Nelson Mandela: First president of the democratic South Africa
1918-2013
NELSON Mandela was one of the most revered public figures of modern times.
Only Gandhi, and perhaps Mother Teresa, came close.
In Mandela’s case, his canonisation was the work of a formidably successful public relations campaign while he sat in jail for 27 years.
By the time he walked out of Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl in the Western Cape, on February 11 1990, this largely anonymous figure occupied a dizzyingly high pedestal. There were concerns, which he shared, that he had been set up for a spectacular fall.
It is perhaps the truest measure of the man that, far from failing to meet the superhuman expectations the world had of him, he rose above them — not by being an exceptional political leader, which he was not, but by being an exceptional human being.
He showed no bitterness or anger for his lost years. He remained to the end magnanimous, modest, compassionate, warm and extraordinarily likeable. In spite of the nonstop megastar treatment to which he was subjected from the moment he left jail, he never lost his essential simplicity.
Nobody who met him ever doubted that it was the real thing.
Little about Mandela before he disappeared behind bars in 1962 at the age of 44 suggested the greatness that lay ahead. Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18 1918 in the village of Mvezo near Mthatha in the Transkei. When he was seven years old, his teacher told him his name would be Nelson.
Mandela’s response to the relentless physical, spiritual and emotional hardships of prison was to adopt a rigid mask of inscrutability that hid his true feelings
His father was a descendant of Thembu king Ngubengcuka, but he lost his chieftainship, cattle, land and income after refusing a summons from a white magistrate, and the family relocated to Qunu.
The elder Mandela was prime minister to two kings. When he died, nine-year-old Nelson was adopted by the regent of the Thembu, who sent him to Healdtown Methodist College and the University of Fort Hare. He was easily outshone there by his nephew, future homeland leader Kaiser Matanzima, whom he idolised. Later, he would dismiss him as a “sellout”.
He studied law and politics, but intellectually — and in terms of political awareness — he was way behind fellow student Oliver Tambo. His heroes were sportsmen, his ambition was to be a court interpreter and his involvement in politics limited to leading a revolt against the food, for which he was expelled.
In 1941, at the age of 22, Mandela fled to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage. He worked as a night watchman on the gold mines, equipped with a helmet, whistle and knobkerrie. When mine officials heard that he was wanted back home by the king, he was fired. He was referred to a politically savvy young estate agent by the name of Walter Sisulu. Mandela told him he wanted to be a lawyer, and Sisulu got him a job as an articled clerk with a young white attorney, Lazar Sidelsky, “the first white man who treated me as a human being”, Mandela remembered.
He enrolled for an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand. A fellow student was Ruth First, who found him proud, prickly, unsure of himself, overly sensitive and arrogant. He was there from 1943 to 1949 and left without a law degree.
He played no role in student politics but was increasingly occupied with the ANC, to which he was introduced by Sisulu. The latter also introduced Mandela to his cousin Evelyn Mase, and she and Mandela were married in 1944.
Mandela’s commitment to the struggle against apartheid was less the result of a single, conscious decision than the cumulative effect of a thousand slights, insults and humiliations. It was a build-up of anger that sucked him into the struggle.
In 1943, he joined a delegation to ANC president Dr AB Xuma to propose the idea of an ANC youth league. It was launched the following year with Anton Lembede as president and Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo on the executive.
Mandela was elected president of the ANC Youth League in 1950, but it was only two years later, through his organising role in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, that anyone credited him with leadership potential.
In that same year, he and Tambo established the first black African law firm in South Africa.
In court, Mandela cultivated a theatrical, assertive style that riled white magistrates and prosecutors. It swelled his fan club, but it was not always in the best interests of his clients.
In 1956, Mandela and 155 other members of the Congress Alliance were arrested on charges of high treason. A crisis was clearly building, and in 1959 the ANC executive decided that when it arrived, Tambo must leave South Africa immediately.
In March 1960, it came in the form of the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC. Tambo went into exile and Mandela wound up their law practice.
Soon after being found not guilty of high treason in March 1961, he went underground and launched Umkhonto weSizwe after a heated dispute among the executive of the ANC — and against the advice of wiser heads who warned that an armed struggle would be futile and counterproductive. Mandela later acknowledged that they were right.
Recent scholarship has suggested that Mandela was a secret member of the South African Communist Party by this time and that his call to arms favoured its agenda rather than the ANC’s, whose president, Albert Luthuli, was resolutely opposed to the use of violence.
Meanwhile, Mandela became the most wanted person in South Africa. The press labelled him “the black pimpernel”. He was interviewed on British television and quoted in overseas newspapers, and the Mandela legend began to take root.
