FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
NELSON MANDELA: SOUTH
AFRICA’S LIBERATOR
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Someday, African National Congress
May Hit The Target
By JOSEPH LELYVELD
August 16, 1981
JOHANNESBURG — Elsie Sekanka, a black domestic servant on a military base just
outside Pretoria, received a message last week that was meant for white South Africa. It
was a 122-millimeter Soviet-made rocket and it came crashing through the roof of her
room in the servants’ quarters behind an officer’s house, exploding near her bed without
causing her any injury.
If that rocket or three others that fell on the base without exploding had struck
anything of military significance, the message would have been that the outlawed African
National Congress, the main movement fighting white rule, had developed the capacity to
operate effectively near the South African capital. Instead, the message was ambiguous:
that the movement’s sabotage campaign is still hampered by ineptitude and that South
Africa, because of the prevalence of blacks as laborers in areas officially deemed to be
“white,” offers few targets that don’t put black lives at risk.
Incidents of sabotage have been occurring almost weekly in the past few months,
but the cost to the white state is probably less than what it loses when the price of gold
dips by a couple of dollars an ounce. Yet the attacks serve as a form of political graffiti,
reminding whites and blacks alike of the existence of a resistance movement and of the
industrial state’s vulnerability to well-conceived assaults on its infrastructure.
The African National Congress is certainly more than the sum of its efforts
underground or in exile, where it has been reasonably effective on the diplomatic front,
spurring boycotts and keeping opposition to white rule at the top of the continent’s
agenda. It is also a political tradition, serving as the main vehicle for the aspirations of
those South African blacks — as far as anyone can tell, a majority — who think the
solution to the country’s conflicts is simply to make whites share power with the
country’s black majority wherever they wield it.
The banning of the A.N.C. in 1960 climaxed half a century of consistently peaceful,
and futile, protest by the organization, which was influenced at its inception in 1912 by
Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns among Indians here. Only after it was forced
underground did its military arm, Umkonto we Sizwe or “Spear of the Nation,” surface.
The government calls its members “terrorists,” but the military branch has sought to
avoid actions that jeopardize civilians of any hue. The explosions this month in
downtown East London and a Port Elizabeth shopping center were so out of keeping with
its recent tactics that the question was raised of whether another group had come on the
scene, perhaps the rival Pan-Africanist Congress, which has been paralyzed in recent
years by dissension in its exile wing and nearly invisible within South Africa.
Some blacks who acknowledge privately that they are close to the African National
Congress (belonging to or supporting the aims of a banned organization is a crime),
contend that its tactics will inevitably become harsher when the black masses understand
the necessity for violent struggle and the underground is strong enough to sustain it. The
greatest restraint now isn’t doctrine but the effectiveness of the state security apparatus,
which has consistently managed to penetrate the movement, lacing its ranks with black
and white spies and agents provocateurs.
Armed with sweeping powers, the police are able to detain people without trial and
without even having to acknowledge that they are holding them. The authorities are
regularly accused of torture, but they also have been able to use material incentives to
gain the cooperation of blacks. In these circumstances, the African National Congress
cannot launch widespread operations without putting its relatively few trained insurgents
at severe risk. Indications are that the military arm is holding down recruitment to try to
deal with infiltration. According to South African estimates, fewer than 1,500 men are
trained or in training in Angola, East Germany or the Soviet Union. Most of these left
South Africa after the black revolts in Soweto and other centers in 1976 and 1977.
The movement’s greatest weakness is its lack of a reliable clandestine structure
within South Africa. It has a network of sympathizers, blacks and even a few whites who
are ready to take chances for it. But its operations almost invariably involve sending
agents into the country across a border — the usual route is from Mozambique via
Swaziland — and getting them out as soon as possible.
South Africa’s security system doesn’t stop at its borders. In January, its forces
attacked congress buildings in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. On July 31, a key figure in
the movement and its chief representative in Zimbabwe, Joe Gqabi, was gunned down
outside his house in Salisbury. Zimbabwe blamed South African agents.
From the vantage point of South Africa, it is difficult to say whether the recent
increase in underground activity is meant as reprisal or as part of a long-term strategy for
seizing power. The indications have been that the African National Congress is hoping to
serve as a catalyst for a mass rising, rather than to launch a conventional guerrilla war
against Africa’s strongest power. For this reason, the battleground is often said to be the
factory floor, where black trade unions have been allowed a tenuous legal existence in
recent years.
The attraction of the labor front for supporters of the congress is partly ideological:
If the unions can be seen as key agents of change, then the revolution can be viewed as a
class rather than as a racial struggle. In the complex South African setting, however,
deciding who may belong to the revolution — more specifically, whether whites can play
a role — is the main issue among blacks. The A.N.C., which has maintained a tactical
alliance for years with South Africa’s small Communist Party, has traditionally resisted
the Pan-Africanist line that the struggle is essentially, if not exclusively, for blacks.
Many of the young blacks who went into exile five years ago came out of what was
known as the Black Consciousness movement and were ideologically closer to the PanAfricanist Congress than to the A.N.C. In choosing between the two, however, they put
aside ideology and went for the movement that seemed most effective.
Reports filtering out of Robben Island, where South Africa holds most of its black
political prisoners, suggest that younger members of the African National Congress there
sometimes get impatient with their putative leader, Nelson Mandela, on grounds that he is
too moderate. But young blacks in the townships seem increasingly firm in their
identification with the congress and with Mr. Mandela as its leader. “Students have high
hopes because they know they will eventually see the liberation,” a young student activist
remarked recently, explaining his readiness to face surveillance and arrest. “All of them
feel it doesn’t matter when it is coming. They see it as if it is already here.” A few days
later, the young man was jailed. In the seemingly endless cycle here of challenge and
repression, he is being held without charge under the Terrorism Act.
South African Woman ‘Banned’ But
Unbowed
By JOSEPH LELYVELD, Special to The New York Times
January 7, 1982
BRANDFORT, South Africa, Jan. 4 — The police station on the main street of this small
farming town in the Orange Free State has two entrances, one marked “white” and the
other “nonwhite.” Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned leader of the banned African
National Conference, went through the one marked “white” today when she reported for
the first time under a new order that banishes and confines her to Brandfort for another
five years.
The order requires her to report to the police weekly, which is pure formality
because she is kept under daily and often nightly surveillance in the hope, she believes,
that she will be caught in some infraction of what is known as her “ban.”
Both sides recognize it as a contest of strong wills. Going through the wrong door at
the police station — as Mrs. Mandela can be relied upon to do for the next 259 weeks —
expresses more than the contempt of a vivid and sophisticated woman for the racial
conventions imposed by the dominant Afrikaners on this provincial community, her place
of exile since 1977.
It is also a way of saying she expects no quarter and gives none. When the
commander of the security police in the Free State turned up last week to serve her with
her fifth banning order since 1962 — the year her husband, Nelson Mandela, was arrested
— she tried not to look at him, she recalled this afternoon.
“I just asked whether it was any different from the last one and told them to put it on
the table,” she said. “You cannot pretend it is not painful, but you develop a type of
immunity after having the same pain inflicted on you over and over again.”
Like the banning order that was to expire two days after the new one was served, it
not only confined her to Brandfort but placed her under house arrest every night and
weekend in her three-room township house, which has neither electricity nor plumbing.
It also forbade her to attend “gatherings” and made it a crime for her words to be
published anywhere in South Africa. The only difference was a slight easing on the
conditions under which she can receive visitors. This was not done for her convenience
but that of the police, she contended, so they can keep tabs on whom she is seeing.
Mrs. Mandela, who has been charged eight times with breaking her various banning
orders and convicted twice, takes the latest as signifying the unyielding quality of
Afrikaner domination. And so she talks about the way the Afrikaners think, much the way
many Afrikaners tend to talk about the way blacks think.
“No, the Afrikaner is not prepared for change; not even Reagan can deceive himself
into believing that,” she said, writing off the possibility of a negotiated settlement on the
protracted issue of South-West Africa. “That’s just not the Afrikaner. He knows only one
language.”
She meant, of course, the language of force. And yet she was able to laugh richly,
the way a woman might laugh over an extravagant compliment, at the implied tribute in
her ban.
“Why should an insignificant woman in the backveld of the Free State be a threat to
the Afrikaner’s kingdom?” she asked in tones of deepening irony and pleasure. “You
know, they are God’s chosen people. They are so strong. The country is so rich, so stable.
Why be afraid of a little ‘Communist’ who belongs to an organization they have wiped
out?”
Still speaking in an ironic vein, Mrs. Mandela returned to the subject of President
Reagan. How was it, she asked, that the Reagan Administration could resort to economic
sanctions against Poland but reject them against South Africa? Weren’t sanctions
“taboo”? The situations in the two countries were now “exactly the same,” she contended,
with Solidarity experiencing in Poland the fate the African National Congress has
experienced here for two decades.
In the last months, she has twice been given restricted furloughs from Brandfort.
The first time was to travel — by a route determined by the security police — to a
brother’s funeral in Transkei. On the way back, the car in which she was being driven
was forced off a bridge by a truck. Mrs. Mandela emerged with a broken arm and several
cracked ribs.
When she recovered enough to travel again, she was permitted to go to Robben
Island off Cape Town, the jail that is her husband’s Elba. She saw him on Christmas and
the day after, each time for 45 minutes, which was 15 minutes longer than any previous
visit. They were not allowed to discuss anything political, including her ban, but it was
plain, she said, “he assumed I would still be in Brandfort for a very long time.”
This premonition was confirmed two days after she returned, with the delivery of
her new ban. Mrs. Mandela, who is 47 years old, expects no leniency from the authorities
but, she said, she also does not expect to be banned forever. “We consider ourselves very
lucky to belong to a generation that will actually see the liberation of our country,” she
declared in a tone that was firm but not insistent, as if she were merely expressing an
obvious fact.
Jailed South Africa Rebel Gives Truce
Terms
By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times
January 27, 1985
JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 26 — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s most prominent jailed
nationalist, was quoted today in a rare interview as saying his armed followers would call
a truce in their war against white rule if the authorities would “legalize us, treat us like a
political party and negotiate with us.”
“Until they do, we will have to live with the armed struggle,” said Mr. Mandela,
who is regarded by many blacks here as their true leader. He was quoted by Lord Bethell,
a British member of the European Parliament, who talked with Mr. Mandela earlier this
month at Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town.
The interview is to appear Sunday in a London newspaper, The Mail on Sunday.
The nationalist, who has been in jail for over two decades and who has been
permitted to give a newspaper interview in prison only once before, in the 1960’s, said
his organization, the African National Congress, would not halt its campaign of sabotage
“unconditionally.” The South African government demands that it abandon violence
before any negotiations can take place.
The interview gave rare insights into Mr. Mandela’s prison life and into his political
and personal attitudes toward the whites who imprisoned him. It presented a picture of a
thoughtful, studious man who regretted violence but felt forced to advocate it by the
policies of the white government, and of a man who has lost no defiance or commitment
to his cause during imprisonment. It seemed also to offer a further indication of the terms
on which the African National Congress would engage in negotiations with the country’s
white rulers. The idea of a truce has seemed unlikely in the sustained confrontation
between Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress and the authorities.
The prospect of discussions seems remote, since the authorities regard the Congress
as a severe and Soviet-inspired threat to their continued supremacy and rule out its other
conditions for negotiations, such as demands for the release of Mr. Mandela and other
political prisoners.
South African authorities have not said why they agreed to permit Mr. Mandela to
be interviewed by Lord Bethell. A request by Senator Edward M. Kennedy to meet with
him was rejected shortly before the British peer’s interview was granted.
Mr. Mandela, 67 years old, is serving a life sentence, imposed in 1964, for sabotage
and for plotting a violent revolution. He was already in jail for other offenses when the
sentence was handed down.
Initially, Mr. Mandela was sent to Robben Island, just off Cape Town, but he was
moved in 1982 to Pollsmoor, a modern high-security prison built in light-colored brick in
a wooded suburb of the city.
Lord Bethell described him as “a six- foot tall, lean figure with silvering hair, an
impeccable olive-green shirt, black shoes and well-creased navy blue trousers.” His
manner, Lord Bethell said, was more self-assured than that of his keepers, with whom his
relationship was depicted as nonconfrontational.
By South African law, Mr. Mandela — like his wife, Winnie, who is a “banned”
person living under severe restrictions in the remote town of Brandfort — may not be
quoted in South Africa, where the authorities depict him and those who think like him as
terrorists.
In the interview, Mr. Mandela said that the African National Congress, outlawed
since 1960 in South Africa, had been forced into “armed struggle” by the government’s
attitudes. He depicted the war fought by his exiled countrymen, however, as having
“certain limits.”
“We go for hard targets only, military installations and the symbols of apartheid,” he
said, referring to the policies of racial compartmentalization that enfold South Africa.
“Civilians must not be touched.” He expressed deep regret over the explosion of a car
bomb outside a military headquarters in Pretoria in May 1983 in which 18 people were
killed, many of them blacks, and 190 were wounded.
“We aim for buildings and property, so it may be that someone gets killed in a fight,
in the heat of battle, but we do not believe in assassinations,” Mr. Mandela was quoted as
having said.
Mr. Mandela said he had rejected an offer of freedom on the condition that he live in
the tribal homeland for Xhosa-speaking people called the Transkei, which has accepted
nominal independence from South Africa.
“I completely rejected the idea,” he said in the interview. “I have served 22 years in
prison for fighting against the policy of Bantustans. There is no way that I could then go
and live in a Bantustan. I would also reject an offer to go abroad. My place is in South
Africa and my home is in Johannesburg.”
South Africa’s security police maintain that there are strong ties between the African
National Congress and the banned South African Communist Party, regarding both as
tools of Moscow.
“Personally I am a Socialist and I believe in a classless society,” Mr. Mandela was
quoted as having said. “But I see no reason to belong to any political party at the
moment.”
“I appreciate the Soviet Union only because it was the one country that long ago
condemned racialism and supported liberation movements,” he said.
Referring to prison conditions, Mr. Mandela, a lawyer by training, said there was
insufficient privacy for his studies, as well as censorship of incoming and outgoing mail
and limitations on who could visit him. He complained, too, that he and five unidentified
others were kept apart from other prisoners.
In comparison with his first 10 years on Robben Island, however, when “conditions
were really very bad” because of physical assaults, hard labor and psychological
persecution, “the food is good, and there are no problems with the staff, racial or
otherwise” at Pollsmoor, Mr. Mandela was quoted as saying.
“I am in good health,” he said, according to the interview, “It is not true that I have
cancer. It is not true that I had a toe amputated. I get up at 3:30 every morning, do two
hours of physical exercise, work up a good sweat. Then I read and study during the day.”
The prisoners grow vegetables in pots, Mr. Mandela said, and the army major who
guards them was described as “an excellent gardener.”
South Africa Hints At Conditional
Release For Jailed Black Leaders
By ALAN COWELL
February 1, 1985
CAPE TOWN, Jan. 31 — President P. W. Botha held out the possibility for the first time
today of a conditional release for Nelson Mandela, the country’s best-known black
nationalist leader, who has been in jail for over two decades and who is regarded by many
South African black people as their true leader.
There was no immediate response from Mr. Mandela, 66 years old, who is in
Pollsmoor maximum-security prison in Cape Town, or from members of his family.
Some South African commentators, however, said the purpose of Mr. Botha’s offer
seemed to be to shift responsibility for Mr. Mandela’s continued incarceration away from
the white authorities and onto the shoulders of Mr. Mandela himself.
Previously, Mr. Mandela, who was sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment on
charges of sabotage and plotting a violent revolution, has spurned offers of release in the
nominally independent tribal homeland of the Transkei, which is reserved for people of
Xhosa ethnic origin, like Mr. Mandela. He has not been offered release in those parts of
South Africa deemed by the authorities to lie outside the tribal homelands.
In the white chamber of South Africa’s new, three-chamber Parliament today, Mr.
Botha said: “The government is not insensitive to the fact that Mr. Mandela and others
have spent a very long time in prison, even though they were duly convicted in open
court.
“The government is also willing to consider Mr. Mandela’s release in the Republic
of South Africa on condition that Mr. Mandela gives a commitment that he will not make
himself guilty of planning, instigating or committing acts of violence for the furtherance
of political objectives, but will conduct himself in such a way that he will not again have
to be arrested.”
“As I have indicated,” Mr. Botha went on, “the government is willing to consider
Mr. Mandela’s release, but I am sure that Parliament will understand that we cannot do so
if Mr. Mandela himself says that the moment he leaves prison he will continue with his
commitment to violence.”
“It is therefore not the South African government which now stands in the way of
Mr. Mandela. It is he himself. The choice is his. All that is required of him is that he
should unconditionally reject violence as a political instrument,” Mr. Botha said.
In a rare interview published in London on Sunday, Mr. Mandela was quoted as
saying he would not accept any restrictions or conditions on his release. Moreover, he
said, the limited guerrilla war being waged by his organization, the African National
Congress, would continue until Mr. Botha’s government agreed to “legalize us, treat us
like a political party and negotiate with us.” At that point, Mr. Mandela was quoted as
saying, he was prepared to call a truce.
“The armed struggle was forced on us by the government and if they want us to give
it up, the ball is in their court,” Mr. Mandela was quoted as saying in the interview. Mr.
Botha did not address Mr. Mandela’s offer of a truce, and did not refer to the idea of
legalizing the African National Congress, which the government has viewed for many
years as its main armed opponent, and which is outlawed in South Africa.
There has recently been much speculation in South African newspapers that the
authorities might talk with representatives of the African National Congress. Oliver
Tambo, an exiled leader of the organization, said in an interview in Lusaka, Zambia,
earlier this month that there could be no such discussions while Mr. Mandela and other
nationalist figures were still in jail.
Mr. Mandela’s position was set out in an interview with Lord Bethell, a British
member of the European Parliament. Access to Mr. Mandela is closely controlled, so the
timing of Mr. Botha’s statement today seemed to hint at orchestration by the authorities
of his comments and Mr. Botha’s response.
Mr. Botha said Lord Bethell’s report on Mr. Mandela’s prison conditions had “given
the lie” to allegations that the nationalist leader was being mistreated.
There have been widespread calls for Mr. Mandela’s release both from black leaders
inside this racially divided nation and from outside the country. From the authorities’
viewpoint, his unconditional release would galvanize black opposition to white minority
rule and permit him to campaign for violent overthrow of the Pretoria government.
At the same time, a renunciation of violence from him, as the authorities are
demanding, would greatly lower his standing among those of his followers who regard
him as a figure untainted by compromise with the white authorities. Release on Mr.
Botha’s terms would undermine Mr. Mandela’s influence unless accompanied by further
concessions by the government on the acceptability of the African National Congress.
Some South African commentators suggested that Mr. Botha was maneuvering for
position rather than embarking on a process of public negotiation between his
government and the imprisoned nationalist.
The Man Nobody Knows
By ALAN COWELL
July 7, 1985
For all his influence, Nelson Mandela is all but invisible. Since August 1962, the man
most black South Africans look up to as their leader has been out of view — imprisoned
for leading the banned African National Congress in its armed resistance to the apartheid
system. During his confinement, Mandela’s fame has grown into legend, assuming an
almost mythical importance in the litanies of the nation’s defiance. Yet he is visited
regularly only by his family, and he remains unseen by his millions of supporters.
Mandela was born in 1918, the eldest son of a chief in what is now the nominally
independent homeland called Transkei. Trained as a lawyer, he joined the African
National Congress in 1944, and was a leader of the congress’s nonviolent campaigns
against apartheid during the 1950’s.
After police killed 69 unarmed black protestors at Sharpeville in 1960, Mandela and
other congress leaders increasingly abandoned their hopes for peaceful change, and in
1961 formed the congress’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation.
“The choice is not ours,” a congress pamphlet declared at the time, “it has been made by
the Nationalist government which has rejected every peaceable demand by the people for
rights and freedom.”
Mandela was arrested in 1962 after helping to direct the first months of Umkhonto
we Sizwe’s sabotage campaign. His comrades — black nationalists and white
Communists — were captured the following year. When their trial ended, Mandela was
jailed for life.
At the trial, Mandela spoke of “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which
all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”
“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve,” he declared. “But if need be,
an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Since then, Mandela’s incarceration has honed the message. No stigma of
compromise or doubt is attached to his name. And his fame has spread not only
throughout Africa, but also to countries such as England, where a song entitled “Free
Nelson Mandela” recently reached the top-10 on rock-music charts.
In the absence of Mandela and his colleagues, the African National Congress has
continued its campaign of armed resistance, directing guerrilla operations from its exile
headquarters in Zambia.
Inside South Africa it is illegal to do or say anything that might aid the congress,
which South African authorities contend is controlled by its Communist members and by
the Soviet Union. Yet, judging from numerous conversations with young and militant
blacks, the congress remains the principal custodian of black yearnings for equality.
There are many in South Africa who say the nation’s anguish will not end unless the
white regime negotiates with Mandela and the congress. But the prospects of such an
encounter seem remote.
Last January, State President P. W. Botha offered to release Mandela if he
renounced violence — an offer Mandela could not accept without dividing his own
organization and seeming to abandon his followers. The authorities’ motives were never
spelled out, but they may have included a desire to seem reasonable in the eyes of the
Reagan Administration and thus to justify Washington’s policy of “constructive
engagement.” They may, too, have reflected a desire to neutralize Mandela’s support.
Although there has been no suggestion that Mandela is infirm, a further consideration
may have been to arrange events so that he does not die in prison — an event that would
cause massive black anger, whatever the circumstances of death.
Mandela declined his own freedom, presenting the authorities with counterdemands
for the legalization of his organization and the freeing of his fellow prisoners. His 23year-old daughter, Zinzi, made his rejection known at a rally in Soweto on Feb. 10.
“My father says: ‘I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I, and
you the people, are not free,’ ” she declared. “ ‘Your freedom and mine cannot be
separated.’ ”
Unbowed, Winnie Mandela Endures
By SHEILA RULE, Special to The New York Times
August 18, 1985
JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 17 — To Winnie Mandela, commitment is a balm that heals
the souls of black people in a land where race can determine destiny.
Mrs. Mandela, the apartheid foe and wife of Nelson Mandela, the jailed leader of the
outlawed African National Congress, is a vigorous symbol of resistance to South Africa’s
system of racial separation. A woman rich in grace and dignity, she wears her pride in her
blackness like a fine silk robe. In at least one way, she says, to be black in South Africa is
to be blessed.
“We are lucky in the sense that each home is a political institution by virtue of our
blackness,” she said in an interview at her lawyer’s office in Johannesburg. “Blackness
alone is commitment because you are born into racism. You are born into a society that
has distorted values by those of another culture.
“We sucked from our mother’s breast the thirst for human dignity. We sucked from
our mother’s breast the yearn for liberation.”
Mrs. Mandela, who will be 49 years old next month, remains unbowed in a struggle
for equality that is saturated with pain. She is what is called a banned person, meaning
that she may not address public gatherings or meet with more than one person at a time.
Since 1977 she has lived in forced exile in a black township outside the city of
Brandfort in the remote Orange Free State. She is under 24-hour surveillance there and
must report to the police every Monday. At the police station or anywhere else, she has
always refused to use entrances or accommodations marked “Nonwhite.”
“That, I believe, is the best way to teach the community that they have human
dignity,” she said.
Within the last two weeks, her home — she calls it her prison — has been raided by
policemen who used rubber bullets and whips to break up a demonstration outside. It has
also been set on fire. The clinic she runs was badly damaged in the blaze, which she says
she believes was the work of government security forces.
Her husband was sentenced in 1964 to life in prison on charges of sabotage and
plotting a violent revolution. President P. W. Botha, in a speech on Thursday, repeated
his offer to release Mr. Mandela if the nationalist leader renounced violence. But Mr.
Mandela, who is regarded by many South African blacks as their true leader, remains
adamant in his refusal to accept any conditional release.
Mrs. Mandela and her family are allowed a maximum of 30 visits a year, each of 40minute duration, with Mr. Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town. Five visits are
allowed at Christmas and New Year’s.
The regular visits are all used up, save for one reserved for emergencies, she said.
For this couple, privacy has become a foreign concept. Since last year, they have been
allowed to have so-called contact visits: they may sit in the same room, although apart,
and are watched by guards.
Like her husband, who is 67 years old, Mrs. Mandela was born in what is now the
nominally independent homeland called Transkei. As a child, she became aware of how
the color of a person’s skin could cast shadows over life’s possibilities.
Her father was a school principal and, by blood rights, was to be a chief in the
village. But he refused to accept the traditional position because it would have meant, in
the eyes of the village, that he was a government servant or “stooge” who no longer had
the interests of the people at heart.
Even with her royal blood, she recalls, she was nothing more than a peasant in the
eyes of the white man. Poverty was constant. Her mother, who died when Mrs. Mandela
was 9 years old, walked to the river to gather herbs to wash the family’s clothes because
there was no soap. Her mother struggled to find food for the next meal.
Mrs. Mandela says she first wore shoes when she went to high school, because her
father could not afford them before then. He sent her off to high school with pocket
money that was the equivalent of 25 cents and that was expected to last for six months,
she said.
“When I went to secondary school, I noticed the difference between the white child
and the black child,” she said in her soft, determined voice.
“White children were dressed beautifully and they traveled in their parents’ cars,”
she said. “But as black children, we learned to do without the bare necessities of life
because our parents could not afford things.”
Mrs. Mandela, who has two adult daughters, finds solace and joy in her work in the
township near Brandfort that is now her home. She has become a part of, in fact a leader
of, the community, to which she plans to return when her modest dwelling and clinic are
restored.
It is a poor patch of land in an area that has been devastated by drought. Black
farmhands have been laid off by their white employers, leaving them with no homes and
no jobs. So they find their way to the township of about 10,000 people, where the only
form of social life is the daily funeral and where hopelessness is a constant, sullen
companion. There, they seek help. Mrs. Mandela tries to provide it. Each morning, she
makes her rounds, gathering scores of children and taking them to the nursery school she
operates in the hall of a Methodist Church. For these children, the soup and the milk they
get at the school are the only real meal of the day.
From there, Mrs. Mandela begins her work at the clinic. She sees many infants who
fall ill after their poverty-stricken mothers give them a concoction of braised flour and
unsterilized water as a formula. There are also many victims of stabbings and other
violence, the byproducts of staggering frustration.
After a full day at the clinic, Mrs. Mandela visits the elderly who cannot travel to
her medical center. She takes them soup and finds out what is ailing them. At her home,
someone is always coming by to seek advice or guidance. Many of the visitors are
delinquent children, products of broken homes who look for comfort in Mrs. Mandela’s
gentleness and strength. They find an abundance of both.
“I find myself strength from the knowledge that each step I take the nation is behind
me,” she said, as her face gave in to a warm smile. “I find my strength in the knowledge
that whatever is done to me is not being done to me as an individual, but it is being done
to me as a symbol.
“To me, the more vicious the acts of terror are, the more they confirm a recognition
of our position,” she said. “That if such anger and sadism are directed at me, then the
impact of the struggle of my people is getting somewhere. And we shall get there.”
Mandela: Man, Legend And Symbol Of
Resistance
By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times
September 5, 1985
JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 4 — Percy Qoboza remembers the days fondly. One of them
goes like this: In the early 1960’s the man was on the run from the police, and Mr.
Qoboza, a young black reporter, was following the story.
“He would disappear and then turn up, somewhere, at a public telephone, and call in
with a statement. Of course the police would trace the call, but by that time, he was long
gone. We had our own pimpernel.”
Mr. Qoboza is now a prominent newspaper editor. The man he was talking about is
Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the African National Congress, whose days as
the pimpernel ran out in August 1962, when he was arrested for sabotage because of his
role in the militant wing of the congress. He has been in prison ever since and has
become, through incarceration and steadfast defiance from within the prison walls, South
Africa’s leading black hero, the man, according to a recent newspaper survey, whom 90
percent of the nation’s black people want unconditionally freed.
“I think,” Mr. Qoboza said in an interview today, “that he symbolizes black
determination to be free.”
The symbolism, from a black nationalist point of view, is evident. Pollsmoor prison,
outside Cape Town, where Mr. Mandela is held, represents the system against which he
rebels. His rebellion, from within, is the ambiguous emblem of defiance in a society
where the rulers seem to call the shots.
The enigma, however, seems to be that, invisible and unheard, removed by white
authority from black political activism, Mr. Mandela has captured the spirit and devotion
not only of those who knew him at the time of his incarceration, but also of those who
have, in the last year of upheaval, assumed the custodianship of black resistance — the
teen-agers who were not yet born when he was jailed.
If Mr. Mandela, 67 years old, was released tomorrow, said Michael Morake, 18, in
an interview in Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black satellite, “I will probably pass
him by because I would not recognize him.”
“But it is his ideas and commitment to the struggle that make even us youths regard
him as our leader,” he said.
“Anyhow,” he added, “I do not worry about not knowing what Mandela looks like
right now, because the day has come closer where I will see him with my own eyes.”
“If the system does not free him,” he said, “the people’s revolution will set him free.
And that day is not far away.”
Mr. Mandela is seen as an inspiration whose physical presence means less than his
message and example.
“He is the symbol of our struggle,” said Mzwakhe Kubheka, 19, a high school
student. “To me he is like Jesus Christ.”
“How many people would rather stay in jail than be free at the cost of their
integrity,” he said.
“For the struggle to go on,” he said, “we do not need Mandela to be around. We, the
youths, will do the job the way our leader would have wanted. And he knows that we are
carrying on from where he left off 23 years ago.”
Mr. Mandela was jailed and was supposed to become, thus, a nonperson, banished,
initially to the harshness of Robben Island, off Cape Town. But the myth was stronger
than the prison walls and it grew across the generations.
There were other heroes, but many have been detained or otherwise neutralized. Mr.
Mandela filled the emptiness at the heart of black yearning for leadership. Who, then, is
he? Mr. Mandela was born in 1918, the eldest son of a chief of the Tembu people,
inheriting a mantle of royal self-confidence that defied white relegation of blacks to
second-class status. He studied law at South Africa’s Fort Hare University, an academy
whose alumni include Robert Mugabe, now Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.
As in Mr. Mugabe’s case, the university seems to have honed political views. Mr.
Mandela is said to have been expelled from it for organizing a student strike.
In Johannesburg, he and Oliver Tambo, now the exiled leader of the African
National Congress, formed a law practice. In 1944 Mr. Mandela joined the congress, then
far less demanding of white concessions than it is today, and played a leading role in its
nonviolent campaigns against apartheid in the 1950’s.
Those actions caused him to be detained, along with 155 others, in 1957, in a fouryear treason trial that ended, in 1961, with all the defendants being acquitted. That was
the start of the pimpernel whose credentials were strengthened, Mr. Qoboza said, by the
fact that Mr. Mandela never chose self-exile to secure comfortable dissent.
It was at this time, too, that a great change came over black resistance in South
Africa. On March 21, 1960, the police shot dead 69 black protesters in Sharpeville, a
black township south of Johannesburg, and, in the wake of the massacre, leaders such as
Mr. Mandela decided to turn to violence.
Mr. Mandela was a central figure in the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe — the
Spear of the Nation — the military wing of the African National Congress, and he
became its first commander. On one of his trips outside South Africa, he was said to have
visited Algeria, to organize training bases, and to have undergone training. The name of
Umkhonto we Sizwe is feted, still, in the songs that young blacks sing at the gravesides of
slain township activists.
In August 1962 the authorities caught up with Mr. Mandela and, after the leadership
of Umkhonto we Sizwe was rounded up, put him on trial for sabotage. His final address
to the court that jailed him for life is burned into the soul of black resistance.
“There comes a time, as it came in my life,” he said, “when a man is denied the right
to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government
has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him. I was driven to this
situation, and I do not regret having taken the decisions that I did take.”
Earlier, when Mr. Mandela launched violent resistance to white rule, a pamphlet
was circulated by his organization saying: “The choice is not ours. It has been made by
the nationalist government which has rejected every peaceable demand by the people for
rights and freedom.”
At his trial, Mr. Mandela talked of “the ideal of a democratic and free society in
which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”
“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve,” he said. “But if need be, an
ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mr. Mandela is visited regularly only by his immediate family. This year, however,
the authorities have permitted some outsiders to see him.
He is, said Lord Bethell, a British peer and member of the European Parliament,
who saw Mr. Mandela in January, “a six-foot-tall, lean figure with silvering hair, an
impeccable olive-green shirt and well-creased navy blue trousers.”
“I am in good health,” Mr. Mandela said at the time. “It is not true that I have
cancer. It is not true that I have had a toe amputated. I get up at 3:30 A.M. every morning,
do two hours of physical exercise, work up a good sweat. Then I read and study during
the day.”
The reference to exercise does not surprise Mr. Qoboza. If Mr. Mandela had not
become a politician, he said, he would have become a great athlete. “When the world had
not discovered jogging, he had,” Mr. Qoboza said. “As an amateur boxer, he packed one
of the meanest left hooks in the business.”
Samuel Dash, chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee and now a professor
of law at Georgetown University, saw Mr. Mandela earlier this year and wrote, in The
New York Times Magazine, that “he is a tall, slim, handsome man” who appears
“vigorous and healthy, with a calm, confident manner and dignified bearing that seemed
incongruous in our prison surroundings.”
“Indeed, throughout our meeting, I felt that I was in the presence not of a guerrilla
fighter or racial ideologue, but of a head of state,” Mr. Dash wrote.
Mr. Mandela, he said, lived in a cell measuring 25 by 40 feet, with access to the roof
the building.
President P. W. Botha has sought to depict the African National Congress, and Mr.
Mandela, as Communists. The Congress has long entertained an alliance with the South
African Communist Party, but Mr. Tambo, its exiled leader, has denied that it is steered
by Moscow.
In his interview with Lord Bethell, Mr. Mandela was quoted as saying: “Personally,
I am a Socialist and I believe in a classless society. But I see no reason to belong to any
political party at the moment.”
Mr. Mandela confronts the authorities with a dilemma, one they have sought to
resolve for almost a year in a kind of negotiation conducted through newspapers and
public statements.
If he were to accept the authorities’ terms for his release — that he renounce
violence — then he would be discredited and thus neutralized. But, if he stays in prison,
the authorities seem to acknowledge, his aura will grow, as will his stature as a rallying
point for black resistance.
Last December, he was offered freedom if he went to live in the so-called homeland
called the Transkei. He rejected the offer.
The offer was not publicized, but, in January, after Lord Bethell saw Mr. Mandela,
the authorities publicly offered to release him if he gave them an undertaking that he
would renounce violence as a means of achieving political goals. That offer, too, was
spurned.
His reply, in the strange dialogue between captor and captive, was transmitted by his
daughter at a rally in Soweto. “My father says I cannot and will not give any undertaking
at a time when I, and you the people, are not free,” she said. “Your freedom and mine
cannot be separated.”
Mr. Mandela’s messages are often transmitted by family members who see him in
prison. His wife, Winnie, is a “banned” person in South Africa, banished to a remote
corner of the Orange Free State, forbidden from being quoted in the South African press.
Their relationship is seen by many blacks as a symbol of resistance since both, in
their different ways, are damaged by white authority, but both refuse to be cowed.
From the authorities’ viewpoint, Mr. Mandela’s incarceration presents special
problems. While visitors say he is in vigorous health, his death in prison would cause a
massive black outcry. To release him might, officials said, strip him of some glamour.
But to release him without conditions might be seen by whites as a sign of weakness, and,
moreover, might result in the unleashing of unpredictable forces.
In the latest statement that he has transmitted through Mrs. Mandela, Mr. Mandela
has said the only thing left to the Afrikaner white elite is to discuss a handing over of
power to the black majority. But he seems to have left open the door to negotiation.
“If the government abandons apartheid,” Mrs. Mandela said after visiting her
husband, “lifts the ban on the A.N.C., releases all political prisoners, and allows the exiles
to return, then Nelson and other A.N.C. leaders would be prepared to sit down and talk.”
What inspires the myth of Mr. Mandela seems to be his refusal to compromise.
“All his life has been dedicated to the struggle,” Mr. Qoboza said, “and I bet that the
first thing he would do if he was released would be to organize a rally in Soweto and rededicate himself to the struggle.”
In his interview with Lord Bethell, Mr. Mandela said much the same thing: “If I was
released, I would never obey any restriction. If they confined me, for instance, to the
Cape area, I would break the order and walk to my home in Soweto to be with my wife
and daughter.”
Pretoria Returns Mandela To Jail
By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times
November 24, 1985
JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 23 — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s most prominent black
nationalist leader, was returned to prison today from a hospital where he had been
recovering from surgery.
Mr. Mandela, 67 years old, is the leader of the African National Congress, an
outlawed and exiled movement committed to the violent overthrow of apartheid. He has a
wide following among South Africa’s black majority of 23 million.
Mr. Mandela has been jailed since 1962 on charges of planning sabotage as a
member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the
congress. He is serving a life sentence.
There has been recent speculation that the government had offered to free him under
an arrangement involving exile in Zambia or in Transkei, a nominally independent tribal
homeland within South Africa’s borders.
His return to prison today, almost three weeks after he underwent prostate surgery,
was interpreted by some of his followers as an indication that no agreement had been
reached on the terms of his release.
President P. W. Botha is reported to be under strong pressure from foreign bankers
to release Mr. Mandela and offer other evidence of political change in return for the
rescheduling of South Africa’s $24 billion foreign debt.
In September, South Africa announced a moratorium on some debt repayments after
American banks closed credit lines in response to the country’s increasing turmoil.
In the last 15 months, more than 850 people have died in political violence in South
Africa. A state of emergency is in force in 38 districts around Johannesburg and Cape
Town and in the Eastern Cape.
Tom Lodge, a white historian who has specialized in South African black politics,
said today that recent events — particularly Mr. Mandela’s long stay in the hospital after
his operation, and the relative freedom of movement accorded lately to his wife, Winnie
— might indicate that the authorities had made a new offer to Mr. Mandela.
