Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait

"This is by a journalist called John Carlin, who was South Africa correspondent for the Independent for a long time, during which Mandela was released from prison and came to power. Carlin got to know Mandela a bit and met him several times. He’s written more than one book about Mandela, but this is a brilliant book because it’s very short and very concise. It seeks to uncover and show you what he was like as a man. It doesn’t give you the full political and historical context of what was going on—Carlin has written about that elsewhere. He really zeroes in on what Mandela was like in the room, what kind of a person he was. “The point of civility is to enable you to row” One of the things that he shows you very persuasively is that Mandela was an intuitive genius of a psychologist. He really understood people, how to handle them. He wasn’t Machiavellian, he believed in the basic goodness of people, and that under the right circumstances, anybody could be brought together to cooperate and share a nation with anybody else. As you know, Mandela’s mission, from the moment he left prison, was to make black South Africans and white South Africans share a nation. He wasn’t interested in a black takeover. He didn’t want a black South Africa. He wanted blacks to be represented fairly and he knew that would mean a black majority government, but he wanted whites to feel part of that nation. He spent many years in prison learning about Afrikaner culture and history, getting to know the prison guards. Yes, he learned Afrikaans. It was partly, I think, just because he was an intellectually curious guy, but it was also because he knew that in order to make Afrikaners feel a part of this vision that he had for South Africa, he had to show them that he understood and respected them. The story I tell in my book is about when that principle and that learning are put to the utmost test, about three years after Mandela has been released from prison, when he is in a power sharing arrangement with the white government. They’re preparing the country for democratic elections and it’s pretty much a done deal that Mandela will be elected president, because there’s a black majority and he’s the head of the ANC. But they’re putting in a lot of groundwork to make sure that this democratic election is truly democratic. Mandela faces this alarming problem of a large, armed militia of white supremacists. We use that term quite loosely these days, in my view: these were real white supremacists, they really did believe in the genetic and cultural superiority of the white race. There was a rally in 1993 with about 15,000 of them. They were armed, they had swastikas, and at the climax this old general, Constand Viljoen, gets up to speak. He promises a bloody conflict that he will lead for a white separatist state, and the crowd cheers. Mandela sees this on TV and is faced with an alarming choice. ‘Do I crush this guy? Could I go in with the security services and take this guy and his allies out? But then I risk making him a martyr, just like I was. Do I want to use the might of the South African military? Am I sure that the South African military is loyal to me and not him?’ So he decides on this other route, which is, ‘I’m going to invite him to tea’. Obviously, being English, I find this particularly exciting: everything can be sorted out over tea. Mandela invites him not to an official building, but to his home in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Viljoen turns up with a couple of other generals and waits for the staff to open the door. But it’s Mandela who opens the door, with a big grin, and says, ‘Hi, guys, very nice to meet you, come in.’ He gives them an effusive welcome. Then he says, ‘Do you mind if Viljoen and I just have a few words first, before we start the meeting properly? And he takes him into his living room. There’s a tea set there. And Mandela says, ‘How do you like your tea?’ and serves him tea just to his liking with the right amount of milk and the right amount of sugar. The reason I’m telling you this, and the reason Carlin tells it, is that 13 years later Carlin interviewed Viljoen. In that time, Viljoen had completely disarmed his militias. He had ordered unilateral disarmament for no concessions whatsoever and become part of the democratic process. And, indeed, he became an ardent admirer and friend of Mandela. A lot of his supporters wanted Mandela to be hanged. Viljoen had been a ruthless enforcer of apartheid, of white supremacy. But he was completely turned around. More than a decade later, he remembered that moment, of being served tea by Mandela, as the moment he started to switch. He just sort of pivoted. I talked about Mandela as a genius at psychology. He was trying to lower Viljoen’s defenses. Viljoen was the representative of a whole crowd. Mandela understood that what was underlying their aggression was fear and insecurity. It was the fear of humiliation. Viljoen was an incredibly proud man, a patriot, even if it was a particularly white form of patriotism. His fear was that his whole identity and everything he cares about was about to be wiped out and that he, and people who he cared about, were going to be humiliated. Mandela clearly realized that the first thing he needed to do was to show him, personally, that he respected Viljoen and was prepared to like him: ‘I don’t see myself as a conqueror who’s come to sweep him away, I’m not trying to dominate him, I actually want to include him.’ And the serving of the tea was this tiny gesture that was psychologically and politically very potent. It enabled them to then get into their negotiations, it enabled them to disagree productively, if you like—because there were many things they disagreed on. “Mandela was an intuitive genius of a psychologist” The contrast with the way people handle disagreements today is so striking. If Mandela was in a social media conversation, the first thing he would think is, ‘Well, I need to humiliate this guy publicly. I need to tell everybody what a terrible Nazi he was, and what a terrible thing he did to me and my family.’ Which is true. And he was able to say that, once he had shown Viljoen that he wanted to have a disagreement as equals. After he’d served the tea, Mandela got serious right away and said, ‘Look, you and your people have done a lot of damage. You’ve done a lot of harm to me personally. I’m a father and I didn’t get to see my kids for 20 years.’ Because another key to productive disagreement is that you have to be honest. Viljoen remembered that as well, that it was a really honest conversation. We did put him in prison; what Mandela said was true. So what Mandela said was, ‘You did terrible things to me’ but he also said, ‘I have a lot of respect for your culture and your history. I know you basically are a good people.’ He told stories of how Afrikaners would look after a black child, if they saw him in trouble, they would take him in. Mandela sought to show Viljoen that he understood the best of their culture, even though he was very honest about the fact they had done him terrible wrongs. It’s just an incredible combination of unflinching honesty and generosity, which is so rare. And of course, as you say, nearly none of us are on that level, but we can all learn a little bit from it, I think."