That’s what we trained for.”23

‘Hani became the leading spokesperson for MK soldiers who felt that the leadership was too complacent. After writing a formal petition, Hani found himself in hot water with the camp leadership and he was detained a while by his own organisation. He was, however, released when his plight came to the attention of the more senior ANC leaders, notably Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo.*

‘Hani returned to South Africa in August 1990, a hero to a great majority of South Africans. Several opinion polls at the time showed that he was easily the second most popular politician in the country.24 In December 1991, he became general secretary of the SACP.

‘Hani [spent] the last years of his life tirelessly addressing meetings throughout the length and breadth of South Africa, in village gatherings, shop stewards’ [meetings], councils and street committee [meetings]. He lent all his authority and military prestige to defend negotiations, often speaking patiently to very sceptical youths or communities suffering the brunt of Third Force violence.*

‘In their amnesty application to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the two convicted killers of Hani – Janusz Waluś and Clive Derby-Lewis – admitted that they had hoped to derail negotiations by unleashing a wave of race hatred and civil war.† It is a tribute to the maturity of South Africans of all persuasions, and it is a tribute to the memory of Hani in particular, that his death, tragically but factually, finally brought focus and urgency to our negotiated settlement.’25

*   *   *

If the steps taken to hammer out an agreement about the date of elections had been onerous and strewn with casualties, the attainment of a negotiated settlement was proving to be an even thornier issue. In 1993, as the elections approached, the possibility of a dangerous, armed right-wing revolt was taking shape. Although huge obstacles had been removed, the potential for renewed violence and disruption of the election was only too real. The fragile conditions for an election of a legitimate Government of National Unity (GNU) had only just been put in place and needed consolidating.

The situation was of great concern for Mandela, who writes: ‘A dark cloud was hanging over South Africa, which threatened to block and even reverse all the gains South Africans had made in regard to the country’s peaceful transformation.’26

Chris Hani’s body was barely cold in his grave when, almost a month after his killing, four former generals of the South African Defence Force (SADF), including the widely respected former army chief Constand Viljoen, established a committee of generals, the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF).‡ This could have been a reaction to the widespread damage in the wake of Hani’s murder, where media reported that there were some white victims among the more than fifteen people killed on the day of the funeral. The generals’ stated intention was to unify Afrikaner elements disillusioned with De Klerk’s National Party and agitate for a volkstaat, an Afrikaner homeland. Most of the press, more volubly the Weekly Mail, saw this initiative as part of a route towards secession.27

Mandela was receiving intelligence reports ‘to the effect that the right-wing Afrikaners had decided to stop the forthcoming elections by violence. To be on the safe side, the president of an organisation must carefully check the accuracy of such reports. I did so, and when I discovered that they were accurate, I decided to act.’28

According to the historian Hermann Giliomee, Mandela had learnt that ‘Viljoen planned to disrupt the elections, have De Klerk removed as leader and restart the negotiations.’29 Some believed that he could raise 50,000 men from the Active Citizen Force or reservists and also some defence force units. In his book The Afrikaners, Giliomee describes how two important generals debated the implications of armed resistance:

In a briefing, General Georg Meiring, Chief of the Defence Force, warned the government and the ANC of the ghastly consequences of Viljoen’s opposing the election.* To dissuade Viljoen, for whom he had ‘the highest regard’, Meiring had several meetings with him. At one of them Viljoen said: ‘You and I and our men can take this country in an afternoon,’ to which Meiring replied: ‘Yes, that is so, but what do we do in the morning after the coup?’ The white–black demographic balance, the internal foreign pressures and all the intractable problems would still be there.30

Mandela knew better than to underestimate an opponent hell-bent on wreaking havoc, especially one that perceived itself to be on a just crusade to preserve vanishing glories. In his quest for a solution he might have been thinking of some of the stalwarts, like Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel peace laureate whose stewardship of the ANC had been at a most difficult time in the 1960s.† What would he have made of this situation? Or Oliver Tambo, his friend and comrade who died on 24 April, barely two weeks after Chris Hani’s burial – what course of action would he have advocated? In making his decision, however, Mandela must have been hearing echoes of Martin Luther King, Jr’s lecture on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

‘Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral,’ Dr King said. ‘I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.’31

In forestalling this destruction, Mandela knew he had to enlist the help of someone whom the right-wingers held in high esteem. In the townships, it was practice to negotiate with the bully’s big brother to get some respite.

‘I flew down to the Wilderness,’ he writes, ‘the retirement home of the former President P. W. Botha, [and] reminded him of the communiqué we jointly issued when I was still in prison in July 1989. In that communiqué we pledged to work together for peace in our country.’32

The twenty-five-minute drive from George Airport to Wilderness is a beautiful journey. There are beaches, passes, pristine rivers and the famous arched railway bridge that traverses the Kaaimans River, which washes into the sea at Wilderness. This scenic view is interrupted by the sudden appearance of informal housing, which spreads along the N2 highway. It being a Saturday afternoon, Mandela would have seen the people milling around and the traffic on the road.

P. W. Botha’s retirement home, called Die Anker (The Anchor), is on farmland almost contiguous with valuable, protected wetland and overlooks the lakes that stretch from Wilderness all the way to Sedgefield. This, Mandela must have thought, is exactly the kind of privilege that the right wing wishes to hold on to, and will fight tooth and nail to keep as the sole preserve of the volk.