Dare Not Linger

by Nelson Mandela

  Having assembled an electoral college, which chose Mandela to be the country’s president, the new National Assembly’s next step was to choose its speaker and deputy speaker. Given the importance of these positions, the ANC leadership, especially Mandela himself, and the parliamentary caucus, had to get involved.

  Mandela writes, ‘An equally contentious question was the election of the Speaker for the National Assembly. Although the ANC had long accepted the principle of gender equality without qualification, actual practice still lagged far behind principle.

  ‘Among my staff as ANC President, there were three women all strong, independent, well informed and outspoken. They brooked no form of chauvinism, either from me or from my comrades. No wonder they came to be known as the three witches.

  ‘They were Barbara Masekela, who later became our Ambassador to France, Jessie Duarte, our Ambassador to Mozambique, and Frene Ginwala. We had numerous discussions on a wide variety of issues. All of them were impressive and hard-working and they helped to purge my system of all contempt for women. I earmarked Frene for the position of Speaker of the National Assembly.

  ‘There was dead silence from my comrades when I first shared the secret with them. I suspected that the fact that I was proposing a female comrade, at that time, irrespective of her qualifications, didn’t go down well to those comrades, the overwhelming majority of whom were males.

  ‘There had also been some differences, and even infighting, among exiles abroad, which were still evident in their work inside the country. I, however, made it clear to all concerned that I would tolerate no unprincipled objection to a competent comrade from an organisation, which had been entrusted with the awesome task of governing the wealthiest and most developed country on the African continent. I virtually ordered that every ANC parliamentarian should vote for her as Speaker.

  ‘The other difficulty came from Frene herself. She telephoned me one morning and demanded to know why there were so few women in the Cabinet. In replying to her, I added that I would ensure that she became the Speaker. She vehemently protested that she was not talking about herself; she was raising a general issue, which affected all women.

  ‘As the debate between us was heating, I asked her pointedly to choose between accepting or rejecting my offer. In our discussions, I have always been consoled by the knowledge that she had more respect for my grey hair than for me in person. She paused a bit and then said she would think about the matter. I was relieved when she later agreed to serve.

  ‘Her decision was a landmark as it was the first occasion in our history for a woman to occupy that powerful position in our national legislature. It was a double victory since the deputy speaker was also a confident and able woman, Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile.

  ‘The common view among parliamentarians from all sides of the House is that she [Ginwala] has acquitted herself well without any previous training or experience in this regard. She is non-partisan and often rebukes members for unparliamentary behaviour, irrespective of the political affiliation of the offender.

  ‘Her superb performance and mastery of the functions of her office has not only enhanced respect and support across the political divide. Her remarkable achievement and that of her female colleagues in the House, has clearly demonstrated that the battle for gender equality is being won.

  ‘This rare achievement was rewarded by parliament when she was unanimously re-elected for another five years.’5

  In line with Mandela’s sentiments – that this should be a people’s parliament – the arrangement of the MPs’ seating was such that each party’s representatives, at least, would be visible to the public on television. Committee meetings were opened to the press, and the far-reaching public outreach programmes to acquaint society with the ins and outs of the legislature deepened mutual trust and candour between the people and the institution. This was a counter-intuitive attitude for anyone, party or leadership, assuming power, even in mature democracies, where the temptation is to control information. The whole project of apartheid was to leave black people, from the cradle to the grave, wallowing in ignorance; white people, who might have imagined that they had escaped this fate, were simply deluded, as they, too, had been lied to.

  In determining to bring sanity to the country and debunk the lies bandied with alarming fluency from as far back as 1652, Mandela sometimes sounded as if he were trying to convince himself about the rightness of ensuring openness in lawmaking. For example, in his second State of the Nation Address, he said, ‘We can therefore claim with justification that such legislation, as has been approved, is representative of the will of the people. It therefore enjoys a degree of legitimacy and enforceability, which all previous laws could never have.’6

  The original parliament building in Cape Town was built in 1884, in a neoclassical design that incorporated features of Cape Dutch architecture. A heritage site, Parliament housed over four thousand works of art, some of them priceless artworks and some dating back to the seventeenth century. But despite their historical importance and value, the collection did not represent all the people and art of South Africa.

