Soundtrack to this blog:
Hugh Masekela – Bring Him home (live).mp3
Johnny Clegg and Savuka – Asimbonanga.mp3 (lyrics) (left click links)
E-mails circulating in South Africa — and doubtlessly various enclaves in Perth, Auckland, Toronto and London — claim that Nelson Mandela has had a stroke, is at death’s door, and that when he eventually does go the way of all mortals, there will be a genocide of white South Africans under codenames such as Uhuru, Red October and Iron Eagle (news link here).
No need to panic, Madiba apparently is alive and well in Mozambique. The genocidal codenames tell us more about the vivid imagination of the composers of these hoax mails, which seems to draw from stereotypes of Stalinist purges and Nazi mythology with a hint of colonial paranoia. Go back to your Playstation games, boys.
Ironically, the idiots who are hoping to spread panic among the more half-witted of South Africa’s white population are the same idiots who less than two decades ago trembled in fear of the notion of Mandela walking out of jail and single-handedly driving whites into the sea.
It was 17 years ago this month that Madiba walked out of Victor Verster prison in Paarl and made his first public speech in almost 30 years on the steps of Cape Town’s City Hall. I was among the tens of thousands on the Grand Parade, the large market-cum-parking lot in central Cape Town, on that 11th of February 1990. South Africa had learnt only the previous day that Mandela would be freed. I was clubbing at the Galaxy in Athlone on Saturday afternoon (the traditional jazz matinee, a brilliant way to begin a weekend of debauchery) when the DJ interrupted a song — a dance remix of Wet Wet Wet’s Sweet Surrender, ironically enough — to announce the news. I stopped queuing for my drink and celebrated.
The day of Madiba’s release was a blistering hot Sunday. We were there before 10 in the morning. There was very little by way of entertainment, and even the political speakers uncharacteristically ran out of things to say. There were only so many Vivas and Amandlas one could shout.
Mandela was supposed to arrive in the afternoon. But he didn’t. While a riot took place on the edge of the Grand Parade — with the kiosks being looted and some set on fire — rumours were circulating that Mandela had not been released after all (even though, as we later discovered, his release was televised, commentated on by the most somnolent of reporters). The politically savvy among us discounted that rumour, but patience was running thin, and the mood threatened to turn ugly.
Darkness was beginning to fall when we tiredly decided to abandon our wait for Mandela. We made our way through the already thinning crowd. As we were about to cross Darling Street, which separates the Grand Parade from the City Hall, Mandela’s car (I think it was a Mercedes) drove up. Enthusiastic well-wishers soon blocked the car’s path. They were mobbing the car, shaking it and its contents in an over-enthusiastic welcome. There were very few cops around — it would have been seen as a provocation, because the police was the enemy — and the UDF marshalls could not react with sufficient speed. Eventually Mandela’s car got through.
It was fortuitous that we had decided to leave when we did. From where we were standing now, we had a fantastic vantage point. After a short wait, Mandela appeared. Nobody knew what he looked like, other than from a sketch that had appeared in the Weekly Mail (the forerunner of the Mail & Guardian) a few weeks previously. During the apartheid years, it was illegal to publish or even possess a pre-jail photo of Mandela, and there were no known photos of him in jail, other than the few that surfaced a couple of years later. I owned a Mandela photo (illicitly obtained through a friend at the Cape Argus), which I hid on a wall beneath a calendar. During a police raid, a strong wind blew through the open window at the calendar. As its pages teasingly fluttered, I was sweating blood, but the security police chaps didn’t notice (those assigned to me presumably were the office dunces). We also did not know Mandela’s voice. I had a video of Mandela being interviewed by the BBC in the early ’60s. But the security police had confiscated it in another raid, and I couldn’t remember what he sounded like.
So, finally Mandela stood before us on the balcony of the City Hall. He was tall and slim with a good posture, dressed in a very elegant suit. His looks did not disappoint. Before us stood a true statesman. Then he spoke. I was disappointed: he had a bloody Japanese accent! But what he said was spot on: a message of reconciliation and principle that was of its time and simultaneously ahead of its time. Even the apartheid apologists could see that this man was not about to drive anyone into the sea.
The years 1988/89 had been a period of difficult struggle. The National Party regime made its last stand, with increasing repression as the struggle intensified. In the middle of it, PW Botha had a stroke and was succeeded by FW de Klerk. At first, it seemed FW was not going to change anything (he had, of course, been a hardliner in Botha’s cabinet).
Many things led de Klerk towards the path he would take. But a few events in 1989 had hinted at a turning the tide, suggesting that the apartheid regime was losing its iron grip, and that the freedom movement finally was making inroads. There were the detainees who daringly escaped from hospital into US and British embassies. There was the march on a busy Saturday morning in central Cape Town’s St George’s Street when the police opened watercanons with purple dye on demonstrators. One enterprising fellow jumped upon the truck, and turned the canon on to the police, who now could not arrest marked protesters (soon, grafitti appeared on a building in the vicinity, proclaiming “The purple shall govern”, a play on the popular phrase “The people shall govern”).
And then there was the election in September that confirmed de Klerk as president. That night, police shot indiscriminately at protesters on the Cape Flats, catching huge amounts of bystanders in police-provoked stampedes. Many fell to police bullets. Like the lad who had been shopping, trying to scale a fence, shot dead in the back.
This accelerated matters. De Klerk now had no option but to allow a peaceful protest led by religious and political leaders in Cape Town. It was a march for liberation from apartheid, led by archbishops and imams, clerics and struggle leaders, and even Cape Town’s mayor (a member of the liberal PFP who later joined the ANC). I was there when the press conference at St George’s Cathedral, led by Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, announced the march. And I was there at the march. Expectations where that 10,000 people taking part. About 40,000 turned up — a stunning number, considering that this was the first legal anti-apartheid march in South Africa, and knowing that if anything were to go wrong, police might shoot.
The march ended at the Grand Parade. We all sat down. Tutu, standing on the same balcony as Mandela would five months later, inaugurated the “Rainbow Nation” (a term he borrowed from Jesse Jackson). Then Boesak, who had a hypnotic way of public speaking, who could fire up a crowd or calm it at will, spoke. At one point, a lone white cop stupidly walked among the crowd, gun in arm. The comrades grew restive. Had Boesak
given instruction to harm the cop, the fool would have been minecemeat. Instead, Boesak calmed the crowd, I think by launching into a freedom song.
That march was a turning point, the moment we knew, really knew, that apartheid was going to fall. UDF meetings would still be broken up, teargas still be fired, but the regime was going. We did not know how soon, we did not know what would follow (though bloody revolution now seemed out of the question). By October, de Klerk released Mandela’s fellow Rivonia trialists (Walter Sisulu et al); on February 2, 1990, he unbanned the ANC and other liberation movements. Apartheid died on its arse like a doomed cockroach.
But it was Mandela’s release on that 11th of February which symbolically confirmed the death of apartheid and the dawn of a new era — a traumatic era, but one without legislated racism and political repression.
The weekend of Mandela’s release another invincible icon fell: “Iron” Mike Tyson, KOed by the underdog Buster Douglas
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