Invictus - Carlin [26]
For his part, Kobie Coetsee came to the conclusion that keeping this prisoner in prison was as improper, and as unhelpful to the talks’ broader goal, as dressing him in prison clothes. Not that he was being treated badly at Pollsmoor. Compared to the claustrophobia he had learned to endure on Robben Island, his cell in Pollsmoor felt like the open sea. But where he went next was a cruise luxury liner.
The worse the Botha regime treated the blacks out on the street, the better it treated Mandela. He could have protested. He could have raged at Barnard, made demands, threatened to call off the secret talks. But he did not. He played the game, because he knew that while his power to intervene in contemporary events was practically nil, his potential to influence the future shape of South Africa might be immense. And so when in December 1988 General Willie Willemse, the top man in the South African prison service, informed him that he would be moved from his big lonely cell in Pollsmoor to a house inside the grounds of a prison called Victor Verster in a pretty town called Paarl, an hour north by road in the heart of the Cape wine country, Mandela raised no objections.
He traded his cell for a spacious home under the supervision of—or rather, looked after by—another Christo Brand, another Afrikaner prison guard who had been with him both in Pollsmoor and on Robben Island. His name was Jack Swart and his job was to cook for Mandela and to play the butler, opening the door to his guests, helping him organize his diary, keeping the house tidy and clean. The kitchen was ample and fully equipped, including devices technologically unimaginable when Mandela went to prison. He was allowed to receive visits from other, still incarcerated political prisoners. One of them was Tokyo Sexwale, an Umkhonto we Sizwe firebrand who spent thirteen years on Robben Island on terrorism charges. Sexwale was one of a small group of young ANC Turks who had gotten close to Mandela on the island, who not only listened to him talking politics but relaxed with him, engaging him in games of Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly before Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor. Recalling that visit to Mandela at Victor Verster, Sexwale laughed. “We saw one television set in the house. That was bad enough. But then we saw another. Two television sets! This, surely, was definitive proof, we thought, that he had sold out to the enemy!”
Smiling broadly, Mandela assured them that this was not a television set. He explained to his openmouthed guests that this machine could boil water. He took a cup of water, and gave them a triumphant demonstration, placing the cup inside and pressing a couple of buttons. A few moments later, Mandela removed the cup of steaming water from the microwave—a device his guests had never seen before.
With Jack Swart ever in attendance, Mandela would entertain dinner guests as varied as Barnard, Sexwale, and his lawyer George Bizos at his new “home.” Before the guests arrived, Swart and Mandela would discuss such matters of etiquette as which might be the correct wine to serve first. As for the vegetables, some came from Mandela’s own garden, which had a swimming pool and a view of the magnificently craggy mountains surrounding the lush valleys of the Cape winelands. Paradise for Mandela wouldn’t have been complete without a gym, furnished with exercise bike and weights, where he toiled diligently every day before dawn.
The idea, as Barnard explained it, was to ease his transition, after what was now twenty-six years of hibernation, into a brave new world of microwaves and personal computers. “We were busy creating a kind of atmosphere where Mr. Mandela could stay and live in at least as normal a surrounding as possible,” Barnard said. The deeper purpose, or so Barnard claimed, was to help him prepare for government and a role on the world stage. “Many times I told him, ‘Mr. Mandela, governing a country is a tough job. It’s not like, with a lot of respect, sitting in London in a hotel and drinking Castle beer from South Africa and talking