  When Parliament decided to remove from its buildings portraits and other works of art from the apartheid era, Mandela supported the action. He said that the decision ‘was taken after extensive deliberations within Parliament, and it was agreed to by all political parties. The new democratic Parliament should reflect the image of an inclusive South Africa, in all its diversity. This is an important component of nation-building and reconciliation.’7

  Mandela paid respect to Parliament in other ways too. Keenly aware of the symbolism of dress, he insisted on wearing a suit to Parliament, in contrast to his usual attire of colourful Madiba shirts. Indeed he was always fastidious about dress – and routine generally. His wife, Graça Machel, relates how he’d wake up every morning to do his exercises, fold his pyjamas and make up his bed until he had to yield to the benign tyranny of Xoliswa Ndoyiya, a senior staff member at their Houghton home. ‘He was very clean and tidy,’ Machel says. ‘You just didn’t throw things in his presence. Where he is, everything has got to be orderly … impeccably clean. Even the way he would dress, he takes his time to dress; he’d look at himself [in the mirror] and make sure he is perfect.’8 He combined an unbending practicality with old-world courtesy, which he also expected of others, especially his colleagues.

  Ginwala once asked him why he always came to Parliament in a suit when he was already known for his trademark colourful shirts. ‘He put on his dignified face,’ Frene says, ‘and said, “Frene, Parliament represents the people, I have to respect it, and, so, I always wear the suit.”’9

  He was not simply concerned with appearances. He also worried about the inconsistent attendance of some MPs and ministers, both because they were needed in the House as elected representatives and to ensure a quorum was achieved during debates. Sometimes snap debates called by the opposition caught the ANC flat-footed.10 When this was raised by the Reverend Makhenkesi Stofile, the first ANC chief whip, Mandela agreed to write to ministers about it, but cautioned, ‘You must find a way of making sure that you don’t put too much of a burden on them because they do have other work.’11

  Mandela was seventy-five when he became president, and he was not an MP. Parliamentary question time was often boisterous and highly partisan. There was therefore an informal agreement – in deference to his age and status, and the pressures of his programme in the early years of transition – that he should be exempt from answering questions in Parliament.12

  Instead, Mandela was invited to the ANC caucus meetings. He attended quite frequently at first, discussing issues with the parliamentary leadership and senior members of the movement, including Ginwala; Govan Mbeki, who was senate deputy president; Stofile, the chief whip; and Mendi Msimang as the caucus chair. He also frequently sounded out his close colleagues and former prison mates, ensuring that their insights were factored into caucus meeting discussions.13

  Notes Mandela
wrote for a caucus meeting in February 1996, almost two years into the new parliament, exemplify his interventions. He continued to be concerned about ANC attendance and conduct in Parliament.14 He was also unhappy about the tensions between the ANC and other parties arising from the fact that the Government of National Unity’s multiparty ethos was not always replicated in Parliament:15

  1.  Have missed several meetings of this caucus due to other engagements I could not avoid.

  Caucus is the main engine for our parliamentary work; and if we’re going to carry out the mandate of our people effectively, duty of all of us to attend.

  Have arranged with my office to arrange my engagements in such a way that I will be able to attend.

  2.  Must also try to be in close contact with the portfolio committees.

  3.  Whips to give me report of attendance at the end of every month. Implications of failure to attend. Matter discussed by … [illegible].

  Utmost discipline crucial. Implications of lack of discipline.

