Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (8 page)

No one in the apartheid state apparatus knew more about what was going on in South African politics than Barnard, who had informers everywhere, some of them deep in the ANC. He was shrewd and discreet, a civil servant to the marrow, with a powerful sense of duty. During the twelve years he remained as head of the NIS, an organization that the likes of the CIA and Britain’s MI6 came to respect, if not love, his face was as unknown to the general public as Mandela’s had been in prison. There was no man Botha trusted more.

Barnard was a tall, sleek, dark-haired, humorless fellow. An Afrikaner Mr. Spock, he spoke in a monotone and his features were so blankly set that if you were to run across him a day after meeting him you would probably fail to recognize him. But the workings of his mind were crystal clear, and while he had a stilted way of talking, years later his memory remained sharp regarding the political mood and the fights within government in the 1980s.

“Some people, specifically in the military, but in the police as well, deep down believed that we had to fight it out in some way or another,” he recalled. “We at the NIS believed this to be the wrong way to go about things. We took the view that a political settlement was the only answer to the problems of this country.” That was a very hard message indeed to sell to the South African government apparatus. Barnard had no illusions about that. “But the important thing was that P. W. Botha, who was more or less born and bred within the security establishment, firmly believed that in some way or another we had to . . . how should I say . . . stabilize the South African situation, and then from there try to find some kind of political solution.”

Botha summoned Barnard to his office one day in May 1988, and told him, “Dr. Barnard, we want you to meet Mr. Mandela now. Try to find out what you have been advocating for some time. Is it possible to find a peaceful settlement with the ANC, with this man Mandela? Try to find out his views on communism . . . and then try to find out, are Mr. Mandela and the ANC interested in a peaceful settlement? For we also have deep suspicions about what they would be interested in.”

Barnard’s first meeting with Mandela was held in the office of Pollsmoor’s commanding officer. As Barnard remembered it, recalling Kobie Coetsees first impressions, “Mr. Mandela came in and I saw immediately that, even in an overall and boots, he had a commanding kind of presence and personality.” The two men sat down, both understanding that the real purpose of this meeting was to become acquainted, to develop a relationship that could sustain the political negotiations that might follow. They made some small talk—Mandela asking him what part of South Africa he was from and Barnard inquiring after his health—and agreed to meet again.

Before they did, however, Barnard ruled, just as Coetsee had done, that Mandela should be kitted out in clothes more befitting a man of his stature. As Barnard explained, “Talking about the future of the country in overall and boots: this was obviously not acceptable. We arranged with Willie Willemse, the commissioner of prisons, that at any future meeting he would be clothed in such a way that it serves his dignity and his pride as a human being.” It was not only on the matter of clothes that Mandela should be accommodated, Barnard decided. A more fitting meeting venue was required. “Mr. Mandela had to be on a par, as an equal, at any future meeting, this much was clear to me. I remember saying with Willie Willemse that we could never again hold such a meeting within the prison building. That would not create an equal situation.” From now on, Barnard and Mandela would meet in Willemse’s home on the Pollsmoor grounds rather than in his nondescript office.

This began with the second meeting, at which Mandela turned up for dinner at the Willemses’ dressed in a jacket. “He was a wonderful guest,” Barnard recalled, his natural reserve thawing at the recollection. At these meetings, Willemse’s wife cooked delicious meals, wine flowed, and the two men talked for hours about how to end apartheid peacefully.

For his part, Kobie Coetsee came to the conclusion that keeping this prisoner in prison was as improper, and as unhelpful to the talks’ broader goal, as dressing him in prison clothes. Not that he was being treated badly at Pollsmoor. Compared to the claustrophobia he had learned to endure on Robben Island, his cell in Pollsmoor felt like the open sea. But where he went next was a cruise luxury liner.

