Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Graça felt that she had broken through the defenses and deep reserve which Mandela had built up in jail, to allow him to express his real emotions: “He can love very deeply, but he tries to control it very well in his public appearance. In private he can allow himself to be a human being. He likes people to know he is happy. When he is unhappy he lets you know.… He’s a very simple person, very gentle.… He is so down to earth. Even politically if you watch him sometimes you can feel there’s a bit of naïveté.”

  She saw him at last able to relax and stand back from the strains of office, no longer feeling defensive about what he could not achieve: “You come to a point when you know who you are, and you know what is the space in which you can move. You reach out to others. You are quite secure. You have to have your emotional life in balance.”17

  By the middle of 1998 the couple seemed established. They moved into a grander, modernized house in Houghton, a street away from Mandela’s former home, with a curving staircase below a big portrait of Mandela, and large rooms separated by sliding glass doors. It was refurbished to their specifications—wherever possible by African artisans—and fitted with a lift so Mandela could avoid the stairs, which were becoming painful for his injured knee.

  Mandela’s friends were still pressing him to marry, but Graça continued to resist. Mandela was planning his eightieth birthday celebrations on July 18, and a few days beforehand rumors began circulating that a magistrate and priests were preparing to marry him and Graça. This was vigorously denied, but in fact Mandela had settled it with Graça two months before, and with his usual sense of timing arranged it for his birthday.

  They were married in the new house, Mandela in a gold-patterned open shirt, Graça wearing a long white dress with wide puffed sleeves, Elizabethan-style. They were blessed beforehand by the Chief Rabbi, and also by the Muslim Sheikh Nazim Mohammed and the Hindu Mrs. Nanahchene. They were married by a Methodist Bishop, Mvume Dandala—since they had both been brought up as Methodists—assisted by Desmond Tutu, now retired as the Anglican Archbishop. Mandela’s family and sixteen friends were present, including Ahmed Kathrada and the Sisulus, and a single photographer, Siphiwe Sibeko from the black magazine Enterprise. “She has made a decent man of him,” Tutu said afterward. “Now you won’t shout at me,” said Mandela.18 Among the guests was Mandela’s former warder Christo Brand, who was now running the Robben Island souvenir shop in Cape Town, and who had been flown up to Johannesburg for the first time in his life. He presented Mandela with some of his favorite Pantene hair oil—which Brand had bought for him while he was in Pollsmoor prison. Now a bottle had been obtained, with great difficulty, from Germany, and was presented to the President with a huge cardboard replica of the bottle.19

  The next day, the Gallagher Convention Centre, between Johannesburg and Pretoria, was transformed into a banqueting hall for the eightieth birthday feast, now also a wedding party. Two thousand guests had been invited, the multiracial elite of the new South Africa, with only a few notable absentees, like F. W. de Klerk and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The President had invited foreign dignitaries including ex-President Kaunda of Zambia, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and General Obasanjo, recently released from detention in Nigeria; but the atmosphere was set by showbiz, with the top South African stars eclipsed by African-American visitors including Michael Jackson, Danny Glover and Stevie Wonder. After the first course and a blast of music, Mandela’s grandson Mandla gave a short speech of praise for his grandfather, followed by Thabo Mbeki, who, as so often, used Shakespeare to express his emotions. He imagined Mandela retiring as King Lear had hoped to,

  to tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—

  Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out …

  Some of the guests were puzzled by the comparison with a mad old king, but Mbeki put the emphasis on Lear’s sacrifices, upon which “the gods themselves throw incense.”

  Mandela himself had prepared a formal birthday speech, asking South Africans to “rededicate themselves to the land of their dreams.” But he confined himself to a few words of thanks, beginning “My wife and I”—to a burst of laughter. He then took to the dance floor with Graça for a brief “Madiba shuffle,” soon to be joined by other guests while the music roared. The next morning the newly married couple flew off to visit Argentina and Brazil, returning to Johannesburg five days later for a birthday concert before retreating to Qunu for a private honeymoon.

