‘However, our actions cannot ignore the painful truth that the most affected will be areas that are poor, with low economic activity and little prospect for alternative employment. This means, among other things, searching for creative negotiated solutions that will help stimulate economic activity.
‘The rationalisation process will not be vindictive. Neither will it be carried out in a haphazard manner. Rather, it will affect all races and provinces. Discussions are well advanced with the relevant ministry to set up the Presidential Review Commission [PRC], which will redefine the structure, functions and procedures of the Public Service, and relevant announcements can be expected soon.*
‘Among the greatest challenges for 1996 is to further build the capacity of government to serve communities. Nowhere is this needed more than at local level, where government interacts on a daily basis with communities. It should therefore be the case that one of the main themes of this year will be the introduction of massive training programmes for the newly elected councillors and their staff.’69
During Mandela’s presidency, two major reports on the public service were commissioned. The director general of the Department of Public Service and Administration, Dr Paseka Ncholo, led a provincial review task team, which probed provincial administrations. In the report, which went to cabinet in August 1997, Ncholo concluded that ‘from an administrative point of view, the system is expensive, chaotic and unaffordable’.70
The PRC reported in 1998, after two years’ work, on how the inherited executive and administration should be restructured to better enable reconstruction and development. Its far-reaching recommendations informed changes made by the next administration. It dwelt sharply on the need for better coordinating and integrating structures at the centre of government, in the presidency and cabinet secretariat.
The various commissions and task groups reflected Mandela’s desire to acquire as much knowledge as possible in order to fulfil his dream of creating a better society. That society could only come about if the public embraced the ideal of making South Africa the country of their dreams. He said as much on opening the third parliamentary session on 9 February 1996:
‘Yes, South Africa is not only on the right road. We are well on our way to making this the country of our dreams. I take the opportunity to congratulate all South Africans, in the public and private sectors – the most prominent in the land as well as the humble member of the community – all of whom are striving to add another brick to the edifice of our democracy. We have set out on this road together, and we should together aim for the stars.’
While praising the achievements of the communities, which ‘have laid the foundation to make a real impact on the inequities of the past’, he admitted that ‘we are only at the beginning of a long journey’. It was ‘a journey we should undertake with expedition, if our consciences are not impervious to the cries of [the] desperation of millions. But this is a journey, too, that requires thorough planning and tenacious industry, if we are to remain on course and capable of sustaining our march … All of us, all South Africans, are called upon to become builders and healers. But, for all the joy and excitement of creation, to build and to heal are difficult undertakings.
‘We can neither heal nor build if such healing and building are perceived as a one-way process, with the victims of past injustices forgiving and the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude. Together we must set out to correct the defects of the past.’71
CHAPTER TEN
Reconciliation
In a fleeting news clip that was broadcast to the world on 12 June 1964, the day he was to start serving his sentence, Nelson Mandela is partly obscured by the wire mesh over the window of the van transporting the condemned men.1 Although unseen, the prisoners leave an indelible stamp of rebellion as clenched fists appear through the ventilation holes on the side panels of the sealed vehicle, a physical complement to the language of defiance from the spectators, many of whom had packed the gallery during the trial.
Even though the police officials had used a back exit to avoid the crowds, many people were still able to cheer their heroes to prison. Above the harsh throb of traffic and the stuttering growl of the outriders’ motorcycle engines, Mandela could hear the shouting outside, the call-and-response chants and songs that had throughout time rallied the faithful to battle. A powerful voice shouted in isiXhosa, ‘Amandla!’ and the people responded, ‘Awethu!’ The chant was then repeated in English, with the voice calling out ‘All power!’ and the crowd responding, ‘To the people!’ Never in the history of struggle in South Africa had there been anything as eloquent as these five simple words to express the agony of millions and their resolve to reverse centuries of oppression.
For a black person to enter prison in June 1964, some sixteen years after the National Party came into power, meant being at the mercy of functionaries trapped at the lowest rung of the state’s administrative hierarchy. Simply, white prison staff were usually of Afrikaner stock, ill-educated and powerful. These were mainly young men and women, the likes of whom had prompted American writer James Baldwin’s observation that ‘ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have’.2
The black warders, also victims of the violence driving the apartheid policy, which had turned them into instruments of oppression, were mostly a more benighted version of their paler brethren. However, it was the white officials who had the responsibility for Mandela and the political prison population.
This was Mandela’s new world, a world in which African prisoners were first subjected to the indignity of being stripped naked and then forced to wear shorts, as opposed to the long trousers worn by Indian and coloured prisoners. He had taken pride in how he dressed in the outside world – dress symbolising his own sense of self. When he was to be sentenced at an earlier court appearance, in 1962, he had eschewed a Western suit for a jackal-skin cloak with beadwork, which he wore with defiant grace, to symbolise his Africanness.
