For 27 years in jail he refused to compromise his principles, while
for most of that time his own party, the African National Congress
(ANC), was broken. But he emerged in February 1990 to become the
dominant influence in his country, without whom peace was unlikely. When
he was elected President in April 1994, he was accepted by whites as
well as blacks as the embodiment of his country's new democracy, with a
unique moral authority.
The roots of Mandela's strength went back
to his upbringing in the rural Transkei, the homeland of the Xhosas in
the Eastern Cape province. He was related to the paramount chief of the
Thembu people, to whom his father was chief councillor, and he was
brought up with a strong sense of responsibility and tribal pride. "The
elders would tell tales," as he later described it, "about the wars
fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland."
His first
influences were very local and tribal. His father died when he was nine,
and he went to live at the paramount chief's Great Place, where he
would watch the chief dispensing justice - which gave him an early
interest in the law. But he soon absorbed a very English missionary
education, at the local Methodist high school, and later at the black
university college of Fort Hare, where he met many future black leaders
including his closest friend, Oliver Tambo.
Mandela was dashing,
ambitious, keen on ballroom dancing and boxing. But he was in a
rebellious mood, both against the college - which suspended him and
others for political agitation - and against the paramount chief who was
planning his marriage and future chieftainship.
At 22 he sold two
oxen to pay for a journey to Johannesburg, where he began a far more
turbulent career. There, he became friends with a much more experienced
black activist, Walter Sisulu, and his mother, with whom he stayed in
the township of Orlando West. Sisulu became his indispensable political
mentor, and introduced him to his cousin, Evelyn, whom he married.
When
Mandela wanted to study law, Sisulu arranged for him to be articled to a
white attorney, Lazar Sidelsky, who befriended him. Mandela studied law
part-time at the University of the Witwatersrand; but he was soon drawn
into militant politics through the ANC, the veteran black organisation
that was now in the process of revival. He was inspired by a fiery young
Zulu intellectual, Anton Lembede, who, together with Sisulu, Tambo and
Mandela, set up a Congress Youth League in 1944 to press the ANC towards
effective protest.
The Youth Leaguers were initially exclusively
African nationalist and fiercely anti-Communist; but they soon widened
their outlook, particularly after the Afrikaner National Party came to
power in 1948 and enforced their apartheid policy.
Mandela and his
friends found common cause with Indian and Coloured leaders and began
to look to communists as invaluable allies. Mandela never joined the
Communist Party, but he respected his communist colleagues in the ANC.
As he put it in 1964: "For many decades the communists were the only
political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as
human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk
with us, live with us, and work with us."
Mandela continued his
legal career, setting up a partnership with Tambo near the centre of
Johannesburg, which helped black clients with their political and other
legal difficulties.
But both partners were now wholly committed to
the struggle against apartheid, and Mandela became more deeply
implicated when the ANC launched its first passive resistance in the
Defiance Campaign in 1952, for which he mobilised volunteers.
Mandela,
Sisulu and Tambo were now seen as the "kingmakers" behind the more
conservative leaders of the ANC. Mandela was the most imposing and
charismatic of them, with his military bearing and chiefly confidence.
He was tall, physically very strong, with a natural sense of command.
But he was politically less shrewd and knowledgeable than either Sisulu
or Tambo.
The Defiance Campaign was soon suppressed by fierce
legislation, and subsequent protests against apartheid were met by mass
arrests. In 1956, the police arrested 156 leaders of the ANC and its
allies, including Mandela, and charged them with treason, in a trial
that periodically immobilised them for four years.
But Mandela was
growing in stature and his morale was strengthened by his second
marriage in 1958 to Winnie Madikizela, a vivacious and attractive social
worker who soon developed her own fiery political awareness, and would
before long become a controversial politician in her own right.
Mandela
faced a much greater challenge in early 1960, when the breakaway Pan
Africanist Congress (PAC) set a faster pace for resistance, and peaceful
protests against passbooks were met with violent reprisals, culminating
in the Sharpeville Massacre. When the ANC and the PAC continued to
demonstrate and burn passes, they were both banned. Mandela was forced
to go underground, travelling in disguise through the country as the
"black Pimpernel".
