Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (19 page)

As the two delegations eyed each other, unsure whether to be fascinated or appalled to find themselves all in the same room, Mandela gently invited General Viljoen to take a seat next to him in the living room. Formal discussions around a large conference table would start presently, but first Mandela paid P. W. Botha the compliment of replicating with Viljoen the elegant manners the big crocodile had shown him four years earlier in Tuynhuys. He offered Constand a cup of tea, and poured it himself. “Do you take milk, General?” The general said he did. “Would you like some sugar?” “Yes, please, Mr. Mandela,” said the general.

Viljoen stirred his tea in a state of quiet confusion, thrown by Mandela’s show of courtly respect. This was not at all what he had expected. Long cemented stereotypes were crumbling. What he did not—and by his upbringing could not—see at that moment was that in political terms he was out of his class. Mandela, as a man of the world rather than a man of one
volk
, had a capacity the general lacked to penetrate the minds of people culturally different from himself. He knew when to flatter and soothe (Niël Barnard spoke of Mandela’s “almost animal instinct for tapping into people’s vulnerabilities and reassuring them.”); he knew also when he could go on the offensive, without causing offense, thus conveying an impression of directness that he knew the general would take to, as P. W. Botha had done. Years later, Mandela said, “I have worked with Afrikaners ever since I was in training as a lawyer, and I found them to be simple and straightforward. And if he doesn’t like you, an Afrikaner, he’ll say ‘
gaan kak
’ ”—“Get lost” would be a polite translation of the Boer original. “But if he likes you, then he agrees with you. They have the ability to stick to what they have undertaken.”

Mandela—polite but decidedly not mincing his words—worked on making Viljoen like him. “Mandela began by saying that the Afrikaner people had done him and his people a lot of harm,” General Viljoen recalled, “and yet somehow he had a great respect for the Afrikaners. He said that maybe it was because, though it was hard to explain to outsiders, the Afrikaner had a humanity about him. He said that if the child of an Afrikaner’s farm laborer got sick, the Afrikaner farmer would take him in his bakkie to the hospital and phone to check up on him and take his parents to see him and be decent. At the same time the Afrikaner farmer will treat his worker hard, expect him to work hard. He will be a demanding employer, Mandela said, but he was also human and that aspect of the Afrikaner was something Mandela was very impressed by.”

Viljoen was amazed at Mandela’s ability to get past the surface caricatures and reach such a deep understanding, as he saw it, of the true nature of the Afrikaner. Just how many black farm laborers Mandela might have found to validate his assessment of the “baas” is another matter. The point was that Mandela knew that his portrait of the Afrikaner as rugged Christian would conform absolutely with Viljoen’s own vision of his people.

Viljoen was as intrigued as Botha had been when Mandela proceeded to point out the similarities between the histories of the blacks and the Afrikaners, both of whom had fought freedom wars. And, of course, Mandela was doing something that Viljoen had not expected. He was doing the general the courtesy of speaking to him in his own language.

Mandela had gauged the mood just right, establishing his bona fides with Viljoen as a man with whom he could talk and expect to be understood. But the real substance of the encounter came at the end of their conversation over that same cup of tea. Braam and Niehaus were eavesdropping at just the right time.

“I hope you understand how difficult it is for white people to trust that things are going to go right with the ANC in power,” Constand Viljoen said, adding, “I am not sure if you realize it, Mr. Mandela, but this can be stopped.”

By “this,” Viljoen meant the peaceful transition to black rule. He stopped short of saying it in so many words, but he was clearly indicating to Mandela that there would be military intervention and the right wing, aided by the SADF, could take over if the Afrikaners were not given a chunk of sovereign territory inside South Africa’s borders.

Gravely, Mandela replied: “Look, General, I know that the military forces you can muster are powerful and well-armed and well-trained; and that they are far more powerful than mine. Militarily we cannot fight you; we cannot win. If, however, you do go to war, you assuredly will not win either, not in the long run. Because, one, the international community will be totally behind us. And, two, we are too many, and you cannot kill us all. So then, what kind of life will there be for your people in this country? My people will go to the bush, the international pressure on you will be enormous and this country will become a living hell for all of us. Is that what you want? No, General, there can be no winners if we go to war.”

