Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (6 page)

That would happen much later. Before it, came Kobie Coetsee’s conversion that November day in 1985.

When Mandela was discharged from the hospital on November 24, 1985, Botha agreed with Coetsee that he should not return to the large cell he had shared over the previous three years with his four old comrades. He would remain in Pollsmoor but would now be kept in a cell on his own, in an otherwise empty section of the prison. This was no punishment, but a first step toward freedom The idea was to keep further contacts between Mandela and the government as secret as possible, even from the other prisoners. Mandela was grateful too to have the space he needed to collect his thoughts and prepare his strategy. Besides, Coetsee saw to it that Mandela, alone in his cell, was pampered as no “baas” had ever pampered a black man in South Africa. His food was improved, and he received newspapers, a radio, and access to an invention unknown in South Africa when he went to prison, a TV.

He also had the company of a prison guard called Christo Brand, who had been transferred with him from Robben Island, and who doted on him. Brought up on a farm, Brand had had his first encounter with electricity at age ten and left school at fifteen. Half Mandela’s age, he was a sweet-tempered man who came to regard his prisoner in a fatherly light. Mandela acted the part, among other things writing letters to Brand’s wife complaining that her spouse wasn’t doing enough to improve himself; that he had a fine mind and that if only he would be persuaded to study he could really get ahead in life. Brand’s own son Riaan, who was born in 1985, became something of a surrogate grandson for Mandela. Brand smuggled Riaan into Pollsmoor when he was eight months old so that Mandela could hold him. Mandela did so with tears in his eyes; he hadn’t been able to touch any of his six children in twenty-three years. As Riaan Brand grew up, Mandela never failed to inquire as to how he was getting on at school, and wrote letters to him punctually each birthday.

The more distant, senior officers at Pollsmoor were harder nuts to crack than Brand. Mandela had to keep his wits honed in order to win them over. The officer in charge at Pollsmoor’s maximum-security C wing was a Major van Sittert, a man who, as Brand would relate, was more comfortable dealing with common criminals than political prisoners. “The major used to come and visit the cells once a month,” Brand said. “He found the political prisoners annoying: they complained and asked for things a lot more than the regular criminal prisoners; also the major did not speak English very well and he felt uncomfortable with them for that reason too.” Mandela, in addition, was world-famous by now, a celebrity in his own way. And that irritated Major van Sittert still more, made him more uneasy in his presence.

Mandela thought hard. He had subdued all his other commanding officers, but the prickly, insecure Van Sittert would put his powers of seduction seriously to the test. Mandela spoke to Brand, probing for weaknesses. And, through Brand, he found one. Sittert was a rugby nut. So Mandela, who had no special interest in rugby, set about zealously learning about the game in preparation for the major’s monthly visit. He read the rugby pages in the newspapers for the first time in his life, watched the sports programs on his TV, and generally boned up on all the latest news so that he could engage the major on his life’s passion with seeming plausibility.

Mandela had an incentive beyond the political satisfaction of snaring more white prey. He had a particular need, a request he wished to make that would impinge significantly on his immediate well-being and that only the major could grant. He didn’t want to wait another month for a chance to satisfy that need, so he had to seize the moment when it came. Mandela met Major van Sittert for the first time in the corridor outside his cell. And while he found himself at a sartorial disadvantage, as he had on the day he met Kobie Coetsee, wearing prison clothes while the major was decked out like an army officer, Mandela again was the master of the situation. He welcomed the major as if he were a guest at his home. Then, realizing how unhappy Van Sittert was speaking English, he addressed him in Afrikaans.

“Mandela was very polite, as usual,” Brand recalled. “He greeted him with a big smile and then immediately started talking rugby. Well, I was very surprised! There he was saying that such and such a player was doing very well, but such and such was below his best, and had really disappointed in the last game, and maybe it was time to give such and such a young player a chance, because he seemed a very promising prospect, and so on, and on.” Once the major got over his own amazement, he became quite animated, agreeing with Mandela on practically every point he made. “You could see all those doubts of the major’s just melting away,” Brand said.

