Invictus - Carlin [28]
Mandela listened politely, but he had no intention of following the instructions of this bright, impudent, slightly odd young man more than thirty years his junior. The two had talked a great deal about the possible release of Sisulu, who had been in prison for twenty-five years now, and if Mandela considered it fit, he would raise the matter with Botha. He did not, however, turn down Barnard’s offer of a special outfit for the occasion. Courtesy of the NIS, a tailor measured him for a suit. When the suit was delivered Mandela studied himself in the mirror and was pleased with the effect. This was the most important meeting of his life and he was eager to get the atmosphere right. Like an actor about to go onstage, he read over the notes he had been preparing for several days, rehearsed his lines, played himself into the role. He would be meeting his jailer-in-chief in the guise of an equal. Two chieftains representing two proud peoples.
On the morning of July 5, 1989, General Willemse picked up Mandela at Victor Verster to accompany him on the forty-five-minute drive from Paarl to the stately presidential residence in Cape Town known as Tuynhuys, an eighteenth-century monument to white colonial rule. Just before they got in the car, Willemse, momentarily taking over the part of Jeeves from Jack Swart, leaned over to Mandela and helped him adjust his tie. Mandela, a dandy before he went to prison, had lost the knack.
About an hour later, after Mandela had stepped out of the car and was preparing to step into Botha’s office, the waiting Barnard did a remarkable thing. Eager for his charge to make a good impression, he kneeled before Mandela and tightened the old man’s shoelaces.
Mandela stood smiling on the threshold of the crocodile’s lair, sensing that if he struck the right tone and chose his words wisely the triumph he had been building up to for a quarter of a century might finally be in his grasp. He knew that Botha’s decision to meet was an acknowledgment that things could not go on as they had. That was why he had not agonized about the appropriateness of sitting down and talking to the most violent bunch of rulers South Africa had known since the establishment of apartheid in 1948.
Mandela understood, first of all, and in a way that the Justice Bekebekes out there on the firing line could not, that the violence Botha had unleashed on the black population over the previous four years signified a growing weakness and despair. With the illusion of legitimacy gone, the only instrument left to keep apartheid going was the barrel of a gun. If Mandela had learned one thing in prison it was to take the long view. And that meant not being sidetracked by present horrors and keeping his eye firmly fixed on the distant goal.
And there was something else. In all his years studying the Afrikaners, their language and culture, he had come to learn that what they were, above all else, was survivors. They had arrived from Europe and settled in Africa and made it their home. In order to have succeeded in that, they had had to be tough, but also pragmatic. There were two P. W. Bothas. There was the pitiless bully, and there was the man who once warned Afrikaners in a celebrated speech that they had to “adapt or die.”
Barnard knocked on the president’s door, opened it, and entered the plush salon, decorated in Versailles upholstery. Mandela recalls the moment in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: “From the opposite side of his grand office PW Botha walked towards me. He had his hand out and was smiling broadly, and in fact from that very first moment he completely disarmed me.” Kobie Coetsee, who stood on the wings of the meeting alongside Barnard, and watched in astonishment