  It had been an African celebration, with its casual mix of pageantry, music and fun. Some white conservatives complained that the festivities were inappropriate at a time of economic crisis. Others were very critical that Mandela had ordered the release of nine thousand prisoners, which they said would encourage crime. A few complained about the personality cult, reminiscent of other parts of Africa. But the gathering was a celebration disconnected from power, or fear; it was more like a nation redefining its image of itself.

  Graça, having provided a happy ending, could connect the icon with the ordinary person. She had seen Mandela in both roles, like her first husband, Machel; and she knew his faults: “Sometimes he is not very patient in discussions of very important things.… Once he has made up his mind he tends to be very stubborn. He doesn’t accept that he’s wrong.” But she also understood the importance of his basic values and sense of human dignity, and how much they influenced ordinary people:

  The world needs symbols, probably nowadays more than before. He is a symbol and he is good at projecting what he represents, his values. But at the same time you have to look at him as a human being who has strengths and weaknesses. I want him as a human being. He is a symbol, that’s correct, but he’s not a saint. Whatever happens to him, it is a mark of the liberation of the African people, particularly the South African people. He makes the point that he should be treated with dignity because he’s absolutely aware of what he represents.20

  39

  Mandela’s World

  DESPITE HIS problems at home, Mandela traveled the world with his reputation undimmed: like earlier global heroes such as Churchill or Eisenhower, his influence abroad seemed unaffected by domestic setbacks. His moral authority as a peacemaker seemed unique as other countries were racked by racial conflicts; and he could make everyone feel better, left or right, black or white. His disarming smile beamed from showbiz magazines or posters for Hilton hotels as well as the New York Times, while his fairy tale seemed scarcely tarnished by his years in power. As he arrived in the presidential jet and inspected guards of honor he still managed to appear as the plain man with whom anyone could identify, like a Gary Cooper or a James Stewart, embodying simple values in a cynical world of technicians and manipulators: the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka called it “the unselfconscious emanation of uncluttered humanity.”1

  Mandela reveled in personal diplomacy, relating directly to other Presidents and Prime Ministers, ringing them up as if bureaucracies and embassies did not exist: a conversation in his office was always liable to be interrupted by an international phone call: “My President! How are you?” Mandela would startle Ambassadors by asking, “How’s Fidel?” or “How’s Bill?,” and he wrote to the Queen of England as “Dear Elizabeth.” He himself seemed like a monarch from an earlier age, naturally at ease with foreign royalty. At a banquet in Oxford he sat alongside Prince Charles and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia—in whose house he was staying overnight—to whom he paid elaborate compliments; but he appeared more regal than either of them. His whole style was becoming more like a monarch’s with a common touch than a politician’s. South Africa had the advantage of a head of state who could express national values and policies with conviction and grandeur; but there were pitfalls in the diplomatic undergrowth.

  Mandela had no difficulty in personifying his country, which he was opening up to the world after its long exclusion as a pariah state. He could justifiably boast: “Aft
er 1994 you only have to say ‘I am a South African,’ whether you are black or white, and the doors of the world are wide open to you.”2 Some foreigners knew his name better than his country’s: one South African businessman who visited Thailand was amazed to find that people there knew about Mandela, but had not heard of South Africa: to them it was “Mandela-land.”

  And Mandela put his own stamp on South Africa’s diplomacy. He chose many old friends and ex-colleagues to be Ambassadors: Mendi Msimang, the clerk in his law firm in the fifties, went to London; Ruth Mompati, his secretary in the firm, went to Switzerland; Barbara Masekela, who ran his ANC office, went to Paris; Carl Niehaus, who had been his press officer during the elections, went to The Hague. Mandela told them to extend his own conciliatory policies abroad, to reach out to make friends for their country, and also to persuade enemies to talk to each other. He would repeat his principle that disputes should be settled “with brains, not blood.” He saw the art of peacemaking and persuasion in the wider world much as he had seen it with warders and prisoners in jail; and he saw no real difference between reconciliation at home and abroad. “People understand the importance of discussing issues and resolving them,” he told me in 1997, “so I haven’t found it more difficult to reconcile people outside.”3