“This is so,” General Viljoen replied. “There can be no winner.”

And that was it. That was the understanding on which the far right and the black liberation movement built their dialogue. That first meeting in Houghton laid the basis for three and a half months of secret talks between delegations of the ANC and the Volksfront. The Volksfront wanted to establish the constitutional principle of an Afrikaner Israel, to which the ANC never quite said no, and never quite said yes, their main concern having been to keep Viljoen’s people talking, dangling before them the possibility of future talks on the constitution of their own longed-for “Boerestaat.”

These contacts continued apace despite a potentially destabilizing sequence of events during the last three months of 1993. First, negotiators at the World Trade Centre announced that South Africa’s first all-race elections would be held on April 27, 1994. Then they set up a committee to decide on a new national anthem and flag. Then Mangosuthu Buthelezi unmasked himself by forming a coalition with the white far-right, a body incorporating the Volksfront and Inkatha that called itself the Freedom Alliance. (Viljoen’s followers, impressed by Inkatha’s willingness to back up their rhetoric with force, cheered this development). Then Chris Hani’s killers, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, were condemned to death. Then a black woman was crowned Miss South Africa for the first time. Then, rubbing still more salt into the wound, Mandela and De Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, most important of all, Mandela and De Klerk presided over a ceremony at which the country’s new transitional constitution was solemnized. The outcome of three and a half years of negotiations was a compromise whereby the first democratically elected government would be a power-sharing coalition, lasting five years: the president would belong to the majority party but the configuration of the cabinet would reflect the proportion of the vote each party won. The new arrangements also provided guarantees that white civil servants, the military included, would not lose their jobs and that white farmers would not lose their land. Neither would there be any Nuremberg-style trials.

Despite the fact that he made this historic deal with De Klerk, Mandela always had more personal regard for Constand Viljoen—and indeed for P. W. Botha—than for the president who had let him free. In Mandela’s eyes, Viljoen was, like him, a patriarchal leader who, within the confines of his unworldly Boerness, had a big heart. Mandela saw mirrored in Viljoen qualities of his own—honesty, integrity, courage—that he liked.

In De Klerk, by contrast, Mandela saw little that he would wish to emulate. Never forgiving him for what he perceived to be his disregard for the loss of black life in the townships, he came to see the president as a lean-souled, slippery lawyer who dwelt in detail and lacked the temperament and conviction of a true leader. This was unfair in the view even of some of his own colleagues in the ANC’s National Executive Committee, but if there was one thing the proper Victorian gentleman in Mandela detested it was the sense that someone had betrayed his good faith.

Yet it was with De Klerk that Mandela received his joint Nobel Prize. This infuriated him, not because he judged it to be premature, which it was since nobody knew yet what the outcome of the race between peace and war was going to be, but because he believed, according to his old friend and lawyer George Bizos, that De Klerk did not deserve it, that it should have been awarded to Mandela and to the ANC as a whole. “When De Klerk gave his acceptance speech,” said George Bizos, who traveled to Norway with the Nobel delegation, “Mandela expected him to acknowledge that an injustice had been done by the cruelties of apartheid to the people of South Africa. There was no such statement in De Klerk’s address.” As if believing the propaganda, as if buying into the evening’s tacit half-truth that he had earned a position of moral equality with Mandela, all De Klerk said was that “mistakes” had been made by both sides. “I looked at Mandela. He just shook his head.”

