Invictus - Carlin [55]
These two wannabe Boers brought South Africa closer than ever to race war. Beeld understood it perfectly. The paper of the Afrikaans establishment warned, “One rash outburst now, one stray bullet, one act of vengeance can bring down the delicate structure of negotiations and unleash satanic forces.”
Mandela received the news by phone in Qunu, the village in the Transkei, by the Eastern Cape, where he was born. Richard Stengel, who co-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, was with him at the time, watching him have his typical breakfast of porridge, fruit, and toast. Mandela’s face turned to stone—or, as Stengel put it, fixed “in the frown of tragedy.” He was devastated. He felt a father’s affection for Hani as a man, huge respect for him as his political heir. Yet, weighing up instantly the gravity of the moment, he saw that he couldn’t afford to indulge his own feelings now. He switched instantly from grieving father to calculating politician.
“He put the phone down,” Stengel recalled, “his mind was already spinning and working, and thinking what’s going to happen? What would this do for the nation? What would it do for the peace? What would this do for the negotiations? And he began a series of phone calls to aides and he saw immediately this could be the match that ignites the tinder, the revolution, God knows what. And he was completely the master of the political moment. And I almost felt I could see inside of this head and see all of these different gears whirring. He was the consummate political animal, thinking through all of the consequences of this and what it meant.”
What it meant was that he had never had greater power than in that moment to define the course his country took. The easier option would be to make war. The difficult one was the call to restraint, an appeal to the angry masses to set aside the emotions of the moment in favor of the bigger goal.
Jessie Duarte, his personal assistant, had phoned him with the news, and she greeted him, after he had traveled to Hani’s village to offer the family his condolences, when he arrived that afternoon at the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg. “He was so sad,” Duarte recalled. “He really loved Chris. Yet he knew also that there was not time to lose, that this was no time to give in to his private feelings. The assessment he made was that the potential for violence around Chris’s death was immense, and as difficult a time as this was for everybody, the responsibility that he carried was to calm people down.”
Duarte worked with Mandela for four years. They shared an office and he rarely traveled anywhere without her. She was a short, intense, bundle of energy whose fiery political activism had earned her a reputation in ANC circles as an angry young woman. But Mandela brought out a cheery side in her and she became, among many other things, a sort of surrogate daughter to him. As such, she was one of the few people whom he let see his sad face, before whom he occasionally let slip his composed politician’s mask. Jessie Duarte understood as well as anyone that his life had been happier, richer, and generally more satisfying in politics than in the personal sphere, which had been filled with failure, disappointment, and tragedy.
Duarte was close by him on the day in April 1992 when he decided to announce his separation from his second wife, Winnie. She was struck by the black gloom that descended on him as he took on board the enormous disappointment Winnie had been to him. She had carried on an affair with a much younger man even after Mandela left prison, she never shared his bed when he was awake, she swore with a vulgarity that Mandela could not stomach, and she drank to ugly excess. As he would say in the divorce trial three years later, describing his two years of post-prison marriage, “I was the loneliest man,” all the lonelier for the dream of love that had sustained him in prison, and that she had helped nourish on her visits to him. A letter he wrote to