Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (18 page)

The standoff lasted four hours, the two sides a hundred yards apart, neither daring to make the first move. The government understood that if people died here, if Boer martyrs were created, the consequences were potentially catastrophic. The ANC’s supporters were numerous, but few were armed. These people were armed to the teeth and in Constand Viljoen they had a leader now capable of tearing the country apart. So the police were ordered to behave with the utmost restraint, not to respond with the force customary in the more familiar environment of a crowd of stone-throwing black youths. Also, the authorities’ respect for Viljoen led them to hope that restraint might yield a reasonable response from their opponents and avoid a bloodbath.

Whether Viljoen actually supported the order to attack was not clear. But it began when Terreblanche ordered his storm troopers, the “elite” unit of the AWB, to advance. Known as the “Iron Guard,” they stood out from the rest on account of their black, SS-style uniforms. There were about thirty of them. The police stepped gingerly aside and let them pass. Eddie von Maltitz, in his camouflage uniform, joined in with them, trotting alongside a tank-sized four-wheeled “bakkie” headed for the building’s main entrance. It smashed through the glass, creating a breach through which Von Maltitz charged. “I led the first group in,” he recalled, triumphant. “We had flak jacket and were ready to shoot. I had an R1 machine gun.”

In no time, four hundred warrior-farmers were marauding inside the building, brushing past heavily armed policemen who didn’t know how to react. At one point a group of four Volksfronters surrounded a black journalist from the Reuters news agency. He was wearing a jacket and tie, which seemed to make them especially angry. “Uppity kaffir,” muttered one. As they pondered whether to do him some damage, a white journalist intervened. “You’re a disgrace to the white race,” one of the armed invaders told him. Eddie von Maltitz suddenly appeared. “Leave this man alone,” he shouted. “We have no quarrel with the black man. The problem’s our white government. Let’s shoot those traitors. Let’s shoot Pik Botha.”

Von Maltitz boasted afterward that he had “stopped a bloodbath.” Viljoen stopped a bigger one. The general stepped in through the broken glass and went upstairs, flanked by a solemn guard of AWBers, to confer with the ANC and government delegates, and the police officers in charge. He had made his point. Like a terrorist who places a bomb but then warns the police in time to defuse it, he had shown his people’s potential to cause harm. All he wanted for now was safe passage out and agreement that none of his men would be arrested on their way home. Agreement was granted and, save for some rude graffiti on the walls, some urinating on the carpets, and much broken glass, no harm was done. For the second time in two months, South Africa had flirted with catastrophe, but managed to avoid it.

Real life carried on regardless. Half a mile away from the World Trade Centre, people were working at offices and factories as usual. A mile farther away, passengers checked in for flights at Johannesburg Airport and airplanes continued to take off and land without interruption. The city bustled on as usual, the traffic lights turned red and green, the coffee shops were full. And Pienaar’s Springboks trained like demons, 375 miles away in Durban, for the game the next day against France.

The ANC had had by now ample reason to say, “Enough is enough, we’re taking the carrot away now and never giving it back.” But they did not. Again Mandela, supported by Steve Tshwete, prevailed, arguing that it was not the Viljoens and Terreblanches and the Von Maltitzes they were appealing to, for they were a lost cause for now, but to the ordinary Afrikaners. Like ordinary people everywhere when a country is poised between war and peace, they put safety and prosperity before ideology, watched what way the wind was blowing, tried to judge which option would best serve the interests of their families. For those people, rugby remained an inducement; taking it away would cause them pain, tempt them to lean closer to the Viljoen camp. Mandela understood that rugby was the opium of apartheid, the drug that dulled white South Africa to what their politicians were doing. It might well be useful to have on hand a drug that could anesthetize white South African minds to the pain of losing their power and privilege.

The game against France, a powerhouse in world rugby against whom South Africa had not been allowed to play in thirteen years, was the proudest moment in François Pienaar’s twenty-six years. Played before an exuberant full house of 52,000, it eclipsed, in the popular imagination, the events at the World Trade Centre twenty-four hours earlier. The game ended in a 20-20 draw, but to Pienaar, and to most of white South Africa, it tasted like victory.

