Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (15 page)

Delegations of the government, the ANC, and various smaller parties met Monday through Friday, gathering in smoke-filled rooms, like rival lawyers, at a conference building near Johannesburg Airport known, with exaggerated grandeur, as the World Trade Center. Some of the delegates got along so well after a while that they began to wonder whether they were racing too far ahead of their constituencies; whether there would be problems, especially for the government, when the time came to ask their people to go along with the deals they had struck. The chief negotiator of the ANC, a former trade union leader called Cyril Ramaphosa, and the chief negotiator of the government, Defence Minister Roelf Meyer, became such good friends that they often debated the issues during weekend fishing trips. Mandela and De Klerk never got on as well, but while they had their tense moments, they stayed in permanent touch, sometimes meeting late into the night. There was no longer any need to beg for a meeting: the former prisoner could get the president on the end of a phone line any time he chose.

In this rapidly changing climate, in May 1991 the highest appeal court in South Africa overturned twenty-one out of the twenty-five original murder convictions in the Upington case, and dismissed all fourteen death sentences. Bekebeke was one of the four whose convictions stood. He would leave Death Row, but the court had ruled that he had a ten-year sentence to serve. He took the news with good grace, responding to the verdicts by reaching out and embracing the old man Gideon Madlongolwana who, with his wife Evelina, was free to go. Within eight months, having served a total of six years and one and a half months in prison, he too was free. On January 6, 1992, he rejoined his family and friends and his girlfriend, Selina, in Upington. It was a happy time but Bekebeke was impatient. He had a lot of time to make up, and a pledge to keep. He had made it to himself and to his fellow inmates on the day when Anton Lubowski was killed.

Until then, he had been clear about his life’s ambition. He wanted to become a doctor. “But that day I changed my plan. From that day on I knew there was only one thing I wanted to be: a lawyer. I would pick up his spear. I would follow in his footsteps. I would fill the vacuum he had left. I would become another Anton.”

It was an amazing thing for an angry young black man like Bekebeke to say, but prison had mellowed him as it had mellowed Mandela. Within two weeks of his release he had acted on his grandiloquent rhetoric. Down in Cape Town, the place where he had had his inspirational child’s fantasy of visiting Mandela and the other “leaders” in their island prison, he was now going to start, aged thirty-one, his university career. Bekebeke excelled at the University of the Western Cape. He got top marks in his exams and obtained a scholarship. He was, he said, a student possessed. “All along the spirit of Anton drove me and I knew that however tough it got I would never wilt, I would never fail him. I told my comrades in Death Row that this is what I would do. I made a vow, and I fulfilled it.”

Mandela was well on the way to fulfilling his old vow to bring freedom to South Africa, but there were storms ahead, phenomena of political nature that he had not anticipated and that initially escaped his control. For, with the negotiations at the World Trade Centre proceeding at their stately pace, the right-wing war to scupper them was already under way. It was a war that took different forms, and one of them—the bloodiest—had a black face. For there was not only a white right wing in South Africa but also—far more difficult for an outsider to understand—a black right. And their interests converged.

The Zulu right-wing movement Inkatha and in particular its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi (“crazy like a fox,” as a foreign ambassador described him), were as fearful as the white right that if the ANC came to power it would exact dreadful retribution on them. For Buthelezi had gone along with apartheid, while pretending, when the occasion demanded it, that he did not. His rhetoric often aped the ANC’s, lashing the government’s racism and so forth, but the fact was that he had taken the apartheid shilling. Hendrick Verwoerd’s “grand apartheid” plan had been to divide South Africa into a series of tribal homelands, which he conceived of as internationally recognized sovereign states. The Dr. Strangelove of apartheid (“I never suffer from the nagging doubt,” Verwoerd once declared, “that perhaps I might be wrong”) imagined that each of South Africa’s nine tribal groups would have its own mini-state, while the white tribe would bag the mineral and farm-rich lion’s share, the big cities included. Buthelezi went along with the plan, accepting a little fiefdom financed entirely by Pretoria and named KwaZulu. Here he lived a grand life as “chief minister,” complete with a cabinet and ministers and a police force headed by an Afrikaner brigadier (in this terrain Pretoria called the shots) who was a former chief of white South Africa’s security police.

