Invictus - Carlin [29]
Botha showed Mandela unqualified respect. Mandela too was politeness itself, but where he had the edge over the president was in the guile of his seductive arts. He reached out by drawing analogies between black people’s present struggle for liberation and the Afrikaners’ similar endeavor in the Anglo-Boer War, nearly a hundred years earlier, to shake off the British imperial yoke. Botha, whose father and grandfather had fought the British in that war, was impressed by Mandela’s knowledge of his people’s history.
Having judged that he had softened up the president, Mandela went ahead and disobeyed Barnard’s instructions, raising the subject of his friend Sisulu’s release. It was of deep importance, both for political and personal reasons, that Sisulu, whose health was not perfect, should be set free, he argued. “Strangely enough,” Barnard recalled a decade later, “Mr. Botha listened, and he said, ‘Dr. Barnard, you know the problems we have. I take it that you’ve explained to Mr. Mandela, but I think we must help him. I think it must be done. You will give some attention to that.’ I said, ‘All right, Mr. President.’ ”
It was not all easy going between the two men. “There were moments of great sincerity,” Coetsee recalled, “and both parties were very serious in their position.” Mandela may have had to bite his lip when Botha, as Coetsee remembered it, began banging on about “standards and norms, civilization and the scriptures,” which was National Party politicians’ coded way of contrasting the merits of their culture with the benighted barbarism of the world inhabited by the blacks. Botha would not have been thrilled, for his part, to hear Mandela restate his view that the Communist Party was a longtime ally and he was “not now going to shed partners who had been with the ANC throughout the struggle.”
Yet the two men parted as affably as they had met. The chemistry Coetsee identified had worked because Botha confirmed immediately one of the impressions Barnard had reached: Mandela was a man of strong convictions and was unafraid to state them. “Mandela was very sincere, even rudely straightforward at times,” Barnard said. “Afrikaner people like that.” Botha looked at the leader of black South Africa and he chose to see an idealized version of his own blunt self. Appealing to his vanity and to his Afrikaner pride, Mandela had conquered the “krokodil.” “Mandela,” Barnard said, “knew how to use his power subtly. It is like comparing old money and new money. He knew how to handle power without humiliating his enemies.”
An official statement after the meeting rendered Mandela’s victory in bland language: the two men had “confirmed their support for peaceful developments” in South Africa. Botha had committed himself, in other words, to the plan Mandela had been hatching for twenty-seven years in prison: peace through dialogue. Preparations toward full negotiations between the ANC and the government, blessed now by the Afrikaner-in-chief, would continue apace. Also, there had been the pleasing bonus of apparent movement on the release of Walter Sisulu and half a dozen other veteran prisoners, which happened three months later, even though Botha himself would be out of office by then, replaced by F. W. de Klerk.
Both men left that meeting in Tuynhuys feeling better about themselves and the world than when they had gone in. Mandela, in particular, left in a mood of quiet triumph. As he would write in his autobiography, “Mr. Botha had long talked about the need to cross the Rubicon, but he never did it himself until that morning in Tuynhuys. Now, I felt, there was no turning back.”
That was the end of Mandela’s political work behind bars. He had won over his immediate jailers, like Christo Brand and Jack Swart; then