  4.  Section 43 [concerned with the powers of provinces] under discussion.

  5.  Did not win through military victory where we dictate terms to a conquered army.

  6.  Work done – statutory committees result of our hard work.16

  Mandela’s personal notes for meetings show his preoccupation with discipline – especially collective discipline – loyalty and honesty. In one, he observes that the ‘organisation has gone through many challenges’, referring to some of the upheavals, including the ousting of the so-called Africanists in the fifties and the Group of Eight in the seventies.* These ‘were popular in the ANC – but once out it was easy to deal with them’. Then, at the head of a list of affirmations, mnemonics and admonitions to self as well as to an imaginary audience, Mandela remarks that the ‘secret is that our struggle is a principled struggle’.17

  There are a few more such notes, all evocative, speaking to the mindset of a man for whom the democracy was an ideal for which he was prepared to die. To the uninitiated, Mandela’s scribbled notes might come across as folksy aphorisms, words a parent might impart to a troubled teenager – ‘Never to wash dirty linen in public’ or ‘Think through brain, not blood’ – but they were informed by absolute seriousness. One, reading, ‘Let leaders decide who takes part in debate’, related to Mandela’s determination to pay attention to the work of parliamentary portfolio committees.18 In comparison to the old apartheid committee system, where, as an observer put it, ‘one clerk served five committees that met in secret to rubber stamp the executive’s laws and policies’, the democratic committees ‘had teeth to hold the executive accountable. They had the authority to receive evidence and summon witnesses and facilitate public participation in the parliamentary process.’19 There was therefore a need for a balancing mechanism for ministers, part of the very executive that had to be held in check, and their participation in portfolio committees where they were part of the legislature. Mandela thus ensured that the poachers took their obligations as gamekeepers seriously.

  In January 1996 there was a heated exchange at a hearing of the Portfolio Committee on Defence on legislation relating to integration of the armed forces. The proposed legislation included a suggestion that English be the sole language used within the integrated force. The defence force head, General Georg Meiring, complained to Mandela about the incident. At the next caucus meeting, Mandela reprimanded ANC members of the committee for proposing a policy, which, he said, ran counter to the reconciliation efforts of the ANC and the GNU.20

  Another issue that threw a harsh spotlight on the relation between the executive and committees concerned a state-sponsored musical, Sarafina II, about AIDS prevention, which quickly became a cause célèbre. The story of the musical and the splurging of state monies, together with an incoherent explanation from the Ministry of Health as to the source of funding, itself became a drama that Mandela certainly didn’t need. Aware of the intense public interest in the matter, he was keen that it be handled judiciously. Having explained the merits of the project, the health minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, offered to resign if it transpired that she had done wrong. Mandela declined her offer. Some, like Ahmed Kathrada – as has been noted earlier – cited Mandela’s loyalty as both his weakness and his strength. But despite the exoneration of Minister Dlamini-Zuma from financial liability by the Office of the Public Protector, the incident did damage Mandela’s reputation, leading elements of the media at home and abroad to editorialise about the creep of corruption during his watch.

  If he knew what was being said, Mandela never let anything deter him from his course, guided by what he had learnt from Sophocles – ‘What people believe prevails over the truth’.21 When considering the character Mandela played in a performance of Antigone on Robben Island, the renowned South African author André Brink commented that, ‘although, like his fellow actors, he primarily identified with Antigone, he brought to the interpretation of Creon what must have been, in retrospect, a peculiar insight: “Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgment, not till he’s shown his colour, ruling the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.”’22

  Now the stage was here in the new chamber where, almost fourteen kilometres from the Island, issues of national importance were put before Parliament in the form of special debates or statements. Among these were the dissolution of the Reconstruction and Development Programme office, the Constitutional Assembly’s adoption of the Constitution, and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

