Invictus - Carlin [66]
“This is so,” General Viljoen replied. “There can be no winner.”
And that was it. That was the understanding on which the far right and the black liberation movement built their dialogue. That first meeting in Houghton laid the basis for three and a half months of secret talks between delegations of the ANC and the Volksfront. The Volksfront wanted to establish the constitutional principle of an Afrikaner Israel, to which the ANC never quite said no, and never quite said yes, their main concern having been to keep Viljoen’s people talking, dangling before them the possibility of future talks on the constitution of their own longed-for “Boerestaat.”
These contacts continued apace despite a potentially destabilizing sequence of events during the last three months of 1993. First, negotiators at the World Trade Centre announced that South Africa’s first all-race elections would be held on April 27, 1994. Then they set up a committee to decide on a new national anthem and flag. Then Mangosuthu Buthelezi unmasked himself by forming a coalition with the white far-right, a body incorporating the Volksfront and Inkatha that called itself the Freedom Alliance. (Viljoen’s followers, impressed by Inkatha’s willingness to back up their rhetoric with force, cheered this development). Then Chris Hani’s killers, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, were condemned to death. Then a black woman was crowned Miss South Africa for the first time. Then, rubbing still more salt into the wound, Mandela and De Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, most important of all, Mandela and De Klerk presided over a ceremony at which the country’s new transitional constitution was solemnized. The outcome of three and a half years of negotiations was a compromise whereby the first democratically elected government would be a power-sharing coalition, lasting five years: the president would belong to the majority party but the configuration of the cabinet would reflect the proportion of the vote each party won. The new arrangements also provided guarantees that white civil servants, the military included, would not lose their jobs and that white farmers would not lose their land. Neither would there be any Nuremberg-style trials.
Despite the fact that he made this historic deal with De Klerk, Mandela always had more personal regard for Constand Viljoen—and indeed for P. W. Botha—than for the president who had let him free. In Mandela’s eyes, Viljoen was, like him, a patriarchal leader who, within the confines of his unworldly Boerness, had a big heart. Mandela saw mirrored in Viljoen qualities of his own—honesty, integrity, courage—that he liked.
In De Klerk, by contrast, Mandela saw little that he would wish to emulate. Never forgiving him for what he perceived to be his disregard for the loss of black life in the townships, he came to see the president as a lean-souled, slippery lawyer who dwelt in detail and lacked the temperament and conviction of a true leader. This was unfair in the view even of some of his own colleagues in the ANC’s National Executive Committee, but if there was one thing the proper Victorian gentleman in Mandela detested it was the sense that someone had betrayed his good faith.
Yet it was with De Klerk that Mandela received his joint Nobel Prize. This infuriated him, not because he judged it to be premature, which it was since nobody knew yet what the outcome of the race between peace and war was going to be, but because he believed, according to his old friend and lawyer George Bizos, that De Klerk did not deserve it, that it should have been awarded to Mandela and to the ANC as a whole. “When De Klerk gave his acceptance speech,” said George Bizos, who traveled to Norway with the Nobel delegation, “Mandela expected him to