The End of Apartheid (11 page)

I said that we could not agree with other ANC demands. Ideas that an interim government should be established, or elections to a constituent assembly held, before any agreement on the future
constitution had been reached were non-starters; they amounted to a demand that majority rule should be established before negotiations had taken place.

Mandela indicated that he believed that only two conditions – lifting the state of emergency and an amnesty for political prisoners – needed to be met before negotiations could be engaged. I asked if, on that basis, the ANC would commit themselves formally to a suspension of violence, and Mandela said that he thought they should. I raised the issue of the violence in Natal. Mandela said that he had been able to maintain good personal relations with Buthelezi and he hoped that these could be used to stop the killings.

Mandela added that he had a high personal regard for the Prime Minister and wanted to ‘get her on my side'. But he hoped that Margaret Thatcher would not visit South Africa until matters were much further advanced. He was under instructions from the ANC in Lusaka not to meet the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, during his visit to South Africa en route to Namibia; the ANC remained opposed to ministerial visits at this time.

I pointed out that the ANC's position was illogical. Mandela himself had been urging us to use our influence with the South African government to promote further change. How could we be expected to do that without seeing them at a senior level? Mandela talked about meeting Douglas Hurd in Namibia, but the ANC would agree only if there were no prior visit by him to South Africa.

Mandela said that he would be visiting London to attend the concert at Wembley Stadium celebrating his release, on 16 April. He wanted to meet the Prime Minister, but would have to get the
agreement of the ANC. He had said publicly that he wanted to talk to her about sanctions. I said that it would be a mistake not to meet the Prime Minister in London and Mandela clearly thought so too.

As the oil giant Mobil recently had disinvested, leaving us being asked to bail out projects they had been supporting in Soweto, I asked Mandela not to call for further disinvestment, explaining why. Mandela said that he could not change the ANC line on disinvestment. I said that he did not need to; all I was asking was that he should not call for it himself (and, as a matter of fact, he never did).

The Prime Minister, not surprisingly, found Mandela's deference to his ANC colleagues disappointing. Mandela told me subsequently that he was annoyed with them for opposing a meeting with her during the Wembley visit and had made clear that he would be doing so on the next occasion (the US embassy were told that he was ‘furious' with Zwelakhe Sisulu for leading the opposition to such a meeting
24
).

Meanwhile, he needed some practical help from us. Not wanting to rely for his security only on the South African police, he asked us to provide training for his personal bodyguards, which we arranged for the SAS to do. Later on, when he moved to his wife's much larger house, he asked for our help in providing better privacy and security there.

The violence continued in Natal. I had urged Mandela to hold a meeting as soon as possible with Chief Buthelezi, reminding him that Buthelezi had refused to negotiate with the government until he was
released. Mandela told me that he had telephoned Buthelezi after his release and wanted to meet him. But, as he records in
Long Walk to Freedom,
when he visited the ANC leadership in Lusaka, the idea of such a meeting was rejected.
25

Mandela, addressing a huge crowd in Durban, urged them to ‘Take your guns, your knives and your pangas and throw them into the sea! … End this war now!' But, because of the opposition of the ANC leaders in Natal, led by Harry Gwala, a planned meeting with Buthelezi was cancelled. Mandela told me that, when he mentioned the possibility of a meeting with Buthelezi in Pietermaritzburg, he found the crowd muttering against it. He and Sisulu made a failed attempt instead to meet the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini.

The decision to cancel the joint meeting with Buthelezi was a serious mistake. On his return from exile, I discovered that the leading Zulu in the ANC politburo, Jacob Zuma, strongly agreed with me about this. It was, in his view, a fatal error not to have arranged from the outset a meeting with Buthelezi and a joint call for peace, instead of giving in to the opposition of the ANC in Natal. The better part of a year was to elapse before such a meeting took place, leaving Buthelezi aggrieved and the violence worse than ever. Jacob Zuma later was to make great efforts himself to reduce the clashes with Inkatha.

