Invictus - Carlin [71]
Why? Because Mr. Mandela, and his new friend Terror had treated him with respect—Walter Sisulu’s “ordinary respect.” “I never got that respect from De Klerk and the National Party, you know. But from Mr. Mandela, yes . . . I believe, I really do, that we must give them a chance.”
The ANC had won the elections with just under two-thirds of the national vote, and nearly 89 percent of the black one. Of the rest, one percent went to the openly antiwhite PAC—whose “one settler, one bullet” slogan ANC supporters jeeringly translated into “one settler, one percent”; and 10 percent went to Inkatha. (Abandoned by Viljoen, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was left with no option but to join the election process.) The National Party got 20 percent, which meant four seats in cabinet, including the deputy presidency for De Klerk, in the new coalition government over which Mandela would preside. And Viljoen’s party, which he named the Freedom Front, got 2 percent of the vote, which meant a not unrespectable nine seats in the new, multicolored parliament.
No sooner had the results come in than John Reinders, chief of presidential protocol under both De Klerk and P. W. Botha, contacted his former employers, the Department of Correctional Services. Botha had dragged him out of the prison bureaucracy in 1980, when he had occupied the rank of major, but Reinders found to his relief that, yes, they had a job for him.
His last job before leaving was to organize Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration on May 10, 1994. It was a logistical nightmare compared to De Klerk’s inauguration, to which no foreign delegation—save locally based diplomats—had thought fit to travel. This inauguration would be quite different. Four thousand people gathered at Pretoria’s seat of power, an early-twentieth century pile called the Union Buildings atop a hill overlooking the city. Among the guests were figures otherwise unimaginable in the same room, such as Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro, Prince Philip, Yassir Arafat, and the president of Israel, Chaim Herzog. The two national anthems—“Nkosi Sikelele” and “Die Stem”—were played side by side as the brand-new national flag fluttered. It was the most multicolored flag in the world, a sort of crazy quilt in black, green, gold, red, blue, and white, combining colors associated with black resistance with those of the old South African flag. Mandela took his oath of office before a white judge flanked by his daughter Zenani, and surrounded by black former prisoners and white SADF generals standing to attention in full-dress uniform. (“A few years earlier they would have arrested me,” he joked later.) The ceremony closed with the spectacle of South African Air Force jets soaring overhead painting the colors of the new flag in the sky.
Mightily relieved that the ceremony had passed without catastrophe, John Reinders arrived at his office in the Union Buildings early next morning, May 11, with a couple of large cardboard boxes under his arms. He was a large man, but he had the deferential manner of someone much slighter, as well as the good judgment to know when he was beaten.
“I came in early that morning to collect my things,” Reinders recalled. “All we whites had applied for jobs elsewhere, sure we would be asked to leave. Quite a few meant to go and work for Mr. de Klerk in the deputy presidency.”
Reinders was packing away his mementos of seventeen years spent running the presidential office, organizing ceremonial dos, bumping into famous people on official trips, when suddenly he was startled out of his reminiscences by a knock at the door. It was another early riser. Mandela.
“Good morning, how are you?” he said, stepping into Reinders’s office with outstretched hand.
“Very well, Mr. President, thank you. And