Dare Not Linger

by Nelson Mandela

  Impatiently cooling his heels while based in the Tanzanian camps of the ANC, Hani had excoriated its leadership in exile, accusing it of relinquishing its mission towards liberation and wallowing in corruption, which weakened the prospect of MK returning to fight inside South Africa. He and his co-signatories to the memorandum were charged with treason and sentenced to death. It was only through Oliver Tambo’s intervention that they were reprieved. Hani’s action contributed to the ANC’s Luthuli Detachment’s campaign in Wankie and Sipolilo.

  Similarly, more than two decades earlier in 1944, Mandela was among the pioneers of the ANC’s Youth League – the erstwhile Young Lions – who challenged orthodox views in order to re-energise the ANC. One of the veterans of Wankie, Major General Wilson Ngqose (Ret.), remembers Hani at a camp called Kongwa in Tanzania in the late sixties, which the ANC shared with the MPLA, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO)) and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The MPLA already enjoyed liberated zones in Portuguese-occupied Angola. It was in Kongwa, he says, that MPLA leader Dr Agostinho Neto invited Oliver Tambo to send trainees to the camps, seeing that the ANC was facing problems in Tanzania.20 Already a celebrated poet, Neto’s ringing call to arms in a poem titled ‘Haste’ could have informed Hani’s impatience with the slothful leadership of the time. It also speaks to the fighting spirit that imbued Mandela and his colleagues in the Youth League to challenge the ANC leadership, which believed in petitions and appeals to the consciences of a heartless regime.

  I am impatient in this historical tepidness

  of delays and lentitude

  when with haste the just are murdered

  when the prisons are bursting with youths

  crushed to death against the wall of violence

  Let us end this tepidness of words and gestures

  and smiles hidden behind book covers

  and the resigned biblical gesture

  of turning the other cheek

  Start action vigorous male intelligent

  which answers tooth for tooth eye for eye

  man for man

  come vigorous action

  of the people’s army for the liberation of men

  come whirlwinds to shatter this passiveness.21

  Much later, Mandela would acknowledge the debt of gratitude that democratic South Africa owed to the people of Angola. In his 1998 address to the Angolan National Assembly in Luanda, he said that Angola’s solidarity with South Africans ‘struggling for their liberation was of heroic proportions’.

  ‘Before your own freedom was secure,’ he said, ‘and within the reach of our ruthless enemy, you dared to act upon the principle that freedom in southern Africa was indivisible. Led by the founder of liberated Angola, that great African patriot and internationalist, Agostinho Neto, you insisted that all of Africa’s children must be freed from bondage.’22

  Of the young hero, Chris Hani, Mandela continues writing: ‘In 1959 Hani enrolled at Fort Hare University [Mandela’s own alma mater] and attracted the attention of Govan Mbeki, the father of Thabo Mbeki. Govan played a formative role in Hani’s development. It was here that Hani encountered Marxist ideas and joined the already illegal Communist Party of South Africa. He always emphasised that his conversion to Marxism also deepened his non-racial perspective.

  ‘Hani was a bold and forthright young man and did not hesitate to criticise even his own organisation when he felt it was failing to give correct leadership. He recalled that: “Those of us in the camps in the sixties did not have a profound understanding of the problems. Most of us were very young – in our twenties. We were impatient to get into action. ‘Don’t tell us there are no routes,’ we used to say. We must be deployed to find routes. That’s what we trained for.”23

  ‘Hani became the leading spokesperson for MK soldiers who felt that the leadership was too complacent. After writing a formal petition, Hani found himself in hot water with the camp leadership and he was detained a while by his own organisation. He was, however, released when his plight came to the attention of the more senior ANC leaders, notably Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo.*

  ‘Hani returned to South Africa in August 1990, a hero to a great majority of South Africans. Several opinion polls at the time showed that he was easily the second most popular politician in the country.24 In December 1991, he became general secretary of the SACP.