Other analysts said Mr. Mandela’s return to Pollsmoor Prison suggested that any
discussions had stalled. From the authorities’ viewpoint, releasing Mr. Mandela from the
hospital would be an easier step, on humanitarian grounds, than freeing him from prison.
Winnie Mandela, who is a political figure in her own right, said today that she was
unaware of her husband’s return to Pollsmoor, a high-security prison near Cape Town, to
which Mr. Mandela was transferred several years ago after being held on Robben Island.
Mrs. Mandela is supposedly banished to a segregated black township outside
Brandfort in the Orange Free State. Her home there was firebombed earlier this year, and
she has defied two police deadlines this month to return there, although she visited
Brandfort today for a funeral.
The authorities’ failure to enforce the banishment has increased speculation about
negotiations for Mr. Mandela’s release.
Mr. Lodge, the historian, said the authorities seemed to want Mr. Mandela released,
partly because they did not want him to die in their custody — and thus promote greater
black protest — and partly because they did not want his continued imprisonment to
serve as a symbol for blacks.
But Mr. Lodge said Mr. Mandela was unlikely to agree to go into exile and would
not leave prison unless other African National Congress figures, such as Walter Sisulu
and Govan Mbeki, were also freed.
Mrs. Mandela reiterated her husband’s opposition to exile in Transkei two days ago.
Winnie Mandela, Defying Pretoria,
Vows Vengeance
By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times
December 4, 1985
MAMELODI, South Africa, Dec. 3 — Winnie Mandela, breaking an officially imposed
silence, pledged vengeance today for the blood of fallen blacks at what she said was the
first mass rally she had addressed in 25 years.
Mrs. Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist and the wife of the black leader Nelson
Mandela, spoke from a platform in a soccer stadium shortly after 12 out of 15 people
slain by the police here on Nov. 21 were buried in a mass funeral.
“This is our country,” Mrs. Mandela said. “In the same way as you have had to bury
our children today, so shall the blood of these heroes we buried today be avenged.”
Those buried today included five blacks over the age of 50 and a two-month-old
baby boy, said to have choked on tear gas fired by the police.
Diplomats from 11 non-Communist countries, including the United States, attended
the funeral. Timothy M. Carney, political counselor at the United States Embassy, who
attended the ceremony, said it was the first time an official American representative had
attended such a mass burial.
The 11 diplomats represented the United States, Australia, Belgium, Britain,
Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and West Germany.
In Pretoria, close to this segregated black township, meanwhile, President P. W.
Botha, saying that “the revolutionary climate is fast losing momentum,” announced the
lifting of a state-of-emergency decree in 8 of the 38 districts where it is in force.
The eight districts, in the Eastern Cape and the Transvaal, were all small settlements
that had not figured prominently in the 14 months of violence that has taken about 935
lives around the country. The emergency decree is still in force in major nonwhite
townships around Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.
Mamelodi is not covered by the state of emergency. Seeming to defy Mr. Botha’s
assessment of the situation, an estimated 30,000 black people, including Mrs. Mandela,
gathered under the black, green and gold banner of the outlawed African National
Congress for the burial of the 12 dead.
Mrs. Mandela, whose husband is the leader of the African National Congress, is
what is known in South Africa as a “banned” person.
Under the terms of the banning order, she is banished to a segregated black
township outside the remote town of Brandfort, may not meet with more than one other
person at a time and may not address public meetings. She may not be quoted in South
Africa but her words often appear in publications abroad.
Since her home in Brandfort was damaged by fire in August, Mrs. Mandela has
shown increasing readiness to defy the white authorities who set the terms of her most
recent ban eight years ago.
She has been under restrictions of one form or another for almost a quarter century,
and her husband, has been serving a life sentence for sabotage and plotting revolution for
23 years.
Her appearance at an impromptu gathering of over 2,000 blacks after the mass
funeral here today, however, was her most audacious and defiant challenge to the
authorities so far.
Climbing onto the wooden stage, she waved a clenched-fist salute proclaiming the
black nationalist slogan “Amandla,” meaning power. The crowd shouted back: “Awetu”
— “It shall be ours.”
“I bring you a message of love from those you sent outside to help fight for this
liberation that has led to our burying our children,” she said in reference to the African
National Congress, the best known of exiled guerrilla movements seeking the violent
overthrow of rule by the white minority.
“I bring you a message of love from your leaders inside prison,” she said.
“Pretoria has failed to rule this country,” she declared. “The solution of this
country’s problems lies in black hands.”
“We promise you that the mandate you gave us shall be carried through to the hilt,”
she said in reference to the Congress’s pledge to overthrow the white authorities by force
and introduce universal franchise.
“The day is not far when we shall lead you to freedom,” she said. Then she sped
from the stadium in a high-powered sedan as a yellow-painted police helicopter circled
overhead.
She switched cars later to drive past police and army roadblocks on the outskirts of
the township.
The speech presented the authorities with an acute dilemma. If Mrs. Mandela is
permitted to continue flouting her banning order, then the white government could seem
weak in the eyes of both blacks and whites, and might appear to acknowledge her
political influence. If the authorities enforce the ban, the action would almost certainly be
presented by their critics as evidence that the government’s promises of political and
racial reform are hollow.
Moreover, if Mrs. Mandela is again confined to Brandfort, in the Orange Free State,
the authorities’ international credibility could be further weakened when Western bankers
are seeking assurances, in return for rescheduling the nation’s $24 billion foreign debt,
that the government will undertake political changes to defuse the unrest.
Mrs. Mandela said she had decided spontaneously to address the gathering and told
reporters that the last time she spoke before a mass rally was in 1960 to the Indian Youth
Congress.
Throughout today’s funeral, and at the subsequent, impromptu gathering, the police
and army remained outside Mamelodi, as part of a deal with clerics who addressed the
funeral. By early evening there had been no reports of violence.
Those buried today died on Nov. 21 when the police fired on a crowd estimated at
50,000 that included many elderly women protesting rent increases and other grievances.
In Pretoria, President Botha said he believed that “elements that are ideologically
opposed to orderly reform” were being defeated.
The comment seemed certain to be challenged by Mr. Botha’s foes. While some
segregated black townships, notably east of Johannesburg, seem less tense than earlier
this year, violence has continued unabated, spilling beyond areas under emergency rule
and into other places like Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, where 14 people were killed
last month, and Mamelodi.
Moreover, in the month since television coverage of areas of unrest was outlawed,
and restrictions were placed on other reporters, more than 80 people have died in
confrontations with the police and in other violence pitting radical blacks against those
they call stooges for the white authorities.
Television crews and other journalists were allowed free access to today’s rally.
Mr. Carney, the American diplomat who attended the funeral here today, said
Washington’s decision to be represented reflected American commitment to “peaceful
protest and due process.” He denied, however, that it represented a shift of the United
States policy towards South Africa, known as “constructive engagement.”
Mandela Taken From Her Home In
South Africa
By ALAN COWELL, Special to The New York Times
December 22, 1985
SOWETO, South Africa, Dec. 21 — Armed white policemen forcibly removed Winnie
Mandela, the South African black activist, from her home in this segregated township
today after she refused to accept renewed and relaxed restrictions on her movements,
family friends and lawyers said.
Several hours after Mrs. Mandela, the wife of the imprisoned leader of the African
National Congress, Nelson Mandela, was driven from her small home in Soweto by the
police, her lawyers said her whereabouts were unknown. According to the lawyers, the
police said she was to be taken to an airport hotel.
Witnesses said Mrs. Mandela had refused to check in at the hotel. Friends said later
she had called to tell them where she was, but they did not disclose the location.
In Durban, meanwhile, eight people, including two white children, were wounded
when an assailant threw an explosive at a van while the children were waiting for their
parents in a crowded street. One of the wounded, a white passer-by, was said by the
police to be in critical condition.
The South African Press Association quoted an unidentified witness as saying a
black youth had thrown a grenade at the vehicle. But the police said a limpet mine was
thrown under the van by an unidentified assailant.
The attack seemed to be a further effort by anti-government operatives to strike at
what are known as “soft” white targets. Last Sunday, six whites were killed when their
truck hit a land mine near Messina in the northern part of the country close to the
Limpopo River frontier with Zimbabwe.
The outlawed African National Congress took responsibility for the land-mine
attack.
In Soweto, relatives at Mrs. Mandela’s home said the police arrived at about 2 P.M.
to deliver documents relaxing an eight-year-old official order that banishes her to a
segregated black township outside the remote Orange Free State town of Brandfort.
A lawyer present when Mrs. Mandela was seized said she had refused to accept any
documents from them and there had been an argument.
“She refused to leave,” the lawyer said. Mrs. Mandela had been treated in a clinic
for high blood pressure earlier this month, the lawyer said, and her personal physician,
present during the confrontation, had advised against her being moved.
“They wanted Mrs. Mandela to accompany them of her own free will,” the lawyer
said of the police.
Two uniformed policemen, the lawyer said, “then went in and grabbed Mrs.
Mandela, each of them taking an arm, and dragged her out of the house.”
Under South African law, Mrs. Mandela is what is called a banned person. She may
not be quoted inside South Africa, and her movements are restricted. Under a 1977 ban,
she was consigned to Brandfort, ordered to remain at her home in the township during
certain hours and prohibited from meeting with more than one other person at a time,
other than family members.
In a statement today, Louis Le Grange, Minister of Law and Order, said he had
decided to ease the restrictions so Mrs. Mandela could attend social gatherings, leave
Brandfort and not be obliged to report to police stations.
But Mr. Le Grange said she was still barred from living in Soweto — which, she has
told friends, she considers to be her home — and would not be permitted to attend
political meetings, be quoted, enter “educational institutions,” distribute publications or
join political movements.
Mrs. Mandela left her home in Brandfort after it was damaged by a gasoline bomb
in August and has not returned there since.
Since then, she has increasingly defied the terms of her ban. Earlier this month, she
addressed a political rally for the first time, she said, in 25 years.
Western analysts said that the authorities are seeking a formula to release Mr.
Mandela in a manner that defuses what many believe to be a huge political following
among South Africa’s 23 million blacks. Relaxing the terms of Mrs. Mandela’s
banishment may have been designed, the analysts said, to counter international criticism
of South Africa, particularly by creditor banks.
But segments of the white minority have demanded that the authorities not be seen
as knuckling under to the defiance of such figures as Mrs. Mandela.
According to friends and lawyers, Mrs. Mandela decided that accepting the relaxed
restrictions would have given her enemies a victory, and she refused to take action that
might have been interpreted as collaboration with them.
The manner in which Mrs. Mandela was taken from her home, the analysts said,
seemed certain to negate the perceived image-building benefits of relaxing her ban, and
the bomb attack in Durban will stiffen white hostility to overtures to the black majority in
general and the African National Congress in particular.
The events thus seemed to deepen the sense of crisis in South Africa, where a state
of emergency decree has been in force in some districts, including the country’s main
industrial centers, since July 21. More than 1,000 people have died in political violence in
South Africa over the last 15 months.
Who Speaks For Nelson Mandela?
By JOHN D. BATTERSBY, Special to The New York Times
July 30, 1988
JOHANNESBURG, July 29 — Nelson Mandela, speaking through his lawyer, today
repudiated a claim by a public relations consultant from North Carolina who said he had
been given power of attorney to represent the Mandela family interests and prevent “the
rip-off” of the imprisoned anti-apartheid leader’s name.
The statement attributed to Mr. Mandela appeared to bring into the open a dispute
between his wife, Winnie Mandela, and the African National Congress, the exiled antiapartheid movement that he leads, over who has the authority to authorize use of the
Mandela name and control the disbursement of proceeds from concerts, movies, T-shirts
and buttons.
To the extent that there has been such a conflict, Mr. Mandela was plainly siding
with his movement and not his wife.
Mrs. Mandela was at the side of Robert J. Brown, the North Carolina consultant,
when he announced last week that he had been given power of attorney to prevent
financial exploitation of the Mandela name. Mr. Brown, a conservative Republican, came
to attention here two years ago when it became known he was President Reagan’s choice
to be the first black ambassador from the United States to South Africa.
Before the nomination could be formally made, reports emerged about Mr. Brown’s
close ties to a Nigerian politician, Umaru Dikko, who is accused by the present
authorities in Lagos of having absconded with hundreds of millions of dollars. There
were also accusations, vehemently denied by Mr. Brown, that his concern in High Point,
N.C., engaged in anti-union activities. The nomination did not go forward.
When he announced his arrangement with Mrs. Mandela, Mr. Brown was standing
outside Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, where the two had just visited Mr. Mandela,
who recently marked his 70th birthday there.
The announcement spread consternation among Mr. Mandela’s supporters, who
voiced the fear that his moral authority, based on the reputation for selfless sacrifice his
26 years in jail have earned him, might be eroded if the impression spread that his family
was prepared to profit by his name.
“We are terribly embarrassed by all this,” an exile who speaks for the African
National Congress declared. “Mandela is a public figure. His name does not belong to the
family but to the movement.”
In the statement he dictated to Ismail Ayob, a Johannesburg lawyer who has
represented Mr. Mandela since 1972, Mr. Mandela insisted that the congress was his
legitimate representative.
Mrs. Mandela, who is staying with friends in Soweto, refused to speak to reporters
tonight.
But Mr. Brown said from his Johannesburg hotel that he stood by his statement that
he had been granted power of attorney and said that Mr. Ayob had no one to corroborate
his version of Mr. Mandela’s view.
Mr. Ayob said in an interview tonight that he had been urgently summoned to
Pollsmoor Prison by Mr. Mandela on Thursday and had drafted the statement at his
request.
Mr. Ayob said he had conveyed the content of Mr. Mandela’s statement to Mrs.
Mandela at a meeting in Soweto Thursday night at the house of friends where she is
staying.
Mr. Ayob said that Mr. Brown had been visiting Mrs. Mandela at the time and that
he asked Mr. Brown to leave the room so he could speak to Mrs. Mandela.
Mrs. Mandela, he said, had told him that Mr. Brown had been misquoted as saying
that Mr. Mandela had agreed that he should have power of attorney for the Mandela
family.
Mr. Mandela’s statement said that any matter related to the family should be dealt
with only by the African National Congress and that Mr. Brown’s request should be put
to Oliver R. Tambo, the congress’s exiled president, whom Mr. Mandela described as his
“closest friend and colleague.”
Mr. Mandela said he had told Mr. Brown that he would consider any decision made
by the congress to be in the best interests of the family.
The statement from Mr. Mandela was supported by a statement issued by the
African National Congress today in London and Lusaka, Zambia.
The congress said Mr. Brown’s claim had been proved false and then quoted in full
the statement issued by Mr. Mandela’s lawyer in his name.
Mr. Ayob said in the statement, “Mr. Mandela was of the view that if the family
name needed protection it could only be protected by the African National Congress with
its worldwide infrastructure and only the African National Congress is authorized to act
on his behalf.”
Mr. Brown said he had been asked by Mrs. Mandela to assist in preventing the “ripoff” that was occurring by people exploiting the Mandela name for their own financial
gain.
“I think it is a great tragedy that a family that has given as much as the Mandelas
should be treated in this way,” he said, adding that Mrs. Mandela was “literally destitute.”
He said the situation was even worse since Mrs. Mandela’s house in Soweto was
burned down by black youths Thursday.
But there appeared to be no connection between the burning of Mrs. Mandela’s
house and the controversy over legal control of the Mandela name.
The Mandela house appeared to have been burned down after a clash between
youthful members of the Mandela United Football Club, a group of radical black youths
who act as Mrs. Mandela’s bodyguards, and other black youths who resent the power
they wield in the community.
Mr. Ayob said tonight he was still acting on Mrs. Mandela’s behalf.
He denied that she was “destitute,” but he agreed that she was “utterly devastated”
by the destruction of her house.
Mrs. Mandela, who has endured internal exile, banning and almost constant
harassment over the 26 years her husband has been in prison, has increasingly become an
object of controversy within the congress and the anti-apartheid movement.
Some eyebrows were raised, especially in Soweto, when a spacious $350,000 house
was built for the Mandelas there last year.
Mr. Brown said Mrs. Mandela would not move into the mansion until Mr. Mandela
is released from prison.
Mr. Brown has opposed economic sanctions against South Africa and has been a
controversial figure among anti-apartheid campaigners in the United States.
“I find a Mandela-Brown arrangement strange and difficult to believe,” said Randall
Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, a Washington-based group that opposes
apartheid and has organized many protests against it.
“In the first place,” Mr. Robinson added, “how can anybody control the use of
anybody’s name?”
Mr. Brown said he had not spoken to Mr. Tambo since his meeting with Mr.
Mandela.
When asked whether Mr. Mandela had agreed that Mr. Brown would represent the
family interests, Mr. Brown said:
“Mr. Mandela said it was a very sensitive issue and that I should double-check with
Oliver Tambo about any moves I was making.”
Mrs. Mandela said in a statement issued by Mr. Brown on July 22 that she had
granted power of attorney to Mr. Brown “because people around the world are using the
painful history of the Mandela family to benefit themselves.”
“This situation has reached scandalous proportions and must be handled in a firm
manner,” Mrs. Mandela said.
Mandela Moved To House At Prison
Farm
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to The New York Times
December 8, 1988
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 7 — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s most prominent prisoner,
was quietly transferred tonight from a clinic outside Cape Town to a house on a prison
farm about 50 miles away, the government said.
Justice Minister Kobie H. Coetsee said Mr. Mandela had been moved from the
Constantia Clinic to a “suitable, comfortable and properly secured home” next to the
Victor Verster Prison Farm outside the small town of Paarl.
Mr. Mandela’s transfer was the first step in what appears to be a government
strategy to move him to less austere accommodations rather than free him outright.
Mr. Coetsee said last month that Mr. Mandela would not have to return to Pollsmoor
Prison, where he had been serving a life sentence on charges of conspiracy to overthrow
the government and sabotage.
A South African journalist with contacts inside the government said the security
police had vetoed suggestions within the Cabinet to free Mr. Mandela outright as a
concession to Western critics, arguing that it could trigger a wave of demonstrations on
his behalf and possible violence.
The press was not notified of Mr. Mandela’s transfer until after it had been
accomplished, and the government was not expected to make him available to journalists,
except possibly later on a selected basis.
Details of the house where he is now being confined were not released, although it
sounded as if it was part of the quarters set aside for prison wardens or guards. It was
unlikely that some of Mr. Mandela’s supporters would see his new home inside a prison
complex as consistent with the spirit of Mr. Coetsee’s promise two weeks ago.
Tonight, the South African Press Agency quoted the Justice Minister as saying:
“In my statement of 24 Nov. 1988, I mentioned that if Mr. Mandela continues to
improve he will no longer be cared for in a clinic. This stage has now been reached and in
the meantime, Mr. Mandela has been transferred from the clinic to a suitable, comfortable
and properly secured home adjacent to Victor Verster in the Paarl district.”
Mr. Mandela, 70 years old, had been convalescing in Constantia Clinic since Aug.
31, when he was moved from a Cape Town hospital where he had undergone emergency
treatment for tuberculosis.
Reports by the authorities that his health was steadily improving prompted repeated
rumors that he would be released soon.
Mr. Mandela, who is revered as a patriarch of the banned African National
Congress, has spent 26 years in prison, including a year and a half on lesser political
charges before he was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 12, 1964.
The government hoped that his transfer would be taken as a conciliatory gesture.
Mr. Mandela’s wife, Winnie, refused to accept it as such.
A statement issued tonight by Mr. Mandela’s lawyer, Ismail Ayob, who confirmed
his transfer, said Mrs. Mandela would not accept the unlimited visiting hours the
government had offered her. She was quoted as saying she would adhere to the 40-minute
period she has been allowed, because she still considers him a political prisoner.
Mrs. Mandela said she and her family would not take advantage of the open visiting
hours for her husband until all other political prisoners were allowed the same leniency.
Mr. Ayoub said the commanding officer of Pollsmoor Prison, whom he identified as
a Brigadier Munro, notified him of Mr. Mandela’s transfer to the house on the prison
farm tonight.
The lawyer said the invitation of unlimited access to Mr. Mandela was extended to
his wife, children and grandchildren.
“I spoke with Mrs. Mandela,” Mr. Ayoub reported. “Her reply was that Mr.
Mandela still remained a prisoner of the South African government and that the
concession made today to him personally is clearly a response to the domestic and
international pressure for his release.”
Winnie Mandela Losing Allies In
Soweto
By JOHN D. BATTERSBY, Special to The New York Times
February 14, 1989
CAPE TOWN, Feb. 13 — Winnie Mandela appears to be increasingly isolated among
blacks after weekend reports in the South African press that she took part in the beating
of four black youths, one of whom is presumed dead, at her home in Soweto on Dec. 29.
Mrs. Mandela, wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader, Nelson R.
Mandela, who is regarded by some as an anti-apartheid leader in her own right, has
denied the allegations. And she has threatened to sue the South African newspapers that
reported these charges.
In an unexpected development today, Krish Naidoo, a civil rights lawyer who has
acted on Mrs. Mandela’s behalf in recent months, resigned.
Mr. Naidoo said in an interview that he had a long discussion with her on Friday and
decided not to continue representing her. He would not give the reasons for his decision.
Mr. Naidoo has represented Mrs. Mandela since she refused to deal with Ismail
Ayob, who had been the Mandela family lawyer for the last 17 years. Mr. Ayob continues
to represent Nelson Mandela.
Mr. Naidoo’s resignation followed a six-week controversy surrounding Mrs.
Mandela and a score of black youths, known as the Mandela United Football Club, who
act as her bodyguards.
Besides representing Mrs. Mandela, Mr. Naidoo has also served as an adviser to the
Mandela Crisis Committee, a group of anti-apartheid leaders formed at Nelson Mandela’s
request last August.
The committee, which includes the most respected church and trade union leaders,
was ordered to insure that the football club was disbanded after Mrs. Mandela’s Soweto
house was burned down, reportedly by black youths who had been provoked by club
members.
However, in a statement issued last Friday, the Mandela Crisis Committee admitted
that it had failed to disband the club and indicated it was abandoning attempts to defuse
the situation, ostensibly because a police investigation had been launched the day before
into the charges surrounding Mrs. Mandela. She avoided meetings with the committee
and refused to speak to its members.
Soweto residents who were previously admirers of Mrs. Mandela say she has
become a law unto herself and is not accountable to other anti-apartheid leaders, either
inside the country or in exile.
Geoff Budlender, a lawyer who has represented political prisoners in cases where
they testified they were victims of torture, serves as lawyer for three black youths who
said they were abducted by the Mandela United Football Club on Dec. 29. He said today
that he had sworn affidavits from them.
The youths said they had been abducted and assaulted and that Mrs. Mandela had
been involved in those events that night.
South African police today called on young black radicals, known as comrades, who
claim to have discovered the body of the missing youth, to hand it over to the police to
assist in their investigation.
The Sunday Star, an English-language newspaper, reported that Mrs. Mandela had
personally taken part in the beating of the four youths by football club members.
Mrs. Mandela stopped consulting Mr. Ayob after a controversy last summer, when
she entered into an agreement with Robert Brown, a black American lawyer and
businessman from North Carolina, concerning the rights to use of the Mandela name on
books and other products and in publicity campaigns. She took that action without
consulting her husband.
Nelson Mandela subsequently summoned Mr. Ayob to Pollsmoor Prison, where he
was then incarcerated, and dictated a statement in which he repudiated the agreement and,
by implication, the actions of his wife.
Anti-Apartheid Groups Cast Out Winnie
Mandela, Citing Terror
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to The New York Times
February 17, 1989
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 16 — Winnie Mandela was effectively cast out today by the
anti-apartheid movement to which she and her husband, Nelson Mandela, have devoted
their lives.
The announcement by the movement’s leadership, distancing itself from her
activities and asking its supporters to do the same, was made as the police pressed an
investigation into the killing of a 14-year-old youth whom Mrs. Mandela’s bodyguards
are accused of abducting.
At a news conference, Murphy Morobe, the publicity secretary of the United
Democratic Front, the country’s major legal anti-apartheid organization, read a statement
accusing the bodyguards of mounting a “reign of terror” in Soweto leading up to the
killing and blaming Mrs. Mandela for creating them.
It was not known how Nelson Mandela, who has been in prison for 26 years, felt
about the repudiation of his wife. But it seemed unlikely that the action would have been
taken unless Mr. Mandela’s lawyers had warned him and sought his tacit assent for the
sake of the anti-apartheid movement.
Today’s announcement fed rumors among blacks that Mr. Mandela might
contemplate a divorce in the interest of the struggle, particularly if Mrs. Mandela became
the subject of criminal prosecution. She visited her husband in Cape Town on
Wednesday.
The body of the youth, Stompie Moeketsi, was positively identified on Wednesday.
He was among four youths reportedly abducted in December by the Mandela United
Football Club, a group of about 30 young men acting as Mrs. Mandela’s bodyguards.
“We are outraged at Mrs. Mandela’s complicity in the recent abductions of
Stompie,” Mr. Morobe said. “Had Stompie and his three colleagues not been abducted by
Mrs. Mandela’s ‘football team,’ he would have been alive today.”
Mrs. Mandela’s increasingly erratic behavior has not dampened public admiration
for her husband, whose image has assumed almost mythic dimensions during his years in
prison. But the leadership seemed anxious today not to erode his accumulated prestige.
“We take the opportunity to reaffirm our unqualified support for our leader Nelson
Mandela and call for his immediate release,” Mr. Morobe said.
This evening, the state-run South African television reported that the police were
investigating the disappearance of two other young men believed linked to the soccer
team, including a claim that Mrs. Mandela was present when one, Lolo Corlett Sono, 21
years old, was taken from his home by her bodyguards and accused of being a police
informer. The other man, Sibonise Anton Tshabalala, 20, was summoned to Mrs.
Mandela’s home and was not seen again, the television news reported.
The friction between the soccer club and local youths is rooted in the political
climate of Soweto. The club members refused to be accountable to the alternative power
structures created for the struggle against apartheid and incurred the hostility of residents
by throwing their weight around.
Mr. Morobe was flanked at the news conference today by Archie Gumede, president
of the United Democratic Front, which represents some 700 affiliated groups, and Elijah
Barayi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which claims 800,000
mostly black members. The two groups form the backbone of the open struggle against
apartheid in South Africa.
The effect of the decision, which Mr. Morobe said had been considered for some
time, was to drop Mrs. Mandela from the common struggle against apartheid and increase
her isolation in the black community. It has also left her more dependent for safety and
companionship on her soccer team, which the exiled African National Congress, to which
Nelson Mandela belongs, had been urging her to disband.
The announcement today stressed that unhappiness with Mrs. Mandela had predated
the scandal in which she is now embroiled.
“We are of the view that Mrs. Mandela has abused the trust and confidence which
she has enjoyed over the years,” Mr. Morobe said. “She has often acted without
consulting the democratic movement. Often, her practices have violated the spirit and
ethics of the democratic movement.”
His statement took note of the public resentment that had been building in Soweto
over Mrs. Mandela’s unaccountability and the bullying behavior of her soccer team.
“In recent years, Mrs. Mandela’s actions have increasingly led her into conflict with
various sections of the oppressed people and with the mass democratic movement as a
whole,” he said. “The recent conflict in the community has centered largely around the
conduct of her so-called football club, which has been widely condemned by the
community.
“In particular, we are outraged by the reign of terror that the team has been
associated with. Not only is Mrs. Mandela associated with the team; in fact, the team is
her own creation.”
But Mrs. Mandela has been the most prominent woman in the anti-apartheid
struggle, and her ostracism was announced with sorrow rather than anger. “The Mandela
family has always occupied a very special position in the hearts of our people,” Mr.
Morobe said.
He observed that Mrs. Mandela had been separated from her husband for most of
their married life and raised two children alone while coping with house arrest, detention
and banishment by the government’
“We pay tribute to her contribution,” Mr. Morobe said.
The leadership said many efforts had been made to mediate frictions between Mrs.
Mandela and Soweto residents, including the formation of a crisis committee of people
respected in the anti-apartheid movement to deal with the excesses of the football club.
“On every occasion, Mrs. Mandela has refused to cooperate and has chosen to disregard
the sentiments of the community,” the statement said.
A woman who answered the phone at Mrs. Mandela’s office in Soweto this
afternoon said that “she’s not taking any calls.” The woman promised to convey a request
for Mrs. Mandela to return the call, but Mrs. Mandela failed to do so.
The soccer team members have been accused of abducting four young men,
including Mr. Moeketsi, from the house of a Methodist minister in Soweto on the night of
Dec. 28, and taking them to Mrs. Mandela’s home. One youth escaped but the other three
were reportedly beaten.
Two youths were released after the crisis committee intervened. Stompie Moeketsi
disappeared, and Mrs. Mandela and the club members disclaimed any knowledge of his
whereabouts. The police announced Wednesday that a body found early last month was
that of Mr. Moeketsi, and said he had died from knife wounds in the throat.
Editorial: Just Free Nelson Mandela
July 11, 1989
Much that ails South Africa is apparent in microcosm in the meeting last week between
President P. W. Botha and Nelson Mandela, jailed leader of the African National
Congress. Not since the A.N.C.’s establishment in 1912 has any South African president
or prime minister deigned to meet with its leader.
If this is a Botha trick to demean the captive and upstage the President’s likely
successor, black leadership is justified in crying foul. But whatever Mr. Botha’s motives,
the visit sends an unmistakable message — that Mr. Mandela is a legitimate leader with
whom South Africans must reckon. And if the Botha-Mandela meeting makes it easier for
the next leader in Pretoria to act on that moral and political fact, some good can come of
it.
Mr. Botha is a grudging lame duck, forced by illness to yield leadership of the ruling
National Party to F. W. de Klerk, who is expected to succeed to the presidency after
elections in September. Rivalry is already evident between the crusty incumbent and his
more articulate, better-educated heir apparent. It’s too early to say how far the new leader
is willing to go, but he has stirred hope by favoring a new constitution that provides some
political rights for blacks.
Mr. Botha’s eagerness to appear a benevolent jailer may be a sign of change. In
December, he moved Mr. Mandela from prison to a luxurious clinic; now officials claim
that in last week’s 45-minute meeting, Mr. Mandela affirmed his support for “peaceful
development in South Africa.” Yet why should anyone trust the official version? Even
after 27 years in prison, Mr. Mandela is still forbidden to speak for himself.
The only way to know what Mr. Mandela thinks is to free him, and then listen to
what he says. The test for Mr. de Klerk is whether he will be the first South African head
of government willing to deal with unsubmissive blacks openly, fairly and freely.
Mandela To Go Free Today; De Klerk
Proclaims Ending Of ‘Chapter’ After 27
Years
By JOHN F. BURNS, Special to The New York Times
February 11, 1990
CAPE TOWN, Feb. 10 — President F. W. de Klerk announced today that Nelson
Mandela would be released from a prison outside Cape Town on Sunday afternoon,
ending 27 and a half years of imprisonment for South Africa’s most celebrated black
leader.
Saying the release “will bring us to the end of a long chapter,” Mr. de Klerk coupled
his announcement with an appeal to the 71-year-old black leader to help steer the country
toward a negotiated political settlement between whites and blacks.
His plea underscored the extraordinary influence that Mr. Mandela has exerted
while serving a life sentence for conspiracy to overthrow the government and sabotage.
Although he has spent more than half his adult life in jail, Mr. Mandela will emerge in a
position that many South Africans have equated with that of Mr. de Klerk, the country’s
head of state.
When he walks out of prison, as he has evidently insisted on doing in rejecting more
elaborate government proposals for the release, Mr. Mandela will do so as the virtually
uncontested leader of millions of South African blacks.
This position, owed partly to his resolute refusal to compromise with the
government during his imprisonment and partly to a powerful personality that even
government leaders have acknowledged, was achieved even though ordinary South
Africans have not heard his voice in a generation. Until tonight, when the government
released a photograph of him meeting on Friday with Mr. de Klerk, they had not even
seen what Mr. Mandela looked like since the last published photograph was taken in a
prison garden in 1968.
Mr. de Klerk smiled frequently as he made the announcement, showing no effects
from the angry attacks leveled by white conservatives since he told Parliament eight days
ago that the government would release Mr. Mandela and lift its ban on the African
National Congress.
He began by reading a brief statement outlining the government’s decision to end
the life term imposed on Mr. Mandela in the so-called Rivonia Trial. The sentence was
handed down when the black leader was already serving a five-year term for a previous
conviction.
“I am now in a position to announce that Mr. Nelson Mandela will be released at the
Victor Verster Prison on Sunday, Feb. 11, 1990, at about 3 o’ clock,” President de Klerk
said. He added, “We would all like Mr. Mandela’s release to take place in a dignified and
orderly manner.”
The white leader said he had informed Mr. Mandela of his impending release at a
meeting on Friday evening in Cape Town. Mr. de Klerk gave no indication of Mr.
Mandela’s reaction. Asked about the black leader’s plans after leaving prison, he said he
preferred not “to speak on behalf of Mr. Mandela,” and that Mr. Mandela could make his
own statement on Sunday.
Mr. de Klerk also said that the national state of emergency declared in July 1986
could be lifted soon if there was no upsurge of unrest. He voiced a willingness to
negotiate the possible release of remaining political prisoners.
In recent talks with the government, Mr. Mandela has demanded freedom for all
political prisoners and an end to the state of emergency.
The announcement of the release set off immediate rejoicing in black areas around
the country. In Soweto, a black satellite city outside Johannesburg, Archbishop Desmond
M. Tutu, southern Africa’s Anglican primate and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, emerged
from a meeting with Mr. Mandela’s wife, Winnie, jumped in the air and shouted
“Hoorah!” Speaking later in Johannesburg, Archbishop Tutu said Mr. de Klerk’s decision
was “mind boggling” and added: “F. W., you have done well. We want to congratulate
you for the things you have done and the things you are going to do.”
White conservatives reacted with dismay. Jakobus van der Merwe, the
parliamentary spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party, which has challenged
Mr. de Klerk to hold a white referendum on his reform program, said: “It’s a joke.
Mandela wins by a knockout. De Klerk is being carried away on a stretcher.”
In Pretoria, members of a white neo-Nazi group, the Afrikaner Resistance
Movement, chanted “Hang Mandela!” as they marched in protest to the Union Buildings,
the government’s administrative headquarters.
A personal respect for Mr. Mandela and a hope that he will prove a catalyst in
bringing black leaders to the negotiating table was evident throughout Mr. de Klerk’s 30minute news conference at a government auditorium here. The news conference was
broadcast live in many other countries, including the United States, but was recorded and
aired only in excerpts later on South Africa’s state-owned television.
Mr. de Klerk, who was an unknown attorney in a provincial town when Mr.
Mandela was sentenced to life in the Rivonia Trial on June 12, 1964, described the black
leader as “friendly,” “dignified” and “interesting,” terms that would surely have shocked
an earlier generation of white leaders who routinely referred to Mr. Mandela as a
“communist” and a “terrorist.”
Apparently anticipating still angrier denunciations from white conservatives, who
have described him as a traitor for his effort to seek a political settlement with blacks, Mr.
de Klerk added that the government was certain that it was acting correctly. “We are
doing what we sincerely believe to be in the best interests of South Africa,” he said.
The president’s announcement followed a week of secretive maneuvering over
conditions for the release since Mr. de Klerk’s parliamentary speech, in which the white
leader linked his pledge to free Mr. Mandela to other reforms. The moves amounted to
the most far-reaching relaxation of policy since Mr. de Klerk’s National Party
predecessors won power in 1948 and set out to construct apartheid, a system of strict
racial segregation and white domination that the government has now pledged to
abandon.
In addition to removing the ban on the African National Congress, the country’s
leading black group fighting to overthrow white rule, Mr. de Klerk said on Feb. 2 that he
would lift bans on the Pan-Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party,
abolish restrictions on scores of anti-apartheid leaders, and at least temporarily halt
executions. He said the government was committed to building “a new democratic
constitution” with a universal franchise, based on the principle of “no domination.” He
invited black leaders to join the government in negotiations to that end.
The interval between Mr. de Klerk’s announcement of Mr. Mandela’s forthcoming
release and his statement today was taken up by discussions between the government and
Mr. Mandela over arrangements. Officials had indicated that they preferred a carefully
managed release, possibly including a joint appearance at a news conference by Mr. de
Klerk and Mr. Mandela.
But it appeared that Mr. Mandela had set his own terms for the release, beginning
with simply walking out of the jail in the hilly wine country outside Paarl, 35 miles
northeast of Cape Town. Mr. de Klerk said that discussions on “suitable arrangements”
for this were being held with the “parties concerned,” but the government’s role seems set
to end the moment Mr. Mandela walked through the prison gates.
Shortly before midnight, lawyers for Mr. Mandela said he would allow photographs
to be taken as he leaves the prison, hold a news conference soon afterward and address a
rally in his honor later in Cape Town.
The lawyers did not say whether Mr. Mandela would leave after the rally for the
small brick house in Soweto he last saw in 1961. One report said he might remain in Cape
Town for as long as two days.
It was evident from Mr. de Klerk’s answers to journalists’ questions that Mr.
Mandela had declined any government role in protecting him.
The black leader’s safety has been a matter of growing concern, partly because of
threats from white extremists. Government officials have said he also might face violence
at the hands of elements in the black resistance who denounced his decision three years
ago to begin a series of secret contacts with the government.
Mr. de Klerk indicated that the issue was not discussed at the meeting Friday night
between the two men, apparently because Mr. Mandela had already made it clear that he
wanted no formal links or arrangements with the government. Once released, Mr. de
Klerk said, Mr. Mandela “becomes a free man, and he doesn’t owe it to me to inform me
of his program. I have not asked him about it, either.”
But striking one of the few somber moments in the news conference, the white
leader said “there are all sorts of people” who might threaten Mr. Mandela’s life. “I think
radicals from the far left might be tempted to do so, and I think there is also a risk that it
might come from radicalists from the right,” he said. “With him having such a high
profile I think this is a real risk.”