Having laid the trap, Mandela lured the major into it. Gingerly, he steered him into his cell, casually mentioning that he had a little problem, one that he felt sure the major would not wish a rugby man like him to endure. He told him that he received more food for lunch than for dinner, and for this reason he had gotten into the habit of keeping some of his lunch until the evening came. The trouble was that by then the food was cold. But there was a solution, Mandela said. He had heard about a device called a hot plate. It seemed like just the thing to resolve his dilemma. “Major,” he said, “would it be at all possible for you to help me obtain one?”

To Brand’s surprise, Van Sittert capitulated without a struggle. “Brand,” he ordered, “go and get Mandela a hot plate!”

He got all that and more, meeting again secretly with Kobie Coetsee, this time at his home. The minister, anxious to afford Mandela the dignity he saw he deserved, arranged for the prison authorities to dress him in a jacket for the first time in twenty-three years, and to drive him over not in a prison van but in a stately sedan. At this second encounter the content of the discussion was more explicitly political. Coetsee, pleased, reported to Botha that prison did indeed seem to have mellowed Mandela, that he was not the firebrand terrorist type anymore, that he seemed willing to explore an accommodation with the whites.

Mandela was rewarded with more privileges. Brand and Van Sittert were astounded to receive orders that Mandela be taken on drives around Cape Town. A small committee of Botha’s confidants who were in on the secret talks (Coetsee; Niël Barnard, the head of intelligence; and one or two others) feared that if they let Botha’s full cabinet know about the talks, someone might leak the story to the press. Even so, they considered it so important for Mandela to start getting acclimated to life outside prison that they even authorized his prison minders to let him go for short strolls on his own, mingling with unsuspecting locals. Once Christo Brand took him to his home, to introduce Mandela to his wife and children. Another time, two other prison officers drove him all the way to a town called Paternoster, seventy-five miles north of Cape Town, on the Atlantic Ocean. As Mandela strolled alone on the town’s pristine white beach, a bus-load of German tourists suddenly appeared. The two prison officials panicked, fearing he would be recognized. They need not have worried. The tourists, enraptured by the wild beauty of the setting, snapped photos, ignoring the gray-haired black man nearby. Mandela could have rushed into their midst and jumped on their bus, in search of political asylum, but he didn’t want to get out of prison just yet, despite the clamor that had been building around the world for his release. He could do more good, he saw, by staying inside, talking.

CHAPTER III

SEPARATE AMENITIES

Justice Bekebeke was an angry young black man in November 1985, one of millions. Tall and stick-thin, like an African carving, he had a courteous manner and a soothing baritone voice that when he spoke carried a wisdom, hard won, beyond his twenty-four years.

Paballelo was where Bekebeke lived, a treeless township five hundred miles north of Mandela’s Cape Town prison and five hundred west of Johannesburg, on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in the back of beyond. A black township in South Africa was always paired with a white town. But while the townships invariably had a lot more people in them, only the white towns appeared on the maps. The townships were the black shadows of the towns. Paballelo was the black shadow of Upington.

Upington was a stark caricature of an apartheid town. An incurious visitor to a big city like Johannesburg might have missed the system’s crasser racist edges. But in Upington those edges were sharp and blatant—“Slegs Blankes” (“Whites Only”) signs at the public toilets, bars, drinking fountains, cinemas, public swimming pools, parks, bus stops, the railway station. Such nonsense, legally required by the Separate Amenities Act of 1953, sometimes generated dark comedy. Should a black woman carrying her “madam’s” white baby travel in the “whites only” or “nonwhites” section of a train? Or would a Japanese visitor who used a “whites only” public toilet be breaking the law? Or what was a bus conductor to do when he ordered a brown-skinned passenger to get off a whites-only bus and the passenger refused, insisting that he was a white man with a deep suntan?

Often, among the more liberal-minded white set in Cape Town or Johannesburg, these finer points of law were ignored. In places like Upington, deep in the Afrikaner heartland, they were obeyed with Calvinist rigor. Paballelo was poorer, dingier, and more cramped than Upington, but less stifling. There you could escape apartheid’s pettier constraints. You could eat, shop, or sit wherever you pleased. To get to Paballelo from Upington you drove about a mile on the road west toward Namibia, until you reached the municipal slaughterhouse. There you turned left and before you stood a rusting sign that read “Welcome to Paballelo.” The contrast between one place and the other, as always when you crossed over the white world to the black world in South Africa, was staggering, as if you had gone back a century, or stepped straight from suburban Connecticut into Burkina Faso. One was bone-dry, a cramped labyrinth of matchbox houses on a flat expanse of scrub; the other was a man-made oasis of weeping willows, golf-green lawns, lovingly tended rose gardens, and large homes whose owners had not been shy about sucking up the resources of the nearby Orange River. Upington would have been almost gracious, had it been less unnatural, had the greenery not smacked of fake adornment amid the obliterating heat and desert drabness all around, had it not been a place where white people routinely called black people by that most hurtful, shaming of names, “kaffir”—South Africa’s version of “nigger.”

