Invictus - Carlin [17]
A few days before Badenhorst was due to leave, the national commissioner of prisons, a General Steyn, visited Robben Island. He met with Mandela in Badenhorst’s presence. When the meeting was over and Steyn had moved out of earshot, Badenhorst came up to Mandela and, strikingly polite in his demeanor, informed him of his impending departure. Then he said, “I just want to wish you people good luck.” Mandela was momentarily struck dumb, but he collected himself sufficiently to thank him and wish him good luck too in his new posting.
Mandela dwelled on that incident, examining the lessons to be drawn from it, reflecting on how a man he had seen as callous and barbarous had in the end revealed himself in a gentler light. He tucked away those thoughts, but he also found ways to put them to immediate use. Applying the strategies he had developed during his seven years on Robben Island, he used all the help that he could from the likes of Helen Suzman and the judicial system toward making the prison a more livable place. By the late seventies not only was the quality of the food and clothing and bedding far better than in 1964, not only had the seaweed-picking and the forced labor on the quarry ceased, but all manner of unimagined luxuries had been added. The prisoners could watch films, listen to radio programs on a prisonwide speaker system, and, best of all, play sports. Tennis, remarkably, was on the agenda. And so was soccer, black South Africa’s favorite pastime. At the authorities’ insistence, rugby was added to the list. The rule from above was that it would be one week soccer, the next week rugby, always alternating. The younger prisoners played rugby and listened to broadcasts of important matches on the radio. Even though, to a man, they noisily supported the rival teams when the Springboks played, the authorities persisted, as if hoping for a miraculous conversion.
That would happen much later. Before it, came Kobie Coetsee’s conversion that November day in 1985.
When Mandela was discharged from the hospital on November 24, 1985, Botha agreed with Coetsee that he should not return to the large cell he had shared over the previous three years with his four old comrades. He would remain in Pollsmoor but would now be kept in a cell on his own, in an otherwise empty section of the prison. This was no punishment, but a first step toward freedom The idea was to keep further contacts between Mandela and the government as secret as possible, even from the other prisoners. Mandela was grateful too to have the space he needed to collect his thoughts and prepare his strategy. Besides, Coetsee saw to it that Mandela, alone in his cell, was pampered as no “baas” had ever pampered a black man in South Africa. His food was improved, and he received newspapers, a radio, and access to an invention unknown in South Africa when he went to prison, a TV.
He also had the company of a prison guard called Christo Brand, who had been transferred with him from Robben Island, and who doted on him. Brought up on a farm, Brand had had his first encounter with electricity at age ten and left school at fifteen. Half Mandela’s age, he was a sweet-tempered man who came to regard his prisoner in a fatherly light. Mandela acted the part, among other things writing letters to Brand’s wife complaining that her spouse wasn’t doing enough to improve himself; that he had a fine mind and that if only he would be persuaded to study he could really get ahead in life. Brand’s own son Riaan, who was born in 1985, became something of a surrogate grandson for Mandela. Brand smuggled Riaan into Pollsmoor when he was eight months old so that Mandela could hold him. Mandela did so with tears in his eyes; he hadn’t been able to touch any of his six children in twenty-three years. As Riaan Brand grew up, Mandela never failed to inquire as to how he was getting on at school, and wrote letters to him punctually each birthday.
The more distant, senior officers at Pollsmoor were harder nuts to crack than Brand. Mandela had to keep his wits honed in order