by Alec Russell
Smiling his famous dazzling beam, he summoned the schoolgirls. His bodyguard, long since inured to his whims, did a minuscule shrug to the presidential secretary as if to say ‘here we go again’, while Mandela wove his magic, asking the girls where they were from and where they went to school before concluding with a playful question about their ambitions.
‘So what do you want to do when you grow up?’ he asked.
‘Do you want to be a politician?’
‘Oh no,’ one of them gasped. ‘That is too much hard work ‘ Mandela laughed as if it was the funniest thing he had heard all week. Then he turned to the girls’ companions and delivered an impromptu homily on the importance of going to school before moving back to the doorway to greet the Carlton’s manager with the warmth most of us reserve for a long-lost friend.
I was there in my capacity as head of South Africa’s Foreign Correspondents’ Association as he was due to address us over lunch. I had watched his charm at work many times before over the years. But his magnetism had lost none of its powers. He switched from cheeky family confidant, asking my wife how long it had taken her to persuade me to get married, to mischievous quipster, joking that he had just come from the African Development Bank, where he had asked for the keys of the safe, to pillar of rectitude.
‘I will defer to you, Mr. Chairman, in everything,’ he said when I asked when he wanted to speak. ‘I am sure you know what is best. I am in your hands.’
Thus we gathered around him over lunch open-mouthed, like novices before a seer, utterly unable to pose a serious question as he indulged what his friends joke is his desire to go down in history as the grandfather of story telling. He started with a Solomonic tale about how one Christmas he had been called on to mediate in a chicken dispute in his home village in the Transkei region. From time to time he lost the thread – and I had in fact heard the chicken story before – but as with all the best stories it was the telling of it that mattered. He closed with a lecture on the importance of Africans learning good time keeping.
Mandela can be electric when he speaks off the cuff, but he is ponderous when delivering formal speeches, and so it came as no surprise that his address elicited nothing new, particularly since the ANC’s triennial congress was three weeks away. But no one was disappointed. As he headed for the exit, a gaggle of journalists and waiters blocked his path to shake his hand. Halfway down the line he stopped in front of one of my female colleagues, a striking six-foot television producer. Ever the lady’s man he looked her up and down with an approving glance.
‘You must play sport. Do you play basketball?’ he asked the astonished young woman. Startled to be flirted with by the world’s most popular statesman, she spluttered that swimming was her only exercise. He did the closest thing there is to a presidential wink. Then he pottered on to the door with a broad smile.
So what is his secret? Good manners play a large part. Mandela is a perfect synthesis of informality with form; and his especial brilliance is knowing when and where each applies. His values blend the stem precepts of the British missionaries who taught him in his early years in the Transkei with the mores of the proud Thembu chief in whose home he was raised. He is a model of courtly old-world charm, although he is also a stickler for protocol. As a young lawyer he was disappointed on meeting a leading white radical lawyer who was not wearing a tie. Fifty years later when he was introduced in the Bundestag to MPs from Germany’s Green Party, he chided them for not wearing suits, asking them how they thought they would be taken seriously if they were dressed informally. He regularly remonstrated with reporters for asking him about his private life, saying it was not right to ask an old man such personal questions. Young guns in the ANC leadership soon learned that the genial grandfather figure who would always ask them about their families had more than a touch of a Victorian headmaster.
Six months into the new era, Whitney Houston, the black American singer who was an idol for black South Africans, was performing in Johannesburg over a weekend when the party’s national executive was meeting in Cape Town. Several of the younger members were desperate to go, but so wary were they of incurring Mandela’s disapproval by asking to miss part of the meeting that they slipped out on the Saturday evening, flew the two hours to Johannesburg in time for the second half of the concert and then flew straight back in time for the Sunday morning session. ‘There we were, a bunch of former freedom fighters with years of imprisonment and activism behind us, and we suddenly felt like naughty children,’ recalled Mannie Oipico, one of the rebels, who was premier of the Northern Cape province. ‘We just knew it would be a big mistake to tell him.’