In the past week, people claiming to speaking for Mr. Mandela, including his wife,
have suggested that Mr. Mandela would not leave prison until a number of conditions
previously set by the African National Congress, of which Mr. Mandela is a member, had
been met.
But it appeared that Mr. Mandela and fellow congress leaders previously released
after serving life terms with him, including Walter Sisulu, the 77-year-old former
Secretary General of the congress, decided this week that the release should proceed
without further haggling over terms.
As outlined by Mr. Sisulu and others, these mainly involved the release of people
identified by the congress as political prisoners, about 350 of whom are said to be serving
time in South African jails; a demand that all political exiles be free to return to South
Africa without fear of arrest under laws governing “terrorism” and other anti-apartheid
offenses; and a demand that the government lift the state of emergency it declared in
1986.
In his speech to Parliament, Mr. de Klerk said that the government would free all
those convicted of “purely political” offenses like membership in banned organizations, a
step it has already begun to take, but not those convicted of “common law” crimes like
murder. He also kept parts of the emergency regulations in force.
In Mr. Mandela’s contacts with the government — he met once previously with Mr.
de Klerk, and once with the previous president, P. W. Botha, last July, as well as dozens
of times with other government ministers — he is said to have insisted that the
government meet the congress’s terms.
But today, Mr. de Klerk indicated that the two men had agreed that these issues
could be deferred for future talks. He said he had emphasized to Mr. Mandela on Friday
“the importance of creating conditions” that would allow him to lift the emergency,
meaning an end to black unrest.
He also said that while the status of political prisoners and exiles should be left to
“negotiations,” he had told Mr. Mandela that “exploratory discussions could take place in
the meantime.”
Some of Mr. Mandela’s supporters had feared that a visit by the Rev. Jesse Jackson,
the American civil rights leader, might prompt the government to delay the release. But
Mr. Jackson said he would be on hand Sunday when the foremost champion of South
Africa’s black majority walks out the prison door.
Mandela, Freed, Urges Step-Up In
Pressure To End White Rule
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to The New York Times
February 12, 1990
CAPE TOWN, Feb. 11 — After 27 and a half years in prison, Nelson Mandela finally
won his freedom today and promptly urged his supporters at home and abroad to increase
their pressure against the white minority government that had just released him.
“We have waited too long for our freedom,” Mr. Mandela told a cheering crowd
from a balcony of Cape Town’s old City Hall. “We can wait no longer.”
“Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts,” he said. “To relax our
efforts now would be a mistake which generations to come will not able to forgive.”
Mr. Mandela’s 20-minute speech, which he prepared before leaving prison today,
constituted his first remarks in public since before he was sentenced in June 1964 to life
imprisonment for conspiracy to overthrow the government and engage in sabotage.
He asked the international community not to lift its sanctions against South Africa,
despite the recent changes introduced by President F. W. de Klerk, which culminated in
Mr. Mandela’s release.
“To lift sanctions now would be to run the risk of aborting the process toward
ending apartheid,” he said.
Mr. Mandela’s voice sounded firm and his words as eloquently militant as when he
defended violence as the ultimate recourse at his political trial in 1964. Though he looked
all of his 71 years and was grayer than artists’ renditions over the years had depicted, he
walked out of Victor Verster prison erect and vigorous.
In Washington, President Bush rejoiced over the release of Mr. Mandela, spoke to
him by telephone and invited the anti-apartheid leader to visit the White House. Mr.
Mandela gave no evidence that his militant opposition to apartheid had been tempered by
the more than 10,000 days he spent in confinement. But he also said nothing that would
have surprised the government had he said it during his years of incarceration. Indeed,
there appeared to be nothing in Mr. Mandela’s initial remarks after his release to give the
government much consolation or encouragement.
Although he has been viewed as a potential leader for all South Africans, he stressed
time and again that his loyalty lay with the African National Congress, for which he was
working underground when he was jailed in August 1962 on charges of incitement and
leaving the country illegally. He was serving time on that conviction when he was
sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.
Mr. Mandela told a crowd that he remained a “loyal and disciplined member” of the
African National Congress and still endorsed its policies, including its use of armed
struggle against the white minority government.
He said he saluted the congress’s military wing, Spear of the Nation, and its ally, the
South African Communist Party, “for its steady contribution to the struggle for
democracy.”
But he also thanked the Black Sash, an organization of white women working to end
apartheid, and the predominantly white National Union of South African Students for
being “the conscience of white South Africans.” And he held out an olive branch to all
whites, asking them to join in shaping a new South Africa.
“The freedom movement is a political home for you, too,” he said.
In his first speech after his release, Mr. Mandela may have taken an orthodox line
with a mass audience sympathetic to the African National Congress and might in private
discussions show greater flexibility on the question of discussions that the government
wants to have with blacks, who are 28 million of the population, compared with the 5
million whites of the ruling minority.
He said he was only making some preliminary comments following his release, and
would have more to say “after I have had the opportunity to consult with my comrades.”
By this he meant the leaders of the African National Congress now in exile in Zambia as
well as colleagues still based in South Africa.
But he appeared to discourage any leading role for himself, such as the government
has in mind, saying, “A leader of the movement is a person who has been democratically
elected at a national conference.”
President de Klerk has invited black leaders to join talks leading to the formulation
of a new constitution that would let black South Africans take part at last in their nation’s
politics.
Mr. Mandela acknowledged to the crowd that he had conducted a dialogue with the
government during his last years in prison. But he added: “My talks with the government
have been aimed at normalizing the political situation in the country. We have not yet
begun discussing the basic demands of our struggle.”
“I wish to stress that I myself have at no time entered into negotiations about the
future of our country, except to insist on a meeting between the A.N.C. and the
government,” he said.
He described Mr. de Klerk, whom he has met twice since December, as “a man of
integrity.”
“Mr. de Klerk has gone further than any other Nationalist president in taking real
steps to normalize the situation,” Mr. Mandela said.
“But as an organization we base our policy and strategy and tactics on the harsh
reality we are faced with,” he said. “And this reality is that we are still suffering under the
policies of the Nationalist government.”
The National Party, which Mr. de Klerk now leads, instituted apartheid after taking
power in 1948.
Mr. Mandela said the government had to take further steps before negotiations could
begin.
As a prerequisite for negotiations, he reiterated two demands that he had conveyed
from prison through recent visitors. These are the lifting of the state of emergency, which
was imposed in June 1986, and the release of all political prisoners, including those
accused of crimes committed in the struggle against apartheid.
“Only such a normalized situation which allows for free political activity can allow
us to consult our people in order to obtain a mandate,” Mr. Mandela said.
He said the people had to be consulted about who would represent them in talks
with the government.
“Negotiations cannot take place above the heads or behind the backs of our people,”
he said. “It is our belief that the future of our country can only be determined by a body
which is democratically elected on a nonracial basis.”
Mr. Mandela appeared to allude to a formula under which a constituent assembly, in
effect supplanting the existing Parliament, would draft a new constitution. Such a plan
would mean the creation of an interim government in South Africa and has previously
been rejected by Mr. de Klerk for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison near Paarl at 4:15 P.M., 75
minutes later than the release time announced Saturday afternoon by Mr. de Klerk.
Acquaintances of the Mandela family said his departure from the prison was delayed by
family discussions.
He was greeted by about 5,000 supporters lining the asphalt road outside the prison
farm where he has been held since December 1988. Some waved the black, green and
yellow flags of the African National Congress, from which Mr. de Klerk removed a ban
on Feb. 2.
Mr. Mandela was then driven 40 miles from Paarl to Cape Town, passing several
hundred people who had parked by the roadside or waited on overpasses in hope of
seeing him. They held homemade signs, some of which read simply, “Welcome home.”
A huge crowd, which organizers said reached 250,000 people, assembled in the
square in front of the old City Hall in Cape Town to greet Mr. Mandela. Reporters
covering the rally put the crowd’s size at only 50,000 people at its peak. They became
impatient and sometimes unruly, waiting up to six hours in the hot sun and had dwindled
to about 20,000 by sunset, when Mr. Mandela finally appeared.
In the 1950’s it was government policy to prevent blacks from settling in the
Western Cape, so they are not in the clear majority in Cape Town, where Mr. Mandela
was released. People of mixed race, known as “coloreds,” are the largest population
group in Cape Town, where whites also outnumber blacks.
Blacks, who account for nearly 75 percent of the population in the country as a
whole, are in the overwhelming majority in the Johannesburg region, where Mr. Mandela
can expect his most tumultuous welcome.
The festive occasion was marred by violence after some youths who had been
drinking on the fringes of the rally started breaking windows and looting shops in
downtown Cape Town.
The police tried to disperse them by firing shotguns and tear gas, and some of the
youths retaliated by throwing bottles and stones. At one point, drunken protesters invaded
a Chinese restaurant, snatched up the liquor and wine and threw bottles at the police from
the rooftop. One man in the crowd was also injured in a knife fight.
The South African Press Association reported tonight that 2 people had been killed
and 13 wounded in the confrontations. A physician treating casualties on the scene
estimated that 100 people had been wounded, mostly by buckshot. Most suffered only
light injuries, including three journalists covering the rally.
Cheryl Carolus, a spokeswoman for the United Democratic Front, which helped
organize the rally, attributed the violence to outsiders who, she said, were “beyond our
usual crowds, or who supported the rival Pan-Africanist Movement.”‘
At times, some supporters at the rally had to scramble for cover as the police chased
or fired at looters and stone-throwers. The Rev. Allan Boesak, a prominent figure in the
anti-apartheid movement, pleaded for more than 45 minutes with the crowd to maintain
discipline and move back.
Dullah Omar, a lawyer representing the Mandela family, said Mr. Mandela had been
unaware of the violence.
This evening, Mr. Mandela failed to appear at a news conference arranged by the
reception committee that is handling his schedule. A representative said Mr. Mandela
would meet the press later this week in Johannesburg.
Mr. Mandela and his wife, Winnie, are expected to fly to Johannesburg on Monday
and proceed to their home in the black township of Soweto.
One of the organizers, Saki Mocozoma, said security considerations precluded him
from revealing where the Mandelas were spending their first night.
Mr. Mandela also paid tribute to his wife, who has lived apart from him for more
than 27 years, and their children. “I am convinced that your pain and suffering was far
greater than my own,” he told them.
C.I.A. Tie Reported In Mandela Arrest
By DAVID JOHNSTON, Special to The New York Times
June 10, 1990
WASHINGTON, June 9 — The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in
the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was
jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.
The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress,
provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s
activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.
The report, scheduled for publication on Sunday, quoted an unidentified retired
official who said that a senior C.I.A. officer told him shortly after Mr. Mandela’s arrest:
“We have turned Mandela over to the South African Security branch. We gave them
every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be.”
Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the agency, declined to comment on the newsservice report. “As a matter of policy, we do not discuss allegations of intelligence
activities,” he said.
Reports that American intelligence tipped off the South African officials who
arrested Mr. Mandela have circulated for years. Newsweek reported in February that the
agency was believed to have been involved.
Mr. Mandela is scheduled to visit the United States beginning June 20 for a five-city
tour that will include talks with President Bush and a speech before a joint meeting of
Congress.
The news-service report said that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August
1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups
like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security
service.
The account said the American intelligence agency was willing to assist in the
apprehension of Mr. Mandela because it was concerned that a successful nationalist
movement threatened a friendly South African Government. Expansion of such
movements outside South Africa’s borders, the agency feared, would jeopardize the
stability of other African states, the account said.
A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report
as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover
agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.
That agent provided the intelligence service with detailed accounts of the
organization’s activities, including information on the whereabouts of Mr. Mandela, then
being sought as a fugitive for his anti-apartheid activities.
The morning after a secret dinner party with other congress members in Durban, Mr.
Mandela, dressed as a chauffeur, ran into a roadblock. He was immediately recognized
and arrested.
The retired official said that because of concern over the propriety of the C.I.A.’s
actions in the Mandela case, “higher authorities” required that the State Department
approve any similar operations in the future. The report said the State Department refused
on at least three occasions to allow the agency to provide South African officials with
information about other dissidents.
Mandela Gets An Emotional New York
City Welcome
By JOHN KIFNER
June 21, 1990
Nelson Mandela, the living symbol of resistance to South African apartheid, swept tired
but triumphant yesterday into an emotional New York welcome.
During Mr. Mandela’s first hours in the United States at the start of an eight-city
visit, tens of thousands of people in the black Brooklyn neighborhoods of BedfordStuyvesant, East New York and Fort Greene lined the sidewalks, wildly cheering the
honored guest’s motorcade and brandishing clenched fists.
In Lower Manhattan huge clumps of computer printouts tumbled to the streets of the
financial district in place of ticker tape, made obsolete by electronics, in the city’s
traditional hero’s greeting.
“Apartheid is doomed,” Mr. Mandela said at the end of brief, graceful remarks at a
City Hall welcoming ceremony. “South Africa will be free. The struggle continues.” For
the city’s blacks it was a particularly compelling moment.
“I felt a blessing from God that I could be part of this,” said Taraja Samuel, an
administrator with the city’s Board of Education, who took her 15-year-old son Taiye to
the City Hall ceremony. “I came of age in the 1960’s, but the regret of my life is I never
met Dr. King or Malcolm. I told my son today to be in the presence of Nelson Mandela
was an honor.
“This makes me able to go back to the board, despite all the problems, and know
that I can make a difference,” she said. “This man is an inspiration.”
As Mr. Mandela praised David N. Dinkins as New York’s first black mayor, Deputy
Mayor Bill Lynch, who managed Mr. Dinkins’s campaign and played a major role in
organizing Mr. Mandela’s visit, wept in the row behind them.
The police estimated that 750,000 people saw Mr. Mandela at one point or another
— 50,000 in Queens at Kennedy International Airport and along the route, 100,000 as he
passed through Brooklyn, 400,000 along the ticker-tape parade and 200,000 in the
ceremony at City Hall. Hundreds of thousands more saw the events broadcast live on
local television.
Police helicopters flew overhead, and Mr. Mandela’s 40-car motorcade bristling
with police and State Department security officers was led by two dozen police
motorcycles. As part of a huge security operation, traffic was frozen as the motorcade
passed.
As the day progressed, there was increasing concern for the health of Mr. Mandela,
the deputy president of the African National Congress, who will turn 72 years of age next
month and was released less than five months ago after 27 years in prison. He is in the
midst of a six-week, 14-nation tour and at the beginning of a hastily arranged visit to the
United States, where he is seeking financial support and the continuation of economic
sanctions against the white regime in South Africa.
Last night, an exhausted Mr. Mandela canceled several scheduled events, including
meetings with black journalists and exiled South Africans, and even the scaled-down,
intimate family meal at Gracie Mansion that had replaced plans for a 22-person dinner
went by the boards.
Roger Wilkins, the national coordinator of the trip, told journalists last night that the
Dinkinses were eating downstairs while Mr. Mandela remained in the guest suite upstairs.
After the City Hall ceremonies, Mr. Wilkins said: “It was clear he reached the limit
where he should not be pushed. The man is tired.”
Earlier, Zwelakhe Sisulu, Mr. Mandela’s press secretary and the director of
information of the African National Congress, told reporters that Mr. Mandela was “quite
tired after such a hectic day.”
Mr. Wilkins had said at the earlier news briefing: “The fact that we express our
concerns doesn’t mean we have a sick man on our hands. It just means that we are being
realistic about a very strenuous program for a 71-year-old man.”
Mr. Mandela arrived from Canada almost two hours behind schedule yesterday
morning in order to get extra rest, and by the end of the day he was visibly worn.
As Mr. Mandela rode up Broadway, he was encased in an odd vehicle immediately
dubbed the “Mandelamobile.” A small bulletproof glass shelter with a peaked roof was
built atop a police flatbed truck. Spotlights fixed to the corners of the roof give it an
uncanny resemblance to a prison watchtower.
But all the security was virtually swept aside at one point as hundreds of excited
black teen-agers surrounded the motorcade when it left Boys and Girls High School in
Brooklyn, running, whooping and cheering alongside the cars. State Department security
officers paled and their eyes widened at the sight.
The major political goal of Mr. Mandela’s trip is to keep economic sanctions on
South Africa in hope of creating pressure for greater social change. African National
Congress leaders say they fear that the limited reforms instituted by the government of
President F. W. de Klerk could be used to justify a lifting of sanctions.
President Bush, who opposed sanctions, told reporters somewhat wistfully yesterday
that he is precluded from removing any of the sanctions. Under the law enacted in 1986
over the veto of President Ronald Reagan, the sanctions may not be lifted until a series of
specific conditions are met, and the Bush Administration acknowledges that has not yet
happened.
“I can’t lift the sanctions under existing U.S. law,” Mr. Bush said at a news
conference in Huntsville, Ala. But he said he intended to take the issue up with Mr.
Mandela when they meet at the White House on Monday.
“I look forward to talking to Mr. Mandela about this,” the president said. “There are
black leaders in South Africa that disagree with him on this question of sanctions.”
The President added that his administration was looking for ways to demonstrate its
support of Mr. de Klerk’s government.
“I’d like to find a way to show Mr. de Klerk that we, the United States, are grateful
for this new approach that is having South Africa evolve to a much more open society
and hopefully one day to one which is color blind in terms of participation in the political
process,” he said.
Mr. Mandela’s red and white plane, a Canadian military transport, touched down
just after 11:30 A.M. at Kennedy, where several hundred elected officials, community
advocates, African National Congress members and supporters and journalists had been
waiting for hours, most of them, it seemed, talking on cellular telephones.
Mr. Wilkins, the writer and educator who is running the American trip, called in the
middle of the night, a senior aide to Mr. Dinkins said, to tell Harry Belafonte, the singer
who is one of the main organizers here, that Mr. Mandela was tired and needed more rest.
Mr. Wilkins said the African National Congress wanted to cancel the visit to Boys and
Girls High School, the mayoral aide said, but Mr. Lynch, the deputy mayor, insisted that
it go forward.
But Mr. Mandela appeared almost radiant as he stepped from the hatch of the
airplane, a tall figure in a conservative gray suit, blue shirt and dark-patterned tie. He
would soon be wearing a gold “Big Apple” pin in his lapel. Behind him, Winnie
Mandela, wearing purple and white traditional African dress with a matching head wrap,
raised a clenched fist.
“I saw astounded people; I saw euphoric people,” Mr. Wilkins said at the end of the
day. “I saw a nearly 72-year-old man tired from a very emotional day. But when I was
running by that security vehicle, I looked up, and the smile on his face was like a child at
Christmas.”
A receiving line of about 50 dignitaries, including the Mayor and his wife, Joyce,
and Govs. Mario M. Cuomo of New York and Jim Florio of New Jersey, was stretched
along a red carpet to a speakers stand where the African National Congress’s black, green
and yellow flag stood along with city, state and American flags.
But Mr. Mandela first stooped down, his hands on his knees, and gave his undivided
attention to two young girls, members of the African National Congress, who tied scarves
in the group’s colors, bandana style, around his and his wife’s necks in greeting.
Then, moving with the dignified, almost regal bearing — he is a hereditary tribal
chief — that he would maintain, Mr. Mandela took 10 minutes to work his way through
the receiving line and then swept past the speakers stand to greet the crowd of several
hundred supporters.
“It is a source of tremendous joy and strength for us, my wife, our delegation, to be
received with such a rousing welcome by the people of the city,” he said in brief remarks
after being welcomed by the mayor and both governors.
“Join us in the international actions we are taking. The only way we can walk
together on this difficult road is for you to insure that sanctions are applied,” he added in
what he said would be his main message throughout his visit.
Roadside crowds gradually swelled as Mr. Mandela’s motorcade raced from Queens
into predominantly black sections of Brooklyn, with schoolchildren neatly lined behind
banners. People waved portraits of Mr. Mandela and posters or makeshift signs
welcoming him.
But in the predominantly white communities of Howard Beach and Ozone Park,
Queens, there were a few rude gestures, and one man with a video camera held his hand
in front of the lens with a finger raised, so that the motorcade became the background for
an obscene gesture.
Some 3,000 people, a predominantly black crowd, were waiting on the athletic field
of Boys and Girls High on Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant when the motorcade
arrived shortly after one o’clock. At times they seemed to be a sea of yellow signs that
said “Free South Africa,” red-black-and- green liberation flags, dazzling multicolor
headdresses of African and Caribbean design and T-shirts with Mr. Mandela’s face.
“Mandela, Mandela,” the crowd cheered, surging forward in the muggy sunlight as
Mr. Mandela and his wife climbed the makeshift stage of an 18-wheel truck. “Keep the
pressure on.”
“We in South Africa have always known that we have loyal friends among the
people of New York, but we have no idea that we were perceived with such love and
warmth,” Mr. Mandela said in a slow, deliberate voice, each word punching through the
public address system. With little further ado, he began an appeal to raise money to build
schools in South Africa.
As the motorcade left, many in the crowd raced out of the schoolyard and into the
streets, slowing the pace to a crawl. Many raced along with the cars on foot or on bicycles
until they could speed up.
The sidewalk crowds swelled as the motorcade moved through Bedford-Stuyvesant,
with welcoming banners like “Forward to Victory” stretched across Fulton Street.
Mr. Mandela paused briefly for lunch at the Coast Guard Station at the Battery and
an almost obligatory photo opportunity with the Statue of Liberty in the background.
Then he climbed into the odd-looking Mandelamobile for the ticker-tape parade.
As 3 P.M. approached, the crowd was beginning to thin along Broadway. People
looked at their watches, stood on tiptoes and, where space and dress allowed, slumped to
the curb to rest. Executives kicked their wingtips at the paper underfoot and secretaries
moaned for their Nikes.
Then, in a wail of sirens and a shower of saved-up confetti, the motorcade appeared.
The canyon of tall buildings presented a strange sight. Instead of the familiar ticker
tape of parades past, rectangles of paper floated down and the police and sanitation
workers lining the streets had to kick through thick wads of computer printouts.
“It was worth waiting for,” Henrietta Wilson, an officer’s assistant at Chemical
Bank, said as she rushed back toward the Battery to work. “That was history.”
Mandela Ends Tour Of U.S. With
Oakland Appearance
By JOHN KIFNER, Special to The New York Times
July 1, 1990
OAKLAND, Calif., June 30 — A weary Nelson Mandela ended a grueling eight-city
American tour today, transformed into a popular hero hailed by millions who a few
months ago were probably giving scant attention to apartheid in South Africa.
“We are at a crucial historical juncture,” Mr. Mandela told a cheering crowd of
58,000 people packing the Oakland Coliseum and turning it into a sea of black, green and
yellow banners of the African National Congress. “We shall not turn back.”
In the last appearance of his tour, the deputy president of the African National
Congress smiled broadly and told the crowd, “Despite my 71 years, at the end of this visit
I feel like a young man of 35. I feel like an old battery that has been recharged. And if I
feel so young, it is the people of the United States of America that are responsible for
this.”
Although he had refrained from speaking on American issues for most of his visit,
Mr. Mandela said he had received a number of messages from “the first American nation,
the American Indians,” including a group prevented by logistical mixups from presenting
him ceremonial robes today.
“I can assure you they have left me very disturbed,” Mr. Mandela said, “and if I had
time I would visit their areas and get from them an authoritative description of the
difficulties under which they live.” He said he would do so on a future visit to the United
States in October.
Mr. Mandela landed here this afternoon and was greeted by Representative Ronald
V. Dellums, the California Democrat who has for years pushed legislation for sanctions
against the South African government. Mr. Mandela then thanked the Bay Area for its
support of his goal of “one person, one vote” and “a democratic, nonracial, nonsexist”
society.
The area was a must stop on Mr. Mandela’s trip, organizers said, because the cities
of Oakland, Berkley and San Francisco have ordinances calling for divestment of stocks
in American companies doing business in South Africa, and regional longshoremen have
refused to unload South African goods.
From the airport Mr. Mandela went to the rally at the stadium, after which he
returned to the airport, held a brief news conference and began a flight to Ireland.
Aides said the trip to Ireland was to thank the Dublin government for its support in
the European Community’s recent decision to maintain sanctions against South Africa.
They said they knew of no plans for Mr. Mandela to meet with the Irish Republican
Army, an outlawed organization that has given aid to the African National Congress.
Mr. Mandela’s American tour has been instant history, a televised pageant that
riveted audiences in New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles and,
finally, the Bay Area.
Local television stations went live with airport arrival ceremonies and nightly
concert-rallies, and newspapers issued souvenir sections. At times, the coverage verged
on adulation, like when a television anchor in Detroit called Mr. Mandela “this dear
man.”
Over and over, people along the way gave the same answer when reporters asked
why they had turned out for the former political prisoner from a faraway land: “This is
history.”
Boarding Mr. Mandela’s rented plane in Los Angeles this morning, Roger Wilkins,
the trip director, said, “The purpose of the trip was for him to get his message about the
current state of politics in South Africa and the nature of the African National Congress
struggle to the American people.”
Mr. Wilkins declined to say how much money had been raised at fund-raising
events along the way, including a $5,000-a-place reception and dinner for film stars and
other celebrities in Los Angeles Friday night. The total appeared to run over $5 million.
For Mr. Mandela, who was released last year after 27 years in a South African
prison, the trip was in some ways a revelation, too, close aides said.
“The political life of the U.S. is not so new, because, of course, he has been reading
about it,” said Zwelakhe Sisulu, editor of the South African weekly New Nation, who is
accompanying Mr. Mandela.
Instead, Mr. Sisulu said, it was the cultural experience that came across as new and
Mr. Mandela particularly enjoyed meeting sportsmen and musicians.
“He had always thought of them as tall, huge people,” Mr. Sisulu said, “and he
remarked to Quincy Jones on how small they were in person. “I think he was very
surprised at the warmth of the American people; that was what was most striking. If
anything, I think this was a humbling experience.”
There was concern throughout his trip for the health of Mr. Mandela, who in the
past few days has appeared to be walking slowly and stiffly. Friday night, he paused and
mopped his face several times as he spoke in the Hollywood Coliseum. As Mr. Mandela
has waited to speak in the past few days, his face has seemed drawn and tired, but it
lighted up as he faced a crowd.
Along his itinerary, Americans, particularly black Americans, wanted Mr. Mandela
to join in their political agenda, speaking about poor education, drugs and poverty.
But, except for his statement about the American Indians, he remained totally
focused on South Africa.
Winnie Mandela, Given Sentence Of 6
Years In Kidnapping Case
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
May 15, 1991
JOHANNESBURG, May 14 — Winnie Mandela, the wife of the African National
Congress leader Nelson Mandela, was sentenced today to six years in prison in the
kidnapping and beating of four young men in Soweto in late 1988.
Justice Michael S. Stegmann, who found her guilty on Monday of kidnapping and
being an accessory to the assaults, imposed consecutive sentences of five years for
kidnapping and one year on the accessory conviction.
The sentences stunned spectators in the courtroom, some of whom expected Mrs.
Mandela to get a suspended sentence. But her lawyer immediately filed an appeal,
postponing for months the prospect that Mrs. Mandela will actually go to prison. And
there has been speculation that President F. W. de Klerk may yet step in and pardon her
in order not to jeopardize proposed negotiations on the nation’s future with Mr. Mandela
and the African National Congress.
Released on a modest bail equivalent to $72, Mrs. Mandela looked defiant as she
walked out of the courthouse to cheers from several hundred waiting supporters, some of
whom held placards declaring “Stop harassing our mother Winnie Mandela” and “No
justice under an unjust government.”
“We have been found guilty by the media,” Mrs. Mandela told reporters.
Mr. Mandela, who did not attend the sentencing, told a news conference at the
University of Stellenbosch that he believed his wife was innocent, but added that the
verdict and sentence had no direct bearing on talks with the government on dismantling
South Africa’s apartheid system. He said the talks depended on the government’s
willingness to meet the Congress’s demands that it halt ongoing political violence.
The African National Congress issued a statement saying it viewed the verdict and
sentence given Mrs. Mandela “with dismay,” but added: “The last word on this entire
affair has not yet been spoken. We elect to leave the matter in the hands of the courts,
fully confident that in the end the truth will emerge.”
The congress’s secretary general, Alfred Nzo, had charged on Jan. 25 that Mrs.
Mandela’s trial amounted to “blatant harassment of the A.N.C.” His accusation went
unrepeated today.
In delivering his verdict on Monday, Justice Stegmann found that Mrs. Mandela
plotted with other defendants to discredit a local Methodist minister by abducting four
street youths living at his manse in Soweto and taking them to Mrs. Mandela’s house on
Dec. 29, 1988.
Mrs. Mandela’s followers went further than she intended, the judge found, and
savagely beat the young men to make three of them say they were sexually molested by
the minister and the fourth to confess that he was a police informer. The fourth, James
“Stompie” Moeketsi Seipei, who was 14 years old, was found on Jan. 6 battered and with
his throat cut. Mrs. Mandela’s chief bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, was convicted last May
of murdering the youth.
Mrs. Mandela did not deny that the four were taken to her home but said she was
absent in the Orange Free State when it happened. She said she returned home two days
later but was unaware that they had been assaulted.
Justice Stegmann ruled that while Mrs. Mandela’s alibi was reasonable, the
abductions could not have been carried out without her prior approval. He did not convict
her of the more serious crime of assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm, but
he said she became an accessory by covering up the crime and allying herself with the
assailants, who were living at her house.
Justice Stegmann was unmoved by an argument from George Bizos, the chief
defense lawyer, that Mrs. Mandela did not deserve a harsh sentence because she did not
know what happened to the kidnapped youths in her home. The judge said that “a
diligence in ignorance is the equivalent of knowledge.”
“All she had to do was open her eyes and look around and open her ears and hear,
and she would have found out all the information she needed,” Justice Stegmann said.
The judge said she and her co-defendants had not shown the slightest remorse and might
be tempted to do the same again if the opportunity arose.
One of her co-defendants, Xoliswa Falati, was also sentenced to six years in prison
for kidnapping and assault. The other, John Morgan, who drove the bus used to abduct
the young men, drew a suspended sentence of one year for kidnapping. Four other codefendants have jumped bail and disappeared.
The conviction and prison sentence raise questions about Mrs. Mandela’s future in
the African National Congress, which her husband leads as its deputy president. Except
for Mr. Mandela, none of its senior officials came to the trial recently to show solidarity
with his wife, as some did back in February.
Mr. Mandela, who looked shattered by the guilty verdict on Monday, commented
further on her case at his news conference in Stellenbosch.
“I have never believed that she was guilty of assaulting anyone,” Mr. Mandela said,
according to the South African Press Association. “Application for appeal has been filed
and I’m advised it should succeed. I trust that soon her name will be cleared completely.”
Mrs. Mandela, who is 56 years old and one of the more radical voices in the
Congress, heads its social welfare department, among other posts, and the conviction and
sentence could prompt her opponents in the group to press her to give up the key job. The
trial was believed to have influenced her resounding defeat in a contest for the presidency
of the congress’s Women’s League last month.
South Africans’ opinions of Mrs. Mandela run the gamut. Some white South
Africans applauded the verdict, but she remains popular among more militant black
youngsters, who regarded her trial as more political harassment.
Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu of Cape Town, the Anglican clergyman who is also
an anti-apartheid leader, expressed shock at the severity of the sentence but did not
challenge it.
“I would want to stress what she would stress: that the movement is larger than any
single individual,” Archbishop Tutu said in a statement release in Cape Town. “The
movement will continue and will honor her for the good things that she did and recognize
that human beings are human beings.”
But other black South Africans, recalling that the kidnapped youths were black too,
argued for a harsher verdict.
“The judge was too lenient,” said a journalist from Soweto, where the Mandelas
live. “She should have been convicted of assault too.”
Kenneth Dladla, another Sowetan, said he thought that Mrs. Mandela got what she
deserved. “Winnie has disgraced the black community and most of all the A.N.C.,” he
said. “In actual fact, she is an outcast, so we can do better without her in the
organization.”
Doris Dlamini, who lives in the same neighborhood, Orlando West, thought Mrs.
Mandela should have been fined but not jailed, because protests by her supporters could
add to the current violence.
“I don’t deny that Mrs. Mandela has committed the crimes mentioned, but for the
sake of peace, her sentence should be lightened,” Mrs. Dlamini said.
“I admit that Mrs. Mandela has hurt so many people, but for the sake of her
husband, I want the South African government to forgive her,” said Emily Nkuthe, a
woman from Sebokeng. “God will punish her in a rightful way which will not disturb the
talks between F. W. and Mandela, and most of all peace.”
South Africa Court Suspends Winnie
Mandela’s Jail Term
By BILL KELLER
June 3, 1993
JOHANNESBURG, June 2 — South Africa’s highest appeals court today upheld Winnie
Mandela’s conviction for the kidnapping of four black youths, but said she would not go
to prison for her role in a crime that opened deep wounds in the anti-apartheid movement.
The appeals panel rejected the five-year jail term imposed by a lower court judge in
favor of a fine, a payment to the victims, and a suspended sentence, saying the more
lenient sentence would “achieve a measure of social justice and fit the crime.”
The ruling was certain to be greeted with some ambivalence by the black
mainstream. On the one hand, it leaves Mrs. Mandela free to continue her radical
criticism of the mainstream leadership of the African National Congress, which many fear
could undermine the congress’s election campaign and its ability to govern if victorious.
On the other hand, a jail term would have caused pain and distraction for her
husband, Nelson Mandela, the president of the African National Congress, and might
have prompted another disruptive wave of protest by Mrs. Mandela’s militant followers.
The five-member court in Bloemfontein also overturned Mrs. Mandela’s conviction
and one-year sentence on a related charge of being an accessory to assault.
Mrs. Mandela was convicted a year ago of sending her bodyguards to kidnap and
beat four young men in 1988.
One of the victims, 14-year-old James (Stompie) Seipei, was later found dead in a
field with his throat cut. Mrs. Mandela’s chief bodyguard, Jerry Richardson, was
convicted of the murder and is serving a life prison term.
Shunned by black leaders who accused her of conducting a “reign of terror” in the
black township of Soweto, and later stripped of her official positions in the African
National Congress, Mrs. Mandela, 58, has recently set about building her own
independent power base among the dwellers of squatter camps and the militant youths of
the black townships.
Since January she has repeatedly excoriated the African National Congress, and
implicitly her husband, for compromising with the white government on the terms of a
future post-apartheid constitution.
Mr. Mandela, who stood by his wife through the trial but later announced their
separation, told reporters today that he was pleased that the court had decided not to send
her to jail.
Although prison sentences are usual in kidnapping cases, there had been speculation
since her conviction that she might receive a suspended sentence or a pardon to prevent
disrupting the negotiations that now seem on the verge of setting an election date.
The judges who today set aside her jail sentence did not explain whether they were
influenced by the possible political turmoil her imprisonment might generate, or perhaps
moved by sympathy for a woman whose life has been a chronicle of apartheid miseries.
They ordered her to pay a fine of $4,800, and another $1,600 each to the three
surviving victims, and gave her a two-year suspended sentence.
The judges also upheld the convictions of Mrs. Mandela’s co-defendants John
Morgan and Xoliswa Falati. Miss Falati’s six-year sentence was reduced to four years, of
which two were suspended. Mr. Morgan received a suspended one-year sentence in the
original trial.
In their unanimous, 192-page judgment, the judges said there was no doubt Mrs.
Mandela had instigated the kidnapping, and that she had been “on occasion evasive,
untruthful, contradictory and capable of dishonest improvisation.”
But they agreed with her that the prosecution had failed to refute her alibi that she
was 200 miles away when the actual beatings took place.
Her supporters say Mrs. Mandela’s story is the tragedy of a woman brutalized by
apartheid, isolated by the demands of the struggle and ultimately abandoned by her
fellows in the liberation movement.
Three years after her marriage to Mr. Mandela, he disappeared, first into the
underground, then into prison, where he remained for 27 years.
Left alone, Mrs. Mandela was repeatedly arrested, banned from public gatherings
and banished to a rural settlement. She spent 17 months in solitary confinement.
With most leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in prison or exile, she surrounded
herself with a coterie of young thugs whom she dressed in soccer jerseys and called the
Mandela United Football Club, although their only sport was attacking anyone perceived
as an enemy of Mrs. Mandela.
Mrs. Mandela asserted that the four young men were taken from a Methodist church
home because of reports they were being sexually abused by a white minister.
The court found that the abducted youths were driven to Mrs. Mandela’s home and
severely beaten to force them to back up the charges against the minister, and to confess
that Mr. Seipei was a police spy.
Mandela Shares Nobel Accolade With
De Klerk
By BILL KELLER
October 16, 1993
JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 15 — Nelson Mandela and President F. W. de Klerk today
shared the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the apartheid state and
collaborating in the quest for a nonracial democracy.
The Nobel Committee said Mr. de Klerk and Mr. Mandela, almost universally
regarded as the last white President and the first black President of South Africa, had
displayed “personal integrity and great political courage” in finding a middle ground in
the bitterly polarized politics of South Africa.
“South Africa has been the symbol of racially conditioned suppression,” the
committee said, announcing the $825,000 award in Oslo. “Mandela’s and de Klerk’s
constructive policy of peace and reconciliation also points the way to the peaceful
resolution of similar deep-rooted conflicts elsewhere in the world.”
The two men accepted the joint award with the strained grace that has become
characteristic of their complex relationship as leaders of mistrustful camps who now
depend on each other to complete their work.
In a news conference at the headquarters of his African National Congress, Mr.
Mandela declined to repeat his much-quoted 1990 assessment of Mr. de Klerk as a man
of integrity, and, when asked what he thought the white President had done to deserve the
prize, snapped: “Just ask the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.”
The 75-year-old patriarch of the anti-apartheid movement brushed aside repeated
questions about his opinion of the 57-year-old white President, focusing instead on the
elections scheduled for next April 27.
“When those elections take place we will stop worrying what Mr. de Klerk does or
does not do, because the democratic forces will be in power,” he said.
