Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (20 page)

The meeting had just gotten started when an assistant walked in to inform Mandela that he had a phone call from a head of state. He left the room and the thirty or so men and women of the ANC’s supreme decision-making body carried on without him. The consensus was overwhelmingly in favor of scrapping “Die Stem” and replacing it with “Nkosi Sikelele.” The NEC members were reveling in their decision and all it symbolized for the new South Africa when Mandela returned. They told him what they’d decided and he said, ’Well, I am sorry. I don’t want to be rude, but . . . I think I should express myself on this motion. I never thought seasoned people such as yourselves would take a decision of such magnitude on such an important matter without even waiting for the president of your organization.”

And then Mandela sternly set forth his point of view. “This song that you treat so easily holds the emotions of many people who you don’t represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very—the only—basis that we are building upon: reconciliation.”

The ladies and gentlemen of the National Executive Committee of the ANC cringed with embarrassment. Mandela proposed instead that South Africa should have two anthems, to be played one immediately after the other at all official ceremonies, from presidential inaugurations to international rugby matches: “Die Stem” and “Nkosi Sikelele.” Quickly convinced by the logic of Mandela’s argument, the freedom fighters unanimously caved in. Jacob Zuma, who had been chairing the meeting said, “Well, I . . . I . . . I think the matter is clear, comrades. I think the matter is clear.” There were no objections.

The NEC capitulated in the face of Mandela’s wrath because they realized that his response to the anthem question was the correct one in tactical terms. He had in fact lectured the NEC on the business of winning over the Afrikaners, on showing respect for their symbols; on going out of one’s way, for example, to employ a few words of Afrikaans at the beginning of a speech. “You don’t address their brains,” he told them, “you address their hearts.”

With Constand Viljoen, Mandela addressed both head and heart, but it was the heart that won out in the end. It helped a huge amount that on March 11 the Volksfront met its Waterloo, shoving the general in the direction toward which Mandela had been gently pushing him.

With the elections barely six weeks away, Viljoen responded to a call from one of his black allies in the Freedom Alliance. It was not Buthelezi this time, but the leader of another of the tribal statelets that the ideologue-in-chief Hendrick Verwoerd had devised as part of his “grand apartheid” strategy, a man by the name of Lucas Mangope, whose rule over Bophuthatswana was under threat from the majority of his ANC-supporting citizens, who found his dependence on Pretoria offensive. Viljoen mobilized a force of over a thousand men to go to the capital of “Bop,” a town called Mmabatho. The whole thing turned into a fiasco when Eugene Terreblanche’s AWB entered the fray and went on what the Afrikaans papers were to describe as a “kaffirskietpiekniek”—a kaffir-shooting picnic. Mangope’s security forces revolted, turning their guns on the Volksfronters, and when the SADF arrived late in the day in a column of armored vehicles, Viljoen’s forces fled the field in disarray.

What happened at Mmabatho is often given as the sole reason why Viljoen decided to abandon the Boer resistance struggle. He confided that there was more to it than that. Once rid of the AWB hooligan element, it would have remained within his means to carry on leading an effective “military” campaign, even if everybody else would have described it as terrorism. “We had a plan in place. We could have stopped the elections from taking place, and not with the SADF, but on our own. We had the means, we had the arms, we had the tactics, and we had the will. Not to take power, not to defeat the SADF, but yes, to prevent the elections from taking place successfully, no doubt about that.”

Arrie Rossouw, perceived four years after Mandela’s release as a heavyweight of Afrikaner journalism, a man who would go on to become editor-in-chief of both
Beeld
and
Die Burger
, agreed. “No question, he could have caused terrible damage to this country,” Rossouw said. “He could easily have placed four hundred highly trained former members of the Reconnaissance regiments [Special Forces] under his command, and with them, well armed, he could have blown up airports, train stations, bus stations, assassinated people. They would not have managed to overthrow the government—that was the lesson of Mmabatho—but they could have paralyzed the economy and caused absolute political chaos. And they could have gone on for years and years.”

They could have done, in other words, what the IRA did in Northern Ireland for thirty years, but with far more catastrophic impact. This was partly because they disposed of more arms and more men with more sophisticated military experience, but mainly because South Africa was a fragile, volatile, infant democracy, with a brittle economy, susceptible in a way neither Ireland nor Britain had been to chaos and collapse. The alarming thing was that it fell not to a collective but to one man to decide which of the two it would be, peace or war.

“Yes, it was entirely my decision. Entirely.” Viljoen solemnly confirmed. “During those final weeks before the election, opinion was divided in the Afrikaner Volksfront, fifty-fifty between those who wanted the violent option, disrupting the elections and the whole democratic process in South Africa, and those who wanted a negotiated solution.” So how did he reach his decision? “I always took the view that war or violence is not an easy option. I know war. So I told my supporters that I would take it upon myself whether to go to war or not to go. It was the most difficult decision I had to take in my life.

“In the military you must understand that before making up our minds on a question like this we weigh up all the factors, we evaluate, we think hard, and it is only after a long process that we decide. I considered that the right option was negotiations, and participation in the elections. I considered that it was best for the country, and best for the Afrikaner people.”

But what was the decisive factor? Was it the AWB rabble? Was it Mmabatho? He replied without hesitation, “The character of the opponent—whether you can trust him, whether you believe he is genuinely for peace. The important thing when you sit down and negotiate with an enemy is the character of the people you have across the table from you and whether they carry their people’s support. Mandela had both.”