  But he soon came up against the constraints of multilateral diplomacy and treaties, while his own white diplomats could put up obstacles. The Department of Foreign Affairs was an unreconstructed ministry, still full of Afrikaners conducting business in Afrikaans, under a conservative Director-General, Rusty Evans. The embassies were full of Afrikaner old-timers more accustomed to siege diplomacy than to reaching out for friends or conducting sophisticated negotiations, while the new ANC Ambassadors often found themselves reporting to Afrikaners in Pretoria who disapproved of their policies. There were only a few experienced African diplomats, and some of those came from former Bantustan governments which had given them the wrong kind of experience. It was not until 1998 that Mandela could appoint an African Director-General, Jackie Selebi, in whom he could have full confidence, to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

  Mandela sometimes created his own confusions. When he rang up other Presidents he did not always tell his colleagues what he or they had said. The Foreign Minister, Alfred Nzo, Mandela’s coactivist in the fifties, could be quite shrewd, but he had a slow and somnolent style—he was nicknamed “Nzzzz.” The real executor of foreign policy was often Thabo Mbeki, who as Deputy President was constantly persuading and negotiating behind the scenes. The different operations were often uncoordinated: “Really we have three separate foreign policies,” complained one Ambassador. “When I want something done, I ring up Madiba.”

  It was Mandela who set the direction and priorities of South African diplomacy. He had strong ideals: “South Africa’s future foreign relations,” he told the American journal Foreign Affairs shortly before coming to power, “will be based on our belief that human rights should be the core of international relations, and we are ready to play a role in fostering peace and prosperity in the world.”4 He was determined to be loyal to friendly powers, as to people: “My foreign policy is determined by the past,” he said in 1998. “The relations I have had with the country, the contributions they have made to our struggle.”5 Sometimes loyalty conflicted with human rights—for instance in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Libya. But Mandela saw himself with a moral mission to spread peace and tolerance around the world, convinced that South Africa had lessons for other countries. And he resisted the more cynical calculations of Realpolitik.

  He could not ignore his African neighbors—if only because the poverty and instability beyond South Africa’s borders were pressing millions of immigrants into the country. Mandela insisted that Africans must take charge of their own destiny: “The time has come for Africa to take full responsibility for her woes,” he told the Zimbabwe Parliament in May 1997, “and use the immense collective wisdom it possesses to make a reality of the idea of the African renaissance.”6 The “renaissance” had already been popularized by Thabo Mbeki, who insisted that Africa must face up to its past disasters. Mbeki looked back to the “lost decade” of the eighties, when African politicians experimented with one-party states, military governments and expensive economic policies, none of which had worked; as he said in February 1997: “Now I believe there is a new generation on the continent saying we are ready to turn things around.”7 Mandela took up the theme: with his keen sense of dignity and faith in democracy, he provided an appropriate symbol for a continent seeking to escape from its colonial past and the legacy of the Cold War, and to develop stable systems of government. South Africa, by far the richest country south of the Sahara, was well placed to give leadership to a renaissance. Western businessmen, though, remained skeptical, conditioned to “Afro-pessimism”: they feared that South Africa would be dragged into the African morass of corruption and chaos.

