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Feb 17th 1990 | JOHANNESBURG | From The Economist print edition
FROM OUR AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
FOR those who stubbornly persisted in believing that one day peace would be possible among South Africans—black, brown and white—the release of Mr Nelson Mandela from prison had long seemed the essential first step. His liberation would show that the country's white government was open to reform. It would fulfil anti-apartheid campaigners' favourite slogan. And it would give blacks a leader whose near-mythical reputation had hoisted him above the rivalries and dogmas that afflict so many of his followers. Only Mr Mandela could lead the blacks into talks with the government.
On February 11th the myth stepped outside his prison gate and walked a few steps before ducking into a car to escape the shouts of the world's press. In their different ways South Africans of all colours and convictions are still trying to catch their breath.
The first result of Mr Mandela's freedom has been uncontrollable crowds. On the day he left prison masses of people squeezed hip-to-hip into Cape Town's biggest square. Mr Mandela turned up three hours later than the crowds had expected. While they waited, a series of temporarily inanimate bodies was hauled out of the jam, while on the outskirts of the rally wild young blacks looted shops and bombarded policemen with bottles, and got shotgun pellets in return. The crowds were just as big in Soweto the next day. At least 100 people have been injured in the excitement and the fringe violence, and some of them have died.
South Africans will not forget the day Mr Mandela was released. The impact on politics will take longer to show, but the first signs of what it might be are starting to take shape. To begin with, black politics should now become more flexible.
Although the state of emergency remains in force, and soldiers continue to patrol some townships, many blacks are now ready to be told that their tactics—in particular, the boycotting of white-created political institutions—need modification. Their leaders therefore have a freer hand than ever before. Mr Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) may soon be in a position to suspend the “armed struggle” and start talking to the government with little fear of being called soft. Their rivals in the Pan-Africanist Congress, who sniff at President F.W. de Klerk's concessions, can probably be ignored.
For the moment Mr Mandela is making sure of his base. He has talked much of his loyalty to the ANC, lest anyone think him ready to negotiate with the government over his comrades' heads. At his first rally he won the loudest cheers with his praise for the armed struggle and for the Communist party's contribution to the black cause. The next day he told journalists that he still believed in nationalisation. As a precondition for any concessions on his part, Mr Mandela is insisting on the lifting of the state of emergency and an amnesty for politically motivated crimes.
This is stern stuff, which will infuriate South Africa's white right-wingers and make white liberals gulp a bit. Some people think that Mr de Klerk, noting this and hoping for some fading of foreign pressure on his government, may refuse to make more concessions unless the ANC promises something in return. In fact, the president shows no sign of faltering on his chosen course. His ministers have made the most of Mr Mandela's more generous remarks—that he regards Mr de Klerk as a man of integrity, that he looks forward to the time when it is possible to halt the armed struggle, and that the ANC does not want to frighten whites. The tougher talk, the ministers explain, is Mr Mandela's party-line duty, inevitable at the moment.
In short, new black flexibility could generate more white flexibility. It is being suggested by people around the government that nothing in today's South Africa—the voting system, residential segregation, the future of the “independent” homelands—is beyond negotiation, so long as the whites are given some guarantees against being swamped. The reformers in the ruling National party favour a comprehensive anti-apartheid bill that would abolish all discriminatory laws at once. The government's chief negotiator, Mr Gerrit Viljoen, says that in ten years' time his party will have a minority role in government, if that.
Mr de Klerk insists there will be room at the negotiating table for a wide variety of parties. But the prospect of talks involving the ANC makes some other politicians feel uncomfortable. Mr Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the mixed-race chamber of parliament, did as much as anyone to discomfit the government two years ago; now nobody mentions him. The mainly white Democratic party also feels forgotten; some of its leaders are rumoured to be on the point of joining the ANC.
The rulers of the ten black “homelands” are the most uncomfortable of all. In BophuthaTswana and Ciskei they have seen sizeable numbers of their people demonstrating in favour of reincorporation into South Africa. Transkei's leader has sensibly called a referendum to allow his people a chance to vote themselves back into South Africa. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose Zulu power base makes him stronger than any other homeland leader, seems equally nervous. As the world watches Mr Mandela, Mr Buthelezi insists that he too has opposed apartheid, and deserves some credit for it.
