What did the generals know of this black man who had survived them and who now parleyed with them? They must have known of the power he represented and the people behind him, but what did they know of him? That he was amiable, avuncular and smiled a lot – knowledge that might have been muddled up in their own memory of his origins and his championing of the armed struggle. It is also a truism that black people end up knowing more about white people than the other way round. Mandela realised that the generals represented, in the main, a demographic steeped in tradition, with a respect for authority, law and order – a Calvinist dogma – whose overwhelming majority consisted of members of the middle class; family men and women who simply wanted to be left alone. A good percentage had already embraced some form of reform, looking beyond the present and seeking solutions for a liveable future (witness their support of De Klerk’s options in the referendum). Conformity with societal mores and respect for law and order were ingrained in young Afrikaners, a view supported by Niël Barnard, who writes:
‘At school and in the hostel, as in the home environment, there were standards; there was order, discipline: bells rang when it was time to rise and shine … there were prayer meetings … and traditional folk games and dancing. We walked in single file to school, and for anything that looked the least bit like a serious transgression the cane was brought out … All those who were in positions of authority were respected; their word was law.’42
That De Klerk’s – and, to a large extent, Mandela’s – word was law had been accepted, albeit grudgingly, by a significant section of Afrikaners. The exceptions, such as Eugene Terre’Blanche, who operated outside the accepted code of conduct – as determined by Afrikaner authorities – were in many instances a source of embarrassment rather than of pride. Were these people ready to relinquish the comfort of their factories, businesses, homes, farms and schools to take up arms in defence of … what?
Notwithstanding all these considerations, Mandela had read enough about the history of conflict to know that language, culture and nationhood had been the source of devastating conflicts across the globe. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the old Soviet Union had already opened up a Pandora’s box of ethnic resurgences in Eastern Europe. The general’s conciliatory tone about his reluctance to go back to his people ‘with empty hands’ on the question of a volkstaat struck a chord with Mandela. He knew that, however right he might have been, it was supremely unwise to swell the numbers of opponents to him or to the envisaged democratic republic.
‘Up to that moment,’ Mandela writes, ‘I had insisted that as long as I was President of the ANC, there would never be a Volkstaat in this country. A Volkstaat was a separate, autonomous area for the Afrikaner. But now, faced with such a formidable challenge, I decided to retreat but in such a way that they would find it far from easy to realise their demand.’43
More than thirty years earlier, while operating underground and on the run, Mandela had lived in SACP activist Wolfie Kodesh’s flat. Kodesh introduced him to Carl von Clausewitz’s classic, On War.44 In dealing with the right wing as he did, Mandela put into practice the Prussian general’s theory of war and conflict.
In his essay ‘Mandela on War’, Jonathan Hyslop concludes that ‘[in] understanding that South Africa could not avoid violent conflict but that the prosecution of conflict without limit was a danger to any possibility of creating a viable future society, Mandela charted an intelligent and principled course. And this can also be understood as a notably Clausewitzian way of thinking: Mandela grasped that responsible leadership requires a recognition of the conditions of real war, of the limits of what it can achieve, and of the problems that flow from it rather than the pursuit of the chimera of absolute war.’45
Mandela informed generals Viljoen and Hartzenberg that he would approach the ANC and ask that it ‘review its attitude to the Volkstaat on three conditions. The two of them, plus Terre’Blanche, claimed that they represented the majority of Afrikaners who wanted a Volkstaat. On the other hand, President de Klerk insisted that only he represented the majority of Afrikaners, all of whom rejected the demand.
‘The first condition was, therefore, that Afrikaners should have a referendum to determine whether or not they wanted a Volkstaat. Second, the result of the referendum would not necessarily bind the ANC, but would be an important factor to take into account when considering their demand. Finally, they should answer the question: Who was an Afrikaner? Was it a white person who spoke Afrikaans? Or was it any person – [including] black, that is African, Coloured or Indian – who spoke the language? On compliance with these conditions, I would then report to my organisation, leaving it to its members to review the matter as they deemed fit.
‘The general,’ Mandela writes, ‘was satisfied that I had given him something to present to his force, but Hartzenberg sharply differed and insisted that I should there and then make an unequivocal undertaking that I would give them the Volkstaat. I told him that I was a mere servant of the ANC, subject to their authority and discipline; that if I acted unilaterally on a principle of such fundamental importance the organisation would summarily dismiss me, rendering me useless to the right wing. He retorted quite firmly that if I did not accept his demand, the plan would be carried out. I said: “So be it,” and that was the end of our discussion.
‘That same day, I telephoned former President Botha and briefed him on the General’s decision. I requested the former president to persuade the General to join the negotiations at the World Trade Centre.
