Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait

PREFACE

This is a short book about a big man I was fortunate to get to know, Nelson Mandela. The story centers on the epic period, between 1990 and 1995, when Mandela faced his most daunting obstacles and achieved his greatest triumphs; the time when the full flower of his genius as a political leader was most vividly on display.

I spent those five years recording Mandela’s feats, trials, and tribulations as the South African correspondent for the London Independent and, as such, was one of the few foreign journalists there to cover both his release from prison, on February 11, 1990, and his accession to the presidency four years later. My proximity to Mandela throughout this decisive period in South Africa’s history allowed me to observe the man as closely as anyone in my position could reasonably have expected. I don’t presume to call him a friend, but I can safely say that he knew very well who I was, and read much of what I wrote, which fills me with pride.

After I left South Africa for Washington in 1995, I continued to study and think about Mandela in the course of interviewing many people who had been close to him as research for a number of film documentaries and for my previous book, Playing the Enemy, about his crowning political moment, a turning point in history masquerading as a game of rugby. I have accumulated an enormous amount of information, along with many telling anecdotes about Mandela that have shaped my perceptions about his private and public life.

I believe that, large as Mandela’s presence on the global stage has been, there’s still much more to say about the man, the quality of his leadership, and the legacy he leaves the world. My hope is that readers will come away from this book with a more profound understanding of Mandela the individual and of why he has been the towering moral and political figure of our age.

Yet he had his flaws and bore the scars of much personal anguish. His triumphs on the political stage were won at the cost of unhappiness, loneliness, and disappointment. He was neither a superman nor a saint. But this only serves, in my view, to magnify his achievement, placing him alongside men like Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the sparsely populated pantheon of historical greats.

General Alan Brooke, Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War, said of Winston Churchill, He is quite the most wonderful man I have ever met, and it is a source of never-ending interest studying him and getting to realize that occasionally such human beings make their appearance on this earth, human beings who stand out head and shoulders above all others.

To me, those words may as well have been said, with at least as much relevance, about Mandela. He is the one political leader I have encountered in more than thirty years as a journalist—reporting on conflicts all over the world, from bloody guerrilla warfare in Central America to bloodless battles of words in the U.S. Congress—who succeeded in upending the cynicism that tends to go hand in hand with the business of journalism. I arrived in South Africa after ten years in Latin America, sickened by the horrors wrought by murderous generals on their own people and by the puppet presidents put in place by Cold War powers. Mandela changed all that. Thanks to him, I left South Africa newly convinced that noble and enlightened leadership had not, after all, been erased from the roster of human possibilities.

Just about everywhere we look, our faith in political leaders has hit rock bottom; mediocrity, fanaticism, and moral cowardice abound. Nelson Mandela, who remained as generous as he was shrewd, despite spending twenty-seven years in jail, stands as a timely reminder and a timeless inspiration. Humanity is, and always has been, capable of great things, and there is always room and reason for us to do better.

With gratitude and affection, I submit this attempt to capture Mandela’s imperishable legacy in words.

August 2013

1

THE PRESIDENT AND

THE JOURNALIST

Condemned in 1964 to life in prison for taking up arms against the state, he was supposed to have died in a small cell on a small island. Yet here was Nelson Mandela, almost thirty years later, standing before me, no longer a prisoner of that state, but the head of it. Barely a month had passed since he had been elected president of South Africa when he welcomed me into his new office at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, wearing his large and familiar smile, enveloping my hand in his enormous one, leathery after years of forced labor. Ah, hello, John! he cried with what felt like genuine delight. How are you? Very good to see you.

It was flattering to have the most celebrated man in the world call me by my first name with such seemingly spontaneous exuberance but, for the hour I spent with him, in the first interview he did with a foreign newspaper after assuming power, I chose to forget that Mandela, like that other master politician Bill Clinton, seemed able to recollect the name of virtually every person he’d ever met. It was only later, when the glow of his charm had worn off, that I paused to consider whether his behavior was calculated, whether he had deliberately sought to beguile me, as he had succeeded in doing with every other journalist, every politician of every hue, practically every single person who had spent any time in his company. Was he an actor or was he sincere? I’d come up with an answer in due time, but the honest truth is that, back then, I, like all the others, was powerless to resist.

Six foot tall, commandingly upright in a dark, pencil-sharp suit, Mandela walked a little rigidly, but his arms swung loose by his sides, his air both jaunty and majestic, as he led me into his wood-paneled office—large enough to accommodate his old prison cell forty times over. The most urbane of hosts, he motioned me towards a set of chairs so finely upholstered that they would not have been out of place in the Palace of Versailles. Mandela, soon to turn seventy-six, was as gracefully at ease in his presidential role as if he had spent the past third of his life not in jail, but amidst the gilded trappings that his white predecessors had lavished on themselves to compensate for the indignity of knowing the rest of the world held them in contempt.

