1 Minutes of the State Security Council meeting, 16 August 1989.
2 One of the best examples of this is the author Richard Rosenthal, who blames everyone other than himself for the failure of his uncalled-for attempts. See Richard Rosenthal, Mission Improbable (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998); and Willie Esterhuyse, Endgame: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), pp. 159–161, 169–171.
3 Maritz Spaarwater, Die spook wat boom geklim en lig gevind het (Hermanus: Erfenis Publikasies, 2015), p. 236; Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007), pp. 563–567.
4 Aziz Pahad, Insurgent Diplomat (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2014), p. 220; and Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country (London: Arrow Press, 1997), p. 113.
Chapter 3
Fifteen hundred crucial days
From Nelson Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990 until his inauguration as president on 10 May 1994, South Africans sat around countless negotiating tables to hammer out a peaceful resolution to the impasse in which they found themselves.
These more than fifteen hundred days marked the beginning of an epoch. Alas, they were also days of selfishness, egotism and blatant opportunism, spawning turncoats and power-seekers.
The negotiations dragged on, day after day, night after night and weekend after weekend. It is an illusion that everything progressed neatly and according to plan. From table to table the participants wrestled on, often without any clear goals. When crises arose, they were tackled and most were addressed. This was only possible thanks to the mutual trust and determination of the core group of negotiators for whom peace had become a passion.
Most of the negotiations took place in the headquarters of Constitutional Development Services, at 240 Walker Street in Pretoria, but others were held throughout the length and breadth of the country – even in a neighbouring country. From D’Nyala in the Bushveld and De Hoop in the southern Cape, to the ivory towers of the Witwatersrand and the government buildings of Pretoria, intense debates were held, most of them with the ANC. At Ulundi and elsewhere in Natal, endless discussions were held with the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Talks with the PAC were held in Gaborone because its members refused to negotiate on South African soil. The right-wingers, appropriately enough, were met at a hunting lodge in the far northern Transvaal on the banks of the Limpopo River, where Thomas Langley had the temerity to insist that the proposed volkstaat (a state exclusively for the Afrikaner volk) be accorded international diplomatic representation.
The old Verwoerd Building at 120 Plein Street in Cape Town was also home to negotiations involving, among others, a number of splinter groups and ‘flentergatpartye’ (ragtag parties), as PW Botha described them. Suddenly, everyone was too important in their own eyes to be excluded from the search for a political solution. The challenge lay in not pushing them aside but, at the same time, making them understand that their bargaining power at the negotiation table was more or less proportional to their support base, which was still untested at that stage.
Come what may, listening to what everyone had to say was the only way to ensure full participation. No sooner said than done.
The ANC’s team
The ANC’s core negotiating team was formidable and represented many shades of opinion. Furthermore, it had the advantage of having a global icon as its principal and leader.
Many a time, Mandela played the negotiation process like a Stradivarius violin. Everyone realised that his approval was the final test, which, in reality, gave him veto rights. When he deemed it necessary, he was stubborn and unyielding. Sometimes, he was almost trite with reproachful passion – for example, on the ‘third force’ and security issues, a matter on which the ANC was solidly behind him.
Why was Cyril Ramaphosa the one chosen to lead the ANC team, and not Thabo Mbeki, who, after all, had done the lion’s share of the preparation? The NI’s sources gave a logical explanation for this, which lay partly in the internal conflict in the ANC – conflict between the decimated United Democratic Front (UDF) wing inside the country and the corrupt external wing. The former had been manhandled by the security forces; the latter’s members were gallivanting overseas in posh hotels. This was the perception, and was not entirely devoid of truth.
The ANC leadership regarded Mbeki as the talented intellectual who might be too soft in his dealings with the government, too malleable. In contrast, Ramaphosa was seen as the battering ram who would put the government’s negotiators in their place. When the pendulum swung in favour of aggressive negotiators, Ramaphosa, with his personality and experience in trade union bargaining, seemed the obvious choice.
It appears that Mbeki accepted his supporting role with grace. He often helped to clear bottlenecks, particularly those involving the right-wing Afrikaners and the tussle to include them in the peace process. Mbeki was sharp, but never malicious. He is a good listener, and was always on hand to seek solutions and help others to solve core dilemmas clearly and decisively. Everyone realised that, in his own right and as a protégé of Oliver Tambo, he was a heavyweight with access to Mandela.
Ramaphosa was equally quick-witted and was always well prepared. During the negotiations, he was a straight talker – a trait worth its weight in gold. Negotiations, as the Germans would say, are about Blut und Boden (blood and soil) issues; Ramaphosa knew this all too well. He is a friendly person, but sometimes conducted himself like a sergeant major on the parade ground. Then, he was bombastic and even arrogant – as he was on the day he snapped at me while I was speaking Afrikaans, saying that all government officials were supposed to be bilingual.
He brought gravitas and many talents to the table. Everyone knew that if Cyril was part of a plan, the chances of success were virtually assured.
The rest of the ANC’s core team comprised equally talented people: Joe Slovo, Mac Maharaj, Valli Moosa and, sometimes, Mathews Phosa. They were well prepared and complemented one another perfectly, like an Olympic relay team handing the baton faultlessly from one team member to the next. Their explicit objective – a democratic dispensation for South Africa – gave the ANC team an indisputable advantage. Intellectual and academic arguments simply cannot hold a candle to the reality of the will of the people at the ballot box. In the back of every negotiator’s head, he or she knew this all too well.
Then there was the ANC’s extended negotiating team, comprising knowledgeable people who were drawn circumstantially into the discussions – when certain topics and bottlenecks arose, for example. They included, among others, Jacob Zuma, Joel Netshitenzhe, Barbara Masekela, Baleka Kgositsile (Mbete), Joe Modise, Zola Skweyiya, Arthur Chaskalson, Siphiwe Nyanda and Aziz Pahad. All were old campaigners, most with outstanding struggle credentials, which meant that they could speak with authority.
It was insightful to contrast the thousands of days that the ANC negotiators had spent on snow-covered parade grounds in East Germany, in lice-infested barracks in Angola and Uganda, and behind bars in South Africa – in constant fear that the defence force’s special forces could swoop in on one’s hiding place in the neighbouring states – with the comfortable armchair existence of the government’s negotiating team.
When the ANC team first embarked on the negotiation process, its members appeared somewhat disorganised. No one could fathom who was wielding the sceptre. Was it Mandela,
