The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A proud, prickly chief's son raised to counsel kings, Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison turning his temper into self-command and his jailers into allies, then used forgiveness as both a moral code and a political weapon to bring a nation through its transition, while the family he left behind paid the price.
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Critical acts
- 1
Walking Out of Fort Hare and the Great Place
Mandela refused alone, arguing that "it would be morally incorrect to say that we enjoyed their confidence." He made up his mind only in Kerr's office: "at the moment I needed to compromise, I simply could not do so." Both books record a less heroic motive. His nephew K. D. Matanzima had urged him not to capitulate, and "I think at the time I feared K.D.
- 2
Turning the ANC to Armed Struggle
When the stay-at-home fell short, he told the press that "we are closing a chapter on this question of a nonviolent policy," before the executive had discussed it: "sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organization in the direction you want it to go."
- 3
"An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die"
He chose to read a statement from the dock, which could not be cross-examined but "does not have the same legal weight as ordinary testimony." "I wanted very much to cross swords with Percy Yutar, but it was more important that I use the platform to highlight our grievances." He drafted it in his own hand, with Castro's "History will absolve me" in mind.
- 4
Refusing Conditional Release
He drafted a reply to be made public at a UDF rally in Soweto's Jabulani Stadium. He turned the challenge back on Botha: "I am not a violent man... Let him renounce violence. Let him say that he will dismantle apartheid. Let him unban the people's organization."
- 5
Opening Secret Talks Alone
He took his isolation as an opportunity. "I chose to tell no one of what I was about to do. Not my colleagues upstairs or those in Lusaka." He went back to the shepherd image, now reversed: "There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way."
- 6
Serving One Term Only
In the unpublished sequel to his autobiography he says he first tried to refuse. He argued that "it would be wise to get a far younger person, male or female, who had been out of prison," and that he had "always admired men and women who used their talents to serve the community... even though they held no office whatsoever."
Maxims
Defeat your opponent without dishonouring him
A donkey threw the boy Mandela into a thornbush in front of his friends, and he learned how losing face hurts. Seventy years later he flattered his prosecutor Percy Yutar over lunch and prompted Verwoerd's widow in Afrikaans when she stumbled.
Listen all day; speak last
The regent heard every criticism in silence until sunset, then summed up. Mandela made it his method in cabinet: "Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard." See "The Regent's Court."
Sometimes the shepherd must walk out in front
He broke the consensus rule when it counted. Alone at Pollsmoor he opened talks with the government, telling no one, because "my colleagues upstairs would condemn my proposal, and that would kill my initiative even before it was born."
Hold nonviolence as a tactic, never as a creed
"There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon." He told a court the opposite so as not to give the prosecution a "loophole." The code bent on means, never on ends, and he later admitted to Stengel what he had kept from the court.
Know your jailer's language better than he does
He told a warder who had studied only practical Afrikaans to be "ashamed of yourself," and then used Afrikaner history to disarm P. W. Botha.
Part IThe Story
The Prisoner Who Asked Not to Be Released
On February 9, 1990, F. W. de Klerk called the most famous prisoner in the world to his office at Tuynhuys in Cape Town and told him, smiling, that he would be released the next day.
Nelson Mandela had been in prison for twenty-seven years. He "felt a conflict between my blood and my brain." Walking out at once would throw his family and his organization into chaos. So, "at the risk of appearing ungrateful," he told the President that he "would prefer to have a week's notice... After waiting twenty-seven years, I could certainly wait another seven days." Then he refused the government's plan to fly him to Johannesburg and release him there. He wanted to walk out of the gates of Victor Verster prison, thank the people who had guarded him, and greet the people of Cape Town. "Once I am free, I will look after myself."
De Klerk left the room twice to consult. "It was a tense moment," Mandela recalled, "and, at the time, neither of us saw any irony in a prisoner asking not to be released and his jailer attempting to release him." They split the difference: Victor Verster, but no postponement. De Klerk poured two whiskies. Mandela "only pretended to drink."
