Invictus - Carlin [56]
He announced the end of his marriage at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. In a room far too small for the occasion, packed stiflingly with more than a hundred journalists from all over the world, Mandela sat down at a table, Walter Sisulu by his side, slipped on his reading glasses, and read out a brief statement. Then he looked up, grayer and graver than they had ever seen him, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will appreciate how painful this is for me. This conference is now over.” Usually an announcement of this magnitude prompts reporters to fire a barrage of questions in hopes of provoking an unguarded, quotable outburst. But as he got up, slowly and stiffly, and turned toward the door with a mournful look on his face, the journalists stood, all of them, in silence.
Never before and never again would they be offered such a harrowing glimpse of the regret he felt at his failure as a family man. It was the only time he let the mask slip, allowing the world to see the sorrow written on his face; the cumulative sorrow of decades, for he felt responsible for the hardships that Winnie endured during his absence in jail, and for the drunken acts of criminality to which she was eventually reduced, unable to cope on her own with the combination of fame and relentless police persecution to which she was subjected. He felt just as responsible for the waywardness, and in some cases bitterness toward him, displayed by some of his children (two with Winnie, four—two of whom died—with Eveline). “He never shook off the idea that if he hadn’t gone to prison his entire family would have been very different people,” Jessie said.
But that was the risk he consciously took the day in 1961 when he founded Umkhonto we Sizwe. He had made his choice then to be father of the nation first, paterfamilias second. Partly to cover the pain of the choice he made, partly in a measure of how complete his dedication to the cause had been, the political mask became his real face; Mandela the man and Mandela the politician became one and the same.
Hani’s death rivaled the divorce for the heartache it caused Mandela. He had lost a wife then; now he had lost a surrogate son. But this time he could not afford to let the mask slip. The audience, live on prime time, was the entire country, via the state-run channels of the SABC. De Klerk could have objected, but he did not because he grasped that in the light of the looming catastrophe he was powerless, irrelevant. He had as much ability to influence the angry black masses as Mandela had to influence the AWB, probably less. Mandela, not De Klerk, was now the keeper of the peace. It was as de facto head of state that he addressed the nation on TV and radio that night.
“It was a father talking about a son who had just been murdered and asking people to be calm,” Jessie Duarte said of Mandela’s performance. Pitched in that way, how could anyone disobey? If the father himself was not baying for revenge, then what right had anybody else to go and seek it? For once, Mandela’s flat public speaking style was of a piece with the message he sought to convey. This time the challenge wasn’t winning over the whites; it was to persuade his own people. To do this he had to reroute the river of their anger, which was headed straight for hostile confrontation with white South Africa. To succeed he had to appeal not to their resentment, but to what remained of their generosity. That was why in his televised address he drew his audience’s attention to the fortuitous fact that an Afrikaner had been, amid the tragedy, the hero of the hour. Janusz Walus was arrested almost immediately due to