Following police shootings in Sebokeng in which eleven people were killed, Mandela threatened to postpone indefinitely talks with the government. The police action was indefensible and was criticised by De Klerk, but over four hundred people had been killed in unrest since
the unbanning of the ANC and much of the mayhem had been caused by the teenage ‘comrades'.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi saw the Prime Minister in London. She expressed disappointment at Mandela's refusal to suspend the armed struggle and at the continued references to nationalisation. Buthelezi said that, nevertheless, Mandela was a ‘bigger man than the others' and this would eventually show.

I reported that the unbanning of the ANC inevitably had triggered a wave of unrest in the townships. When I saw De Klerk, I found him reacting calmly to this, but he said he could not remove the remaining emergency regulations until there was a period of calm.

Walter Sisulu told me that the ANC were in no hurry to start negotiations. They wanted the release of all political prisoners, including those convicted of violent crimes. The government were acknowledging privately the case for a general amnesty in due course, particularly given the equally violent record of members of the security forces.

Peter Mokaba, on his release from detention, proceeded to distinguish himself by making inflammatory speeches about ‘one Boer, one bullet'. I telephoned Mandela to say that, having asked me to help get him released, now he needed to tell Mokaba to shut up. Mandela, with disingenuous charm, declared that ‘the young man must have been misquoted', but we heard no more from Mokaba, a highly dubious individual, about one Boer, one bullet.

When Douglas Hurd and I saw De Klerk, he did not rule out an amnesty. He was concerned at what he regarded as delaying tactics by
the ANC. The talks with the government, when they were engaged, would focus on the release of prisoners and return of exiles. De Klerk was determined not to be thrown off track by temporary setbacks.

In the future constitution, he considered the key to be the protection of minority rights. He had no blueprint for this, but there had to be recognition of the pluralism of South African society. He wanted to move away from the definition of groups, which was unacceptable, and favoured a bill of rights. But the protection of individual rights would not of itself protect minorities. He talked of some form of power-sharing, and was, he said, in a hurry in his search for a solution. The ship he had launched would never be turned around, but he was not about to commit suicide. Mandela's continuing references to nationalisation reflected the long-standing policy of the ANC. Douglas Hurd observed that all Mandela's pronouncements currently were accorded a mystical reverence, whether they made sense or not.

De Klerk and Pik Botha told Douglas Hurd that, for South Africa to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they needed our help in getting the neighbouring countries to do so as well, even though, obviously, the effect would be purely symbolic. Hurd concluded that De Klerk, bent on dismantling apartheid and the South African military nuclear programme, was ‘an amazingly brave and wise man'.

Gerrit Viljoen said that the upsurge in violence was partly attributable to continued ANC emphasis on the armed struggle. Mandela understood the need to meet white concerns in the new constitution, but these would not be allayed if simple majority voting in a unitary state
were accepted from the outset. Otherwise, they could be managed. I said that the issue of greatest concern to Mandela was the release of prisoners. Viljoen said there could not be early release for those convicted of ‘gross' crimes. There would need to be an amnesty in stages.

There followed a meeting at the embassy with the two recently released Delmas treason trialists, Popo Molefe (secretary-general of the UDF) and Mosiuoa ‘Terror' Lekota. The meeting was opposed by some of their colleagues, but they had not forgotten the support we had showed for them by visiting the courtroom when they were on trial for their lives. They were trying to calm things down in the townships. They did not distrust De Klerk's motives, but had no reason to trust the security forces. They wanted us to maintain sanctions. But they knew that we had argued hard for their release and wanted us to continue to use our influence with the South African government.

On a visit we arranged to some of the projects we were supporting in the Cape townships, Douglas Hurd was surprised to find himself being escorted around Crossroads by an honour guard of young black South Africans carrying wooden rifles and chanting ‘Viva Tambo!', but took this in his stride.

On the following day, Douglas Hurd and I flew in to Windhoek for the Namibia independence celebrations. It was not without some dramas that this goal finally had been reached.

