Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (17 page)

Viljoen understood this as well as Keller did, but he didn’t like it at all. What was worse, he and the rest of the right-wing
volk
chose to interpret Hani’s funeral—a massive affair that ended with a thrilling call for peace and unity from Desmond Tutu—as a coming-out party for vengeful blacks. Rather than listen to the words of Mandela and Tutu calling for calm, they tuned in to the discordant messages emitted from the podium by young, third-ranking ANC officials who, doing the exact opposite of what Mandela always strove for, appealed to the crowd’s baser instincts by leading them in a song popular among the angry township youth. The drumbeat refrain, repeated in a rising, hypnotic crescendo, went, “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!”

That sentiment was always there among the politically energetic black youth. The obvious thing would have been to seize on that energy and transform it into scorched-earth, Ayatollah revolution. The fear and prejudice and guilt in white hearts was such that it was impossible for many to conceive of the changes Mandela had in mind in anything other than vengeful terms.

The cries of “Kill the Boer,” which Mandela tolerated as a means of allowing the youth to blow off their anger, were the sideshow, not the main event. Failing to understand that, Constand Viljoen decided that he had been seething silently in his farm long enough, that the time had come to answer the call of nationalist duty. On May 7, 1993, he entered the fray, turning up at the biggest right-wing rally to date in Potchefstroom, a town seventy-five miles southwest of Johannesburg. There, a mini-Nuremberg was enacted, complete with flags, imitation Swastika insignias, parade drills, long-bearded Boer “bitter-ender” warriors in brown shirts, and barking orators like Eugene Terreblanche of the AWB. An ample and varied host of malcontents gathered there, united all by their expectation that on the day the blacks came to power they would treat the whites as the whites had treated them. An AWB offshoot called the Boer Resistance Movement (Boere Weerstandsbeweging, or (BWB) was there, an outfit called Resistance Against Communism, the Afrikaner Monarchist Movement, the Foundation for Survival and Freedom, Blanke Veiligheid (White Security), Blanke Weerstandsbeweging (White Resistance Movement), the Boer Republican Army, Boere Kommando, Orde Boerevolk (Order of the Boer People), Pretoria Boere, Volksleër (People’s Army), Wenkommando (Victory Commando), the White Wolves, the Order of Death, and even the Ku Klux Klan. They might have been dismissed as a bunch of wackos in fancy dress, were there not 15,000 of them, and were this not the mental swamp that had spawned Hani’s murderer, Janusz Walus.

Constand Viljoen was treated with reverence by the first Boer patriots to spot his arrival. At the pageant’s climax, he was called up onstage and invited to assume the leadership of the
volk.
He did as he was bade, Eugene Terreblanche ushering him up the steps and declaring that he would be “proud, proud” to serve as “a corporal” under a Boer hero like Viljoen. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, Viljoen denounced the “unholy alliance”that had emerged between Mandela and De Klerk and declared himself ready and willing to lead the Boer battalions. “The Afrikaner people must prepare to defend themselves,” the general cried. “Every Afrikaner must be ready. Every farm, every school is a target. If they attack our churches, nowhere is safe. If we are stripped of our defensive capacity we will be destroyed. A bloody conflict which will require sacrifices is inevitable, but we will gladly sacrifice because our cause is just.”

The crowd roared their approval. “You lead, we will follow! You lead, we will follow!” they chanted. Terreblanche offered good theater but the serious-minded Viljoen, who still commanded much respect within the officer class of the SADF, was the redeemer the
volk
had been waiting for. The leaders of the AWB, the BWB, the Wenkommando, and all the rest of them took turns to pledge their fealty, as Terreblanche had done, to the general, who was anointed there and then the leader of the new “Boer People’s Army.”

A political wing was created too that day, the Afrikaner Volksfront, a coalition of the Conservative Party and all the other assorted militias. The Volksfront’s platform: the creation of an independent Afrikaner state—a “Boerestaat”—carved out of South Africa’s existing borders. “An Israel for the Afrikaner,” Viljoen called it, making almost explicit a new vision of himself, shared by his ecstatic followers, as the Boer Moses.