  ‘Hani [spent] the last years of his life tirelessly addressing meetings throughout the length and breadth of South Africa, in village gatherings, shop stewards’ [meetings], councils and street committee [meetings]. He lent all his authority and military prestige to defend negotiations, often speaking patiently to very sceptical youths or communities suffering the brunt of Third Force violence.*

  ‘In their amnesty application to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the two convicted killers of Hani – Janusz Waluś and Clive Derby-Lewis – admitted that they had hoped to derail negotiations by unleashing a wave of race hatred and civil war.† It is a tribute to the maturity of South Africans of all persuasions, and it is a tribute to the memory of Hani in particular, that his death, tragically but factually, finally brought focus and urgency to our negotiated settlement.’25

  * * *

  If the steps taken to hammer out an agreement about the date of elections had been onerous and strewn with casualties, the attainment of a negotiated settlement was proving to be an even thornier issue. In 1993, as the elections approached, the possibility of a dangerous, armed right-wing revolt was taking shape. Although huge obstacles had been removed, the potential for renewed violence and disruption of the election was only too real. The fragile conditions for an election of a legitimate Government of National Unity (GNU) had only just been put in place and needed consolidating.

  The situation was of great concern for Mandela, who writes: ‘A dark cloud was hanging over South Africa, which threatened to block and even reverse all the gains South Africans had made in regard to the country’s peaceful transformation.’26

  Chris Hani’s body was barely cold in his grave when, almost a month after his killing, four former generals of the South African Defence Force (SADF), including the widely respected former army chief Constand Viljoen, established a committee of generals, the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF).‡ This could have been a reaction to the widespread damage in the wake of Hani’s murder, where media reported that there were some white victims among the more than fifteen people killed on the day of the funeral. The generals’ stated intention was to unify Afrikaner elements disillusioned with De Klerk’s National Party and agitate for a volkstaat, an Afrikaner homeland. Most of the press, more volubly the Weekly Mail, saw this initiative as part of a route towards secession.27

  Mandela was receiving intelligence reports ‘to the effect that the right-wing Afrikaners had decided to stop the forthcoming elections by violence. To be on the safe side, the president of an organisation must carefully check the accuracy of such reports. I did so, and when I discovered that they were accurate, I decided to act.’28

  According to the historian Hermann Giliomee, Mandela had learnt that ‘Viljoen planned to disrupt the elections, have De Klerk removed as leader and restart the negotiations.’29 Some believed that he could raise 50,000 men from the Active Citizen Force or reservists and also some defence force units. In his book The Afrikaners, Giliomee describes how two important generals debated the implications of armed resistance:

  In a briefing, General Georg Meiring, Chief of the Defence Force, warned the government and the ANC of the ghastly consequences of Viljoen’s opposing the election.* To dissuade Viljoen, for whom he had ‘the highest regard’, Meiring had several meetings with him. At one of them Viljoen said: ‘You and I and our men can take this country in an afternoon,’ to which Meiring replied: ‘Yes, that is so, but what do we do in the morning after the coup?’ The white–black demographic balance, the internal foreign pressures and all the intractable problems would still be there
.30

  Mandela knew better than to underestimate an opponent hell-bent on wreaking havoc, especially one that perceived itself to be on a just crusade to preserve vanishing glories. In his quest for a solution he might have been thinking of some of the stalwarts, like Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel peace laureate whose stewardship of the ANC had been at a most difficult time in the 1960s.† What would he have made of this situation? Or Oliver Tambo, his friend and comrade who died on 24 April, barely two weeks after Chris Hani’s burial – what course of action would he have advocated? In making his decision, however, Mandela must have been hearing echoes of Martin Luther King, Jr’s lecture on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

  ‘Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral,’ Dr King said. ‘I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.’31

  In forestalling this destruction, Mandela knew he had to enlist the help of someone whom the right-wingers held in high esteem. In the townships, it was practice to negotiate with the bully’s big brother to get some respite.

