Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (5 page)

Mandela often joked that had he never met Sisulu, he would have spared himself a lot of complications in life. The truth was that Mandela, whose Xhosa name, Rolihlahla, means “troublemaker,” went out of his way to court complication, deploying a gift for striking poses to valuable political effect during the peaceful resistance movement of the 1940s and ’50s. Public acts had to be staged that would raise political consciousness and set an example of boldness to the black population at large. Mandela, as the so-called “Volunteer in Chief ” of the “Defiance Campaign” of that period, was the first to burn his black man’s identity document, known as “the pass book,” a humiliating method the apartheid government imposed to ensure black people entered white areas only in order to work. Before burning the document, he chose the time and place with a view to maximum media impact. Photographs of the time show him smiling for the cameras as he broke that cornerstone apartheid law. Within days, thousands of ordinary black people were following suit.

As president of the ANC Youth League in the fifties, he stood out as a uniquely self-confident individual. During a meeting of the ANC’s top leadership, a black-tie event at which he showed up in a dapper brown suit, he shocked everyone present by giving a speech in which he predicted that he would be the first black president of South Africa.

There was something of the brash young Muhammad Ali in him—quite apart from the fact that he boxed to stay in shape, a shape he also enjoyed displaying. A number of photographs show him posing for the cameras stripped to the waist in classic boxing stances. In photographs of him in suits, he looks the image of a Hollywood matinee idol. In the fifties, he was already the most visible face of black protest, and he dressed impeccably: the only black man who had his suits cut by the same tailor as South Africa’s richest man, the gold and diamond magnate Harry Oppenheimer.

When the ANC took up the armed struggle in 1961, largely at his behest, and he became commander in chief of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, he shed the suits and took up liberation chic, modeling himself on one of his heroes, Che Guevara. At the very last public function he attended before his arrest in 1962, a party in Durban, he appeared in green camouflage guerrilla dress. He was the most wanted man in South Africa at the time, but such was the importance he gave to striking the right note of defiance, as well as the pleasure he derived from standing out in a crowd, that he refused his comrades’ advice to shave off the imitation “Che” beard he sported in police Most Wanted photographs.

If his vanity was, in part at least, his downfall, he also put it to good use. In jail, facing charges of sabotage, he determined that at his first appearance in court he would again steal the show. He entered the courtroom with deliberately magisterial slowness, dressed, as befitted his status in the Xhosa clan where he was raised, in the elaborate garb of a high-ranking African chieftain—an animal skin across his chest, beads around his neck and arms. As he strode to his seat, a hush fell over the room; even the judge struggled briefly to find his voice. He sat down, then, on a nod from the judge, stood up, slowly surveying the room before beginning what would turn out to be an electrifying speech. It began, “I am a black man in a white man’s court,” and it achieved precisely the national purpose he sought, generating a mood of unbowed black defiance.

It was an important discovery. Prison could also serve as a political stage; even from behind bars he could make an impact. It transformed his outlook on the sentence that lay before him, and from then on, building on the skills he had acquired as a lawyer defending black clients in white courts during the fifties, he used prison as his practice ground, the place where he trained himself for the grand game that awaited him outside. He honed his natural ability for theater toward the achievement of his political ends, rehearsing his role among his jailers and fellow prisoners for the triumphant destiny he had the temerity to believe awaited him outside.

The first challenge was to get to know his enemy, a task to which he applied himself with the same rigor he devoted to his physical exercises. He had two tools at hand: books—through which he learned about the history of the Afrikaners and taught himself their language—and the Afrikaner prison guards, simple men, occupants of the lowest rung in apartheid’s great white labor preferment scheme. Fikile Bam, who spent time in prison with Mandela, remembered vividly the seriousness with which, right from the start of his sentence, Mandela set about understanding the Afrikaner mentality. “In his mind, and he actually preached this to us, the Afrikaner was an African. He belonged to the soil, and whatever solution there was going to be on the political issues was going to involve Afrikaans people.”

At the time, the standard ANC position was that Afrikaner power was an updated version of European colonialism. For Mandela to challenge that view, to declare that the Afrikaners had as much right to be called Africans as the black Africans with whom he shared his cells, took some pluck. Nor did he disguise his newfound passion for finding out about the Afrikaners’ past. “He had this very intense interest in historical Afrikaner figures, not least Afrikaner leaders during the Anglo-Boer War,” Bam said. “He knew the names of the various Boer commanders.”