The next afternoon he asked the warders and their families to line up at the gate so that he could thank them individually.
Even on the day of his freedom, the prisoner set the terms. That was the skill Mandela spent twenty-seven years building: turning a temper into self-command, jailers into allies, and forgiveness into both a moral code and a political weapon. It brought a nation through its transition without the bloodbath almost everyone expected. It also cost the people closest to him more than he ever repaid. His daughter Maki put it in one sentence: "You are a father to all our people, but you have never had the time to be father to me."
He is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and he would have been the first to object to the halo. Late in life he worried about "the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one."
By the Numbers
The Long Walk
27 yearsIn prison, 1962–1990
4 hoursLength of his statement from the dock at the Rivonia trial
30 secondsSilence in the courtroom after he said he was prepared to die
7 daysExtra notice he asked de Klerk for before his release
15 minutesNightly self-examination he prescribed from his cell
75His age when he fought his first election, in 1994
1 termAs President, announced shortly after taking office
The Regent's Court
He was born in 1918, the son of a Thembu chief who was deposed for refusing a magistrate's summons. The father "could be exceedingly stubborn," Mandela wrote, "another trait that may unfortunately have been passed down from father to son." In him the boy recognized "a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness."
When he was nine, his father died coughing on the floor of his mother's hut, his pipe still lit, and the boy was sent to Mqhekezweni, the Great Place of the Thembu regent, Jongintaba — who had become acting paramount chief on the recommendation of Mandela's own father. He was raised there, "groomed... to counsel the rulers of the tribe."
Among the Xhosa, he wrote, "we were meant to learn through imitation and emulation, not through questions." He pressed the regent's suits, "carefully making the crease in his trousers," and watched him deal with white magistrates "courteously, but not obsequiously." His biographer Anthony Sampson traces Mandela's "lifelong respect for clothes" to that ironing.
Above all, he watched the tribal meetings in the courtyard, where "everyone who wanted to speak did so... chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer." He was "astonished by the vehemence — and candor — with which people criticized the regent," who "simply listened, not defending himself, showing no emotion at all." Only at sunset did Jongintaba speak, "to sum up what had been said and form some consensus." Meetings "ended in unanimity or not at all" — though Mandela adds that women were "deemed second-class citizens."
The regent's axiom stayed with him for life: "a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind." As President he still quoted it.
He learned something else as a boy. A donkey once threw him into a thornbush in front of his friends, and he discovered how losing face hurts. "To humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them."
"I did well in school not so much through cleverness as through doggedness." Cross-country running at university turned this into a rule: "training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did."
Walking Out
By 1940 Mandela was on the safest path open to a black South African. He was a ward of the regent and a student at Fort Hare — to him "Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one" — with his heart set on "the glitter of a civil service career" as an interpreter.
Then the students boycotted a council election over the food, and only twenty-five voted. Mandela and five others were elected and resigned. The principal, Dr. Kerr, held a second vote at suppertime with everyone present, and the same twenty-five returned the same six. His five colleagues accepted office on "the technical view" that everyone had been in the room. Kerr offered Mandela a way out: he could come back next year if he joined the council.
Mandela refused alone, arguing that "it would be morally incorrect to say that we enjoyed their confidence." He decided only in Kerr's office: "at the moment I needed to compromise, I simply could not do so. Something inside me would not let me." Both his autobiography and his biographer record a less heroic motive. His nephew K. D. Matanzima had urged him not to capitulate, and "I think at the time I feared K.D. even more than I did Dr. Kerr." To Sampson he admitted it more bluntly: "I was frightened."
Back home, the regent ordered him to return to Fort Hare and then announced marriages he had arranged for both Mandela and his own son, Justice. Mandela, "more advanced socially than politically," ran for Johannesburg with Justice. To pay for it they sold two of the regent's prize oxen to a trader who assumed the regent had sent them: "we did not correct him." They lied to a magistrate to get travel papers, and when the regent shouted down the telephone, "Arrest those boys!", Mandela used his scraps of law to talk them out of custody.