CHAPTER X

ROMANCING THE GENERAL

In 1838, the Boer general Piet Retief led a thousand ox-wagons laden with men, women, and children deep into Zulu country. Dingaan, the Zulu king, eyed the trekkers with apprehension. He had received reports that they were gobbling up land wherever they went, but he had also heard that they had inflicted terrible losses on the black tribes that had tried to oppose them. Dingaan’s first instinct was to stand and fight. The Zulus were, after all, the bravest, most disciplined, and most feared warriors in southern Africa. Earlier generations of his people had swept all before them the way the Boers appeared to be doing now. But this enemy had horses and rifles, and the Zulu king reckoned he might be better off trying to strike a deal than pitting his spear-wielding impis against them. So he sent out emissaries to General Retief and invited him to his royal kraal, proposing they come up with a formula to allow them to live side by side in peace.

Retief, whom history holds to have been an honorable man, accepted the invitation, despite warnings from some of his people not to trust the Zulu king, who had ascended to the throne after murdering his half brother, Shaka. Retief calculated, however, that Dingaan would not be so rash as to do the same to the leader of a large contingent of heavily armed white men.

On February 3, Retief arrived at the Zulu capital of uMgungundlovu, which means “the secret place of the elephant,” with a party of sixty-nine men and gifts for Dingaan of cattle and horses. Things went well. Before the end of the next day the two sides agreed to a treaty whereby Dingaan ceded large tracts of land to the Boer pioneers. To celebrate the deal the king invited Retief and his party to a feast two days later featuring traditional Zulu dances. They received instructions, which they politely obeyed, to leave their guns outside the royal kraal. They went in, sat down, and then, as the dancing reached its frenzied high-stepping climax, Dingaan leapt to his feet and cried, “Bambani aba thakathi!”—“Kill the wizards!” The king’s warriors overpowered Retief and his men and took them to a nearby hill where they butchered them.

The story of Piet Retief and Dingaan was known by every white South African schoolchild. For traditionalists like Constand Viljoen who were steeped in Boer lore and who saw themselves following in the proud tradition of Boer heroes like Retief, the memory of Dingaan’s treachery lurked always as a reminder of what could happen if you chose to trust the black man.

That was pretty much what Mandela was doing to F. W. de Klerk in the eyes of the Volksfront faithful. Braam Viljoen, Constand’s twin brother, understood the way of thinking of the far right better than practically any other person, aligned broadly, as he was, with the ANC camp. What the right had chosen to learn from history was that “our blacks” responded not to rational persuasion, but to intimidation and force. Braam Viljoen wrote a paper for IDASA, the think tank for which he was working, that influenced Mandela and the ANC to start taking the far right as seriously as De Klerk, who possessed better intelligence, had been doing for some time. In his paper, Braam said that the new caliber of leadership “had transformed the mood of the right wing from doom to militant activism and made it possible for the most diverse Afrikaner groups to unite under the new Volksfront umbrella.” Braam, who did not exclude the possibility of significant sectors of the serving SADF answering his brother’s call, warned that the far right had to be given a hearing. “Sometimes I think that the classic elements of tragedy are constellating here: the past inescapably determining the future; heroism and valour combining strangely with utter foolishness to bring about ultimate—but inevitable—disaster.”

In order to find out whether the far right might countenance the “hearing” he advocated, meaning talks with the ANC, Braam decided the time had finally come to break the ice with his brother. Four months short of their sixtieth birthdays, in early July 1993, Braam and Constand Viljoen sat and talked politics for the first time either of them could remember.

Braam began by asking Constand a simple, blunt question. “What are your options?”

“I am afraid,” Constand replied, “that we have only one option. We will have to sort this out with military action.”

Braam, who was expecting him to say that, said, “There might be one more option. Would you consider a high-level bilateral meeting with the ANC? As a last attempt to prevent a civil war?”

Constand reflected for a moment, then he said, “I will put it to my board at the Volksfront.”