  ‘I flew down to the Wilderness,’ he writes, ‘the retirement home of the former President P. W. Botha, [and] reminded him of the communiqué we jointly issued when I was still in prison in July 1989. In that communiqué we pledged to work together for peace in our country.’32

  The twenty-five-minute drive from George Airport to Wilderness is a beautiful journey. There are beaches, passes, pristine rivers and the famous arched railway bridge that traverses the Kaaimans River, which washes into the sea at Wilderness. This scenic view is interrupted by the sudden appearance of informal housing, which spreads along the N2 highway. It being a Saturday afternoon, Mandela would have seen the people milling around and the traffic on the road.

  P. W. Botha’s retirement home, called Die Anker (The Anchor), is on farmland almost contiguous with valuable, protected wetland and overlooks the lakes that stretch from Wilderness all the way to Sedgefield. This, Mandela must have thought, is exactly the kind of privilege that the right wing wishes to hold on to, and will fight tooth and nail to keep as the sole preserve of the volk. But he had work to do. He had his meeting with P. W. Botha.

  Mandela writes: ‘I informed him that the peace was now threatened by the right wing and asked him to intervene. He was cooperative and confirmed that Afrikaners were determined to stop the elections. But he added that he did not want to discuss the matter with me alone, and suggested that I bring President F. W. de Klerk, Ferdi Hartzenberg and the General.

  ‘I proposed that we should also include the leader of the extreme Afrikaner right wing, Eugene Terre’Blanche, on the grounds that he was a reckless demagogue who at that time could attract larger crowds than President De Klerk. On this issue, the former president was so negative that I dropped the subject.’*33

  Mandela’s meeting with P. W. Botha in the latter’s own backyard could not have been without disagreements on specific issues. However, the cordiality reported in the press, which had characterised the two-hour meeting, had as much to do with realpolitik as with culture, where the two septuagenarians were closer in age and had a shared if divergent grasp of South Africa’s history. Mandela was also aware that P. W. Botha had himself taken on the mantle of reformer at the beginning of his presidency, when he made his famous call to his recalcitrant followers that they must adapt or die.34 In time his stance had hardened when his ill-advised tricameral parliament gave rise to resistance and the birth of the UDF. By then he had cast himself as an irascible and obdurate old man.

  Reacting to his meeting with Mandela, commentators recognised that ‘while Mr Botha might have some residual influence with the far right, his far greater influence lies with the SADF, over which he presided with extravagant indulgence for many years and some of whose generals, past and present, reportedly maintain affectionate contact with him’.35

  ‘I returned to Johannesburg,’ Mandela writes, ‘and immediately telephoned President de Klerk and informed him of Botha’s invitation. He was as hostile to the whole idea of us meeting the former president as the latter was towards Terre’Blanche. I then approached the progressive Afrikaner theologian, Professor Johan Heyns, to bring together the General, Hartzenberg, Terre’Blanche and myself. Terre’Blanche was uncompromising and rejected any meeting with me, a communist, as he said.’36

  Mandela was alive to the irony of an ex-prisoner mediating not only between the restive black majority and the government, but also between De Klerk and the bellicose right wing, which seemed prepared to set the whole country ablaze. The National Party’s backward policies throughout the decades had been a shrill dog whistle to which the dogs of hate were now responding in Ventersdorp, Terre’Blanche’s home town. Mandela had heard the rhetoric of scorn spewed by Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). He had seen how, in mid-1993, they had stormed the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, Gauteng, smashing through the glass doors in an armoured car to disrupt the talks.