Over the past three years the bloody feud in the province of Natal between Mr Buthelezi's followers and blacks who regard him as too restrained has killed, on average, ten people a week. Mr Mandela's release produced a fresh wave of killings, as Mr Buthelezi's Inkatha party walked out of peace talks with its opponents. After the euphoria of his release, Mr Mandela needs to demonstrate his capacity for statesmanship. His first opportunity comes in Natal.
On the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, we are taking a look back along with The New York Review at the books published, the reviews and articles that document the making of Mandela and the transition of power--the history of the revolution that happened without bloodshed. It was an extraordinary moment when Mandela was released and later became president. Where were you when you heard the news?
South Africa: The Fire This Time?
By Leonard Thompson, June 14, 1990
In South Africa today, President F.W. de Klerk has disavowed apartheid and claims to be seeking a democratic solution; and Nelson Mandela, the effective leader of the African National Congress, has now agreed to negotiate with him. Allister Sparks's The Mind of South Africa is a splendid guide to the new situation in which both leaders find themselves. As a South African journalist and a former editor of Johannesburg's morning newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, which ceased publication in 1985, Sparks writes with close knowledge of the workings of apartheid. The first part of The Mind of South Africa deals with South African history down to 1948; the rest, more than half of the book, describes the apartheid era, about which he draws on his own experience. South Africa, he believes, is in transition to a better future, and later in this article, I shall discuss his conclusion in the light of my visit, during the last two weeks of March, to the southern Transvaal, Kwazulu, and Natal.Sparks's interesting account of the two forces that confront each other in South Africa today, Afrikaner nationalism and African nationalism, follows the lines of interpretation of most liberal South African historians, although many passages in his book are impressionistic rather than grounded in specific evidence, and, in continually emphasizing the contemporary significance of the past, he takes liberties that professional historians are loath to do. Read the rest of the article.
The Making of Mandela
By George M. Fredrickson, September 27, 1990
In Nelson Mandela's speech in Cape Town immediately after his release from prison in February was the key statement, 'I am a disciplined member of the ANC.' His constant use of the imperial 'we' in the public addresses and statements that he made during his recent US tour did not mean that he has an inflated sense of himself but that he was speaking for the African National Congress. Some American commentators and interviewers did not seem to understand this. Their questions and comments seemed to assume that he could have, or should have, deviated from well-established ANC positions on such matters as the use of force, sanctions, support of the PLO, and friendship for Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddhafi.Story continues belowThere is no reason to believe that his own thinking differs in any significant way from that of the organization he represents, but it is helpful to remember that he lacks the maneuverability of a constituted head of state. He cannot negotiate with the freedom of George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, or F. W. de Klerk; for, in his view, everything he does and says must be cleared with the collective leadership of an organization that he has never formally headed and over which he had only limited influence during his twenty-seven years in prison. Mandela's personal attitudes and qualities are likely to prove important in the long run, but for the moment those who wish to understand the direction of black politics in South Africa would be well-advised to learn as much as possible about the nature and objectives of the ANC. Mandela's recent utterances are more useful for what they tell us about the movement than for what they reveal about the man. Read the rest of the article.
South Africa on the Edge
By Scott MacLeod, February 11, 1993
The main achievement of South Africa's state president, F.W. de Klerk, has been to take the difficult political steps necessary to begin dismantling the system of white supremacy. Unfortunately, he has not shown similar courage or wisdom in leading the country toward the future. He has been particularly unsuccessful in dealing with the struggle over what will replace apartheid, which has pitted white against black and black against black, and which has resulted in some of the most appalling violence ever seen in South Africa. Since de Klerk was inaugurated in September 1989, nearly 10,000 people have been killed in the townships, largely in fighting among black political groups. A smaller number of people, an estimated 2,300, were killed between 1984 and 1986, the years in which the government used extreme force to suppress black uprisings.[1]In the California-like suburbs where many whites reside, life goes on much as usual, but some of the townships, where gunmen stand watch at street barricades and gunfire is heard after nightfall, remind me of Beirut. Nearly every day, the Johannesburg Star, the Sowetan, and other newspapers report new acts of violence in a black community--the ambush of a carload of activists, the assassination of a local leader, the lynching of a suspected informant, indiscriminate shootings of commuters on trains and buses. Read the rest of the article.
