Invictus - Carlin [78]
On this day, the Springboks had annihilated a Welsh team with such style and passion that the team’s coach, Kitch Christie, declared himself convinced that the Springboks could win the World Cup. Quite possibly Johan Heyns, in common with many other Afrikaners, had formed the same opinion too. But he did not live to see the day. That evening, as he sat at his home in Pretoria playing cards with his wife and his two grandsons, aged eight and eleven, he was shot dead. A gunman outside killed him with one bullet to the back of the head.
Professor Johan Heyns, who was sixty-six, had been a pillar of the apartheid establishment, serving as moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church between 1986 and 1990. But he had also been a motor for political change, having ended thirty years of conflict with Braam Viljoen and the small group of dissenting theologians who thought like him by acknowledging that it was wrong to believe that apartheid enjoyed biblical justification. That was in 1986. His own parting shot as head of the Afrikaners’ biggest church had been boldly to declare in 1990, soon after Mandela’s release, that apartheid was a sin. He had undergone his private conversion during a protracted stay in Europe in the early eighties. “I had grown up with the idea that blacks were culturally inferior to whites,” Heyns had once confessed. “Exposure in Europe to black people of high academic standing had a profound effect on me.”
In 1990, when the first spasms of right-wing resistance were being felt, he had said, “What we’re experiencing now are the birth pangs of the new nation. And—have no doubt—the new nation will be born. But birth is usually accompanied by pain, even death.”
Heyns’s assassination was not in the same order as Chris Hani’s in terms of the immediate dangers that it posed, but it did fill people with foreboding. Who had done it and who might be next? Could it have been a former member of one of the old police or army death squads? It had certainly been a professional job. The murder weapon had been a high-caliber rifle fired through a window from some twenty feet away. No one doubted that it had been an action of the far right. But nobody knew who had done it, or why.
Mandela was outraged. Heyns, whom he had met many times, had been his favorite kind of Afrikaner. Morally and physically brave, honest to the core, he’d had the courage late in life to admit to the error of his ways. Mandela mourned his “loss to the South African nation as a whole, both black and white.” But then, three days after Heyns’s death, he went on the offensive. He announced a crackdown on the far right, accusing the previous government of having not done nearly enough to defuse the right-wing threat. And he began his crackdown by wielding the axe on the police, from whose ranks he suspected complicity in Heyns’s killing, as well as an unwillingness to seriously uncover the culprits. Mandela had hitherto trod gingerly with the police. He had deliberately not done what his heart asked him to do, cut heads at the top. Now he did.
One man who had remained in place six months into the Mandela presidency was the nation’s top cop, Commisioner Johan van der Merwe, a former security police chief who had been suspected of colluding in dirty tricks operations against the ANC, including murder. Mandela was prepared to swallow a lot for the cause of peace, going so far as to name the Inkatha leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, minister of home affairs. But Heyns’s death had stretched his patience. “We cannot allow a police force to develop in opposition to government,” he declared, going so far as to accuse segements of the police of “declaring war” on the ANC. Singling out Van der Merwe, who had been chief of the notorious security police in the eighties, he accused him of failing to support the democratic government. A few days later, he acted on his threats and fired him.
Expecting a backlash, Mandela received reports two months later of what sounded like a serious plot against his government.