The End of Apartheid (15 page)

When I left, Wits University, on the proposal of Helen Suzman, was kind enough to award me an honorary degree ‘for services to the struggle against apartheid'. (The offer from the South African government of the Order of Good Hope I had to decline – on the same grounds Margaret Thatcher had declined the freedom of the city of Johannesburg.) Mandela and Buthelezi added their good wishes, and it was this that pleased me the most, for it demonstrated that, in this deeply divided society, it was possible to try to act as a genuinely honest broker and to retain the confidence of the main participants. This in itself was a demonstration that, in the end, they wanted to try to find a way to agree.

I left with an unaccustomed sense of humility. My predecessors, however hard they tried – and some tried harder than others – could not hope to achieve much in the face of that ironclad regime. And what in the end was achieved was accomplished by and for South Africans – not by any outsider, however well disposed. The most that any embassy could do was to try to help act as a facilitator, and then let South Africans get on with a process in which too much foreign
involvement was positively undesirable. For a time the South African government, trying to change but still hard put to bring itself to do so, did feel that it needed one Western country it felt it could appeal to. For a time, Mandela and the ANC also felt they needed someone they could appeal to, with, they hoped, some influence on the other side. Within months, there could be little further need, and certainly much less scope, for such a role.

Two and a half years later, I was asked by Mandela to fulfil a promise to him that, as soon as he was ready to call for new investment, Britain would be the first to help him to attract back to South Africa some of the companies that had left and to encourage others to invest. This we did at a dinner and reception he addressed at the British embassy in Washington, to which we invited a host of American industrialists and investment fund managers. Throwing away his dreary and partisan prepared speech, as I urged him to do, Mandela declared his intention to seek an accommodation with Buthelezi and to reappoint De Klerk's finance minister, Derek Keys.

Several of the South African businessmen travelling in his wake had been pillars of the apartheid regime. When I congratulated him on his apparent ability to forget this, Mandela replied, with understandable bitterness, that he forgot nothing, and nor did he forgive, but that he needed them now.

A few weeks later, the first fully democratic elections ever to be held in South Africa resulted in a resounding victory for the ANC
and in a coalition government in which, despite the tensions between them, all the main political forces for the time being were represented in a still deeply divided society.

The Government of National Unity lasted until May 1996, by which time De Klerk and his colleagues felt that the ANC, with their commanding majority in parliament, had little interest in sharing power and certainly not with their former adversaries. With Mandela installed as President, I was amazed to hear, among others from Anthony Sampson, that he had started saying that he preferred dealing with PW Botha, being supposedly more straightforward, than with FW de Klerk, whom his ANC colleagues continued to regard as a serious political rival. Very exceptionally, I asked to see Mandela, who received me in his office at the Tuynhuys. After the usual greetings, I recalled the meetings I had had, in the same office, with PW Botha, which had entailed arguing, with no success, for his release and for people's lives, for instance those of the Sharpeville Six.

Whatever their disagreements, I reminded him, he should please bear in mind that, but for De Klerk, he would not have been elected President and might still be in jail. Mandela, characteristically, informed his assistant that ‘the ambassador is right' (though I had ceased to be one), adding that De Klerk had richly deserved his Nobel Peace Prize, ‘for he had made peace possible'.

CHAPTER XV

‘We did not join the ANC to become rich; we joined it to go to jail'

During Mandela's state visit to the UK as President of South Africa, in July 1996, he combined with the Prince of Wales to sponsor a musical evening at the Royal Albert Hall. Asked to look after him in the interval, I pointed out that, when it came to the performance by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the entire audience would be expecting him to get up and dance, as he was accustomed to do in South Africa. Mandela was worried that this might offend the Queen, whom he greatly admired and had taken to calling ‘Elizabeth' (not a form of address allowed to anyone else on the planet, except Prince Philip). But get up and dance he did in the Royal Box, with the Duke of Edinburgh following suit – and then the Queen. This was not a feat that could have been accomplished by any other world leader.

When the time came for Mandela to hand over as President, his own preferred candidate to succeed him was Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary-general of the ANC, who had played the leading role in
negotiating the new constitution. The party hierarchy insisted on Thabo Mbeki, who had played no less crucial a role in the transition. Mbeki, however, was anxious to step out from the shadow of his predecessor and had anyway been running the government under him. Mandela complained to me and others that, while he could get through to any other world leader, he had difficulty in doing so with his successor, who did not always bother to return his calls.

After he stood down as President, Mandela told me how much he detested Robert Mugabe, whom he regarded as having betrayed everything the liberation movements had fought for. He referred to him derisively as ‘Comrade Bob'. Always meticulous about time-keeping himself, he also was infuriated by Mugabe's habit of arriving in regal style two hours late for meetings of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Asked on one occasion what the people of Zimbabwe should do about him, Mandela said: ‘If necessary, take up arms!' This earned him some severe remonstrances from the ANC, urging him not to rock the boat, whereupon he fell silent on the subject. In 2000, when the government-sponsored land seizures began in Zimbabwe, however, Mandela told me that, if anything of the kind were to occur in South Africa, he would come out of retirement and ‘stop this on the first farm'.

Meanwhile, he did start to criticise the Mbeki government's denialism about HIV/Aids. This led him to discover that his intense loyalty to his party was not always reciprocated. He was summoned to explain himself at a meeting of the national executive committee (NEC) in March 2002. Mbeki did not attend the meeting himself, but Mandela was astonished to find himself being heckled in the meeting by a
claque of Mbeki supporters for criticising the government. A furious Mandela never attended another NEC meeting.

The difference between the ANC he believed he represented and its conduct as the ruling party was denounced by his great friend Archbishop Tutu (‘they stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on it themselves'). At the 1997 conference in Mafikeng, during which he handed over the presidency of the party to Thabo Mbeki, Mandela railed against corruption. Yet, after standing down as President of the country, to the disappointment of his admirers and despite his own unease, he remained silent about its departures from his ideals. There were many who would have liked to hear him remind his colleagues that, as Kgalema Motlanthe observed of his fellow Robben Islanders: ‘We did not join the ANC to become rich; we joined it to go to jail.'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Jonathan Ball for suggesting that I should publish this account of numerous meetings with PW Botha, FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and others at a crucial time in South Africa’s history, and to Jeremy Boraine, Alfred LeMaitre and the team at Jonathan Ball Publishers for their help in producing it. I have been grateful to John Carlin and David Welsh for their suggestions on the manuscript and to Katie Gareh and Marie-France Renwick for their invaluable help with it.

I must especially record my thanks to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and to the FCO historians Professor Patrick Salmon and Dr Richard Smith for their kindness in enabling me, in writing this book, to review all the reports I sent from South Africa while I was ambassador and the messages exchanged between the Prime Minister, PW Botha and FW de Klerk at the time.