The Election Mandela Lost
By William Finnegan, October 20, 1994
Although the victory of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in the historic South African elections in April was widely expected, the ANC actually lost badly to F. W. de Klerk's National Party in the Western Cape--a major province that includes Cape Town, the country's second-biggest city and the site of the National Parliament. This loss went largely unremarked by the international press, but it was a serious one for Mandela and for the liberation movement, whose members had fought desperately in the last weeks of the campaign to stave it off. Their defeat has deep implications for the country's future.The standard explanation for the startling capture of a regional government by the party of apartheid is that the Western Cape does not have a black African majority; it has a "coloured" (or "mixed-race") majority, whose members, it was said, did not feel drawn to the black-dominated ANC and simply decided to vote for the white masters they already knew. But this explanation begs more questions than it answers. The Northern Cape province also has a coloured majority, and the ANC won there. The Western Cape was, moreover, an anti-government stronghold throughout the 1980s. In truth, something extra-ordinary happened in and around Cape Town after 1990, causing a stampede of poor and working-class coloureds toward their traditional oppressors. Read the rest of the article.
The Liberator
By William Finnegan, February 2, 1995
This may seem a strange time for the autobiography of Nelson Mandela to appear. He has only recently been elected president of South Africa; presumably, his days will continue to be packed with newsworthy if not historic events for the next few years at least. Mandela's life, however, has already been so full, so improbably long and mythologically complete, that his current employment can almost be read as a postscript. Certainly Long Walk to Freedom does not give the impression of being a premature work. It is, in fact, timely in that some of its main themes--the complex alliance between South African Communists and African nationalists, the generational conflicts within the democracy movement, the tension between rural traditionalists and Westernized city folk--prefigure major political issues in the new South Africa. More than that, the book answers, not always intentionally, some fundamental questions about the extraordinary Mosaic figure who has become South Africa's first democratically chosen leader.He was born in 1918 in the Transkei, a beautiful, deeply impoverished, green-hilled region on the Indian Ocean coast which is the home of the Xhosaspeaking people. Mandela's father, a local chief, was a member of the royal house of the Thembu tribe, whose kings he served as a counselor. Although illiterate, he was a celebrated public speaker: his son, Rolihlahla, who only got the name Nelson from a teacher on his first day at school (Rolihlahla is Xhosa, we are told, for "trouble-maker"), so admired his father, who had a tuft of white hair above his forehead, that he used to rub ashes into his own hair to get the same effect. Read the rest of the article.
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Danny Schechter: Remembering Mandela's Freedom: Twenty Years Ago
Mandela's release from prison energized a world-wide human rights struggle.
When it comes to second bananas in professional sports, my client Pau Gasol is second to none.
Edie Lush: South Africa at Davos: The Strange Case of Sponsorship
I was reminded that a quarter of South Africans are unemployed. So I thought, why is their government paying for free drinks when there are thousands closer to home that could use one much more?
My dear readers and fans I am right now listening to the music from the movie Invictus. I am feeling both sad and happy today. 20 years ago today Nelson Mandela walked to freedom after almost 27 years in prison.
I was in Pasadena, California when I got the news. I was both shocked and surprised. I was able to live part of this great historical moment with my five years in South Africa. When I cast my vote in the first all-democratic election in 1994 it was one of the greatest moments of my life.
South Africans you are very lucky to have had a wonderful man like Mandela to guide you to all of the changes that had to take place to make your country real and whole. On the inside he must have been bitter with his 27 years in prison and the people who put him there and kept him there. His heart must have ached over the bad things that happened to his family. He also was deeply indoctrinated in the Marxist ideology with the idea that taking from the rich and giving to the poor is the way to run an economy.