  Notwithstanding his acceptance of De Klerk as a negotiating partner, Mandela was somewhat unimpressed with his handling of the right-wing threat. In a prescient interview with TIME magazine five days after his release from prison in February 1990, when asked if President de Klerk’s fears of the threat of the right wing were justified, he stated emphatically that they were overblown. While the threat was real, he argued, De Klerk viewed it from the perspective of white South Africa, the Afrikaners in particular. If he would only embrace a non-racial South Africa and begin viewing challenges from black perspectives, then his fears would diminish.37

  There is an expression much favoured in political mobilisation among black people of South Africa, which is used by almost all the language groups: Nguni, Sesotho and Xitsonga. In the Nguni version people say, ‘Sihamba nabahambayo’, which simply means in isiZulu ‘We take along with us those who are ready for the journey.’ ‘Ha e duma eyatsamaya’ (When the engine starts roaring, this vehicle is leaving) goes the refrain of a traditional song in Setswana – advice for ditherers to get on with it. For Mandela, the time had come for movement.

  He had already identified the people to take on his journey. He was favourably disposed towards General Constand Viljoen. This was also based on practicalities because Mandela knew of Viljoen’s track record and the role he had played in the destabilisation of neighbouring states, especially against SWAPO, the Namibian national liberation movement and sister organisation of the ANC; Mandela was aware of the massacre of Namibian refugees by the SADF in Kassinga, Angola, on 4 May 1978.*

  But, in line with his attitude towards De Klerk, Mandela saw the general as an ex-soldier who was also in search of a solution.

  Mandela writes: ‘A meeting facilitated by the general’s twin brother, Braam, and stockbroker Jürgen Kögl took place between the general and his colleagues on the one hand, and Joe Nhlanhla, Penuell Maduna, Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki for the ANC, on the other. In this regard, these ANC leaders had a vision far ahead of their comrades. They fully grasped the disastrous repercussions of the impending disaster.’38

  There were numerous such bilateral meetings between the ANC and Viljoen’s delegation of retired generals and others, which included Ferdi Hartzenberg, Tienie Groenewald and Kobus Visser, operating under the umbrella of the AVF. Some meetings were facilitated by Mandela himself, others by Mbeki and the leadership of the ANC, including Joe Modise.† In the meeting with the AVF at his home in the leafy suburb of Houghton, Mandela played the genial host, pouring the men tea and charming General Viljoen by speaking to him in Afrikaans, the general’s mother tongue.

  Mandela asked generals Viljoen and Hartzenberg ‘whether it was true that they were preparing to stop the elections b
y violent means. The General [Viljoen] was frank and admitted that this was correct, and that Afrikaners were arming, and that a bloody civil war was facing the country. I was shaken, but pretended that I was supremely confident of the victory of the liberation movement.

  ‘I told them,’ Mandela continues, ‘that they would give us a hard time since they were better trained militarily than us, commanded more devastating weaponry and, because of their resources, knew the country better than us. But I warned that at the end of that reckless gamble, they would be crushed. We were then on the verge of a historic victory after we inflicted a mortal blow to white supremacy. I pointed out this was not due to their consent; it was in spite of their opposition.’39

  Mandela told the generals that the people of South Africa ‘had a just cause, numbers and the support of the international community. They had none of these. I appealed to them to stop their plans and to join the negotiations at the World Trade Centre. I spent some time persuading them, but they were adamant and I could not move them at all. Finally, when I was about to give up, the general softened a bit and said he could not approach his people with empty hands at such an advanced stage of their preparations.’40

  Mandela had spent a great deal of time in prison thinking about the dilemma in which South Africa found itself. Much more, he saw his incarceration as a chance to know himself. In a letter dated 1 February 1975, he wrote to his wife, Winnie, who was then in Kroonstad Prison, telling her that prison was an ideal place to get to know oneself. ‘The cell,’ he wrote, ‘gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you.’41 It was here, too, that he had immersed himself in understanding the salient aspects of Afrikaner history and culture. He practised his Afrikaans in exchanges with prison officials, although, years later, he still couldn’t quite flatten the broad isiXhosa inflection in speech, which was as much a source of amusement for apartheid functionaries as for ANC members. It is a universally known fact that people love being addressed in their own language – and Mandela had grasped that long before it became a necessity.