Mr. de Klerk, meeting reporters in Cape Town, was equally sparing in his praise,
insisting that the prize was bestowed not on leaders but on a process.
The public reaction was subdued by the feeling that whatever the two men have
brought to South Africa, it is not yet peace. An estimated 10,000 people, mostly blacks,
have died in political violence since February 1990, when Mr. de Klerk ordered Mr.
Mandela released after 27 1/2 years in prison.
In South Africa, the honor for the two leaders competed for public attention with
two other stories more typical of the country’s troubled passage.
As Mr. Mandela met reporters this afternoon, elated black crowds 10 stories below
danced through the streets of downtown Johannesburg, celebrating not the Peace Prize
but the death sentence handed down today against two white men convicted of murdering
the popular black Communist leader Chris Hani.
A white judge, who on Thursday found the men guilty of conspiring to shoot down
Mr. Hani last April, said they should be hanged for the crime.
With executions suspended until a new government is elected, the fate of the two
men and 170 other Death Row inmates may depend more on Mr. Mandela than on Mr. de
Klerk.
The sentence presented Mr. Mandela with a tricky moment at his news conference,
since his followers were hungry for retribution but the congress opposes the death
penalty.
He handled the issue with diplomatic dexterity, heartily applauding the death
sentence but declining to say whether it should be carried out.
At Mr. de Klerk’s news conference, the distraction was last week’s army raid on a
suspected black terrorist hideout in which five teen-agers were riddled with bullets
without firing a shot in resistance.
Mr. de Klerk, who said he authorized the raid, contended that the weapons and
documents seized at the house justified the suspicion that the men were connected to a
militant guerrilla group, but the army has been fiercely condemned for apparently making
no attempt to arrest the men.
“My hands are not dripping with blood,” Mr. de Klerk retorted to reporters. “I am
using my hands and my mind and my energy and I am giving everything I have to work
for peace.”
The Norwegian committee evidently anticipated such controversy, but decided it
was outweighed by the progress the two men have made by setting an election date and
agreeing to let a multiracial council oversee the government during elections.
“These are not saints,” Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the committee, said in
Oslo, according to the Associated Press. “They are politicians in a complicated reality and
it is the total picture that was decisive.”
Two other South Africans have won the Peace Prize, both for nonviolent campaigns
against apartheid.
The Zulu chief Albert Luthuli won in 1960 when, as president of the African
National Congress, he led passive resistance against racist laws. That same year Mr.
Mandela took charge of a campaign of sabotage and limited guerrilla insurgency. The
Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu won in 1984 for braving the wrath of authorities
with his fierce speeches against apartheid.
Archbishop Tutu said he felt the joint award was justified.
“I hope that it will work to weld us together as a people,” he said.
The award is unlikely to have much effect on negotiators racing to draft an interim
constitution in time for parliamentary approval in late November.
Already weeks behind their timetable, they took the day off to debate last week’s
army raid. The pace of transition is also threatened by a new alliance of white separatists
and Zulu nationalists who demand powerful enclaves of their own in the new order.
Mr. de Klerk said this week that before holding elections the country may need to
hold a multiracial referendum to prove that the public supports the transition, but Mr.
Mandela said today that the elections must remain on schedule “whoever is opposed to
it.”
The former prisoner and his former jailer have never become friends, although the
younger men who serve as their chief negotiators — Roelf Meyer of the government and
Cyril Ramaphosa of the Congress — have a close relationship.
Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk blame each other for failing to curb the violence.
And while they are partners in negotiations, they are simultaneously rivals in the
forthcoming elections.
Mr. Mandela said today that the congress leadership would decide how his share of
the prize money should be used. Mr. de Klerk said he had not given any thought to the
money, but “inasmuch as there is money, I will do my best with it.”
The Nobel Peace Prize, endowed by the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred
Nobel, has been awarded since 1901. There have been 19 years in which no prize was
given. The award will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Mr. Nobel’s
death.
Mandela Is Named President, Closing
The Era Of Apartheid
By BILL KELLER
May 10, 1994
CAPE TOWN, May 9 — The power that had belonged to whites since they first settled
on this cape 342 years ago passed today to a Parliament as diverse as any in the world, a
cast of proud survivors who began their work by electing Nelson Mandela to be the first
black president of South Africa.
Unopposed, Mr. Mandela was proclaimed president without a word of dissent or
even a show of hands, then sat, strangely grim-faced, while his giddy followers whooped
in unparliamentary delight.
Ninety minutes later he appeared on a high balcony at the old Cape Town City Hall,
gazed across a delirious throng toward the bay where he spent more than a third of his
adult life on an island prison, and spoke his presidential theme of inclusion.
“We place our vision of a new constitutional order for South Africa on the table not
as conquerors, prescribing to the conquered,” he declared, from the same perch where he
first addressed his followers four years ago after he was released and the negotiated
revolution began in earnest.
“We speak as fellow citizens to heal the wounds of the past with the intent of
constructing a new order based on justice for all,” he said.
Afterwards Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the irrepressible Anglican Primate of
Southern Africa, who serves as a kind of national toastmaster, sprang to the microphone
and gleefully shrieked, “We are free today! We are free today!”
Mr. Mandela does not become president until Tuesday when he is to be sworn in at
a pageant in Pretoria, but the symbolic redefining of South Africa was already dizzily
under way.
Entering the Parliamentary chamber from which blacks were previously excluded,
Mr. Mandela was announced by a bare-chested tribal imbongi, or praise-singer, shouting
tributes to this most famous prisoner of apartheid.
Before the new Parliament adjourned its maiden session, the Speaker — for
centuries a white man in a black morning coat — was an Indian woman in a sari, Frene
Ginwala, an eloquent lawyer and women’s rights campaigner who found cause for
celebration in the more than 70 women elected among the 400 lawmakers.
Mr. Mandela entered the chamber with his arm around his predecessor, F. W. de
Klerk, and settled into the brown leather seat from which Mr. de Klerk led the repeal of
apartheid during the last four years.
Mr. de Klerk, still president for a day, moved across the aisle to the place from
which the pro-apartheid opposition used to harangue him as a traitor to his race. In the
new order, he is one of two vice presidents.
Behind them the assembly fanned out in a florid display of races and costumes,
white men in suits outnumbered by black women in the bright hats that are the feminine
custom of the house. The Parliament is roughly a mirror of the public, which is about 75
percent black, 15 percent white, and 10 percent Indian and mixed-race.
The spectacle today shattered not only the South African tradition of minority
dominion but also the stereotype of liberation parliaments, for here the former prisoners
were sworn in alongside their former jailers, returned exiles sat across from recycled
racists, and the descendants of the system joined its victims and the next of kin.
All are now $55,000-a-year incumbents who will address each other as “honorable
member” in the same spirit with which Mr. Mandela bounded from his place today to
embrace his Zulu nationalist rival, Chief Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, and to pump the hand
of Gen. Constandt Viljoen, parliamentary leader of the nine-member white separatist
delegation.
The new legislators came forward in flights of 10 to be sworn in, each lineup
containing several novels’ worth of pain endured and history upended.
In the first batch, together with Mr. Mandela, stood his estranged wife Winnie, the
militant champion of the dispossessed and convicted kidnapper. Mr. Mandela ignored
her, staring away as they pledged their devotion to the new South Africa, and ignored her
again later when she sat briefly beside him to nominate the deputy Speaker.
In recent weeks she has spoken of reconciliation, and he has denied it. He invited
their two daughters to escort him to the main inaugural party Tuesday, but Mrs. Mandela
is not on the guest list.
Sharing the first oath, too, was Joe Slovo, the Communist Party chairman and one of
about 50 Communists who serve under the umbrella of Mr. Mandela’s African National
Congress — allies of convenience, nothing more, Mr. Mandela always explains, but a
reliable source of white anxiety. Mr. Slovo wore his trademark red socks, and on the way
in hoisted his trouser legs for the TV cameras.
Another group included Ahmed Kathrada, perhaps the new order’s most perfect
example of whimsical reversal. Mr. Kathrada shared a cell block with Mr. Mandela on
Robben Island and served as scribe and editor of illicit prison writings. Now he is Mr.
Mandela’s designated Minister of Correctional Services, responsible for overseeing the
prison system.
The African National Congress, which won 252 of the 400 seats, held its first
caucus Sunday in the older parliamentary chamber where the apartheid laws were enacted
and where the founding ideologist of separation, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, survived two
bullets from a would-be assassin.
Today the whole assembly gathered in a chamber built in 1985 for joint sessions of
a tricameral parliament, an apartheid device that excluded blacks but provided houses to
represent Indians and mixed-race people.
Passing along the once forbidden corridors, the tortured and exiled gawked at stiffly
heroic paintings of the Afrikaners who have run the country since 1948.
“I hope some of the portraits that are hanging here will be taken to the museum so
that there really will be a change,” said Gen. Bantu Holomisa, the former dictator of the
Transkei homeland, elected on Mr. Mandela’s ticket.
“I’m excited like a young boy,” said Cyril Ramaphosa, the African National
Congress’s chief negotiator and party leader, who eschewed a Cabinet post after being
passed over for a vice-presidency but showed no sign of depression today. “This is a
Parliament we’ve been storming all these years and finally, through negotiations, the
doors are open and we are walking in very majestically.”
By the end of the week Mr. Mandela is expected to have a full complement of 27
Cabinet ministers, and by June the Parliament should be at work on his first budget.
Mr. de Klerk today announced the six members of his party who will be included in
the unity Cabinet, including Roelof F. Botha, the world’s longest serving Foreign
Minister, who will take over the mining portfolio, Roelf Meyer, the party’s chief
negotiator, who will handle constitutional issues and relations with the provinces, and
Derek Keys, who retains his post as Finance Minister.
Mr. Mandela announced most of the Cabinet choices from his own party last week.
Leaders of Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party said today that they would
accept three posts in the new Cabinet, joining the unity government despite months of
insisting that the Constitution was fatally flawed.
The only determined outsider in the new panoply was General Viljoen, who ran in
hope of winning the Afrikaners an independent homeland by fighting from the inside.
Asked what would be his role in the new Parliament, he declared: “Opposition, of
course. There is no other way.”
A Day In The Life Of Mandela: Charm,
Control, A Bit Of Acid
By BILL KELLER
September 12, 1994
CAPE TOWN, Sept. 8 — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s indispensable man, settled
into the seat of his presidential jet. He propped his chronically swollen feet on two
pillows, accepted a bowl of cereal and a plate of fruit, and commenced a daylong
demonstration of his art of the presidency.
It was 6 A.M. on his 122d day as liberator-turned-chief-executive, and he had
agreed to let two reporters watch him do his job. Never a man oblivious of his audience,
Mr. Mandela promptly embarked on a campaign of seductive engagement: deliberate
charm, disarming confidences, a command of details mustered in defense of crisp
convictions.
Admirers who regard the man as a modern saint might have had moments of doubt.
In the course of this day he would display an occasional meanness toward his predecessor
and now deputy, F. W. de Klerk, and a surprising solicitousness of corporate big shots
who have quietly donated money to his cause.
But the day would leave little question of the patriarchal authority that sometimes
seems to be the main force binding this country’s improbable governing fusion of races
and interests.
As he poked at the fruit, Mr. Mandela recalled the paternal scolding he had
delivered the night before to one of his closest allies, the Congress of South African
Trade Unions.
Dressed in a union cap and T-shirt, the President had told the unionists the last thing
they wanted to hear: Ease up on the strikes; you are scaring foreign investors. Prepare to
“tighten your belts” and accept low wages, because that is how some Asian economies
became tigers.
He warned union workers against putting their own modest advantages above the
needs of five million blacks with no jobs at all, for whom the President is convinced the
only hope is to make South Africa a mecca for foreign capital. But Mr. Mandela knows
that many in the unions — and some senior figures in his own party — regard such
thinking as sacrilege.
“You still have this question of populism — ‘Let the workers strike!’ ” Mr. Mandela
said now, flying from Pretoria to Cape Town. “They say, ‘We want only investors who
will invest at all costs.’
“I’m trying to warn against that type of thinking. That is irresponsible. We must
move from the position of a resistance movement to one of builders.”
South Africa is not a one-man show. In his Cabinet and Parliament, and in the
provincial governments, Mr. Mandela has a strong cast, including two possible successors
— Thabo Mbeki, a former exile and liberation diplomat who now serves as the first of
two Deputy Presidents, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a tough-minded labor leader during the
apartheid years who refused his pick of Cabinet posts to remain as head of Mr. Mandela’s
party, the African National Congress.
But probably none of them has the weight to say what Mr. Mandela said the night
before to the unionists, and to expect the respectful hearing he got.
At 7:50 A.M. today, his Falcon 900 landed at an air force base outside Cape Town,
and the official day began.
There is little of Nelson Mandela in the Cape Town office that he inherited from the
last presidents of apartheid.
The only personal touches among the African artifacts installed by the National
Gallery to “indigenize” the suite are a photograph of the little cottage where he grew up
in a remote rural village, the scion of tribal royalty, and four pictures of two young boxers
sparring in Soweto in 1959, one of them recognizably the young Nelson Mandela.
The vibe, however, is pure Mandela. The staff around him is conspicuously and
comfortably multiracial. The working style is courteously informal. Each visitor,
including Cabinet ministers and diplomats, is invited to shake hands with the woman who
serves them tea.
8:30 A.M. “This is the office where I saw P. W. Botha in July 1989,” Mr. Mandela
said, folding his long, erect frame onto a cream-colored upholstered sofa. That meeting
with the President who preceded Mr. de Klerk was a watershed in the long negotiations
toward democracy.
Mr. Botha was known for good reason as “the Great Crocodile,” but Mr. Mandela
recalls him as “a charming man” who poured tea for his guest and addressed him with
respect.
Mr. Mandela places a premium on personal contact in affairs of state. Manners
count, and loyalty, even the easy loyalty of a kind word or a generous check, is
remembered.
When he upbraided the labor leaders the day before, he did not mention another
reason their militancy has worried him: some employers who have been the targets of
strikes have been secret benefactors of the African National Congress.
Before the election campaign, Mr. Mandela went to 20 titans of corporate South
Africa and asked each for at least a million rand — about $275,000 — to build up his
party and finance the campaign.
All but one, he said, complied. A few, like Raymond D. Ackerman, the head of the
Pick ’n Pay grocery chain, gave double the minimum request, Mr. Mandela said. So it
rankled him that Mr. Ackerman’s stores had just borne the brunt of a raucous strike by
store clerks.
“The right to strike is in the Constitution,” he said. “But for them to target people
who have been assisting us creates difficulties. Without funds we could not have built the
organization, we could not have won the election.”
South Africa has no law requiring that political gifts be disclosed, and no tradition
that frowns on officials giving access, even sympathy, to contributors.
With the election over, wealthy executives seeking to impress Mr. Mandela with
their commitment to the new order are now being invited to donate to the President’s
Fund, a charitable trust Mr. Mandela began with a large contribution from his own salary.
The President uses the fund to start projects he likes, mostly for children. For
example, he persuaded the Anglo American Corporation, the gold-and-diamonds
colossus, to give his fund a mining compound it was not using. He then called the
Finance Minister and extracted $8 million in state money to develop the property as a
home for delinquent children.
The arrangement enhances Mr. Mandela’s personal influence, and gives contributors
an entree. When Mr. Ackerman, his benefactor from Pick ’n Pay, phones later in the day
with a problem, Mr. Mandela instantly takes his call.
9 A.M. Two officials from the Foreign Ministry brief Mr. Mandela on Lesotho, a
tiny kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa, where the king has recently thrown
out the elected government. Under gentle pressure from Mr. Mandela, the king has agreed
to restore democracy, but now the military is balking. Mr. Mandela and his aides consider
how to approach the recalcitrant generals.
The President has quietly engaged himself in the problems of the region, taking a
personal hand in Lesotho, visiting Mozambique and Zimbabwe, playing matchmaker
among the rival parties in war-battered Angola.
Lesotho, he said, seems near solution, and he has stepped up his mediation. But in
Angola, he said, there is little more he can do because he fears Jonas Savimbi, the rebel
leader, is not ready for peace.
“I don’t think he wants to play second fiddle,” Mr. Mandela said. Reciting a lesson
from South Africa’s own experience, he added, “Intervention only works when the people
concerned seem to be keen for peace.”
The Japanese Ambassador arrives at 9:35 leading a business delegation to pose for
pictures with the presence-in-chief.
Mr. Mandela gets 200 requests a day for such photos. Mary Mxadana, his
formidable personal secretary, turns down almost all, accepting only those she senses will
appeal to Mr. Mandela: the blind marathon-runner raising money for charity, the
occasional beauty queen, golf and rugby champions. Mr. Mandela cannot resist children
or people who, like the Japanese, bring money to South Africa.
“Well, it’s a real pleasure to meet you, and we appreciate the aid,” he says, pumping
hands with the beaming businessmen.
10:15 A.M. Much of the morning, untypically, is given over to ceremony. Five new
ambassadors present their credentials, part of an incoming diplomatic tide that has
followed South Africa’s readmission to the world.
For a novice president and a man who spent more than a third of his life in prison,
Mr. Mandela displays a dazzling familiarity with the world. He has visited all five of the
places represented today — India, the Vatican, Botswana, Tanzania and Belgium — and
banters familiarly about the kings and presidents he knows.
“Does the Pope still play his guitar?” Mr. Mandela inquired over tea with
Archbishop Ambrose De Paoli, the new Vatican nuncio.
The blank look on the diplomat’s face suggested he was unaware of the Pope’s
musical hobby. But Mr. Mandela’s recall is famous, and no one could be sure that he had
not, indeed, been serenaded by the Pope.
For all his hobnobbing with the world’s political nobility, Mr. Mandela is careful to
avoid the ostentation of power. South Africans were infuriated recently when President
Robert Mugabe, visiting from neighboring Zimbabwe, tied up Johannesburg traffic with a
noisy, flashing-lights, screaming-sirens motorcade, a custom almost everywhere in Africa
except here.
Mr. Mandela often works in a well-tailored African shirt rather than the three-piece
gray suit and tie he has donned for the diplomats this day. But others in his government
have not been so proletarian, prompting a swell of indignant articles about lavish salaries,
Concorde trips and free-spending bodyguards.
“We have this problem,” Mr. Mandela said. “We have the high salaries and we are
living in luxury. That destroys your capacity to speak in a forthright manner and tell
people to tighten their belts.”
11:55 A.M. The local press corps is loitering outside for a comment on the latest
Zulu problem.
The Zulu king has invited Mr. Mandela to attend an annual celebration honoring
Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation. But Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, who serves as the
king’s prime minister, has objected.
Before the election, strife between Mr. Mandela’s followers and the Zulu
nationalists loyal to Mr. Buthelezi cost thousands of lives and threatened to ruin the
elections. Now Mr. Buthelezi sits in the Cabinet, but he remains jealous of his tribal
prerogatives, and the fear of new violence lingers.
Mr. Mandela steps before the reporters and ducks a question about whether he will
attend the Shaka Day ceremony.
Later Mr. Mandela says that he believes his aggressive courtship of Mr. Buthelezi
has produced a cordial, constructive relationship, but one that requires constant attention.
Mr. Buthelezi, the President notes, was the nephew of a Zulu king. He was raised in
the royal court, but treated as an outsider.
“He was deprived of parental love and care, so he grew up with this insecurity,” Mr.
Mandela explained. “Once you understand that, Buthelezi is a very fine person. When we
are together, he is very, very courteous. But when he is away from you, he behaves totally
differently because he does not know if he is still your friend or not.”
The two Deputy Presidents, Mr. Mbeki and Mr. de Klerk, arrive at 12:45 from
offices nearby to talk about more money in the budget for the police. The night before
Mr. Mandela sat up late with his Minister of Safety and Security, listening to horror
stories about the spread of crime syndicates and the low morale of the police force.
Before getting down to business, Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk joke stiffly about
the security entourage that followed Mr. de Klerk on his vacation. “They’re wasting
money,” the former President tells the current one. “I feel so safe nowadays.”
The banter betrays a new chill in Mr. Mandela’s relationship with the man who
shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him. Mr. Mandela has never had great affection for
Mr. de Klerk, and now he finds that slapping down the former President plays well with
those in his own party who fear he is too cozy with the white establishment.
So, while effusively praising the other members of Mr. de Klerk’s party who sit in
the Cabinet — “You would think they were members of the democratic movement” —
Mr. Mandela portrays Mr. de Klerk as a small-minded, partisan conniver.
“His tactic is to praise the President and then attack and undermine the A.N.C.,” Mr.
Mandela said later.
He also pokes fun at Mr. de Klerk for being so slow to vacate the presidential
mansion in Pretoria (“He is still there,” the President says, rolling his eyes), and he
blames Mr. de Klerk for impeding efforts to create a more frugal style of government.
At one point, Mr. Mandela discloses that he has just stripped Mr. de Klerk of his
assignment overseeing administration of the intelligence service, a demonstration of
mistrust.
1:15 P.M. “I’m not sure you’re allowed to kiss the Speaker,” says the Speaker of
Parliament, Frene Ginwala, as the President busses her vigorously on both cheeks.
Mrs. Ginwala is an old friend and a new adversary, for she represents a Parliament
increasingly unwilling to defer to Mr. Mandela’s executive power. Mr. Mandela, she
says, “feels this as a tension, when it is in fact an issue of separation of power.”
Over a lunch of chicken and rice in Mr. Mandela’s office, they discuss procedural
matters, then finish with a genial joust.
“The executive in our case actually controls the legislature,” Mr. Mandela points
out, citing the Constitution.
“I’ll battle you on that one,” Mrs. Ginwala replies amicably, noting that the
Constitution is soon to be rewritten.
Like the rambunctious unions, the A.N.C. caucus in Parliament is an independent
force that requires delicate handling.
“The concept of a government of national unity has not sifted down to the grass
roots,” Mr. Mandela said before lunch, speaking of his caucus. “There is still a lot of
resistance — and for good reasons.” Many in Parliament, after all, suffered
imprisonment, torture, exile and the death of loved ones at the hands of the party that now
shares power.
The Surgeon General briefs Mr. Mandela after lunch on the military medical system
available to treat him in the event of an emergency. But the President interrupts to inquire
about procedures used to screen blood for the AIDS virus, and again to reminisce about a
doctor who tested him in prison with a faulty blood-pressure gauge: “He said, ‘Mr.
Mandela, according to this instrument you should be dead.’ ”
To all appearances Mr. Mandela, who is 76, is in robust health. He wears hearing
aids, and he has to mop his eyes from time to time with a handkerchief. While removing
cataracts recently, a surgeon also unplugged tear ducts that had been clogged during Mr.
Mandela’s years laboring in a dusty prison limestone quarry. For years, Mr. Mandela
could not cry. Now he cannot help it.
His aides work to guard him against fatigue, but his energy remains astonishing.
This morning he was up by 5 A.M. for a long walk, as he has done since his days as an
amateur boxer. He eats and drinks little, a habit acquired during 27 years in prison.
With the surgeon general, he jokes about his gravest health concern — trying to get
his two Deputy Presidents to give up smoking.
3:50 P.M. Fink Haysom, the President’s legal counsel, arrives with documents for
signing. Among them are letters to retiring officials of the intelligence service, thanking
them for their years of service. Much of that service, Mr. Mandela remarks, was devoted
to keeping people like him from power.
“This might be a fellow who was putting bombs in installations and injuring
innocent people,” Mr. Mandela says, as he signs a farewell.
Mr. Mandela insists he has no fear of the securo-crats, but he does not entirely trust
them either. Like much of the vast civil service he inherited, they were schooled in the
tasks of racist government, and are slow to change course. Despite frequent demands, he
said, he has yet to extract a complete report on domestic spying, telephone taps, papershredding and other activities.
“When I first took over, they would give me a briefing and tell me about the World
Health Organization, all these things that were peripheral and far away,” he said. “I called
them and told them, ‘You are taking a chance.’ ”
Things have improved slightly. “They have come back with a report now which
covers at least what I already knew,” he said.
4:30 P.M. Mr. Mandela gives an interview to an American reporter, then departs for
a plane back to Pretoria. But a delegation from Lesotho has arrived unexpectedly to
pursue a peace settlement.
“Shall I feed them dinner?” his secretary asks.
“That puts them in a better mood,” Mr. Mandela concurs.
He had planned an evening with his children and grandchildren, but instead he will
dine with the delegation. The main item on the menu, of course, will be the Mandela
charm.
Mandela Against Mandela; South
African Cabinet Split Sets Up Political
Test Of Strength
By BILL KELLER
March 29, 1995
JOHANNESBURG, March 28 — The caller identified himself as a former anti-apartheid
guerrilla, now a brigadier in South Africa’s newly integrated army. He had a warning for
the white radio host who sounded so pleased about the dismissal of Winnie Mandela.
Enjoy your moment, the caller said, because when Mrs. Mandela becomes President
there will be no more pandering to whites, and carping critics will be silenced, as they are
in Uganda and Kenya.
“People like you should actually be castrated,” he added.
President Winnie Mandela? It is white South Africa’s ultimate nightmare —
although she has not declared her intention of muzzling critics, let alone castrating them.
The prospect also alarms many blacks who share President Nelson Mandela’s vision of
reconciliation.
With Mr. Mandela’s announcement on Monday that he was expelling his estranged
wife from his government for flouting party discipline, Mrs. Mandela has been pushed
closer to outright opposition, reviving the debate over whether she is South Africa’s
future or just a noisy voice on the margins.
Mrs. Mandela has repeatedly said she would not break with the African National
Congress, which as the cherished vehicle of black liberation (and now the dispenser of
official patronage) is virtually invincible.
The last faction to split from the A.N.C., African nationalists who created the Pan
Africanist Congress in 1959, remained stuck on the fringe. They won 1.2 percent of the
vote in the first free elections last year.
A somewhat more plausible precedent is the internal coup Nelson Mandela and
several friends pulled off within the A.N.C. in 1949. They toppled the organization’s
president, whom they considered overly timid, and put the anti-apartheid campaign on a
more confrontational course.
The question, then, is whether Mrs. Mandela could wage a successful campaign
within the A.N.C. against her husband’s line of racial reconciliation, pro-business
economics and gradual social upliftment.
The case for taking her seriously rests on a simple calculation: that beneath the
veneer of racial harmony lies an explosive charge of black resentment. The more time
passes without blacks feeling that they are moving toward economic equality, the easier it
will be for a populist like Mrs. Mandela to tap their anger.
She is a charismatic speaker, skillful at demonizing her opponents and portraying
herself as a lonely champion of the downtrodden. She is a regular presence at the
township funerals, protest marches and local rallies that other political celebrities are now
too busy to attend.
When 3,000 A.N.C. delegates voted in January for the Congress’s governing
executive committee, Mrs. Mandela and two allied firebrands placed in the top five.
Kaizer Nyatsumba, the black political editor of the country’s largest newspaper, The
Star, which is white-owned, contends that Mrs. Mandela is being silenced for attacking
white privilege.
“Now, it is not popular to point these things out in this era of putative equality and
bending over backwards to accommodate so-called white fears in order to perpetuate the
myth of a newly found racial harmony in South Africa,” Mr. Nyatsumba wrote this week.
Mrs. Mandela is also an icon for many blacks elsewhere in Africa and in the West,
including African-Americans, who are inclined to sympathize with her as one of
apartheid’s most valiant victims.
Those who take Mrs. Mandela less seriously say the black impatience on which
populists hope to feed is greatly exaggerated. Polls show that blacks have abundant faith
in Mr. Mandela and his program of compromise.
“Yes, our people want to identify themselves with people like Winnie Mandela who
have suffered but have also triumphed, who are seen as fighters,” said Cyril Ramaphosa,
secretary general of the A.N.C. and a strong critic of Mrs. Mandela.
But as for representing a potent alternative force, he said in a recent interview: “No,
no, she doesn’t. Clearly not. There is a temptation in the A.N.C. for people to want to be
populist. But the traditions that have evolved in the A.N.C. keep most people walking
along the straight and narrow path of party policy.”
Indeed, the African National Congress and its partners in the anti-apartheid
movement quickly closed ranks on Monday behind Mr. Mandela’s decision to dismiss his
wife as deputy minister of arts and culture.
While Mrs. Mandela’s penchant for race-baiting makes her especially reviled by
whites, Asians and mixed-race voters (one election-time poll found her by far the most
unpopular politician among those groups) she is not universally loved among blacks.
In the growing black middle class, to which most of the political leadership now
belongs, Mrs. Mandela is regarded as a patron of the violence that, in many black
townships, began as rebellion and deteriorated into crime and general disorder.
Her neighbors in the Soweto neighborhood of Orlando still speak with fear and
distaste of Mrs. Mandela’s coterie of bodyguards that terrorized the neighborhood in the
1980’s.
At times Mrs. Mandela’s worst enemy is herself. She has a history of putting
incriminating things in writing, as though she considered herself invulnerable. In one
letter to a lover, leaked to a newspaper, she discussed embezzling money from the A.N.C.
Above all, critics say Mrs. Mandela’s popularity will wane if people face a choice
between her and her husband. The loyalty he commands is profound.
Tokyo Sexwale, a bellwether politician who has himself veered between populism
and moderation, on Sunday fiercely scolded Mrs. Mandela (without actually naming her)
for the ultimate sin — undermining the president.
“We loved you, don’t abuse our love!” Mr. Sexwale, the governor of the province
centered on Johannesburg, told an audience of mine workers who had no doubts whom
the speaker meant. “If you fight Mandela, you are declaring war on the people.”
The big question is, what would happen in the absence of Mr. Mandela? Who else
would stand up to her?
Mr. Ramaphosa, who has the will, does not excite the rank and file the way she
does.
Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Mandela’s diplomatic deputy president and the current favorite to
succeed him, has made peace with the militants to advance his own career. Mr. Mbeki
reportedly argued against dismissing Mrs. Mandela for fear of a possible backlash.
If her challenge is to outwait her 76-year-old husband, Mrs. Mandela has one
advantage: she is 16 years younger.
South African Judge Gives Nelson
Mandela A Divorce
By SUZANNE DALEY
March 20, 1996
JOHANNESBURG, March 19 — Saying he could see no likelihood that President
Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie, would ever be reconciled, a judge here granted
Mr. Mandela’s petition for a divorce today, ending a 38-year marriage that endured the
persecution of apartheid only to founder after he was released from prison.
The ruling brought a quick end to a two-day spectacle that had transfixed South
Africans as they listened to hourly radio accounts of the events unfolding. The 77-yearold president laid bare the most intimate details of his relationship with his wife, which
were plastered across the newspapers and discussed everywhere.
During the court proceeding, Mr. Mandela was the only witness to take the stand. At
the prodding of his own lawyer, he quietly described how he had been “the loneliest man”
after he was released from a 27-year imprisonment in 1990 and went to live with his wife.
Mrs. Mandela, he testified, was having an affair with a young colleague and never
entered his bedroom while he was awake.
The ruling came after a day in which Mrs. Mandela, in a last-ditch effort to delay the
proceedings, had abruptly dismissed her lawyer and then, in a wavering voice, begged the
court for a postponement. But the judge, unimpressed, simply ordered her to defend
herself.
She repeatedly refused. “I do not know what to do, My Lord,” Mrs. Mandela said at
one point. “I am not the state president. I am an ordinary person.”
After the divorce was granted, Mr. Mandela stood and gazed at Mrs. Mandela, who
was seated only a few feet away. But she only turned her back to him and left quickly
without comment.
The breakup of the Mandela marriage marks the end of one of the great partnerships
in the history of liberation politics. During Mr. Mandela’s years in prison, Mrs. Mandela
served as her husband’s surrogate, testifying to his continuing adherence to the struggle
and campaigning for his release. She did so in the face of great pressure by the South
African security forces.
Mr. Mandela announced his separation from his wife in 1992, at the time speaking
of her with great tenderness and affection. But within months, Mr. Mandela testified in
court, a newspaper editor had shown him a letter that Mr. Mandela said showed his wife
was being unfaithful. It was then, he said, that he decided they could never be reconciled.
Mr. Mandela said in court today that since then he had sent several emissaries to his
wife, hoping to negotiate a quiet divorce. But she had treated several of them badly, in
one case literally “chasing them out of her house,” he said.
In his court papers, Mr. Mandela said he was seeking the divorce because he found
having a marriage in name only “embarrassing” and because Mrs. Mandela “takes
opportunities at public functions to show affection for him,” which he considers
distasteful.
He said that at home, months went by when they barely talked to each other.
Mrs. Mandela had contested the divorce, saying the couple had not yet tried
traditional efforts at reconciliation, which involve mediation by tribal elders. But today it
seemed clear that she had no coherent strategy beyond asking for postponements.
In granting the divorce, the judge, Frikkie Eloff, said he based his decision on three
facts: The couple had lived apart for four years; one partner, Mr. Mandela, had no desire
to reconcile; and Mr. Mandela had presented evidence of Mrs. Mandela’s adultery that
neither she nor her lawyer attempted to rebut.
During most of the morning, Mrs. Mandela’s lawyer, Ishmael Semenya, questioned
Mr. Mandela about the hardships Mrs. Mandela had endured during his time in prison. He
appeared to be building a case for a financial settlement without addressing the grounds
for divorce.
The judge grew impatient with this line of questioning and pressed Mr. Semenya to
move on. He asked for a postponement. When the judge refused, Mrs. Mandela dismissed
her lawyer and asked for the postponement herself so she could get a new lawyer.
Mr. Mandela’s lawyer, Wim Trengove, objected, calling Mrs. Mandela’s maneuver
the “oldest trick in the book.”
The judge agreed and after several exchanges in which Mrs. Mandela refused to
present her own case, Judge Eloff ruled that her defense was complete.
During most of his testimony on Monday, Mr. Mandela described his
disappointments in the marriage and his suspicions of Mrs. Mandela’s relationship with
the junior colleague, Dali Mpofu. Taking the stand again today, Mr. Mandela was often
generous in praising his wife’s efforts while he was in jail. He agreed that she had
suffered a great deal.
The Mandelas, who were married in 1958, only had a few years together before he
was sentenced in 1963 to life in prison for his political activities. But the birth of their
romance is described in Mr. Mandela’s autobiography.
“I cannot say for certain if there is such a thing as love at first sight,” he wrote. “But
I do know that the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzamo, I knew that I wanted to
have her as my wife.”
Since their separation, Mrs. Mandela has been involved in several scandals,
including some related to the government. In recent months, she has been in the news
because of her frequent battles with creditors.
The ruling is hardly likely to help. In granting the divorce, Judge Eloff ordered Mrs.
Mandela to pay the court costs.
A hearing to determine the divorce settlement is scheduled to begin on Wednesday.
Mrs. Mandela has asked for half of Mr. Mandela’s assets, which she has valued at about
$5 million.
Mandela Ends Triumphant Visit To
Britain
By YOUSSEF M. IBRAHIM
July 13, 1996
LONDON, July 12 — It was officially labeled a state visit, but as it ended today, Nelson
Mandela’s four-day triumphal sweep through London looked more like a coronation.
From Buckingham Palace, where he stayed as the honored guest of the Queen, to
the festively decorated streets of Brixton, home to one of Britain’s largest black
communities, Mr. Mandela was feted as a king in a country where Margaret Thatcher
once called him a “terrorist” and dismissed the possibility that he could one day govern
South Africa as a pipe dream out of “cloud-cuckoo land.”
In his first state visit to Britain as South Africa’s president, the 78-year-old Mr.
Mandela was not only assiduously courted by royalty, but also honored by academics
(who conferred eight honorary degrees upon him), lionized in Parliament, pursued by
business leaders and worshiped as a hero by the Britons.
He took it all in stride.
Thursday night, as he repaid the Queen’s hospitality with a party of music and dance
at the Royal Albert Hall, which he referred to as “this big round building,” he had the
Queen and Prince Charles on their feet.
Mr. Mandela, dressed in a black silk shirt, and the Prince of Wales were swaying
and clapping to the music, joined by the Queen, “who has seldom been known to boogie
in public,” according to this morning’s Daily Telegraph.
As he has done throughout the visit, he broke away from rules of protocol. Instead
of a traditional state dinner to return the Queen’s hospitality, he chose the party,
organized to raise money for his Nations Trust to help schoolchildren in South Africa.
Phil Collins, Quincy Jones, Tony Bennett and Hugh Masekela performed.
From Britain’s ruling establishment and the press there was nothing but respect. If
there were dissidents, their voices were not raised. Newspapers described him as “the
man who kept his halo bright” and politicians used words like “brilliant” and “splendid”
to describe his every comment.
Addressing a joint meeting of Parliament at Westminster Hall on Thursday, he
walked into a room that had not been so full since Charles de Gaulle came here to speak
30 years ago. Members of Parliament brought their wives, mothers and children.
President Mandela, in a dark suit, white shirt and a green polka-dot tie, limped to the
rostrum holding the hand of the strong-minded Laborite Speaker of the House of
Commons, Betty Boothroyd, who introduced him by saying, “You spent more than a
third of your life in prison, though your spirit was freer there than those of your captors
outside.”
Commentators pointed out that Mr. Mandela addressed members of Parliament in
the 900-year-old Westminster Hall while President Clinton and the French President,
Jacques Chirac, were assigned to the Royal Gallery of the Lords for their addresses.
“It was fitting,” said The Guardian today. “The Gallery is a fake, Victorian idea of
monarchical splendor. Westminster Hall is the real thing.”
Again, Mr. Mandela seemed unfazed by the pomp, ceremony and high emotions.
While courteous, he was unflinching.
Reminding all that the African National Congress, which he led for many years
while in jail, had come to Britain to seek justice and had been turned away, Mr. Mandela
said: “We return to this honored place neither with pikes, nor a desire for revenge, nor
even a plea to assuage our hunger.”
But staring at the members of the Houses of Commons and Lords with an
emotionless face, he went on to make it clear that while he has forgiven he has not
forgotten.
