Invictus - Carlin [36]
It wasn’t him. It was Anton Lubowski. The Upington 14 endured many sorrows on Death Row, but none worse than when they heard on the radio on September 13, 1989, two months after Mandela’s tea at Tuynhuys with Botha, that the previous night Lubowski had been gunned down at the entrance to his home in Windhoek, Namibia. Justice never forgot that moment. “There were six of us from Upington together in my cell that morning. We reacted first with disbelief. It could not be true. Then, as time went by, the truth sank in and we were destroyed, devastated—inconsolable. We knew who had done it. Of course we knew. It was the state.”
CHAPTER VI
AYATOLLAH MANDELA
1990
After years in the wilderness, the myth became man; the aging patriarch made himself visible to his people again, vowing to set them free. The embodiment of revolutionary virtue, he was met everywhere by vast, enraptured crowds. “I will strike with my fists at the mouths of the government,” he cried on the day he returned from his long exile, and within ten days, on February 11, 1979, the state had collapsed and his militias controlled the streets. To rapturous acclaim, the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed himself head of a new revolutionary government.
Exactly eleven years later, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela put an end to his own exile, walking out of jail. The coincidence in dates was not lost on the South African government. They feared that in releasing him, and in allowing the ANC to operate legally again after a thirty-year ban, they would unleash what they described to each other, in moments of panic, as “the Ayatollah factor.” Niël Barnard was less worried than most. But even he was concerned, in some corner of his skeptical spy’s heart, that maybe Mandela had taken him for a ride, had conned him. State officials’ nightmare was that after being released in Cape Town, Mandela would set off on a long march north to the political heartland of Johannesburg and Soweto. “There would be a momentum building up and he would be moving through the country,” was how Barnard put it, “and he would get to Johannesburg and it would be almost like the Ayatollah—a rolling momentum . . . hundreds of thousands of people on the rampage, shooting and killing. The anxiety was whether it would be possible for us to go through the first twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours without a major people’s uprising, without a revolution.”
If the Iranian precedent had given the government pause, it was a more recent foreign episode that impelled the new president, F. W. de Klerk, to push ahead urgently with the work P. W. Botha had initiated. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which had happened barely two months earlier, offered grounds to believe that, whatever happened in South Africa, communism would never again be viable, whether in Eastern Europe or South Africa. Besides, if apartheid had been an embarrassment before, now it was internationally unsustainable. It was fortunate for De Klerk that his predecessor had had the wisdom to pave the way for Mandela’s release and for the start of negotiations.
But on that day, February 11, 1990, De Klerk dwelled less on his good fortune than on the perils that might lurk around Mandela’s release. It didn’t help his or anybody else’s state of mind in the government that Mandela’s release, for reasons that De Klerk watching on television did not at first understand, went wildly beyond schedule. A battery of television cameras was perched at the entrance to Victor Verster prison and millions of people were watching worldwide,