Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (9 page)

Mandela stood smiling on the threshold of the crocodile’s lair, sensing that if he struck the right tone and chose his words wisely the triumph he had been building up to for a quarter of a century might finally be in his grasp. He knew that Botha’s decision to meet was an acknowledgment that things could not go on as they had. That was why he had not agonized about the appropriateness of sitting down and talking to the most violent bunch of rulers South Africa had known since the establishment of apartheid in 1948.

Mandela understood, first of all, and in a way that the Justice Bekebekes out there on the firing line could not, that the violence Botha had unleashed on the black population over the previous four years signified a growing weakness and despair. With the illusion of legitimacy gone, the only instrument left to keep apartheid going was the barrel of a gun. If Mandela had learned one thing in prison it was to take the long view. And that meant not being sidetracked by present horrors and keeping his eye firmly fixed on the distant goal.

And there was something else. In all his years studying the Afrikaners, their language and culture, he had come to learn that what they were, above all else, was survivors. They had arrived from Europe and settled in Africa and made it their home. In order to have succeeded in that, they had had to be tough, but also pragmatic. There were two P. W. Bothas. There was the pitiless bully, and there was the man who once warned Afrikaners in a celebrated speech that they had to “adapt or die.”

Barnard knocked on the president’s door, opened it, and entered the plush salon, decorated in Versailles upholstery. Mandela recalls the moment in his autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom
: “From the opposite side of his grand office PW Botha walked towards me. He had his hand out and was smiling broadly, and in fact from that very first moment he completely disarmed me.” Kobie Coetsee, who stood on the wings of the meeting alongside Barnard, and watched in astonishment as Botha poured Mandela a cup of tea, judged that the disarming was mutual. Mandela put the gruff old crocodile at his ease, soothed him with his frank smile and stately manner, and by speaking to him in Afrikaans. “I would say there was almost relief as they approached each other for the first time,” Coetsee said.

Botha showed Mandela unqualified respect. Mandela too was politeness itself, but where he had the edge over the president was in the guile of his seductive arts. He reached out by drawing analogies between black people’s present struggle for liberation and the Afrikaners’ similar endeavor in the Anglo-Boer War, nearly a hundred years earlier, to shake off the British imperial yoke. Botha, whose father and grandfather had fought the British in that war, was impressed by Mandela’s knowledge of his people’s history.

Having judged that he had softened up the president, Mandela went ahead and disobeyed Barnard’s instructions, raising the subject of his friend Sisulu’s release. It was of deep importance, both for political and personal reasons, that Sisulu, whose health was not perfect, should be set free, he argued. “Strangely enough,” Barnard recalled a decade later, “Mr. Botha listened, and he said, ‘Dr. Barnard, you know the problems we have. I take it that you’ve explained to Mr. Mandela, but I think we must help him. I think it must be done. You will give some attention to that.’ I said, ‘All right, Mr. President.’ ”

It was not all easy going between the two men. “There were moments of great sincerity,” Coetsee recalled, “and both parties were very serious in their position.” Mandela may have had to bite his lip when Botha, as Coetsee remembered it, began banging on about “standards and norms, civilization and the scriptures,” which was National Party politicians’ coded way of contrasting the merits of their culture with the benighted barbarism of the world inhabited by the blacks. Botha would not have been thrilled, for his part, to hear Mandela restate his view that the Communist Party was a longtime ally and he was “not now going to shed partners who had been with the ANC throughout the struggle.”

Yet the two men parted as affably as they had met. The chemistry Coetsee identified had worked because Botha confirmed immediately one of the impressions Barnard had reached: Mandela was a man of strong convictions and was unafraid to state them. “Mandela was very sincere, even rudely straightforward at times,” Barnard said. “Afrikaner people like that.” Botha looked at the leader of black South Africa and he chose to see an idealized version of his own blunt self. Appealing to his vanity and to his Afrikaner pride, Mandela had conquered the “krokodil.” “Mandela,” Barnard said, “knew how to use his power subtly. It is like comparing old money and new money. He knew how to handle power without humiliating his enemies.”