In prison, Mandela took an Afrikaans language course for a couple of years, and he never missed an opportunity to work on improving his proficiency in the language. “He had absolutely no qualms about greeting people in Afrikaans, and about trying his Afrikaans out on the warders. Other prisoners had their doubts and inhibitions, but not Nelson. He wanted to really get to know Afrikaners. The warders served his purpose wonderfully well.”

And not just for learning their language. Mandela looked at these men, the most visible and immediate face of the enemy, and he set himself a goal—to persuade them to treat him with dignity. If he succeeded, how much greater the chances, he figured, that he might do the same one day with the whites as a whole in the wider world.

Sisulu had observed him out of prison, observed him in prison, and—like the trainer who spots the young boxer who becomes heavyweight champ—congratulated himself on the astuteness of his choice. Sisulu was always, by preference, in Mandela’s shadow, yet Mandela relied on him for advice on matters personal and political all his life. It was Sisulu, for example, who best understood how to thaw the white jailers’ hearts. The key to it all, as he would explain much later, was “respect, ordinary respect.” He did not want to crush his enemies. He did not want to humiliate them. He did not want to repay them in kind. He just wanted them to treat him with no-frills, run-of-the-mill respect.

That was precisely what the rough, undereducated white men who ruled over his prison wanted too, and that was what Mandela endeavored to give them right from the start, however hellish they made life for him. His cell, his home for eighteen years, was smaller than the average white South African’s bathroom. Eight feet by seven feet, or three Mandela paces long and two and a half across, it had one small barred window a square foot in size that looked onto a flat cement courtyard where the prisoners would sit for hours at a time breaking stones. Mandela slept on a straw mat, and three threadbare blankets provided the only protection against the windy cold of the Cape winters. Like the rest of the political prisoners, who enjoyed fewer privileges than the criminal occupants of the island’s plusher wing, he was obliged to wear short pants (long ones were provided only for the Indian or coloured prisoners, not for the black Africans), and the food was as scarce as it was grim: a corn gruel laced, on good days, with gristle. Mandela soon lost weight and his vitamin-deprived skin became sallow, yet he was forced to engage in hard labor, either working with a pick on the island’s lime quarry or collecting seaweed that would be exported to Japan for use as fertilizer. To wash they were given buckets of cold Atlantic seawater.

Two months after Mandela’s arrival on Robben Island, his lawyer George Bizos had his first chance to see the toll that prison had taken on him. Mandela was now much thinner and humiliatingly dressed in those short pants and shoes without socks. Forming a box around him were eight smartly uniformed guards, two in front, two behind, and two on each side. But from the moment Bizos spotted his client, he could tell that Mandela carried himself differently from the typical prisoner. When he emerged from the prison van with his escort, he, not his guards, set the pace. Bizos threaded his way past the two guards in front and embraced his client, to the confusion of the guards, who had never conceived of the notion of a white man hugging a black one. The two men chatted briefly, Mandela asking after his old friend’s family, but with a start he interrupted himself and said, “George, I’m sorry, I have not introduced you to my guard of honor.” Mandela identified each of the officers to Bizos by name. The guards were so stunned, as Bizos would recall many years later, “that they actually behaved like a guard of honor, each respectfully shaking my hand.”

It was not always thus. The guards and the commanding officers of the prison inevitably rotated, and some regimes were brutal, some relatively benign. Mandela, recognized by his fellow political prisoners as their leader from day one, refined the art of manipulating all of them, irrespective of their character. He strove to persuade the prisoners that deep down all the guards were vulnerable human beings; that it was the system that had made many of them brutish. But that did not mean that when the occasion required it Mandela failed to stand up aggressively for his rights. The one and only time on the island that a guard was clearly about to strike him a blow, Mandela, the lawyer-boxer, stood his ground and said, “If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land. And when I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse.” The guard huffed and puffed but held back from hitting him, before sheepishly walking away.

In the mini-South Africa that the island became, the black prisoners stood up to the white prison regime in much the way they had done to the government when they had been free. Civil disobedience was the general principle, and it expressed itself in hunger strikes, work go-slows, and a habit of salvaging every crumb of dignity they could. The prison guards whom Mandela met when he arrived on the island were accustomed to the prisoners addressing them as “baas.” Mandela refused and, while subject to intimidation, never budged.

