It was 1990, a grey, wintry morning in Brussels, when my best friend in the city, Sally Swart, phoned and said only three words: “He’s coming out.”
“Who’s coming out?” I demanded. I spent the rest of the day with Sally and her husband Rian watching their television for the moment when Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela emerged from a prison outside Cape Town after 27 years behind bars.
South Africa was then an unhappy country. It was immersed in apartheid, the policy by which the white minority monopolised power and the black majority was voteless. There were riots, arson, killings and international sanctions.
Sally, Rian and I had left SA to see the world and advance our careers. But many others had left SA in despair, believing it wouldn’t change; it would only get worse.
As we watched the hazy TV pictures of the prison entrance, we knew then that South Africa had changed. What we didn’t know was how the change would be shaped by the tall, elegant man striding towards the gate and greeting the crowd with a clenched fist.
Until that moment, none of us knew Mandela. His writings were banned in SA. All we had was his statement in court in 1964: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society”.
He had spent most of the 27 years in a prison on Robben Island, a flat islet in the bay of Cape Town. When we drove the highway that skirts the mountain overlooking Cape Town, we would look out to the island, wistfully. “Whenever I see the island, I greet Nelson by extra-sensory perception,” the white activist Sheila Lapinsky once told me.
Mandela did not disappoint. In four swift years, he and President Frederik De Klerk reached an agreement that brought peace to the nation. Conventional wisdom says negotiators have to trust each other. But De Klerk, a champion of apartheid who turned against it, and Mandela, did not.
How then did they succeed? What lessons can we learn in a region that yearns for peace between Turks and Kurds, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, Israelis and Palestinians?
First, Mandela and De Klerk knew they had to reach a settlement. When their talks began to drag in 1992-93, the violence intensified, culminating in the assassination of Chris Hani, a popular black leader killed by a white man. The country seemed to be on the brink of a bloodbath. Mandela and De Klerk set a deadline: one person, one vote elections would take place in April 1994. Then they hammered out the constitution. With the will to do it, they did it.
The second lesson is that their need for each other outweighed their mutual distrust. At one point, Mandela said of De Klerk, “whether I like him or not is irrelevant. I need him”.
Third, Mandela and De Klerk had the courage to face down the dissenters in their own camps who protested as they made big compromises. In his excellent biography of Mandela, Anthony Sampson recalls the “negotiators on both sides would often find it harder to persuade their own colleagues than their opponents”.
I saw Mandela only once. In the election of 1999, I took my wife, a Turk, to a Johannesburg shopping mall where he was expected. We were in a cafe when a big, well-dressed white man rushed by, knocking tables and chairs out of the way. Mandela had arrived and the man was determined to shake his hand.
Mandela made a short campaign speech, and then reached out to take hands. I watched proudly as he shook my wife’s. It was “firm, reassuring”, Meltem recalled.
He was besieged by people wanting his hand; his guards trying to control them. Mandela obliged, smiling broadly, but the twinkle in his eye showed he knew they were making too much fuss.
To me, this is Mandela’s loveliest quality: his humility, so different from the intimidating presence of his Afrikaner nationalist predecessors. And from this flowed his reaching out to opponents. I was astonished when President Mandela hosted Percy Yutar, the utterly rightwing prosecutor of his 1964 trial. Yutar said afterwards that Mandela was a “saintly” man.
But Mandela was not trying to be saintly. He was trying to build a nation. And he did.
Jasper Mortimer reports on Turkey, Cyprus and Iran. His main outlet is the English service of France 24 television, but he also freelances for Radio France Internationale, Cape Talk radio in South Africa, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Cyprus Mail