  No single issue would arouse as much controversy as the process Mandela instigated of unearthing and confronting the institutionally sanctioned evil of the past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established by an Act of Parliament in 1995, the TRC’s first hearings into South Africa’s inglorious past started in April 1996 in East London, in the Eastern Cape, the country’s poorest province. It was here that, on the second day, the chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, broke down during the televised public hearing when he listened to the grim accounts by wheelchair-bound Singqokwana Malgas, a former Robben Island prisoner who’d suffered a stroke in 1989 as a result of years of torture in the hands of the security police. Malgas, who spoke with difficulty, said that, in 1963, after being arrested by the East London police and accused of being a terrorist, ‘he had been tortured and “assaulted terribly” before being taken to Pretoria, charged and sentenced to twenty-two years in jail. On appeal the sentence was reduced to 14 years.’23

  There were many such instances, typified by Malgas’s horrific account, which laid bare the evil of an unacknowledged past.

  Even though Mandela and De Klerk wrangled for months over the commission’s terms of reference, for instance, the period of the probe – with a section of the white community fearing that old wounds would be opened – the TRC did lead to the unravelling of the apartheid security apparatus and exposed its covert networks. While the five-volume final report failed to satisfy everybody – white South Africans because it felt like an officially sanctioned hatchet job and black South Africans because it hadn’t gone far enough – it became an invaluable record of social history.

  * * *

  In June 1995, Mandela responded to a senator who had raised a question about the progress of police investigations into the killing of IFP supporters outside Shell House, the ANC’s HQ in Johannesburg, in March 1994. Intending to close the matter, Mandela said he was responsible for the Shell House shootings. In fact, as later emerged during the TRC’s amnesty hearings, Mandela had not ordered security to kill anyone, only to protect the building.24 But he did what leaders should do: he took direct responsibility. With a curious mix of calmness and asperity, he tackled the issue in a speech to the Senate:

  ‘Regarding the question of the so-called massacre in Shell House the members of the NP have stood up on the IFP’s side. This is in spite of the fact that on the day before the event, I telephone
d President De Klerk, as he then was, Gen Van der Merwe and Gen Calitz. I told them that there was going to be that so-called demonstration, and that a lot of people were going to die. I asked them to put up roadblocks around Johannesburg, so as to protect lives.

  ‘They all undertook to do so. Mr De Klerk actually interrupted me and said: “Have you told Van der Merwe about this?” and I said: “Yes, I have.” He then said that he would also tell him. No roadblocks were put in place. Those people were allowed to go into the city with their weapons. By 07:00, Radio 702 had announced that Inkatha had killed thirty-two people in Soweto. By the time they came into town, we already had that information.

  ‘They came to Shell House, past the spot where they were supposed to have the meeting. We knew why; therefore I gave instructions to our security that if they attacked the House, they must please protect it, even if they had to kill people. It was absolutely necessary for me to give that instruction.

  ‘What is important now is that the NP and the DP [Democratic Party], which is now to the right of the NP, were not once able to say who killed the forty-five people in Johannesburg. Their sole preoccupation was the nine people who were killed in self-defence. That was the sole purpose of the point of view of the NP and the DP. They showed no concern about the forty-five other people who were killed, thus encouraging the perception that Whites do not care about Blacks.’25

  A firestorm of public outrage greeted Mandela’s statement, and the opposition called for a snap debate. When Thabo Mbeki and Sydney Mufamadi came to see him, even before they raised the matter he said, ‘I know why you’ve come. You’re diplomats. I am not a diplomat because I have spent my time fighting with warders. What should I do about my statement?’26

  After their discussion, a special meeting of top ANC officials was called to devise a strategy and formulate a response for a parliamentary debate. Aware of the significance of the imminent debate, Mandela prepared himself. He knew, however, that the task of explaining himself would be even harder if he didn’t take the media along with him. ‘Finally,’ he wrote, in preparation for the meeting, ‘the opinion of the media is important and in some respects crucial. We must always treat it with respect; the whites have powerful weapons and propaganda, which we ignore at our peril. But we must never forget the people out there and our strategy must not ignore their feelings on this subject.’27