I would have loved to know what his exact thoughts were when he walked through the prison gates and the adulation of the world.
Some people who are given power "rise to the occasion." They find vision and wonderful qualities inside themselves they perhaps they did not even know they had. Nelson Mandela was and is that rare man. He was guided by a heart full of kindness and forgiveness and a great vision for his country and all of his people. South Africa did not become another failed Marxist African state like Zimbabwe next door. Instead it has moved forward and grown and prospered. He is truly "The Father of Your Country."
One person who should not be forgotten or over looked on this day is former President F.W. de Klerk. He could easily be described,in one sense, as a "Rechter Lechter Afrikaaner." I know him as a man of incredible intelligence and rare sensitivity. South Africa is blessed to had had him in power at that time. He saw his whole way of life being challenged and coming to an end. He showed rare courage and vision to rise to the occasion and start the reconciliation process.
This 20 years has passed so fast. With some good luck I will have twenty more years. With incredible good luck I will have 40 years more.
On Feb. 11, 1990 — 20 years ago this Thursday — Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of a South African prison after 27 years of confinement. His release was celebrated the world over. But it had a particular effect on those who were being held as political prisoners by other repressive regimes. The Op-Ed editors asked seven of these former captives to describe what it was like when they heard the news of Mr. Mandela’s liberation.
Nelson Mandela at the inauguration of President Jacob Zuma in Pretoria in May.
JOHANNESBURG — The icon is a very old man now. His hair is white, his body frail. Visitors say Nelson Mandela leans heavily on a cane when he walks into his study. He slips off his shoes, lowers himself into a stiff-backed chair and lifts each leg onto a cushioned stool. His wife, Graça, adjusts his feet “so they’re symmetrical, and gives him a peck,” says George Bizos, his old friend and lawyer.
Nelson Mandela with his wife, Graça Machel, and his grandson Ziyanda Manaway during Mr. Mandela's 91st birthday in July.
To Mr. Mandela’s left is a small table piled with newspapers in English and Afrikaans, the language of the whites who imprisoned him for 27 years. Family and old comrades sit to his right, where his hearing is better. His memory has weakened, but he still loves to reminisce, bringing out oft-told stories “like polished stones,” as one visitor put it.
“There’s a quietness about him,” said Barbara Masekela, his chief of staff after his release from prison in 1990. “I find myself trying to amuse him, and I feel joyous when he breaks out in laughter.”
Mr. Mandela, perhaps the world’s most beloved statesman and a natural showman, has repeatedly announced his retirement from public life only to appear at a pop concert in his honor or a political rally. But recently, as he canceled engagements, rumors that he was gravely ill swirled so persistently in South Africa that his foundation released a statement saying he was “as well as anyone can expect of someone who is 91 years old.”
Yet even as Mr. Mandela fades from view, he retains a vital place in the public consciousness here. To many, he is still the ideal of a leader — warm, magnanimous, willing to own up to his failings — against which his political successors are measured and often found wanting. He is the founding father whose values continue to shape the nation.
“It’s the idea of Nelson Mandela that remains the glue that binds South Africa together,” said Mondli Makhanya, editor in chief of The Sunday Times. “The older he grows, the more fragile he becomes, the closer the inevitable becomes, we all fear that moment. There’s the love of the man, but there’s also the question: Who will bind us?”
There is a yearning for the exhilarating days when South Africa peacefully ended white racist rule, and a desire to understand the imperfect, big-hearted man who embodied that moment. Because of this, various historians and journalists are at work on a new round of books about Mr. Mandela.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation agreed last month to sell publishers in some 20 countries the rights to a book, “Conversations With Myself,” based on material from Mr. Mandela’s personal papers — jottings on envelopes, journals, desk calendars, drafts of intimate letters to relatives written in prison and documents from his years as South Africa’s first democratically chosen black president.
