Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (21 page)

Mightily relieved that the ceremony had passed without catastrophe, John Reinders arrived at his office in the Union Buildings early next morning, May 11, with a couple of large cardboard boxes under his arms. He was a large man, but he had the deferential manner of someone much slighter, as well as the good judgment to know when he was beaten.

“I came in early that morning to collect my things,” Reinders recalled. “All we whites had applied for jobs elsewhere, sure we would be asked to leave. Quite a few meant to go and work for Mr. de Klerk in the deputy presidency.”

Reinders was packing away his mementos of seventeen years spent running the presidential office, organizing ceremonial dos, bumping into famous people on official trips, when suddenly he was startled out of his reminiscences by a knock at the door. It was another early riser. Mandela.

“Good morning, how are you?” he said, stepping into Reinders’s office with outstretched hand.

“Very well, Mr. President, thank you. And you?”

“Well, well, but . . .” Mandela said, puzzled, “what are you doing?”

“I am collecting my things and getting ready to go, Mr. President.”

“Oh, I see. And may I ask where you are going?”

“Back to correctional services, Mr. President, where I used to serve.”

“Mmm,” said Mandela, pursing his lips. “I was there twenty-seven years, you know. It was very bad.” He grinned as he repeated, “Very bad!”

Reinders, flummoxed, offered him a half-smile back. “Now,” Mandela continued, “I would like you to consider staying here with us.” Reinders examined Mandela’s eyes with astonishment. “Yes. I am quite serious. You know this job. I don’t. I am from the bush. I am ignorant. Now, if you stay with me, it would be just one term, that is all. Five years. And then, of course, you would be free to leave. Now, please understand me: this is not an order. I would like to have you here only if you wish to stay and share your knowledge and your experience with me.”

Mandela smiled. Reinders smiled, wholeheartedly now. “So,” Mandela continued, “what do you say? Will you stay with me?”

Amazed as he was, Reinders did not hesitate. ‘Yes, Mr. President. I will. Yes. Thank you.”

At which point his new boss gave him his first task: to gather together all the presidential staff, including the cleaners and the gardeners, at the cabinet room for a meeting. The new president walked among them, shaking hands with each one of the hundred or so people assembled, saying a few words to each, in Afrikaans where appropriate. Then he addressed them all. “Hello, I’m Nelson Mandela. If any of you prefer to take the [severance] package, you are free to leave. Go. There is no problem. But I beg you, stay! Five years, that is all. You have the knowledge. We need that knowledge, we need that experience of yours.”

Every single member of the presidential staff stayed.

Two weeks later, on May 24, four hundred newly elected delegates converged on Cape Town for the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament, held at the very same National Assembly building where the whites-only parliament used to gather. Until now it had been a dull, heavy, monochrome sort of place. On the May morning when the same chamber opened its doors to Mandela’s non-racial democracy the scene underwent a Technicolor transformation. The sight from high up in the visitors’ gallery suggested a cross between the United Nations General Assembly, a pop concert, and an end-of-term college party. A glance at the roster of new members of parliament told it all. Before they were called Botha or Van der Merwe or Smith. Now they were called those names, but also Bengu and Dlamini and Farisani and Maharaj and Mushwana and Neerahoo and Pahad and Zulu. And a third of the MPs, including the new speaker, Frene Ginwala, were women. More striking was the proportion of MPs who had spent time in prison, or had been on the run from the police. Practically every ANC MP had broken the law; now they would be making it, led by the longest-serving prisoner of them all, the last man in today, Mandela.

As word spread of his arrival, the MPs rose to their feet, the buzz gave way to a roar, to freedom songs and swaying dances from the younger, more exuberant members of the ANC contingent. Amid the Rainbow Nation hurly-burly, General Viljoen cut an anomalous figure. Sober as ever, in a dark suit and tie, he stood in the middle of the oval chamber at ground level, as befitted the leader of the honorable Freedom Front opposition. Mandela emerged, also at ground level, straight-backed and beaming, to a cheer from the assembly.

