage to say only, “All that I want to say is in her song.” He looked tearful, and the delegates seemed subdued as they saw the old men giving way to a much younger generation.
The next day Mbeki was confirmed unopposed as the new President of the ANC—at fifty-five, he was the representative of the new generation. He gave a short speech warning that “the revolution has not been completed.” But the real excitement was over the deputy presidency. Winnie was nominated from the hall, but seconded by only about twenty delegates; overall she received only 127 votes from the 3,500 delegates. She asked Mbeki to be allowed to consult the “structures,” but he refused. Winnie responded defiantly: “Comrade Thabo, I think I understand what’s happening here. To those comrades who nominated my name, I apologise. I have to decline.” Delegates cheered and whistled, sang and danced. Winnie left the platform, with hugs and kisses from members of the executive, accompanied by her militant young friend Peter Mokaba. “She will remain,” he said. “She is an old iron soldier. She stood down to retain unity within the organisation that she loves.”32 The delegates went on to elect the favored candidate, Jacob Zuma. Later they elected Terror Lekota, another of Mandela’s prison protégés, Chairman of the party.
The real surprise was the voting for the new National Executive. Many commentators had predicted that the ANC under Mbeki would become more “Africanist,” less tolerant of white and Indian allies; and the overwhelming majority of the delegates were Africans. The existing executive was markedly multiracial, and vulnerable to Africanist attacks: there were many prominent Indians, Coloureds and whites, including the Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar, the Minister of Water, Kader Asmal, the Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel and the Deputy Defence Minister, Ronnie Kasrils. They had all made unpopular decisions, supporting the government’s conservative economic policy including strict fiscal discipline and privatization, which had antagonized the unions and the Marxists. Yet when delegates voted at the end of the conference they showed confidence in the rainbow government. The top vote went to Cyril Ramaphosa, Mbeki’s chief rival, who was now an ambitious businessman. Next place went to Kader Asmal, while Manuel, Omar and Kasrils all increased their vote. Among the top ten, only three were Africans—and they were far from populists. Winnie dropped from fifth place at the previous election to fifteenth. More important, the delegates approved with few changes the government’s orthodox economic policy, which was even endorsed by the communists and trade unionists. The revolutionary anticapitalist movement appeared to be transmuting into a governing party which accepted the disciplines of the global marketplace.
On the last day of the conference, when many of the media had left, Mandela gave his own moving farewell to the party which (he insisted) had made him:
More often than not an epoch creates and nurtures the individuals who are associated with its twists and turns: and so a name becomes the symbol of an era. As we hand over the baton it is appropriate that I should thank the ANC for shaping me as such a symbol of what it stands for.…
We take leave so that the competent generation of lawyers, computer experts, economists, financiers, doctors, industrialists, engineers and above all ordinary workers and peasants can take the ANC into the new millennium. I look forward to that period when I will be able to wake up with the sun, to walk the hills and valleys of my country village, Qunu, in peace and tranquillity.
He paid a tribute to his successor, Mbeki, which made some listeners uneasy: “I am of course worried,” he began jokingly, “by the fact that there should be two bulls in one kraal, even though I have the advantage that one is short.” He congratulated Mbeki on being elected without opposition, but went on to warn:
There is a heavy responsibility for a leader elected unopposed. He may use that powerful position to settle scores with his detractors, to marginalize or get rid of them [applause] and surround themselves with yes-men and -women [applause]. His first duty is to allay the concerns of his colleagues to enable them to discuss freely without fear within internal structures.
A leader, he explained, “must keep forces together: but you can’t do that unless you allow dissent.… People should be able to criticize the leader without fear or favor.” He hastened to emphasize that “our President understands these issues. He has taken criticism in a comradely spirit. He is not the man who is going to sideline anybody” (applause). And he asked his audience to make allowances for an old man: if he complained about younger people in the future, “Just remember that I was once your colleague” (laughter). But he warned them that as an ordinary ANC member “I will have the privilege to be as critical as I can be.”33 With that, Mandela left for his Christmas holiday in Qunu with some favorite books: War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov and Nadine Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter, based on his friend Bram Fischer.
Mbeki was certainly a quite different kind of leader from Mandela. He was an introvert from a bookish background, without deep rural roots: “He has never played in his youth,” said Mandela.34 He loved quoting Shakespeare and Yeats, wrote poetry himself, and often talked enigmatically: some Africans complained that he had spent too long in England. He remained reluctant to lead from the front—at least while Mandela was there—and bore some marks of the underground leader who could only trust a small cell: he played his cards close to his chest. After his cosmopolitan past and overseas friendships he felt the more need to show himself as a true African. He kept his distance from white businessmen and journalists, and took many advisers from Black Consciousness, who sometimes interpreted his “African Renaissance” as an exclusively African crusade. Indian and white colleagues worried that he would play the race card, and that the multiracial vision of South Africa would fade, as it had in other African states.
