Robben Island secrets
MANDELA: BOOK REVEALS THAT THERE WERE FURTHER TALKS WITH PW, FW
Readers will be ‘taken aback’ by some disclosures.
Prisoner 913, published by Tafelberg, contains revelations about Nelson Mandela’s activities in prison – notably his interaction with the National Party government and presidents PW Botha and FW de Klerk.
Based on secret records kept by the late Kobie Coetsee, then minister of justice and prisons, it reveals that collaboration between Mandela and the government went much further than what is generally known.
It reveals that, with government approval and support, Mandela embarked on an extensive campaign to persuade political prisoners about to be released to keep a low profile, and to persuade their organisations to help lower political tensions in the country.
It reveals that in the last months of his imprisonment, Mandela tried to forge a deal between the NP government and the ANC in exile in terms of which Pretoria would have agreed to accept ANC preconditions for constitutional negotiations in exchange for the ANC giving up its armed struggle.
It discloses that Mandela was asked to become De Klerk’s personal advisor in the transitional period after his release. This proposal was based on the belief among key government figures that Mandela would soon be politically side-lined.
The proposal remained alive until a day before De Klerk’s famous address in parliament on 2 February 1990, when it was mysteriously abandoned.
The book also reveals that Mandela believed Winnie Mandela played a role in his arrest at Howick in Natal in 1962, prior to his conviction in the Rivonia Trial.
Prisoner 913: The Release of Nelson Mandela – Revelations from the Secret Archive of Apartheid Minister Kobie Coetsee is based on the classified files on Mandela which Coetsee kept in his ministry, which he removed when he left government prior to the 1994 elections. It is co-authored with Riaan de Villiers, a former journalist, and Dr Jan-Ad Stemmet, a historian at the University of the Free State.
They say Coetsee promised the material to Stemmet in 2000, but died two days later. His widow eventually donated the material to a Bloemfontein archive, where Stemmet discovered it in 2013.
Subsequent study revealed that the archive also contains transcripts of hidden recordings of many of Mandela’s conversations with his visitors.
It also contains transcripts of Mandela’s phone conversations with key ANC figures in exile, made with the government’s permission from Victor Verster Prison, in which he punted a “simultaneous declaration” between Pretoria and Lusaka.
While, the authors write, readers might be surprised – and “even taken aback” – by some of the disclosures, the archive underlines that Mandela was faced with a wide array of challenges, over a very long period.
It helps to reveal how he dealt with those challenges while struggling to keep abreast of political developments in the outside world. As a result, for them, Mandela has “grown rather than diminished in stature, becoming more human in the process”.
They add that the archive also serves as a reminder that, as Mandela himself remarked in later years, he was no saint, but a “flawed and fallible human being”.