Free State, qualifying with a BA LLB. In that time, he was active in the youth branch of the NP. He then practised as an attorney in Bloemfontein for some 17 years. In this period, he also volunteered for military service, and became an officer in the President Steyn armoured car regiment in Bloemfontein. In 1956, he married Helena (Ena) Malan. They had two sons and three daughters.
In 1968, he became the member of parliament for Bloemfontein West, a seat that fell vacant when J.J. (Jim) Fouché succeeded Blackie Swart as State President. In 1972, Coetsee was admitted to the Bloemfontein Bar, enabling him to practise as an advocate in the higher courts.
In 1978, he was elected as chairman of the Defence Group of the NP caucus. In the same year, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, P.W. Botha appointed Coetsee as Deputy Minister of Defence and National Security. (Botha himself held on to these portfolios until 1980, when he appointed General Magnus Malan as Minister of Defence.) In 1985, Coetsee became leader of the NP in the Orange Free State.
In this period, at Botha’s behest, Coetsee reorganised the national intelligence services in the wake of the Information Scandal, which had led to the resignation of the previous Prime Minister, John Vorster. In October 1980, he was appointed as Minister of Justice, which gave him a seat on the State Security Council. Crucially, he became Minister of Correctional Services as well.
Coetsee introduced significant legal reforms, including the small claims court system and the Matrimonial Property Act, which improved the status of married women, as well as the accrual system of sharing property between spouses. He also changed the conscription system to allow conscientious objectors, who had previously been jailed, to perform community service instead.
In April 1986, he appointed a commission to examine the role of the courts in protecting group and individual rights, resulting in a report on human and group rights that, he later believed, influenced the addition of a Bill of Rights to the South African Constitution of 1996.
From 1985 onwards, he played a seminal role in the South African transition by embarking on exploratory talks with Nelson Mandela while the latter was still in prison. In July 1989, he was present at the historic meeting between Mandela – then still a prisoner – and an ailing President P.W. Botha.
In May 1990, he formed part of the government delegation at the talks between representatives of the NP government and the newly unbanned African National Congress (ANC) which resulted in the Groote Schuur Minute. He played a major role in the constitutional negotiations from the early 1990s onwards that led to the adoption of the interim constitution of 1993.
In this period, he piloted the Indemnity Act through parliament, which granted temporary immunity to people who returned to South Africa to take part in the negotiations after the unbanning of the ANC. He also played a major role in the protracted and controversial negotiations around amnesty for people on both sides of the conflict who had committed acts of violence.
From April 1993 until April 1994, he also served as Minister of Defence. After the 1994 elections, he was elected as president of the Senate, with the support of the ANC and other parties, and held this position until 1998. In that year he retired, supposedly to pursue his hobbies of hunting, shooting and fishing, and he died two years later.
This still does little to explain the ambiguities and opacities that perpetually seem to surround Coetsee. For this, we need to turn to comments by some of his contemporaries.
First up is P.W. Botha. ‘The Big Crocodile’ appointed Coetsee as Deputy Minister of Defence and of National Intelligence, and then to the senior cabinet posts of Minister of Justice and Correctional Services. Coetsee later said they had worked closely together for many years, and he believed they trusted one another. However, following Coetsee’s death, Botha was surprisingly equivocal about their relationship.
Following its grandiose opening paragraph, the Telegraph obituary referred to earlier went on to say that, by 1985, Botha’s government had ‘conspicuously failed’ to quell black unrest, and the South African economy was under siege. Coetsee’s ‘damascene conversion’ came that year when Winnie Mandela persuaded him to meet her husband, who, while still a prisoner, was in a Cape Town hospital recovering from a prostate operation.
Coetsee was immediately impressed by Mandela, whom he likened to ‘an old Roman citizen, with dignitas, gravitas, honestas, simplicitas’. The two men struck up an unlikely friendship, and several further encounters followed in Pollsmoor Prison where Mandela was confined, leading eventually to the meeting between Botha and Mandela in 1989. (Much of this is either incorrect or oversimplified, but that is not directly relevant here.)
According to the obit, Mandela called Coetsee a ‘reformer ahead of his time’. Botha, however, was inclined to denigrate Coetsee’s contribution to the reform process, calling him a ‘funny little man’. ‘I always felt after talking to him,’ Botha was quoted as saying, ‘that it was a case of confusion worse confounded.’ The source of this comment was not cited.5
While the source of Coetsee’s remark about Mandela was also not provided, it was drawn from an interview with Coetsee by John Carlin, South African correspondent for the leading British newspaper The Independent from 1990 to 1995. Generally credited with being one of the most capable foreign correspondents to cover the transition to democracy, Carlin distilled his experiences into two books. In Knowing Mandela (2013),6 Carlin offers a personal account of Mandela, based on their relationship which developed in the period from 1990 to 1995 and thereafter, as well as research conducted during his spell in South Africa. This includes in-depth interviews with 24 role players in the South African transition. The interviews have been collected under the theme ‘The Long Walk to Freedom of Nelson Mandela’, related to a television series Carlin helped to make, and are available online.7
This resource shows that The Telegraph got the quote by Coetsee about Mandela slightly wrong as well. In the full-length interview, Carlin records Coetsee as saying: ‘I have studied the classics, and for me, he [Mandela] is the incarnation of the great Roman virtues of gravitas, honestas, dignitas. Everywhere and anywhere, where people choose people, you can’t help but choose Mandela.’ In Knowing Mandela, Carlin recounts that, while saying this, Coetsee was ‘shedding tears’.8
Then, however, with surprising rancour, Carlin describes Coetsee as a ‘small man whose place as a trusted member of the P.W. Botha court owed more to the fawning obsequiousness he showed the Big Crocodile than to any great intellectual merit or originality of thought. He fancied himself a bit of a classicist, and enjoyed flaunting his knowledge of Ciceronian discourse among his decidedly unlearned cabinet colleagues.’9 Nothing in his interview with Coetsee seems to justify this snide observation. However, it emerges that Carlin was not the only person whom Coetsee rubbed up the wrong way.
At least the Telegraph obit was more accurate about Mandela; indications are that he was well disposed towards Coetsee, and remained so in later years. In Long Walk to Freedom (his famous autobiography, revised and partly ghost-written by the American journalist Richard Stengel), Mandela recounts his secret meetings with Coetsee and the process surrounding them in some detail, but without commenting on Coetsee personally. His only remark about Coetsee appears in a passage where he writes about being moved, in December 1988, to a cottage in the grounds of the Victor Verster Prison outside the Western Cape town of Paarl, a ‘halfway house between prison and freedom’.
On his first day there, he writes, he was visited by Coetsee, who brought a case of Cape wine as a housewarming gift. ‘He was extremely solicitous, and wanted to make sure that I like my new home … He told me the cottage … would be my last home before becoming a free man. The reason behind this move, he said, was that I should have a place where I could hold discussions in privacy and comfort.’10
(While the cottage might have offered more comfortable surroundings for Mandela’s discussions,
