the constitutional settlement”. “We” should collaborate in its defence – but there were no specifics.
‘I went on to ask him what he had made of the TRC’s statement about the “strategic decisions with regard to the prosecution of Madikizela-Mandela” [for her alleged complicity in the killing of the young activist Stompie Seipei] being influenced by the “political sensitivities of this period”. He gave no direct response, simply fixing me with his sphinx-like smile. We were never to meet again – a few months later he died, on 29 July 2000.’25
It would be untrue, however, to say that Coetsee remains a total enigma. He was also interviewed by O’Malley on four separate occasions, over several years. He seemingly trusted O’Malley, and spoke to him candidly and at some length. It seems safe to say that he probably went some way towards saying the things he intended to record in his memoirs, which he was then working on but later abandoned.
Among other things, those conversations went far deeper than Carlin’s single interview, and reveal Carlin’s malicious comment about Coetsee to be materially misguided. Specifically, his conclusion that Coetsee was a person of ‘limited intelligence with no great capacity for original thought’ was quite incorrect.
Over the years, and at a distance, Coetsee emerges from these transcripts as a highly intelligent person who, in the course of a long career in some of the most important portfolios in the NP government from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – including defence, security, justice and prisons – built up a deep knowledge and understanding of the complex political processes that played themselves out in those key state functions in that period.
The interviews provide significant insights into Coetsee’s own beliefs and motivations; for instance, he says, he realised in the mid-1970s that separate development was both immoral and unviable. He continued to work in the NP, though, as he realised that ‘you can’t change anything if you’re not there’. He then went on to a sustained effort to ‘swap the sword for justice’.
The interviews also provide a fascinating insight into the real drivers of the NP government’s impetus towards reform, largely under P.W. Botha, from whom Coetsee took his orders, which have been widely misunderstood and undervalued.
However, in the ebb and flow of Coetsee’s conversations with O’Malley, interrupted and resumed over several years, they never got around to talking in detail about his activities in the crucial period from the mid-1980s onwards, when the conversations with Mandela began and the foundation was laid for his eventual release. Whether by accident or design, Coetsee said nothing about his massive, partly secret archive or the fact that it contained transcripts of many conversations between Mandela and his visitors over a period of six years – or that surveillance of ANC negotiators continued well after 1990, into the constitutional negotiations.
Or did he? The transcription of the O’Malley interview on 5 September 1998 contains a tantalising passage. O’Malley asks Coetsee whether he agrees that the NP was a pushover in the constitutional negotiations or, in the journalist Patti Waldmeir’s words, ‘the Boers gave it all away’.26 In response, Coetsee says one has to look at areas where the NP negotiators succeeded.
This includes the issue of whether or not the provinces should be retained. He then claims that Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer had agreed that there would be no provinces, but that they might be considered at a later stage. Stalwarts in the NP (which seemed to include Coetsee) went to F.W. de Klerk and threatened to walk out if he did not dig in his heels. De Klerk agreed, and the provinces were retained. ‘We succeeded also because we read the innards of the ANC correctly, that there were more people that would feel safe within the provincial structure than there were people who would feel safe outside.’
O’Malley: ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’
Coetsee: ‘That is a different story, my friend, that is a different story, and I’ll tell it to you one day.’
He goes on to say that he was a spokesperson on this issue, and by then he had become annoyed by the way in which ‘certain things’ were lost by the wayside through backroom deals. He was certain the ANC would agree to provinces, even when Ramaphosa and Meyer had agreed that there would be no provinces, but they could be reintroduced at a later stage. ‘We pushed and I pushed, knowing that there would be forces inside the ANC that would accept it.’
O’Malley: ‘How did you know there were forces within the ANC that would accept [this]?’
Coetsee: ‘I’m just saying to you that I knew. I don’t think it’s necessary for us to record this at this point of time. But I knew. And we pushed and we succeeded.’
Lastly, the O’Malley interviews also go some way towards explaining why people found Coetsee so exasperating. He does indeed talk in an elliptical way, while also switching freely between topics, and moving backwards and forwards in time. At times, O’Malley too is confounded. Amusingly, Coetsee reveals that he is well aware of his trademark style and its power to annoy and confuse, that he derived pleasure from this, and deliberately used it to his political advantage. All this comes together in a single passage. Coetsee tells O’Malley that, at some (typically unspecified) point (but presumably in the early 1980s), he received visits from two opposition luminaries: Helen Suzman, veteran liberal parliamentarian, and Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, then the official opposition in parliament. Suzman spoke to him about releasing Mandela, and Slabbert about releasing dissident Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach. He hints that they influenced his political thinking.
Eventually, he told them that, with the approval of P.W. Botha and the cabinet, he was going to change the policy relating to the release of ‘security prisoners’, as he called them. He would announce this in an extended committee session of his vote – Justice and Prisons – in the Senate, instead of the more prominent House of Assembly. He would announce that ‘there’s going to be a change in policy, and I stipulated the conditions which will lead to the release of Mr Mandela, although I’m not going to announce that as such. But the first person to benefit would be Breytenbach …’
He contacted Slabbert and told him there was one condition, namely that he and Suzman should not be ‘jubilant in the press’. Botha did not want to be embarrassed. And he would always honour them (Slabbert and Suzman) for honouring the agreement – ‘they listened to me, they walked out, not a smile on their faces, knowing that this was the beginning. And you must get Hansard of my announcement there, and you will see it was couched in a style which people say belongs to me, you couldn’t read it there but it was there. You understand what I’m saying?’
O’Malley (clearly confounded): ‘This was on the release of Breytenbach.’
Coetsee: ‘Yes, but it was changing just the policy, and the rest followed … The press wrote a few lines on it, they didn’t realise what they were writing, and I enjoyed the situation …’
What is beyond doubt is that Coetsee decided to start talking to Mandela, albeit under a general brief from P.W. Botha to resolve the growing problems surrounding ‘security prisoners’, comprising mounting legal claims and court cases as well as rapidly escalating international pressure on the one hand, and pressure from the Breytenbach family – who knew Botha – on the other. Added to this, as F.W. de Klerk later remarked, long-term ‘security prisoners’ were due for some kind of parole in any case. The only sticking point was whether they would continue to advocate political violence after their release.
In this context, the Coetsee archive also reveals, quite startlingly, that Coetsee proposed the unconditional release of Mandela and numerous other ‘security prisoners’ to the State Security Council in December 1984 – four years before Mandela met P.W. Botha, and five years before he walked out