A few days later Constand reported back to his brother. Constand was familiar with war; he wished to avoid it. He was in favor of meeting Mandela, and the Volksfront leadership, military types who deferred naturally to their maximum leader, had agreed. “The answer is yes,” Constand told his brother. “We are prepared to meet with the ANC.” Braam set to work immediately. He contacted a former theology student of his called Carl Niehaus who had become one of the most high-profile Afrikaners in the ANC. He ran the day-to-day operations in the organisation’s communications department.

Braam Viljoen told Niehaus that since his brother had been made head of the Volksfront, he had been traveling the country rousing the faithful for war. They hoped to derail the negotiations process and stop all-race elections from taking place. Constand, in league with senior SADF officers sympathetic to his cause, was seriously entertaining the prospect of mounting a coup. “Braam told me they had it in them to break the the SADF’s loyalty to the negotiations process and force government out of power in classic coup style,” Niehaus later recalled. “He told me they believed they had enough firepower and people at their disposal to make it happen.”

Braam told Niehaus that the Volksfront would not participate, as numerous small political groups had done, in the World Trade Centre negotiations. For them, sitting with the ANC was bad enough, but sitting with the De Klerk government was unthinkable. The only faint possibility of finding a peaceful way out of the looming crisis lay in direct talks between the ANC and the Volksfront leadership. Did Niehaus think this might be feasible?

Niehaus immediately contacted a senior ANC intelligence officer, Mathews Phosa, and asked him whether talk of a coup should be taken seriously. Phosa confirmed that, according to his sources, it should be taken very seriously indeed. Phosa was in favour of a meeting with the Volksfront, as were other senior ANC figures Niehaus talked to. “When Nelson Mandela heard about the proposal, he did not hesitate. He immediately saw the value of the meeting,” Niehaus recalled. “He believed in the personal contact and he was convinced that he would be able to connect with Constand Viljoen and persuade him to think again.”

Niehaus conveyed the ANC’s positive response back to Braam, who reported back to his brother. Constand said he was satisfied the meeting should go on, but he had two basic preconditions. Guarantees had to be given, first, for the safety of the Volksfront delegation and, second, that the meeting would be held in absolute secrecy. Constand, who may have had Piet Retief in the back of his mind, was unwittingly following in Mandela’s footsteps. Back in the late ’80s, it would have been disastrous for the imprisoned Mandela if the ANC rank and file had found out he was talking to the enemy. Bafflement would have given way to damaging divisions in the ranks. Viljoen feared the same, or worse, if his soldiers found out that he was meeting with Mandela.

Braam reassured his brother on the ANC’s behalf, and on August 12, 1993, just four days after that first contact with Niehaus, Braam and Constand Viljoen stepped through the front door of Nelson Mandela’s home in Houghton. Waiting for them, hand outstretched, and offering them his beaming smile, stood Mandela himself. It was a mutually stupefying encounter. Mandela was so much taller than the two brothers, so physically imposing generally. And he was so warm; so apparently delighted to see them. Mandela, looking from one brother to the other, saw two middle-height, middle-sized men with identically bulbous noses, jutting chins, boyishly lush white heads of hair, and solemn, sea-blue eyes. It was only when he ushered the brothers inside, and saw them walk, that he perceived a difference between the stiff, straight-backed step of the military man and the more shambling gait of his theologian brother.

Constand brought with him the three retired generals who made up his Volksfront high command; Mandela had the top two people in the ANC’s military and intelligence wings. Braam and Carl Niehaus, the peace brokers, completed the group. The person most at ease during the otherwise awkward introductions was Mandela, who might as well have been welcoming a group of European ambassadors. Yet here were two sets of people who were on the brink of an inversion of their decades-long relationship, while maintaining the same violent enmity. Viljoen was doing what Mandela had done back in 1961: set up an armed resistance movement designed violently to challenge the status quo. Mandela wanted to give the would-be terrorists the peaceful alternative he himself had not been offered until nearly thirty years after he had founded Umkhonto.