‘A few days later,’ Mandela continues, ‘the General [Viljoen] pulled out of the conspiracy of the right wing and joined the negotiating parties. His colleagues heavily vilified him for saving South Africa from such a calamity. Hartzenberg did not have any military capacity at all, and Terre’Blanche relied on a collection of undisciplined amateurs who had no idea whatsoever of what war involved.’46
General Viljoen, who knew exactly what war entailed, reached an agreement with the ANC negotiators on 12 April 1994, having registered his own newly formed political party, the Freedom Front, on 4 March 1994. But Mandela’s signature was still needed to secure the Freedom Front’s participation in the forthcoming elections. As days passed, a restive Viljoen decided to act. He knew that war was not actually an option, but he believed he could mobilise enough people to seriously disrupt the elections, and resolved to do so. Before taking the final decision, however, he confided his plans to the US ambassador, Princeton Lyman, who had maintained contact with Viljoen since late 1993, and with Mandela.47 The latter had phoned President Bill Clinton in February 1994, asking him to persuade Viljoen and others to take part in the elections.48 Lyman informed the ANC of the situation, and the Afrikaner Accord on Self-Determination was signed on 23 April 1994, three days before the start of the elections, by the Freedom Front, ANC and the National Party. It was an agreement for the parties ‘to address, through a process of negotiations, the idea of Afrikaner self-determination, including the concept of a Volkstaat.’49
The rejection of the right-wingers’ demands precipitated mayhem. Mandela writes that ‘on the eve of the elections, bombs exploded, especially in Johannesburg, and killed about twenty innocent civilians. It was a matter for police action, and the culprits were arrested and convicted. The situation would have imposed formidable difficulties if Viljoen was still part of the plot.’50
The media at home and abroad, which had been watching the unfolding drama with interest, reported how the elements of the right wing made good on their threat to try to disrupt the elections. The explosions, according to Bill Keller in the New York Times:
most minor, but ominous in their message, led some panicky residents to stockpile household goods but seemed only to harden the resolve of black voters to exercise their first franchise.
Bolstered by the united condemnation of politicians and by their own lifetimes of being denied, even blacks in the line of fire said they would not be frightened from voting.
&n
bsp; ‘Someone is trying to scare us away from the election,’ said Zole Msenti, who was sitting in his baby-blue minibus chatting with a friend when the Germiston blast suddenly lofted his vehicle into the air and smashed all the windows. Scores of vehicles gather each morning at suburban taxi parks to bring commuters into the city to work.
Bandaged but unbowed, he returned from the hospital to retrieve his taxi and accept the condolences of whites who stopped to commiserate.
‘They are wasting their time,’ he said of the spoilers. ‘We are going.’51
Mr Msenti’s three words – ‘we are going’ – almost certainly meant that he, his colleagues and their families were going to vote, come hell or high water. A few decades earlier, such determination might not even have been there, but now that the resistance had gained a foothold in every corner of the country, it had started to become a reality. As a taxi driver he might have ferried thousands of passengers and heard their tales of woe, which reflected the reality of what he and his peers had endured. And then one day, change began to seem possible. In 1976, the youth in schools had revolted against the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction; in response the regime had tightened its chokehold around the necks of the people and declared States of Emergency. To many this was a sign that the apartheid government was losing its grip. In the words of American writer James Baldwin on the decline of a kingdom, ‘Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims.’52
* * *
When eight men were released from prison on 15 October 1989, it heralded the end of a system that had led to so much pain, and signalled that the walls were coming down. The hour of the victim had come. And then, on 11 February 1990, almost 120 days later, Mandela stepped out and it all became real. At last, it was happening. All the songs that people had sung in churches, at the lips of open graves and in the camps thousands of miles from home, all transmuted into an affirmation: ‘We are going to cast our vote.’ Seven simple words whose import had eluded the architects of apartheid for decades.
The Afrikaner right wing had failed.
