Invictus - Carlin [54]
But instead of responding with the gratitude that Mandela had expected, the white right stepped up their resistance rhetoric and their plans for war. They saw that negotiations between the ANC and the government were inching toward democracy. De Klerk had announced just a few weeks later that he had set a target date for multirace elections, April 1994. The fears that prospect held outweighed Mandela’s sporting blandishments.
Within days of the rugby announcement, all the talk in political circles was of civil war. Even President de Klerk, a lawyer who generally tried to keep noise levels down, felt compelled by the intelligence information he was receiving to declare that the alternative to negotiations was “a devastating war.” A member of his cabinet said, “We are concerned by events in Yugoslavia—more so than most people realize.” So was the ANC. Mandela and his lieutenants openly worried about their dreams of democracy “drowning,” as Mandela himself put it, “in blood.”
On April 10, 1993, they nearly did. An odd couple emerged from the motley far-right crew to carry out the closest thing to regicide South Africa had seen since the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966, but with incalculably more dangerous consequences. Verwoerd had been stabbed to death by a half-mad parliamentary messenger. It was a shock to his family and supporters, but not to the political system, which carried on regardless. The assassination of Chris Hani was something else altogether.
Hani was, next to Mandela, black South Africa’s greatest hero. Had Mandela never been born, or had he died in prison, Hani would have been the leader of black South Africa by acclamation. Like Mandela, his myth preceded him. In exile for nearly thirty years, his face was unknown to the general public until the ANC was unbanned and he returned home shortly after Mandela’s release. The myth rested on two powerful arguments: he had led the two organizations the white regime feared most, Umkhonto we Sizwe and the South African Communist Party. The general rule among black militants was that the more an ANC leader was reviled by the government, the more he was admired. Hani, Mandela’s heir as “terrorist-in-chief ” in white eyes, had been a legend whose dimensions were compounded by tales of derring-do and survived assassination attempts that filtered back to the townships; by the rumor—entirely true—of the extreme poverty into which he had been born in the black, rural Eastern Cape.
The photographs and TV images of April 10, 1993, foreshadowed big trouble: the fallen idol lying facedown in a pool of blood, the spontaneous nationwide demonstrations and the forests of black fists raised in anger, the burning barricades, the torched cars, the white riot policemen clutching their shotguns protectively to their chests. The scale of the peril was contained in the words Archbishop Tutu used to restrain the blacks from doing what natural justice demanded. “Let us not allow Chris’s killers success in their nefarious purpose of getting our country to go up in flames,” Tutu pleaded, “because now it could easily go up in flames.”
Hani’s assassin, the man who gunned him down outside his home in the previously all-white working-class suburb of Dawn Park, in Johannesburg, was a Polish immigrant, a foot soldier of the white resistance struggle, a member of the AWB called Janusz Walus whose anti-Communist zealotry was matched only by his desire to be admitted into the right-wing Boer fold. Walus’s comrade in arms, the nearest thing to a brain behind the plot, shared the Pole’s need to be welcomed into the volk’s embrace. He was called Clive Derby-Lewis and he looked and sounded exactly as one would expect someone with a name like that. A member of parliament for Dr. Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, he wore blue blazers and cravats, sported an exuberant mustache, and spoke English with a plummy