The worse the Botha regime treated the blacks out on the street, the better it treated Mandela. He could have protested. He could have raged at Barnard, made demands, threatened to call off the secret talks. But he did not. He played the game, because he knew that while his power to intervene in contemporary events was practically nil, his potential to influence the future shape of South Africa might be immense. And so when in December 1988 General Willie Willemse, the top man in the South African prison service, informed him that he would be moved from his big lonely cell in Pollsmoor to a house inside the grounds of a prison called Victor Verster in a pretty town called Paarl, an hour north by road in the heart of the Cape wine country, Mandela raised no objections.

He traded his cell for a spacious home under the supervision of—or rather, looked after by—another Christo Brand, another Afrikaner prison guard who had been with him both in Pollsmoor and on Robben Island. His name was Jack Swart and his job was to cook for Mandela and to play the butler, opening the door to his guests, helping him organize his diary, keeping the house tidy and clean. The kitchen was ample and fully equipped, including devices technologically unimaginable when Mandela went to prison. He was allowed to receive visits from other, still incarcerated political prisoners. One of them was Tokyo Sexwale, an Umkhonto we Sizwe firebrand who spent thirteen years on Robben Island on terrorism charges. Sexwale was one of a small group of young ANC Turks who had gotten close to Mandela on the island, who not only listened to him talking politics but relaxed with him, engaging him in games of Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly before Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor. Recalling that visit to Mandela at Victor Verster, Sexwale laughed. “We saw one television set in the house. That was bad enough. But then we saw another. Two television sets! This, surely, was definitive proof, we thought, that he had sold out to the enemy!”

Smiling broadly, Mandela assured them that this was not a television set. He explained to his openmouthed guests that this machine could boil water. He took a cup of water, and gave them a triumphant demonstration, placing the cup inside and pressing a couple of buttons. A few moments later, Mandela removed the cup of steaming water from the microwave—a device his guests had never seen before.

With Jack Swart ever in attendance, Mandela would entertain dinner guests as varied as Barnard, Sexwale, and his lawyer George Bizos at his new “home.” Before the guests arrived, Swart and Mandela would discuss such matters of etiquette as which might be the correct wine to serve first. As for the vegetables, some came from Mandela’s own garden, which had a swimming pool and a view of the magnificently craggy mountains surrounding the lush valleys of the Cape winelands. Paradise for Mandela wouldn’t have been complete without a gym, furnished with exercise bike and weights, where he toiled diligently every day before dawn.

The idea, as Barnard explained it, was to ease his transition, after what was now twenty-six years of hibernation, into a brave new world of microwaves and personal computers. “We were busy creating a kind of atmosphere where Mr. Mandela could stay and live in at least as normal a surrounding as possible,” Barnard said. The deeper purpose, or so Barnard claimed, was to help him prepare for government and a role on the world stage. “Many times I told him, ‘Mr. Mandela, governing a country is a tough job. It’s not like, with a lot of respect, sitting in London in a hotel and drinking Castle beer from South Africa and talking about government. [Barnard was aiming a barb at the ANC’s exiled leaders.] I told him, ‘Government is a tough job, you must understand that it is difficult.’ ”

Barnard also bore the more difficult task of preparing President Botha, the “krokodil,” to meet with Mandela. The initial pressure for such a meeting came from Mandela himself, who began to express some impatience with the pace of progress. He wanted these talks to pave the way for a negotiations process involving the ANC, the government, and all other parties that wished to take part, aimed at ending apartheid by peaceful means. When 1989 came around, after more than six months of meetings between prisoner and spy, Mandela had had enough. “It is good to have preliminary discussions with you on the fundamental issues,” Mandela said to Barnard, “but you will understand that you are not a politician. You don’t have the authority and the power. I must have a discussion with Mr. Botha himself, as quickly as possible.”

In March 1989, Barnard delivered a letter from Mandela to his boss. In it Mandela argued that the only way a lasting peace could be reached in South Africa would be via a negotiated settlement. He said that the black majority had no intention, however, of accepting the terms of a surrender. “Majority rule and internal peace,” he wrote, “are like the two sides of a single coin, and White South Africa simply has to accept that there will never be peace and stability in this country until the principle is fully applied.”