Journalists were sometimes tempted to mock these Old Testament naysayers. But the arrival of Viljoen, who brought in four other retired generals as his aides-de-camp, made the white right a serious threat. Within two days of the Potchefstroom rally De Klerk sounded his strongest warning yet, declaring that the possibility had increased of “a bloody Bosnia-like civil war.”

Viljoen set about his new mission with the dedication and thoroughness that had characterized his military operations in Angola. Within two months he and his generals had organized and addressed 155 clandestine meetings nationwide. “We had to mobilize the Afrikaners psychologically, start our propaganda campaigns,” Viljoen would later reveal. “But as importantly, we had to build a massive military capability.” In those first two months the Volksfront recruited 150,000 secessionists to the cause, of whom 100,000 were men-at-arms, practically all of them with military experience.

That still left another three million-plus Afrikaners, and a total of five million white South Africans if you included the “English,” who were not openly aligned with the separatist cause. Where were they? There was a Lubowski minority that actively supported the ANC. There was a large minority, about 15 percent of the whites, who might not vote for the ANC in an election but were sufficiently alert politically to see apartheid for what it was and give their support to the Democratic Party, the new offshoot of the Progressive Federal Party for which Braam Viljoen had stood in the 1987 election. Roughly 20 percent of whites, mostly Afrikaners, quietly went along with the general thinking of the Volksfront, or at least with its fears. And then there was the rest, the large rump of middle-class white South Africa to which François Pienaar and his family belonged, about 60 percent of whom tended to believe that the long-ruling National Party could be relied upon to look after their interests. They did wake out of their torpor, but only sporadically, when events like Hani’s assassination caught their eye and the thought ocurred that there might be consequences for their daily lives.

But this very same rump was also susceptible to Mandela’s appeals. Unfixed in their views, their identities less dependent on ancient prejudices than those of the Volksfront faithful, they responded with pleasant surprise to Mandela’s praise of the Afrikaner lady who noted down the license plate of Hani’s assassin. And they liked his position on rugby, the first fruits of which they would taste on June 26, 1993, when the Springboks kicked off their long and deliberate preparations for the World Cup, still two years away, by playing an international at home against France. It was the game in which François Pienaar made his Springbok debut.

Pienaar, then twenty-six, reacted to the news of his selection as if he were living in a normal country. In his autobiography,
Rainbow Warrior
, he makes no mention of the charged political context against which he achieved “the over-riding ambition” of his life. The continued killings in the townships, the preparations for right-wing war, the possible imminence of all-race elections: none of it impinged seriously on his consciousness, none of it had any more bearing on his life than the Sharpeville blacks had done when he was growing up. A new era was dawning in South African rugby and the national team needed a new captain. Pienaar was overwhelmed to learn at his first Springbok training session that, in a break with all precedent in all sports, he would be leading South Africa out onto the field against France in his debut game. The game was to be played on a Saturday at Durban’s King’s Park Stadium. On the Thursday before, Pienaar arranged for his parents to fly to Durban, the first plane flight of their lives, and in the evening he drove around to their hotel in a Mercedes-Benz the Springboks’ sponsors had loaned him. As he posed for family photographs in his green Springbok uniform, fit and ready for battle, he was as happy as any Afrikaner had ever been.

That very evening thousands of Volksfront soldiers were polishing their weapons in preparation for the first military action since General Constand Viljoen had been made bitter-ender-in-chief. In a well-organized logistical operation, they began converging overnight by road on Johannesburg, aiming to arrive at dawn at the gates of the World Trade Centre, the site of negotiations between the ANC and the government. They came from all over South Africa, from the Western Cape and the Northern Cape, the Eastern and the Northern Transvaal. Eddie von Maltitz headed a contingent from Ficksburg in the Orange Free State, five hours away. “We organized ourselves a bus and we crammed into it, strong men only, all heavily armed,” as he would recall. “We expected blood. We didn’t just have to stop the ANC, we had to stop De Klerk. We had to stop those negotiations. They were leading us to Armageddon. It was the storming of the Bastille all over again; the start of a revolution, we thought.”