Mandela was now the effective leader of the
banned ANC inside South Africa, while Tambo led it in exile. Mandela
threw all his energies into an ambitious stay-at-home strike planned for
May 1961, when South Africa would become a republic. But the police
massed in the townships with armoured cars, and the protest - though
remarkably successful - was depicted by the press as a flop. Mandela was
convinced that, as he said on British television: "We are closing a
chapter on this question of non-violent protest".
Mandela and his radical colleagues now persuaded the ANC leadership,
with some difficulty, to form a separate military wing, called Umkhonto
we Sizwe (MK), to embark on the "armed struggle" beginning with
sabotage. Mandela became commander- in-chief; and MK set up a secret
base on a farm at Rivonia outside of Johannesburg.
It was a much
more dangerous policy than passive resistance and strikes, and conceived
with inadequate planning, and bound to alienate many allies. But their
sabotage was carefully limited to destroying power plants and
communications that, Mandela hoped, would discourage overseas
investment; and linked to appeals to world opinion to impose economic
sanctions on Pretoria to compel it to abandon apartheid.
Soon
after the first explosions, Mandela was smuggled out of the country to
make his first journey abroad, appealing for world support. After
addressing a conference in Ethiopia he travelled through North and West
Africa and visited London, where he made influential friends including
Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour opposition leader, and David Astor, the
editor of The Observer. He returned to South Africa, back in disguise,
and rashly visited political colleagues until in August 1962 his car was
stopped by the police in Natal and he was arrested after 17 months in
hiding. He was charged with incitement to strike and with illegally
leaving the country. He conducted his own eloquent defence, insisting
that this was "a trial of the aspirations of the African people". He was
sentenced to five years' imprisonment with hard labour.
But while
he was serving his sentence the police raided the farm in Rivonia,
capturing other conspirators and uncovering documents revealing the
plans for future sabotage. Mandela became one of the accused in the much
bigger "Rivonia trial" with colleagues, including Sisulu, charged with
organising sabotage and violent revolution, and furthering the aims of
communism.
At the end of the massive trial, Mandela made his most
historic speech, a four-hour exposition of his political philosophy and
development, and his ideal of democracy, concluding with the words: "It
is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." The accused were found
guilty and narrowly avoided a death sentence, but were sentenced to life
imprisonment, and were sent to Robben Island.
Most white South
Africans assumed that Mandela and the ANC would never again play a role
in politics, and for the next decade the black opposition inside South
Africa was virtually obliterated. But on Robben Island Mandela, Sisulu
and the others maintained their optimism. They were encouraged in the
late 1960s by the news of ANC guerrilla fighters entering South Africa
from the north. But it was not until 1976 that they saw a revival of
political militancy, when a younger generation rebelled against their
schooling in Soweto. The revolt was suppressed with more ruthless
detention, interrogation and torture by the police. But the influx of
young, new political prisoners gave Mandela new cause for hope.
Mandela
developed his inner strength and political judgement through all his
years in jail; and his letters to his family show how consistently he
retained his self- control and self-respect, and exerted his authority
over the warders themselves. He was not a religious man; but he had a
strong sense of human and family values, and a conviction that his cause
would eventually win. He also used his prison experience to sharpen his
mind by constant argument and later by studying for a law degree, which
he took from jail.
By 1984, Mandela could at last see signs of
more concerted world action against apartheid, as a new mass revolt was
spreading inside South Africa, accompanied by massive international
protest and the beginnings of effective sanctions, which were beginning
to achieve what Mandela had anticipated a quarter century before. But he
was surprised to find the most effective boycott coming from American
bankers, who had helped to finance Pretoria's military state in the
past, and were now abruptly withdrawing their loans and investments.
The
first hopes of concessions from Pretoria were soon dashed, as the
government imposed its severest state of emergency, detaining 20,000
people without trial. But the government was becoming painfully aware
that its acceptance by the outside world would depend on Mandela's
release; and some ministers believed that Mandela was more dangerous
inside jail than at large.
