Invictus - Carlin [45]
But it was not the brownshirts, this time, who defined the event. More sinister, and a more ominous measure of the challenge that lay ahead for Mandela, was the outward normality of most of the people, a cross section of the human spectacle you would see any day of the week in the center of Upington, or Vereeniging, or anywhere else in white South Africa. There were youths in jeans and Springbok jerseys, eager-eyed young couples with babies, potbellied men in khaki shorts and long socks, old gentlemen in tweed jackets, and ladies dressed as if they were going to the annual bowling club dance. They were the white middle class anywhere in northern Europe or Middle America. And they did not want blacks to rule over their lives. They all shared the nightmare of a black hand emerging from under the bed in the middle of the night, of gangs of marauding young black men crashing into their homes.
It was never immediately obvious, but if you looked closely you found that there was a vulnerable softness at the core of white South Africa, among Afrikaners and English speakers, city and country people, poor and rich. The difference lay in the degree to which each individual managed to disguise it. But because acknowledging that vulnerability did not fit with the rugged survivor image that Afrikaners, in particular, chose to have of themselves, some strove to mask their fears behind the rhetoric of resistance. Which was not to say that they did not believe what they said. Fear made them dangerous. Dr. Andries Treurnicht, the Conservative Party leader, got the biggest cheer of the day at the Church Square rally when he cried, “The Afrikaner is a friendly tiger, but don’t mess around with him!” The hard, simple certainties of the past were beginning to crack, but here was a truth, they chose to believe that neither Mandela nor the now legalized “Communists” of the ANC could ever dent. The Afrikaner was a tiger and any beast that tangled with it was doomed. “As long as the ANC operates as a militant organization, we will hit them as hard as we can,” roared Treurnicht, a theologian and former minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. “As far as we’re concerned, it is war, plain and simple.”
Some in the ANC still believed they actually could beat the tiger. Mandela knew they could not. The enemy had all the guns, the air force, the logistics, the money. Mandela’s chief principle of political action was the one he had come to understand in prison a long time ago: that the only way to beat the tiger was to tame him. These people snarling under the shadow of Paul Kruger’s statue were the same people he had subdued to his will on Robben Island.
Mandela’s first priority was to prevent civil war. And not just between whites and blacks, but between whites and whites too. The liberal Dr. Woolf types, who had gotten where they did after swimming courageously against the currents of white orthodoxy, would be in the sights of the right-wing warriors. They already were. Dr. Woolf himself had received threats from right-wing organizations after the story of his family’s encounter with Mandela was published in a Durban newspaper. They put him on a death list. The Arrie Rossouws of the Afrikaans press also paid a price for having run ahead of the times. Poison mail poured into the Johannesburg office of his newspaper, Beeld,