Von Maltitz’s bus was composed mainly of members of the AWB, which he had joined back in that eventful year, 1985. Why did he join? “God spoke to me,” he replied. “He urged me to fight to stop the Communists from taking over my country.” A dedicated Christian, Von Maltitz was of German origin but considered himself an honorary Boer. The AWB manifesto struck a chord with him. It defined the resistance movement’s mission as “assuring the survival of the Boer nation” that “came into being through Divine Providence.” To this end they proposed secession and the creation within South Africa’s boundaries of “a free Christian republic.”

The biggest draw for most of the AWB brownshirts was not the manifesto, however, so much as their leader, Eugene Terreblanche, whose speeches contained such pearls as “We will level the gravel with Nelson Mandela!” and “We will govern ourselves with our own superior white genes.” Even better was how he said it. The beefy, white-bearded Terreblanche was a rousing public speaker. His rallies could always be depended upon to stir the passions of Boers, anxious to mask their fears in blustery defiance. He was good in part because he was a natural actor, whose most treasured prop was the white horse he rode, in part because he had a poetically rich sense of the cadences of language, in part because a propensity for drink loosened his tongue, and in part because he had made a point during his youth of studying the oratorical techniques of Adolf Hitler.

Von Maltitz was less of a demagogue than Terreblanche, but he was just as driven. His zeal saw him rise quickly in the AWB to become Terreblanche’s chief lieutenant in the Free State, South Africa’s geographical heart. If he was not Boer by blood, he was one in spirit. His grandfather had fought alongside the Afrikaners in the war against the British, but, more important, he felt as pure and passionate an attachment to the land as any of the
volk.
Raised on the family farm, which he inherited from his father, he saw himself as a true son of Africa, proud of having milked his first cow at the age of three. Militarily, he felt he brought a measure of Prussian professionalism to Boer ranks that some of Terreblanche’s blowhards lacked. He had done his military service in the elite paratroop regiment, knew how to handle all sorts of weaponry, and had a black belt in karate.

But he became disaffected with Terreblanche, in particular by his heavy drinking. (More than once the leader, drunk, fell off his white horse, to the delight of journalists and black passersby.) Terreblanche, alert to the possibility that he might lose his best man in the Free State, phoned him one night and said, “Herr von Maltitz, are you with me or against me?” Von Maltitz replied ambiguously, “I am with you in the cause.”

Soon after (this was in 1989), Von Maltitz left and formed an outfit he named the Boer Resistance Movement, or BWB, which he left shortly thereafter to form another group calling itself Resistance Against Communism. Sinewy and straight-backed, with strong farmer’s hands, he never left his home in anything other than full military camouflage gear and he always had a gun strapped to his hip. Von Maltitz believed that God spoke to him—often—and this might have been funny had he not converted his farm, in response to Mandela’s release, into a part-time military training camp. At least once a week, he would gather like-minded Christian soldiers and prepare them for what he called “full military resistance” against the ANC. “The enemy is now at my back door. I must fight him,” was Von Maltitz’s reasoning. As many as seventy aspiring “kommandos” at a time were schooled in the use of shotguns, Magnum pistols, and guerrilla warfare.

Von Maltitz’s name was on the list of right-wing radicals being watched by Niël Barnard’s National Intelligence Service. For the intelligence people, as well as to a handful of journalists who kept tabs on the far right, the name Eddie von Maltitz had by now acquired a sinister resonance.

The Boer Warriors stormed the World Trade Centre on the morning of Friday, June 25, 1993. Inside the two-story glass and concrete building prominent officials had gathered, including Joe Slovo, legendary head of the Communist Party, and Foreign Minister Pik Botha. Before the attack, some three thousand armed Volksfront loyalists found themselves facing down riot police who formed a protective perimeter around the building. One side wore brown, the other gray-blue, but otherwise they were the mirror image of each other. They spoke the same language, they had the same surnames, they had been taught the same white supremacist propaganda all their lives, they had learned to hate and fear the ANC. These policemen belonged to the riot squad, apartheid enforcers programmed to crush “black unrest.” Today, here at the World Trade Centre, they confronted something new and bewildering. This was white unrest. Their training—their upbringing—hadn’t prepared them for this. What were they supposed to do? Would one among their ranks imitate the example of the soldier guarding the Bastille who refused to fire on his own people, and turned his gun on his officer instead? And if so, then what?