  Mandela’s hardest case was Nigeria, the most populous African country. It had been taken over by the corrupt dictator General Sani Abacha, who had imprisoned his democratic predecessors and critics, including the much-publicized poet-agitator Ken Saro-Wiwa. Mandela was bringing pressure behind the scenes, following (he explained later) the methods accepted by international law, to stop the violation of human rights.8 The issue of Nigeria dominated the Commonwealth Summit in New Zealand in November 1995—Mandela’s first such meeting as President, where he renewed his admiration for the Queen. Some members called for sanctions against Nigeria, but Mandela still favored “quiet diplomacy,” believing that Abacha would yield to pressure; but during the summit Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed. Mandela was outraged, feeling personally betrayed, and was soon under attack for having been too soft: “Were quiet diplomacy pursued in South Africa,” a lawyer for Saro-Wiwa wrote to him, “I doubt you would be alive today.”9 In New Zealand Mandela mustered all his moral authority to call for immediate sanctions against Nigeria, but was disappointed by the caution of the British Prime Minister, John Major.10 Back in South Africa, he said publicly that he was “hurt and angry” with the action of “an insensitive, frightened dictator”: “If Africa refrains from taking firm action against Nigeria, then talk about the renaissance in Africa is hollow, is shallow.” Abacha, he warned, was “sitting on a volcano, and I am going to explode it under him.”11 It was the first time, said the journalist Cameron Duodu, who interviewed him, “that an African head of state had publicly gone against trade union rules and insulted a fellow card-holder.”12

  Mandela’s frankness was refreshing, but his plans to impose sanctions through the UN Security Council were unrealistic. He wanted to involve China, as a member of the Council; but Pretoria did not then recognize Beijing. Other members, including Britain, were too interested in Nigerian oil to support sanctions, and South Africa soon found itself isolated. Nigeria was later suspended from the Commonwealth, but its tyranny was ended only by the death of Abacha in 1998—which was followed by promising moves toward democracy. In the meantime Mandela had experienced the limits of moral authority as a diplomatic weapon.

  Mandela’s closest African dealings were with the eleven neighboring states grouped as the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which were heavily dependent on trade and investment from South Africa. When Mandela became Chairman of SADC in 1996 he brought a welcome candor to its proceedings: he criticized the prevailing complacency, and even suggested sanctions against countries like Zambia and Swaziland which were resisting pressure toward democracy. “Can we continue to give comfort to member states,” he asked the SADC Summit in September 1997, “whose actions are so diametrically against the values and principles we hold so dear?”13 But he faced growing resentment, particularly from Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who had previously dominated SADC, and his hopes of a peaceful renaissance were soon dashed by the chaos in Zaire, which had rashly been admitted as a member.

  Zaire’s dictator, President Mobutu, had been supported by the Americans through the Cold War, but in 199
7 he was threatened by the rebel army of Laurent Kabila, backed by Uganda and Rwanda. Mandela tried to bring Mobutu and Kabila together, providing a South African warship anchored off the mouth of the Congo River as a neutral meeting place, on which he waited patiently. But both sides were intransigent, and Kabila failed to turn up at a second rendezvous. Mandela did help persuade Mobutu to leave Zaire, which averted further bloodshed; but Kabila failed to consolidate his victory or to control his borders. Uganda and Rwanda turned against him, sending in their own armies, while Zimbabwe and Angola came to his support. The tragedy of Zaire—now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo—threatened to involve all its neighbors in a single African war. Mandela again tried to calm things down, urging the President not to send in troops; but each country had its own conflicting interests in the disintegrating country. The Congo seemed once again to be the “heart of darkness” which could infect its neighbors with its lawlessness; while across its border Angola, which had been riven by the rivalries of Cold Warriors, had gone back to civil war.

  Mandela was also drawn into the problems of Lesotho, the mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa. In 1998 its Prime Minister, Pakalitha Mosisili, asked for Pretoria’s help to forestall a threatened rebellion. Buthelezi, who was Acting President at the time, consulted both Mandela and Mbeki (who were traveling abroad), who approved the intervention; but the South African army, dangerously lacking in intelligence, sent an inadequate force of six hundred men. They took several days to impose order, and in the process destroyed much of the capital, Maseru, while looters emptied the shops. There was an outcry of indignation, and in parliamentary hearings Ministers and the military candidly admitted to basic misjudgments. Mandela insisted that the intervention had achieved its object: “We have handled it very well,” he said in January 1999. “The military aspects may not have been properly arranged, but we have got peace in that country.”14 But the bungled operation made South Africa look like a clumsy bully, and damaged Mandela’s image as the peacemaker.