Invictus - Carlin [41]
There was an acknowledgment of his kinder jailers—the Christo Brands and the Jack Swarts and the Willem Willemses—when he was asked the big obvious question that had to be asked, whether he felt any bitterness after his twenty-seven and a half years in captivity. He also offered a fleeting but potent recognition of the value prison had played in shaping his political strategy. “Despite the hard times in prison, we had also the opportunity to think about programs . . . and in prison there have been men who are very good, in the sense that they understood our point of view, and they did everything to try and make you as happy as possible. That,” Mandela said, emphatically, as if underlining the sentence as he spoke it, “has wiped out any bitterness that a man could have.”
Asked what had most surprised him upon reentering the world, he declared that he was “absolutely surprised” by the number of white people who had been on the streets to greet him the day before. Most important of all, Mandela stated that the way to a negotiated solution lay in a simple-sounding formula: reconciling white fears with black aspirations. “The ANC is very much concerned to address the question of the concern Whites have over the demand of one person, one vote,” he said. “They insist on . . . guarantees . . . to ensure that the realization of this demand does not result in the domination of whites by blacks. We understand those feelings and the ANC is concerned to address that problem and to find a solution which will suit both the blacks and whites of this country.”
Hearing in public those words that he had heard so often in private, Niël Barnard heaved a sigh of relief. This was not the language of insurrection. This was not an Ayatollah smashing fists into people’s mouths. When the press conference ended, forty-five minutes after it had begun, all the earlier anxieties seemed absurdly misplaced. Mandela had transformed what had been advertised as his first public grilling into the balmy outdoor equivalent of a cozy fireside chat. He had planted the seed of a notion among some white South Africans that a black man might be capable of touching their hearts. François Pienaar, still far from a political animal, found himself surprisingly moved by the sight of Mandela on TV. “I cannot recall any emotion other than sadness,” he told me. “I felt sad that he had been in jail for so long and, although his face brimmed with pride, I felt that he had lost so much time.”
Other white television viewers would have been less sympathetic, and many would have snarled. A significant chunk of right-wing opinion held that the white establishment had made a mistake not to hang Mandela, whose influence as a source of inspiration to black revolutionaries had endured throughout his captivity. Such people watched Mandela’s release on television and felt only bitterness and contempt toward De Klerk and what they perceived as his traitorous government for selling out white South Africa, for releasing the terrorist in chief onto the streets.
He had a very different effect on those journalists standing before him on Archbishop Tutu’s lawn on the morning of February 12, 1990. All it took was those forty-five minutes for Mandela to wrap the world’s media in his astute embrace. The journalists did not quite realize it then, for they were too benumbed, but in due course they would understand that Mandela was a canny strategist, a talented manipulator of mass sentiment. His gift for political theater was as sophisticated as Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s. At that news conference, Mandela pulled off a coup that