Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (16 page)

In January 1993, just five months after the fiasco at the game against New Zealand, Mandela gave white South Africa the biggest, best, and least-deserved gift they could have imagined—the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Not only would South Africa be allowed to take part for the first time, but South Africa would stage the competition. Walter Sisulu headed a small delegation that met at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg with the top people of the International Rugby Board. All emerged from the meeting to declare their “elation” at the ANC’s decision unconditionally to support a proposal unthinkable only three years earlier, when Mandela was still in jail.

But instead of responding with the gratitude that Mandela had expected, the white right stepped up their resistance rhetoric and their plans for war. They saw that negotiations between the ANC and the government were inching toward democracy. De Klerk had announced just a few weeks later that he had set a target date for multirace elections, April 1994. The fears that prospect held outweighed Mandela’s sporting blandishments.

Within days of the rugby announcement, all the talk in political circles was of civil war. Even President de Klerk, a lawyer who generally tried to keep noise levels down, felt compelled by the intelligence information he was receiving to declare that the alternative to negotiations was “a devastating war.” A member of his cabinet said, “We are concerned by events in Yugoslavia—more so than most people realize.” So was the ANC. Mandela and his lieutenants openly worried about their dreams of democracy “drowning,” as Mandela himself put it, “in blood.”

On April 10, 1993, they nearly did. An odd couple emerged from the motley far-right crew to carry out the closest thing to regicide South Africa had seen since the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966, but with incalculably more dangerous consequences. Verwoerd had been stabbed to death by a half-mad parliamentary messenger. It was a shock to his family and supporters, but not to the political system, which carried on regardless. The assassination of Chris Hani was something else altogether.

Hani was, next to Mandela, black South Africa’s greatest hero. Had Mandela never been born, or had he died in prison, Hani would have been the leader of black South Africa by acclamation. Like Mandela, his myth preceded him. In exile for nearly thirty years, his face was unknown to the general public until the ANC was unbanned and he returned home shortly after Mandela’s release. The myth rested on two powerful arguments: he had led the two organizations the white regime feared most, Umkhonto we Sizwe and the South African Communist Party. The general rule among black militants was that the more an ANC leader was reviled by the government, the more he was admired. Hani, Mandela’s heir as “terrorist-in-chief ” in white eyes, had been a legend whose dimensions were compounded by tales of derring-do and survived assassination attempts that filtered back to the townships; by the rumor—entirely true—of the extreme poverty into which he had been born in the black, rural Eastern Cape.

The photographs and TV images of April 10, 1993, foreshadowed big trouble: the fallen idol lying facedown in a pool of blood, the spontaneous nationwide demonstrations and the forests of black fists raised in anger, the burning barricades, the torched cars, the white riot policemen clutching their shotguns protectively to their chests. The scale of the peril was contained in the words Archbishop Tutu used to restrain the blacks from doing what natural justice demanded. “Let us not allow Chris’s killers success in their nefarious purpose of getting our country to go up in flames,” Tutu pleaded, “because now it could easily go up in flames.”

Hani’s assassin, the man who gunned him down outside his home in the previously all-white working-class suburb of Dawn Park, in Johannesburg, was a Polish immigrant, a foot soldier of the white resistance struggle, a member of the AWB called Janusz Walus whose anti-Communist zealotry was matched only by his desire to be admitted into the right-wing Boer fold. Walus’s comrade in arms, the nearest thing to a brain behind the plot, shared the Pole’s need to be welcomed into the
volk
’s embrace. He was called Clive Derby-Lewis and he looked and sounded exactly as one would expect someone with a name like that. A member of parliament for Dr. Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, he wore blue blazers and cravats, sported an exuberant mustache, and spoke English with a plummy upper-crust accent: he looked and sounded like an actor playing the part of a British pantomime cad.

These two wannabe Boers brought South Africa closer than ever to race war.
Beeld
understood it perfectly. The paper of the Afrikaans establishment warned, “One rash outburst now, one stray bullet, one act of vengeance can bring down the delicate structure of negotiations and unleash satanic forces.”