Martti Ahtisaari and Prem Chand had continued to experience difficulties with the South African government, requiring frequent
interventions by us, over the return of Swapo leaders and refugees. When the Swapo leaders did return to Windhoek, I invited Hage Geingob (who became prime minister on Namibia's independence), Theo-Ben Gurirab (foreign minister) and Hidipo Hamutenya (later Minister of Trade and Industry) to lunch at the Kalahari Sands Hotel. We had kept in touch with them throughout their years of exile. I explained that I did not expect them to feel any particular affinity with a Conservative government in Britain, or vice versa. We did not agree with their quasi-Marxist economic views and hoped that they would change them. But we were determined to see that they were given a fair chance in free elections and I expected them to win. If they did, we would help the new government to get established. The response was positive. The Swapo leaders made clear that they were determined to preserve the Namibian economy. I encouraged them to visit the Rössing uranium mine, which they did shortly afterwards and were as impressed as I had been by what they found there.

Not long afterwards, the leading white member of Swapo, lawyer Anton Lubowski, was assassinated. I had got to know him quite well and had no doubt that this exploit was the work of the criminals in the CCB. It was a black day when I attended his funeral in the township, where Theo-Ben Gurirab made an emotional appeal for calm.

As the Namibian elections, due in November, drew closer I also had no doubt that we would witness a final attempt by South African military intelligence to disrupt them. What could not be predicted was the form this would take.

One day in Pretoria I suddenly was summoned, with the other Western ambassadors, to an urgent meeting with Pik Botha and General Jannie Geldenhuys, the Chief of the SADF. Pik Botha read out intercepted radio messages which purported to show that another massive Swapo incursion was planned, with the connivance of the Kenyan battalion of Untag, the UN force. As British military personnel controlled the UN's communications in Namibia, it took me about three hours to discover, and not much longer to warn Van Heerden, that these messages were false. A furious Pik Botha had been misled by his own intelligence services. As usual, no action appeared to be taken against those responsible for this deception.

The crisis passed, with Swapo winning the elections by a large margin. Douglas Hurd and I attended the celebrations in Windhoek to mark Namibia's independence. It was a chaotic evening, with Pérez de Cuéllar and various heads of state barely able to get into the stadium and PLO leader Yasser Arafat attempting to accost James Baker, who was by no means anxious to meet him. But there also was no doubting the sense of joy, and also of relief, among the immense crowd gathered there at the attainment of self-rule and the end of a long and bitter conflict.

CHAPTER XI

‘You can be Mandela and I'll be Mrs Thatcher'

On his return to London, Douglas Hurd reported to the Prime Minister that the government and the ANC were edging their way towards ‘talks about talks'. De Klerk had appeared unruffled. The emergency powers would be relaxed as soon as the violence abated. But there were in the townships large groups of radicalised, uneducated teenagers engaged in violence.

Hurd saw Mandela briefly at the independence dinner in Windhoek. Mandela was friendly, apologised for the fact that a meeting had not taken place and offered one for the next day, by which time Hurd had to leave.

On my return to Cape Town, Van Heerden told me that, in his meeting with De Klerk, Mandela had attacked the conduct of the police, not only at Sebokeng, but in the townships generally. But the wave of violence across the country over the past eight weeks had not been triggered by the police, and the ANC needed to discipline their
own supporters. De Klerk wanted to lift the emergency restrictions as soon as he could. A lot of prisoners had already been released and more would follow. De Klerk could not consider an immediate amnesty for those responsible for ‘necklace' killings and bombings. There would be progress in removing obstacles to the return of the exiles.

The Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, commented favourably to Douglas Hurd on his own meeting with De Klerk, also in Windhoek. The Russians, he said, should use their influence with the ANC and we should use ours with the South African government.

For the ANC, the obstacles to negotiations were the state of emergency and the delay in the release of prisoners; for the government, it was the mayhem in the townships. I asked Viljoen's deputy, Roelf Meyer, if the state of emergency could be restricted to Natal. Beyond that, it would have a positive effect to establish a programme for the repeal of the remaining apartheid laws. The government would be wasting its time unless it was prepared to deal directly with the issue of one person, one vote. Meyer said that, personally, he agreed, provided they could entrench an independent judiciary and a justiciable bill of rights. Ways would have to be found to assure the whites and other minorities that their interests could not be overridden by the majority. No one had yet come up with a viable solution to this problem.