An official statement after the meeting rendered Mandela’s victory in bland language: the two men had “confirmed their support for peaceful developments” in South Africa. Botha had committed himself, in other words, to the plan Mandela had been hatching for twenty-seven years in prison: peace through dialogue. Preparations toward full negotiations between the ANC and the government, blessed now by the Afrikaner-in-chief, would continue apace. Also, there had been the pleasing bonus of apparent movement on the release of Walter Sisulu and half a dozen other veteran prisoners, which happened three months later, even though Botha himself would be out of office by then, replaced by F. W. de Klerk.

Both men left that meeting in Tuynhuys feeling better about themselves and the world than when they had gone in. Mandela, in particular, left in a mood of quiet triumph. As he would write in his autobiography, “Mr. Botha had long talked about the need to cross the Rubicon, but he never did it himself until that morning in Tuynhuys. Now, I felt, there was no turning back.”

That was the end of Mandela’s political work behind bars. He had won over his immediate jailers, like Christo Brand and Jack Swart; then the prison bosses—the Colonel Aucamps and the Major van Sitterts; then Kobie Coetsee, Niël Barnard, and, against all odds, the big crocodile himself. The next step was to leave jail and start practicing his magic on the population at large, broadening his charm offensive until it embraced all of white South Africa.

CHAPTER V

DIFFERENT PLANETS

The world Mandela found himself inhabiting in 1989 was far removed in time and moral space from the harshness of life in South Africa, especially black South Africa. As he dressed up for a night out at the home of that nice Willemse couple, as he messed around with his microwave oven, discussed wine with his butler, splashed in his pool, and admired the view from his garden, the most powerful men in the country—the very ones with whom he would sit and sip those genteel cups of tea—would sneak out of the back door and regress to apartheid type, venting the furies on the people Mandela had dedicated his life to setting free.

Apart from the usual riot police mayhem in the townships, the police and army death squads whose creation Botha had approved were bumping off activists they considered a particular danger to the state. And Kobie Coetsee still presided over a judicial system that was sentencing more people to death than Saudi Arabia and the United States (though fewer than China, Iraq, and Iran) and was passing one unjust judgment after another. In April 1989, two white farmers found guilty of beating a black farm employee to death had been sentenced to a fine of 1,200 rand (then about $500), plus a six-month jail sentence suspended for five years. On the very same day another court had found three policemen guilty of beating a black man to death, but jailed just one of the policemen, the one who happened to be black, for twelve years.

Nothing quite compared, though, with what Coetsee’s people were getting up to in a courtroom in downtown Upington. Of the twenty-six individuals accused of the murder of Lucas Sethwala, the black policeman who had fired into the crowd, they had contrived to find twenty-five guilty. What still remained to be decided in the middle of 1989 was whether the twenty-five, who had all been in jail since the end of 1985, would receive the mandatory death sentence.

Paballelo was consumed by every detail of the trial. But for the white population of Upington it might have been unfolding in Borneo, for all the interest it held. Save for the policemen on duty, not one white Upingtonian turned up during the whole three and a half years that the trial lasted. Drama works on the premise of a shared humanity with the protagonists. For Upington, Paballelo was a dimly lit parallel world inhabited by an alien species; best left well alone.

It would be unfair to suggest that Upington had cornered the market on white racism. The trial under way there, and the circumstances around it, could have happened in any of a hundred other towns in South Africa. Upington, sitting out there in the desert, did provide a sharply focused vision of apartheid, of the neatly drawn lines that kept the races apart. But the local white burghers were by no means alone, or substantially different from most of their pale-skinned compatriots. And while they were satirized and pilloried the world over, you would have to wonder whether the average citizen of the United States, Canada, or Australia, had he or she been born in apartheid South Africa, would have behaved much differently. They inhabited the same general orbit as the most privileged people in the Western world. Their lives centered on home and work, on leading an enjoyable and comfortable life. Politics rarely came into it. The difference lay in that they happened to live side by side with some of the poorest, most badly treated people in the world, and that their good fortune, the reason why white South Africans enjoyed quite possibly the world’s highest average standard of living, and most definitely the most comfortable quality of life, depended on the misfortune of their black neighbors.

