Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (4 page)

It was in jail too that he seized his first great chance to put the strategy into action. The adversary on that occasion was a man called Kobie Coetsee, whose state of mind on this morning of the rugby game was one of nerve-shredding excitement, like everybody else’s; whose clarity of purpose was clouded only by the question whether he should watch the game at his home, just outside Cape Town, or soak in the atmosphere at a neighborhood bar. Coetsee and Mandela were on the same side today to a degree that would have been unthinkable when they had first met a decade ago. Back then, they had every reason to feel hostile toward each other. Mandela was South Africa’s most celebrated political prisoner; Coetsee was South Africa’s minister of justice and of prisons. The task Mandela had set himself back then, twenty-three years into his life sentence, was to win over Coetsee, the man who held the keys to his cell.

CHAPTER II

THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE

November 1985

Nineteen eighty-five was a hopeful year for the world but not for South Africa. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president for a second term, and the two Cold War leaders held their first meeting, offering the strongest signal in forty years that the superpowers might prevail upon each other to shelve their stratagems for mutually assured destruction. South Africa was rushing in the opposite direction. Tensions between anti-apartheid militants and the police exploded into the most violent escalation of racial hostilities since Queen Victoria’s redcoats and King Cetshwayo’s battalions inflicted savage slaughter on each other in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The exiled ANC leadership stirred their supporters inside South Africa to rise up against the government, but they pursued their offensive against the government across other fronts too. Through the powerful domestic trade unions, through international economic sanctions, through diplomatic isolation. And through rugby. For twenty years, the ANC had been waging a campaign to deprive white male South Africans, and especially the Afrikaners, of international rugby, their lives’ great passion. Nineteen eighty-five was the year they secured their greatest triumphs, successfully thwarting a planned Springbok tour of New Zealand. That hurt. The fresh memory of that defeat injected an added vitality into the hammy forearms of the Afrikaner riot police as they thumped their truncheons down on the heads of their black victims.

The only prospect in sight that year, it seemed, was civil war. A national opinion poll conducted in mid-August found that 70 percent of the black population and 30 percent of the white believed that was the direction the country was heading in. But were it to come to that, the winner would not be Mandela’s ANC; it would be their chief adversary, President P. W. Botha, better known in South Africa as “P.W.” or, by the friends and foes who feared him, “die groot krokodil,” the big crocodile. Botha, who ruled South Africa between 1978 and 1989, announced a state of emergency in the middle of 1985 and ordered 35,000 troops of the South African Defence Force, better known as the SADF, into the black townships, the first time the military had been called in to help the police quell what the government believed to be an increasingly orchestrated rebellion. Their suspicions were confirmed when the ANC’s exiled leadership responded to Botha’s move by calling for a “People’s War” to make the country “ungovernable,” prompting white people to flee the country—to Britain, to Australia, to America—in droves. Nineteen eighty-five was the year in which TV viewers around the world grew accustomed to seeing South Africa as a country of burning barricades where stone-throwing black youths faced up to white policemen with guns, where SADF armored vehicles advanced like spidery alien craft on angry, frightened black mobs. Under the state of emergency regulations, the security forces were granted practically limitless powers of search, seizure, and arrest—as well as the comfort of knowing that they could assault suspects with impunity. In the fifteen months leading up to the first week of November that year 850 people had died in political violence and thousands had been jailed without charge.

In this climate, in this year, Mandela launched his peace offensive. Convinced that negotiations were the only way that apartheid could ultimately be brought down, he took on the challenge alone and, as it turned out, with one arm tied behind his back. Earlier in the year, doctors had discovered he had prostate problems and, fearing cancer, ruled that he needed urgent surgery. They had made the diagnosis at Pollsmoor Prison, where he’d been transferred from Robben Island three years earlier, in 1982. Pollsmoor, on the mainland near Cape Town, was where he shared the large cell with Walter Sisulu and three other prison veterans whom he would infuriate with his predawn indoor runs. The operation, carried out on November 4, 1985, was a success, but Mandela, now aged sixty-seven, had to remain under observation. Doctors’ orders were for him to convalesce in the hospital for three more weeks.

During this interlude, Mandela’s first spell outside bars in twenty-three years, he began his ten-year courtship of white South Africa. By a remarkable historical coincidence, this was the very month in which Reagan and Gorbachev met. Just as the American president set out to use his charm on the Soviet leader, Mandela prepared to use his on Kobie Coetsee, the man with the world’s most contradictory job description, minister of justice of South Africa.

But while the superpower summit in Geneva was a media circus, this meeting was top secret. The press did not learn of it until five years later, but even if they had known about it at the time, even if the story had been leaked, they would have had trouble finding anyone to believe it. The ANC were the enemy, the purveyors of a Soviet-inspired “Total Onslaught,” in P. W. Botha’s term, against whom the state’s security forces had launched what he called a “Total Strategy.” Nothing was more unthinkable than the idea of the Botha regime negotiating with the “Communist terrorists,” much less with their jailed leader.