“Racism,” he said, “is a blight on the human conscience. The idea that any people
can be inferior to another, to the point where those who consider themselves superior
define and treat the rest as sub-human, denies the humanity even of those who elevate
themselves to the status of gods.”
This morning he carried the forgiving further, inviting Lady Thatcher — who as
Prime Minister in the 1980’s refused to endorse international sanctions against the white
supremacist government — to Buckingham Palace, where they held a 20-minute chat.
No details were released, but when he was asked earlier in the week about her stand,
Mr. Mandela said, “Let bygones be bygones.” Lady Thatcher said nothing.
But it was in Brixton, torn by race riots in the 1980’s, where Mr. Mandela was
unambiguously treated as a living legend.
Having insisted on taking a stroll, he was given a rapturous welcome by a crowd
standing 10-deep on the sidewalks and streets.
Balconies, roofs and store fronts were covered with welcome signs. Thousands of
people wearing Mandela T-shirts jammed the streets: mothers carrying babies, couples
holding hands, school boys and girls climbing to the highest vantage points.
Long before he arrived at 11 A.M., the whole of Brixton reverberated to reggae
music. When he did arrive, walking with his bodyguards and framed by policemen riding
huge horses, he was still tall enough for people to see him.
Darting from one spot to another as she jumped up to catch a glimpse, Diane
Cambel, a 24-year-old physical education teacher, said: “This is the best day for Brixton.
This is lovely. This should be a day on which we do something special from now on. He
just blessed Brixton.”
Laura MacArdale, an 11-year-old who was one of 400 schoolchildren who sang for
him at Brixton’s recreational center at the start of his 80-minute tour, giggled as she said
she wished he would take her and her friends and “put us in his pocket.”
Part Democrat/Part Autocrat: Mandela
The Pol
By ANTHONY LEWIS
March 23, 1997
When I began visiting South Africa 30 years ago, it was a police state that enforced
official racism with a mad logic. Government employees classified people as white or
colored (mixed race) by testing the curl in their hair. Hundreds of thousands of blacks
were arrested every year for being in a “white area” without the right pass. Sex across
color lines was a crime. A teen-age boy was sentenced to five years in prison under the
Terrorism Act for writing an anti-white poem and “publishing” it by showing it to his
girlfriend.
I thought then, and on many later visits, that South Africa was the most fascinating
country on earth. There were exceptional human beings — bishops and writers and
lawyers and political thinkers — whose struggle against the system seemed to deepen
their characters. And there was a great unfinished drama. How long could whites, then 16
percent of the population, continue to hold all political and economic power? Would it
end in an explosion, or would there somehow be a peaceful transition to majority rule?
Richard Rive, a colored literary scholar, put it in a sentence to me in 1975: “The end is
inevitable, but not predictable.”
To revisit the country now is a dazzling experience. The old sense of entering a vast
prison is gone. There are no restraints on what political creed one may espouse. No one is
“banned” or held in detention without trial. Life in South Africa is a human kaleidoscope
of colors: in shops and business offices and not least in Parliament, that former bastion of
whiteness. And at the center, where for two generations stern Afrikaner leaders enforced
the ideology of racial separation, stands the benign, all-embracing figure who brought
about the peaceful transformation, President Nelson Mandela.
Mandela is probably the most widely known political leader in the world, and
without doubt the most revered. In an age of ethnic, religious and racial conflicts,
societies of a very different character and history wish they had someone of his unifying
qualities and unassailable standing; I have heard that from, among others, Israelis and
Palestinians. He is one of the most written-about figures anywhere. Sidney Poitier
portrayed him in a television drama last month, and a full-length documentary on his life
has just opened in United States theaters.
Yet in profound respects Mandela remains a mystery. What exactly is the magic of
his leadership, the means by which he persuades diverse people in what was a riven
country to join with him? What enabled him to survive 27 years in prison without
disabling bitterness? What makes him Mandela?
The South African drama continues, the fascination of its central character
undiminished. Now Mandela is coming under criticism for his government’s
performance; people are asking whether the qualities that enabled him to lead the country
peacefully to freedom are right for the fretful business of governing. So I found on a visit
last month to explore the Mandela mystery.
I first interviewed Mandela in March 1990, a month after he left prison. My wife
and I — she comes from South Africa, where she was an anti-apartheid student leader —
saw him in the temporary offices of the African National Congress in downtown
Johannesburg. The place was in turmoil, people rushing in and out, going from meeting
to meeting. Joel Joffe, a lawyer who had not seen Mandela and his fellow prisoners since
the end of their trial in 1964, was there visiting from his home in England, hugging and
being hugged. But when we sat down with Mandela in his office, there was serenity. It
was as if he had nothing to do but talk with us. There was a profound courtesy, almost a
courtliness, in his manner.
In the middle of our meeting he had a telephone call from Mangosuthu Buthelezi,
the KwaZulu-Natal leader whose supporters in the province were fighting A.N.C.
members. We rose to leave; Mandela motioned us to stay. Buthelezi was upset about the
cancellation of what he thought was an agreement for the two of them to meet at a rural
spot in KwaZulu-Natal. Mandela explained that it had not been finally agreed because his
advisers thought the place was not safe. He tried to mollify Chief Buthelezi, deferentially.
But Buthelezi was not mollified.
When the phone call ended, Mandela said it was “pointless to apportion blame” for
the cancelled meeting. The need, he said, was “to unite all the anti-apartheid forces in the
country” to win “basic human rights. We can’t afford to be killing one another.” There
was not a word of recrimination toward Buthelezi.
Later in that interview he sounded the note that was so startling in those early days
but became the received view: that there would be no revenge for the crimes committed
in the maintenance of apartheid. The reason again was the need for unity, now on a
national scale. If there was to be a negotiated settlement, he said, it must “involve the
entire community in its support. Otherwise it will be an intolerable situation.”
I talked with President Mandela last month in the presidential residence outside
Cape Town. The house used to be called Westbrooke; a year ago he renamed it
Genadendal, as a symbol of South Africa’s diversity and unity. Genadendal was a
Christian mission established in 1738, the oldest in South Africa; It was a sanctuary for
former slaves after the abolition of slavery, and in Genadendal the Dutch dialect arose
that helped to form the Afrikaans language.
At 78, Mandela is still erect and slim, though a knee injury slows his walking. A
physiotherapist gives him massages to help the knee, and he works out on an exercise
bike. He gets up at 4:30 or 5 in the morning — prison routine — then waits until 6 or
6:30 to telephone friends. If he can, he comes home at 4 P.M. to sit in the garden, take off
his shoes and put up his feet. He works late but, I was told, needs only a few hours of
sleep. He does not like to eat alone, so he will often invite friends for breakfast or supper:
Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada, for example, comrades from Robben Island; Nadine
Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning writer; George Bizos, a lawyer who has been his
advocate and friend for 40 years, and Amina Cachalia, widow of a leader of the Transvaal
Indian Congress.
Home is not really Genadendal, a place of large, empty rooms and overstuffed
furniture, or the equally barren president’s house in South Africa’s other capital, Pretoria.
He lives in a private house in Houghton, a suburb of fine homes and gardens north of
Johannesburg. Sometimes he slips away to Qunu, the village where he grew up in the
Transkei. A small house has been built for him there: a replica of the warden’s cottage at
Victor Verster Prison, where the authorities installed him in transition from prison to
freedom.
His loneliness has been overcome, in the last six months, by his love affair with
Graca Machel, the 51-year-old widow of the former President of Mozambique. They have
decided not to marry, and she continues to live mostly in Maputo. But she comes to
Houghton or Qunu or Cape Town to stay with Mandela, and recently she accompanied
him on a state visit to Asia.
I asked friends what he does for leisure. The answer was that he does not have
much. He expressed regret to a friend that he no longer has time to read. His life is largely
official. He is driven around (in a sedan, not a limousine) in a security convoy. He has
meetings in his office or at home. He travels on state business. But he does not complain.
He never has complained. It has been a life of duty.
The personal cost of that life is indicated, tellingly, in a story from “Every Secret
Thing,” a new book by Gillian Slovo, Joe Slovo’s daughter, to be published in the United
States in May. Joe Slovo, who had been the commander-in-exile of the A.N.C.’s guerrilla
force and then Minister of Housing in the Mandela government, died on Jan. 6, 1995. A
few hours after his death, in the early morning, President Mandela appeared at the house.
He sat across from Slovo’s daughters and somehow sensed their feeling that their father
had abandoned them for politics. Gillian Slovo writes: “He told us how one day when he
had gone to hug his grown-up daughter she had flinched away from him and burst out,
‘You are the father to all our people, but you have never had time to be a father to me.’
This, he said, was his greatest, perhaps his only regret: that his children, and the children
of his comrades, had been the ones to pay the price of their parents’ commitment.”
But Mandela is not a melancholy person. Nor, for all the burdens on him, does he
seem under stress. He still radiates calm, seeming so relaxed that he puts a visitor at ease.
He tells little jokes on himself, for example mentioning when a photographer comes in
during our talk that he was so unaware of technology when he came out of prison, he did
not know what a fleece-covered microphone was when it was thrust at him.
The interview took place at 7 in the morning, in an alcove looking out across
beautiful lawns and trees down the hill toward Rondebosch, a suburb that is the home of
the University of Cape Town. The President came down after having breakfast in his
room upstairs. No security men were in sight until an hour later.
I began by asking about the future, about where South Africa was headed. But seven
years after his release from prison, with a new Constitution in place and himself in office
after the country’s first democratic election, he was still concerned about national unity.
He wanted to talk first about the peaceful transformation. South Africa, he said, had
avoided “tragedies such as Bosnia.”
What lessons, I asked, did he think the South African story had for Bosnia and other
conflicted societies? “It would be presumptuous of me to lecture” Bosnian leaders, he
answered. But then he added:
“They thought through their blood and not through their brains. In countries where
innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.”
It was a rare piece of self-revelation, I thought. The world sees Nelson Mandela as a
man of extraordinary magnanimity, eschewing revenge for the cruelties of apartheid,
reaching out to enemies: the nearest thing politics has to a saint. True, but not the whole
truth. When you talk to those who know him best, you come to understand that Mandela
is anything but benign. He is a map of powerful emotions, but even more powerful
discipline. If he is saintly, he is saintly for a purpose. Through 27 years of prison and now
7 of public leadership, he has disciplined himself to suppress his feelings: to think with
his brains and not his blood.
“He has a much keener sense of power than appears in that benign image,” an
official close to him said. “He has a purpose even in gestures of reconciliation.” As an
example, the official described what happened at the rugby World Cup final, played in
Johannesburg in 1995.
Rugby has been a sport for whites, especially Afrikaners. Hence blacks scorned
South Africa’s Springbok rugby team. Before the World Cup matches, President Mandela
urged blacks to support the national team. When I asked him about it, he laughed and said
he had worn a Springbok cap to black political meetings. “I told them, ‘We wish our boys
success,’ ” he said, “and they would clap politely — not so enthusiastically.”
Against the odds, South Africa made it into the final, against New Zealand. Mandela
went to the match and astonished the Springboks by appearing in their locker room before
it started, wearing the No. 6 green jersey of their captain and wishing them luck. In a
great upset, the Springboks won, 15-12. (“It almost shattered my nerves because of
tension,” Mandela said when I interviewed him. “I’m still recovering.”) When the
President walked out on the field to present the trophy, still wearing the green jersey, the
Afrikaner crowd broke into a chant: “Nelson, Nelson, Nelson.”
A great emotional moment. But it was more than that. The official who told me
about it said: “It had a devastating effect on the far-right white groups, the people who
had refused to vote in 1994 or to recognize the new Constitution, saying, ‘It’s not our
country.’ The groups simply disintegrated. Their people stopped using the symbols of the
past, the old flag, the songs. Mandela became the symbol of the whole country.”
Symbols matter in the politics of any society, any culture, and Mandela is a master
of them. That is one key to his leadership. There is a calculating aspect to what he does,
of course: the sense of power that his official mentioned. But he puts so much into a
gesture that people accept its good faith. He did not just casually support the rugby
Springboks; he touted them to black audiences, he wore the jersey, he went to the locker
room, he visibly cared.
Here is another example, a current one. Last month Mandela and the Deputy
President, Thabo Mbeki, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The
country was going to be without a head of state for a day. To act in that role Mandela
designated Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose Inkatha Freedom Party is in the coalition
government and who also serves as Minister of Home Affairs. But since 1990, Inkatha
has led violent marches, carried out deadly conflict with the A.N.C. and boycotted the
writing of the permanent new Constitution. Everyone was astonished at Buthelezi’s
designation. I asked the President to explain it.
“Actually our relations have been on a sound basis ever since I knew him as a young
man,” Mandela said. “And that relationship grew when I was in jail, because he was one
of the few public figures who were allowed to write to me whilst I was in prison. And he
wrote me beautiful letters. Not only that. He was able on my birthdays to call large
meetings to celebrate my birthday.
“And in the Cabinet, Buthelezi is one of the most supportive, the most constructive.
The problem, of course, is when he leaves the Cabinet and appears on public platforms.
Then he behaves like any other politician.
“The reason, therefore, why I appointed him to be President is that he is a capable
person. He is experienced. And if that opportunity would also promote the spirit of
reconciliation, I’ll be happy. But the real reason was merit. I appointed him on merit.”
Well, fine. But one does not have to be cynical to believe that the designation served
a larger political purpose. Chief Buthelezi is a man with a fragile ego, always conscious
of perceived slights. Here was a gesture that in the grandest way said he was respected.
The result was to make it harder for him to pull Inkatha out of the government if things
get dicey — an eventuality that the unity-minded Mandela wants to avoid. Some saw an
even broader purpose in the gesture. President Mandela has been trying to help settle the
intractable conflict in Angola, where the ego of the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi has so far
kept him from fulfilling an agreement to join the government of President Eduardo Dos
Santos. Mandela’s gesture was one those two could not miss: a sign that a great leader
can gain by being generous toward a prickly antagonist.
To carry out the Mandela theme of reconciliation, not revenge, his new government
as one of its first acts set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission with power to grant
amnesty to individuals in return for full confession of a political crime. When I talked
with the President, the commission had just received amnesty applications from five
former policemen involved in what was probably the single most notorious apartheid
killing: the murder of Steve Biko, the young Black Consciousness movement leader who
died of brain damage while he was in jail in 1977. At the time, under oath, the police
denied responsibility for his death. Now they said they had killed him inadvertently. The
extent and truth of their confessions must be tested at hearings where in other cases, the
details were so gruesome that the commission chairman, retired Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, put his head down on the table and wept.
I asked the President whether the public would continue to support the policy of
amnesty as the horrifying truth of what happened to Steve Biko and others came out. “In
fact,” he answered, “some of the relatives of the victims have said, ‘We don’t want
revenge, but we want to know what happened to our beloveds.’ And that is an indication.
If a person who has actually suffered can say that, then you know people understand that
you can’t build a united nation on the basis of revenge.”
Mandela never met Steve Biko, who rose to prominence while Mandela was in
prison; Biko’s name is not mentioned in his autobiography. Biko led a movement whose
first premise, at least — that blacks should rely on themselves for liberation — was very
different from the A.N.C.’s historic nonracialism. I asked the President what role he
thought Biko would have played if he had lived.
“There can be no doubt that he was one of the most talented and colorful freedom
fighters South Africa has produced,” he said. Then he placed Biko in his own pantheon of
unity. “Young as he was, he was concerned with the question of unity. . . . Now that is a
young man with realism, who could at that stage have felt that we were wasting our
energies, our talents, by remaining divided.”
A realist: Mandela’s highest praise. Neville Alexander, his fellow prisoner, said
Mandela’s realism was the more effective because he was “extremely patient and wise.
He’s always been prepared to wait for people to catch up with reality. We wanted to fight
the prison authorities. He said, ‘Look, chaps, we’re going to be here 10 years or more.’ ”
Alexander’s view of Mandela, in the testing conditions of Robben Island, is
especially interesting because his politics were different. He was a Marxist with a Ph.D.
from Tubingen University in Germany, a member not of the African National Congress
but of a student group called the National Liberation Front. We spoke admiringly of
Mandela’s single-minded pragmatic leadership even though the two men were
ideologically apart in prison and, according to others, on cool terms personally.
“His goal always was the deracialization of South African society and the creation
of a liberal democracy,” Alexander said. “For that end he was willing to make
compromises with people of different views. He was able to concentrate on his goal with
utter conviction and lucidity, and he was a man of extreme discipline. His aristocratic
family background and training — one can use that term realistically — were reinforced
by both legal practice and a jurisprudential cast of mind.”
Helen Suzman, who as an opposition member of Parliament visited the prisoners on
Robben Island starting in 1967, said the same thing about Mandela’s consistent goal: “ ‘I
want to normalize things in South Africa.’ That was what he always said to me in prison.”
What really mattered was ending the racial supremacy that dominated the country’s life.
Everything else — economic theory, social ideology — was subordinated in his mind to
that end.
It was not easy for Mandela to make his view prevail, as the romance about his
person may lead some to think. He had to fight for his pragmatism over many years. I
talked with half a dozen alumni of Robben Island, and I learned something that surprised
me. There were deep divisions among the prisoners, not only political but personal, even
among A.N.C. members.
Relations were tense in prison, I was told, between Mandela and Govan Mbeki, a
senior A.N.C. colleague and a leading figure in the Communist Party. Mbeki was critical
of Mandela’s good relations with what he called right-wing elements. They included
Buthelezi and some tribal chiefs whom Mandela, who was from a Xhosa chief’s family,
acknowledged as leaders of a kind. However sharp the dispute with Mbeki, Mandela did
not visit it on the next generation. He has made Govan’s son, Thabo Mbeki, the Deputy
President and his heir apparent. As for Communism, the odd fact is that when apartheid
fell, the Communist leaders Joe Slovo and Chris Hani played a crucial part in winning
acceptance of the compromises necessary for a peaceful transition.
Many people told me that Mandela does not like what he considers ad hominem
attacks or confrontations. One said: “With all the warm things he does, inside he can be
hard. He has a terrible grudge against anyone who has crossed him — once you’ve lost
favor with him, he never lets go. That’s the mistake that Winnie made: thinking he would
forever be at her beck and call. She will never get close to him again, because he has
finally taken the turn.”
As to Winnie Mandela, it must be added that he did not move immediately for a
divorce when he understood that she would not live with him as a wife. He waited until
her trial for kidnapping was over, lest their public separation disadvantage her. And his
lawyer, George Bizos, represented her. Magnanimity — but it could also be said that the
respectful way he dealt with her and the regret with which he announced the divorce
minimized the possibility of antagonizing her young supporters in the A.N.C.
Whatever the differences among the prisoners on Robben Island, in the end they
accepted his leadership. So several told me. Fikile Bam, a lawyer who is now Judge
President of the Land Claims Court (set up to give justice to people whose land was
seized over the last century), went to Robben Island, like Neville Alexander, as a member
of the National Liberation Front. He said: “Mandela had this quality of being able to keep
people together. It didn’t matter whether you were P.A.C.” — Pan-Africanist Congress
— “or A.N.C. or what, we all tended to congregate around him. Even his critics — and he
had them — deferred to him at the end of the day as a moral leader. He still has that
quality. Without him I can’t visualize how the transition would have gone.”
Then Bam told a story about Mandela. Bam arrived in 1964 on Robben Island a few
months before Mandela and his colleagues, after a different trial. When the Mandela
group arrived, they were put in a separate wing of the prison.
“On July 18, 1964, my birthday,” Bam said, “the guys in my section started singing
‘Happy Birthday’ to me early one morning. Then we could hear the others singing
‘Happy Birthday.’ We were not allowed to mix at that stage, but we had a way of
communicating as we went to the showers, and we found that Mandela had the same
birthday.
“Every year after that he had a gift for me on my birthday. We were allowed to buy
sweets and biscuits over Christmas, and he would keep them seven months so he could
give me a present. It embarrassed me, because I could never keep them for seven
months.” (Talk about self-discipline: those were the only treats a prisoner got in a whole
year.)
I told President Mandela that Fikile Bam had told me about the birthday presents.
He beamed. “Yes,” he said, “black magic.” Black magic? “Yes, Black Magic, they’re a
brand of chocolates. He couldn’t imagine that somebody would keep a box of chocolates
for seven months.”
In politics, it was hard for some of the prisoners to accept the idea of negotiating
with the apartheid regime. “I had to sit down with my colleagues,” Mandela told me, “and
say, ‘Let us talk with our enemies. Let us suppress our feelings.’ ” That is what happened
after 1990.
It was President F. W. de Klerk who opened the way for negotiations by his
courageous decision to free political prisoners and end the ban on opposition movements.
He and Mandela have often been pictured together, famously the two of them clasping
hands aloft when they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the two are not friends. Alex Boraine, the deputy chairman of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, has said that the apartheid system rather than individuals
was responsible for the crimes committed, so de Klerk, as a man who presided over the
system for some time, should apply for amnesty. I asked President Mandela what he
thought of that idea. “It is true that it is the system,” he said, “and it would be a fine
gesture if Mr. de Klerk admitted responsibility. Because it was his party that was
responsible. . . . I agree with Dr. Boraine that that would be a fine gesture on his part.”
Curiously, the President seems to have a better relationship now with Gen. Constand
Viljoen, former chief of staff of the South African Defense Force, who heads a right-wing
party called the Freedom Front. During the transitional period General Viljoen had ties
with Afrikaners who seemed ready to use force to try to block political change. Mandela
went to him and said, “General, you may defeat us now, but if you take the road of
violence, some day you and your people will be destroyed.” General Viljoen dissociated
himself from violence and took the Freedom Front into the new political system. When
he asked the President to extend the time for amnesty applications to the truth
commission last year, it was done.
In his character and his place in his country’s history, Mandela brings to mind
George Washington. Of course they are worlds apart, in time and culture. But
Washington’s biographers, too, describe him as a man of strong emotions who suppressed
them in the interest of creating a nation. His disciplined leadership held the quarreling
colonies together in war and kept such strong-minded political antagonists as Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton together in his Cabinet.
“There is in the life of a country but one such person; we are just lucky that he came
along at this time.” That was said to me of Mandela by his lawyer, George Bizos. It
sounds like the standard appraisal of Washington. The face that Washington presented to
the world was not Mandela’s disarming smile but an austere formality. But the two seem
similar in the controlled personalities that made them the irreplaceable fathers of their
countries.
The question emerging in South Africa is whether the Great Reconciler is also a
great President. In Washington’s day there was world enough and time. In Mandela’s,
South Africans, like everyone else, have to compete pell-mell in a world economy. A
fast-growing population suffers from unemployment that may be as high as 40 percent, a
grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth, appalling crime. Voices are beginning to be
heard complaining about Mandela’s record on those and other problems.
“The young are fed up,” a prominent black figure told me, “with 400,000 coming on
the job market every year and few jobs. They think this old man has been too much of a
moderate, too reconciliatory, too compromising.” Kaizer Nyatsumba, political editor of
The Star in Johannesburg, wrote a tough column last fall after Mandela denounced some
black journalists. “His unquestionable greatness notwithstanding,” Nyatsumba said,
“Mandela is an ordinary man with feet of clay.”
If one ranks the challenges facing South Africa by what is on people’s minds, crime
is the most serious. Across lines of race and class, it is the subject of conversation.
Carjacking is a terrifying example. Drivers are jumped as they get into their cars outside
their homes or stop at a red light, ordered out at gunpoint, sometimes killed. The
president of the Constitutional Court, Arthur Chaskalson, and his wife were held up
outside their home. It happened to another judge while I was in Johannesburg last month.
“The main problem in the country is criminal violence,” said Winston Floquet, the chief
executive of Fleming Martin Securities. His brother-in-law was shot dead outside his
home, and two people in Floquet’s office were attacked recently. One of them
immediately left for Australia. White emigration has increased, and Floquet said
Australians are vigorously recruiting South African financial professionals.
When I asked President Mandela about crime, he began by saying, “We don’t want
to be complaining about what happened under the apartheid regime — we have now been
in power for more than two and one half years, and it is our responsibility to solve
problems as we find them.” But it is a reality, he said, that in the apartheid years the
police concentrated “not on detecting crime but on suppressing political activity.” Others
of varying political views made the same point to me. Not only did the white police
devote most of their effort to putting down dissent; they also encouraged black policemen
in Soweto to make deals with criminal syndicates that let the criminals operate in return
for their help in the job of suppression. So corruption was and is a major problem. The
President said his government had arrested more police on corruption charges in its brief
life than previous governments had in the 45 years of apartheid: 400 police in the
Johannesburg area alone.
The apartheid system did create conditions for crime: oppressive racial
discrimination, deliberate denial of decent education to blacks, miserable housing and
economic policies that left millions jobless. But the President was right that the
responsibility is his government’s now, and its performance so far has to be judged a
failure. In his address at the opening of Parliament in Cape Town last month he said, “Let
me warn the criminals — the carjackers, the rapists — we will make their lives difficult.”
Perhaps new policies will take hold, but the police are still undermanned and underreformed.
Housing is a signal disappointment in the government’s record. The need is
overwhelming, as even a casual visitor who looks around will understand. On the way to
town from the Cape Town Airport you pass Crossroads, a squatter community that
became famous 20 years ago, when the apartheid government bulldozed it, not just once
but repeatedly. But the squatter problem persisted, as thousands of blacks fled the
desolate “homelands” to which they were confined under apartheid. It is still not over.
From time to time, residents of Crossroads are resettled, but new thousands move in and
build their shacks. And not just in Crossroads. Around the country homeless families
occupy land — often land on which the government plans to build houses. It is a serious
enough problem that President Mandela, in his speech at the opening of Parliament last
month, condemned the illegal “occupation of land.”
The A.N.C. promised in the 1994 election campaign to build a million new homes in
five years; so far, according to the Department of Housing, 123,000 have been built or are
under construction. On the plus side, millions of people have been provided clean water
and electricity for the first time. Mandela estimated that 1,700,000 more would get water
this year: a remarkable accomplishment. The government has also tackled, through the
Land Claims Court and legislation, the daunting problem of restoring rights to people
who lost their land to whites in the apartheid years.
The contrast between Cape Town, which may be the most beautiful city in the
world, and nearby Crossroads symbolizes a fundamental truth about South Africa. It is
both a first- and a third-world country, with some people, most of them whites, living in a
luxury scarcely matched anywhere else, and others barely surviving. The society’s gross
disparities in wealth remain essentially untouched, a time bomb for possible future social
turmoil. When I asked Mandela about that, he said: “We must not overestimate the speed
with which a democratic government can bring about change in the thinking of the
community or the structure of the economy. We are determined not to be deflected from
the aim of assuring that there’s a proper distribution. But we must not be unrealistic. We
want to bring about change without any dislocation to the economy.” He added that a
start had been made on equalizing wages and on what is called black economic
empowerment, black ownership of major companies. A striking example of the latter is
the move by Cyril Ramaphosa, who was the A.N.C.’s chief constitutional negotiator,
from politician to capitalist as the head of a large industrial group.
Mandela’s caution about “dislocation to the economy” reflects a big change in his
thinking and that of his colleagues, a growing concern about killing the golden goose in
pursuit of equality. The A.N.C.’s 1955 Freedom Charter called for nationalization in
some areas of the economy, and that was still in the air in 1990. The word is not heard
today. When I spoke with the President, one of the first statements he volunteered was,
“Private sector development remains the motive force of growth and development.”
Leaders of business say they are content with the government. Bobby Godsell, a
high executive in the giant Anglo-American Corporation, said he was “robustly
optimistic.” His reason was that “at long last the fundamental diseases of the economy are
being tackled.” From the mid-1970’s on, the apartheid government ran very high budget
deficits. The effect, Godsell said, was “to depress saving and investment, which
undermined our capacity to acquire new technology, to be globally competitive.” Helen
Suzman, one of the sharpest critics around, said: “You cannot undo 45 years of
misgovernance in so short a time. In that light they’ve done amazingly well.”
Inflation was down last year from double digits to 7 percent, the lowest figure in 25
years. But the value of the South African rand fell 25 percent, though it recovered some
of that loss in the opening months of 1997. Government corporations built up in the
apartheid years — owners of airlines, the railroad system, telecommunications and other
big companies — are being wholly or partly privatized. Annual economic growth is about
3 percent, not enough to make a dent in the unemployment rate.
The question is what the orthodox economic policy being followed by the
government will do to meet the expectations of the poor majority of blacks, and how
soon. Mandela was careful not to raise expectations high in the 1994 election campaign.
And South Africans have always been patient — astonishingly so by American standards.
Will that patience continue? Deputy President Mbeki has said that it will if people can see
some improvement, however modest: a fresh water tap, a halt to the eviction of rural
tenants. The government aims to raise the economic growth rate to 6 percent. But that
will take lots of foreign investment, which has not flooded in so far, and an increase in
worker skills.
“The worst legacy of apartheid is the lack of education,” Winston Floquet said.
“People say South Africa is going to be another tiger economy, like the ones in Asia. But
you can’t get there from such a low skills base. It will haunt us for at least another
decade.”
Segregated schools and grossly disproportionate spending on white students played
a key part in creating the separate worlds that the philosophers of apartheid wanted. But
that is changing rapidly, as large numbers of black children enroll in the once all-white
public schools in the suburbs of Johannesburg. “It is one of the most successful pieces of
racial integration that I know about in the world,” Bobby Godsell said. “It is one area in
which the two worlds have begun to overlap.”
But around the country most black children still get a sadly inadequate education.
And critics say the government is leveling down rather than up. It set a national standard
of 1 teacher to 40 pupils and then forced thousands of teachers in Western Cape Province
to move or retire because the ratio there was only 1 to 25 or 30. (Almost all retired.)
Beyond these specific areas of doubt about the Mandela government’s performance,
there is criticism from all quarters about the way it governs. The complaint is that the
President is too autocratic, too loyal to failed Cabinet ministers who go into a defensive
crouch when their mistakes are exposed. Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, vice chancellor of the
University of Cape Town, who is close to Mandela, said, “The more insecure people are,
the less open they are to constructive criticism. He’s not insecure, but his government is.”
Some of Mandela’s old A.N.C. colleagues have been successes in office, others
surely not, a prime example being the Foreign Minister, Alfred Nzo, who is virtually
invisible. The Minister of Health, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, spent the equivalent of $4
million on a theatrical production that was supposed to tour the country advising people
on how to avoid AIDS. The President did nothing when that misspending came to light,
and nothing when the same minister later announced that scientists at Pretoria University
had found a cure for AIDS — without submitting the claim to normal scrutiny. (The
country’s AIDS problem is frightening. Nearly a fifth of the women who go to prenatal
clinics in the Johannesburg area are HIV-positive.)
Mandela has rejected all calls for changes in the Cabinet. He made a joke of it when
he spoke to Parliament last month. After delivering his written text for an hour, he put the
manuscript aside, took off his glasses and ad libbed that he had rejected all the reasons
advanced for reshuffling his Cabinet, but he had looked over during his speech and seen
several members asleep — “A good reason to drop them,” he said. But then, he added, he
had noticed the same thing among opposition M.P.’s, “so in equity I won’t reshuffle the
cabinet.”
There are questions, too, about the way President Mandela has anointed Thabo
Mbeki as his successor. At least some in the A.N.C. would have preferred an open contest
between him and Cyril Ramaphosa for the party leadership when Mandela gives it up at
the end of this year, with the presidency following almost inevitably. Mandela is sensitive
on the subject, insisting that he has not forced the choice but that it will be made
democratically by the A.N.C. He told me that he had agreed to Ramaphosa’s wish to go
into private business only after once turning him down. And he said he continues to speak
frequently with Ramaphosa: “I am not going to allow him to escape from political duties.
Cyril Ramaphosa is a son to me.” Opinions differ on whether Ramaphosa will some day
again seek public office. He would do so from an interesting new position: wealth.
Finally, among the felt doubts about Mandela as President, there is a concern that he
has carried his emphasis on unity too far, to the point of dampening the criticism that
characterizes democracy. He recently invited the Pan-Africanist Congress to join the
government — and the Democratic Party, heir to Helen Suzman’s Progressives, which
has modest white liberal support. The Democrats’ leader, Tony Leon, has been a vigorous
critic, saying recently that President Mandela has too often “sacrificed accountability to
loyalty.” Suzman snorted at the idea of his joining the government. She said she had told
the President that “that would emasculate Tony Leon.” (After considering the invitation
for weeks, Leon declined the invitation.)
Those are the main criticisms of Nelson Mandela as President. To me, they are
overshadowed — overwhelmed — by his achievements in the last three years. He has
taken a country utterly divided by race and made it one where people of different races
actually share a vision: where “the two worlds have begun to overlap,” as Bobby Godsell
of Anglo-American put it. He has transformed the political system without creating
unrealistic expectations in the newly enfranchised. He has taken a country where fear was
everywhere and made it free. He has given a society marked by official murder a culture
of human rights.
I find South Africans today less resentful, less guilty, less prickly about race than
many Americans. The submissiveness of some blacks is fading along with white
lordliness. Young black lawyers call senior white colleagues by their first names: a social
revolution.
But it is the acceptance of a human rights culture that struck me most powerfully on
this visit. Law used to be an instrument of oppression. It dictated where you could live,
whom you could marry, what you could read. The masters of that system rejected all
demands for legal protection of individual rights, and many feared that when change
came the new masters would be as unrelenting toward the old. But Mandela the lawyer,
together with Cyril Ramaphosa and Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos and other
lawyers, carried out a revolution by law and in law.
A written Constitution and Bill of Rights as protective as America’s now defends
South Africans against official abuse. President Mandela told me with pride how the new
Constitutional Court, where Chaskalson now presides, had overturned as unconstitutional
his proclamation of elections in the Western Cape: “Arthur Chaskalson defended me
when I was sent to Robben Island for 27 years. But when it came to the question whether
I was entitled to issue those proclamations, he felt I had no right. And he overrode me.
And within an hour of his ruling I came out and made a public statement to say this is the
highest tribunal in constitutional matters, they handled a complicated case with great
skill, and I called upon members of the A.N.C. and the public to respect the decision. I
had to do so. It was a fitting opportunity for us to assert the independence of the
structures we have put up to show that the bill of rights is a living document.”
Neville Alexander, Mandela’s Marxist fellow prisoner, said: “I don’t think his South
Africa is going to do much for the people in economic and social terms. But the crucial
point of agreement is on a human rights culture.”
For me, South Africa remains the most moving, the most exhilarating of countries: a
land of possibility. Nelson Mandela made it that, made it a country whose people feel like
proud citizens rather than pariahs. And that is not just a product of the transitional years
after 1990. It could all have been lost when it came time to form and run a government.
Whatever the faults of the Mandela government — and the critics have a case — the
transformation of South Africa into a free and rights-oriented society has been secured.
The critics, most of them, recognize that. Richard Steyn, former editor of The Star, said:
“Mandela is so intent on reconciliation that governing takes second place. We need some
tough decisions. But just think where we were!”
There is an autocratic element in Mandela. He is both an autocrat and a democrat, an
old colleague said. But he has an unyielding respect for human beings, and for law. What
other leader of a liberation movement has subjected himself to legal limits when he won
power: Castro? Mao? Arafat?
What, then, is the source of Nelson Mandela’s leadership? The friends I have quoted
mentioned his discipline, his mastery of symbols, his single-minded purpose, his
magnanimity, his patience, his realism, his sense of power. Helen Suzman spoke of the
way he establishes personal contact: “When I stuck my hand through the bars of his cell
in 1967, it was almost an instant rapport.”
Patrick (Terror) Lekota is a younger man who met Mandela on Robben Island and
became an A.N.C. supporter there. He has just been made chairman of the new upper
house of Parliament, the National Council of Provinces. When I asked him, he listed
these qualities: “First of all, consistency. I cannot think of a day when he seemed to flag
in his commitment to the struggle for freedom or even for better prison conditions. His
stamina, to pursue an issue right to the end. There’s a certain deliberateness. If you are
deliberate in taking the risks of a certain course of action, then nothing can shock you
because you’ve already come to terms with the possibility. And he is at peace with
himself.”
Nadine Gordimer said: “It’s his total lack of personal self-protection and vanity.
And an honesty of what he feels and thinks — for me, that’s what makes him absolutely
unique.” No vanity, I said, but isn’t there pride? “Not pride,” Ms. Gordimer said: “Selfrespect. You’re entitled to that when you know who you are and what you stand for.”
Yes, Mandela knows who he is. Magnanimity came easily to him because he
regarded himself as superior to his persecutors. There is an inner confidence in him as
great as any I have sensed. And a moral quality: It is hard to imagine him doing a mean
act.
But if those are some of the qualities that account for his ability to lead, where do
they come from? His childhood in a chief’s family cannot explain it, I said to George
Bizos; hundreds and thousands have come from such a background, and the same with
prison. What was it that made Mandela what he is? Bizos said, “I don’t know that you’ll
ever find an answer.”
Toward the end of the interview, I asked the President how he would like to be
remembered. I mentioned Jefferson’s tombstone, which by his choice says nothing of his
having been President. Laughing, Mandela said, “Well, that would be very egotistic of
me, to say how I would like to be remembered. I’d leave that entirely to South Africans.”
But he said that he had “reached the stage of planning my death.” Then, in a soft voice,
he added, “I would just like a simple stone on which is written, ‘Mandela.’ ”
The Heir Apparent
Thabo Mbeki, Deputy President and Mandela’s almost certain successor as party
leader and President, is 54. He was in exile during the years of Mandela’s imprisonment,
acting as the African National Congress’s top diplomat and as such developing
friendships with officials and journalists around the world.
He has his critics. They say he can be edgy, seeming to lack Mandela’s inner core of
security. There are also admirers, by no means all in the A.N.C. Several business and
financial leaders told me they find him well informed and sensible. Fikile Bam, a judge
who was a prisoner with Mandela on Robben Island, said he thought Mbeki had the same
natural courtesy as Mandela. “He’s good at economic issues and foreign policy,” Bam
added, “and he might be able to handle the problem of the wealth gap better; by training
he’s an economist.” Mbeki is already the government’s hands-on leader. Mandela leaves
the details to him.