But Mbeki belonged in many ways more closely to the ANC tradition than did Mandela. He remained deeply influenced by his mentor Tambo: he talked, walked and worked like him, patiently listening and seeking consensus with an unassertive style. He was always sensitive to the crosscurrents within his party, and was skillful at defusing dangerous egos and tensions, as he had defused Buthelezi. He knew he could never play the same heroic role Mandela had done over the last nine years. Mandela, like Churchill, had been called upon by his party to meet a supreme challenge; he was loyal to his party, but remained above it. Mbeki was essentially the creation of the ANC; and he knew that the age of heroes had passed. He also knew that he would face angry, disappointed voters. “What happens to a dream deferred?” he asked, quoting the black American poet Langston Hughes. “It explodes.”35
38
Graça
AS HEAD of state, Mandela had seemed more personally isolated than he was before. He had loyal and strong women friends like Fatima Meer, Amina Cachalia and Barbara Masekela, but it was difficult for them to break through the barricades of government. Fatima saw no one in his Houghton house who had been part of his former life, and found him hard to detach from politics or the television news.1 He was becoming accustomed to the hectic pace of government, he
explained, but “it destroys your family life.”2 His grandchildren were often in the house, but his contacts with his children were fitful. His son, Makgatho, was again studying law, in Durban, but rarely saw his father. His eldest daughter, Maki, still found him uneasy, worried that she might unleash complaints about the past. Zindzi and Zeni, his two daughters by Winnie, were torn between their parents after the divorce, though they came closer to their father. For a time Mandela was cared for in Houghton by his charming granddaughter Rochelle Mtirara, but she began to have difficulty in studying there, and moved out. “People are always calling for her so that they can get to me,” Mandela explained. “She has no life of her own.”3
Mandela could still flirt with an attractive woman. A week after divorcing Winnie he was welcoming the Irish President, Mary Robinson, at Cape Town airport when he spotted a pretty Irish journalist, Nicola Byrne, whom he had seen before, and asked her if she was married. When she said no, he smiled: “Well, if you were to ask me to marry you I would consider the request very favorably.” Byrne said later: “He is my hero. I would marry him tomorrow.”4 But the “proposal” looked less flattering when Mandela later appeared to mistake another reporter, Alexandra Zavis of the Associated Press, for Byrne.5
It was in July 1990, when he visited Mozambique six months after his release, that Mandela first met Graça Machel, the widow of the former President, Samora Machel. Machel had died in a mysterious air crash in 1986, after which the Mandelas had sent Graça a joint message of condolence. Graça had written back to Nelson: “From within your vast prison, you brought a ray of light in my hour of darkness.”6 To Winnie she wrote that “those who have locked up your husband are the same as those who killed mine. They think that by cutting down the tallest trees they can destroy the forest.”7 Graça already saw Mandela as her hero, and when he came to Mozambique she visited him with her family in a government guest house. He was impressed, but she was still mourning her dead husband, and it was not love at first sight. It was two years before they met again, soon after Mandela had separated from Winnie, when Graça came to Cape Town to receive an honorary doctorate. He did not recognize her in the lineup, and when he was reminded he went back to talk to her, and was struck by her sensitivity and compassion. Soon afterward they met again, and Mandela felt physically attracted to her. Thereafter he saw her whenever he could. Oliver Tambo had been custodian to Machel’s six children, and after he died Mandela took over the responsibility—which gave him more opportunities to see Graça.
She was then forty-six, twenty-seven years younger than Mandela, with a wide smile, a piercing laugh and big eyes behind spectacles. She was a strong character, but not dominating like Winnie. She came from a humble rural family, the youngest of six children; her father was a peasant who was taught by Methodists to read and write as an adult. He died just before she was born, but he had asked his elder children to help her through school, and she eventually won a Methodist scholarship to Lisbon University, where she became politically active against the Portuguese colonial power. After taking her degree she trained as a freedom fighter for the liberation movement FRELIMO in Tanzania, and came close to its leader, Samora Machel, whose wife had died. When Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975 FRELIMO became the government, and Graça was appointed Minister of Education at the age of twenty-nine: soon afterward she married President Machel, looking after his six children. She was now at the heart of a young country which was being devastated by the rebel army Renamo and the mass exodus of whites, and destabilized by the South African government, which she suspected of being involved in her husband’s death. She mourned him in black for four years, feeling empty and lonely, determined to continue his work. She became involved with children’s welfare, and later wrote a report for the UN on the effects of war on children. This remained a central interest, and linked her to Mandela’s Children’s Fund.
By mid-1995, while Mandela was divorcing Winnie, he began dropping public hints about his new love. Graça was spotted with him at a banquet in Paris, and again at President Mugabe’s wedding in Zimbabwe, where she and Mandela were seen kissing. Archbishop Tutu, who had given up on a reconciliation with Winnie, said: “Madiba needs to have someone to give him his slippers and someone on whose shoulders he could cry.”
