On the journey out of Victor Verster he had already told himself that his life’s mission was ‘to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both’.15 This meant that he would have to try and straddle the gulf between the oppressor, represented by the government that had jailed him, and the oppressed: the majority of the people of South Africa in all their diversity. He had already accepted what it would take to achieve that goal. It was a goal that destiny had set for him.

‘The real test of a man,’ Václav Havel writes, ‘is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.’16

Much later, Barbara Masekela, a renowned writer and diplomat who was chief of staff in Mandela’s office, echoed this sentiment.* ‘Mandela,’ she said, ‘knew that being president was playing a role – and he was determined to play it well.’17

Playing it well was far from easy, however, and Mandela’s preparations had begun a long time before. In the mid-1980s Mandela had grasped the nettle and explored the possibility of initiating talks between the ANC and the National Party government of De Klerk’s predecessor, President P. W. Botha.† A cartoonist’s favourite, whose scowling countenance and finger-wagging admonishment graced national newspapers, President Botha was one of the last hard men, a hawk nicknamed ‘Die Groot Krokodil’ (The Big Crocodile) for his hard-line stance, who saw brute force as the answer to conflict. But even Botha had learnt from some of his most hawkish generals that the resolution of the South African nightmare could not be achieved through military force alone.

Mandela knew that the cycle of violence was taking its toll on the poorest and most marginalised sections of the population. The restive black majority had its expectations. The benefactors of the apartheid regime – many of them armed and possessed of a formidable capacity to wreak havoc – were also waiting with bated breath for a significant threat to the status quo.

In all this, Mandela had to signal that F. W. de Klerk was a man of integrity, if only to disarm the hardliners who would have chortled with glee if the South African president were further weakened by the ex-prisoner’s rejection. According to the right-wingers’ so-called logic, it was one thing for De Klerk to release the terrorist, and another for the self-same terrorist to call the shots while spurning the hand of his liberator.

For Mandela, conducting the dialogue with the Pretoria regime was like negotiating a route through volatile traffic. He had to act as a buffer between the group of negotiators led by De Klerk and two vehicles coming from different directions – one driven by the expectations of a black majority who would wait no longer, and the other by the right-wing hardliners, influenced by fear and a misplaced sense of righteousness. For Mandela, the derailment of the negotiations before they even started would have been the greatest tragedy. In this regard, he went against the counsel of the representatives of his own organisations, who were uncomfortable about his intention to call De Klerk a man of integrity. When his colleagues bristled at his accommodation of De Klerk he always insisted that he would continue to accept De Klerk as a man of integrity until he was presented with facts to the contrary. Until then, De Klerk was going to be his future negotiating partner.

Mandela was able to see and make a distinction between F. W. de Klerk the man and De Klerk the representative, if not the victim, of a repressive and all-powerful state machine. Perhaps Mandela’s one wish was to work on his political counterpart and wean him from the influence of the political party that espoused apartheid as a policy, a stance he found wholly repugnant.

On this, he would comment later: ‘The apartheid regime, even during the period of negotiations … still believed that they could save white supremacy with black consent. Although the apartheid negotiators tried to be subtle, it was clear right from the start of the talks that the overriding idea was to prevent us from governing the country, even if we won in a democratic election.’

He’d had a foretaste of this stance when he first met President de Klerk while still a prisoner at Victor Verster, on 13 December 1989. He writes:

‘Shortly before that meeting, I had read an article written by the editor of Die Burger, then the official mouthpiece of the National Party, under the pen name of Dawie in which he sharply criticised the concept of Group Rights which was being peddled by that Party as the best solution for the country’s problems. This meant that each population group after the first democratic elections would retain permanently the rights and privileges it had enjoyed before such elections, no matter which political party had won.’

This deception would mean that the ‘white minority would continue to monopolise all the important rights of citizenship. The revolutionary changes demanded by the liberation movement, and for which martyrs across the centuries had paid the highest price, would be stifled. The new government would be unable to provide shelter for the people and quality education for their children. Poverty, unemployment, hunger, illiteracy and disease would be rampant. Die Burger criticised this pseudo policy as introducing apartheid through the back door.’

Mandela pointed out to De Klerk that ‘if their own mouthpiece condemned this idea, he could well imagine what we thought of it. We would reject it out of hand.’18

‘It was at this point that the president impressed me,’ Mandela writes. ‘He conceded that if our movement would not even consider the idea, he would scrap it. I immediately sent a message to the ANC leadership in Zambia in which I described the President as a man of integrity with whom we could do business.’19

Mandela might have been impressed with De Klerk, but it was another matter to sell the proposition to the ANC.