Mandela, however, tempers his propriety with a dislike of pomposity and a finely judged wit. He seldom loses sight of the humorous side of his change of fortune. He was once being interviewed in his office when the telephone rang. On picking up the receiver and listening to the receptionist, he paused and then turned to the interviewer.
‘It’s P.W.’ he said in a stage whisper, meaning De Klerk’s predecessor, P.W. Botha. When the Great Crocodile, as Botha was known in his heyday, came on the line to plead for Mandela to intervene on behalf of right-wing prisoners, Mandela chatted away in Afrikaans as if to an old friend.
While a believer in etiquette, Mandela could certainly never be accused of being staid. Early in his presidency he urged South Africans to address him by his clan name, ‘Madiba’. He also did to South Africa’s fashion what he had already done to its politics – he turned it upside down. Taking their cue from European royalty, post-colonial African leaders have tradition ally had eclectic tastes. The old Big Man favourites were khaki fatigues, pantomime uniforms, Afro-chic or Savile Row. Mandela, however, forged his own distinctive path, opting for jazzy flowing shirts, garish but always elegant and never an eyesore.
‘Madiba’, humorously known as ‘Madiba Formal’, even became an accepted dress code on invitations.
His old friend Bishop Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, was a lone critic, arguing that he preferred Mandela in a suit – prompting a classic Mandela retort: ‘That’s a bit rich coming from a man in a dress.’ And yet Mandela never made the mistake of looking casual when an occasion called for respect. He wore one of his shirts to the summit of UN world leaders but a dark grey suit for his speech to a joint sitting of the two houses of parliament during his state visit to Britain in 1996. This was a forum he had long admired. One of the few surviving pre-Robben Island photographs of Mandela shows him glancing up at the sky outside Westminster in 1962, when he was roaming the world’s capitals drumming up support for the
‘struggle’.
Such was his impact during his state visit that one bedazzled British commentator went so far as to hail him as a very British African leader. 1 After the long years of greedy and cruel post colonial presidents, Mandela was seen as a man whom Britain could understand and trust. He himself writes of his anglophilia, both at mission school and on his visit in 1962. There is indeed a touch of the old-fashioned country gentleman about him. Legend has it that one of his first questions on being freed was to ask whether the Australian cricketing genius Don Bradman was still alive. He loves his garden, reads Shakespeare – or at least did in prison, when he had the time – and goes for an early morning ‘constitutional’ each day.
But it was a huge mistake, not to say presumption, to assume Mandela was a Brit isjud. It is just that he knows what the Brits want to hear. He is a natural socializer, and although even his closest friends confide they are frozen from his inner feelings, he loves meeting people, particularly children and women. Wherever he goes he has a cheery ‘Hello. How are you?’ His skill is to dredge out a connection, however tenuous, to put interlocutors at their ease. His eyes rolled when I interviewed him in 1994 and introduced myself as the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.
‘Your paper interviewed me before,’ he said. ‘In August.’ It was then December and my mind raced: it had not been me; had someone else come out from my
paper and interviewed him? After a suitable pause, Mandela continued in his usual deliberate manner: ‘August 21st ... 1964.’
It transpires that the Telegraph has no record of the interview.
Indeed Telegraph journalists of the era do not recall a ‘Mr. Newman’, the name Mandela gave the reporter in his autobiography, ever working for the newspaper. It could be that a South African security agent masqueraded as a correspondent to try to elicit some information, or that a local newspaper sold the story to the Telegraph, or that Mandela’s memory was faulty. What ever the truth of the matter, the man whom I grew up knowing as the name of a dozen student common rooms had won me over before the interview had even begun.
Mandela was at his most brilliant when charming the Afrikaner. The dourest of Nationalists melted at his approach, beguiled by his mixture of blokishness and brio. He was after all an amalgam after their hearts. He dispensed with the British desire for the ‘done thing’ but had a respect for authority and age. He appealed to Afrikaners’ rustic hankerings. Soon after his release from prison he confided that more than anything he had missed the fresh smell of the first summer rains on the veld after the dry winter months. He also felt they had an affinity through their common heritage, African and Afrikaner, oppressed and oppressor, and latterly ruler and ruled.