Mandela arrived in London for the Wembley concert to celebrate his release. A crowd of seventy-two thousand packed Wembley Stadium
for the star-studded concert, which was broadcast live to more than sixty countries. Mandela received an eight-minute standing ovation when he took the stage.

The Prime Minister, however, reacted with incredulity to a statement by him criticising her planned meeting with De Klerk, whom she had helped to persuade to release him. Nor did she consider that such a meeting required the permission of the ANC. But Mandela also said publicly that he would be returning soon to London to meet her and, as he had told me, that she was ‘a very powerful lady – one I would rather have as an ally than an enemy'.
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Pik Botha argued that the Population Registration Act, the 1950 law that first elaborated the apartheid system of race classification, would automatically disappear with the passage of a new constitution. I said that it would be far better to repeal it beforehand. We had impressed on the ANC that there must be no further postponement of talks with the government and that they would not succeed in their demand for the setting-up of a constituent assembly prior to deciding the new constitution.

Van Heerden told me that the government had evidence that elements of the ANC did not believe in the negotiating process. I said that the ANC were saying exactly the same to me about elements of the security forces.

De Klerk made a speech to parliament in which he accepted for the first time the possibility of universal suffrage based on a common voters' roll and set out a timetable for the repeal of the remaining
apartheid legislation (the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act). De Klerk continued to reject the notion of ‘black majority rule' on the grounds that no community should be pre-eminent over the others.

The Prime Minister told Gerrit Viljoen, in London, that De Klerk's speech the previous day had been another major step forward. She was disappointed that Mandela continued to defer to his ANC colleagues, rather than leading from the front. Viljoen said he was thinking of possible entrenched representation for the minorities in an upper house.

I reported on the tensions between Thabo Mbeki and MK leader Chris Hani, who felt that the ANC were simply being led into a trap. Desmond Tutu and Kenneth Kaunda both by now were calling for suspension of the armed struggle, and the ANC were having difficulty controlling their own supporters. The overthrow of the intensely unpopular homeland government in Ciskei on 4 March, a coup in which twenty-seven people were killed, had been followed by looting and arson.

As these scenes unfolded, I telephoned Terror Lekota at the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg and asked him and his colleagues to do something about this, given that we were trying to persuade De Klerk to lift the state of emergency. To his credit, Lekota did rush to the Ciskei and some semblance of order was restored.

Barend du Plessis assured me that the government were not going to be pushed off course by the violence. There would be progress with Mandela on the release of prisoners. I said that I hoped the government would stop denouncing ‘simplistic majority rule'. They would do better to insist on the need for constitutional guarantees and a genuine
multiparty system. Du Plessis replied that what the government were concerned to avoid was ‘democracy African style'.

In the run-up to the first meeting between the South African government and the ANC, held at the historic Groote Schuur (‘great barn') residence of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town, the government tried to resist the inclusion of white South Africa's
bête noire
, Joe Slovo, in the ANC delegation, only for Mandela to insist that he be included. (As described later, Joe Slovo at times was to prove a moderating influence on his colleagues in the ANC.) In personal terms, the two sides got on better than they had expected, each proving to the other that, as Mbeki said, ‘they did not have horns'.
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In the meeting, Mandela said that he was not sure that De Klerk would be able to carry the National Party and its supporters along with him on the course he had chosen. However, at the conclusion of the talks, De Klerk said that he looked to the future with confidence. Mandela said that the meeting was ‘the realisation of a dream', given all the ANC's efforts through its history to engage with the government. The ANC would look into the whole question of the armed struggle. Sanctions should not be lifted, but it should not be necessary to ask for them to be intensified.

Mandela, however, was sticking to the ANC demands for the establishment of an interim government and a constituent assembly. I told him again that we would support him over the emergency laws and release of prisoners, but not over these demands, which had no chance of being accepted.

Pik Botha told us that an indemnity from prosecution had been agreed, which would be applied across the board, and would cover both ANC and security force miscreants. The state of emergency would be re-examined in the context of a commitment to reduce violence. Mandela had effectively said that continued references to the ‘armed struggle' were largely rhetoric. They had agreed to a ‘common commitment … to a peaceful process of negotiations'. Crucially, the talks had been held in a cordial atmosphere, and members of the government had got on well with their ANC counterparts.

