and used this knowledge to control and manipulate the complex situation surrounding Mandela to his and the government’s perceived advantage.
All this presented me with a massively exciting opportunity – but also a massive challenge. As a result, in the same year, I invited Professor Willie Esterhuyse of the University of Stellenbosch to join me in studying the archive, and we spent months sifting through the material. Our paths eventually diverged, and Professor Esterhuyse went on to write about Mandela’s and Coetsee’s ‘leading-edge diplomacy’ in a book published in 2015.1
In 2017, my friend, the former journalist and specialist editor Riaan de Villiers, joined me as co-author. A visit to Bloemfontein, many emails and many hours of phone conversations followed. Initially, we tried to develop an account of all the themes and the entire period covered by the archive, but remained overwhelmed by its vast scope. Moreover, as our understanding of the material deepened, we began to realise that the archive contained some startling revelations about the latter stages of the process surrounding Mandela’s release, and we decided to concentrate on this single theme. Excitedly, we began to reread certain documents and transcriptions, and share some new insights. From then on, the book began to take shape quite rapidly.
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Two overarching points need to be made. The first concerns the vast scope of the archive, not only in terms of volume but also its multiple dimensions. Almost a decade’s worth of secret memorandums and other government documents provides a unique window on the hidden workings of the NP government, as well as the actions of key role players. At that time, insight into this material would have been truly lethal knowledge. Added to this, summaries and transcripts of Mandela’s conversations with literally hundreds of visitors illuminate not only his interaction with Coetsee and other government figures, but also his relationships with his captors; his fellow prisoners; his legal representatives; and Winnie Mandela and other members of his family. Some of these revelations are not only political, but also social, as well as intensely personal. Beyond our chosen theme, much of this remains unexplored.
The second, related, point concerns the scope of this book. Perhaps it will be best to say what it doesn’t do, before saying what it does. Firstly, it does not seek to retell the story of the South African transition, based on revelations in the archive. The transition was a hugely complex process, with many more dimensions, both local and global, than those touched on in this book. All of these worked in concert to end white domination and propel South Africa into a largely peaceful transition to an inclusive constitutional democracy. It has been and would remain a mistake to try to reduce the transition to a single causal driver.
Secondly, this book does not even seek to retell the story of this single strand, namely the largely secret process surrounding Mandela and his interaction with various government and other role players during the last few years of his incarceration. Among other things, the Coetsee archive is not complete or continuous enough to allow for the development of an entire alternative narrative. However, what it does do is to cast new – and sometimes startling – light on aspects of this process, which, we believe, requires the accepted history to be partly revised and rewritten.
Throughout, we have tried, as far as possible, to let the material speak for itself. In some instances, beyond providing essential background and context, we have tentatively drawn out some of the implications; in others, we have left this to the reader.
To conclude, the Coetsee archive forms part of our national heritage. As such, it is bigger than any single researcher or author, and no one should seek to claim any exclusive insight into or ownership of its contents, much of which is extremely sensitive. We tried to deal with the material pertinent to our theme as responsibly as possible, steering clear of conspiracy theory as well as political pulp fiction. We hope other researchers will do so too.
Who was Kobie Coetsee?
Riaan de Villiers
‘In a sense I had, by the early eighties, already accepted that I
had this position, it was a very powerful position. History will tell whether I have abused this position, or whether I’ve used this position to bring about change.’ – Kobie Coetsee, interview with Padraig O’Malley, 26 September 1997
WHEN, ON Saturday, 29 July 2000, Kobie Coetsee died of a heart attack at age 69, the reaction in the South African media was curiously muted. Time and events had moved on, and comments came from younger politicians and others who had not been Coetsee’s contemporaries. The ‘big guns’ of the 1980s and 1990s had fallen silent.
In a Sapa report carried on IOL News, Inus Aucamp, New National Party leader in the Free State, described Coetsee as a ‘leader of outstanding talent with a brilliant intellect who played a significant role in South African politics’, without offering any insight into what that role had been.
A bit closer to home, but still without any real explanation, the NNP’s national leader, Marthinus (‘Kortbroek’) van Schalkwyk, declared that Coetsee had ‘broken the ice between then President P.W. Botha and Nelson Mandela, and understood how important it was to release Mandela’. He added that Coetsee was ‘very effective in administering his department, and also introduced the first domestic violence legislation in South Africa’.
Paul Setsetse, spokesman for Justice Minister Penuell Maduna, observed that Coetsee had worked closely with Maduna, and that his demise was a ‘sad loss for the country’. He added that Maduna and Coetsee had forged a close friendship during the Codesa talks.1 Tony Leon, leader of the Democratic Party, said he had ‘great admiration and considerable affection’ for Coetsee. The latter had reformed the institution of law in South Africa, and was a reformer ahead of his own party and era.
The Sapa report then proceeded to a biography which failed to mention the most important feature of Coetsee’s political career – his decision, while serving as Minister of Justice and later, Prisons, in the mid-1980s, to start secret talks with Nelson Mandela.2
In some ways, Coetsee’s death gained greater prominence overseas than in South Africa itself – but to no greater avail. An obituary in The Telegraph of London on 31 July 2000 started with the wild assertion that Coetsee had ‘guided the National Party in its first tentative steps towards reform, and brokered the first meeting between P.W. Botha, then president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela’. It went further downhill from there, providing an overdramatised account riddled with errors of fact and interpretation.3
The obituary in The Guardian on 5 August 2000 was even more misguided – a surprising failure by a respected newspaper that had covered events in South Africa assiduously and quite accurately for many years. Among other things, after stating that Coetsee had ‘decided to take up a challenge’ from Winnie Mandela to ‘meet his most famous prisoner’, it went on to say, absurdly, that Coetsee’s first meeting with Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison ‘so impressed Coetsee that he soon went back for more’. One can only surmise that this obit was written by a backroom staffer who had never reported from South Africa, and had cobbled it together from files.4
Both obituaries declared that C.R. (Blackie) Swart, South Africa’s first Republican head of state, was one of Coetsee’s grandfathers, leading them to conclude that he had ‘learnt politics at his grandfather’s knee’. This is a total untruth, seemingly prompted by a clumsy sentence in a stock South African biography which the obit writers must have found online. It does, however, seem that both Coetsee’s grandfathers saw active service in the Anglo-Boer War. What can be gleaned with reasonable accuracy from these and other obituaries is the following:
Hendrik Jacobus (Kobie) Coetsee was born in the town of Ladybrand in the eastern Free State on 19 April 1931. His father, Jan, was a printer, who married Josephine van Zyl. Both were active members of the National Party