But if anyone in government was to make that first contact with the enemy it was Coetsee, whose portfolio extended beyond justice to include correctional services, meaning the prison system. Botha chose Coetsee to be his secret emissary because he was blindly loyal—one of the few people in his cabinet whom Botha trusted to behave discreetly—and because, as minister of justice and of prisons, he was the appropriate member of his government to go and meet Mandela. Besides, it had been to Coetsee, as to his predecessors in the Justice Ministry, that Mandela had long been addressing letters requesting a meeting. In so doing Mandela had been following in a rather hapless ANC tradition, begun with the organization’s founding in 1912, of seeking to persuade white governments to sit down and discuss the country’s future together. But now at last it was going to happen: the very first talks between a black politician and a senior member of the white government. Botha’s reasons for sanctioning the encounter were partly a matter of curiosity—the ANC had launched a Free Mandela campaign in 1980 and by now he was the most famous, least known prisoner in the world. But Botha was motivated more by the increasingly volatile situation in the townships and the intensifying pressure from the outside world. He felt that the time had come to dip a toe in the waters of reconciliation, to venture the first tentative test of whether one day an accommodation with black South Africa might be possible. As Coetsee would explain it later, “We had painted ourselves into a corner and we had to find a way out.”

The curious thing was that while Mandela had been the supplicant, Coetsee was the one who felt uncomfortable. It was a mixture of guilt and fear—guilt because he would be seeing Mandela as the emissary of the government that was killing his people; fear because he had read the files on Mandela and he was uneasy at the prospect of coming face-to-face with an enemy so apparently ruthless. “The picture I had formed of him,” he said during an interview in Cape Town some years after he had left government, “was of a leader determined to seize power, given the chance, at whatever cost in human lives.” From Mandela’s files, Coetsee would also have formed a mental image of an imposing former heavyweight boxer who had had the temerity ten months earlier to humiliate his dour, scowling boss, P. W. Botha, before the entire nation. Botha had publicly offered to free Mandela, but he had issued preconditions. Mandela had to promise to abandon the very “armed struggle” that he himself had set in motion when he founded the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), back in 1961; he also had to conduct himself “in such a way that he will not have to be arrested” under the apartheid laws. Mandela replied through a statement read out by his daughter Zindzi at a rally in Soweto. Challenging Botha to renounce violence against black people, Mandela mocked the very idea that he might be set free when, so long as apartheid existed, every black person remained in bondage. “I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free,” Mandela’s statement said. “Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.”

Coetsee had understandable misgivings about the meeting, but the balance was tilted heavily in his favor. Mandela was the prisoner, after all, and Coetsee the jailer; Mandela was thin and weak after his operation and wearing hospital clothes—bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers—while Coetsee, in ministerial suit and tie, glowed with health. And far more depended on the outcome of the meeting for Mandela than it did for Coetsee. For Mandela it was a life-or-death opportunity that might not be repeated; for Coetsee it was an exploratory encounter, almost an act of curiosity. In Mandela’s eyes this was the chance he had sought ever since he embarked in politics four decades earlier to begin a serious conversation about the future direction of the country between black and white South Africa. Of all the challenges to his powers of political seduction that he would subsequently face, none would hold greater risks. For had he failed, had he argued with Coetsee, or had the chemistry been wrong, that might have been the beginning and the end of everything.

Yet the moment Coetsee entered Mandela’s hospital room the apprehensions on both sides evaporated. Mandela, a model host smiling grandly, put Coetsee at his ease, and almost immediately, to their quietly contained surprise, prisoner and jailer found themselves chatting amiably. Anybody watching unaware of who they were would have assumed that they knew each other well, in the way that a royal adviser knows his prince, or a lawyer his biggest client. It had partly to do with the fact that Mandela, at six foot one, towered over Coetsee, a small, chirpy fellow with big black-framed glasses and the air of a small-town real estate lawyer. But it had more to do with body language, with the impact Mandela’s manner had on people he met. First there was his erect posture. Then there was the way he shook hands. He never stooped, he did not incline his head. All the movement was in the socket of the arm and shoulder. Add to that the massive size of his hand and its leathery texture, and the effect was both regal and intimidating. Or it would have been were it not for Mandela’s warm gaze and his big, easy smile.

“He was a natural,” Coetsee recalled, sparkling with animation, “and I realized that from the moment I set eyes on him. He was a born leader. And he was affable. He was obviously well liked by the hospital personnel and yet he was respected, even though they knew that he was a prisoner. And he was clearly in command of his surroundings.”

Mandela mentioned people in the prison service they knew in common; Coetsee inquired after Mandela’s health; they chatted about a chance encounter Coetsee had had with his wife, Winnie, on an airplane a few days earlier. Coetsee was surprised by Mandela’s willingness to talk in Afrikaans, his knowledge of Afrikaans history. It was all terribly genteel. But both men knew very well that the significance of the meeting lay not in the words they exchanged, but in those that were left unsaid. The fact that there was no animosity in the encounter was in itself a signal, transmitted and received by both men, that the time had come to explore the possibility of fundamental change in how black and white South Africans related politically to one another. It was, as Coetsee would see it, the beginning of a new exercise, “to talk, rather than to fight.”

The absence of cameras, the anodyne hospital setting, the pajamas, the inconsequential affability of the chat all disguised the truth that Mandela had pulled off the seemingly impossible feat that the ANC had been striving toward for seventy-three years. How had he done it? Like everyone who is very good at what they do—be they athletes, painters, or violinists—he had worked long and hard to develop his natural talent. Walter Sisulu had spotted the leader in him the first day the two men met, in 1942. Sisulu, six years older than Mandela, was a veteran ANC organizer in Johannesburg; Mandela, twenty-five, had just arrived from the countryside. Mandela was a bumpkin to Sisulu’s city slicker, but as he sized up the young man standing tall before him, the canny activist in Sisulu saw something that he could use. “He happened to strike me more than any person I had met,” Sisulu said more than half a century after that first encounter. “His demeanor, his warmth . . . I was looking for people of caliber to fill positions of leadership and he was a godsend to me.”