Mandela received the news by phone in Qunu, the village in the Transkei, by the Eastern Cape, where he was born. Richard Stengel, who co-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, was with him at the time, watching him have his typical breakfast of porridge, fruit, and toast. Mandela’s face turned to stone—or, as Stengel put it, fixed “in the frown of tragedy.” He was devastated. He felt a father’s affection for Hani as a man, huge respect for him as his political heir. Yet, weighing up instantly the gravity of the moment, he saw that he couldn’t afford to indulge his own feelings now. He switched instantly from grieving father to calculating politician.

“He put the phone down,” Stengel recalled, “his mind was already spinning and working, and thinking what’s going to happen? What would this do for the nation? What would it do for the peace? What would this do for the negotiations? And he began a series of phone calls to aides and he saw immediately this could be the match that ignites the tinder, the revolution, God knows what. And he was completely the master of the political moment. And I almost felt I could see inside of this head and see all of these different gears whirring. He was the consummate political animal, thinking through all of the consequences of this and what it meant.”

What it meant was that he had never had greater power than in that moment to define the course his country took. The easier option would be to make war. The difficult one was the call to restraint, an appeal to the angry masses to set aside the emotions of the moment in favor of the bigger goal.

Jessie Duarte, his personal assistant, had phoned him with the news, and she greeted him, after he had traveled to Hani’s village to offer the family his condolences, when he arrived that afternoon at the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg. “He was so sad,” Duarte recalled. “He really loved Chris. Yet he knew also that there was not time to lose, that this was no time to give in to his private feelings. The assessment he made was that the potential for violence around Chris’s death was immense, and as difficult a time as this was for everybody, the responsibility that he carried was to calm people down.”

Duarte worked with Mandela for four years. They shared an office and he rarely traveled anywhere without her. She was a short, intense, bundle of energy whose fiery political activism had earned her a reputation in ANC circles as an angry young woman. But Mandela brought out a cheery side in her and she became, among many other things, a sort of surrogate daughter to him. As such, she was one of the few people whom he let see his sad face, before whom he occasionally let slip his composed politician’s mask. Jessie Duarte understood as well as anyone that his life had been happier, richer, and generally more satisfying in politics than in the personal sphere, which had been filled with failure, disappointment, and tragedy.

Duarte was close by him on the day in April 1992 when he decided to announce his separation from his second wife, Winnie. She was struck by the black gloom that descended on him as he took on board the enormous disappointment Winnie had been to him. She had carried on an affair with a much younger man even after Mandela left prison, she never shared his bed when he was awake, she swore with a vulgarity that Mandela could not stomach, and she drank to ugly excess. As he would say in the divorce trial three years later, describing his two years of post-prison marriage, “I was the loneliest man,” all the lonelier for the dream of love that had sustained him in prison, and that she had helped nourish on her visits to him. A letter he wrote to her early on in his time in prison revealed the longing, as well as his perception of the need not to let those around him detect his vulnerability. “My Darling Winnie,” Mandela wrote, “I have been fairly successful in putting on a mask behind which I have pined for the family alone, never rushing for the post when it comes until somebody calls out my name. I am struggling to suppress my emotions as I write this letter.”

He announced the end of his marriage at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. In a room far too small for the occasion, packed stiflingly with more than a hundred journalists from all over the world, Mandela sat down at a table, Walter Sisulu by his side, slipped on his reading glasses, and read out a brief statement. Then he looked up, grayer and graver than they had ever seen him, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will appreciate how painful this is for me. This conference is now over.” Usually an announcement of this magnitude prompts reporters to fire a barrage of questions in hopes of provoking an unguarded, quotable outburst. But as he got up, slowly and stiffly, and turned toward the door with a mournful look on his face, the journalists stood, all of them, in silence.