In Johannesburg he was fired from a job at the mines "for boasting that he had run away from home and deceived the Regent." A cousin sent him to Walter Sisulu, who arranged for him to be articled to Lazar Sidelsky, a white lawyer.
The autobiography is candid about the cost of the escape: "I realize that we did not exhaust all the options available to us... But I was young and impatient, and did not see any virtue in waiting." When the regent died six months after a forgiving visit, Mandela "regretted that he had not been more grateful."
The Proud Young Man
Ruth First, who met him at the University of the Witwatersrand, remembered him as "good-looking, very proud, very dignified, very prickly, rather sensitive, perhaps even arrogant. But of course he was exposed to all the humiliations." He later wrote that as a young man "I relied on arrogance in order to hide my weaknesses."
He was hot-tempered. A relative who knew him as a boy said: "He didn't like to be provoked. If you provoked him he would tell you directly." Oliver Tambo, whose "even-tempered objectivity" Mandela called "an antidote to my more emotional reactions," put it bluntly: "When I want a confrontation, I ask for Nelson."
He was also, in his youth, sectarian. As a member of the ANC Youth League he went "so far as breaking up CP meetings by storming the stage, tearing up signs, and capturing the microphone." When the Defiance Campaign was being planned, he urged that it be "exclusively African," because "I still feared the influence of Indians." Sampson adds a detail the autobiography leaves out: at Newclare, "Mandela physically dragged the Indian leader Yusuf Cachalia from the platform." He changed his mind; by 1961 he was recruiting the white Communist Joe Slovo to his new army. But he had kept the Defiance Campaign going "too long... in our enthusiasm and even arrogance."
In August 1952 he and Tambo opened Mandela and Tambo in Chancellor House, opposite the magistrates' court. "We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers" — "the firm of first choice and last resort." When the Group Areas Act ordered them out to a distant township, they "occupied our premises illegally." In court he acted "as if everyone else — white and black — was a guest in my court." When a Special Branch detective greeted him during the 1960 State of Emergency with "Hello, Nelson!", he answered: "I am not Nelson to you, I am Mr. Mandela."
The cost of all this fell at home. When his eldest son, Thembi, was five, he "asked his mother where I lived." After his first marriage broke up, Thembi "would frequently wear my clothes, even though they were far too large for him." The autobiography presents his first wife Evelyn's suspicion that he was "seeing other women" as unfounded. Sampson mentions "the other women he and Evelyn had quarreled over," his reputation as "a ladies' man," and Evelyn's claim that "he once nearly throttled her — a charge which Mandela emphatically denies." Of their early marriage, his second wife, Winnie, said: "The honest truth of God is that I didn't know him at all."
The Turn to Arms
Mandela never held nonviolence as a creed. He said so from 1953: "For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon." That year he was "severely reprimanded" for telling a Sophiatown crowd that "violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid."
At the long Treason Trial that followed, the accused contended that nonviolence was "an inviolate principle, not a tactic." Years later Mandela told the journalist Richard Stengel why: "if we had said [we believed in it] as a tactic it would give a loophole to the crown... So we avoided that, but only for that reason. We have always believed in non-violence as a tactic."
By 1961 the ANC had been banned for a year. Mandela was underground, running a national stay-at-home, and the army had carried out "its largest call-up since the war." For fifty years the ANC had treated nonviolence "as a core principle, beyond question or debate," and its president, Chief Luthuli, held it as a Christian conviction.
When the stay-at-home fell short, Mandela told a reporter that "we are closing a chapter on this question of a nonviolent policy" — before his executive had discussed it. He was criticized for it, and he defended the method: "sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organization in the direction you want it to go." The Communist leader Moses Kotane crushed his first proposal in committee — "we will be exposing innocent people to massacres by the enemy" — so Sisulu arranged a private session. "We spent the whole day talking." Mandela argued that Kotane was like the Cuban Communists who had waited for "textbook conditions" while Castro acted. Then he and others "worked on" Luthuli "the whole night." At a joint meeting of the congresses, J. N. Singh warned: "Nonviolence has not failed us, we have failed nonviolence." Mandela replied that it had failed.