I asked Mbeki what kind of South Africa he saw 10 years from now. He replied, in
part, as follows.
“This country today continues to be characterized in good part by the old racial
divisions — whether you talk about the economy, skills, housing. . . . Ten years down the
road I think you will see a South Africa that is much, much, much less segregated.
“Secondly, you will see a much better educated South Africa. I’m talking about
levels of literacy, numeracy, but also about access to knowledge: a South Africa that will
not be as ignorant of the rest of the world as it is today. Some of us who spent quite a bit
of time in exile can see the gaps in knowledge. There is tremendous enthusiasm to be
educated.
“It’s a fortunate circumstance that the possibility of lifting people out of ignorance,
reintegrating them in the world of knowledge, occurs at the time of the information
revolution. We’ll get on the information superhighway much quicker than the developed
countries could. For one thing, we don’t have the huge communications infrastructure
that New York or Los Angeles does. There’s nothing to dig up. Our telecommunications
infrastructure will be built at today’s level of technology. That will have a rapid uplifting
impact.
“The other big question is poverty, which is huge and expressed in numberless
ways, whether it is unemployment, homelessness, landlessness. We ought to have a South
Africa 10 years from now that has done something very meaningful about that.”
Party Led By Mandela Now Owns Up
To Atrocities
By SUZANNE DALEY
May 13, 1997
CAPE TOWN, May 12 — South Africa’s governing party admitted today that it used
torture, executions, and land mines during its fight against apartheid, opening a new
chapter in this country’s efforts to come to terms with its past.
Senior officials of the African National Congress also said they could have done far
more to stop the gruesome practice in the black townships of “necklacing” people
suspected of cooperating with the South African security forces. Such people were pinned
inside a car tire, doused in gasoline, set on fire and left to die.
Party officials had long resisted appearing before the commission, saying their
actions were excusable because they had been fighting a “just war.” Today’s testimony
before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission represented a major step toward holding
the winners in the struggle against the white apartheid government accountable for their
share of atrocities.
The testimony came after more than 300 members of the Congress, including most
Cabinet ministers and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who has been designated by the
Congress to succeed Nelson Mandela as president, submitted amnesty applications in
time to meet a Saturday midnight deadline.
The applications and the appearance of the Congress leaders are a boost for the
Truth Commission, which was created to put South Africa’s brutal past to rest without the
expense and political divisiveness of prosecutions. It is empowered to offer amnesty to
those who confess.
But the Commission, headed by former Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, is often
dismissed by South African whites as a “witch hunt” whose purpose is to make the
former National Party government look bad. Last year Archbishop Tutu told President
Mandela that he would resign unless A.N.C. members recognized that they had
committed gross violations of human rights and needed to apply for amnesty.
The Congress appeared before the commission last August, but at that time it made
only a formal written submission. This time, the party also submitted another 139 pages
of written testimony before answering questions. The testimony includes 33 pages of
responses and requests for elaboration by the Truth Commission, including more details
on deaths at the Congress’s bases in Angola, the use of land mines in border areas and
details about 15 Congress members who were executed for spying and mutiny.
In submitting testimony to the commission, the Congress said it would take
responsibility for 500 bombings over 11 years, and perhaps for another 95, but it could
not be sure of the precise number.
Mac Maharaj, a Congress official, explained that communication had been so
difficult that the movement’s guerrillas were often left to make decisions on their own.
For instance, he told the commission that until recently he thought three comrades had
died in an explosion while trying to blow up a railway line. A few weeks ago, however,
because of the disclosures made to the Commission, he found out that the men had been
abducted and shot by the police, and then taken to the tracks and blown up so that it
would look like an A.N.C. attempt at sabotage.
“It is these kind of circumstances that make it hard for us to be precise,” said Mr.
Maharaj, who is now minister of transport.
The Congress did, however, say that its former president, Oliver Tambo, personally
authorized the 1983 car-bombing of South African Air Force headquarters in Pretoria, in
which 19 people died.
On the use of land mines, the A.N.C. leaders said they had used only land mines that
were set off by heavy weights like trucks and military vehicles, and only on roads heavily
patrolled by army vehicles. The A.N.C., they said, refused to use anti-personnel mines
such as those that now infest much of the country side in Angola and Mozambique. Such
mines can be detonated by the weight of a child.
Unfortunately, the A.N.C. officials said, farm trucks carrying workers were also
sometimes blown up by the movement’s mines. In the end, the Congress stopped using
them for this reason, the officials said.
“We debated this question and agonized over it,” Mr. Maharaj said, “and we came
to the conclusion that we should stop.”
The Truth Commission, which is supposed to finish most of its work by the end of
the year, has now received more than 8,000 amnesty applications. Only two applications
are from former high-level National Party officials and only a handful are from former
army officers.
Most of the disclosures about the torture and murder the National Party engaged in
have come from former police officers. Probably the most notorious of those is Eugene
de Kock, who was convicted of murder last year. Mr. de Kock’s application, filed just
before the deadline, is more than 1,000 pages long.
For Mandela’s 80th, Parties And Talk Of
A Wedding
By SUZANNE DALEY
July 18, 1998
JOHANNESBURG, July 17 — If you were a man who had grown up in a tiny village in
rural South Africa, spent 27 years in jail for your political beliefs and succeeded in
changing the course of history, what would you ask for on your 80th birthday? A bride?
Newspapers across this country are betting that that is just what President Nelson
Mandela will get on Saturday, when his schedule says that he is spending his 80th
birthday at home with his family in Houghton, a suburb north of Johannesburg.
His spokesman has denied any such plans. But in an interview with the
Johannesburg paper The Sowetan, a playful Mr. Mandela seemed less willing to deny the
event.
Mr. Mandela and his Mozambican sweetheart, Graca Machel, 52, made their
romance public two years ago and have since been seen all over the world holding hands.
But though he has indicated his willingness to marry, she has demured. Mrs. Machel, the
widow of the former President of Mozambique, Samora Machel, has said she wants to
keep her independence and her former husband’s name as a tribute to him.
In front of a reporter for The Sowetan, Mr. Mandela called Mrs. Machel to tell her
of the banner headlines about their impending marriage. “Eh, Mama,” he said. “There is a
front-page story here saying that you are going to have wedding bells on Saturday with
this old man.”
“But I cannot talk now,” he added. He said the reporter would write anything he
said, therefore, “I cannot deny or say anything.”
Whether or not the couple ties the knot, Mr. Mandela will hardly be lacking in
birthday celebrations. Mandela mania has seized the country. Birthday celebrations began
on Thursday when the President gave a party at Kruger National Park for more than 1,000
orphans, complete with a 260-pound cake.
On Sunday night he will attend a charity birthday bash with more than 2,000 guests
willing to pay up to $1,200 a seat. Among the stars in attendance with be Michael
Jackson and the actor Danny Glover. The event is one of dozens being planned over the
next year to raise money for Mr. Mandela’s Millennium Fund, which supports his
favorite charities. Two concerts are to take place later in the month.
Newspapers are also falling all over themselves to honor the occasion, running fullpage collages of birthday cards drawn by schoolchildren and offering glossy pullout
sections recounting Mr. Mandela’s life from his boyhood tending sheep in Qunu to his
days as the “Black Pimpernel,” a guerrilla fighter trying to free South Africa from white
supremacist rule. The post office is printing Happy Birthday Madiba (Mr. Mandela’s clan
name) on almost seven million letters this week.
The government also announced today that it would mark the President’s birthday
by releasing thousands of prisoners early. The decision, which prompted criticism from
other political parties, will see about 9,000 prisoners with less than six months left on
their sentences set free next week.
Individual South Africans are turning out to pay tribute to their beloved President in
their own ways. Thousands have simply sent Mr. Mandela birthday wishes by electronic
mail. But a group of gay men from Cape Town took a different route. They are planning a
“Mad about the Man” party. Posters and pamphlets advertising the event depict a
beaming Mr. Mandela flanked by naked men covering their genitals.
One newspaper editor wrote about how she was thrown in jail for trying to organize
a party for Mr. Mandela’s 70th birthday.
The guards at Pollsmoor Prison, where Mr. Mandela spent most of the 1980’s, sent
their own greetings. They took out an ad in a Cape Town newspaper saying: “If we can
stand tall and join hands we could rise above all doubts. Love is the only thing that will
keep our country together, because the world has found a friend in you. May your
ancestors smile upon you.”
Editorial: South Africa After Nelson
Mandela
May 17, 1999
Few nations that have made a transition to democracy have emerged with as solid a
political system as South Africa’s. The five years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency, which
ends next month, have seen a genuine change of political power, widespread respect for
the rule of law and none of the political revenge killings that have marked other societies
in transition. South Africa has many problems, such as desperate poverty and terrifying
crime. But its suffering would have been infinitely greater absent the moral authority and
democratic, inclusive spirit that made Mr. Mandela a giant as leader of the liberation
movement and as President.
On June 2, South Africa will hold parliamentary elections, after which the winning
party — undoubtedly Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress — will name the new
president. That will undoubtedly be Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Mandela’s Deputy President. Mr.
Mbeki has essentially been running South Africa for years, even leading cabinet
meetings. He is widely seen as sophisticated, effective and honest. But he has weaknesses
that he must overcome if the country’s healing is to continue.
The contrast between Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Mandela is visible in their reactions to the
report the country’s truth commission released six months ago. The commission blamed
the apartheid regime for the vast majority of human rights violations and called the
A.N.C.’s struggle a “just war.” But it criticized the A.N.C. for some crimes. Mr. Mandela
embraced the criticism and the report. Mr. Mbeki attacked the report, and said the truth
commission had unfairly equated the A.N.C. and apartheid.
The effectiveness of Mr. Mandela’s moral leadership comes from his stature. As a
leader of the liberation movement who spent 27 years in prison, he could speak for South
Africa’s blacks. His authority allowed him to bully F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid
President, into taking A.N.C. demands seriously. He did not have to placate the more
destructive factions in the A.N.C. After the murder of the beloved Communist leader
Chris Hani in 1993, Mr. Mandela’s calming speeches averted widespread violence. His
conversion to market economics broke the taboo on such views inside the A.N.C., which
had favored nationalizations.
Although he established and led the A.N.C.’s first guerrilla army, in 1961, Mr.
Mandela spent the racially divisive years of armed struggle in prison. For decades, he has
held that South Africa needs all races to thrive. While Mr. Mandela has occasionally
made anti-white outbursts, his emphasis has been on reconciliation, a policy that Mr.
Mbeki, more than 20 years his junior, is not expected to follow.
Mr. Mandela’s stature could have harmed his country had he been autocratic.
Fortunately, he is a committed democrat. His decision to serve only one term set a crucial
precedent for transfer of power.
Mr. Mbeki, who spent much of his life in exile as a diplomat for the A.N.C., is a
more knowledgeable and experienced administrator than Mr. Mandela. But he has no
power base within the party. In an effort to win support, he has appointed some party
hacks and curried favor with some of the A.N.C.’s most dangerous demagogues, such as
Winnie Mandela. He has also used some of his speeches to the A.N.C. to pander to
extremist race-baiting.
This tendency may continue if South Africa’s economic problems do not improve.
The country’s economic policies — largely fashioned by Mr. Mbeki — are unlikely to
change. But the poor will undoubtedly have less patience when Mr. Mandela steps down.
Mr. Mbeki will have to resist the temptation to exploit racial resentment as a substitute
for economic progress.
Mr. Mbeki also needs to overcome an oversensitivity to criticism and an obsession
with the press. But even his adversaries call him a democrat, who will not tamper with the
basic freedoms South Africans enjoy, in large part thanks to Mr. Mandela.
Mandela, In Last State Of Nation
Speech, Pleads For Peace
By SUZANNE DALEY
February 6, 1999
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 5 — President Nelson Mandela gave his last state of the nation
speech to Parliament today, highlighting the successes of South Africa’s first postapartheid government and calling for the nation’s blacks and whites to stop
“slaughtering” each other in their “words” and “attitudes.”
In his 90-minute speech, Mr. Mandela, whose term expires this year, touched on
issues ranging from the number of citizens who now have clean water and electricity to
the country’s need for a “reconstruction and development program” for the soul. He also
acknowledged the growing perception here that racial tensions are increasing.
While he chastised both blacks and whites for their attitudes, some of his rebukes
were clearly aimed more at whites — the group more likely to travel abroad and
disparage the new government or question its poverty programs.
“We slaughter one another in the stereotypes and mistrust that linger in our heads,”
he said, “and the words of hate we spew from our lips. We slaughter one another in the
responses that some of us give to efforts aimed at bettering the lives of the poor. We
slaughter one another and our country by the manner in which we exaggerate our
weaknesses to the wider world, heroes of the gab who astound their foreign associates by
their self-flagellation.”
“This must come to an end,” Mr. Mandela said. “For indeed, those who thrive on
hatred destroy their own capacity to make a positive contribution.”
But Mr. Mandela also took aim at the whole of society, saying that five years after
the country elected its first black President there was still much to be done in remaking its
soul. South Africa, he said, was still sick from more than four decades under apartheid
rule.
“Quite clearly there is something wrong with a society where freedom is interpreted
to mean that teachers or students get to school drunk; warders chase away management
and appoint their own friends to lead institutions; striking workers resort to violence and
destruction of property; business people lavish money in court cases simply to delay
implementation of legislation they do not like; and tax evasion turns individuals into
heroes of dinner-table talk,” he said.
“Something drastic needs to be done about this,” Mr. Mandela said. “South African
society — in its schools and universities, in the workplace, in the sports, in professional
work and all areas of social interaction — needs to infuse itself with a measure of
discipline, a work ethic and responsibility for the actions we undertake.”
Mr. Mandela’s speech came as the country is gearing up for national elections and
his skills as a politician were apparent as he took careful note of his government’s
accomplishments.
But it was also a moment for the country to take stock of how far it had come and to
enjoy the performance of a man who is beloved by South Africans of all races.
For his part, the 80-year-old Mr. Mandela, who has always said he would not run for
a second term, proved that he had not lost his touch for making an audience laugh.
As he stopped for water after about an hour, he urged everyone to give him credit
for his impressive performance so far. “Men of 80,” he said, “start coughing after uttering
the first sentence.”
And he used the speech to announce that the government would be increasing the
amount given to old age pensioners by 20 rands, or about $3.30 a month, an
announcement he said he was very happy about.
He described how, at a recent economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, he had
warned that soon he would be out of a job, an old man standing by the side of the road
with a big sign saying: “Unemployed! No money! A new wife! A big family!”
“Now with these 20 rands,” Mr. Mandela said. “I may not stand on the side of the
road.”
In his speech, Mr. Mandela inventoried housing starts, health programs, school
feeding programs and a host of new legislation. He assured the crime-weary public that
there were signs of hope: the country was full of initiatives, some of which were working.
“Let me reiterate,” he said. “The battle against crime has been joined and we have
no doubts at all who the victors will be.”
And despite a high unemployment rate, he pointed out that the economy had not
been damaged by the world economic crisis, proof, he said, that the country’s
“fundamentals” were in good order.
In past years, Mr. Mandela’s opening of Parliament speeches were rarely criticized
much by opposition leaders. But this year, most of them sought to score points in the
campaign, saying Mr. Mandela had been sent in to gloss over the government’s problems.
They also criticized him for not announcing any new programs to combat crime and
unemployment.
Many South Africans had hoped that Mr. Mandela would announce a date for the
holding of the elections this year, which are expected before July. In his prepared text he
said that the elections would be between May 18 and 27. But in making the speech, he
skipped the relevant paragraph, apparently because of several lawsuits on election
procedures that are still pending.
But the man who spent 27 years in prison for his efforts to topple South Africa’s
former white supremacist government urged South Africans to vote and to work hard not
to succumb to “arm-chair whining.”
“The long walk is not yet over,” Mr. Mandela said. “The prize of a better life has yet
to be won.”
“The foundation has been laid. The building is in progress. With a new generation
of leaders and a people that rolls up its sleeves in partnerships for change, we can and
shall build the country of our dreams.”
Mandela, With Touch Of Grace, Paves
Way For Successor
By SUZANNE DALEY
June 15, 1999
CAPE TOWN, June 14 — Looking solemn in a gray suit and silk tie, President Nelson
Mandela watched South Africa’s second post-apartheid Parliament get on with the
business of democracy today and choose the man who will replace him as the country’s
leader, Thabo Mbeki.
Mr. Mandela said not a word. But when the voting was finished and Mr. Mbeki had
delivered his acceptance speech, Mr. Mandela, 80, signaled the end of his era with the
kind of grace that has been his trademark. He rose from the President’s seat and gestured
to Mr. Mbeki to take it.
Caught off guard, Mr. Mbeki, 56, who is to be inaugurated on Wednesday, tried at
first to refuse. But Mr. Mandela, a much taller man, straightened to his full height and
pointed sternly at the chair. Finally, Mr. Mbeki gave in and slid onto the leather bench
with the official seal as applause filled the chamber.
This was the second time that a Parliament elected by South Africans of all races
had been sworn in here, and there was sense of celebration throughout the chamber.
Parliament members took their oaths 10 at a time, some carrying shields and dressed in
bright tribal regalia.
But there was a sense, too, that South Africans were old hands at this. Not all the
seats in the spectator gallery were full, and the country scarcely seemed to pay attention,
going about business as usual.
Mr. Mbeki’s nomination for President was unopposed. The governing African
National Congress won in a landslide this month and controls 266 of the 400 seats in
Parliament. So great is the A.N.C. margin that laughter erupted when the Chief of the
Constitutional Court, Arthur Chaskalson, asked whether there were other Presidential
nominations.
In his speech, Mr. Mbeki, hoarse from influenza, paid tribute to the “masses” who
had propelled the A.N.C. to its second overwhelming mandate. “If all of us stand tall
today, as all of us surely do, it is only because we are borne aloft by the firm hands of the
ordinary people of our country,” he said.
He also referred to the deep poverty and racial divide that continue to trouble South
Africa and promised to focus on improving delivery of services and uniting citizens of all
races.
“Many of the problems we face require the greatest possible unity among ourselves
as South Africans so that we use our collective strength for the benefit of the country,”
Mr. Mbeki said. “And yet all of us are aware that our country continues to be divided
along racial and other lines and is, therefore, that much more difficult to unite around
common objectives. The new presidency will have to focus on all these matters, in the
interests of the country as a whole.”
The British-educated Mr. Mbeki, who has in effect been running the country for the
last few years as Deputy President, is to be inaugurated in Pretoria, and is expected to
appoint his Cabinet on Thursday.
In the election on June 2, the African National Congress won 66 percent of the vote.
Five years ago, when it first swept to power in the apartheid-ending election, the party
won just under 63 percent.
But although the A.N.C. will again dominate the legislature and continue to have the
power to enact almost any legislation it wishes, the opposition is quite likely to be livelier
than before.
The New National Party, which as the National Party brought South Africa
apartheid and ruled for more than 40 years, lost most of its seats in the assembly to the
liberal Democratic Party, a far more vocal and effective critic of government.
Making his maiden speech as leader of the opposition, Tony Leon of the Democratic
Party congratulated Mr. Mbeki and struck a conciliatory note. He promised that his party
would “stand up to you whenever necessary, and sit down with you whenever possible.”
He also issued a gentle warning, borrowing lines from one of Mr. Mbeki’s favorite
poets, W. B. Yeats: “I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you
tread on my dreams.”
After the speeches, Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Mandela walked out of the chamber
shoulder to shoulder. And for once looking much like Mr. Mandela, the usually reserved
Mr. Mbeki stretched to shake hands with everyone in reach.
Breaking Taboo, Mandela Reveals Son
Died Of AIDS
By MICHAEL WINES
January 6, 2005
SALT ROCK, South Africa, Jan. 6 — Nelson Mandela, who has devoted much of his life
after leaving South Africa’s presidency to a campaign against AIDS, said today that his
54-year-old son had died of the disease in a Johannesburg clinic.
The son, Makgatho L. Mandela, who was a lawyer, had been seriously ill for more
than a month, but the nature of his ailment had not been made public before his death
today.
At a news conference in the garden of his Johannesburg home, the elder Mr.
Mandela, 86, said that he was revealing the cause of his son’s death to focus more public
attention on AIDS, which is still a taboo topic among many South Africans.
To keep the illness secret would wrongly imply that it is shameful, he said.
“That is why I have announced that my son has died of AIDS,” he said. “Let us give
publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a
normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died
because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary for
which people go to hell and not to heaven.”
Mr. Mandela gave the statement surrounded by his family, including his wife, Graca
Machel, his daughter Makaziwe and his grandchildren. Makgatho was Mr. Mandela’s
only surviving son; his younger son, Thembekile, died in an auto accident in 1969,
shortly after Mr. Mandela began 27 years of imprisonment as punishment for his antiapartheid activities.
Makgotho and his sister, Makaziwe, who survives him, were from Mr. Mandela’s
first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, who died in May at 82.
Both personally and through his Nelson Mandela Foundation, Mr. Mandela has
campaigned for greater awareness and acceptance of AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that
causes the disease, for the last three years. As he announced his son’s death, he said that
he had not known about his son’s H.I.V. status when he began his campaign.
He did not say whether his son had been receiving antiretroviral therapy, the drug
regimen that can prolong the lives of many people infected with H.I.V. for years, if not
decades. Antiretrovirals have been available through private doctors in South Africa for
some time, but the current government has lagged in extending the treatment to scores of
thousands of South Africans who need the drugs but cannot afford them, a delay Mr.
Mandela has publicly criticized.
Some five million South Africans have H.I.V., the most of any nation, although the
adult infection rate — about one in eight — is lower than in many other sub-Saharan
nations.
Makgatho Mandela had been ill since he entered Linksfield Clinic in Johannesburg
in late November, and his father canceled a number of appearances to be at his bedside
during that time. After word of his hospitalization spread in December, the family issued
an appeal for privacy, stating that members would talk to the press at an appropriate time.
Makgotha Mandela worked as an insurance underwriter before earning a law degree
in 1997, being admitted to the South African bar in 2000 and becoming counsel and
consultant to Standard Bank here. He also was an executive of a South African health
care company and had only recently resigned as corporate secretary of the South African
operations of Diner’s Club.
His wife, Zondi, died of pneumonia in 2003 at age 46. He is survived by four sons.
John O’Neil contributed reporting from New York for this article.
At 91, Mandela Endures As South
Africa’s Ideal
By CELIA W. DUGGER
November 8, 2009
JOHANNESBURG — The icon is a very old man now. His hair is white, his body frail.
Visitors say Nelson Mandela leans heavily on a cane when he walks into his study. He
slips off his shoes, lowers himself into a stiff-backed chair and lifts each leg onto a
cushioned stool. His wife, Graça, adjusts his feet “so they’re symmetrical, and gives him
a peck,” says George Bizos, his old friend and lawyer.
To Mr. Mandela’s left is a small table piled with newspapers in English and
Afrikaans, the language of the whites who imprisoned him for 27 years. Family and old
comrades sit to his right, where his hearing is better. His memory has weakened, but he
still loves to reminisce, bringing out oft-told stories “like polished stones,” as one visitor
put it.
“There’s a quietness about him,” said Barbara Masekela, his chief of staff after his
release from prison in 1990. “I find myself trying to amuse him, and I feel joyous when
he breaks out in laughter.”
Mr. Mandela, perhaps the world’s most beloved statesman and a natural showman,
has repeatedly announced his retirement from public life only to appear at a pop concert
in his honor or a political rally. But recently, as he canceled engagements, rumors that he
was gravely ill swirled so persistently in South Africa that his foundation released a
statement saying he was “as well as anyone can expect of someone who is 91 years old.”
Yet even as Mr. Mandela fades from view, he retains a vital place in the public
consciousness here. To many, he is still the ideal of a leader — warm, magnanimous,
willing to own up to his failings — against which his political successors are measured
and often found wanting. He is the founding father whose values continue to shape the
nation.
“It’s the idea of Nelson Mandela that remains the glue that binds South Africa
together,” said Mondli Makhanya, editor in chief of The Sunday Times. “The older he
grows, the more fragile he becomes, the closer the inevitable becomes, we all fear that
moment. There’s the love of the man, but there’s also the question: Who will bind us?”
There is a yearning for the exhilarating days when South Africa peacefully ended
white racist rule, and a desire to understand the imperfect, big-hearted man who
embodied that moment. Because of this, various historians and journalists are at work on
a new round of books about Mr. Mandela.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation agreed last month to sell publishers in some 20
countries the rights to a book, “Conversations With Myself,” based on material from Mr.
Mandela’s personal papers — jottings on envelopes, journals, desk calendars, drafts of
intimate letters to relatives written in prison and documents from his years as South
Africa’s first democratically chosen black president.
“He was and still is an obsessive record keeper,” said Verne Harris, who has been
Mr. Mandela’s archivist since 2004 and will knit together the excerpts with Tim Couzens,
a biographer. “The oldest records we have in that collection are his Methodist Church
membership cards, the earliest one dated 1929. So he was 11 years old then.”
There are telling nuggets in unexpected places. In his prison years, the authorities
gave him a South Africa tourist desk calendar each year. He typically recorded facts in it
— his blood pressure, or whom he met that day — but occasionally he noted a dream,
like one in which his daughter Zindzi, whom he was not allowed to see from when she
was 3 years old until she was 15, “asks me to kiss her & remarks that I am not warm
enough.”
The book will also draw on 71 hours of taped conversations that Mr. Mandela had
with Richard Stengel, who collaborated with him on his autobiography, “Long Walk to
Freedom,” and Ahmed Kathrada, Mr. Mandela’s prison comrade.
“One of the amazing, uncanny things was his memory,” said Mr. Stengel, who is
writing a memoir of his time with Mr. Mandela, called “Mandela’s Way,” to be published
in March.
“It was like he was watching a movie of his life and then narrating it,” Mr. Stengel,
Time magazine’s managing editor, continued. “He would do voices of his father, of his
teachers, of his prison guard.”
Eventually, after a team at the foundation has catalogued the entire archive, the
foundation plans to digitize it and put it on the Internet. The vast bulk of it is not yet
public.
Historians say they are not expecting major surprises about Mr. Mandela’s generally
well-known views, but hope to find rare glimpses of the man.
Mr. Mandela is looked after by his wife, Graça Machel, 64, the widow of a former
president of Mozambique and a humanitarian activist. “They behave like young lovers,”
Mr. Bizos said. “They hold hands.”
Here in Johannesburg, it is not unusual for residents of his neighborhood, Houghton,
to gossip about how he is doing. Mr. Harris, seeking to douse rumors that Mr. Mandela
was deteriorating, said he was still healthy but tired of small talk with strangers.
“He can reminisce at great length about things that happened years and years ago,”
Mr. Harris said. “But you know what old age is like. Short-term memory starts to
malfunction and you have bad days.”
His oldest friends, stalwarts of the anti-apartheid struggle, still visit. Mr. Bizos, who
went to law school with Mr. Mandela in the 1940s, said Ms. Machel worried that Mr.
Mandela would be alone when she was out of town, and eat too little without company.
So from time to time, Mr. Bizos gets a call from their housekeeper to come for lunch.
Mr. Mandela sits at the head of a large table, with Mr. Bizos to his right. They relish
their favorite dish — oxtail in a rich sauce — and talk about old times. Mr. Mandela tells
how he walked into a law school class and sat next to a white fellow with big ears, who
promptly changed seats to avoid sitting next to a black man. Mr. Mandela had wanted to
invite the man to their 50th reunion at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1999, but
the man had already died.
“He repeats it from time to time,” Mr. Bizos said. “He regrets he did not have the
opportunity to meet him. He would have said to him, ‘Do you remember what happened?
But please don’t worry. I forgive you.’ ”
Like a grown child for whom each goodbye to an aged parent feels as if it may be
the last, South Africa seems to be preparing itself for the final farewell to its epic hero.
And Mr. Mandela seems to have readied himself, poking fun at his infirmity. Mr. Harris
recounted a joke he had heard Mr. Mandela tell and retell.
“When I die, I’m going to get up to the gates of heaven, and they’re going to say to
me, ‘Who are you?’ ” Mr. Mandela says. “And I’ll say, ‘I’m Madiba,’ ” he said, referring
to his clan name.
“And they’ll say, ‘But where do you come from?’ And I’ll say, ‘South Africa.’ And
they’ll say, ‘Oh, that Madiba. You’ve come to the wrong gates. You see the ones down
there that are very warm? That’s where you have to go.’ ”
Mr. Mandela’s wish is to be buried alongside his ancestors in Qunu, on the eastern
Cape, where he spent the happiest years of his boyhood. In his autobiography, he
describes it as a place of small, beehive-shaped huts with grass roofs.
“It was in the fields,” he wrote, “that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky
with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet
milk from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams, and to catch fish with
twine and sharpened bits of wire.”
Mandela Fades Amid Battles Over Who
Will Claim Legacy
By LYDIA POLGREEN
May 15, 2013
JOHANNESBURG — “Smile!” the visitor implored, an edge of forced bonhomie in his
voice, as he held up a cellphone camera to take a snapshot.
But the face of Nelson Mandela, the 94-year-old leader of the struggle against
apartheid who became South Africa’s beloved first black president, remained impassive
as stone. He looked confused and irritated, as if his rheumy eyes failed to register the
faces of the top leaders of the African National Congress who came to see him last
month, even though he had known them for decades.
These images, captured by a government camera crew and broadcast nationwide,
were the first to appear in more than nine months of the ailing Mr. Mandela, who has
been in the hospital four times in less than a year. Far from being honored, Mr. Mandela’s
relatives were furious over the broadcast, saying party leaders had invaded his privacy
and exploited his frailty to reap the political benefits of being seen in his hallowed
company at least one more time.
“I was really, really livid,” said Makaziwe Mandela, Mr. Mandela’s eldest daughter,
arguing that the filming took place against the family’s wishes. “They should have had
the sense to not publish those pictures.”
As Mr. Mandela fades away, the struggle to claim his legacy, his image, his
moneymaking potential and even the time he has remaining has begun in earnest.
The governing African National Congress, which Mr. Mandela led for decades, is
accused of using him as a prop to remind voters of the party’s noble roots at a time when
it has come to be seen as a collection of corrupt, self-serving elites. The party’s main
rival, the Democratic Alliance, has come under fire, too, for using a photo of him
embracing one of its white progenitors, spurring complaints that the opposition is trying
to co-opt Mr. Mandela’s image to unseat his own party.
And all the while, his descendants are engaged in a very public fight over Mr.
Mandela’s financial legacy. Angry that a trust set up for their welfare and upkeep is partly
controlled by someone they consider an outsider, his friend George Bizos, the family has
gone to court to remove Mr. Bizos as a director.
“Everyone wants a piece of the Madiba magic,” said William Gumede, who has
written extensively about Mr. Mandela, using the former president’s clan name. “This is
just a preview of what will come when he goes.”
The phrase “when he goes” is the polite euphemism used by anyone who dares to
hint at the inevitable death of Mr. Mandela, a revered figure across the globe. Speaking
about the death of an elder is considered taboo in most of South Africa’s rainbow of
cultures. But Mr. Mandela’s age and fragile health have led to the increasingly
acrimonious war over how he will be remembered — and what he has to pass on.
Last month, two of Mr. Mandela’s daughters sued Mr. Bizos and two other
associates of their father to force them off the boards of two companies set up to sell a
series of paintings Mr. Mandela had made with his handprints, one of several commercial
ventures devised to raise money for him and his heirs. The Mandela family includes a
sometimes squabbling assembly of three daughters from two marriages, 17 grandchildren
and 14 great-grandchildren.
The suit asserts that Mr. Bizos and two other people were improperly appointed to
the boards. Mr. Bizos, a prominent human rights lawyer, appears stung by the effort to
oust him; he helped defend Mr. Mandela against charges of sabotage and conspiracy to
overthrow the state 50 years ago and remained a close friend. The newspaper The Star
quoted Mr. Bizos as saying that Mr. Mandela’s daughters “wanted to get their hands on
things that should not be sold and the money in the companies.”
In a statement, Mr. Mandela’s grandchildren angrily rejected efforts to “paint our
family as insensitive money grabbers with no respect,” adding that “most of us are
gainfully employed, work for our own companies and run our own projects.”
Makaziwe Mandela said in an interview that “this issue that we are greedy, that we
are wanting this money before my dad passes away, is all nonsense.”
She added that Mr. Bizos was “making himself as if he is the super trustee, above
everybody else,” and pointed to documents that created the trust, which stipulate that
money from it can be used for almost any purpose by Mr. Mandela’s descendants —
buying a house or a car, starting a business, paying tuition or even taking a vacation.
Despite her father’s fame, she said, the family is not wealthy.
“This idea that somehow because we are Mandelas we are born with a diamond
spoon is actually a very false idea,” Ms. Mandela said.
Ms. Mandela, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, serves on several corporate boards
and runs a wine company with her daughter, Tukwini, called House of Mandela. She said
many people made money off her father’s name and image, so why should the Mandelas
be prohibited from using their name?
“I don’t hear anybody criticizing the Rothschilds for using their name,” Ms.
Mandela said.
The Mandelas are hardly immune to money troubles. A court ordered that a tea set,
paintings and furniture owned by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mr. Mandela’s second
wife, be auctioned off next week to pay a $2,150 debt she owes to a private school for
tuition and boarding for a relative, according to news reports.
Beyond commerce, many have tried to make political hay with Mr. Mandela’s
name. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, recently printed materials
using a photograph of Mr. Mandela embracing Helen Suzman, a pioneering white antiapartheid politician whose party was a precursor of the alliance. The image was part of an
effort to dispel the notion that the party is dominated by white people, or that it somehow
supports the return of apartheid. (A recent survey found that many young black people
believed this, though it is untrue.)
The A.N.C. cried foul, with one senior leader calling the use of Mr. Mandela’s
image “a cynical and opportunistic exercise in propaganda.”
Helen Zille, the leader of the opposition, hit back, saying: “We cannot just sit back
and allow the A.N.C.’s propaganda to falsely paint the D.A. as the party of apartheid.
And we will reject the A.N.C.’s lie that if we win an election we will bring apartheid
back.”
Protecting Mr. Mandela’s image has always been an onerous task. His face and
name are everywhere — on South Africa’s currency, on T-shirts and clock faces, on
bronze statues and in songs. While Mr. Mandela never shied from using his image and
name to further causes he supported — like children’s rights, H.I.V. and AIDS research
and peacemaking — fighting unauthorized commercial use costs the Nelson Mandela
Foundation hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
In many ways, Mr. Mandela’s image has never really been his own. After he was
convicted in 1964, the man himself disappeared from South Africa entirely. His image, in
silhouette or with prison bars superimposed over it, became an icon of the A.N.C. and its
struggle against apartheid. College students across the globe tacked up posters of his face
on their dormitory walls as part of the Free Mandela campaign.
“As soon as Mandela was in jail, the A.N.C. decided that he would be our hero,”
said Sisonke Msimang, an activist who spent her childhood in exile because of her
family’s prominence in the A.N.C. “He would be the face of our international campaign.”
When he was finally to be released from prison in 1990, one American magazine
ran an article asking, “What will he look like?”
These days, Mr. Mandela wishes only to be left alone to enjoy his family, said Ms.
Mandela, his daughter. “We never had Tata, even when he went out of jail,” she said,
using the Xhosa word for father. “This is the only moment we have as a family to dote on
him. It is our time. I think we should be given the time to enjoy whatever years Tata has
left in front of him.”
Messy Fight Over Mandela Trust Goes
Public
By LYDIA POLGREEN
May 24, 2013
JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela was livid. He believed that two of his daughters,
working with a lawyer he had recently fired, were trying to meddle in his financial affairs.
So he summoned the daughters, Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini, to his home
here for a family meeting in April 2005. According to two people present, he gave them a
withering talking-to.
“Mr. Mandela made it clear,” Bally Chuene, Mr. Mandela’s current lawyer, said this
month in a sworn statement, “that he did not want them involved in his affairs.”
At the time, the daughters appeared to acquiesce to Mr. Mandela’s wish to appoint
independent trustees to a trust he had created to provide for his descendants. According to
the statement, they agreed to the appointment of Mr. Chuene and George Bizos, a veteran
human rights lawyer and close associate of Mr. Mandela, as trustees to a trust financed by
the sale of paintings of Mr. Mandela’s handprints.
But the daughters secretly amended the trust document, with the help of Mr.
Mandela’s estranged lawyer, Ismail Ayob, according to statements by Mr. Chuene and
Mr. Bizos. And by 2011, they were seeking to distribute much of the trust’s money, about
$1.3 million, among Mr. Mandela’s children and grandchildren, despite the insistence of
the independent trustees that he wanted the money to last for generations.
Now the matter is in court, with Mr. Mandela’s daughters seeking to remove Mr.
Bizos and Mr. Chuene as trustees of the boards of two companies that support the
Mandela Trust, arguing that they were improperly appointed. The case has brought into
the open a long-simmering dispute over who will control Mr. Mandela’s financial legacy
after he dies.
The latest documents to emerge in the increasingly messy legal fight portray Mr.
Mandela’s daughters and other relatives as being willing to trample on his expressed
wishes to get their hands on money he set aside for his descendants’ welfare.
Makaziwe Mandela, who sits on several corporate boards, runs a wine company
called House of Mandela and speaks for her sister, declined to comment on the affidavits,
as did Mr. Ayob.
Mr. Mandela, 94 and in frail health, spent 27 years in prison in his battle against
apartheid, emerging in 1990 to lead the African National Congress in a negotiated end to
the brutal system of racial separation. He became South Africa’s first black president,
stepping down in 1999 after one term to pursue charity work. He retired from public life
in 2004, and has largely disappeared from view as his health has declined.
The extent of the family’s wealth is not publicly known. Mr. Mandela received a
presidential salary and pension, and his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” was a
best-seller. But he never worked in the private sector, and his personal wealth is believed
to be relatively modest.