CHAPTER THREE
A Free and Fair Election
With the immediate roadblocks removed, the way was open for an election that would be the final step in the establishment of a democratically elected government. The Transitional Executive Council (TEC) to promote the preparation for and transition to a democratic order was now well established and ready to promote the conditions for unrestricted political activity in the run-up to the elections.* Between 15 April and 15 May 1994, the country saw South Africa’s most comprehensive peacetime mobilisation of the security forces to ensure a free election.1 The main political parties, even the Inkatha Freedom Party, which had only agreed to participate at the eleventh hour, had strong campaign machines. Widespread voter education campaigns among the disenfranchised had started two years earlier, when the ANC had started preparing for an elected constituent assembly. In place, too, since December 1993, was the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). When the IEC was established, Mandela had phoned its head, Judge Johann Kriegler, a tough and energetic jurist, saying that he and the ANC realised there were difficulties, but Kriegler should know that he had the support and confidence of the party.†2
What struck Judge Kriegler was Mandela’s ability to connect with people from widely different constituencies. Kriegler observed that when he had an issue to raise, ‘Mandela would call personally, unlike the usual CEO whose PA calls you to say the CEO would like to speak to you and then you wait for the CEO.’3 In mid-April, in a meeting of the TEC at which Mandela was present, Kriegler reported on a meeting with the IFP:
There was at one point talk of a boycott of the elections by the ZCC [Zion Christian Church]. At that time there were several threats of boycott: IFP, North West, Ciskei and the right wing. I went to meet with Bishop Lekganyane to persuade him to support the process, before Easter.* He said that he had invited the leaders of all parties to attend the Easter celebration to set the right tone for the election, which seemed to imply that he would be encouraging participation. At the Easter meeting I sat in the hall next to Mandela for two hours. It was the first time I talked to him as a person. He was like a grandfather. He recognised people as they came in, explaining that this one was married to that one’s sister; he was able to identify them from all over the country by family connections – he really knew his natural constituents.’4
It was the Kenyan professor John S. Mbiti who observed in his seminal work, African Religions and Philosophy, that Africans are notoriously religious; this is borne out to a very large extent in the sizeable adherents of the ZCC with its syncretic mix of Christian and traditional African religious beliefs.5 It therefore made sense for Mandela, or any political leader for that matter, to woo its bishop, whose influence extended well beyond the borders of South Africa, with hundreds of thousands of the faithful trekking from all points of southern Africa to the pilgrimage in Moria, in what was then the northern Transvaal. They might have come to worship, but for Mandela they constituted a voting public. First and foremost, Mandela wanted to ensure the integrity of the founding election, an essential condition for a peaceful transition to democracy.
Mandela writes that ‘the formation of the first democratically elected government of South Africa was preceded by a countrywide election campaign during which ANC leaders in all levels of the organisation systematically combed the entire country, visited rural and urban areas and spoke to all sections of the population.
‘It is this team of men and women that made 27 April 1994 unforgettable in the collective memory of the South African nation as a day in which our people came together and united in symbolic action.
‘That day concluded months of excitement, expectations and fears following the conclusion of negotiations in November of the previous year.
‘The election date was agreed at the negotiations so that for five months the nation waited with bated breath for the arrival of that historic day in the life of South Africa.
‘To the black majority, it meant the birth of a dream that had inspired generations, namely, that one day the people will govern.
‘For decades, after the conclusion of the colonial wars of dispossession, they had to sit on the sidelines of political life, watching their compatriots voting to rule over them. Now the day was nearing when they would, together with all their compatriots, decide on the politics of their country.
‘To many of the white population, the prospect of that day obviously held cause for trepidation, fear and insecurity. To them it would signal the end of minority control and privilege, opening up the frightening prospect of having to share with those whom they subjected for so long and in many respects so cruelly.
‘The atmosphere in those months leading up to election day was therefore understandably a mixture of all those different and competing emotions and expectations. As we went around the country campaigning and canvassing our people to come out to vote for the liberation movement, we encountered those various moods.
‘It was clear that the hard work done by the liberation movement over so many decades had left an indelible mark on the voting patterns to be expected. All over the country and in all communities, we were greeted with enthusiasm and overwhelming signs of support.
‘[In my capacity as] the ANC president, [I] travelled to virtually every corner of the country. In the run-up to the elections in the last six months, [I] personally addressed at least two and a half million people through rallies and meetings across the length and breadth of South Africa. It was moving to observe how the name and reputation of our movement lived in even the remotest rural areas.
‘In the long-established tradition of our organisation and of Congress politics, we dre
w into our campaign the widest possible array of people. As we had done during negotiations, when we managed to win over to our side different parties who originally were thought to be allies of the apartheid regime, we now again adopted that broad approach to unite people even in campaigning. We used modern research techniques and methodologies including polling opinion. Our polling adviser was Stan Greenberg who was adviser to [President] Clinton in his 1992 campaign.
‘In the campaign we held People’s Forums, focus groups and inserted media adverts seeking inputs from the people. These yielded enormous responses. We engaged with the people face-to-face.’6
Mandela and the ANC had long realised that they didn’t have the campaign resources to match the National Party’s formidable election machinery, which enjoyed the advantage of incumbency. Although credited to Greenberg, the ANC, through an activist such as Ketso Gordhan, had actually reformatted the Nicaraguan strategy of the people’s forums to suit local conditions.
In a chapter on the election in the Western Cape, as part of a well-researched study, Launching Democracy in South Africa, co-edited by the journalist and political scientist R. W. Johnson and eminent South African sociologist and political scientist Lawrence Schlemmer, contributors Robert Mattes, Hermann Giliomee and Wilmot James write that the media opportunities ‘afforded by the forums were important in order to communicate the real symbolic message of the ANC’s accountability, representativeness and accessibility and rebuild its image as a “parliament of the people”’.7 Here, the leaders did not speak; instead they responded to questions from the representatives of the audience in an environment that facilitated democratic exchange.
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