He was authorized to found a separate army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, linked to the ANC but "fundamentally autonomous." "I, who had never been a soldier, who had never fought in battle, who had never fired a gun at an enemy, had been given the task of starting an army."
MK began with sabotage, "what was least violent to individuals but most damaging to the state." His 1962 notebook shows how quickly the logic could harden: "We must have the courage to accept that there will be reprisals against the population." Two decades later, MK's first car bomb, in Pretoria in 1983, killed nineteen people. Mandela called the civilian deaths "a tragic accident" but "the inevitable consequence of the decision to embark on a military struggle."
Sampson's judgment cuts both ways. Mandela was "not a very realistic military commander," who "seriously underestimated his enemy's strength" and "made careless mistakes which led to his own arrest." But Sampson rejects the charge that MK was useless, and argues that "his lack of military ruthlessness was the key to achieving the transition to democracy without a bloodbath."
The Black Pimpernel
Underground, Mandela was "probably the most wanted man in the country" and "a creature of the night." He posed as a chauffeur in blue overalls and "round, rimless glasses," let his hair and beard grow, and walked stooped. "Just as there is a way to walk in a room in order to make yourself stand out, there is a way of walking and behaving that makes you inconspicuous... When underground I did not walk as tall or stand as straight." The press called him the Black Pimpernel, and he fed the legend by phoning reporters from telephone boxes.
For two months he hid in Wolfie Kodesh's one-room flat in a white suburb, reading Clausewitz and running in place for an hour each dawn.
He was fond of amasi, the Xhosa sour milk, so he left a pint of milk on the windowsill to ferment. One evening he heard two young men speaking Zulu outside. "What is 'our milk' doing on that window ledge?" one said. Mandela understood at once that "only a black man would place milk on the ledge like that," and that a black man living in a white area would raise questions. "I left for a different hideout the next night."
He was less careful elsewhere. A friend noticed Winnie's car arriving caked in farm mud after visits to the movement's hideout at Lilliesleaf Farm: "They were all terribly careless." Mandela "had been careless in Durban, and had left too many clues," and in 1962 he was arrested at Howick in his white chauffeur's coat.
Prepared to Die
At his 1962 trial he put "the state on trial." He asked the magistrate to recuse himself because "I did not consider myself morally bound to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I had no representation," and told the court that "the whole life of any thinking African in this country drives him continuously to a conflict between his conscience on the one hand and the law on the other." He came to court in a leopard-skin kaross, "literally carrying on my back the history, culture, and heritage of my people." He had, he wrote, "something of a revelation": "I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor."
He got five years. Then, in July 1963, police raided Lilliesleaf Farm at Rivonia and captured the MK High Command with a plan for guerrilla warfare lying on the table. Mandela was brought in from prison as accused number one. Justice Minister Vorster had reportedly said that Smuts's "greatest blunder" was failing to hang him for treason during the war, and "the Nationalists, he said, would not make the same mistake."
Mandela chose to read a statement from the dock. It could not be cross-examined, but it "does not have the same legal weight as ordinary testimony," and his lawyers warned it would put him "in a more precarious legal situation." "I wanted very much to cross swords with Percy Yutar," he wrote of the prosecutor, "but it was more important that I use the platform to highlight our grievances." He drafted it in his own hand, with Castro's "History will absolve me" in mind. The lawyers feared the ending would provoke the judge to hang him. He "refused to leave them out, but eventually agreed to insert the words: 'if needs be.'"
For four hours he admitted to planning sabotage, explained why, and ended:
— Nelson Mandela, statement from the dock, Rivonia trialI have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
There was "thirty seconds' silence." Sampson calls it "the most effective [speech] of Mandela's whole political career." With Sisulu and Govan Mbeki he told counsel that "whatever sentences we received, even the death sentence, we would not appeal," because an appeal "would undermine the moral stance we had taken." Privately, he admitted that "the threat of death evoked no desire in me to play the role of martyr... But the anxiety to live always lingered."
