But he had work to do. He had his meeting with P. W. Botha.

Mandela writes: ‘I informed him that the peace was now threatened by the right wing and asked him to intervene. He was cooperative and confirmed that Afrikaners were determined to stop the elections. But he added that he did not want to discuss the matter with me alone, and suggested that I bring President F. W. de Klerk, Ferdi Hartzenberg and the General.

‘I proposed that we should also include the leader of the extreme Afrikaner right wing, Eugene Terre’Blanche, on the grounds that he was a reckless demagogue who at that time could attract larger crowds than President De Klerk. On this issue, the former president was so negative that I dropped the subject.’*33

Mandela’s meeting with P. W. Botha in the latter’s own backyard could not have been without disagreements on specific issues. However, the cordiality reported in the press, which had characterised the two-hour meeting, had as much to do with realpolitik as with culture, where the two septuagenarians were closer in age and had a shared if divergent grasp of South Africa’s history. Mandela was also aware that P. W. Botha had himself taken on the mantle of reformer at the beginning of his presidency, when he made his famous call to his recalcitrant followers that they must adapt or die.34 In time his stance had hardened when his ill-advised tricameral parliament gave rise to resistance and the birth of the UDF. By then he had cast himself as an irascible and obdurate old man.

Reacting to his meeting with Mandela, commentators recognised that ‘while Mr Botha might have some residual influence with the far right, his far greater influence lies with the SADF, over which he presided with extravagant indulgence for many years and some of whose generals, past and present, reportedly maintain affectionate contact with him’.35

‘I returned to Johannesburg,’ Mandela writes, ‘and immediately telephoned President de Klerk and informed him of Botha’s invitation. He was as hostile to the whole idea of us meeting the former president as the latter was towards Terre’Blanche. I then approached the progressive Afrikaner theologian, Professor Johan Heyns, to bring together the General, Hartzenberg, Terre’Blanche and myself. Terre’Blanche was uncompromising and rejected any meeting with me, a communist, as he said.’36

Mandela was alive to the irony of an ex-prisoner mediating not only between the restive black majority and the government, but also between De Klerk and the bellicose right wing, which seemed prepared to set the whole country ablaze. The National Party’s backward policies throughout the decades had been a shrill dog whistle to which the dogs of hate were now responding in Ventersdorp, Terre’Blanche’s home town. Mandela had heard the rhetoric of scorn spewed by Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). He had seen how, in mid-1993, they had stormed the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, Gauteng, smashing through the glass doors in an armoured car to disrupt the talks.

Notwithstanding his acceptance of De Klerk as a negotiating partner, Mandela was somewhat unimpressed with his handling of the right-wing threat. In a prescient interview with TIME magazine five days after his release from prison in February 1990, when asked if President de Klerk’s fears of the threat of the right wing were justified, he stated emphatically that they were overblown. While the threat was real, he argued, De Klerk viewed it from the perspective of white South Africa, the Afrikaners in particular. If he would only embrace a non-racial South Africa and begin viewing challenges from black perspectives, then his fears would diminish.37

There is an expression much favoured in political mobilisation among black people of South Africa, which is used by almost all the language groups: Nguni, Sesotho and Xitsonga. In the Nguni version people say, ‘Sihamba nabahambayo’, which simply means in isiZulu ‘We take along with us those who are ready for the journey.’ ‘Ha e duma eyatsamaya’ (When the engine starts roaring, this vehicle is leaving) goes the refrain of a traditional song in Setswana – advice for ditherers to get on with it. For Mandela, the time had come for movement.

He had already identified the people to take on his journey. He was favourably disposed towards General Constand Viljoen. This was also based on practicalities because Mandela knew of Viljoen’s track record and the role he had played in the destabilisation of neighbouring states, especially against SWAPO, the Namibian national liberation movement and sister organisation of the ANC; Mandela was aware of the massacre of Namibian refugees by the SADF in Kassinga, Angola, on 4 May 1978.*

But, in line with his attitude towards De Klerk, Mandela saw the general as an ex-soldier who was also in search of a solution.

Mandela writes: ‘A meeting facilitated by the general’s twin brother, Braam, and stockbroker Jürgen Kögl took place between the general and his colleagues on the one hand, and Joe Nhlanhla, Penuell Maduna, Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki for the ANC, on the other. In this regard, these ANC leaders had a vision far ahead of their comrades.