Buthelezi’s statelet might have been comical had it not been a tool of Botha’s counter insurgency. Guided by Pretoria’s in-house brigadier, Buthelezi dispatched his
impi
(Zulu for “battalion”) forces against the town-dwelling, English-speaking, ANC-supporting half of the Zulu population, resulting in battles between the two sides that caused thousands of deaths. The ANC and its supporters came to detest Buthelezi as much as Botha, if not more. Buthelezi feared that if Mandela ever took power he would lose the political and economic privileges derived from his complicity with the apartheid state. He also feared bloody revenge, as the white right did, which was why neither saw any benefit in a negotiation process whose end was majority rule.

Within six months of Mandela’s release, Inkatha’s spear-wielding warriors had extended their war beyond Zulu country to the townships around Johannesburg, mounting assaults on the community at large, knowing that the vast majority were going to be supporters of the ANC. Hundreds died—shot, speared, knifed, or burned—every month. In their attacks, which continued for the first three years after Mandela’s release, Buthelezi’s thugs counted on the overt assistance of the uniformed police, whose armored cars escorted the Inkatha impis in and out of battle. Covertly, elements of the security police and military intelligence were providing the Inkatha terrorists with guns. The objective was quite clear: to provoke the ANC into a series of mini-civil wars in the townships and render the planned new order ungovernable.

For all Mandela’s calculation and charm, he had moments of towering indignation, in most cases precipitated by the slaughter in the townships and by De Klerk, whom he now regretted having called “a man of integrity” and accused of passive complicity in the violence. Tokyo Sexwale, the former Robben Island prisoner and now member of the ANC’s top decision-making body, the National Executive Committee (NEC), said that there came a moment when Mandela wanted to break off relations with the government. “So we remonstrated. ‘If we do that, what do we do? Go back to armed struggle?’ Mandela was an angry man, but we had to defeat him, and we did. But he was very affected by the amount of blood flowing throughout the country.” Mandela let off steam by denouncing De Klerk. “If it were white people dying,” he raged, “I know that he would be addressing the matter with a great deal more urgency.”

Buthelezi, who knew that the limits of impunity guaranteed him by the apartheid state did not extend to killing white people, found himself drawn ever closer to the far-right Conservative Party and their assorted storm troopers, who cheered on the Inkatha impis, celebrated their massacres, and looked forward to the day when they might forge a Zulu-Boer alliance against the ANC. Mandela, meanwhile, was receiving more and more reports from his own intelligence people, as well as from friendly foreign governments, of right-wing mobilization.

By early 1992 there was no sign of the township bloodbath abating and every sign that the far right would violently show their hand. Danger loomed, and Mandela had to dispel it. He needed to appease whites’ fears, to give them some incentive to accept the impending new order. The NEC met and the idea came up to consider converting the political stick that sports had provided them into a carrot: offering to ease up on, or drop altogether, the boycott on rugby. Arnold Stofile, the man jailed in 1985 for his part in stopping an All Black tour, was an active participant in the debate. “This is no ordinary carrot we would be offering white South Africa,” the effervescent Stofile told his colleagues, not all of whom grasped the significance of rugby in the Afrikaner soul. “This is not politics. This is not ideology. It is something much more powerful and primal, and personal! Offering to restore the international rugby games is a way of saying to whites, ‘If you play along with us you will be able to go to Europe and the U.S. and Australia to visit your friends and not be seen at the airport when your passport is checked as pariahs. And they will see it as good for business too and, above all, it would mean being liked again. That’s the bottom line. That will mean so much to them. They’ll be able to exclaim, ‘They like us! They like us!’ In sum, comrades, white South Africa will be able to feel like human beings again, like citizens of the world.”