Perhaps more significant than this letter was the fact that Mandela had already convinced Barnard of the argument it contained. Barnard would convince his boss, even if the letter could not.

“Yes . . . ,” Barnard said, a fondness creeping into the steely flatness of his voice, “the old man”—he meant Mandela—“he is one of those strange individuals who captivates you. He has this strange charisma. You find yourself wanting to listen to him . . . So, yes,” continued Barnard, “there was, in our minds, looking from an intelligence perspective, never the slightest doubt. This is the man—if you cannot find a settlement with him, any settlement will be out.”

That was the point he argued before Botha. But there were other arguments he recommended the president consider too. The world was changing fast. The anti-communist Solidarity movement had come to power in Poland; demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were calling for Chinese reform; the Soviet army ended its nine-year occupation of Afghanistan; the Berlin Wall was tottering. Apartheid belonged, like communism, to another age.

Barnard’s arguments influenced Botha, yet the president might have continued to dither, bristle, and pace inside his mental fortress had biological destiny not intervened. A stroke he suffered in January 1989 injected a new urgency into his dealings. He was more respected than loved by his cabinet peers, and some of them feared him. His enemies within his own National Party, sensing weakness at last, were circling for the kill. Barnard, one of the few people who actually felt affection for Botha, sensed that his boss’s days in office were numbered and that he had to act quickly. “I remember telling him that the time was absolutely right to meet Mr. Mandela, as quickly as possible. If not, we are going to slip, perhaps, one of the most important opportunities in our history. My views with Mr. Botha were the following: ‘Mr. President, if you meet Mandela and it becomes the basis, the foundation for future development in our country, history will always acknowledge you as the man who started this due process. In my considered opinion, there is only a win-win situation.’ ”

It was a polite way of saying that here maybe was the last opportunity Botha would have to be remembered not entirely as a large, terrifying reptile. Botha got the message and Barnard reported back to Mandela with the happy news that the president had agreed to meet him. “But I warned him, ‘Listen, this is an ice-breaker meeting. It is not about fundamental issues. Come to learn about the man. Talk about all those easy things in life. And don’t mention the issue of Walter Sisulu. . . . If you mention the release again of Walter Sisulu, Mr. Botha will say no. I know him. And if he says no, it’s no . . . Leave that aside. There’s another way to tackle the issue. Furthermore, don’t tackle difficult issues, that’s not the reason for the first meeting.”

Mandela listened politely, but he had no intention of following the instructions of this bright, impudent, slightly odd young man more than thirty years his junior. The two had talked a great deal about the possible release of Sisulu, who had been in prison for twenty-five years now, and if Mandela considered it fit, he would raise the matter with Botha. He did not, however, turn down Barnard’s offer of a special outfit for the occasion. Courtesy of the NIS, a tailor measured him for a suit. When the suit was delivered Mandela studied himself in the mirror and was pleased with the effect. This was the most important meeting of his life and he was eager to get the atmosphere right. Like an actor about to go onstage, he read over the notes he had been preparing for several days, rehearsed his lines, played himself into the role. He would be meeting his jailer-in-chief in the guise of an equal. Two chieftains representing two proud peoples.

On the morning of July 5, 1989, General Willemse picked up Mandela at Victor Verster to accompany him on the forty-five-minute drive from Paarl to the stately presidential residence in Cape Town known as Tuynhuys, an eighteenth-century monument to white colonial rule. Just before they got in the car, Willemse, momentarily taking over the part of Jeeves from Jack Swart, leaned over to Mandela and helped him adjust his tie. Mandela, a dandy before he went to prison, had lost the knack.

About an hour later, after Mandela had stepped out of the car and was preparing to step into Botha’s office, the waiting Barnard did a remarkable thing. Eager for his charge to make a good impression, he kneeled before Mandela and tightened the old man’s shoelaces.