Invictus - Carlin [68]
General Viljoen felt more uncertain and uncomfortable than ever before. As the chances of victory for the Volksfront became more remote, his soldiers clamored more loudly for war. Mandela heard those cries too, and felt for Viljoen. He knew that Viljoen’s constituency needed something to cheer. The rest of the ANC leadership were not so clear on this point. At a meeting of the movement’s National Executive Committee early in 1994, the issue on the table was, what should the position of the new government be on the delicate question of the national anthem? The old anthem was clearly unacceptable. A part of “Die Stem,” a sombre martial tune, was an acceptably neutral entreaty to God to “guard our beloved land”; but another part of it—and this was the part black people heard—celebrated the triumphs of Retief, Pretorius, and the rest of the “trekkers” as they drove upward through South Africa in the nineteenth century, crushing black resistance, their “creaking wagons cutting their trails into the earth.” The unofficial anthem of black South Africa, “Nkosi Sikelele,” was the richly soulful expression of a long-suffering people yearning to be free.
The meeting had just gotten started when an assistant walked in to inform Mandela that he had a phone call from a head of state. He left the room and the thirty or so men and women of the ANC’s supreme decision-making body carried on without him. The consensus was overwhelmingly in favor of scrapping “Die Stem” and replacing it with “Nkosi Sikelele.” The NEC members were reveling in their decision and all it symbolized for the new South Africa when Mandela returned. They told him what they’d decided and he said, ’Well, I am sorry. I don’t want to be rude, but . . . I think I should express myself on this motion. I never thought seasoned people such as yourselves would take a decision of such magnitude on such an important matter without even waiting for the president of your organization.”
And then Mandela sternly set forth his point of view. “This song that you treat so easily holds the emotions of many people who you don’t represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very—the only—basis that we are building upon: reconciliation.”
The ladies and gentlemen of the National Executive Committee of the ANC cringed with embarrassment. Mandela proposed instead that South Africa should have two anthems, to be played one immediately after the other at all official ceremonies, from presidential inaugurations to international rugby matches: “Die Stem” and “Nkosi Sikelele.” Quickly convinced by the logic of Mandela’s argument, the freedom fighters unanimously caved in. Jacob Zuma, who had been chairing the meeting said, “Well, I . . . I . . . I think the matter is clear, comrades. I think the matter is clear.” There were no objections.
The NEC capitulated in the face of Mandela’s wrath because they realized that his response to the anthem question was the correct one in tactical terms. He had in fact lectured the NEC on the business of winning over the Afrikaners, on showing respect for their symbols; on going out of one’s way, for example, to employ a few words of Afrikaans at the beginning of a speech. “You don’t address their brains,” he told them, “you address their hearts.”
With Constand Viljoen, Mandela addressed both head and heart, but it was the heart that won out in the end. It helped a huge amount that on March 11 the Volksfront met its Waterloo, shoving the general in the direction toward which Mandela had been gently pushing him.
With the elections