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

in the world. But Botha was motivated more by the increasingly volatile situation in the townships and the intensifying pressure from the outside world. He felt that the time had come to dip a toe in the waters of reconciliation, to venture the first tentative test of whether one day an accommodation with black South Africa might be possible. As Coetsee would explain it later, “We had painted ourselves into a corner and we had to find a way out.”
    The curious thing was that while Mandela had been the supplicant, Coetsee was the one who felt uncomfortable. It was a mixture of guilt and fear—guilt because he would be seeing Mandela as the emissary of the government that was killing his people; fear because he had read the files on Mandela and he was uneasy at the prospect of coming face-to-face with an enemy so apparently ruthless. “The picture I had formed of him,” he said during an interview in Cape Town some years after he had left government, “was of a leader determined to seize power, given the chance, at whatever cost in human lives.” From Mandela’s files, Coetsee would also have formed a mental image of an imposing former heavyweight boxer who had had the temerity ten months earlier to humiliate his dour, scowling boss, P. W. Botha, before the entire nation. Botha had publicly offered to free Mandela, but he had issued preconditions. Mandela had to promise to abandon the very “armed struggle” that he himself had set in motion when he founded the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), back in 1961; he also had to conduct himself “in such a way that he will not have to be arrested” under the apartheid laws. Mandela replied through a statement read out by his daughter Zindzi at a rally in Soweto. Challenging Botha to renounce violence against black people, Mandela mocked the very idea that he might be set free when, so long as apartheid existed, every black person remained in bondage. “I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free,” Mandela’s statement said. “Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.”
    Coetsee had understandable misgivings about the meeting, but the balance was tilted heavily in his favor. Mandela was the prisoner, after all, and Coetsee the jailer; Mandela was thin and weak after his operation and wearing hospital clothes—bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers—while Coetsee, in ministerial suit and tie, glowed with health. And far more depended on the outcome of the meeting for Mandela than it did for Coetsee. For Mandela it was a life-or-death opportunity that might not be repeated; for Coetsee it was an exploratory encounter, almost an act of curiosity. In Mandela’s eyes this was the chance he had sought ever since he embarked in politics four decades earlier to begin a serious conversation about the future direction of the country between black and white South Africa. Of all the challenges to his powers of political seduction that he would subsequently face, none would hold greater risks. For had he failed, had he argued with Coetsee, or had the chemistry been wrong, that might have been the beginning and the end of everything.
    Yet the moment Coetsee entered Mandela’s hospital room the apprehensions on both sides evaporated. Mandela, a model host smiling grandly, put Coetsee at his ease, and almost immediately, to their quietly contained surprise, prisoner and jailer found themselves chatting amiably. Anybody watching unaware of who they were would have assumed that they knew each other well, in the way that a royal adviser knows his prince, or a lawyer his biggest client. It had partly to do with the fact that Mandela, at six foot one, towered over Coetsee, a small, chirpy fellow with big black-framed glasses and the air of a small-town real estate lawyer. But it had more to do with body language, with the impact Mandela’s manner had on people he met. First there was his erect posture. Then