Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation Read Online Free PDF

make the country “ungovernable,” prompting white people to flee the country—to Britain, to Australia, to America—in droves. Nineteen eighty-five was the year in which TV viewers around the world grew accustomed to seeing South Africa as a country of burning barricades where stone-throwing black youths faced up to white policemen with guns, where SADF armored vehicles advanced like spidery alien craft on angry, frightened black mobs. Under the state of emergency regulations, the security forces were granted practically limitless powers of search, seizure, and arrest—as well as the comfort of knowing that they could assault suspects with impunity. In the fifteen months leading up to the first week of November that year 850 people had died in political violence and thousands had been jailed without charge.
    In this climate, in this year, Mandela launched his peace offensive. Convinced that negotiations were the only way that apartheid could ultimately be brought down, he took on the challenge alone and, as it turned out, with one arm tied behind his back. Earlier in the year, doctors had discovered he had prostate problems and, fearing cancer, ruled that he needed urgent surgery. They had made the diagnosis at Pollsmoor Prison, where he’d been transferred from Robben Island three years earlier, in 1982. Pollsmoor, on the mainland near Cape Town, was where he shared the large cell with Walter Sisulu and three other prison veterans whom he would infuriate with his predawn indoor runs. The operation, carried out on November 4, 1985, was a success, but Mandela, now aged sixty-seven, had to remain under observation. Doctors’ orders were for him to convalesce in the hospital for three more weeks.
    During this interlude, Mandela’s first spell outside bars in twenty-three years, he began his ten-year courtship of white South Africa. By a remarkable historical coincidence, this was the very month in which Reagan and Gorbachev met. Just as the American president set out to use his charm on the Soviet leader, Mandela prepared to use his on Kobie Coetsee, the man with the world’s most contradictory job description, minister of justice of South Africa.
    But while the superpower summit in Geneva was a media circus, this meeting was top secret. The press did not learn of it until five years later, but even if they had known about it at the time, even if the story had been leaked, they would have had trouble finding anyone to believe it. The ANC were the enemy, the purveyors of a Soviet-inspired “Total Onslaught,” in P. W. Botha’s term, against whom the state’s security forces had launched what he called a “Total Strategy.” Nothing was more unthinkable than the idea of the Botha regime negotiating with the “Communist terrorists,” much less with their jailed leader.
    But if anyone in government was to make that first contact with the enemy it was Coetsee, whose portfolio extended beyond justice to include correctional services, meaning the prison system. Botha chose Coetsee to be his secret emissary because he was blindly loyal—one of the few people in his cabinet whom Botha trusted to behave discreetly—and because, as minister of justice and of prisons, he was the appropriate member of his government to go and meet Mandela. Besides, it had been to Coetsee, as to his predecessors in the Justice Ministry, that Mandela had long been addressing letters requesting a meeting. In so doing Mandela had been following in a rather hapless ANC tradition, begun with the organization’s founding in 1912, of seeking to persuade white governments to sit down and discuss the country’s future together. But now at last it was going to happen: the very first talks between a black politician and a senior member of the white government. Botha’s reasons for sanctioning the encounter were partly a matter of curiosity—the ANC had launched a Free Mandela campaign in 1980 and by now he was the most famous, least known prisoner