Prison conditions on the little island fiefdom, formerly a leper colony and a lunatic asylum, were very much the expression of the personality of the commanding officer at any particular time. A mild and affable one called Van Aarde was replaced in 1970 by Colonel Piet Badenhorst, the most fearsome character Mandela would encounter during his years behind bars. The new recruits Badenhorst brought with him to the island were very nasty too, and between them they set about a reign of terror that lasted a year. Badenhorst was incapable of opening his mouth without swearing, and he made a habit at first of singling out Mandela for his filthiest abuse. His guards followed their master’s lead, jostling prisoners on their way to the quarry, submitting their cells to snap searches, and confiscating their cherished books, among which Shakespeare and the Greek classics were Mandela’s and Sisulu’s particular favorites. One day in May 1971 Badenhorst’s guards entered the political wing, B section, early one morning, quite drunk. They ordered the prisoners to strip naked while they searched their cells. An hour later one of the prisoners collapsed, and when another one remonstrated, and then hit out, he was beaten so badly that his cell was spattered in blood.

Mandela kept his cool, and under his guidance the prisoners again took up the lessons they had learned in their political struggle outside. They turned for help beyond their microcosmic island world. They sent out messages via prison visitors and the International Red Cross. Help was also at hand from South Africa’s most high-profile progressive politician in parliament, Helen Suzman, who visited the prisoners on the island, and was referred by them to Mandela, their unanimously elected spokesman.

The decisive moment came when three judges visited the prison toward the end of 1971. In the presence of Badenhorst, the three met with Mandela, who did not hold back from denouncing the harsh treatment the colonel had been meting out. He mentioned the sorry diet and the hard labor, but dwelled at length on the incident when the drunken guards had stripped the prisoners and beaten them. Badenhorst wagged his finger at Mandela and said, “Be careful, Mandela. If you talk about things you haven’t seen, you will get yourself into trouble, you know what I mean?” Mandela seized on Badenhorst’s mistake. Turning triumphantly to the judges, as if he were a lawyer in a courtroom again, he said, “Gentlemen, you see for yourselves the type of man we are dealing with as commanding officer. If he can threaten me here, in your presence, you can imagine what he does when you are not here.” One judge turned to the others and said, “The prisoner is quite right.”

Mandela had tamed his tormentor. After the judges left, prison conditions improved, and within three months word arrived that Badenhorst was to be transferred. But that was not the end of the story. The most interesting part was still to come, for it made an impact on Mandela that would help shape his attitude toward the Afrikaner “oppressors” for the rest of his life, and proved decisive when he was eventually allowed to join political battle with them.

A few days before Badenhorst was due to leave, the national commissioner of prisons, a General Steyn, visited Robben Island. He met with Mandela in Badenhorst’s presence. When the meeting was over and Steyn had moved out of earshot, Badenhorst came up to Mandela and, strikingly polite in his demeanor, informed him of his impending departure. Then he said, “I just want to wish you people good luck.” Mandela was momentarily struck dumb, but he collected himself sufficiently to thank him and wish him good luck too in his new posting.

Mandela dwelled on that incident, examining the lessons to be drawn from it, reflecting on how a man he had seen as callous and barbarous had in the end revealed himself in a gentler light. He tucked away those thoughts, but he also found ways to put them to immediate use. Applying the strategies he had developed during his seven years on Robben Island, he used all the help that he could from the likes of Helen Suzman and the judicial system toward making the prison a more livable place. By the late seventies not only was the quality of the food and clothing and bedding far better than in 1964, not only had the seaweed-picking and the forced labor on the quarry ceased, but all manner of unimagined luxuries had been added. The prisoners could watch films, listen to radio programs on a prisonwide speaker system, and, best of all, play sports. Tennis, remarkably, was on the agenda. And so was soccer, black South Africa’s favorite pastime. At the authorities’ insistence, rugby was added to the list. The rule from above was that it would be one week soccer, the next week rugby, always alternating. The younger prisoners played rugby and listened to broadcasts of important matches on the radio. Even though, to a man, they noisily supported the rival teams when the Springboks played, the authorities persisted, as if hoping for a miraculous conversion.