Choose a family from among the lower economic rungs of white South Africa. Choose, say, the family of François Pienaar, who would end up as Springbok captain in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. Pienaar’s father was a blue-collar worker in the steel industry. His family was not well-off by the standards of white South Africa. Life for them was a financial struggle. Pienaar was embarrassed by the battered old family car, by the presents he received at Christmas, less extravagant than other boys’. Yet the Pienaar family had a home large enough to accommodate two live-in black maids, who would address François and his three younger brothers as “klein baas,” “little boss.” This kind of relationship between six-year-old white boys and maids old enough to be their mothers or grandmothers was normal in white homes—as it had been for a long time. P. W. Botha, once described in an interview with the
New York Times
his relationship with black people as he grew up. “I was taught by my father to be strict with them,” he said “but to be just.”

Pienaar grew up in an industrial town south of Johannesburg, five hundred miles east of Upington, called Vereeniging. White Vereeniging had the same relationship with its nearest black township, Sharpeville, as white Upington did with Paballelo. Sharpeville occupied a place in the minds of the Pienaar family barely more meaningful to them than Selma, Alabama. Yet Vereeniging weighed heavily on the minds of Sharpeville’s residents. It was the place from which death had been famously visited on them. Sharpeville endured the single worst atrocity of the apartheid era; in 1960 police opened fire on unarmed, fleeing black demonstrators, killing sixty-nine.

There was probably more hatred concentrated toward whites in Vereeniging than anywhere else in South Africa. Sharpeville was the township where the PAC—the “one settler, one bullet” people—had their strongest base of support. Yet Pienaar had little notion that the blacks viewed him as a mortal enemy, and no sense of Sharpeville’s existence, let alone its history, as he grew up. Black people drifted around the fuzzier outside edges of his youthful consciousness. As he would admit, “We were a typical, not very politically aware working-class Afrikaner family who never spoke about politics and believed a hundred percent in the propaganda of the day.”

That was the way it was for practically everybody who grew up in Pienaar’s world. It didn’t cross their minds to question the justness of whites having bigger homes, better cars, better schools, better sports facilities, or the ancestral right to jump the line ahead of black people at the post office. Even more remote for Pienaar, as for the vast majority of Afrikaners of his social class, was the notion that this privileged life whites led had been dubiously acquired, and could be roughly taken away one day. In his adolescence, the notion that black people might organize themselves into a force meriting the title of “enemy” would have seemed far-fetched. The enemy, as far as the rugby-playing François was concerned, were “the Englishmen.” They also played rugby, though never as well as the Afrikaners, whom the English-speaking whites called “Dutchmen.” The young Pienaar took great pride in the fact that during his entire school career, his team never lost once to a school whose predominant language was English.

The gap between the Pienaar family’s passion for rugby and their lack of interest in politics was revealed during the Springboks’ 1981 tour of New Zealand. Ordinarily one of the most politically placid countries in the world, New Zealand was split dangerously down the middle by the tour, such was the strength of feeling between the half of the country that shared the Afrikaners’ blind devotion to the game and the half that abhorred South Africa’s great “crime against humanity.” Never before had the population of the island nation been more polarized. The tour lasted eight tumultuous weeks, and everywhere the Springboks went they were met by frenzied demonstrators, helmeted riot police, soldiers, and barbed wire. The stadiums were always full, but the streets outside were packed with just as many demonstrators laying siege. The tour’s final game in Auckland was disrupted by a low-flying light plane that dropped flour bombs on the field. Combined with images of policemen clubbing demonstrators dressed in clown costumes, it all made for great TV. The Pienaar family was watching. But they were frankly puzzled by what they saw.