In 1965, when he was serving a life sentence on Robben Island, there was no suggestion of future generosity in a series of grainy pictures that were smuggled out and published by the International Defence and Aid Fund in London, in which a shaven Mandela and his compatriot Walter Sisulu are deep in discussion.* All around them is the unremitted bleakness of the rock quarry and walls of stone. It was, as the late Indres Naidoo called it, truly an ‘island in chains’.3 It was not a place to nurture the spirit of reconciliation.
Yet, thirty-one years later, the image of a beaming Mandela kitted out in the Springbok rugby strip at the victorious end of the Rugby World Cup in 1995 has in itself become graphic shorthand for reconciliation and sanity. It adds to the mystery that has always surrounded the man the media once called the Black Pimpernel.
* * *
In the early 1960s, the National Party’s penal system was one of the most dreaded coercive arms of the apartheid state. Mandela had already had earlier brushes with the law, most notably as the ANC’s volunteer-in-chief during the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws, which had kicked off on 26 June 1952, and he was one of the accused in the marathon Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961. Prior to being sentenced to life imprisonment, he had been serving a five-year sentence, since 7 November 1962, for leaving the country without a passport and inciting workers to strike.*
In all these encounters, Mandela had evinced great dignity. A sense of dignity derives from an unwillingness to be demeaned, and Mandela had recognised quite early into his incarceration that he would have to thwart the designs of the regime and its minions. As with all people forced to fight for their lives, he would discover his own strength in the height of battle. Outside, before his arrest, he had enjoyed the support of the ANC and its infrastructure; prison was different and needed different tactics. Here, he had himself, his close comrades and a prison population that consisted of people of varying political affiliations. However, they all had one thing in common: they were political prisoners seeking the downfall of t
he apartheid regime. Together they learnt to use the rules to their advantage. They defied those they found unacceptable and, eventually, after repeated flouting, the rules became unenforceable.
In recalling the period, Michael Dingake, who was released from the Island in 1981 after a fifteen-year sentence, wrote that among all the inmates, Mandela ‘was the most tireless participant in discussions – in formal discussions restricted to ANC members and in informal, bilateral or group discussions with members of other organisations. Some of us, whenever we could, preferred to engage in mlevo (palaver or idle talk). Not Comrade Nelson. Every day, but every day, in addition to his organisation’s programmes, he had numerous appointments with individuals, always on his own initiative, to discuss inter-organisational relations, prisoners’ complaints, joint strategies against prison authorities and general topics. Nelson Mandela is an indefatigable activist for human rights.’4
An energetic and forceful political organiser – and a maverick among ministers in Mandela’s first cabinet – Mac Maharaj had proven a handful for his jailers on Robben Island. He devised ingenious plans for smuggling Mandela’s writings out of prison. Functioning as a troubleshooter who unravelled difficult situations during the transition, he wasn’t anybody’s cheerleader, which others could find disconcerting. He ascribes his former inmate’s success in surviving incarceration to the older leader’s ‘extraordinary self-control’.
‘Mandela’s greatest achievements stem from engaging with others by proceeding from their assumptions and carefully marshalling arguments to move them to his conclusions. His line of advance is developed on the other party’s line of attack. In private, he never stops trying to understand the other side, be it the enemy, an adversary, an opponent or his own colleague.’5
But what was to heighten Mandela’s stature among supporter and foe alike was his unerring sense of timing. He seized every opportunity to make an impact, never, in the process, allowing an affront, however insignificant, to pass unchallenged. He confronted the authorities at every turn, invoking the rights of prisoners and resisting any form of humiliation against him and his fellow inmates. Over time, he fought the prison officials, for small things, little freedoms, for the long trousers. Slowly, inevitably – mainly through the testimonies of freed prisoners and friendly jurists who could visit the men inside – the struggles and privation inside prison became known to the outside world. So, too, did the invincibility of the spirit of one man.
* * *
It is possibly only in popular culture, sports and the arts – especially music, film and dance – that the world has been able to get a richer picture, as it were, of Mandela’s infectious humanity. The liberation songs inspiring a generation of political activists, from the 1960s to the 1990s, invoked Mandela’s name. Internationally, artists like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, once caged birds at home who were freed to soar in exile, collaborated with global household names like Harry Belafonte, Quincy Jones and many others to popularise the struggle of the people of South Africa – a struggle that had become synonymous with Mandela’s name.* Tony Hollingsworth, who produced the star-studded ‘Mandela concerts’ at Wembley Stadium in 1988 and 1990, credits Mandela’s global appeal for the success of the extravaganzas.
The struggle in South Africa, which forced the world to examine its own conscience – hence the various resolutions at the United Nations condemning apartheid as a crime against humanity – found its anchor in Mandela. As the struggle took shape, its message of courage spreading to all corners of the world, it bore on its face the image of one man. It was common for representatives of the ANC to open their address to world bodies with the words: ‘We greet you in the name of Nelson Mandela and the struggling masses of South Africa.’