That evening Mandela and De Klerk were standing by Oslo Cathedral watching a torchlit procession. Part of the ceremony involved a rendition of “Nkosi Sikelele.” Mandela noticed that, as the liberation anthem was sung, De Klerk chatted distractedly with his wife. Mandela’s patience finally snapped at a dinner hosted that night by the prime minister of Norway before 150 guests, members of his government and the diplomatic corps. Bizos was as shocked as everyone else present by the venom that left Mandela’s lips when he stood up to speak. “He gave the most horrible detail of what had happened to prisoners on Robben Island,” Bizos recalled, “including the burying of a man in the sand with his head out and urinating on him . . . he told the story as an example of the inhumanity there had been in this system, though he did actually stop short of saying, ‘Look, here are the people who represented that system.’ ”

Clearly, Mandela retained some residue of bitterness toward his jailers, contrary to his own claim in the press conference on the day after his release, and to the perception that his admirers worldwide wished to have of him. He was human after all; he was not a saint.

CHAPTER XI

“ADDRESS THEIR HEARTS”

1994

A simple, low-fat diet, vigorous exercise, fresh sea air, plenty of sleep, regular hours, practically zero stress: prison did have its compensations. It helped explain why Mandela’s doctors confirmed the evidence of those who watched him in action during his spectacularly eventful seventy-sixth year: he had the constitution of a fit man of fifty.

Nineteen ninety-three had been eventful; 1994 was shaping up to be more arduous still. Mandela was getting up at 4:30 every morning as a matter not only of routine, but of necessity. The black and white right were still refusing to sign up for the elections, and threatened war if they went ahead without them; in the event that the first ever multiracial vote did go ahead on April 27, as scheduled, there was the matter of a national election campaign to occupy himself with, and assuming that passed off successfully, he would then have a country to run—one that would present all the usual problems faced by countries everywhere, plus the certainty that the fundamental problem of stability, the prospect of counterrevolutionary terrorism of some sort, would not be going away.

The good news was that Constand Viljoen was losing his enthusiasm for war. Since his call to arms at Potchefstroom he had developed—with Mandela’s prodding—a sharper sense of the bloodbath he might unleash, and he was beginning to see that a black-led government mightn’t be as apocalyptic as he had first imagined. Yet Viljoen continued to urge his people to mobilize for war. “If you want to argue with a wolf, make sure you have a pistol in your hand,” was his motto. The problem was that he was not entirely certain anymore whether the wolf was a wolf, or a hound that could be tamed. He liked Mandela but had his doubts about the ANC; he worried that the leaders he was meeting with, like the ANC’s wily number two, Thabo Mbeki, might be abusing his bona fides, might seek to trick him into selling out his people. And there was another thing. If the ANC was playing an elaborately deceitful game, if they really did mean to convert South Africa to communism and exact terrible vengeance on whites but were pretending not to, the SADF high command had fallen for it completely. General Georg Meiring, Viljoen’s successor as head of the armed forces, had come out with a speech just before Christmas 1993 in which he had pledged his support for the new constitution. (One inducement to do so was a threat from the progressive-minded chief of the air force that he would bomb him if he turned the army against the new order.) Viljoen now knew that if the Volksfront went to war they would probably face the might of the same military he had served with such distinction and pride. Certain sectors of the SADF might still be relied upon to fight alongside the Boer resistance, but short of a progressively less likely coup at the top, the institution appeared to be aligned with Mandela and De Klerk.

General Viljoen felt more uncertain and uncomfortable than ever before. As the chances of victory for the Volksfront became more remote, his soldiers clamored more loudly for war. Mandela heard those cries too, and felt for Viljoen. He knew that Viljoen’s constituency needed something to cheer. The rest of the ANC leadership were not so clear on this point. At a meeting of the movement’s National Executive Committee early in 1994, the issue on the table was, what should the position of the new government be on the delicate question of the national anthem? The old anthem was clearly unacceptable. A part of “Die Stem,” a sombre martial tune, was an acceptably neutral entreaty to God to “guard our beloved land”; but another part of it—and this was the part black people heard—celebrated the triumphs of Retief, Pretorius, and the rest of the “trekkers” as they drove upward through South Africa in the nineteenth century, crushing black resistance, their “creaking wagons cutting their trails into the earth.” The unofficial anthem of black South Africa, “Nkosi Sikelele,” was the richly soulful expression of a long-suffering people yearning to be free.