Mandela was visibly enchanted by Graça. He enjoyed her warmth, her grace, her love of children. He telephoned her every day. He formally proposed to her, but she was concerned about her obligations to her family and her country: “I belong to Mozambique,” she insisted. “I will always be the wife of Samora Machel.” Mandela had to concede: “She has made a clear statement that she will not marry the President of South Africa. I cannot overrule her.” Eventually they agreed on an unconventional bargain: that she should spend two weeks every month with him in Johannesburg.
Their friendship was now public knowledge, and the love story was unfolding theatrically. In September 1996 Mandela was snapped on a Sunday afternoon walking near his Houghton home with his arm around Graça, laughing happily. “It’s just wonderful,” Graça told a radio program, “that finally we have found each other and can share a life together.”8 Winnie was mocking about Mandela’s “concubine,” or “the Portuguese woman.” She said it was a huge joke, claimed that she was still Mandela’s wife by African custom,9 and warned that another marriage would undermine the children—although, as Mandela pointed out, they were now all fully adult. Mandela’s first wife, Evelyn, whom he had divorced nearly forty years before, also claimed that he was still her husband in God’s eyes; though she herself would remarry a year later, aged seventy-seven. Some clerics complained about the President’s half-time half marriage, and urged him to tie the knot. “People like Archbishop Tutu are making my life very difficult,” Mandela admitted, “because they feel that I’m not setting a proper example for the young people.” But Graça seemed content: “I think we are OK like this.… We are two grown-up people who love each other.”10
By 1997 Graça had clearly become the President’s consort. She officially accompanied him on his tour of Southeast Asia; when a young journalist in the Philippines asked Mandela whether they would marry, he replied with a favorite reproof: “My cultural background does not permit me to answer questions of this nature from someone younger than my grandchildren.”11 Mandela also tried to fit in with Graça’s own travel plans, “playing second fiddle.” When she was offered an honorary degree by Essex University he hastily accepted an invitation from the Islamic Centre at Oxford to visit Britain—to their great surprise, and to the chagrin of Oxford University, who had tried to invite him earlier—so that he could accompany her.
Graça brought her own experience and sensibility to the foreign tours, noticing Mandela’s friends, watching his health and his moods, remembering people from her own past travels. But she kept a firm base in Mozambique, where she lived in a spacious house with marble floors in the diplomatic quarter of Maputo, overlooking the Indian Ocean. She was still very popular there, sometimes even described as the next leader, and regarded warily by President Joaquim Chissano. Other Mozambicans were ambivalent about her friendship with Mandela. “He is probably the only person they would accept in Samora’s place,” she reckoned, “but others are genuinely concerned that something is being stolen from them.”12
At home, Mandela’s friends saw a more relaxed and carefree man. “That’s the real South African miracle,” one colleague said. Mandela was visibly proud of having attracted such a notable woman, and had long, loving conversations with her on the telephone, which he did not mind friends overhearing. He began talking openly like a young lover about his own transformation. “I’m in love with a remarkable lady,” he said in a television interview in February 1998. “I don’t regret the reverses and setbacks because late in my life I am blooming like a flower, because of the love and support she has given me.… She is the boss. When I am alone I am very weak.”13
On public occasions they seemed love-struck without embarrass
ment. When Graça was awarded an international prize in Johannesburg in February 1998 she began her acceptance speech with “Madiba!”—to long applause. Afterward he came up to whisper to her, clasping her hand, before leaving. “We were all terrorists,” said the chairman of the ceremony, Andrew Young. “Now we’re all lovers.”14
Graça had some difficulty in adjusting to Mandela’s lifestyle, particularly his early rising and bedtime: “When you love somebody you really have to give up certain things. I’m not an early riser, but I’m getting used to it.” She did her best to stop him ringing people up from home at all hours of the day and night: “I’m trying. I’m trying,” she said in March 1998. “When I’m here I make sure he doesn’t do it. Weekends have been much better since last year. Now he’s really trying to slow down.” She looked forward to his retirement, stretching out their holidays: she spent Christmas 1997 with him in Qunu, and he spent the New Year with her in Maputo. “I want to help him to do things he loves as a human being,” she said, “and not what he is expected to do.”15
She could ease his relationships with his own family through her experience as a stepmother: “I’m that kind of woman who never knew what it is to start a family. I got married and I was a mother of six immediately.” Her own two children were now both studying in Cape Town: her daughter Jozina had a flat in the President’s mansion Genadendal, where she kept Mandela company and sometimes accompanied him on visits.
Graça was aware of the problems of other hero-parents, like the Nyereres in Tanzania or the Kaundas in Zambia, whom she knew well. She knew how Mandela’s children had longed to have a father to touch and talk to, and how they resented sharing him with the nation. “I think they have adjusted: they know what they can expect, and he is also trying now to make himself available.” She relished his grandchildren: “This is a normal family with children running around and making noises,” she explained in their Houghton house as they shouted outside. “Now you can take over,” she told the six boys as she let them into the drawing room. “We’re taking over!” they yelled while she grinned. “We’re taking over the world!”16
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