Three childhood memories had a lasting effect on the man Justice Bekebeke would become. The first dated from early in his childhood when he visited Cape Town with his family. Looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, he spotted a speck of land not far offshore. His father, who was barely literate but knew where he stood politically, told him that this was the place where “our leaders” were. The speck was Robben Island. Justice begged his father for a coin to put into a shoreline telescope so he could catch a glimpse of his leaders. He did not succeed, the island being seven miles away, but he saw the outlines of the buildings where the cells were—enough for him to construct a fantasy in his mind that he had actually been to the island. He went back home and recounted the fantasy as fact, impressing his school friends so much that before he knew it he had acquired the status in Paballelo as a leader himself, as someone from whom his young peers were prepared to take political direction.

Thanks to that episode, and thanks to the influence of his father, Justice allied himself from an early age with Mandela’s African National Congress rather than with its rival, the more radical Pan Africanist Congress. The PAC was an openly, vengefully racist party that counted “one settler, one bullet” and “throw the whites into the sea” among its slogans, and almost became the dominant force in black politics during the 1960s. The PAC was South Africa’s Hamas.

Imagine Yassir Arafat convincing Hamas to succumb to his leadership and unite the Palestinian people under the banner of his Fatah party and you have a sense of what Mandela achieved with his own much larger and more tribally disparate constituency. In black South Africa there were Zulus, there were Xhosas, there were Sothos and six other tribal groups, all of whom spoke different languages at home, most of whom had some history of animosity toward one another. Mandela, whom everybody knew to be a Xhosa of the royal house, ultimately won over ninety percent of all black South Africans.

Bekebeke’s second defining memory was sealed when he was ten. He heard about a black man who had been arguing with a white policeman. The dispute grew more and more heated until the policeman pulled out his gun and shot the black man, who, as he fell, thrust at the policeman with a knife and stabbed him to death. Justice didn’t know the black man, but the story had the force of a parable on him. “I adored that man,” he blazed, recapturing the mood of his youth, when he told the story much later. “I hero-worshiped him for standing up to the white policeman, for fighting back.”

If that memory suggests the challenge Mandela would face in persuading his people to accept a negotiated end to apartheid, Justice’s third great childhood memory illustrated how tough it would be to persuade them to support the Springboks. It concerned a rugby game in Upington in 1970, also in his tenth year.

Like most black children, he had little interest in the game. It was the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people. But this time curiosity, and the prospect of gloating over a rare defeat for his white neighbors, urged him on to the local rugby stadium. The New Zealand rugby team was on a tour of South Africa and had come to Upington to play against the big provincial team, North West Cape. The stadium was small, with a capacity of nine thousand, and space—where the sun beat hardest—for only a few hundred blacks. But Justice went along, trusting that the local team, the pride of Afrikaner Upington, would receive a good drubbing.

The Afrikaners, of Dutch descent mostly, speaking a language that most modern Dutch people could understand, made up 65 percent of South Africa’s five million white people. The other 35 percent spoke English at home, were of mostly British descent (though there were a number of Portuguese, Greeks, and Lithuanian Jews), and were dominant in the business world, especially big business—which in South Africa meant the gold, diamond, and platinum mines. But in terms of political power, the Afrikaners ruled supreme. They ran the state—every cabinet minister, every army general, every police general, every senior intelligence officer was an Afrikaner—and they owned and farmed the land. So complete was the association between the Afrikaners and the land that the word “Boer,” meaning “farmer” in Afrikaans, was almost synonymous in practice with Afrikaner. This was hardly surprising given that 50,000 white farmers owned twelve times as much arable and grazing land as the country’s 14 million rural blacks.