Here is a provision that if you are found guilty you’ll lose those properties. Your associates here are poor people, they have nothing to lose.”† The leader then opted to have his own lawyers and refused to be defended with the rest of the accused. Then the lawyer leading his witness told the court that there were many documents where the accused were demanding equality with the whites: what did his witness believe? What was his opinion?

‘The leader,’ Mandela continued, with a small chuckle at the memory, ‘said, “There will never be anything like that.” And the lawyer said, “But do you and your colleagues here accept that?”’ The leader ‘was beginning to point towards Walter Sisulu when the judge says, “No, no, no, no, no, you speak for yourself.” But that experience of being arrested was too much for him.’ He paused, reflecting. ‘Now we nevertheless appreciated the role that he had played, during the days before we were arrested. He had done very well.’

Not pausing to explain the ambiguity of the last statement, which elicited great hilarity – was ‘doing well’ an appreciation of the leader’s service to the organisation or a barbed comment aimed at his material wealth? – Mandela wound up his off-script commentary.

‘I’m saying this,’ he concluded with a mischievous glint in his eye, ‘because if one day I myself should cave in and say, “I have been misled by these young chaps”, just remember I was once your colleague.’

Returning to the script, he said that the time had come to hand over the baton. ‘And,’ he went on, ‘I personally relish the moment when my fellow veterans, whom you have seen here, and I shall be able to observe from near and judge from afar. As 1999 approaches, I will endeavour as State President to delegate more and more responsibility so as to ensure a smooth transition to the new presidency.

‘Thus I will be able to have that opportunity in my last years to spoil my grandchildren and try in various ways to assist all South African children, especially those who have been the hapless victims of a system that did not care. I will also have more time to continue the debates with Tyopho, that is Walter Sisulu, Uncle Govan (Govan Mbeki) and others,* which the 20 years of umrabulo [intense political debate for educational purposes] on the Island could not resolve.†

‘Let me assure you … that, in my humble way, I shall continue to be of service to transformation, and to the ANC, the only movement that is capable of bringing about that transformation. As an ordinary member of the ANC I suppose that I will also have many privileges that I have been deprived of over the years: to be as critical as I can be; to challenge any signs of autocracy from Shell House and to lobby for my preferred candidates from the branch level upwards.‡

‘On a more serious note though, I wish to reiterate that I will remain a disciplined member of the ANC; and in my last months in government office, I will always be guided by the ANC’s policies, and [will] find mechanisms that will allow you to rap me over the knuckles for any indiscretions …

‘Our generation traversed a century that was characterised by conflict, bloodshed, hatred and intolerance; a century which tried but could not fully resolve the problems of disparity between the rich and the poor, between developing and developed countries.

‘I hope that our endeavours as the ANC have contributed and will continue to contribute to this search for a just world order.

‘Today marks the completion of one more lap in that relay race – still to continue for many more decades – when we take leave so that the competent generation of lawyers, computer experts, economists, financiers, industrialists, doctors, engineers and, above all, ordinary workers and peasants can take the ANC into the new millennium.

‘I look forward to that period when I will be able to wake up with the sun; to walk the hills and valleys of my country village, Qunu, in peace and tranquillity.§ And I am confident that this will certainly be the case, because, as I do so, and see the smiles on the faces of children which reflect the sunshine in their hearts, I will know, comrade Thabo and your team, that you are on the right track; you are succeeding.

‘I will know that the ANC lives – it continues to lead!’1

As one, the conference delegates and invited guests rose to their feet and started singing, clapping and swaying to a medley of songs before settling on one that was both a valediction to a unique son and a sad admission that, whatever happened, South Africa would never be the same again.

‘Nelson Mandela,’ the song went, ‘there’s no other like him.’

 

CHAPTER ONE

The Challenge of Freedom

Nelson Mandela had heard this freedom song and its many variations long before his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990.* The concerted efforts of the state security apparatus and the prison authorities to isolate him from the unfolding drama of struggle – and its evocative soundtrack – could not stop the flow of information between the prized prisoner and his many interlocutors. The influx into prisons, including Robben Island, in the late 1980s of newcomers who were mainly young people from various political formations – preceded in 1976 by the flood of student activists following the upheavals in Soweto and elsewhere – marked the escalation of the struggle and brought with it new songs, each verse a coded commentary on progress or setback, tragedy or comedy, unfolding on the streets. The recurring refrain of the songs was that the South African regime was on the wrong side of history.

Like most people who accept that history has carved for them a special place, and probably being familiar with Emerson’s mordant dictum – ‘to be great is to be misunderstood’1 – Mandela knew that his own legacy depended on the course he had championed: the talks between the government and the ANC. These had started five years prior to his release, when fresh from a check-up at Volks Hospital where he was visited by Kobie Coetsee, the minister of justice, Mandela had broached the question of talks between the ANC and the government.* Coetsee’s presence was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise unrelieved darkness. The year 1985 marked the bloodiest period of the struggle, a time characterised by an irreversibility of intent and a hardening of attitudes among the warring sides that stared at each other from across a great gulf.

Oliver Tambo, the ANC president and Mandela’s compatriot, had just called on South Africans to render the country ungovernable.†2 Mandela, however, realised that the toll would be heavier on the unarmed masses facing an enemy using the panoply of state power. But he was a prisoner, a political prisoner, who, like a prisoner of war, has only one obligation – and that is to escape. Only, his escape from his immediate confinement was irreversibly intertwined with the need for the broader escape, or liberation, of the people of South Africa from the shackles of an unjust order. Having long studied his enemy and having read up on its literature on history, jurisprudence, philosophy, language and culture, Mandela had come to the understanding that white people were fated to discover that they were as damaged by racism as were black people. The system based on lies that had given them a false sense of superiority would prove poisonous to them and to future generations, rendering them unsuited to the larger world.

Separated from his prison comrades on his return from hospital to Pollsmoor Prison, a period Mandela called his ‘splendid isolation’, it was brought home to him that something had to give.‡ He concluded that ‘it simply did not make sense for both sides to lose thousands if not millions of lives in a conflict that was unnecessary’.3 It was time to talk.

Conscious of the repercussions of his actions to the liberation struggle in general and the ANC in particular, he was resigned to his fate: if things went awry, he reasoned, the ANC could still save face by ascribing his actions to the erratic frolic of an isolated individual, not its representative.

‘Great men make history,’ C. L. R. James, the influential Afro-Trinidadian historian writes, ‘but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment.’4

In almost three decades of incarceration, Mandela had devoted time to analysing the country he was destined to lead. In those moments of waiting for word from his captors or for a clandestine signal from his compatriots, he mulled over the nature of society, its saints and its monsters. Although in prison – his freedom of achievement limited by the necessities of his environment – he gradually gained access to the highest councils of apartheid power, finally meeting with an ailing President P. W. Botha, and later his successor, F. W. de Klerk.*

Outside, deaths multiplied and death squads thrived; more funerals gave rise to more cycles of killings and assassinations, including of academics. A new language evolved on the streets, and people became inured to self-defence units and grislier methods of execution, such as the brutal ‘necklace’, being used on those seen as apartheid collaborators.†

In all the meetings Mandela held with government representatives what was paramount in his mind was a solution to the South African tragedy. From De Klerk down to the nineteen-year-old policeman clad in body armour, trying to push away angry crowds, these were men and women of flesh and blood, who, like a child playing with a hand grenade, seemed unaware of the fact that they were careening towards destruction – and taking countless millions down with them.

Mandela hoped that sense would prevail before it was too late. Nearing seventy, he was aware of his own mortality.