In 1989, the State President, Pieter
Willem Botha, had a talk with Mandela to explore a new formula for his
release, and soon afterwards his successor Frederik Willem de Klerk
quickly recognised that he must give way to world opinion and internal
resistance and moved towards a more conciliatory agenda. In February
1990, De Klerk unbanned the ANC, and shortly afterwards released Mandela
himself, after 27 years in jail.
It was a sensational emergence.
Many observers had expected Mandela to appear as a weakened old man who
would be out of touch with the modern world and the militant younger
blacks. But from the beginning he was politically shrewd, loyal to the
ANC and mastering new communications, including television - which had
not existed in South Africa when he began his sentence.
His style was that of a statesman combining intimacy with a
formidable presence and authority. But he remained a master-politician:
and at 71 he had mental flexibility and openness to new ideas at an age
when most people become more rigid.
Two weeks after his release he
was confirmed as Deputy President of the ANC, serving alongside his old
friend Oliver Tambo, the official President, who was recovering from a
stroke.
In the following months, Mandela became still more clearly
the key to future peace in South Africa. He betrayed no signs of
bitterness or resentment, praised the integrity of President De Klerk
and reassured white South Africans. But he continued to follow the ANC's
official policy.
He refused to reject the armed struggle; called for nationalising the mines and industry; and, remained committed to sanctions.
But
he was privately more conciliatory and far-sighted than many of his
younger colleagues. He welcomed dialogue with international businessmen,
and looked forward to overseas investment after sanctions were no
longer needed. He was very aware of South Africa's interdependence with
the world.
His public glory was accompanied by personal
loneliness: after Oliver Tambo died in April 1993 he described himself
as being "like the loneliest man in the world". He had separated from
his wife Winnie in April 1992, after she had been convicted of
kidnapping and accessory to assault; and he was painfully aware of his
limited contact with his children. "To be the father of a nation is a
great honour," he wrote later, "but to be the father of a family is a
greater joy. It was a joy I had far too little of."
In the four
years following his release he became that indisputable father of the
nation. He demonstrated all of his political skill by maintaining his
party's unity and the support of young militants while also working
towards a government of national unity, in coalition with his former
white enemies.
He could never wholly trust De Klerk, after he
realised that he had endorsed a "double agenda" that included secret
police support of Zulu killing bands; and he still felt the need to
re-assert the ANC's power by demonstrations and strikes. But he was
still prepared to negotiate with De Klerk - and with other Afrikaner
politicians who had previously approved torture and murders.
And
whites were increasingly seeing him as a national leader - all the more
so after the assassination of his radical lieutenant Chris Hani.
Temporarily, Mandela virtually took over the role of head of state in
successfully appealing for calm.
When democratic elections were
eventually agreed for April 1994, Mandela became a tireless campaigner,
projecting his reassuring smile across the nation; but he was careful
not to raise black expectations too high. The ANC victory in the
elections automatically made Mandela President and Head of State. His
inauguration ceremony in Pretoria revealed his full achievement in
attracting the loyalty of whites.
He was welcomed emotionally by
many former right-wingers who now saw Mandela bringing South Africa back
to the world's fold. Mandela, at the cost of painful compromises, could
now rely on the military chiefs to support him. When the generals
saluted him, he reflected: "Not so many years before they would not have
saluted but arrested me."
He had achieved the main purpose for
which he had sacrificed much of his life, and he had maintained his
fundamental principles. But he also knew that the hardest part was still
to come. As he concluded in his memoirs, finished after his election:
"The true test of our devotion to freedom is only just beginning."
PRESIDENT
Becoming president at 75, Mandela was aware that his powers were circumscribed.
For
the first two years, he maintained the "government of national unity"
with his former enemy De Klerk as one deputy president; and in many
fields he regarded himself as head of state, rather than head of
government, leaving most appointments and practical decisions to his
other deputy, Thabo Mbeki.