Mr. Mandela was the first to admit that his life as an anti-apartheid activist and his
long imprisonment meant that his family was often neglected. He had six children with
two wives, both of whom he divorced. He is now married to Graça Machel, a children’s
rights activist and former first lady of Mozambique.
“To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a
greater joy,” Mr. Mandela wrote in his autobiography. “But it is a joy I had far too little
of.”
Makaziwe Mandela said in an earlier interview that her father had been a distant
figure her entire life. “My father knows us, but never really knows us,” she said. “We
never really had that opportunity to develop that bond.”
The fragile relationship between Mr. Mandela and his daughters was strained even
further in a second family meeting on June 11, 2006.
“The meeting was very heated and, in some respects, unpleasant,” Mr. Chuene said
in his statement. “Mr. Mandela was furious.”
His daughters, Mr. Chuene said, “had allowed themselves to be used by Mr. Ayob
and had continued to associate themselves with him knowing full well that he had
terminated his relationship with Mr. Ayob.”
“He was moreover upset that they continued to be involved in his personal affairs
despite his clear instructions,” Mr. Chuene said.
Soon after, the trustees met in November 2006 to choose board members for the
companies that fed the Mandela Trust, and Mr. Bizos, Mr. Chuene and two others were
named to the boards.
Then, in August 2011, Ms. Dlamini, who is South Africa’s ambassador to
Argentina, called for another family meeting “to discuss the financial constraints that she
and other members of Mr. Mandela’s family were experiencing,” Mr. Chuene said in his
statement. At the meeting, family members asked that the money in the two companies
that feed the trust be distributed directly to them.
But Mr. Bizos balked.
“As a confidant of Mr. Mandela, I know that his wishes in relation to the three
general trusts established by him was that these ought to provide long-term assurance, to
the extent possible, for the support and education of the beneficiaries, which would
include generations to come,” Mr. Bizos said in a sworn statement. “I was, accordingly,
concerned to learn in the last quarter of 2011 of a proposal for the distribution of almost
the entire capital of the Mandela Trust in lump sums.”
He added that whenever any member of the family had requested money from the
trust it had been granted.
Not long after, Ms. Mandela and Ms. Dlamini’s lawyer, Mr. Ayob, started writing
letters to Mr. Bizos and the other board members demanding that they resign. When they
refused, Mr. Mandela’s daughters took them to court, and what had been a quiet
disagreement became a very public battle over the legacy of a man many here consider a
secular saint.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s
Liberator As Prisoner And President,
Dies At 95
By BILL KELLER
December 5, 2013
Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and
served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity
and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was 95.
The South African president, Jacob Zuma, announced Mr. Mandela’s death.
Mr. Mandela had long said he wanted a quiet exit, but the time he spent in a Pretoria
hospital this summer was a clamor of quarreling family, hungry news media, spotlightseeking politicians and a national outpouring of affection and loss. The vigil eclipsed a
visit by President Obama, who paid homage to Mr. Mandela but decided not to intrude on
the privacy of a dying man he considered his hero.
Mr. Mandela ultimately died at home at 8:50 p.m. local time, and he will be buried
according to his wishes in the village of Qunu, where he grew up. The exhumed remains
of three of his children were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving a
family squabble that had played out in the news media.
Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the
liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest
country. And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful
revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully
handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty,
corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace.
The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had
systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast
him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite.
The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable
fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became
president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame
a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize
with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk.
And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the
bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring whites with fears of vengeance.
The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was
that rarity among revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable
with compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire.
When the question was put to Mr. Mandela in an interview for this obituary in 2007
— after such barbarous torment, how do you keep hatred in check? — his answer was
almost dismissive: Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot
afford to hate.
Except for a youthful flirtation with black nationalism, he seemed to have genuinely
transcended the racial passions that tore at his country. Some who worked with him said
this apparent magnanimity came easily to him because he always regarded himself as
superior to his persecutors.
In his five years as president, Mr. Mandela, though still a sainted figure abroad, lost
some luster at home as he strained to hold together a divided populace and to turn a
fractious liberation movement into a credible government.
Some blacks — including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mr. Mandela’s former wife,
who cultivated a following among the most disaffected blacks — complained that he had
moved too slowly to narrow the vast gulf between the impoverished black majority and
the more prosperous white minority. Some whites said he had failed to control crime,
corruption and cronyism. Some blacks deserted government to make money; some whites
emigrated, taking capital and knowledge with them.
Undoubtedly Mr. Mandela had become less attentive to the details of governing,
turning over the daily responsibilities to the deputy who would succeed him in 1999,
Thabo Mbeki.
But few among his countrymen doubted that without his patriarchal authority and
political shrewdness, South Africa might well have descended into civil war long before
it reached its imperfect state of democracy.
After leaving the presidency, Mr. Mandela brought that moral stature to bear
elsewhere around the continent, as a peace broker and champion of greater outside
investment.
Mr. Mandela was deep into a life prison term when he caught the notice of the world
as a symbol of the opposition to apartheid, literally “apartness” in the Afrikaans language,
a system of racial gerrymandering that stripped blacks of their citizenship and relegated
them to reservation-style “homelands” and townships.
Around 1980, exiled leaders of the foremost anti-apartheid movement, the African
National Congress, decided that this eloquent lawyer was the perfect hero to humanize
their campaign against the system that denied 80 percent of South Africans any voice in
their own affairs. “Free Nelson Mandela,” already a liberation chant within South Africa,
became a pop-chart anthem in Britain, and Mr. Mandela’s face bloomed on placards at
student rallies in America aimed at mustering trade sanctions against the apartheid
regime.
Mr. Mandela noted with some amusement in his 1994 autobiography, “Long Walk
to Freedom,” that this congregation made him the world’s best-known political prisoner
without knowing precisely who he was. Probably it was just his impish humor, but he
claimed to have been told that when posters went up in London, many young supporters
thought Free was his Christian name.
In South Africa, though, and among those who followed the country’s affairs more
closely, Nelson Mandela was already a name to reckon with.
He was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918, in Mvezo, a tiny village of cows,
corn and mud huts in the rolling hills of the Transkei, a former British protectorate in the
south. His given name, he enjoyed pointing out, translates colloquially as “troublemaker.”
He received his more familiar English name from a teacher when he began school at age
7. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a chief of the Thembu people, a
subdivision of the Xhosa nation.
When Nelson was an infant, his father was stripped of his chieftainship by a British
magistrate for insubordination, showing a proud stubborn streak his son willingly claimed
as an inheritance.
Nine years later, on the death of his father, young Nelson was taken into the home
of the paramount chief of the Thembu — not as an heir to power, but in a position to
study it. He would become worldly and westernized, but some of his closest friends
would always attribute his regal self-confidence (and his occasional autocratic behavior)
to his upbringing in a royal household.
Unlike many black South Africans, whose confidence had been crushed by
generations of officially proclaimed white superiority, Mr. Mandela never seemed to
doubt that he was the equal of any man. “The first thing to remember about Mandela is
that he came from a royal family,” said Ahmed Kathrada, an activist who shared a prison
cellblock with Mr. Mandela and was part of his inner circle. “That always gave him a
strength.”
In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela recalled eavesdropping on the endless
consensus-seeking deliberations of the tribal council and noticing that the chief worked
“like a shepherd.”
“He stays behind the flock,” he continued, “letting the most nimble go out ahead,
whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from
behind.”
That would often be his own style as leader and president.
Mr. Mandela maintained his close ties to the royal family of the Thembu tribe, a
large and influential constituency in the important Transkei region. And his background
there gave him useful insights into the sometimes tribal politics of South Africa.
Most important, it helped him manage the lethal divisions within the large Zulu
nation, which was rived by a power struggle between the African National Congress and
the Inkatha Freedom Party. While many A.N.C. leaders demonized the Inkatha leader,
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Mr. Mandela embraced him into his new unity government and
finally quelled the violence.
Mr. Mandela once explained in an interview that the key to peace in the Zulu nation
was simple: Mr. Buthelezi had been raised as a member of the royal Zulu family, but as a
nephew, not in the direct line of succession, leaving him tortured by a sense of insecurity
about his position. The solution was to love him into acquiescence.
The enlarging of Mr. Mandela’s outlook began at Methodist missionary schools and
the University College of Fort Hare, then the only residential college for blacks in South
Africa. Mr. Mandela said later that he had entered the university still thinking of himself
as a Xhosa first and foremost, but left with a broader African perspective.
Studying law at Fort Hare, he fell in with Oliver Tambo, another leader-to-be of the
liberation movement. The two were suspended for a student protest in 1940 and sent
home on the verge of expulsion. Much later, Mr. Mandela called the episode — his
refusal to yield on a minor point of principle — “foolhardy.”
On returning to his home village, he learned that his family had chosen a bride for
him. Finding the woman unappealing and the prospect of a career in tribal government
even more so, he ran away to the black metropolis of Soweto, following other young
blacks who had left mostly to work in the gold mines around Johannesburg.
There he was directed to Walter Sisulu, who ran a real estate business and was a
spark plug in the African National Congress. Mr. Sisulu looked upon the tall young man
with his aristocratic bearing and confident gaze and, he recalled in an interview, decided
that his prayers had been answered.
Mr. Mandela soon impressed the activists with his ability to win over doubters. “His
starting point is that ‘I am going to persuade this person no matter what,’ ” Mr. Sisulu
said. “That is his gift. He will go to anybody, anywhere, with that confidence. Even when
he does not have a strong case, he convinces himself that he has.”
Mr. Mandela, though he had not yet completed his law degree, opened the first
black law partnership in South Africa with Mr. Tambo. He took up amateur boxing,
rising before dawn to run roadwork. Tall and slim, he was also somewhat vain. He wore
impeccable suits, displaying an attention to fashion that would much later be evident in
the elegantly bright loose shirts of African cloth that became his trademark.
Impatient with the seeming impotence of their elders in the African National
Congress, Mr. Mandela, Mr. Tambo, Mr. Sisulu and other militants organized the A.N.C.
Youth League, issuing a manifesto so charged with Pan-African nationalism that some of
their nonblack sympathizers were offended.
Africanism versus nonracialism: that was the great divide in liberation thinking. The
black consciousness movement, whose most famous martyr was Steve Biko, argued that
before Africans could take their place in a multiracial state, their confidence and sense of
responsibility must be rebuilt.
Mr. Mandela, too, was attracted to this doctrine of self-sufficiency.
“I was angry at the white man, not at racism,” he wrote in his autobiography. “While
I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy
if he climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition.”
In his conviction that blacks should liberate themselves, he joined friends in
breaking up Communist Party meetings because he regarded Communism as an alien,
non-African ideology, and for a time he insisted that the A.N.C. keep a distance from
Indian and mixed-race political movements.
“This was the trend of the youth at that time,” Mr. Sisulu said. But Mr. Mandela, he
said, was never “an extreme nationalist,” or much of an ideologue of any stripe. He was a
man of action.
He was also, already, a man of audacious self-confidence.
Joe Matthews, who worked for Mr. Mandela in the Youth League (and later became
a moderate voice in the rival Inkatha movement), heard Mr. Mandela speak at a black-tie
dinner in 1952 and predict, in what the audience took as impudence, that he would be the
first president of a free South Africa.
“He was not a theoretician, but he was a doer,” Mr. Matthews said in an interview
for the television documentary program “Frontline.” “He was a man who did things, and
he was always ready to volunteer to be the first to do any dangerous or difficult thing.”
Five years after forming the Youth League, the young rebels engineered a
generational takeover of the African National Congress.
During his years as a young lawyer in Soweto, Mr. Mandela married a nurse, Evelyn
Ntoko Mase, and they had four children, including a daughter who died at 9 months. But
the demands of his politics kept him from his family. Compounding the strain was his
wife’s joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect that abjures any participation in politics.
The marriage grew cold and ended with abruptness.
“He said, ‘Evelyn, I feel that I have no love for you anymore,’ ” his first wife said in
an interview for a documentary film. “ ‘I’ll give you the children and the house.’ ”
Not long afterward, a friend introduced him to Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, a
stunning and strong-willed medical social worker 16 years his junior. Mr. Mandela was
smitten, declaring on their first date that he would marry her. He did so in 1958, while he
and other activists were in the midst of a marathon trial on treason charges. His second
marriage would be tumultuous, producing two daughters and a national drama of forced
separation, devotion, remorse and acrimony.
In 1961, with the patience of the liberation movement stretched to the snapping
point by the police killing of 69 peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville township the
previous year, Mr. Mandela led the African National Congress onto a new road of armed
insurrection.
It was an abrupt shift for a man who, not many weeks earlier, had proclaimed
nonviolence an inviolable principle of the A.N.C. He later explained that forswearing
violence “was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an
ineffective weapon.”
Taking as his text Che Guevara’s “Guerrilla Warfare,” Mr. Mandela became the first
commander of a motley liberation army, grandly named Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of
the Nation.
Although he denied it throughout his life, there is persuasive evidence that about
this time Mr. Mandela briefly joined the South African Communist Party, the A.N.C.’s
partner in opening the armed resistance. Mr. Mandela presumably joined for the party’s
connections to Communist countries that would finance the campaign of violence.
Stephen Ellis, a British historian who in 2011 found reference to Mr. Mandela’s
membership in secret party minutes, said Mr. Mandela “wasn’t a real convert; it was just
an opportunist thing.”
Mr. Mandela’s exploits in the “armed struggle” have been somewhat mythologized.
During his months as a cloak-and-dagger outlaw, the press christened him “the Black
Pimpernel.” But while he trained for guerrilla fighting and sought weapons for Spear of
the Nation, he saw no combat. The A.N.C.’s armed activities were mostly confined to
planting land mines, blowing up electrical stations and committing occasional acts of
terrorism against civilians.
After the first free elections in South Africa, Spear of the Nation’s reputation was
stained by admissions of human rights abuses in its training camps, though no evidence
emerged that Mr. Mandela was complicit in them.
South Africa’s rulers were determined to put Mr. Mandela and his comrades out of
action. In 1956, he and scores of other dissidents were arrested on charges of treason. The
state botched the prosecution, and after the acquittal Mr. Mandela went underground.
Upon his capture he was charged with inciting a strike and leaving the country without a
passport. His legend grew when, on the first day of that trial, he entered the courtroom
wearing a traditional Xhosa leopard-skin cape to underscore that he was an African
entering a white man’s jurisdiction.
That trial resulted in a three-year sentence, but it was just a warm-up for the main
event. Next Mr. Mandela and eight other A.N.C. leaders were charged with sabotage and
conspiracy to overthrow the state — capital crimes. It was called the Rivonia trial, for the
name of the farm where the defendants had conspired and where a trove of incriminating
documents was found — many in Mr. Mandela’s handwriting — outlining and justifying
a violent campaign to bring down the regime.
At Mr. Mandela’s suggestion, the defendants, certain of conviction, set out to turn
the trial into a moral drama that would vindicate them in the court of world opinion. They
admitted that they had organized a liberation army and had engaged in sabotage and tried
to lay out a political justification for these acts. Among themselves, they agreed that even
if sentenced to hang, they would refuse on principle to appeal.
The four-hour speech with which Mr. Mandela opened the defense’s case was one
of the most eloquent of his life, and — in the view of his authorized biographer, Anthony
Sampson — it established him as the leader not only of the A.N.C. but also of the
international movement against apartheid.
Mr. Mandela described his personal evolution from the temptations of black
nationalism to the politics of multiracialism. He acknowledged that he was the
commander of Spear of the Nation, but asserted that he had turned to violence only after
nonviolent resistance had been foreclosed. He conceded that he had made alliances with
Communists — a powerful current in the prosecution case in those Cold War days — but
likened this to Churchill’s cooperation with Stalin against Hitler.
He finished with a coda of his convictions that would endure as an oratorical
highlight of South African history.
“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black
domination,” he told the court. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free
society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It
is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But my lord, if it needs be, it is
an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Under considerable pressure from liberals at home and abroad, including a nearly
unanimous vote of the United Nations General Assembly, to spare the defendants, the
judge acquitted one and sentenced Mr. Mandela and the others to life in prison.
Mr. Mandela was 44 when he was manacled and put on a ferry to the Robben Island
prison. He would be 71 when he was released.
Robben Island, in shark-infested waters about seven miles off Cape Town, had over
the centuries been a naval garrison, a mental hospital and a leper colony, but it was most
famously a prison. For Mr. Mandela and his co-defendants, it began with a nauseating
ferry ride, during which guards amused themselves by urinating down the air vents onto
the prisoners below.
The routine on Robben Island was one of isolation, boredom and petty humiliations,
met with frequent shows of resistance. By day the men were marched to a limestone
quarry, where the fine dust stirred up by their labors glued their tear ducts shut.
But in some ways prison was less arduous than life outside in those unsettled times.
For Mr. Mandela and others, Robben Island was a university. In whispered conversations
as they hacked at the limestone and in tightly written polemics handed from cellblock to
cellblock, the prisoners debated everything from Marxism to circumcision.
Mr. Mandela learned Afrikaans, the language of the dominant whites, and urged
other prisoners to do the same.
He honed his skills as a leader, negotiator and proselytizer, and not only the factions
among the prisoners but also some of the white administrators found his charm and iron
will irresistible. He credited his prison experience with teaching him the tactics and
strategy that would make him president.
Almost from his arrival he assumed a kind of command. The first time his lawyer,
George Bizos, visited him, Mr. Mandela greeted him and then introduced his eight guards
by name — to their amazement — as “my guard of honor.” The prison authorities began
treating him as a prison elder statesman.
During his time on the island, a new generation of political inmates arose, defiant
veterans of a national student uprising who at first resisted the authority of the elders but
gradually came under their tutelage. Years later Mr. Mandela recalled the young hotheads
with a measure of exasperation:
“When you say, ‘What are you going to do?’ they say, ‘We will attack and destroy
them!’ I say: ‘All right, have you analyzed how strong they are, the enemy? Have you
compared their strength to your strength?’ They say, ‘No, we will just attack!’ ”
Perhaps because Mr. Mandela was so revered, he was singled out for gratuitous
cruelties by the authorities. The wardens left newspaper clippings in his cell about how
his wife had been cited as the other woman in a divorce case, and about the persecution
she and her children endured after being exiled to a bleak town 250 miles from
Johannesburg.
He was denied permission to attend the funerals of his mother and his oldest son,
who died in a car accident.
Friends say his experiences steeled his self-control and made him, more than ever, a
man who buried his emotions deep, who spoke in the collective “we” of liberation
rhetoric.
Still, Mr. Mandela said he regarded his prison experience as a major factor in his
nonracial outlook. He said prison tempered any desire for vengeance by exposing him to
sympathetic white guards who smuggled in newspapers and extra rations, and to
moderates within the National Party government who approached him in hopes of
opening a dialogue. Above all, prison taught him to be a master negotiator.
Mr. Mandela’s decision to begin negotiations with the white government was one of
the most momentous of his life, and he made it like an autocrat, without consulting his
comrades, knowing full well that they would resist.
“My comrades did not have the advantages that I had of brushing shoulders with the
V.I.P.’s who came here, the judges, the minister of justice, the commissioner of prisons,
and I had come to overcome my own prejudice towards them,” he recalled. “So I decided
to present my colleagues with a fait accompli.”
With an overture to Kobie Coetsee, the justice minister, and a visit to President P.
W. Botha, Mr. Mandela, in 1986, began what would be years of negotiations on the future
of South Africa. The encounters, remarkably, were characterized by mutual shows of
respect. When he occupied the president’s office, Mr. Mandela would delightedly show
visitors where President Botha had poured him tea.
Mr. Mandela demanded as a show of good will that Walter Sisulu and other
defendants in the Rivonia trial be released. President F. W. de Klerk, Mr. Botha’s
successor, complied.
In the last months of his imprisonment, as the negotiations gathered force, he was
relocated to Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town, where the government could meet
with him conveniently and monitor his health. (In prison he had had prostate surgery and
lung problems, and the government was terrified of the uproar if he were to die in
captivity.) He lived in a warden’s bungalow. He had access to a swimming pool, a
garden, a chef and a VCR. A suit was tailored for his meetings with government
luminaries.
(After his release he built a vacation home near his ancestral village, a brick replica
of the warden’s house. This was pure pragmatism, he explained: he was accustomed to
the floor plan and could find the bathroom at night without stumbling in the dark.)
From the moment they learned of the talks, Mr. Mandela’s allies in the A.N.C. were
suspicious, and their worries were not allayed when the government allowed them to
confer with Mr. Mandela at his quarters in the warden’s house.
Tokyo Sexwale, who had come to Robben Island as a student rebel, spoke in a
“Frontline” interview about encountering Mr. Mandela in this comfortable house. Mr.
Mandela walked them through the house, showing off the television and the microwave.
“And,” Mr. Sexwale said, “I thought, ‘I think you are sold out.’ ”
Mr. Mandela seated his visitors at a table and patiently explained his view that the
enemy was morally and politically defeated, with nothing left but the army, the country
ungovernable. His strategy, he said, was to give the white rulers every chance to retreat in
an orderly way. He was preparing to meet Mr. de Klerk, who had just taken over from
Mr. Botha.
In February 1990, Mr. Mandela walked out of prison into a world that he knew
little, and that knew him less. The African National Congress was now torn by factions
— the prison veterans, those who had spent the years of struggle working legally in labor
unions, and the exiles who had spent them in foreign capitals. The white government was
also split, with some committed to negotiating an honest new order while others fomented
factional violence.
Over the next four years Mr. Mandela would be embroiled in a laborious
negotiation, not only with the white government but also with his own fractious alliance.
But first he took time for a victory lap around the world, including an eight-city tour
of the United States that began with a motorcade through delirious crowds in New York
City.
The anti-apartheid movement had had a rocky relationship with United States
governments, which saw South Africa through the lens of the Cold War rivalry with
Communists and also regarded the country as an important source of uranium. Until the
late 1980s the Central Intelligence Agency portrayed the A.N.C. as Communistdominated. There have been allegations, neither substantiated nor dispelled, that a C.I.A.
agent had tipped the police officers who arrested Mr. Mandela.
Congress, following popular sentiment, enacted economic sanctions against
investment in South Africa in 1986, overriding the veto of President Ronald Reagan.
Even at the time of his euphoric public welcome in the United States, Mr. Mandela was
regarded with some official misgivings, because of both his devotion to economic
sanctions and his loyalties to various self-styled liberation figures like Col. Muammar elQaddafi and Yasir Arafat.
While Mr. Mandela had languished in prison, a campaign of civil disobedience was
underway. No one participated more enthusiastically than Winnie Mandela. By the time
of her husband’s imprisonment, the Mandelas had produced two daughters but had little
time to enjoy a domestic life. For most of their marriage they saw each other through the
thick glass partition of the prison visiting room: for 21 years of his captivity, they never
touched.
She was, however, a megaphone to the outside world, a source of information on
friends and comrades and an interpreter of his views through the journalists who came to
visit her. She was tormented by the police, jailed and banished with her children to a
remote Afrikaner town, Brandfort, where she challenged her captors at every turn.
By the time she was released into the tumult of Soweto in 1984, she had become a
firebrand. She now dressed in military khakis and boots and spoke in a violent rhetoric,
notoriously endorsing the practice of “necklacing” foes, incinerating them in a straitjacket
of gasoline-soaked tires. She surrounded herself with young thugs who terrorized,
kidnapped and killed blacks she deemed hostile to the cause.
Friends said Mr. Mandela’s choice of his cause over his family often filled him with
remorse — so much so that long after Winnie Mandela was widely known to have
conducted a reign of terror, long after she was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of
young township activists, long after the marriage was effectively dead, Mr. Mandela
refused to utter a word of criticism.
As president, he bowed to her popularity by appointing her deputy minister of arts, a
position in which she became entangled in financial scandals and increasingly challenged
the government for appeasing whites. In 1995 Mr. Mandela finally filed for divorce,
which was granted the next year after an emotionally wrenching public hearing.
Mr. Mandela later fell publicly in love with Graça Machel, widow of the former
president of Mozambique and an activist in her own right for humanitarian causes. They
married on Mr. Mandela’s 80th birthday. She survives him, as do his two daughters by
Winnie Mandela, Zenani and Zindziswa; a daughter, Makaziwe, by his first wife; 17
grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.
Two years after Mr. Mandela’s release from prison, black and white leaders met in a
convention center on the outskirts of Johannesburg for negotiations that would lead,
fitfully, to an end of white rule. While out in the country extremists black and white used
violence to try to tilt the outcome their way, Mr. Mandela and the white president, Mr. de
Klerk, argued and maneuvered toward a peaceful transfer of power.
Mr. Mandela understood the mutual need in his relationship with Mr. de Klerk, a
proud, dour, chain-smoking pragmatist, but he never much liked or fully trusted him.
Two years into the negotiations, the men were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and
their appearance together in Oslo in 1993 was marked by bouts of pique and
recriminations. In a conversation a year after becoming president, with Mr. de Klerk as
deputy president, Mr. Mandela said he still suspected Mr. de Klerk of complicity in the
murders of countless blacks by police and army units, a rogue “third force” opposed to
black rule.
Eventually, though, Mr. Mandela and his negotiating team, led by the former labor
leader Cyril Ramaphosa, found their way to the grand bargain that assured free elections
in exchange for promising opposition parties a share of power and a guarantee that whites
would not be subjected to reprisals.
At times, the ensuing election campaign seemed in danger of collapsing into chaos.
Strife between rival Zulu factions cost hundreds of lives, and white extremists set off
bombs at campaign rallies and assassinated the second most popular black figure, Chris
Hani.
But the fear was more than offset by the excitement in black townships. Mr.
Mandela, wearing a hearing aid and orthopedic socks, soldiered on through 12-hour
campaign days, igniting euphoric crowds packed into dusty soccer stadiums and perched
on building tops to sing liberation songs and cheer.
During the elections in April 1994, voters lined up in some places for miles. The
African National Congress won 62 percent of the vote, earning 252 of the 400 seats in
Parliament’s National Assembly and ensuring that Mr. Mandela, as party leader, would
be named president when Parliament convened.
Mr. Mandela was sworn in as president on May 10, and he accepted office with a
speech of shared patriotism, summoning South Africans’ communal exhilaration in their
land and their common relief at being freed from the world’s disapproval.
“Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again
experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of
the world,” he declared.
Then nine Mirage fighter jets of the South African Air Force, originally bought to
help keep someone like Mr. Mandela from taking power, roared overhead, and 50,000
roared back from the lawn spread below the government buildings in Pretoria, “Viva the
South African Air Force, viva!”
As president, Mr. Mandela set a style that was informal and multiracial. He lived
much of the time in a modest house in Johannesburg, where he made his own bed. He
enjoyed inviting visiting foreign dignitaries to shake hands with the woman who served
them tea.
But he was also casual, even careless, in his relationships with rich capitalists, the
mining tycoons, retailers and developers whose continued investment he saw as vital to
South Africa’s economy. Before the election, he went to 20 industrialists and asked each
for at least one million rand ($275,000 at the exchange rate of that time) to build up his
party and finance the campaign. In office, he was unabashed about taking their phone
calls — and bristled when unions organized a strike against some of his big donors. He
enjoyed socializing with the very rich and the show-business celebrities who flocked to
pay homage.
At the same time, he was insistent that the black majority should not expect instant
material gratification. He told union leaders at one point to “tighten your belts” and
accept low wages so that investment would flow. “We must move from the position of a
resistance movement to one of builders,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Mandela exhibited a genius for the grand gesture of reconciliation. Some
attempts, like a tea he organized for prominent A.N.C. women and the wives of
apartheid-era white officials, were awkward.
Others were triumphant. Few in South Africa, whatever their race, were unmoved in
June 1995 when the South African rugby team, long a symbol of white arrogance,
defeated New Zealand in a World Cup final, a moment dramatized in the 2009 film
“Invictus.” Mr. Mandela strode onto the field wearing the team’s green jersey, and 80,000
fans, mostly Afrikaners, erupted in a chant of “Nel-son! Nel-son!”
Mr. Mandela’s instinct for compromise in the interest of unity was evident in the
1995 creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, devised to balance justice and
forgiveness in a reckoning of the country’s history. The panel offered individual
amnesties for anyone who testified fully on the crimes committed during the apartheid
period.
In the end, the process fell short of both truth (white officials and A.N.C. leaders
were evasive) and reconciliation (many blacks found that information only fed their
anger). But it was generally counted a success, giving South Africans who had lost loved
ones to secret graves a chance to reclaim their grief, while avoiding the spectacle of
endless trials.
There was a limit, though, to how much Mr. Mandela — by exhortation, by
symbolism, by regal appeals to the better natures of his constituents — could paper over
the gulf between white privilege and black privation.
After Mr. Mandela delivered one miracle in the shape of South Africa’s freedom, it
was perhaps too much to expect that he could deliver another in the form of broad
prosperity. In his term, he made only modest progress in fulfilling the modest goals he
had set for housing, education and jobs.
He tried with limited success to transform the police from an instrument of white
supremacy to an effective crime-fighting force. Corruption and cronyism, which predated
majority rule, blossomed. Foreign investment, despite the universal high esteem for Mr.
Mandela, kept its distance. Racial divisions, kept in check by the euphoria of the peaceful
transition and by Mr. Mandela’s moral authority, re-emerged somewhat as the ultimate
problem of closing the income gap remained unresolved.
The South African journalist Mark Gevisser, in his 2007 biography of Mr.
Mandela’s successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, wrote: “The overriding legacy of the
Mandela presidency — of the years 1994 to 1999 — is a country where the rule of law
was entrenched in an unassailable Bill of Rights, and where the predictions of racial and
ethnic conflict did not come true. These feats, alone, guarantee Mandela his sanctity. But
he was a far better liberator and nation-builder than he was a governor.”
Mr. Mandela himself deferred to his party, notably in the choice of a successor.
After the party favorite, Mr. Mbeki, had ascended to the presidency, Mr. Mandela let it be
known that he had actually preferred the younger Mr. Ramaphosa, the former mine
workers’ union leader who had negotiated the new Constitution. Mr. Mbeki knew and
resented that he was not the favorite, and for much of his presidency he snubbed Mr.
Mandela.
Mr. Mandela mostly refrained from directly criticizing his successor, but his
disappointment was unmistakable when Mr. Mbeki showed his intolerance of criticism
and his conspiratorial view of the world. When Mr. Mbeki questioned mainstream
medical explanations of the cause of AIDS, stifling open discussion that might have
helped cope with a galloping epidemic, Mr. Mandela spoke up on the need for protected
sex and cheaper medicines. When his eldest son, Makgatho, died in 2005, Mr. Mandela
gathered family members to publicly disclose that the cause was AIDS.
In the 2007 interview, speaking on the condition that he not be quoted until after his
death, Mr. Mandela was openly scornful of Mr. Mbeki’s leadership. The A.N.C., he said,
had always succeeded as a movement and a party because it had drawn on the collective
wisdom of its many constituencies.
“There is a great deal of centralization now under President Mbeki, where he takes
decisions himself,” Mr. Mandela declared. “We never liked that.”
Mr. Mbeki often found it excruciating to govern in Mr. Mandela’s shadow. He felt
that his predecessor had dealt him a nearly impossible hand — first by encouraging the
notion that South Africa’s liberation was the magic of one great black man, and second
by emphasizing accommodation with white power and thus doing relatively little to
relieve the impoverished black majority.
In interviews published in Mr. Gevisser’s biography, Mr. Mbeki chafed at President
Mandela’s ability to rule by charm and stature, with little attention to the mechanics of
governing.
“Madiba didn’t pay any attention to what the government was doing,” Mr. Mbeki
said, using the clan name for his predecessor. “We had to, because somebody had to.”
As a former president, Mr. Mandela lent his charisma to a variety of causes on the
African continent, joining peace talks in several wars and assisting his wife, Graça, in
raising money for children’s aid organizations.
In 2010, the World Cup soccer games took place in South Africa, another sportingworld benediction of the peace Mr. Mandela did so much to deliver to his country. But
for Mr. Mandela, the proud occasion turned to heartbreak when his 13-year-old
granddaughter Zenani was killed in an auto accident while returning from an opening-day
concert. Mr. Mandela, who had been instrumental in luring the tournament to its first
African setting, canceled his plans to attend the opening day.
By then, his hearing and memory shaky, he had already largely withdrawn from
public debate, declining almost all interview requests and confining himself to scripted
public statements on issues like the war in Iraq. (He was vehemently against it.)
When he received a reporter for the 2007 interview, his aides were already
contending with a custody battle over Mr. Mandela’s legacy, including where he would
be buried and how he would be memorialized. Mr. Mandela insisted that his burial be left
to his widow and be done with minimal fanfare. His acolytes had other plans.
Mandela’s Death Leaves South Africa
Without Its Moral Center
By LYDIA POLGREEN
December 5, 2013
JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president and an
enduring icon of the struggle against racial oppression, died on Thursday, the government
announced, leaving the nation without its moral center at a time of growing
dissatisfaction with the country’s leaders.
“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” President Jacob Zuma said in a televised
address late Thursday night, adding that Mr. Mandela had died at 8:50 p.m. local time.
“His tireless struggle for freedom earned him the respect of the world. His humility, his
compassion and his humanity earned him their love.”
Mr. Zuma called Mr. Mandela’s death “the moment of our deepest sorrow,” and said
that South Africa’s thoughts were now with the former president’s family. “They have
sacrificed much and endured much so that our people could be free,” he said.
Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted of treason by the white
minority government, only to forge a peaceful end to white rule by negotiating with his
captors after his release in 1990. He led the African National Congress, long a banned
liberation movement, to a resounding electoral victory in 1994, the first fully democratic
election in the country’s history.
Mr. Mandela, who was 95, served just one term as South Africa’s president and had
not been seen in public since 2010, when the nation hosted the soccer World Cup. But his
decades in prison and his insistence on forgiveness over vengeance made him a potent
symbol of the struggle to end this country’s brutally codified system of racial domination,
and of the power of peaceful resolution in even the most intractable conflicts.
Years after he retreated from public life, his name still resonated as an emblem of
his effort to transcend decades of racial division and create what South Africans called a
Rainbow Nation.
“His commitment to transfer power and reconcile with those who jailed him set an
example that all humanity should aspire to,” a grim President Obama said Thursday
evening, describing Mr. Mandela as an “influential, courageous and profoundly good”
man who inspired millions — including himself — to a spirit of reconciliation.
Mr. Mandela and Mr. Obama both served as the first black leaders of their nations,
and both men won the Nobel Peace Prize. But the American president has shied away
from comparisons, often noting that his own sacrifices would never compare to the ones
that Mr. Mandela endured.
Mr. Obama said that the world would “not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela
again,” and he noted that the former South African president had once said that he was
“not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
Mr. Zuma did not announce the specific cause of Mr. Mandela’s death, but he had
been battling pneumonia and other lung ailments for the past six months, and had been in
and out of the hospital. Though his death was announced close to midnight, when most in
this nation of early risers are asleep, a small crowd quickly gathered outside the house
where he once lived in Soweto, on Vilekazi Street.
“Nelson Mandela, there is no one like you,” they sang, stamping their feet in unison
to a praise song usually sung in joy. But in the midnight darkness, sadness tinged the
melody.
“He was our father, our mother, our everything,” said Numfundo Matli, 28, a
housekeeper who joined the impromptu celebration of Mr. Mandela’s life. “What will we
do without him?”
His death comes during a period of deep unease and painful self-examination for
South Africa.
In the past year and a half, the country has faced perhaps its most serious unrest
since the end of apartheid, provoked by a wave of wildcat strikes by angry miners, a
deadly response on the part of the police, a messy leadership struggle within the A.N.C.
and the deepening fissures between South Africa’s rulers and its impoverished masses.
Scandals over corruption involving senior members of the party have fed a broader
perception that Mr. Mandela’s near saintly legacy from the years of struggle has been
eroded by a more recent scramble for self-enrichment among a newer elite.
After spending decades in penurious exile, many political figures returned to find
themselves at the center of a grab for power and money. Mr. Zuma himself was charged
with corruption before rising to the presidency in 2009, though the charges were dropped
on largely technical grounds. He has faced renewed scrutiny in the past year over $27
million spent in renovations to his house in rural Zululand.
Graphic cellphone videos of police officers abusing people they have detained have
further fueled anger at a government seen increasingly out of touch with the lives of
ordinary South Africans.
Mr. Mandela served as president from 1994 to 1999, stepping aside to allow his
deputy, Thabo Mbeki, to run and take the reins. Mr. Mandela spent his early retirement
years focused on charitable causes for children and later speaking out about AIDS, which
has killed millions of Africans, including his son Makgatho, who died in 2005.
Mr. Mandela retreated from public life in 2004 at the age of 85, largely withdrawing
to his homes in the upscale Johannesburg suburb of Houghton and his ancestral village in
the Eastern Cape, Qunu.
Just after 1 a.m. in Soweto, Lerato Motau walked down Vilekazi Street, clutching a
handful of red and white roses plucked from her parents’ garden. Ms. Motau, 38, had
grown up down the street from the Mandela home, and had many memories of Mr.
Mandela’s visits after he was released from prison.
“He always had time for us kids,” she said, holding the hand of her own 12-year-old
daughter, up past her bedtime to witness history just as Ms. Motau was when Mr.
Mandela was released from prison when she was in school.
Ms. Motau’s father, Shadrack Motau, had accompanied Mr. Mandela on a tour of
the neighborhood after his release. Early Friday morning, his eyes filled with sleepy
sadness as he flipped through old photographs of Mr. Mandela with his daughters.
“The man had so much humility,” Mr. Motau said. “He treated everyone with
respect and dignity, from statesmen to children.”