De Klerk made a successful eighteen-day visit to Europe, during which he held talks with the Prime Minister, Chancellor Kohl, French president François Mitterrand and other European leaders. There was still as yet no formal relaxation of sanctions by the European Community, but the member states had lost interest in enforcing them. De Klerk received a warm reception from the Prime Minister at Chequers. In his words, ‘Once she had decided that she could trust me, and that I would do what I said I was going to do, she did everything that she could to support me.'
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On his return, De Klerk felt that the sanctions tide had turned. I told Van Heerden that this would depend on what the government did about the release of prisoners and the state of emergency.

Further meeting with Mandela. He had told an astonished crowd of his supporters in Soweto to learn Afrikaans, which he had done while in
prison, better to understand the minds of their antagonists and to start disarming them by addressing them in their own language. I recalled, to laughter from Mandela, that the last political leader to require this of the Sowetans had been Dr Treurnicht, whose attempt to introduce Afrikaans in the schools had led to the 1976 Soweto uprising.

On the future constitution, I said that we were committed to one person, one vote, and majority government, but did not regard these as incompatible with the sort of protection for minority rights that existed in other democratic constitutions. Nor did Mandela, he said, though not on the basis of ‘group rights'. Ways would have to be found to address this.

I said that, since he was asking us to use our influence with the South African government, in particular to lift the state of emergency, we knew what they would accept and what they would not. The ANC still were placing great emphasis on the demand for the election of a constituent assembly, which had no chance of being agreed and which we did not support ourselves, as that would entail majority rule before the constitution was written. Mandela said that there was strong pressure from within the movement for this, but he understood the point I was making.

Mandela, in a revealing aside, said that, if he had achieved a prominent position, it was because of the organisation. No political leader was of any value unless he could take his constituency with him. If he lost the support of his party, it would remain only for him to write his memoirs. Black South Africans had suffered terrible things for forty years under leaders such as Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha. Three million people had been forcibly removed. Thousands had been killed by
the police. Police shootings – though not the fault of De Klerk – were continuing even now. All this had left an enormous residue of bitterness and militancy. He would want to explain this to the Prime Minister, but also to assure her of his strong commitment to a negotiated solution.

I suggested to Mandela that, to celebrate his release, next time we should meet for lunch at the best restaurant in Johannesburg, Linger Longer, then in Braamfontein. It is hard to imagine today the commotion this caused at the time – the intake of breath as we revealed to the proprietor, at the last minute, the identity of our guest and the reactions of the other diners, most of whom had voted to keep him for three decades in jail, as he shook hands with every one of them, as if they were his natural supporters. It was a bravura performance, often to be repeated, and calculated quite deliberately to win over his former opponents. At the end of the meal, characteristically, he dived into the kitchen to thank those who had prepared it.

De Klerk announced the lifting of the state of emergency in all parts of the country except Natal. He also released a number of ANC prisoners convicted of political crimes and announced an indemnity for the returning exiles.

Pik Botha told me that agreement in principle had been reached with the ANC intelligence chief, Jacob Zuma, on the eventual release of all ‘political' prisoners. But he was alarmed at the unexpectedly strong showing by the Conservative Party in a by-election in Umlazi.
The result had been a severe shock to the National Party. If an election were held the next day, he contended, they could not be sure of getting a majority from the white electorate.

De Klerk wrote to thank the Prime Minister for their meeting at Chequers. He went through all the steps he had taken since becoming President to achieve a ‘totally changed South Africa'. He was concerned that the ANC had not yet abandoned the armed struggle and at their continued insistence on nationalisation.

In each of his meetings with me, I had found Mandela practising his classic strategy of seeking to co-opt me, just as he had his warder in jail and the justice minister. The journalist John Carlin, who has written more perceptively than anyone about Mandela, in
Playing the Enemy
and
Knowing Mandela
, describes exactly the same tactics being used on him.
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I was his advisor, Mandela kept insisting to me and others. I soon found that his next target for co-option was more ambitious. It was in fact the Prime Minister.