When De Klerk left the coalition, Mbeki
was more clearly emerging as head of government, and Mandela retreated
further, sometimes leaving Mbeki to preside over the cabinet.
His
relations with Mbeki were sometimes strained: he had been chosen as
deputy not by Mandela, but by the ANC and its allies. Mandela worried
privately that Mbeki was too suspicious of his colleagues, too dependent
on a few cronies, and sometimes implied that he would have preferred
Cyril Ramaphosa, who had left politics for business. But Mbeki was in
many ways well-suited to running the government, under an increasingly
detached President: he made many of the key appointments; he
masterminded economic policy, and he remained a skilful negotiator and
conciliator - particularly with Buthelezi, the troublesome Zulu minister
for home affairs.
The sharing of power was often uneasy and
confusing: Mandela often intervened, particularly in foreign affairs,
without informing his colleagues, and his own office was sometimes
muddled. He had made the inspired choice of Professor Jakes Gerwel as
cabinet secretary, but Mandela did not always give a clear lead, and was
criticised, particularly by business leaders, for not grappling with
urgent issues including tackling corruption and crime.
Both
Mandela and Mbeki were limited by the constraints of the ANC: the
cabinet had to represent different strands of the party; including some
ministers who had obvious shortcomings, particularly in education,
health and home affairs. But the ministers who were in the most critical
departments of economic policy and justice achieved remarkable
stability and trust, gaining the admiration of foreign governments.
Mandela's
overriding objective was to set a basis of reconciliation with the
white population including his former enemies, which he achieved with
the help of dramatic personal gestures, including visiting the widow of
Dr Verwoerd and his former prosecutor Percy Yutar, and congratulating
the leader of the Springbok rugby team.
His most obvious failure was in not confronting the growing disaster
of Aids. Before he became president in 1994, he had avoided the subject
in his election campaign because - as he later admitted - it was not a
popular issue, at a time when many black South Africans were shy of
condoms or contraception. And as president he resisted calls to lead a
major campaign against Aids.
Edwin Cameron, the gay South African
judge who was found to be HIV-positive, and became a prominent
campaigner against Aids, later explained: "A message from this man of
saintlike, in some ways almost godlike, stature, would have been
effective. He didn't do it. In 199 ways he was our country's saviour. In
the 200th way, he was not."
In his final two years as President,
Mandela withdrew further from executive government and gave up the
leadership of the ANC. But his role as the prophet of the new
multiracial democracy and the spirit of reconciliation remained as
important as ever.
He symbolised the rebirth of a country that had been nearly torn asunder by racial conflict.
His
personal life was now more serene and fulfilled. He had divorced from
Winnie and eventually married Graça Machel, the widow of the former
president of Mozambique, who gave him the companionship and support that
he craved, and eased his relationships with his children and
grandchildren.
Graça was a politician in her own right, who was
able to connect up the private Mandela with his overpowering public
image, with her own practical realism. "I want him as a human being,"
she explained. "He is a symbol, but not a saint. Whatever happens to
him, it is a mark of the liberation of the African people."
RETIREMENT
When
Mandela relinquished the Presidency in 1999, to be succeeded by
President Mbeki, the manner of his retirement was in itself a tribute to
his achievement. Five years earlier most South Africans had doubted
whether elections could be held at all, in the face of violent threats
and bombs. Now they took for granted that their country was a working
multiracial democracy.
For the first time since Mandela had left prison nine years before,
he was now a private individual without any political position. For a
short time he appeared content with a quiet life with his wife Graça
and his growing family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, moving
between Johannesburg, Cape Town, Qunu and Mozambique.
But he soon
forgot about the quiet life, and he became more, not less, impatient: an
old man in a hurry. "I have retired," he said at 84, "but if there's
anything that would kill me it is to wake up in the morning not knowing
what to do." "He needs to be very busy," his wife Graça confirmed.
"He is quite clear that if he slows down he will feel depressed. He'll feel he is not needed any more."