The sentence was life imprisonment. The moral stand had a cost he later acknowledged: "by not appealing, we undoubtedly cost Kathy, Andrew, and Elias: an appeals court might have cut down their sentences."
The University of Robben Island
On his first arrival on Robben Island in 1963, a warder named Kleynhans came at him. Mandela warned that he would take him "to the highest court in the land" — and later admitted: "I had been afraid, and spoke not from courage, but out of a kind of bravado. At such times, one must put up a bold front despite what one feels inside."
The island became his school. The prisoners built their own curriculum: "We became our own faculty, with our own professors, our own curriculum, our own courses." "Order in prison was preserved not by the warders but by ourselves." They regarded "the struggle in prison as a microcosm of the struggle as a whole." "Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure."
The first fight was over trousers. In 1962 at Pretoria, the newly convicted Mandela had been issued the African uniform: "a pair of short trousers... Only Africans are given short trousers, for only African men are deemed 'boys' by the authorities." He refused them and was offered long trousers in solitary. Within weeks he learned that "nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship," and was "ready to swallow my pride." On Robben Island he protested again from the first day, and after a fortnight "a pair of old khaki trousers" appeared on his cell floor: "No pin-striped three-piece suit has ever pleased me as much." Then he checked whether his comrades had been given trousers too. They had not, "and I told the warder to take them back."
He "studied Afrikaans systematically," though his comrade Ahmed Kathrada thought his pronunciation "atrocious," and urged the others to speak it to the warders "to understand more about their psychology and culture." When the warder in charge of prison studies admitted he had done only practical Afrikaans, Mandela told him: "Sergeant, you should be ashamed of yourself. I am Xhosa and I did Afrikaans and Nederlands."
He cultivated the men with the keys. "The most important person in any prisoner's life is not the minister of justice... but the warder in one's section." "There was no point in having a permanent enemy among the warders." Whenever a new commanding officer was appointed, he asked to meet him, "to impress upon him the seriousness of our cause and also to evaluate his character."
At the end of 1970 the authorities sent Colonel Piet Badenhorst, "reputed to be one of the most brutal and authoritarian officers in the entire prison service," to restore discipline. He refused the customary meeting, cancelled study privileges, and shouted at Mandela in the quarry: "Mandela, you must pull your finger out of your arse." "Without thinking, I started advancing toward Badenhorst." Later, "after my anger abated," he realized the remark was calculated, the move of "a teacher who takes over a rowdy class" and picks out the ringleader. When three judges visited, Mandela described a recent beating in front of Badenhorst, who wagged his finger: "Be careful, Mandela." Mandela turned to the judges: "If he can threaten me here, in your presence, you can imagine what he does when you are not here." Within months Badenhorst was transferred. On leaving he said, "I just want to wish you people good luck."
Mandela "thought about this moment for a long time afterward." He concluded that Badenhorst "was not evil; his inhumanity had been foisted upon him by an inhuman system," and that "all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency."
The self-control was learned, not given, and it was never complete. Old colleagues "watched with amazement how he could restrain himself in the face of humiliating provocations." But in 1975, when a Lieutenant Prins sneered that Winnie was "only looking for publicity," Mandela "moved toward him and nearly hit him," and let loose "a stream of abuse" that astonished Kathrada.
That same year he wrote to Winnie, then herself in Kroonstad Prison, that "the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself." He prescribed a method: "Regular meditation, say about 15 minutes a day before you turn in," and "the 10th attempt may yield rich rewards. Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying." Sisulu and Kathrada, he said, "never hesitate to criticise me for my mistakes and throughout my political career have served as a mirror through which I can see myself."
Only Free Men Can Negotiate
By January 1985 Mandela had been in prison for more than twenty years. The townships were in revolt. In Parliament, President P. W. Botha offered him freedom if he "unconditionally rejected violence as a political instrument," and added a public challenge: "It is therefore not the South Africa government which now stands in the way of Mr. Mandela's freedom. It is he himself."