One member of the NEC who understood exactly what Stofile was talking about was Steve Tshwete, a former Robben Islander who had also played rugby. In fact Tshwete had been arguing in favor of using sports more as a tool of positive change since the time of Mandela’s release. Arrie Rossouw, the political writer of the Afrikaans newspaper
Beeld
, described how early in 1990 he had flown to Zambia, the ANC’s exile base, and had long chats into the night with Tshwete, already the organization’s Mr. Sports. “Tshwete understood right from the beginning that the restoration of rugby internationals would prompt Afrikaners to rethink their preconceptions about the ANC,” Rossouw said. “He was passionately in favor of using rugby as an instrument of reconciliation.”

He and Stofile argued the point before the NEC. Opinion was divided between the pragmatists who believed the time had come to reach out an undeserved hand of friendship and those who found the idea of rewarding the “Boers’ ” perfidy outrageous. It was the pragmatists who prevailed on Mandela. The idea of using rugby as an inducement for the Afrikaners to board the democracy train could not have been more in keeping with the approach he had rehearsed in prison, most obviously with Major van Sittert in the “hot plate” encounter, and deployed to such valuable political effect since. The whites had plenty of bread, but they had been denied the circus. The ANC would give it back to them; they would allow the Springboks to perform on the world stage once again.

In August 1992 South Africa played its first serious international match in eleven years against New Zealand at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium. A deal was reached beforehand between the rugby authorities and the ANC. We’ll give you the game, the ANC said, so long as you stop the event from being used, as the phrase went, “to promote apartheid symbols.” There was an inbuilt problem, though: the green Springbok jersey itself. Still a potent apartheid symbol for blacks, it was inevitably associated in white minds with the two other symbols the ANC meant when they set out their conditions: the old South African flag, which was still the official national flag, and the old national anthem, “Die Stem,” which was still the national anthem. To ask rugby fans to dissociate one symbol from the others given the inevitable state of inebriation of many by the time they got into the stadium, and their political insensitivity, seemed too much to ask, too soon. And it was.

The old flags flew all around the stadium and Louis Luyt, the big, brash president of the South African Rugby Union, flouted the rules sensationally by ordering the old anthem to be played. The crowd bellowed out the song like a battle cry, converting what the ANC had hoped to be a ritual of reconciliation into a ceremony of defiance.
Rapport
, the Afrikaans newspaper most anchored in the past, waxed sentimental about “the soft tears of pride” spilled by the
volk
at Ellis Park, before switching to heroic mode to applaud their uncompromising spirit. “Here is my song, here is my flag,” rhapsodized
Rapport.
“Here I stand and I will sing my song today.”

Enlightened Afrikaners like Arrie Rossouw, the government’s chief negotiator Roelf Meyer, and Braam Viljoen, the brother of the general, hung their heads in despair. ANC officials lined up to express their indignation. Arnold Stofile felt betrayed. “We were never dogmatic about isolation,” he said. “We turned the stick into a sweet, juicy carrot. But not everybody chewed on it. So when the fans let us down the way they did, singing the apartheid anthem and all the rest of it, our people were really pissed off.”

Yet once the Ellis Park dust had settled, Mandela argued forcefully at NEC meetings for persisting with rugby as an instrument of political persuasion. The case was difficult to make among a group of strong-minded people who had had it with indignities at the hands of white people. But he made it anyway. “Up to now rugby has been the application of apartheid in the sports field,” he told his ANC colleagues. “But now things are changing. We must use sport for the purpose of nation-building and promoting all the ideas which we think will lead to peace and stability in the country.”

The initial response was “very negative,” Mandela recalled. “I understood the anger and hostility of the black population because they had grown up in an atmosphere where they regarded sport as an arm of apartheid, where we supported the foreign teams when they came to play against South Africa. Now suddenly I come out of jail and I’m saying we must embrace these people! I understood their reaction very well and I knew I was going to have a tough time.” The ANC leadership thrashed out the matter over several meetings. Mandela’s most powerful argument was that rugby was worth, as he put it, several battalions. “My idea was to ensure that we got the support of Afrikaners, because—as I kept reminding people—rugby, as far as Afrikaners are concerned, is a religion.”