Viljoen was staring at Mandela with a mixture of awe and affection. On seeing him, Mandela broke parliamentary protocol and, crossing the floor, shook his hand and said with a big smile, “I am very happy to see you here, General.”

Some voices from high up in the gallery shouted, “Give him a hug, General! Go on, hug him!”

In recalling the moment, Viljoen let a small smile pass his lips, nodded, then turned solemn again. “But I did not do that. I am a military man and he was my president. I shook his hand and I stood to attention.”

And that could have been the end of that: order restored, old enemies reconciled, the good king crowned, all players exeunt—exuberantly—stage left. But it was not the end. It was not over yet, neither for Mandela nor for General Viljoen. There was still one more act to be played out before Viljoen could hang up his sword with peace of mind, one final set of challenges to be overcome before Mandela could consider his life’s quest complete.

As Viljoen pointed out, “Forty or fifty percent of my people did not take part in the voting.” Some of them placed bombs at bus stops and other places where black people gathered in large crowds during the week before the election. They also set off a bomb at Johannesburg International Airport. Twenty-one people were killed and more than a hundred badly injured. Mandela’s speeches during his first month in power were consistently upbeat, deliberately trying to set an optimistic, energized mood. But he could not refrain from pointing out at the closing of that first session of parliament that the security forces would have to remain on full alert. “The problem of politically motivated violence is still with us,” he said.

Mandela had a lot on his plate during his five-year term in office: providing houses and schools, water and electricity for black people. But his overwhelming priority was to cement the foundations of the new democracy, render it bombproof. He knew that attempts would be made to subvert the inevitably fragile new order. It could not be that all of white South Africa would surrender its ancient powers, and a fair number of its privileges, without a fight.

As for General Viljoen, he was torn, the way Niël Barnard had been four and a half years earlier on the morning of Mandela’s release. Despite having met Mandela sixty times in prison, Barnard could not entirely dispel that alarm bell going off deep inside his head, warning him, however irrationally, of the Ayatollah factor. Viljoen felt similar misgivings, as if he could not quite believe that life could be as good as Mandela made it seem, as if he had not been able entirely to shed his ancestral misgivings about the black man. A part of him worried as he sat there on that opening day of parliament, and throughout the year ahead, that he might have done the right thing by himself—Mandela always had the door open to him, always treated him with respect—but not the right thing by his people. He confessed that his conscience nagged at him. “I was troubled. Very troubled,” he said. “A lot of fine things had been said, but where was the proof that I could show my people once and for all?”

The answer lay in Mandela’s proving to Viljoen’s people that they were his people too; in widening his embrace beyond Constand Viljoen and John Reinders and Niël Barnard and Kobie Coetsee to include all Afrikaners. Mandela’s legal adviser and close confidant in the presidential office, a white lawyer called Nicholas Haysom, who had been jailed three times during the anti-apartheid years, defined the mission in appropriately epic terms.

“We called it nation-building. But Garibaldi has a quote that exemplifies it more eloquently,” said Haysom, referring to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the soldier-patriot who unified Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. “When he had finished his military mission Garibaldi said, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’ ” Actually, the challenge Mandela faced was tougher than Garibaldi’s. “Italy was divided but homogeneous. South Africa in 1994 was a country that was split historically, culturally, racially, and so many other ways,” Haysom added. “No amount of negotiations, speeches, constitutions would suffice in themselves to ‘make South Africans.’ You needed something else to bring people together. You needed Mandela to do what he did best: rise above our differences, be bigger than those things that divided us and appeal to that which bound us together.”

CHAPTER XII

THE CAPTAIN AND THE PRESIDENT

1994-95

“You looked at him,” Mandela said, recalling his first meeting with François Pienaar, “you considered where he came from, and what you saw was a typical Afrikaner.”

Mandela was right. If the apartheid ideologues had had the same inclination for putting art to political use as their Soviet counterparts, they would have chosen Pienaar to depict the model specimen of Afrikaner manhood. Six foot four, he carried his 240 pounds of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo’s David.