At a bar in the upscale suburb of Greenside, where a multiracial gaggle of college
students home for the holidays drank beers and shots of tequila along a popular strip of
bars, news of Mr. Mandela’s death traveled quickly from one barstool to the next.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” said Kate Reeves, an 18-year-old first-year student at
the University of Cape Town who lives in the same wealthy suburb where Mr. Mandela
died. She clapped her hand to her mouth and fought back tears, reaching for her friend
and college classmate Sandile Makhatho for a hug.
“This is the saddest day of my life,” she said. Indeed, the friendship between Ms.
Reeves, who is white, and Mr. Makhatho, who is black, would scarcely have been
possible in the days before Mr. Mandela led the fight to end apartheid. Both are members
of the “born free” generation, who never really knew apartheid.
“I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for Nelson Mandela,” Mr. Makhatho said.
On talk radio, South Africans from around the world called in to share their
memories of the man they called the father of the nation. From Brisbane, Australia, a
woman spoke to Radio 702, a news station, to say that she had awakened her children to
pray for Mr. Mandela. A black South African living in Alabama spoke of his experiences
of race in America.
Ahmed Kathrada, an activist who was imprisoned at Robben Island along with Mr.
Mandela and was one of his closest friends, called in to the radio station to share his
heartbreak at the loss of his old friend.
“He was my elder brother,” Mr. Kathrada said, his voice breaking with emotion.
“Now I don’t know who to turn to.”
Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Washington.
The Contradictions Of Mandela
By ZAKES MDA
December 5, 2013
I remember Nelson Mandela. No, not the universally adored elder statesman who
successfully resisted the megalomania that comes with deification, and who died
Thursday at age 95, but the young lawyer who used to sit in my parents’ living room until
the early hours of the morning, debating African nationalism with my father, Ashby Peter
Mda.
In 1944, they were among the leaders who had founded the African National
Congress Youth League. These young men considered the African National Congress,
which had by then existed for more than three decades, moribund and outmoded. They
felt there was a need to take the liberation struggle from protest to armed struggle, and
were known to shout down those they felt were “selling out” by participating in
apartheid-created structures through which black people were supposed to express their
political aspirations.
What struck me, even then, was that Mandela was a man of contradictions. He could
be avuncular, especially to us kids, but he was also strict and disciplined. While he was a
fire-breathing revolutionary who would quote Marx and Lenin at the drop of a hat, he was
also a Xhosa traditionalist with aristocratic tendencies. For instance, Kaiser and George
Matanzima, chiefs of the Tembu ethnic group who spearheaded the apartheid “Bantustan”
system of separate territories for black South Africans, were not only his relatives but his
friends as well. While many thought the Matanzima brothers had betrayed the cause of
black liberation, Mandela would not thoroughly denounce them. Perhaps here we could
already see the flicker of tolerance to those with opposing views for which he later
distinguished himself.
It is ironic that in today’s South Africa, there is an increasingly vocal segment of
black South Africans who feel that Mandela sold out the liberation struggle to white
interests. This will come as a surprise to the international community, which informally
canonized him and thinks he enjoyed universal adoration in his country. After he initiated
negotiations for the end of apartheid and led South Africa into a new era of freedom with
a progressive Constitution that recognizes the rights of everyone (including homosexuals,
another admirable contradiction for an African aristocrat), there was, of course, euphoria
in the country. But that was a long time ago. With the rampant corruption of the current
ruling elite, and the fact that very little has changed for a majority of black people, the
euphoria has been replaced with disillusionment.
The new order that Mandela brought about, this argument goes, did not
fundamentally change the economic arrangements in the country. It ushered in prosperity,
but the distribution of that prosperity was skewed in favor of the white establishment and
its dependent new black elite. Today the political apparatchiks are the new billionaires,
led by a president — Jacob Zuma — who blatantly used millions of taxpayer dollars to
upgrade his private residence to accommodate his expanding harem and a phalanx of
children.
The blame-Mandela movement is not by any means a groundswell, but it is loud
enough in its vehemence to warrant attention. It is led by individual activists whose main
platforms are Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and in its formal sense by such
organizations as the September National Imbizo, which believes that “South Africa is an
anti-black white supremacist country managed by the A.N.C. in the interests of white
people. Only blacks can liberate themselves.” The claim is that the settlement reached
between the A.N.C. and the white apartheid government was a fraud perpetrated on the
black people, who have yet to get back the land stolen by whites during colonialism.
Mandela’s government, critics say, focused on the cosmetics of reconciliation, while
nothing materially changed in the lives of a majority of South Africans.
This movement, though not representative of the majority of black South Africans
who still adore Mandela and his A.N.C., is gaining momentum, especially on university
campuses.
I understand the frustrations of those young South Africans and I share their
disillusionment. I, however, do not share their perspective on Mandela. I saw in him a
skillful politician whose policy of reconciliation saved the country from a blood bath and
ushered it into a period of democracy, human rights and tolerance. I admired him for his
compassion and generosity, values that are not usually associated with politicians. I also
admired him for his integrity and loyalty.
But I fear that, for Mandela, loyalty went too far. The corruption that we see today
did not just suddenly erupt after his term in office; it took root during his time. He was
loyal to his comrades to a fault, and was therefore blind to some of their misdeeds.
When he was president, I often wrote about the emerging patronage system and
crony capitalism. To his credit, when I wrote him a long letter outlining my concerns, he
phoned me within a week and arranged a meeting between me and three of his senior
cabinet ministers. Although nothing of substance came of the meeting, the very fact that
Mandela listened attentively to the complaints of an ordinary citizen, and took them
seriously enough to convene such a meeting, was extraordinary for any president.
In later years, however, Mandela became the victim of the very corruption I was
complaining about. He was surrounded by all sorts of characters, friends and relatives,
some of whom were keen to profit from his name. They include his grandson Mandla
Mandela, a petty tribal chief who was widely reported to have pre-emptively sold to a
television network the broadcast rights to his grandfather’s funeral.
Mandela leaves a proud legacy of freedom and human rights, of tolerance and
reconciliation. Alas, some of his compatriots are trampling on it. I cannot speak for him
and say he was pained by what he saw happening to his country in his last days. I had not
spoken with him for years before he died. But I can say that the Mandela I knew would
have been pained.
Zakes Mda, a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, is the author of
“Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider.”
Mandela Taught A Continent To Forgive
By JOHN DRAMANI MAHAMA
December 5, 2013
ACCRA, Ghana — For years, it seemed as though only one photograph of Nelson
Mandela existed. It showed him with bushy hair, plump cheeks, and a look of serious
determination. But it was a black-and-white shot, so grainy it looked ancient — a visual
documentation of an era and an individual whose time had long passed.
In the early 1960s, fed up with the systematic oppression and inhumane treatment of
indigenous Africans, Mandela successfully proposed a plan of violent tactics and guerrilla
warfare, essentially forming the military wing of the African National Congress. Within a
few years, this martial division, aptly named Umkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation,
was discovered and its leadership detained. In 1964 Mandela was found guilty of
sabotage, and ordered to serve a life sentence.
During his trial, in lieu of testimony, he delivered a speech from the dock. “I have
cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in
harmony and with equal opportunities,” he said. “It is an ideal which I hope to live for
and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
I was 5 years old when Nelson Mandela became prisoner number 46664, and was
banished to spend the remainder of his years on Robben Island, five square miles of land
floating just north of Cape Town. Robben Island had been the site of a colony for lepers,
a lunatic asylum and a series of prisons. It was a place of exile, punishment and isolation,
a place where people were sent and then forgotten.
But the haunting image in that photograph did not let us forget. In the 1970s, I was a
member of the African Youth Command, an activist group that protested against social
and political injustices. We idolized Mandela. We hung posters of that photograph in our
dormitory rooms; we printed it on pamphlets. We refused to let Mandela fade into
irrelevance; we marched, held demonstrations, staged concerts and boycotts, signed
petitions and issued press statements. We did everything we could to decry the evils of
apartheid and keep his name on people’s tongues. We even burned effigies of John
Vorster, Jimmy Kruger and other proponents of that government-sanctioned white
supremacy.
Freedom on the African continent was a reality for which we were willing to fight.
Nevertheless, I think we’d resigned ourselves to the likelihood that Mandela would
remain a prisoner until his death, and South Africans would not experience equality until
well after our lifetimes. Then on Feb. 11, 1990, the miraculous happened; Mandela was
released.
The world was spellbound. We wondered what we would do if we were in his shoes.
We all waited for an indescribable rage, a call for retribution that any reasonable mind
would have understood. Twenty-seven years of his life, gone. Day after day of hard labor
in a limestone quarry, chipping away at white rock under a bright and merciless sun —
without benefit of protective eyewear — had virtually destroyed his tear ducts and, for
years, robbed Mandela even of his ability to cry.
Yet, the man insisted on forgiveness. “To go to prison because of your convictions,”
he said, “and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is
an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.”
By the time I finally came face to face with Nelson Mandela, he had already been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and elected president of a land in which he and all other
black people had previously been refused suffrage. He had become an icon, not only of
hope, but also of the possibility for healing.
I was relatively new to politics then, a member of Parliament and minister of
communications. It was my first time in Cape Town. I had stayed out late with friends
and was waiting to take the lift up to my hotel room. When the doors opened, there was
Mandela. I took a step back, and froze. As he exited, Mandela glanced in my direction
and nodded. I could not return the gesture. I couldn’t move, not even to blink. I just stood
there in awe, thinking: here was the man for whom we had marched, sung and wept; the
man from the black-and-white photograph. Here was the man who had created a new
moral compass for South Africa and, as a matter of course, the entire continent.
It is no coincidence that in the years since Mandela’s release so much of Africa has
turned toward democracy and the rule of law. His utilization of peace as a vehicle of
liberation showed Africa that if we were to move beyond the divisiveness caused by
colonization, and the pain of our self-inflicted wounds, compassion and forgiveness must
play a role in governance. Countries, like people, must acknowledge the trauma they have
experienced, and they must find a way to reconcile, to make what was broken whole
again.
That night, as I watched Mandela walk past me, I understood that his story, the long
walk to freedom, was also Africa’s story. The indignation that once permeated our
continent has been replaced by inspiration. The undercurrent of pessimism resulting from
the onslaught of maladies — wars, coups, disease, poverty and oppression — has given
way to a steadily increasing sense of possibility.
It wasn’t just Nelson Mandela who was transformed during those years of his
imprisonment. We all were. And Africa is all the better because of that.
John Dramani Mahama is the president of Ghana and the author of the memoir “My
First Coup d’État: And Other True Stories From the Lost Decades of Africa.”
Obama’s Path Was Shaped By
Mandela’s Story
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
December 5, 2013
WASHINGTON — Without Nelson Mandela, there might never have been a President
Obama.
That is the strong impression conveyed from Mr. Obama, whose political and
personal bonds to Mr. Mandela, the former South African president, transcended their
single face-to-face meeting, which took place at a hotel here in 2005.
It was the fight for racial justice in South Africa by Mr. Mandela that first inspired a
young Barack Obama to public service, the American president recalled on Thursday
evening after hearing that Mr. Mandela, the 95-year-old world icon, had died. Mr. Obama
delivered his first public speech, in 1979, at an anti-apartheid rally.
Mr. Obama’s first moment on the public stage was the start of a life and political
career imbued with the kind of hope that Mr. Mandela personified. “The day that he was
released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided
by their hopes and not by their fears,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.
“Hope” would eventually become the mantra for his ascension to the White House.
On two continents separated by thousands of miles and vastly different political
cultures, the lives of the two men rarely intersected. Weeks before their only meeting, Mr.
Obama wrote Mr. Mandela a letter that Oprah Winfrey carried to South Africa. As Mr.
Obama later emerged as a national political leader, he and Mr. Mandela occasionally
traded phone calls or letters.
But the trajectories of the two leaders, who broke political and social barriers in
their own countries, were destined to be connected, even if mostly from afar. Mr. Obama
wrote about Mr. Mandela as a distant but inspirational figure in the forward to Mr.
Mandela’s 2010 book, “Conversations With Myself.”
“His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they
could on behalf of human progress,” Mr. Obama wrote. “In the most modest of ways, I
was one of those people who tried to answer his call.”
Mr. Mandela and Mr. Obama served as the first black leaders of their nations and
both were looked to by some as the vehicles for reconciliation between polarized
electorates. Both won the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for their charisma and their ability to
inspire and communicate.
Mr. Obama often referred to Mr. Mandela by the former president’s clan name,
Madiba — a term of affection for the aging, beloved leader in South Africa. On
Thursday, Mr. Obama spoke of the goals that Mr. Mandela worked decades for, and
eventually achieved.
“A free South Africa at peace with itself — that’s an example to the world, and
that’s Madiba’s legacy to the nation he loved,” Mr. Obama said from the White House as
news of Mr. Mandela’s death spread.
But the American president regularly shied from direct comparisons with Mr.
Mandela. Mr. Obama often noted privately and publicly that his sacrifices would never
compare to Mr. Mandela’s.
Aides to Mr. Obama said he was uncomfortable when people drew parallels
between them, as they often did. Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary,
accompanied Mr. Obama on his first visit to the tiny prison cell on Robben Island where
Mr. Mandela had been jailed for years.
“Having stood in that space that day, you realize that whatever analogies you might
draw, that Mandela is and always will be a singular figure in the history of the world,”
Mr. Gibbs recalled this summer. “I don’t think the president would look at even the
hardest days as equal even to the very best day that he might have spent inside of Robben
Island.”
And yet, the struggle by Mr. Mandela has been a beacon to Mr. Obama, drawing
him to South Africa twice to pay homage.
The last trip came in June of this year, as Mr. Obama traveled to Senegal, Tanzania
and South Africa on a visit overshadowed by the possibility that the ailing Mr. Mandela
might die at any moment.
On the trip, Mr. Obama did not visit with Mr. Mandela, who was fighting a lung
infection. Officials said a visit would have been disruptive and unhelpful to Mr.
Mandela’s recovery. Instead, Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, visited with
Mr. Mandela’s family.
“I don’t need a photo-op, and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way
obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned about Nelson Mandela’s condition,” Mr.
Obama said at the time.
During the trip, Mr. Obama reflected repeatedly on the impact Mr. Mandela had on
him, and people around the world. Moments before he again stood in the cell on Robben
Island, Mr. Obama told his daughters of Mr. Mandela’s legacy.
“One thing you guys might not be aware of is that the idea of political nonviolence
first took root here in South Africa because Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer here in South
Africa,” the president told them. “When he went back to India the principles ultimately
led to Indian independence, and what Gandhi did inspired Martin Luther King.”
In a speech to students at Cape Town University, Mr. Obama lauded Mr. Mandela
as a leader whose “spirit could never be imprisoned” and a man who serves as an
inspiration for all.
“Nelson Mandela showed us that one man’s courage can move the world,” Mr.
Obama told the students. “And he calls on us to make choices that reflect not our fears,
but our hopes — in our own lives, and in the lives of our communities and our countries.”
The 2005 meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mandela was brief, just a few
minutes, as a young American senator shook the hands of an elderly man. The moment
was captured in a photograph taken by Mr. Obama’s driver. It shows Mr. Obama,
silhouetted against a bright window, holding hands with Mr. Mandela, who is reclining
on a couch.
One copy of the photograph has sat for years on a desk in Mr. Mandela’s office in
South Africa. Another copy is on Mr. Obama’s desk in the Oval Office.
Mandela’s Death Stirs Sense Of Loss
Around The World
By NICHOLAS KULISH, LYDIA POLGREEN and ALAN COWELL
December 6, 2013
SOWETO, South Africa — The mood was more festive than funereal. Outside Nelson
Mandela’s former home in Soweto on Friday, crowds sang, chanted and danced. People
carried posters emblazoned with his famous quotations. Children ran through the streets
holding up pictures of the former president’s face torn from the morning’s newspapers.
“We love you, Papa Mandela,” they cried.
Eunice Ngakane, 40, from North West Province, said she and her friends were going
to spend the whole night on Vilakazi Street, remembering the national hero who had died
the night before. Then they would “freshen up” in the morning and come right back
again.
“When Africa cries, Africa sings,” said Japie Molatedi, 55, who described himself
as a “typical Sowetan.”
Samantha Nkabinde, 28, a financial analyst in Johannesburg, said it was only fitting
for the mourning to take place in such a public fashion. “He never sat behind closed doors
or walls,” she said. “He went out among the people, touched so many people.”
The crowd sang, “Mandela, you’re my president.”
In the government’s first announcement of a schedule for ceremonies that are likely
to draw vast numbers of world dignitaries and less exalted mourners, President Jacob
Zuma said Friday that Mr. Mandela’s body would lie in state from Wednesday to Friday
after a memorial at a huge World Cup soccer stadium in Soweto on Tuesday. He will be
buried in his childhood village, Qunu, in the Eastern Cape region, on Dec. 15, Mr. Zuma
said.
The White House said that President Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama,
would visit South Africa next week “to participate in memorial events.”
As flags flew at half-staff across South Africa, words of loss, blended with
memories of inspiration, were offered by Mr. Obama in Washington, members of the
British royal family and many who saw Mr. Mandela as an exemplar of a broader
struggle.
“A giant among men has passed away,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India
said. “This is as much India’s loss as South Africa’s.”
As public figures reached for superlatives to describe Mr. Mandela, Prime Minister
David Cameron of Britain declared in London, “A great light has gone out in the world.”
Pope Francis praised “the steadfast commitment shown by Nelson Mandela in promoting
the human dignity of all the nation’s citizens.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said
Mr. Mandela was “committed to the end of his days to the ideals of humanism and
justice.”
Speaking in Cape Town, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, himself a towering figure in
the struggle against apartheid, asked rhetorically whether Mr. Mandela was “the
exception to prove the rule.”
“I say no, emphatically,” he said, adding that Mr. Mandela “embodied our hopes
and dreams, symbolized our enormous potential.”
Helen Zille, the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, said that South
Africans owed their sense of belonging to a single family to Mr. Mandela. “That is his
legacy,” she said. “It is why there is an unparalleled outpouring of national grief at his
passing.”
The tone of the tributes reflected broad sentiments crossing racial, national, religious
and political lines. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike rushed to
embrace his legacy. In China, the government hailed him as a liberator from imperialism,
even as dissidents embraced him as a symbol of resistance against repression.
In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, accused by the political opposition of heinous
crimes in a nearly three-year-old civil war, said Mr. Mandela was “an inspiration in the
values of love and human brotherhood.”
In South Africa, people of all races gathered at Mr. Mandela’s home, laying
wreaths, singing freedom songs, whispering prayers and performing the shuffling toyitoyi dance in his honor. People came together in a way that seems increasingly rare in a
nation confronting the everyday worries of a struggling economy, incessant allegations of
government corruption and a sinking sense that a nation born two decades ago into such
promise is slipping into despair.
“It is one of those days when everyone is united again,” said Reginald Hoskins, who
brought his two young children to Mr. Mandela’s house on Friday morning. “That is what
Nelson Mandela stood for, and we need to honor that in our lives every day.”
For those who knew him best, the knowledge that he has gone slowly seeped in.
“I never thought, knowing him for close to 40 years, that I would ever speak of him
in the past tense,” said Tokyo Sexwale, a senior member of the African National
Congress who served prison time on Robben Island alongside Mr. Mandela. “The passing
of an icon like Nelson Mandela signifies the end of an era.”
The tumult of tributes to Mr. Mandela reflected his ability to forge bonds around the
world, and how many leaders and public figures sought him out.
“His passion for freedom and justice created new hope for generations of oppressed
people worldwide,” said former President Jimmy Carter.
Musicians, clerics and sports figures joined those offering accolades after Mr.
Mandela’s death was announced late Thursday, with a leading South African cricketer, A.
B. de Villiers, echoing Archbishop Tutu’s hope for a future free of renewed racial and
social division.
“Let us now, more than ever, stick together as a nation,” Mr. de Villiers said. “We
owe him that much.”
Mr. Mandela was closely linked with sports, both as a boxer in his youth and, after
becoming South Africa’s first black president, as a supporter of the national Springbok
rugby team — once a symbol of white exclusivism — which triumphed in the 1995
World Cup.
“He taught us forgiveness on a grand scale,” Muhammad Ali said in a statement.
“His was a spirit born free, destined to soar above the rainbows. Today his spirit is
soaring through the heavens. He is now forever free.”
In the Middle East, Israeli and Palestinian leaders alike offered tributes to a man
who had been a staunch supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, but who had
also recognized what he called “the legitimacy of Zionism as a Jewish nationalism.”
On Friday, Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader imprisoned since 2002, declared
in a statement: “From within my prison cell, I tell you our freedom seems possible
because you reached yours,” according to a translation released by the P.L.O. At the same
time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called Mr. Mandela “a paragon of our
time” and a “moral leader of the first order.”
When Cliff Rosen, an urban farmer in Johannesburg, awoke Friday to the news that
Mr. Mandela had died, he went out to the sunflowers growing in his garden and cut down
the tallest one.
“A special flower for a special man,” said Mr. Rosen, 40, as he wired the towering,
six-foot stalk to the fence surrounding the spontaneous memorial that has sprung up just
outside the home where Mr. Mandela died.
“I chose this flower because he towered over us all,” Mr. Rosen said. “Today it feels
like the world got a little bit smaller.”
Nicholas Kulish reported from Soweto, Lydia Polgreen from Johannesburg and Alan
Cowell from London. Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Jerusalem, Rick
Gladstone from New York and Michael D. Shear from Washington.
For Mandela, Reverence, But Criticism,
Too
By RICK LYMAN
December 6, 2013
JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela was deeply respected in his homeland, and
almost worshiped by many for his definitive role in ending white rule and installing
multiracial democracy.
But he was never above reproach, political observers say.
When Andile Mngxitama, a black-consciousness advocate and frequent critic of Mr.
Mandela, fired yet another broadside at the former leader before he died — comparing
him unfavorably to neighboring Zimbabwe’s authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe —
it certainly caught the attention of South Africa’s political class.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say Mandela’s leadership style, characterized by
accommodation with the oppressors, will be forgotten, if not rejected within a
generation,” he wrote in June.
That is not, to say the least, the mainstream view here.
“The point is that it was not a popular position, but no one beat him up for it,” said
Steven Friedman, a University of Johannesburg political science professor and director of
the Center for the Study of Democracy.
“There isn’t this kind of mania about him here that there is in some quarters
overseas,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Mandela. “This sanctified image of him has always
been more extreme elsewhere in the world than the local attitude.”
Indeed, the picture that the world had of Mr. Mandela was as an almost saintly
figure, the faultless “father of the nation.” Images of the heartfelt prayer gatherings and
candlelight vigils in recent months as South Africans came to terms with his death have
reinforced that view.
But Mr. Mandela was a politician, among the most transformative of his era, but still
a politician. As such, he went through the usual ups and downs that characterize any
political career.
“Nelson Mandela was not a saint. We would dishonor his memory if we treated him
as if he was one,” Pierre de Vos, a law professor, wrote on Friday in The Daily Maverick,
an online magazine in South Africa, arguing that Mr. Mandela’s genius lay in his
willingness to bend and compromise. “Like all truly exceptional human beings, he was a
person of flesh and blood, with his own idiosyncrasies, his own blind spots and
weaknesses.”
Sometimes, though, the criticisms came in oblique, roundabout ways.
“Often, criticism of Mandela was disguised as criticism of others,” said Adam
Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Some of
the things that his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was criticized for were actually things that
Mandela had initiated or supported.”
Those who were critical of things like the government’s slow reaction to the AIDS
crisis or the halting steps toward economic equality often heaped their abuse on Mr.
Mbeki without acknowledging that Mr. Mandela also shared responsibility for the
slowness.
Even officials in the governing party, the African National Congress, would often
talk about mistakes that “we” had made, when they were actually Mr. Mandela’s own
initiatives, Mr. Habib said. They simply felt that it would be more palatable among their
supporters to disguise the true target of their criticism.
Still, as Mr. Mandela’s life drew to a close, there were clearly efforts from all
political corners to define his legacy and claim a portion of it. And some saw political
calculation at work.
“Who really gains from the elevation of a political figure into an untouchable icon?”
Anthony Butler, a University of Cape Town political science professor, wrote in his
column in the June 28 issue of South Africa’s Business Day newspaper. “Not Mandela
himself, who does not need our plaudits. The mythmakers who claim that a leader is
beyond fault are ultimately seeking to shield a whole political class, and not just one
individual, from the public scrutiny upon which democracy depends.”
Mr. Mandela was certainly seen here, as he was abroad, as a figure of major
historical importance. Even the dwindling bands of white right-wingers who have little
good to say about him share that view.
But that does not mean he did not draw his share of fire, much of it coming from
other corners of the anti-apartheid movement. Some criticized him for what they saw as
an overeagerness to placate the country’s white power elite in the transition to nonracial
democracy in the early 1990s and, thereafter, with being more interested in keeping
economic power brokers happy, albeit with a few new black faces in the group, than in
delivering economic equality to the vast majority of those still living in poverty.
“He has been criticized on chat shows, in newspaper columns and by other political
leaders for his emphasis on reconciliation in the early days of the new democracy, saying
this often came at the expense of economic equality,” Mr. Habib said.
Mr. Mandela also drew fire for his failures, acknowledged by some of his own
closest colleagues, as an administrator. The skills that helped him transform the nation
were not the same ones required to run a government, some argued.
Others questioned his decision to prioritize tranquility over justice, arguing that his
embrace of a reconciliation process left human rights crimes unpunished.
“The criticism has been that he made too many concessions, while the real victims
of apartheid still have to live with the consequences,” Mr. Habib said. “He is a global
icon, a great leader, but he was not perfect.”
There were limits, though, to how much criticism the society, and the ruling part,
could tolerate — and from whom.
In a widely noted 2010 interview with Nadira Naipaul in The London Evening
Standard, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela leveled blistering criticisms at her ex-husband.
“Mandela let us down,” she is quoted as saying. “He agreed to a bad deal for the
blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside.”
Outraged, African National Congress leaders ordered an immediate investigation
and, shortly thereafter, issued a statement calling the entire interview a “fabrication.”
Mr. Mandela was also known for his vanity. Ahmed Kathrada, an anti-apartheid
activist who spent decades in prison with Mr. Mandela, said that late in his imprisonment,
when the conditions had vastly improved from the early days when he had to work in a
quarry, the future president became so focused on obtaining a favored brand of hair oil
that he pestered every visitor to find some for him, even luminaries like the anti-apartheid
activist Helen Sussman.
“He was fixated on Pantene hair oil,” Mr. Kathrada said in an interview on Friday.
“When he ordered it from the warden and was told that it was no longer manufactured, he
became convinced they were lying to him.” Eventually two bottles were scrounged for
him.
Once the political squabbles of Mandela’s era fade, though, the museum-approved,
sanctified image of him is likely to take firmer hold, observers say, though it may not
grow as strong as the one of him abroad.
“To idealize a great political leader — to try to take that person out of politics and
the humanity out of that person — is in the end a futile or even contradictory endeavor,”
Mr. Butler wrote.
Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting.
DealBook: How Mandela Shifted Views
On Freedom Of Markets
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
December 9, 2013
When you think about Nelson Mandela, you probably think about freedom — free
people, free country, free speech. What may be overshadowed by Mr. Mandela’s
extraordinary legacy was his complicated journey to support free markets and a free
economy.
When Mr. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he told his followers in the
African National Congress that he believed in the nationalization of South Africa’s main
businesses. “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the
policy of the A.N.C., and a change or modification of our views in this regard is
inconceivable,” he said at the time.
Two years later, however, Mr. Mandela changed his mind, embracing capitalism,
and charted a new economic course for his country.
The story of Mr. Mandela’s evolving economic view is eye-opening: It happened in
January 1992 during a trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World
Economic Forum. Mr. Mandela was persuaded to support an economic framework for
South Africa based on capitalism and globalization after a series of conversations with
other world leaders.
“They changed my views altogether,” Mr. Mandela told Anthony Sampson, his
friend and the author of “Mandela: The Authorized Biography.” “I came home to say:
‘Chaps, we have to choose. We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we
modify our own attitude and get investment.”
Inside South Africa, Mr. Mandela’s quick reversal was viewed with skepticism, and
questions have long persisted about whether he was somehow pressured by the West to
open up the country’s economy.
However, according to Tito Mboweni, a former governor of the South African
Reserve Bank, who accompanied Mr. Mandela to Davos, Mr. Mandela’s change of heart
was genuine.
When they arrived in Davos, where Mr. Mandela was scheduled to speak, “We were
presented with a speech, prepared by some well-meaning folks at the A.N.C. office” in
Johannesburg that focused on “nationalization as A.N.C. policy,” Mr. Mboweni
recounted in a letter to the Sunday Independent newspaper in South Africa late last year.
“We discussed this at some length and decided that the content was inappropriate for a
Davos audience.”
“So I drafted a short message for the audience,” he added. “That message was about
how the A.N.C. intended to achieve social justice for the majority black people: decent
housing, health care, decent education, public transport, access to clean water, sanitation
and access to what I called ‘the means of production,’ that is, the creation of a black
business class. That is all. No capitulation.”
But as the five-day conference of high-level speed-dating wore on, Mr. Mandela
soon decided he needed to reconsider his long-held views: “Madiba then had some very
interesting meetings with the leaders of the Communist Parties of China and Vietnam,”
Mr. Mboweni wrote, using Mr. Mandela’s clan name. “They told him frankly as follows:
‘We are currently striving to privatize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into
our economies. We are Communist Party governments, and you are a leader of a national
liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?’ ”
“It was those decisive moments which made him think about the need for our
movement to seriously rethink the issue,” Mr. Mboweni said.
Mr. Mandela’s push toward free markets opened up his country to become the
fastest growing in Africa and eventually brought in billions of dollars of investment from
large companies outside the country. Barclays, for example, acquired Absa, South
Africa’s largest consumer bank, in 2005. Iscor, the country’s largest steel maker, was sold
to Lakshmi Mittal’s LNM in 2004. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China bought a
big stake in Standard Bank, South Africa’s largest financial services company, in 2008.
And Massmart, a South African supermarket chain, sold a majority stake to Walmart in
2011.
Mr. Mandela himself also embraced the big money charity that can only be
delivered by billionaire capitalists. He became a friend of Bill and Melinda Gates, who
have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the region; Theodore J. Forstmann, the
buyout executive and philanthropist; and Richard Branson, the entrepreneur, among
others.
But for all of Mr. Mandela’s embrace of capitalism and free markets, as
demonstrated though his policy called GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution),
the results raise more questions than answers about its success.
South Africa has certainly grown, but at an annual 3.2 percent clip from 1993 to
2012, far below other emerging countries like China and India. And the gap between the
haves and have-nots is now higher than it was when Mr. Mandela became president.
Inequality in South Africa is a real and growing issue.
South Africa’s National Planning Commission has said that in 1995, the proportion
of its citizens living below the poverty line of $2 a day was about 53 percent; the figure
has gone as high as 58 percent and as low as only 48 percent.
The official unemployment rate hovers at about 25 percent and may, in truth, be
much higher. According to Bloomberg News, the average white household earns six
times what a black one does. Among young black men, unemployment is close to 50
percent. Whites still hold nearly three-quarters of all management jobs.
“There is still a war between capital and labor,” Irvin Jim, the general secretary of
the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, said on the South African
Broadcasting Corporation’s The Big Debate program in September, according to The
Africa Report magazine. “Nothing has changed. During the struggle, workers fought for a
living wage, but the apartheid wage gap is still there.” The average white wage is 19,000
rand ($1,900) a month, he said, but for blacks it is just 2,500 rand. “What does that buy?
Inferior squatter camps, inferior goods, inferior everything.”
Mr. Mandela may have ended apartheid and years of awful violence, but his dream
of creating a country that, as he said, is “a democratic and free society in which all
persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities” may still remain a dream
that capitalism and free markets have yet to solve.
Andrew Ross Sorkin is the editor at large of DealBook.
World Bids Farewell In The Land
Mandela Freed
By LYDIA POLGREEN, NICHOLAS KULISH and ALAN COWELL
December 10, 2013
SOWETO, South Africa — For a day, the world came to Nelson Mandela’s adopted
hometown. There were celebrities: Bono, Naomi Campbell, Charlize Theron. There were
kings-in-waiting: Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Crown Prince Felipe of Spain.
There were more presidents and prime ministers than at just about any other setting
outside a United Nations General Assembly.
It was a singular gathering to celebrate a life virtually unmatched in modern times,
and the assemblage of allies and adversaries reflected Mr. Mandela’s enduring legacy of
forgiveness and reconciliation, as well the messy and sometimes clashing global
allegiances of his party, the African National Congress.
President Obama gave a eulogy that stirred the crowd, only to be followed later by
President Raúl Castro of Cuba. The two even shared an unexpected handshake. Old
friends met happily in the V.I.P. area, while old enemies, like former Prime Minister
Tony Blair of Britain and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, avoided each other.
“It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well; to
show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is
not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion and
generosity and truth,” Mr. Obama said in his remarks, referring to Mr. Mandela by his
clan name. “He changed laws, but he also changed hearts.”
Sheets of driving rain swept across this former segregated township — an urban
sprawl within sight of the glittery high rises of downtown Johannesburg — keeping many
mourners away from the vast soccer stadium where Mr. Mandela made his last public
appearance, during the World Cup in 2010. Still, tens of thousands of other South
Africans, swathed in their national colors, came out to celebrate Mr. Mandela, who died
on Thursday at the age of 95, some stomping their feet as protesters did during the
movement that led to his release from prison in 1990 after 27 years of incarceration.
“Even heaven is crying,” one woman in the crowd declared as the deluge continued.
“We have lost an angel.”
The day began with a joyful noise.
Nothando Dube, 31, left her home in Soweto at dawn, joining a throng to sing old
songs of the struggle against apartheid, waiting for the memorial to the man who brought
democracy to South Africa and became its first black president. It was a moment for a
country that at times still seems deeply divided by race, class, religion and tribe to join
together once again as the Rainbow Nation of Mr. Mandela’s dreams.
“It feels different when you sing it now as a free young person,” said Ms. Dube,
wearing an A.N.C. beret. “You try to reach that feeling, that emotion they were feeling
when they sang that song in prison.”
But a few hours later, her mood had darkened. As jeers cascaded from the crowd
aimed at South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, Ms. Dube was one of many
rolling their arms in the gesture known the world over as a call to substitute a failing
player in a soccer match. It was an unmistakable message to Mr. Zuma, who faces
corruption charges and deep worries about his governing of the country.
“You don’t want to be airing your laundry in front of everybody, but people wanted
to send a message,” she said. “The man on the street feels there’s a lot that should have
been done by now to fix the country.”
Like many around the world, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon,
praised Mr. Mandela’s ability to look beyond past wrongs, bridge divisions and build a
new nation, inspiring his own country and many others far beyond its borders.
“He showed the awesome power of forgiveness — and of connecting people with
each other and with the true meaning of peace,” Mr. Ban said in his remarks. “That was
his unique gift, and that was the lesson he shared with all humankind. He has done it
again. Look around this stadium and this stage. We see leaders representing many points
of view, and people from all walks of life. All here, all united.”
But what had been planned as a moment to reunite a nation struggling with a
slumping economy, widening inequality, rampant corruption and deep political divisions
ultimately showcased the broad discontent with South African politics today. Many
attending the service booed and hooted at Mr. Zuma, who has for many come to
symbolize all the lost promise of South Africa’s peaceful transition from racist white rule
to nonracial democracy.
“I don’t own a house even though I am always struggling,” said George Tshotlego
Mikobeni, 27 and unemployed, as he watched Mr. Zuma on stage at the memorial.
“He is not like Madiba,” Mr. Mikobeni said. “He only cares about himself. This
man spent all our money on his house, so many millions,” he continued, referring to $27
million on so-called security upgrades to Mr. Zuma’s home, which were paid for with
government money but included things that had nothing to do with security, according to
a preliminary investigation.
The mood reflected the prevailing feeling in South Africa, where basic government
services like education, electricity and water are failing, and joblessness among young
men like Mr. Mikobeni is endemic. Allegations of corruption against top officials like
Mr. Zuma, along with the killing of 34 striking miners in Marikana last year, have fed a
widespread perception that South Africa’s current leaders have drifted far from the
masses they claim to represent. As Mr. Zuma spoke, many began leaving the stadium,
streaming down concrete ramps and into the relentless rain.
“Sometimes I ask myself, why aren’t things better?” Mr. Mikobeni said. “What
happened?”
At times, the proceedings seemed to be more about geopolitics than about national
mourning. China, a vital trade partner for South Africa, sent its vice president, Li
Yuanchao, instead of its president or another official more recognizable abroad. He was
nonetheless granted a prime speaking slot as one of only a few foreign leaders who made
remarks, though few in the audience seemed to be able to identify him — or most of the
other leaders.
But for many who streamed into the stadium, it was a chance to say goodbye to a
beloved figure of whom everyone seemed to have a personal memory.
Joyce Simelane and Meisie Mello traveled together to a stadium in Soweto nearly a
quarter-century ago. It was 1990, and the two sisters were filled with excitement and
anticipation because they were going to see Mr. Mandela, newly released from prison,
speak to the people.
“We were overwhelmed to see him there,” said Ms. Simelane, 60. “I grew up
learning about the A.N.C., Mandela, Robben Island.”
“He changed our lives,” said Ms. Mello, 54.
They moved out of the township. Their children could attend mixed schools with
white teachers. Because of Mr. Mandela, they said, their lives were entirely different from
what they otherwise would have been. Ms. Simelane has hosted students from Alaska,
Italy and Brazil. Her daughter has gone to study in Chile, spoken fluent Spanish and
worked as a tour guide.
So they rose at 5:30 a.m. and made their way, together again, back to Soweto, to a
new, top-of-the-line stadium, but this time with a sadder mission — to bid Mr. Mandela
goodbye.
“We’re going to miss him,” Ms. Simelane said. “Today we feel he needs to rest.
He’s old. He went through so much.”
Lydia Polgreen and Nicholas Kulish reported from Soweto, South Africa, and Alan
Cowell from London.
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