Invictus - Carlin [49]
On taking over as head of the SADF in 1980, Constand found himself obliged to pay more attention to the ANC itself, now active in neighboring countries like Zambia and Mozambique, and to their increasingly rebellious surrogates whom his brother was associating with inside the country. A government document a year earlier had said that the political and military threat against South Africa was intensifying at “an alarming rate.” Determined to couch the war against the ANC in more internationally palatable geopolitical terms, the document described the enemy’s “total onslaught” as part of a plan by Moscow to use South Africa “as a stepping stone to world conquest.” The language convinced American conservatives and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who publicly agreed with President Botha that the ANC was a Communist-inspired “terrorist” organization. Encouraged, Botha ordered the army into the townships. Viljoen thus became the first head of the South African Army to see his remit expand beyond the protection of the country against a foreign enemy to protection of the state against its own people. The army suddenly found itself working hand in hand with the security police, carrying out joint raids in neighboring Mozambique, Botswana, and Lesotho that killed as many innocent civilians as ANC operatives.
Constand was never comfortable in this role. His moral vision may have been less ample than his brother’s, but he was not without scruples. In May 1983 an SADF raid inside Mozambique mistook a number of private homes, a nursery, and a fruit juice factory for an ANC missile site, training center, and logistical base. Six people were killed, none of them ANC personnel, prompting a furious internal memo from Viljoen to the chief of the army in which he declared himself not just disappointed, but shocked. “If we were to analyse our operational effectiveness and to make the results public we would be ashamed,” Viljoen wrote.
The results were not made public and, with the aid of a pliant press, the best possible gloss was put on the exploits of the SADF. A raid on Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, in which South African soldiers killed a boy of six and a man of seventy-one, was reported in glorious terms in the South African press, one newspaper headlining the epic “the Guns of Gaborone.” When Constand retired, after a military career spanning thirty-one years, he had become a living legend—in the Afrikaner popular imagination, almost a white Mandela—and, more to the point, a brave, principled, no-nonsense general in keeping with a nineteenth-century Boer tradition of soldier-politicians like Andries Pretorius and Paul Kruger—the perfect antidote, in other words, to that distinctly un-Boerish shifty, slippery, deal-making F. W de Klerk. Constand Viljoen’s decision to do the time-honored Boer thing and go back to farming only increased the devotion of his admirers. He imagined back in 1985 that he was returning to the land for good. Five years later, as he sat stewing in front of the television watching Mandela’s release, he would not have guessed that the volk would soon call on him to abandon his farm and lead them in their last great freedom war.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MASK
1990-93
Mandela was back in prison within a month of getting out. Of his own free will, this time, he visited the place where he feared in 1964 that he would end up, Death Row in Pretoria. He went to see the Upington 14 and other prisoners who were inside for what he believed to be political reasons. Justice Bekebeke missed him. By a perverse sequence of circumstances related to an unfortunately timed visit by a family member, he was unable to see Mandela. “I didn’t want to die on Death Row but I wanted to kill myself !” Justice half-joked. Mandela reassured the Upington contingent that, with his release, things in South Africa had changed forever. Not only would he persuade the government to accept a moratorium on executions, but he would do all he could to help them gain their freedom. They believed him. In the eyes