At the start of his presidency he was a one-man cure for Afrikaners’ ‘new’ South African blues. I lost count of the number of right-wingers I met who were converted by a brief encounter with the ‘old man’. Lieutenant Attie Wessels, a dour weather-beaten police officer in the remote Northern Cape town of Griquastad, was standing at a road-block when Mandela broke away from an official tour and accosted him.
‘He shook my hand and said he’d try to pay me more,’
Wessels recalled moments later. I’ll be telling my children about this until the day I die.’
Mandela’s most famous reconciliatory pose came in the 1995 Rugby World Cup when he embraced the cause of the Springboks, the national rugby side. For so long they had been a symbol of white muscular defiance. By sporting a Springbok cap and jersey at the final he sent a signal to the volk that all that they cherished was safe in the ‘new’ South Africa, and created an image that will endure in the collective white memory far longer than the sight of Mandela taking the salute at his inauguration. Officials later revealed, to no one’s surprise, that it was a personal decision.
The success of his Springbok support set in motion an extraordinary chain of events, which led some critics to suggest he had taken his crusade too far. He hosted a lunch for Percy Yutar, the prosecutor who had argued long and hard for the death sentence in the Rivonia trial, and had aired his disappointment when Mandela was only jailed for life. He invited the widows and wives of Nationalist former heads of state and black liberation leaders to tea at his residence in Pretoria. Then, as the apex of his reconciliatory mission, he paid a call on Betsy Verwoerd, the widow of the architect of grand apartheid, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd.
The frail ninety-four-year-old had declared she was too weak to take up his invitation to tea with the wives and widows but would be at home if he was in the neighbourhood. She can never have expected he would take up her offer. Her husband, who was assassinated in 1966, refined the apartheid edifice and introduced the legislation that led to the banning of the ANC and Mandela’s imprisonment. Verwoerd was reputed to have prided himself on never having shaken a black man’s hand. And yet there was his widow, wrinkled like a dried-up fruit, offering Mandela coffee and koeksusters (treacly Afrikaner cakes) and glancing up at him for approval as she read out a statement in a quavering voice.
The sight of Mandela leaning over and helping her to read her message was a striking symbol of how South Africa had moved forward. Mrs Verwoerd was one of a handful of diehard separatists living in Orania, a whites-only settlement in one of the remotest parts of the country. Mandela was making the point that he could and would go anywhere in South Africa. Critics, however, argued that his trip was a gimmick and that he would do better focusing on uplifting the poor. At an impromptu press conference on the Verwoerds’ stoep, a black journalist pointedly asked Mandela how a community which barred blacks fitted into the new South Africa. A testy Mandela replied that his reconciliatory drive cost South Africa only a few moments of his time and yet helped to bind the fragile fledgling nation together and had saved it from war.
Anyone who spent more than a few weeks in Mandela’s South Africa will know the question which no one has satisfactorily answered – how can he have emerged from prison so lacking in bitterness, or rather, as many suspect, so good at disguising it?
Just like De Klerk fielding the question about his decision to unban the ANC, Mandela has developed a pat answer. Disappointing as it is to believers in the Mandela myth, he is the first to reject the Christian echoes, talk of saintly attributes, and parallels with Gandhi. For Mandela humanitarianism came a distant second to strategy. Reconciliation was a policy with specific aims, which he identified in prison and then re-emphasized early in his presidency: reaching a settlement, avoiding civil war and shaping the country’s future.
The foundation of his reconciliatory vision can be found in his early career. As a young man he was in the Africanist wing of the ANC Youth League, which argued that blacks should fight white rule on their own, without the support of Asians or whites. ‘While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he had climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition,’ he later recalled.2 But later, after contact with white Communists and ANC members, he came to believe that the ANC’s doctrine of non-racialism was the only way forward for South Africa. As he rose through the ranks of the ANC in the Fifties he had bitter arguments with the Africanists who eventually broke off to form the Pan Africanist Congress.
