Invictus - Carlin [73]
And that could have been the end of that: order restored, old enemies reconciled, the good king crowned, all players exeunt—exuberantly—stage left. But it was not the end. It was not over yet, neither for Mandela nor for General Viljoen. There was still one more act to be played out before Viljoen could hang up his sword with peace of mind, one final set of challenges to be overcome before Mandela could consider his life’s quest complete.
As Viljoen pointed out, “Forty or fifty percent of my people did not take part in the voting.” Some of them placed bombs at bus stops and other places where black people gathered in large crowds during the week before the election. They also set off a bomb at Johannesburg International Airport. Twenty-one people were killed and more than a hundred badly injured. Mandela’s speeches during his first month in power were consistently upbeat, deliberately trying to set an optimistic, energized mood. But he could not refrain from pointing out at the closing of that first session of parliament that the security forces would have to remain on full alert. “The problem of politically motivated violence is still with us,” he said.
Mandela had a lot on his plate during his five-year term in office: providing houses and schools, water and electricity for black people. But his overwhelming priority was to cement the foundations of the new democracy, render it bombproof. He knew that attempts would be made to subvert the inevitably fragile new order. It could not be that all of white South Africa would surrender its ancient powers, and a fair number of its privileges, without a fight.
As for General Viljoen, he was torn, the way Niël Barnard had been four and a half years earlier on the morning of Mandela’s release. Despite having met Mandela sixty times in prison, Barnard could not entirely dispel that alarm bell going off deep inside his head, warning him, however irrationally, of the Ayatollah factor. Viljoen felt similar misgivings, as if he could not quite believe that life could be as good as Mandela made it seem, as if he had not been able entirely to shed his ancestral misgivings about the black man. A part of him worried as he sat there on that opening day of parliament, and throughout the year ahead, that he might have done the right thing by himself—Mandela always had the door open to him, always treated him with respect—but not the right thing by his people. He confessed that his conscience nagged at him. “I was troubled. Very troubled,” he said. “A lot of fine things had been said, but where was the proof that I could show my people once and for all?”
The answer lay in Mandela’s proving to Viljoen’s people that they were his people too; in widening his embrace beyond Constand Viljoen and John Reinders and Niël Barnard and Kobie Coetsee to include all Afrikaners. Mandela’s legal adviser and close confidant in the presidential office, a white lawyer called Nicholas Haysom, who had been jailed three times during the anti-apartheid years, defined the mission in appropriately epic terms.
“We called it nation-building. But Garibaldi has a quote that exemplifies it more eloquently,” said Haysom, referring to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the soldier-patriot who unified Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. “When he had finished his military mission Garibaldi said, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’ ” Actually, the challenge Mandela faced was tougher than Garibaldi’s. “Italy was divided but homogeneous. South Africa in 1994 was a country that was split historically, culturally, racially, and so many other ways,” Haysom added. “No amount of negotiations, speeches, constitutions would suffice in themselves to ‘make South Africans.’ You needed something else to bring people together. You needed Mandela to do what he did best: rise above our differences, be bigger than those things that divided us and appeal to that which bound us together.”
CHAPTER XII
THE CAPTAIN AND THE PRESIDENT
1994-95
“You looked at him,” Mandela said, recalling