He slipped out of the country in January 1962 for military training, met several African heads of state and spent 10 days in London.
He was advised repeatedly not to return to South Africa, but gave the impression of being resigned to — and perhaps even wanting — martyrdom.
The inevitable happened on August 5 1962. The police, following a tip, arrested him en route to Johannesburg after a meeting with MK saboteurs in Durban. Mandela was found guilty of incitement and leaving the country without a passport, sentenced to five years and sent to Robben Island.
In July 1963, with him already behind bars, the police raided the ANC’s hideout and secret meeting place at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, where Mandela had stayed disguised as a gardener before his arrest.
Mandela and nine others, including Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, were tried in Pretoria by Judge Quartus de Wet. Mandela chose to read a statement from the dock rather than undergo cross-examination. It is one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century. Delivered in the shadow of the gallows, it was certainly one of the bravest. Unapologetic and defiant, it practically dared the judge to do his worst. It would have been even more provocative had his lawyers, alarmed by its uncompromising tone, not persuaded
He provided the kind of clear, calm and decisive leadership that was missing on De Klerk’s side. He knew exactly what he wanted — an ANC government and majority rule
Mandela to soften the ending by adding to his declaration — that a free South Africa was something for which he was prepared to die — the words “if needs be”.
Mandela, whose favourite quote at the time was Shakespeare’s “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once”, never betrayed any fear during the trial. He and the others informed their lawyers that should they get the death sentence, they would not appeal it.
On June 12 1964, he and seven of his fellow accused were given life sentences. They were ecstatic, certain they would be out in 10 years.
On Robben Island, a typically wet, freezing Cape winter, in which they were obliged to wear shorts (Mandela rejected the offer of long trousers because it was not extended to other black prisoners) and sandals, quickly dampened their spirits, as did the constant vulgar abuse of the warders and daily routine of hard labour. They crushed rocks in the prison courtyard and worked with pickaxes in a lime quarry — without sunglasses for the first three years, which left Mandela’s eyes irreparably damaged.
It was under these demoralising circumstances that his leadership qualities emerged as never before. Most prisoners on the island — and not only the political prisoners — looked up to Mandela as their leader. His leadership held them together, inspired them and buoyed their morale.
Before jail, he had been confrontational. In jail he made a conscious decision to be more conciliatory, something, he confessed, that did not come naturally to him.
Nothing characterised Mandela more during his imprisonment than iron self-control and self-discipline.
He wrote to his daughter Zindzi: “There are few misfortunes in this world that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will.”
He was ruthless about acknowledging his weaknesses and character flaws, and used his jail time to iron them out.
Mandela’s response to the relentless physical, spiritual and emotional hardships of prison was to adopt a rigid mask of inscrutability that hid his true feelings.
The extent to which this mask became the person was the great unknown about Mandela. A close friend said, some years after his release, that she never knew whether she was dealing with a Machiavelli or a saint.
Mandela’s response to grief was to keep it to himself. In 1969, when he was told that his eldest son, Thembi, had been killed in a car crash, he went to his cell without saying anything. Only when Sisulu came to look for him did he, again without a word, hand him the telegram. Mandela was refused permission to attend the funeral.
In 1976, he wrote to his second wife, the former Winnie Madikizela: “I have been fairly successful in putting on a mask behind which I have pined for the family, alone.”
He had married Winnie in 1958. Given the time he spent underground and out of the country before his arrest, he saw tragically little of his achingly beautiful young wife. Constant, gratuitous harassment by the authorities limited her visits to him on the island. She managed to see him in 1966 for only the second time since his incarceration — a visit that lasted half an hour, during which they were separated by thick glass and closely observed by a warder.
Mandela rejected several offers of freedom, the first in 1974 by justice minister Jimmy Kruger on condition he confine himself to the Transkei, and subsequent offers by state president PW Botha on condition he renounce violence.
In 1982, he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in Tokai, Cape Town. He initiated secret talks with Botha’s government in 1987. When the ANC leadership in Lusaka heard about this, there was considerable anger (he received a “hostile” note from Tambo, he said in his autobiography) and suspicion that he might sell them out.
In 1989 he met Botha, whom, improbably, he rather liked and trusted.
In 1990, at the age of 71, he was released by Botha’s successor, FW de Klerk, whom he neither liked nor trusted.
Their mutual animosity boiled over on the first day of the formal negotiations to end apartheid — the Codesa (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) talks in December 1991 — and almost brought the process to a halt.
Apoplectic with rage, Mandela called De Klerk an ethically challenged leader of an “illegitimate, discredited minority regime” with whom no decent person would want to negotiate.