Raymond Mhlaba, an ANC stalwart who was sentenced with Mandela in 1964 and served almost as long, told me that soon after they arrived on Robben Island they sat down and assessed that apartheid could not work forever. It did not take long, Mhlaba said, to learn to lay aside their anger at the petty prejudices of whites and focus their energies on defeating the system. Confident that eventually they were bound to be released, they started preparing for power and particularly how to handle whites.
‘I knew that people expected me to harbour anger towards whites,’ Mandela said when recalling the morning after his release. ‘But I had none. In prison my anger towards whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew.’3 South Africans had good reason to expect him to be angry. When he went into prison he had a reputation for spirited leadership, as immortalized in his defiant performance in the dock in the Rivonia trial when he was on trial for treason facing a possible death sentence and yet refused to tone down his criticism of apartheid. But he was also known for his impulsiveness. His decision to launch the ANC into the armed struggle in 1961 went against the instincts of many of his colleagues, including the then leader,
Chief Albert Luthuli, who was shortly to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to effect peaceful change. It also gave the authorities the excuse they needed to clamp down on opponents.
Mandela’s subsequent- and brief- career as an underground revolutionary was also marked by rashness. He had followed Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and hoped that the conditions were right for a similar rolling uprising in South Africa, an assumption that flew in the face of logic given the strength of the white government. Baroness Orczy’s Sir Percy Blakeney, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of the French Revolution, would have snorted with derision at the idea of Mandela being a ‘Black Pimpernel’, his nicknamwhen he was on the run from 1961 until his arrest the following year. He flouted the most basic rules of insurgency, carrying incriminating documents and notes on his per son as he toured the country visiting known members of the ANC. Accounts suggest the ANC was riddled with informers and that the authorities just bided their time before picking up its leaders. Indeed the biggest diffi
culty the government faced seems to have been in getting a conviction, so incompetent were the police in preparing their case. But the police’s shortcomings were offset by the ANC’s, for which the party leadership, including Mandela, has to take much of the blame. By 1965, the year after he was imprisoned for life, the ANC was a spent force in South Africa with all its leaders exiled or in prison.
Eleven years would pass until the anti-apartheid movement would strike a serious blow in South Africa with the school children’s uprising in Soweto in 1976- and that was an internal protest which owed nothing to the ANC.
Mandela’s isjudgements, however, have to be seen in con text. It is easy in hindsight to argue that liberal politics had still not run their course, and that by pursuing a policy of civil disobedience the ANC might have won some concessions. But by 1961 the ANC had been waging a non-violent protest for nearly forty years and had made no progress. The government did not reply to Mandela’s letters calling for dialogue. The Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 when white police shot dead sixty-nine black protesters showed how far the government was willing to go in defence of white rule.
One mainly white school of thought would have it that prison was the making of Mandela. After his release Nationalists liked to argue that in the rest of Africa he would have been executed for his crimes and that they were owed a debt of gratitude for preserving him intact. Certainly there was a hypocrisy in the way the world treated Mandela: blacks mistreating blacks was not as bad as whites mistreating blacks. Had Mandela been in prison anywhere else in Africa it is a fair assumption that he would not have been half as well known. Mandela himself readily admits that he was able to mature behind bars. The chapters of his autobiography detailing his prison years read in places like a philosophical handbook on leadership. Time and again he writes how he thought that such an attitude or action was, or was not, the right thing for a leader to do. He had time to analyse South Africa and he learned to turn his anger towards apartheid and away from its beneficiaries. He was also able to watch as his contemporaries floundered in the rest of Africa and grew to realize that seducing South Africa’s whites was critical to the nation’s chances. Samora Machel, Mozambique’s independence leader who was killed in a mysterious plane crash on the South African border in 1986 and whose widow, Graca, was to marry Mandela twelve years later, reflected during his presidency that Mozambique had been crippled by the flight of the Portuguese colonists.