He
established a Mandela Foundation that provided his base. His loyal
Afrikaner secretary Zelda le Grange organised his endless meetings,
travels and phone calls to the world's leaders. He kept flying across
the world, particularly to Britain, America and the Middle East, often
in a private plane provided by one of his rich friends. He embarked on
the second volume of his memoirs, covering his presidential years,
determined to write them himself, without being ghosted. He conducted
his research with very personal methods, ringing up old friends and even
former enemies, like ex-President De Klerk, to ask for their
recollections of crucial meetings.
But he still enjoyed meeting
sports heroes and film stars such as Whoopi Goldberg or Whitney Houston,
whom he welcomed with outrageous flattery ("I'm only here to shine her
shoes").
He sometimes seemed to be re-living his own youth in
Johannesburg in the Fifties, when he was not only a politician, but a
township hero, ladies' man, dancer and boxer, and loved talking about
the old black musicians, writers and sportsmen.
He was lonelier in
politics, at least 30 years older than most of the politicians in South
Africa, and his contemporaries were dying. He often looked his age, and
away from the cameras and with his staff he could be irritable. But he
retained his powerful will to live. In 2001 he was diagnosed with cancer
of the prostate, but after intensive treatment appeared fully
recovered. "If cancer gets the upper hand I will nevertheless be the
winner," he said. "In heaven, I will be looking for the nearest branch
of the ANC."
He sometimes reflected about his past career with
remorse, remembering neglected friends who had helped him on his way up.
He worried about political colleagues who were forgotten, while he was
so much honoured. When Walter Sisulu died in 2003, Mandela explained his
crucial influence.
"By ancestry I was born to rule," he said.
"[But Sisulu] helped me to understand that my real vocation was to be a
servant of the people."
MBEKI
Mandela had
warned that after he retired he would feel free to criticise the
leadership "as an ordinary member of the ANC". But he knew that he was
no ordinary member. He was careful not to upstage or embarrass Mbeki: he
largely avoided commenting on domestic affairs and talked mainly about
the need for reconciliation and peacemaking. But his relations
inevitably became trickier.
At public occasions, Mandela
inevitably overshadowed his successor and often won more applause. Some
of his public statements went against Mbeki's policies; while in private
he became more critical. "I don't want to be a praise singer," he
explained after one closed ANC conference.
"I want to be objective, and I did indicate his weaknesses, which was unpalatable to many members."
Mbeki
in turn became more obviously resentful of Mandela's prominence.He
sometimes omitted Mandela from state occasions, and was often slow to
return his phone calls.
Mbeki's handling of Aids provoked the most
obvious tensions, as he delayed facing and publicising the problem
while Mandela was impatient for bolder action; to make up for his own
past neglect.
He was determined to break through the taboo. In
August 2002, he publicly embraced a militant Aids activist Zachie Achmat
who was HIV positive - a powerful image that was reproduced round the
world. And Mandela disclosed that three members of his own family had
died of Aids. "There is no shame," he said, "to disclose a terminal
disease from which you are suffering."
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Mandela
still travelled tirelessly, making up for his lost years and relishing
foreign friendships and grand occasions. In London, he often called on
the Queen, with whom he enjoyed a personal friendship: he broke with
protocol by writing to her as "Dear Elizabeth". He was the only
foreigner to be awarded the Order of Merit.
He could still play a
personal role abroad in encouraging peaceful settlements and
negotiations. He preferred working behind the scenes. In dealing with
Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who he believed to be a brilliant
politician who should never be underestimated. Mandela feared that overt
South African intervention would be counterproductive, provoking a
civil war in Zimbabwe that would bring force millions of people from
their homes. But Mandela later became much more outspoken than Mbeki
about Mugabe's tyranny.
Mandela had more success in Libya, where
he enjoyed the unique trust of President Muammar Gaddafi. He and his
representative Jakes Gerwel persuaded Gaddafi to release the suspects in
the Lockerbie airline crash, to be tried in the Netherlands, in return
for relaxing sanctions. And Gaddafi's trust in Mandela and Gerwel
prepared the way for the later reconciliation between Libya and the
American and British governments.