Never before and never again would they be offered such a harrowing glimpse of the regret he felt at his failure as a family man. It was the only time he let the mask slip, allowing the world to see the sorrow written on his face; the cumulative sorrow of decades, for he felt responsible for the hardships that Winnie endured during his absence in jail, and for the drunken acts of criminality to which she was eventually reduced, unable to cope on her own with the combination of fame and relentless police persecution to which she was subjected. He felt just as responsible for the waywardness, and in some cases bitterness toward him, displayed by some of his children (two with Winnie, four—two of whom died—with Eveline). “He never shook off the idea that if he hadn’t gone to prison his entire family would have been very different people,” Jessie said.

But that was the risk he consciously took the day in 1961 when he founded Umkhonto we Sizwe. He had made his choice then to be father of the nation first, paterfamilias second. Partly to cover the pain of the choice he made, partly in a measure of how complete his dedication to the cause had been, the political mask became his real face; Mandela the man and Mandela the politician became one and the same.

Hani’s death rivaled the divorce for the heartache it caused Mandela. He had lost a wife then; now he had lost a surrogate son. But this time he could not afford to let the mask slip. The audience, live on prime time, was the entire country, via the state-run channels of the SABC. De Klerk could have objected, but he did not because he grasped that in the light of the looming catastrophe he was powerless, irrelevant. He had as much ability to influence the angry black masses as Mandela had to influence the AWB, probably less. Mandela, not De Klerk, was now the keeper of the peace. It was as de facto head of state that he addressed the nation on TV and radio that night.

“It was a father talking about a son who had just been murdered and asking people to be calm,” Jessie Duarte said of Mandela’s performance. Pitched in that way, how could anyone disobey? If the father himself was not baying for revenge, then what right had anybody else to go and seek it? For once, Mandela’s flat public speaking style was of a piece with the message he sought to convey. This time the challenge wasn’t winning over the whites; it was to persuade his own people. To do this he had to reroute the river of their anger, which was headed straight for hostile confrontation with white South Africa. To succeed he had to appeal not to their resentment, but to what remained of their generosity. That was why in his televised address he drew his audience’s attention to the fortuitous fact that an Afrikaner had been, amid the tragedy, the hero of the hour. Janusz Walus was arrested almost immediately due to an Afrikaner woman, a neighbor of Hani’s, who had the presence of mind to note down the license plate of the getaway car.

“A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation teeters on the brink of disaster,” Mandela said. “A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.”

If Mandela exaggerated her heroism, he did it with a clear political purpose. “This is a watershed moment for all of us,” he said. “Our decisions and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief, and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country, an elected government of the people . . . I appeal, with all the authority at my command, to all our people to remain calm and honor the memory of Chris Hani by remaining a disciplined force for peace.”

It worked. Mass rallies erupted all over the country but the people did not allow their grief to spill over into violent anger. “That time in 1993, it was really touch and go,” Tutu reflected much later on those perilous days. “What I know for sure is that if he hadn’t been around the country would, in fact, have torn itself apart. Because it would have been the easiest thing to have released the dogs of war. That is what maybe many of the younger Turks would have wanted. It was one of the most devastating moments and the anger was palpable. Had Nelson not gone on television and radio the way he did . . . our country would have gone up in flames.”

CHAPTER IX

THE BITTER-ENDERS

1993

For General Constand Viljoen, following events from his farm, the spectacle was exasperating. Throw what you might in its way, the Mandela juggernaut just kept going. Not that Viljoen had conspired in the assassination of Chris Hani. He didn’t belong to the murderous wing of the SADF. But as a member of the
volk
and as a hard-nosed student of counterinsurgency warfare, he’d figured that Hani’s killing would have knocked the process of democratic change off course. Bill Keller,
New York Times
bureau chief in South Africa at the time, described the surprisingly steadying impact of Mandela’s address, and the fact that the government had broadcast it, as signs “of the tacit partnership that has developed between the Government and the African National Congress.” Keller continued, “It is a quarrelsome but remarkably durable working relationship that amounts almost to an informal government of national unity. As a result, the process of peaceful change has become, if not quite inexorable, at least amazingly resilient.”