Invictus - Carlin [19]
Mandela was rewarded with more privileges. Brand and Van Sittert were astounded to receive orders that Mandela be taken on drives around Cape Town. A small committee of Botha’s confidants who were in on the secret talks (Coetsee; Niël Barnard, the head of intelligence; and one or two others) feared that if they let Botha’s full cabinet know about the talks, someone might leak the story to the press. Even so, they considered it so important for Mandela to start getting acclimated to life outside prison that they even authorized his prison minders to let him go for short strolls on his own, mingling with unsuspecting locals. Once Christo Brand took him to his home, to introduce Mandela to his wife and children. Another time, two other prison officers drove him all the way to a town called Paternoster, seventy-five miles north of Cape Town, on the Atlantic Ocean. As Mandela strolled alone on the town’s pristine white beach, a bus-load of German tourists suddenly appeared. The two prison officials panicked, fearing he would be recognized. They need not have worried. The tourists, enraptured by the wild beauty of the setting, snapped photos, ignoring the gray-haired black man nearby. Mandela could have rushed into their midst and jumped on their bus, in search of political asylum, but he didn’t want to get out of prison just yet, despite the clamor that had been building around the world for his release. He could do more good, he saw, by staying inside, talking.
CHAPTER III
SEPARATE AMENITIES
Justice Bekebeke was an angry young black man in November 1985, one of millions. Tall and stick-thin, like an African carving, he had a courteous manner and a soothing baritone voice that when he spoke carried a wisdom, hard won, beyond his twenty-four years.
Paballelo was where Bekebeke lived, a treeless township five hundred miles north of Mandela’s Cape Town prison and five hundred west of Johannesburg, on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in the back of beyond. A black township in South Africa was always paired with a white town. But while the townships invariably had a lot more people in them, only the white towns appeared on the maps. The townships were the black shadows of the towns. Paballelo was the black shadow of Upington.
Upington was a stark caricature of an apartheid town. An incurious visitor to a big city like Johannesburg might have missed the system’s crasser racist edges. But in Upington those edges were sharp and blatant—“Slegs Blankes” (“Whites Only”) signs at the public toilets, bars, drinking fountains, cinemas, public swimming pools, parks, bus stops, the railway station. Such nonsense, legally required by the Separate Amenities Act of 1953, sometimes generated dark comedy. Should a black woman carrying her “madam’s” white baby travel in the “whites only” or “nonwhites” section of a train? Or would a Japanese visitor who used a “whites only” public toilet be breaking the law? Or what was a bus conductor to do when he ordered a brown-skinned passenger to get off a whites-only bus and the passenger refused, insisting that he was a white man with a deep suntan?
Often, among the more liberal-minded white set in Cape Town or Johannesburg, these finer points of law were ignored. In places like Upington, deep in the Afrikaner heartland, they were obeyed with Calvinist rigor. Paballelo was poorer, dingier, and more cramped than Upington, but less stifling. There you could escape apartheid’s pettier constraints. You could eat, shop, or sit wherever you pleased. To get to Paballelo from Upington you drove about a mile on the road west toward Namibia, until you reached the municipal slaughterhouse. There you turned left and before you stood a rusting sign that read “Welcome to Paballelo.” The contrast between one place and the other, as always when you crossed over the white world to the black world in South Africa, was staggering, as if you had gone back a century, or stepped straight from suburban