By a staggering turn of events, the man settling himself in his chair to face me had become quite possibly the most unanimously admired head of state in history. In truth, I was apprehensive. We’d met numerous times before. I had interviewed him; I had had plenty of chats with him, before and after press conferences and other public events since arriving in South Africa in January 1989, thirteen months before his release. Now, five and a half years later, on the morning of June 7, 1994, I felt intimidated. Before he had been a voteless freedom fighter, now he was an elected president. The great and the good had flocked from all over the world for his inauguration four weeks earlier here in these very Union Buildings, a vast brown pile perched on a hill above the South African capital that for eighty-four doleful years had been the seat of whites-only power. From this citadel, the apartheid laws had been enforced. From here, the chiefs of South Africa’s dominant white tribe, the Afrikaners, administered a system that denied 85 percent of the population—those people born with dark skin—any say in the affairs of their country: They could not vote; they were sent to inferior schools so they could not compete with whites in the workplace; they were told where they could and could not live and what hospitals, buses, trains, parks, beaches, public toilets, public telephones they could and could not use.

Apartheid amounted, as Mandela once described it, to a moral genocide: an attempt to exterminate an entire people’s self-respect. The United Nations called that a crime against humanity, but the former masters of the Union Buildings believed that they were doing God’s work on earth, and humanity be damned. With admirable logic, apartheid’s Calvinist orthodoxy preached that black and white souls inhabited separate heavens, rendering it morally imperative for the chosen few to respond to those who rose in opposition to God’s will with all the might that God in his bounty had awarded them. The ordinary black foot soldiers who rebelled were terrorized into submission, beaten by the police, sometimes tortured, in some cases assassinated, very often jailed without charge. The high-profile leaders, like Mandela, were punished with banishment to a barren island off the south Atlantic coast.

But Mandela endured and now, at last, he had stormed and taken the citadel. He never gloated in that hour we spent together, never came close to it, but the truth was that he had defeated apartheid’s God, had kicked the Afrikaner interpretation of Calvinist theology into the dustbin of history. The apartheid laws had been wiped off the books, democratic elections had taken place in his country for the first time and the party he led, the African National Congress, had won with two-thirds of the national vote. He was the chief now, the president on the hilltop. He had fulfilled his destiny and done so in classic style, playing the part of the hero who rebels against tyranny, endures prison with Spartan forbearance, rises again to liberate his chained people and, in a twist unique to Mandela, finally forgives and redeems his enemies. Little wonder the world regarded him as a giant. He, while never betraying any suggestion of arrogance or pomposity, was aware of the global esteem in which he was held. And he knew I knew.

He sensed that I was nervous, but didn’t show it, for that would have been impolite. He was aware of the effect he had on people. Everyone felt overawed in his presence, but Mandela took no delight in that. He wanted to be liked as much as he wanted to be admired.

So, he did with me as he did with everyone else: he strove to put me at ease by reducing himself to my terrestrial level, sending me a message, coded but clear enough, that he was just another toiling mortal, as I was. First, by greeting me as warmly as he did and showing he remembered my name and then, when we were sitting down, throwing me slightly, but again in a flattering way, by saying: I must apologize. I feel certain we have obliged you to work very hard these last weeks. In a distinctive mannerism of his, he held onto the e of the word very, adding an extra beat for emphasis. Ve-ery hard. He said it with cheery mischief in his eye and I thought, as I had done the very first time I had seen him close up, on the morning after he left prison, how regal yet how approachable he was.

I chuckled at his apology and replied in the same spirit, Not as hard as you have been working, Mr. Mandela, I am sure.

Ah, yes, he shot back, the smile widening, but you were not loafing on an island for many years, as I was.

I laughed out loud. Self-deprecation was another of the ploys he used in the attempt to undercut the uneasy awe that he inspired. There was a British quality to that. I always thought Mandela, in another life, would have made a perfect chairman of one of those Victorian-era gentlemen’s clubs that still exist in London. Very proper and correct, but superbly comfortable in his own skin. The impression was not accidental, for he had been taught by British missionaries as a child and, at the age of fourteen, as he would confess later, he knew more about the history of Britain, the battles of Hastings, Waterloo, and Trafalgar than he did about the Afrikaners’ conquest of the southern tip of Africa or the wars of his own Xhosa tribe. When he was born his family named him Rohlihlahla, which means tree-shaker or troublemaker in Xhosa; it was a teacher at school who later gave him the name Nelson, in honor of the British Empire’s most celebrated admiral.

Self-deprecation, as every Englishman since the time of Lord Nelson and before knows, is a subtle sport. There’s a bogus element to it. In making light of your own achievements you are also, by a happy whim, drawing attention to them. There was more than a dash of vanity behind the claim that he had been loafing on Robben Island, for we both knew prison had been no Bahamas vacation. I picked up on that hint of weakness, his need to preen, and in a way he might not necessarily have meant, that served his purpose, too. It humanized him more in my eyes. Whatever the case, the magic, intended or unintended, worked—I had been put at my ease. Not on a footing of social equality, exactly, but sufficiently to be able to set about the business at hand with the composure not to make a fool of myself.

I switched on my cassette recorder and the interview began. I launched into my first political question, and as I uttered my first words his face changed, his smile vanished, his features turned to stone. It was always the way with