Invictus - Carlin [42]
Getting the Afrikaans press on his side was not quite so simple. Because whites generally and Afrikaners in particular were uncertain and afraid of the consequences of his release, they seized on the more alarming things he said—the policy on nationalization; the “armed struggle”; the ANC’s loyalty to its Communist Party allies—while failing to register the esteem he expressed for his prison guards or his desire to reach an accommodation acceptable to all. He faced a comparable challenge in keeping his own people on board, both at leadership level, where there had been some complaints about his unilateral decision to engage in secret talks with the government, and among the great mass of the population, for whom Mandela was a powerful myth but, as flesh-and-blood leader, an unknown quantity.
To address both these challenges, Mandela flew up to Johannesburg, two hours away, on the morning of the news conference, and from there drove to Soweto, where that afternoon Arrie Rossouw went to see him at the small family home he had left when he had gone to prison. It was one of those drab little matchbox houses, identical rows and rows of which lined every township in South Africa, almost identical to the place where Justice Bekebeke had lived before he went to prison. Rossouw was the chief political reporter of Beeld, the newspaper of the Afrikaans establishment. He was one of five Afrikaner journalists invited to a joint interview inside that little faded red-brick house with the man that their papers had taught readers for decades to see as the incarnation of “swart gevaar,” the “black danger.” Rossouw himself was rather more sophisticated than the average member of the volk. Having had contact with the ANC in exile, aware of the need for white South Africa to strike a deal with black South Africa, sufficiently alive to the way apartheid was viewed around the world to feel awkward and ashamed when he traveled abroad, he was ahead of most of his readers—much as Niël Barnard was ahead of the people who voted for the National party. Rossouw, nevertheless, had reason to be nervous. It was still too early to declare the Ayatollah alert conclusively over (a mass rally, as the ANC called it, had been prepared in Soweto the following day).
Instead, Mandela put the same spell on Arrie Rossouw as he had done hours earlier on his foreign colleagues at the news conference in Cape Town. “There he was in the tiny front room of his little brick home and he greeted us like a king, the most charming king imaginable,” Rossouw said. “He actually introduced himself to me. ‘Hello, I am Nelson Mandela, how are you?’ And then I introduced myself and he knew all about me. He knew exactly who I was. He said he had been reading me with great interest for some time and he actually remembered pieces I had written months earlier!”
The Afrikaners were the first group of journalists Mandela saw in such small numbers—before the black press or the white liberal press or the international press. “He deliberately chose us to convey a message that all South Africans had a place in the nation of the future; above all that he was not emerging from prison with revenge in his heart. He saw, of course, that the Afrikaners were the key to a lasting peace, and he sought through us to address their fears literally from day one.”
Rossouw was shrewd enough to understand that Mandela was doing a number on him. But he fell for it anyway. “You could see he had a feel for what made Afrikaners tick. Basically what he told us was, ‘Look, I know you and your people and I know Afrikaners have done much for this country and I know your fears, but let’s discuss them and be friends.’ And as he talked he would make self-deprecating jokes so that you would not feel