The longer he was incarcerated, the more the world opened its arms to Mandela’s political kith and kin, especially those residing in exactly those areas from which South Africa was barred. Exiles like Barry Feinberg, Ronnie Kasrils, Pallo Jordan, John Matshikiza, Billy Nannan – and many others who later occupied important positions in the new South Africa – went on to form Mayibuye, the cultural unit of the ANC, which read to audiences, sang and did short sketches about life in South Africa, their repertoire including Mandela’s speech at the dock.*
Their tours of various countries in Western Europe in the 1970s were continued in the 1980s by the Amandla Cultural Ensemble, which, having originated in the ANC camps in Angola, would once in a while have President O. R. Tambo making a guest appearance and conducting the ensemble.6 Elsewhere, cultural activists like James Phillips established and trained choirs in West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Wales and the United States to sing the liberation songs in the indigenous languages of the people of South Africa. For the packed audiences at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, seeing a troupe of young flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked people singing and shimmying to ‘Shosholoza Mandela’ was infinitely more eloquent than any political speech.
By the time he was released, Mandela had become the world’s most famous political prisoner. He became, according to some, the most recognisable brand after Coca-Cola – and not only in Western circles.7 The Rwandan president of the World Youth Alliance, Obadias Ndaba, writes:
From the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of people in my remote world named their newborns after him. Today, I have a number of childhood friends called Mandela even though the name itself has nothing to do with our culture. As such, I grew up with a mindset associating the name Mandela with something good to emulate: love, freedom and peace, which weren’t present under the madness of [the late Zairean dictator] Mobutu [Sese Seko]. As a people of cattle herders, we even rejoiced in the fact that Mandela herded cattle as a child.8
Nelson Mandela defied expectation in his single-minded quest to humanise his adversaries and – in word and deed – even his own people who were scarred and traumatised by the excesses of the apartheid regime. He embraced his erstwhile jailers, like Christo Brand and James Gregory and Jack Swart, giving them a place of honour during his inauguration on 10 May 1994. He had lunch with Percy Yutar, the prosecutor who – according to George Bizos – had ‘showed his lack of respect for ethical legal practice’.9 During the Rivonia Trial of 1963–4, even though Mandela and his co-accused had been charged with sabotage, Yutar had voiced his preference for them to be charged with high treason, an offence that was more likely to lead to their death by hanging.10
Mandela believed that reconciliation and national unity were one side of the same coin, of which reconstruction and development were the other side – something that could be arrived at ‘through a process of reciprocity’ in which everyone should ‘be part – and be seen to be part – of the task of reconstruction and transformation of our country’.11
Mandela’s nation-building project required that there should be harmony between the diverse elements of South African society. That harmony could only be achieved if those who had benefited from the exploitations of the apartheid era understood that it was now time to share their resources for the benefit of all. Only then would South Africa have a chance of shaping an equitable future. The alternative was conflagration.
Politically, even though the ANC had gained the lion’s share of representation in the Government of National Unity, Mandela wanted to explore the notion of smaller parties participating in government. He held discussions with the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, Azanian People’s Organisation, Democratic Party, Conservative Party and Freedom Front. Although the Constitution made no provision for the inclusion of those parties in cabinet, Mandela said that he was prepared to work for a change in the Constitution to accommodate them.
This was not an act of misplaced altruism but an understanding of, among other policy precepts, the Freedom Charter, which declares that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ and ‘All national groups shall have equal rights’.12 But Mandela knew that he would be remiss if he ignored that the very route towards the vaunted ideal of equality started off from a series
of historical inequities. And he knew that current injustices had their root in historical inequities. Mandela was determined to face the challenge of getting the group that had monopolised power to accept its loss of power and commit to the creation of a just and reconciled society.
That society couldn’t be created without hard work. Mandela had to enter the minds of the peoples forced by time and history to stare at each other from across a wide gulf. He had immersed himself in studying Afrikaans history and culture, roping in his erstwhile jailers as part of his research. He was as familiar with how the Afrikaners would seek to control their fears by holding on to power, as he was of the potential harm if the black masses suspected that their hard-won victories would fall short of securing them lasting political power. Women’s rights advocate and former First Lady of South Africa Zanele Mbeki, in an aside to a friend, encapsulated the tragedy of perceptions between blacks and whites. Blacks, she said, see whites as people who’ve gone to heaven without first dying.13
Mandela had singled out Afrikaners for his initiative of reconciliation for the simple reason that they were a population group that was largely behind the ascendance to power of the National Party. Much more than that, however, was the knowledge that the Afrikaners were also indigenous to South Africa without a home elsewhere.* They were reputed to be straight shooters without the guile or insincerity of their English-speaking counterparts, whom black people credited with having started it all. The Colour Bar was a British colonial invention; the Afrikaner, in devising apartheid, merely worked from a reliable template.† Mandela knew, also, that if the Afrikaners – who share a history of poverty with Africans – accepted the change represented by the new democracy, they would form the backbone of its defence.
Despite all that, Mandela was aware of nuances within communities and that he would be making a mistake if he merely painted Afrikaners with a broad brush and overlooked the fact that, as a group, they were socially differentiated and politically divided over the transition.
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