Invictus - Carlin [50]
South Africa had taken a new course, and while De Klerk was formally in control, Mandela was doing the steering. Talks did begin between the ANC and the government. The process that Mandela had started in secret in jail continued openly now. The right wing growled but the ANC and the government got to know each other, discovered to their surprise that, as one senior ANC official put it, neither side had horns, and set about building the mutual confidence on which progress in negotiations always depends. “The process,” as insiders called it, began formally in May 1990 and advanced as well as Mandela could reasonably have hoped. One of the important concessions Mandela secured early on was, as promised to the Upington 14, a cessation of all legal executions. Political prisoners started to trickle out as part of the horse-trading of negotiations. The Upington group, none of them officially members of the ANC, did not enter into those calculations, however. The law would take its course and they would wait to be exonerated on appeal.
Delegations of the government, the ANC, and various smaller parties met Monday through Friday, gathering in smoke-filled rooms, like rival lawyers, at a conference building near Johannesburg Airport known, with exaggerated grandeur, as the World Trade Center. Some of the delegates got along so well after a while that they began to wonder whether they were racing too far ahead of their constituencies; whether there would be problems, especially for the government, when the time came to ask their people to go along with the deals they had struck. The chief negotiator of the ANC, a former trade union leader called Cyril Ramaphosa, and the chief negotiator of the government, Defence Minister Roelf Meyer, became such good friends that they often debated the issues during weekend fishing trips. Mandela and De Klerk never got on as well, but while they had their tense moments, they stayed in permanent touch, sometimes meeting late into the night. There was no longer any need to beg for a meeting: the former prisoner could get the president on the end of a phone line any time he chose.
In this rapidly changing climate, in May 1991 the highest appeal court in South Africa overturned twenty-one out of the twenty-five original murder convictions in the Upington case, and dismissed all fourteen death sentences. Bekebeke was one of the four whose convictions stood. He would leave Death Row, but the court had ruled that he had a ten-year sentence to serve. He took the news with good grace, responding to the verdicts by reaching out and embracing the old man Gideon Madlongolwana who, with his wife Evelina, was free to go. Within eight months, having served a total of six years and one and a half months in prison, he too was free. On January 6, 1992, he rejoined his family and friends and his girlfriend, Selina, in Upington. It was a happy time but Bekebeke was impatient. He had a lot of time to make up, and a pledge to keep. He had made it to himself and to his fellow inmates on the day when Anton Lubowski was killed.
Until then, he had been clear about his life’s ambition. He wanted to become a doctor. “But that day I changed my plan. From that day on I knew there was only one thing I wanted to be: a lawyer. I would pick up his spear. I would follow in his footsteps. I would fill the vacuum he had left. I would become another Anton.”
It was an amazing thing for an angry young black man like Bekebeke to say, but prison had mellowed him as it had mellowed Mandela. Within two weeks of his release he had acted on his grandiloquent rhetoric. Down in Cape Town, the place where he had had his inspirational child’s fantasy of visiting Mandela and the other “leaders” in their island prison, he was now going to start, aged thirty-one, his university career. Bekebeke excelled at the University of the Western Cape. He