Mandela remained aloof from the details of the negotiations, which he left to his team, but his influence was strongly felt. When there was any doubt about the next move, he was consulted and his word was final. He provided the kind of clear, calm and decisive leadership that was missing on De Klerk’s side.
He knew exactly what he wanted — an ANC government and majority rule.
His confidence was informed by his belief that De Klerk needed the negotiations to succeed more than the ANC did. In the end, he was proved right.
On May 10 1994, he became the first black president of South Africa.
As a symbol of interracial harmony and national unity, Mandela was priceless. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was not exaggerating when he said that without his restraining influence and commanding authority there might have been a blood bath. Nobody else commanded sufficient respect to persuade the belligerent right wing to abandon thoughts of insurrection, and equally belligerent black militants to abandon their fantasy of armed revolution.
When South Africa had been on a knife edge after the assassination of SACP and MK leader Chris Hani in 1993, Mandela had been all that stood between it and mayhem, something that De Klerk — president at the time — acknowledged when he left it to Mandela to address the nation on TV.
When the ANC refused to allow Mandela to meet with Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the early 1990s, it effectively doomed KwaZulu-Natal to a civil war that Jacob Zuma, who had intimate knowledge of the dynamics on both sides, believed Mandela could have stopped.
“The ANC wanted to choke me,” complained Mandela. But he, who could be autocratic when it suited him, allowed it to. It was one of several devastating failures of leadership that blighted his presidency.
He also allowed the ANC to shut him up over the looming Aids crisis because, he was told, it would cost votes. After retiring, he would bitterly regret this and openly challenge Thabo Mbeki’s Aids denialist policies, incurring his and his cabinet’s fury in the process.
As president of South Africa he put loyalty to comrades above the interests of the country, refusing to fire ministers who, in some cases, were almost criminally incompetent.
It was under his watch that the multibillion-rand arms deal, which continues to haunt South Africa, was initiated.
If the arms deal was corruption on an epic scale that may not have personally involved Mandela, apart from the fact that he gave it his blessing, there were examples of corruption on a smaller scale that did. He accepted a bribe for the ANC from Sol Kerzner to use his influence to stop a criminal prosecution against the homeland casino king from going ahead.
He accepted money from Indonesian president Suharto, in return praising the egregiously corrupt and ruthless tyrant as “an able, patient and suave leader”, refusing to condemn his human rights abuses and exhorting his oppressed subjects to vote for him.
He sanctioned the sale of military hardware to some of the most violent and undemocratic regimes on the planet.
He accepted money for the ANC from murderous Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and gave him South Africa’s highest decoration, the Order of Good Hope.
He allowed himself to be overruled on the vital issue of who would be his deputy and thus succeed him as president. He appointed Mbeki, whose potentially damaging flaws he recognised, rather than his first choice, Cyril Ramaphosa, who he believed would do a better job. He then allowed his deputy to become South Africa’s de facto leader, and even allowed him to write his farewell address to the ANC for him (a bitter, racist and divisive document) when he resigned as party leader in 1997.
His own leadership was reduced to, and perhaps cheapened by, a succession of photo opportunities with fatuous celebrities — from Princess Diana and the Spice Girls to Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell and hordes of others.
British columnist Simon Jenkins put Mandela’s failure of political leadership best when he wrote that “a state can be represented by a saint, but not ruled by one”.
During these critical years for South Africa’s fledgling democ-
He allowed the ANC to shut him up over the looming Aids crisis because, he was told, it would cost votes. He later bitterly regretted this, openly challenging the denialist Mbeki
racy, Mandela was a profoundly unhappy and lonely man.
His marriage to Winnie had begun disintegrating soon after her trial in 1991 for the kidnapping and murder of teenage activist Stompie Seipei, and it came to a formal end when he divorced her in the High Court in Johannesburg in 1996.
His relationship with his children was stiff and awkward. He found it impossible to open up to them — or indeed anyone else — emotionally.
Whatever his real feelings were, they remained locked and apparently frozen behind his mask.
The big thaw came when he became romantically involved with Mozambique’s former first lady, Graça Machel, whom he married on his 80th birthday in 1998. In 1999, he stood down as South Africa’s president.
He retired from public life in 2004, and resolutely refused to reveal his thoughts as the party so closely associated with his name slid deeper into the moral quagmire that his own weak leadership had helped to create.
Nelson Mandela is survived by his wife, Graça, and three children. Three children by his first wife predeceased him, including his second son, Makgatho, who died in 2005, at the age of 57, of Aids. — Chris
Barron