They fully grasped the disastrous repercussions of the impending disaster.’38

There were numerous such bilateral meetings between the ANC and Viljoen’s delegation of retired generals and others, which included Ferdi Hartzenberg, Tienie Groenewald and Kobus Visser, operating under the umbrella of the AVF. Some meetings were facilitated by Mandela himself, others by Mbeki and the leadership of the ANC, including Joe Modise.† In the meeting with the AVF at his home in the leafy suburb of Houghton, Mandela played the genial host, pouring the men tea and charming General Viljoen by speaking to him in Afrikaans, the general’s mother tongue.

Mandela asked generals Viljoen and Hartzenberg ‘whether it was true that they were preparing to stop the elections by violent means. The General [Viljoen] was frank and admitted that this was correct, and that Afrikaners were arming, and that a bloody civil war was facing the country. I was shaken, but pretended that I was supremely confident of the victory of the liberation movement.

‘I told them,’ Mandela continues, ‘that they would give us a hard time since they were better trained militarily than us, commanded more devastating weaponry and, because of their resources, knew the country better than us. But I warned that at the end of that reckless gamble, they would be crushed. We were then on the verge of a historic victory after we inflicted a mortal blow to white supremacy. I pointed out this was not due to their consent; it was in spite of their opposition.’39

Mandela told the generals that the people of South Africa ‘had a just cause, numbers and the support of the international community. They had none of these. I appealed to them to stop their plans and to join the negotiations at the World Trade Centre. I spent some time persuading them, but they were adamant and I could not move them at all. Finally, when I was about to give up, the general softened a bit and said he could not approach his people with empty hands at such an advanced stage of their preparations.’40

Mandela had spent a great deal of time in prison thinking about the dilemma in which South Africa found itself. Much more, he saw his incarceration as a chance to know himself. In a letter dated 1 February 1975, he wrote to his wife, Winnie, who was then in Kroonstad Prison, telling her that prison was an ideal place to get to know oneself. ‘The cell,’ he wrote, ‘gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you.’41 It was here, too, that he had immersed himself in understanding the salient aspects of Afrikaner history and culture. He practised his Afrikaans in exchanges with prison officials, although, years later, he still couldn’t quite flatten the broad isiXhosa inflection in speech, which was as much a source of amusement for apartheid functionaries as for ANC members. It is a universally known fact that people love being addressed in their own language – and Mandela had grasped that long before it became a necessity.

What did the generals know of this black man who had survived them and who now parleyed with them? They must have known of the power he represented and the people behind him, but what did they know of him? That he was amiable, avuncular and smiled a lot – knowledge that might have been muddled up in their own memory of his origins and his championing of the armed struggle. It is also a truism that black people end up knowing more about white people than the other way round. Mandela realised that the generals represented, in the main, a demographic steeped in tradition, with a respect for authority, law and order – a Calvinist dogma – whose overwhelming majority consisted of members of the middle class; family men and women who simply wanted to be left alone. A good percentage had already embraced some form of reform, looking beyond the present and seeking solutions for a liveable future (witness their support of De Klerk’s options in the referendum). Conformity with societal mores and respect for law and order were ingrained in young Afrikaners, a view supported by Niël Barnard, who writes:

‘At school and in the hostel, as in the home environment, there were standards; there was order, discipline: bells rang when it was time to rise and shine … there were prayer meetings … and traditional folk games and dancing. We walked in single file to school, and for anything that looked the least bit like a serious transgression the cane was brought out … All those who were in positions of authority were respected; their word was law.’42

That De Klerk’s – and, to a large extent, Mandela’s – word was law had been accepted, albeit grudgingly, by a significant section of Afrikaners. The exceptions, such as Eugene Terre’Blanche, who operated outside the accepted code of conduct – as determined by Afrikaner authorities – were in many instances a source of embarrassment rather than of pride. Were these people ready to relinquish the comfort of their factories, businesses, homes, farms and schools to take up arms in defence of … what?

Notwithstanding all these considerations, Mandela had read enough about the history of conflict to know that language, culture and nationhood had been the source of devastating conflicts across the globe. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the old Soviet Union had already opened up a Pandora’s box of ethnic resurgences in Eastern Europe. The general’s conciliatory tone about his reluctance to go back to his people ‘with empty hands’ on the question of a volkstaat struck a chord with Mandela. He knew that, however right he might have been, it was supremely unwise to swell the numbers of opponents to him or to the envisaged democratic republic.

‘Up to that moment,’ Mandela writes, ‘I had insisted that as long as I was President of the ANC, there would never be a Volkstaat in this country. A Volkstaat was a separate, autonomous area for the Afrikaner. But now, faced with such a formidable challenge, I decided to retreat but in such a way that they would find it far from easy to realise their demand.’43

More than thirty years earlier, while operating underground and on the run, Mandela had lived in SACP activist Wolfie Kodesh’s flat. Kodesh introduced him to Carl von Clausewitz’s classic, On War.44 In dealing with the right wing as he did, Mandela put into practice the Prussian general’s theory of war and conflict.

In his essay ‘Mandela on War’, Jonathan Hyslop concludes that ‘[in] understanding that South Africa could not avoid violent conflict but that the prosecution of conflict without limit was a danger to any possibility of creating a viable future society, Mandela charted an intelligent and principled course. And this can also be understood as a notably Clausewitzian way of thinking: Mandela grasped that responsible leadership requires a recognition of the conditions of real war, of the limits of what it can achieve, and of the problems that flow from it rather than the pursuit of the chimera of absolute war.’45

Mandela informed generals Viljoen and Hartzenberg that he would approach the ANC and ask that it ‘review its attitude to the Volkstaat on three conditions.