If then, as Mandela said, you considered where he came from, you pictured a boy growing up to manhood in Vereeniging in the seventies and eighties and what you saw, with almost cinematic clarity—as Mandela did—was a faithful representation of 90 percent of the Afrikaner
volk
: a people conditioned by the particular time and place in which they happened to be born to be straightforward, uncomplicated, hard-working, tough, secretly sentimental, churchgoing rugby fanatics who related to their superabundant black neighbors with a mixture of disdain, ignorance, and fear.

Yet if there was one thing Mandela had learned in his dealings with the Afrikaners it was to see past appearances. “He did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society,” Mandela said. “I found him quite a charming fellow and I sensed that he was progressive. And, you know, he was an educated chap. He had a BA in law. It was a pleasure to sit down with him.”

Pleasure was the last thing on Pienaar’s mind as he stood on the stone steps of the giant Union Buildings on June 17, 1994, preparing to go inside for a meeting to which President Mandela had invited him. Pienaar, now twenty-seven years old but suddenly feeling an awful lot younger, confessed to waiting reporters that he had never been more nervous in all his life; that the prospect of meeting the president was more daunting than any rugby game.

Dressed in dark suit and tie, Pienaar entered through a small door at the buildings’ west wing, ducked through a metal detector, and presented himself before two policemen waiting for him at a desk behind a green-tinted window of thick bulletproof glass. Both being Afrikaners, they immediately started engaging him animatedly on rugby. One of them led him out into a courtyard and down a corridor lined, though he barely noticed the anomaly, with watercolors of scenes from the Great Trek, ox-wagons and men on horses against a background of brown, yellowy
veldt.
The policeman dropped him off at a small waiting room, bare save for a table and some leather chairs, into which stepped Mandela’s personal assistant, a tall, imposing black lady called Mary Mxadana who asked him to take a seat and wait a moment. He sat in the room alone for five minutes, his palms sweating. “I was incredibly tense as the moment arrived when I would meet him,” he recalled. “I was really in awe of him. I kept thinking. ‘What do I say? What do I ask him?’ ”

Then Mxadana reappeared, asked him if he would like tea or coffee—he said coffee—and bade him follow her. She stepped out of the waiting room into the corridor with the pictures of the ox-wagons, stopped at a tall, dark brown door, knocked sharply, and, in one move, stepped in. She held open the door for Pienaar, whose stage fright only worsened at the sight of the vast room before him, oceanically empty, as at first it seemed, till he crossed the threshold and spotted to his right a tall gray-haired man jumping out of his chair. Mandela was seventy-six but he headed toward Pienaar with the alacrity of a rugby opponent charging in for a tackle—except that he stood erect, had a big smile on his face and his hand outstretched. “Ah, François, how very good of you to come!” Pienaar muttered, “No, Mr. President, thank you so much for inviting me.” Mandela shook his hand warmly, Pienaar registering with surprise that Mandela was almost as tall as he was. “So, how are you, François?” “Oh, very well, Mr. President, and you?” “Ah, very well. Ve-ry well!”

Mandela, smiling all the time, clearly happy to have this big young Boer in his new office, gestured to him to sit down on a sofa at right angles to his own, as he congratulated him on a Springbok victory over England, a convincing 27-9, in a game down in Cape Town six days earlier.

There was a knock at the door and a lady came in carrying a tray of coffee and tea. She was a white woman, middle-aged, wearing a floral dress with shoulder pads. Mandela saw her appear at the door at the other end of the room—a distance six times greater than the length of the cell that had been his home for eighteen years of his life—and immediately stood up, remaining standing as she placed the tray on a low table before the two men. “Ah, thank you very much. Thank you ve-ry much,” smiled Mandela, still standing. “And, ah, this is François Pienaar . . . Lenoy Coetzee.” Pienaar reached out and shook hands with her, and before she turned to go away, Mandela thanked her again and did not sit down again until the Afrikaner lady had exited the room.