“He was and still is an obsessive record keeper,” said Verne Harris, who has been Mr. Mandela’s archivist since 2004 and will knit together the excerpts with Tim Couzens, a biographer. “The oldest records we have in that collection are his Methodist Church membership cards, the earliest one dated 1929. So he was 11 years old then.”
There are telling nuggets in unexpected places. In his prison years, the authorities gave him a South Africa tourist desk calendar each year. He typically recorded facts in it — his blood pressure, or whom he met that day — but occasionally he noted a dream, like one in which his daughter Zindzi, whom he was not allowed to see from when she was 3 years old until she was 15, “asks me to kiss her & remarks that I am not warm enough.”
The book will also draw on 71 hours of taped conversations that Mr. Mandela had with Richard Stengel, who collaborated with him on his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” and Ahmed Kathrada, Mr. Mandela’s prison comrade.
“One of the amazing, uncanny things was his memory,” said Mr. Stengel,who is writing a memoir of his time with Mr. Mandela, called “Mandela’s Way,” to be published in March.
“It was like he was watching a movie of his life and then narrating it,” Mr. Stengel, Timemagazine’s managing editor, continued. “He would do voices of his father, of his teachers, of his prison guard.”
Eventually, after a team at the foundation has catalogued the entire archive, the foundation plans to digitize it and put it on the Internet. The vast bulk of it is not yet public.
Historians say they are not expecting major surprises about Mr. Mandela’s generally well-known views, but hope to find rare glimpses of the man.
Mr. Mandela is looked after by his wife, Graça Machel, 64, the widow of a former president of Mozambique and a humanitarian activist. “They behave like young lovers,” Mr. Bizos said. “They hold hands.”
Here in Johannesburg, it is not unusual for residents of his neighborhood, Houghton, to gossip about how he is doing. Mr. Harris, seeking to douse rumors that Mr. Mandela was deteriorating, said he was still healthy but tired of small talk with strangers.
“He can reminisce at great length about things that happened years and years ago,” Mr. Harris said. “But you know what old age is like. Short-term memory starts to malfunction and you have bad days.”
His oldest friends, stalwarts of the anti-apartheid struggle, still visit. Mr. Bizos, who went to law school with Mr. Mandela in the 1940s, said Ms. Machel worried that Mr. Mandela would be alone when she was out of town, and eat too little without company. So from time to time, Mr. Bizos gets a call from their housekeeper to come for lunch.
Mr. Mandela sits at the head of a large table, with Mr. Bizos to his right. They relish their favorite dish — oxtail in a rich sauce — and talk about old times. Mr. Mandela tells how he walked into a law school class and sat next to a white fellow with big ears, who promptly changed seats to avoid sitting next to a black man. Mr. Mandela had wanted to invite the man to their 50th reunion at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1999, but the man had already died.
“He repeats it from time to time,” Mr. Bizos said. “He regrets he did not have the opportunity to meet him. He would have said to him, ‘Do you remember what happened? But please don’t worry. I forgive you.’ ”
Like a grown child for whom each goodbye to an aged parent feels as if it may be the last, South Africa seems to be preparing itself for the final farewell to its epic hero. And Mr. Mandela seems to have readied himself, poking fun at his infirmity. Mr. Harris recounted a joke he had heard Mr. Mandela tell and retell.
“When I die, I’m going to get up to the gates of heaven, and they’re going to say to me, ‘Who are you?’ ” Mr. Mandela says. “And I’ll say, ‘I’m Madiba,’ ” he said, referring to his clan name.
“And they’ll say, ‘But where do you come from?’ And I’ll say, ‘South Africa.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that Madiba. You’ve come to the wrong gates. You see the ones down there that are very warm? That’s where you have to go.’ ”
Mr. Mandela’s wish is to be buried alongside his ancestors in Qunu, on the eastern Cape, where he spent the happiest years of his boyhood. In his autobiography, he describes it as a place of small, beehive-shaped huts with grass roofs.
“It was in the fields,” he wrote, “that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams, and to catch fish with twine and sharpened bits of wire.”
First Posted: 02-11-10 07:10 AM | Updated: 02-11-10 07:15 AM