Few could withstand Mandela’s charm offensives—not even De Klerk, not even when they were campaigning against each other in the run-up to the April 27 elections, not even after they had gone head-to-head in a U.S.-style live TV debate. De Klerk, young enough to be Mandela’s son, proved sharper and better prepared than his adversary. Then, as the debate was reaching its conclusion, Mandela reached out and shook the president’s hand, praising him as “a true son of Africa.” De Klerk, flabbergasted, could only accept the handshake and put on his best smile, though he knew that in so doing Mandela was landing a knockout punch.

“I felt, and everybody felt, that I was winning on points,” De Klerk would recall. “Then he really pulled up level again by suddenly reaching out, praising me, and taking my hand in front of all the television cameras. That might have been preplanned. I think it was a political move. But I do think that the majority of his media triumphs were an instinctive reaction from him. I think he has a wonderful talent in that regard.” A few days after the debate, De Klerk himself made a gracious public statement. During his very last press conference before the election, he was asked his opinion of his opponent. “Nelson Mandela,” replied De Klerk, spreading out his hands as if in surrender, “is a man of destiny.”

As part of the election campaign Mandela went on a nighttime talk show on Johannesburg’s Radio 702 to answer callers’ questions live. Eddie von Maltitz, the first Volksfront warrior to enter the World Trade Centre during the raid, was down on his farm with some of his “kommandos,” listening to 702. Urged by his comrades to call in and give the “kaffir” a piece of his mind, Von Maltitz obliged. For a full three minutes he ranted and raved at Mandela—communism that, terrorists the other, the destruction of our culture, civilized standards, and norms. He ended with a brutally direct threat. “This country will be embroiled in a bloodbath if you carry on walking with the Communist thugs.”

After a tense pause, Mandela replied, “Well, Eddie, I regard you as a worthy South African and I have no doubt that if we were to sit down and exchange views I will come closer to you and you will come closer to me. Let’s talk, Eddie.”

“Uh . . . Right, okay, Mr. Mandela,” Eddie muttered in confusion. “Thank you,” and he hung up.

At his farm three months later, while Eddie still wore a green military jumpsuit, light green camouflage boots, and a 9mm pistol tucked into his waist, he was a changed man, He had stopped training his kommandos; he had abandoned his preparations for war. The exchange on Radio 702 had changed everything. “That was what got me thinking,” he said. The new ANC premier of the Orange Free State, where he lived, was the man who pushed him over the edge. The premier’s name was “Terror” Lekota, known as such because of his lethal goal-scoring on the soccer field. Lekota, who had spent time on Robben Island during Mandela’s later years there, had many of Mandela’s instincts. He made it his first mission on coming to power to win over the Free State’s Afrikaner farmers. If he roped in Von Maltitz, he would go a long way toward corralling the rest. Lekota himself called Von Maltitz and invited him to his birthday party at his residence in the state capital, Bloemfontein. Von Maltitz said no, but Lekota insisted. He called again. “Please, Eddie, I’d really like you to come.” Von Maltitz said he would talk to his men and get back to him. “We talked and figured, what could we lose?” Von Maltitz recalled. “So when he called back the next time I said yes.”

Von Maltitz turned up at what he called “the big house” in Bloemfontein fully armed. “I did not want to do a Piet Retief with Dingaan,” he said. He went into the house and joined the party, where black people predominated, without being searched. “Terror Lekota saw me across the room and he came over and gave me a big hug. He must have felt my guns but he said nothing. He just kept smiling. I liked him. He was genuine. Like Mr. Mandela, a genuine man. So that’s why I figured, Let’s give them a chance; they deserve it.”

Why? Because Mr. Mandela, and his new friend Terror had treated him with respect—Walter Sisulu’s “ordinary respect.” “I never got that respect from De Klerk and the National Party, you know. But from Mr. Mandela, yes . . . I believe, I really do, that we must give them a chance.”

The ANC had won the elections with just under two-thirds of the national vote, and nearly 89 percent of the black one. Of the rest, one percent went to the openly antiwhite PAC—whose “one settler, one bullet” slogan ANC supporters jeeringly translated into “one settler, one percent”; and 10 percent went to Inkatha. (Abandoned by Viljoen, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was left with no option but to join the election process.) The National Party got 20 percent, which meant four seats in cabinet, including the deputy presidency for De Klerk, in the new coalition government over which Mandela would preside. And Viljoen’s party, which he named the Freedom Front, got 2 percent of the vote, which meant a not unrespectable nine seats in the new, multicolored parliament.

No sooner had the results come in than John Reinders, chief of presidential protocol under both De Klerk and P. W. Botha, contacted his former employers, the Department of Correctional Services. Botha had dragged him out of the prison bureaucracy in 1980, when he had occupied the rank of major, but Reinders found to his relief that, yes, they had a job for him.

His last job before leaving was to organize Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration on May 10, 1994. It was a logistical nightmare compared to De Klerk’s inauguration, to which no foreign delegation—save locally based diplomats—had thought fit to travel. This inauguration would be quite different. Four thousand people gathered at Pretoria’s seat of power, an early-twentieth century pile called the Union Buildings atop a hill overlooking the city. Among the guests were figures otherwise unimaginable in the same room, such as Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro, Prince Philip, Yassir Arafat, and the president of Israel, Chaim Herzog. The two national anthems—“Nkosi Sikelele” and “Die Stem”—were played side by side as the brand-new national flag fluttered. It was the most multicolored flag in the world, a sort of crazy quilt in black, green, gold, red, blue, and white, combining colors associated with black resistance with those of the old South African flag. Mandela took his oath of office before a white judge flanked by his daughter Zenani, and surrounded by black former prisoners and white SADF generals standing to attention in full-dress uniform. (“A few years earlier they would have arrested me,” he joked later.) The ceremony closed with the spectacle of South African Air Force jets soaring overhead painting the colors of the new flag in the sky.