Invictus - Carlin [57]
“A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation teeters on the brink of disaster,” Mandela said. “A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin.”
If Mandela exaggerated her heroism, he did it with a clear political purpose. “This is a watershed moment for all of us,” he said. “Our decisions and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief, and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country, an elected government of the people . . . I appeal, with all the authority at my command, to all our people to remain calm and honor the memory of Chris Hani by remaining a disciplined force for peace.”
It worked. Mass rallies erupted all over the country but the people did not allow their grief to spill over into violent anger. “That time in 1993, it was really touch and go,” Tutu reflected much later on those perilous days. “What I know for sure is that if he hadn’t been around the country would, in fact, have torn itself apart. Because it would have been the easiest thing to have released the dogs of war. That is what maybe many of the younger Turks would have wanted. It was one of the most devastating moments and the anger was palpable. Had Nelson not gone on television and radio the way he did . . . our country would have gone up in flames.”
CHAPTER IX
THE BITTER-ENDERS
1993
For General Constand Viljoen, following events from his farm, the spectacle was exasperating. Throw what you might in its way, the Mandela juggernaut just kept going. Not that Viljoen had conspired in the assassination of Chris Hani. He didn’t belong to the murderous wing of the SADF. But as a member of the volk and as a hard-nosed student of counterinsurgency warfare, he’d figured that Hani’s killing would have knocked the process of democratic change off course. Bill Keller, New York Times bureau chief in South Africa at the time, described the surprisingly steadying impact of Mandela’s address, and the fact that the government had broadcast it, as signs “of the tacit partnership that has developed between the Government and the African National Congress.” Keller continued, “It is a quarrelsome but remarkably durable working relationship that amounts almost to an informal government of national unity. As a result, the process of peaceful change has become, if not quite inexorable, at least amazingly resilient.”
Viljoen understood this as well as Keller did, but he didn’t like it at all. What was worse, he and the rest of the right-wing volk chose to interpret Hani’s funeral—a massive affair that ended with a thrilling call for peace and unity from Desmond Tutu—as a coming-out party for vengeful blacks. Rather than listen to the words of Mandela and Tutu calling for calm, they tuned in to the discordant messages emitted from the podium by young, third-ranking ANC officials who, doing the exact opposite of what Mandela always strove for, appealed to the crowd’s baser instincts by leading them in a song popular among the angry township youth. The drumbeat refrain, repeated in a rising, hypnotic crescendo, went, “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!”
That sentiment was always there among the politically energetic black youth. The obvious thing would have been to seize on that energy and transform it into scorched-earth, Ayatollah revolution. The fear and prejudice and guilt in white hearts was such that it was impossible for many to conceive of the changes Mandela had in mind in anything other than vengeful terms.
The cries of “Kill the Boer,” which Mandela tolerated as a means of allowing the youth to blow off their anger, were the sideshow, not the main event. Failing to understand that, Constand Viljoen decided that he had been seething silently in his farm long enough, that the time had come to answer the call of nationalist