Invictus - Carlin [64]
Niehaus immediately contacted a senior ANC intelligence officer, Mathews Phosa, and asked him whether talk of a coup should be taken seriously. Phosa confirmed that, according to his sources, it should be taken very seriously indeed. Phosa was in favour of a meeting with the Volksfront, as were other senior ANC figures Niehaus talked to. “When Nelson Mandela heard about the proposal, he did not hesitate. He immediately saw the value of the meeting,” Niehaus recalled. “He believed in the personal contact and he was convinced that he would be able to connect with Constand Viljoen and persuade him to think again.”
Niehaus conveyed the ANC’s positive response back to Braam, who reported back to his brother. Constand said he was satisfied the meeting should go on, but he had two basic preconditions. Guarantees had to be given, first, for the safety of the Volksfront delegation and, second, that the meeting would be held in absolute secrecy. Constand, who may have had Piet Retief in the back of his mind, was unwittingly following in Mandela’s footsteps. Back in the late ’80s, it would have been disastrous for the imprisoned Mandela if the ANC rank and file had found out he was talking to the enemy. Bafflement would have given way to damaging divisions in the ranks. Viljoen feared the same, or worse, if his soldiers found out that he was meeting with Mandela.
Braam reassured his brother on the ANC’s behalf, and on August 12, 1993, just four days after that first contact with Niehaus, Braam and Constand Viljoen stepped through the front door of Nelson Mandela’s home in Houghton. Waiting for them, hand outstretched, and offering them his beaming smile, stood Mandela himself. It was a mutually stupefying encounter. Mandela was so much taller than the two brothers, so physically imposing generally. And he was so warm; so apparently delighted to see them. Mandela, looking from one brother to the other, saw two middle-height, middle-sized men with identically bulbous noses, jutting chins, boyishly lush white heads of hair, and solemn, sea-blue eyes. It was only when he ushered the brothers inside, and saw them walk, that he perceived a difference between the stiff, straight-backed step of the military man and the more shambling gait of his theologian brother.
Constand brought with him the three retired generals who made up his Volksfront high command; Mandela had the top two people in the ANC’s military and intelligence wings. Braam and Carl Niehaus, the peace brokers, completed the group. The person most at ease during the otherwise awkward introductions was Mandela, who might as well have been welcoming a group of European ambassadors. Yet here were two sets of people who were on the brink of an inversion of their decades-long relationship, while maintaining the same violent enmity. Viljoen was doing what Mandela had done back in 1961: set up an armed resistance movement designed violently to challenge the status quo. Mandela wanted to give the would-be terrorists the peaceful alternative he himself had not been offered until nearly thirty years after he had founded Umkhonto.
As the two delegations eyed each other, unsure whether to be fascinated or appalled to find themselves all in the same room, Mandela gently invited General Viljoen to take a seat next to him in the living room. Formal discussions around a large conference table would start presently, but first Mandela paid P. W. Botha the compliment of replicating with Viljoen the elegant manners the big crocodile had shown him four years earlier in Tuynhuys. He offered Constand a cup of tea, and poured it himself. “Do you take milk, General?” The general said he did. “Would you like some sugar?” “Yes, please, Mr. Mandela,” said the general.
Viljoen stirred his tea in a state of quiet