Mandela’s 30-year walk to freedom

This week I returned to the Victor Verster Prison, where Nelson Rohilala Mandela walked free on February 11, 1990. It’s a major tourist site. French, English and isiXhosa speaking children

played around the lifelike sculpture capturing the moment and the spot where he raised his fist in defiance as he walked free.

In his autobiography Mandela admitted to feeling alarmed on that day, 30 years ago, at seeing the crowds. He did not yet recognise the intrusive fluffy poles pointed at him as the

unidirectional microphones of broadcasters.

What would he think of today’s South Africa? His favoured successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, retains 62 pre cent of public support, yet seems unable to  break the cycle of rising

joblessness. Nor has Ramaphosa brought to book the perpetrators of the country’s kleptocratic wave under ex-President Jacob Zuma, now facing an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court

on his trial date.

The Mandela I remember was nothing if not a realist. He did not believe he had it in him to fix the economy. He’d been out of circulation for three decades, and business was not his area of

expertise. He had a Western-trained economist as his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, and he left the economy largely to him, save when he twisted the arms of industrialists to pay for another school or

someone in need. Now some of those schools are empty, because administration is so poor. 

Once Mandela had taken stock of his newfound freedom, we saw his immense discipline and focus. He set out to build a unified nation, and he did as much as any leader could have done. Using

every possible tool, including South Africans’ obsession with sport, he set out to bring us together. And he succeeded. After they saw him rooting for a mostly white South African rugby

team, leading to the famous Rugby World Cup win in 1996, for the first time whites stopped using the old apartheid-era flag. They used the new one designed for our democracy and cheered the

president. They loved him.

The Mandela I knew did not do this because he was a kindly teddy bear uncle who believed in love and flowers. Mandela was far too strategic – and tough – for that. He was ruled by his brain

every bit as much as his heart. It was a conscious, deliberate and strategic decision: for South Africa to work, to be a successful country, a unified nation across all classes and races was

necessary. It was the next step on his long walk. He would create the political conditions and social cohesion necessary.

For me, the most remarkable thing about Mandela was his capacity to change and grow. He was of his time and yet out of his time. In prison, he missed the rise of television and the feminist

movement, once asking a colleague why women took offence when he sought photo ops with beauty queens. On gay rights, he added “sexual preference” to his list of freedoms in his stump

speeches at a time when American President Bill Clinton’s limit was “don’t ask, don’t tell”. The man driving him when he was captured was a well-known local gay white theatre director.

Mandela recognised that courage had nothing to do with sexual orientation. 

Soon after his release, I was asked to train him for television. It was a Saturday morning. He told me he had warned his colleagues that this was compulsory. The hardest thing for him was to

talk about his personal life, something he regarded as a cultural taboo. I told him a modern political campaign left him little choice. 

He overcame his reluctance. Campaigning on Robben Island, he steeled himself to reminisce in his old prison cell, about where he kept the picture of the love of his life, Winnie, from whom

he was by now estranged. When the full “walk and talk” was over, a TV producer approached him. Her camera battery had run out. Could he do the whole sequence again? He did. 

Once I raised with him the claim that he was not bitter over his lifetime’s incarceration. Was it true? He quietly brushed the claim aside. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just I don’t have

time.” He understood his life history was now mingled with the country’s. He was determined to enshrine a democratic constitution, then lead for only a single term. When he retired, African

politicians told me he deserved a second Nobel Peace Prize – for the example he set the continent by leaving office, when his popularity would have led others to stay president for life.

Some of his greatest moments occurred in retirement. In office he was dimly aware of the scourge of HIV/Aids sweeping the country. Out of office, he studied up, so that when his immediate

successor, Thabo Mbeki, resisted the latest medical treatments for HIV/Aids, possibly because of Mbeki’s own difficulty in talking about sex, Mandela sought his moment.

A wooden speaker on the occasions that party protocols required him to read a speech drafted by a committee, when Mandela spoke off the cuff, he was magnetic. Mbeki is a thoughtful man, he

began. He does not speak without considering the issues. It was the honey before the sting. By the end, it was clear to everyone that he was in conflict with his president and successor, who

needed to change course on HIV/Aids because lives were at stake. Eventually, a civic protest movement led to court action that forced Mbeki to reverse policy. It had Mandela’s support.

I saw Mandela in a bad mood, especially one morning when the 7am TV setup was running late. He was quiet and frosty. He was campaigning for his one and only election. There was no time to

spare. But only once did I see him seem out of control in public, when US President George W Bush was about to go to war in Iraq. Mandela had been out of office for four years, but was still

exceptionally well-briefed. He was annoyed that the American president had refused to take his call, fobbing him off to his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. 

This American president, he told assembled cameras with feeling, “does not know how to think”. 

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