Mandela became more critical of
American and British foreign policies, particularly after the Kosovo
war, worried that they wanted to be "the policemen of the world" and
Washington was undermining the fragile basis of international law.
"They're introducing chaos in to international affairs," he said.
He
was much more worried about American domination after 11 September
2001. When he talked with President George W Bush soon afterwards in
Washington, he said Osama bin Laden should be held responsible, captured
and tried. But his Muslim friends soon persuaded him to modify his
support, and he explained that US policy could "be seen as undermining
some of the basic tenets of the rule of law". He warned that the war
against terrorism must not itself adopt the weapons of terrorism. And he
was increasingly opposed to Israeli policies towards Palestinians -
like many of his Jewish colleagues in the ANC.
While he had enjoyed a close relationship with George Bush Sr, he
distrusted some his closest advisers whom his son had inherited -
particularly Dick Cheney, who had voted in Congress against calling for
Mandela's release from prison. As the young Bush prepared for war in
Iraq, Mandela stepped up his warnings of the dangers of ignoring the UN,
without success. When he could not get through to Bush, he called his
father and asked him to talk to his son. In October, he gave an
explosive interview to Newsweek describing Bush's advisers Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld as "dinosaurs who do not want him to belong to the
modern age". He attacked both America and Britain for racist attitudes.
They did not criticise Israel for having weapons of mass destruction, he
complained, because Israelis were seen as white, while Iraqis were seen
as black. Mandela was emerging more clearly as the spokesman for the
developing world, rather than the loyal friend of Washington and London.
As
Bush and Blair prepared for war in Iraq, Mandela believed that neither
was taking the UN seriously enough; he reminded Blair that Churchill had
supported the creation of the UN as the safeguard of world peace. But
he felt that Blair was closing ranks with Bush.
Mandela was still
more outspoken in a speech to the International Women's Forums in
January 2003. "It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in
Iraq," he told his surprised audience. "What I am condemning is that one
power, with a President who has no foresight, who cannot think
properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."
Mandela
still hoped to mediate to prevent a war. But his links with Washington
were weakening, and his influence in Iraq was slight: he tried and
failed to ring Saddam Hussein, and even offered to fly to Iraq himself,
provided he was asked by the UN.
When the US and Britain finally
went to war, Mandela avoided further criticism. But he was soon again
denouncing US foreign policy - just before Bush visited South Africa and
other African countries in July 2003.
He could still combine his
friendships with the West with outspoken criticism. In July 2003, he
launched the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in London's Westminster Hall
where he heard tributes from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair - who made an
impromptu speech explaining how Mandela "symbolised the triumph of hope
over injustice". Mandela warmly thanked Blair but did not conceal their
difference about the Middle East: "We differ on one point; very
strongly."
He remained concerned about the mounting tension between Christians
and Muslims. He was proud of the religious tolerance in his own
government, which had included Muslim ministers, and he believed South
Africa could help bridge the religious divide in the rest of the world.
THE MYTH AND THE MAN
Mandela
was still a fairy-tale figure to millions of people around the world:
the prisoner who became president, who caught the imagination of crowds
and children. The name Mandela was attached to streets, squares,
scholarships and buildings across the world - including an elegant new
bridge across central Johannesburg that celebrated his 85th birthday.
The
less heroic other world leaders, the more Mandela appeared as a
solitary hero left over from an age of giants. And as an individual
freed from the compromises of power, his icon shone still brighter.
But
the myth was still connected to a statesman who could play a role in a
dangerous and divided world. His long career had given him a deep
personal experience of both power and powerlessness. He could speak for
the huge populations in the developing world who were ignored by the
richer countries, while he retained his moral authority in the West,
even in America, as the champion of reconciliation and a multi-racial
society.
Anthony Sampton's 'Mandela: The Authorised Biography' was published by HarperCollins in 1999.
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
Nelson Mandela biography: A long walk to immortality - the life and times of Madiba
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