Mandela drafted a reply to be read at a rally in Soweto's Jabulani Stadium. He turned the challenge back: "I am not a violent man... Let him renounce violence. Let him say that he will dismantle apartheid. Let him unban the people's organization." And then: "What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains banned?... Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts... Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return."
The refusal kept him bound to his movement and made Botha, not the prisoner, look like the obstacle. When the government later pressed him to cut ties with the Communist Party, he wrote to Botha: "Which man of honour will desert a lifelong friend at the insistence of a common opponent and still retain a measure of credibility with his people?"
Walking Out in Front of the Flock
In 1985 the authorities separated Mandela from Sisulu, Kathrada and Mhlaba, moving him into three damp rooms at Pollsmoor prison. The country was sliding into "a dark night of oppression, violence, and war." Both sides regarded talks as "a sign of weakness and betrayal," and a decision of this weight "should only have been made in Lusaka."
Mandela took his isolation as an opportunity. "I chose to tell no one of what I was about to do. Not my colleagues upstairs or those in Lusaka." He reversed the regent's shepherd: "There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way." His colleagues "would condemn my proposal, and that would kill my initiative even before it was born." His isolation also gave the ANC cover: "the old man was alone and completely cut off." He wrote to the Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee, and chose to present the talks as "a fait accompli." When he finally told his colleagues, one at a time, "I had resolved to leave out a few details." Sisulu was "at best, lukewarm." Kathrada was "adamant" that he was "going down the wrong path." Mhlaba asked: "Madiba, what have you been waiting for?"
From May 1988 he met a secret working group that included the intelligence chief Niël Barnard. He refused every precondition: "It is up to you... not us, to renounce violence." In 1989 he took tea with Botha himself, talked about the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion, and presented his own struggle as "a struggle between brothers who happen to be different colors." After that, "there was no turning back."
The costs were suspicion and damaged trust. Rumours that he was "selling out" ran for two years; "even Tambo in Lusaka seemed shaken." Allan Boesak said: "He had not consulted, and there was no greater sin in the UDF." Govan Mbeki wondered whether "the other side might have come to some arrangement with him." The government did hope to split him from the ANC. But, said George Bizos, "they thought they could corrupt him, like Matanzima or Mangope. He did not." Sampson's judgment: "when he took his most critical decision — to propose talks with the government — he took it alone."
The Transition
Freedom did not bring a quick settlement. In 1992, while talks were suspended, Mandela refused to meet de Klerk, because "such a meeting would suggest that we had something to talk about."
In April 1993 a right-wing gunman murdered Chris Hani. De Klerk "knew that only Mandela could calm his own people," and later wrote: "This was Mandela's moment not mine." Mandela went on national television that night. The ANC organized a week of rallies to "give people a means of expressing their frustration without resorting to violence," and Mandela used his new weight to insist on an election date. "After Chris Hani died," said Cyril Ramaphosa, "we went for the kill."
In 1994, at seventy-five, he fought his first election. He had warned his comrades that liberation heroes in office "can easily forget that they've been put in power by the poorest of the poor. They often lose their common touch, and turn against their own people." When three senior leaders told him the organisation's "unanimous decision" was that he should be President, he tried to refuse, arguing that "it would be wise to get a far younger person, male or female, who had been out of prison." A colleague "put me flat on the carpet" by reminding him of collective leadership. He gave in on one condition: "I, however, made it clear that I would serve for one term only... I did not want any uncertainty on this question."
On election night he said, "It is not the individuals that matter, but the collective." At the inauguration he felt himself "simply the sum of all those African patriots who had gone before me."
Forgiveness as Power
As President he hunted down his persecutors — and forgave them. He gave lunch to Percy Yutar, the Rivonia prosecutor: "You still look young and fresh." He visited P. W. Botha. He made a callous former chief of the Robben Island prison, Jannie Roux, Ambassador to Austria. He flew to Orania to take tea with Verwoerd's widow and prompted her in Afrikaans when she stumbled over her speech. Sampson compares him to "the legendary ex-convict who hunts down all the people who betrayed him; but instead of murdering them, he forgave them."
"Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace," Mandela said. One colleague told Sampson: "You never quite know whether he's a saint or a Machiavelli." Sampson's own view is that "forgiveness was an aspect of power, establishing a moral supremacy which reminded everyone that the balance had shifted," and that the more he "reached out to individual Afrikaners, the more he could divide and disarm them."
The supreme example was rugby, a game that "more than any other... had been associated with apartheid, and with Afrikaner thuggery toward blacks." One prisoner remembered police torturers kicking him around a cell and saying, "Now we're playing rugby." Many blacks wanted the Springbok name changed; "Mandela insisted that it should remain." In June 1995 South Africa met New Zealand in the World Cup final in Johannesburg. When the Springboks won, Mandela walked onto the field in the green Springbok jersey to hand the trophy to the "amazed captain, Francois Pienaar." The mostly Afrikaner crowd "went wild, chanting 'Nel-son! Nel-son!'" That night Afrikaners were "embracing blacks in the streets."
Sampson records what followed. The rugby union's chairman, Louis Luyt, fought integration, and when the matter reached court Mandela was subpoenaed. Against his lawyers' advice he attended "to show respect for the rule of law — only to hear the judge find in Luyt's favor." Mandela also insisted that reconciliation required change: "We can neither heal nor build... with the victims of past injustices forgiving and the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude." In 1996 he launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "between amnesty and amnesia," and when the ANC later went to court to block its findings against the party, it did so "against the advice of Mandela."
The Limits of the Saint
Sampson found in Mandela none of "the familiar deformities of power: the egomania, pomposity or paranoia." His mistakes "came from the opposite direction: from being too trusting, and seeing the best in everyone, however unworthy." He suspected Winnie was guilty in the Stompie Seipei affair but stood by her "unless she was convicted." In 1994 he "unwisely appointed her Deputy Minister of Arts," and did not dismiss her until she became "openly disloyal."
As President he "saw himself as a ceremonial head of state rather than a chief executive." He let Thabo Mbeki, chosen by the party as his deputy, run the country for most of his term. He was "strongly criticized for not intervening more decisively" on crime and corruption, and could be "devastatingly candid about his government's shortcomings, but he seemed in no hurry to rectify them." He trusted "quiet diplomacy" with Nigeria until Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged, and so learned "the limits of moral authority as a diplomatic weapon." He approved a botched intervention in Lesotho.
He gave up the ANC presidency in 1997, two years before his term ended — "unlike most African leaders," Sampson notes, determined "to appoint a democratically elected successor." "You don't lead by your position, but by the strength of your ideas."
And behind the warmth, Sampson found "an impenetrable reserve." "To be the father of a nation is a great honor," Mandela wrote, "but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far too little of."
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to FreedomI knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred.
Part IIThe Playbook
Mandela's career runs from a chief's courtyard to a prison quarry to the presidency, and his methods changed less than his circumstances. He listened before he spoke, he refused to humiliate, he studied the people who held the keys, and he judged every weapon by whether it worked. He also lied to a court about his creed, went over his colleagues' heads, and left his family to pay for his cause. The principles below are drawn from both columns.
The principles
Principle 1
Listen all day; speak last
The regent at Mqhekezweni heard every criticism in silence until sunset, then summed up. Mandela made it his method for life: "I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard."
A leader who speaks first turns a discussion into a vote on his proposal; one who speaks last directs "from behind." When Mandela needed to change minds — Kotane on armed struggle, his prison colleagues on talks — he did it in private, one person at a time, rather than fighting again in open committee.
Tactic: In any meeting you lead, speak last. When someone blocks you in public, don't re-fight it in public; find a long private conversation instead.
Principle 2
Know when the shepherd must walk in front
The same man broke consensus when it counted. Twice he got ahead of his own executive by going public — in 1953 on violence, and in 1961 when he told a reporter the nonviolent chapter was closing — because "sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organization in the direction you want it to go." And in 1985, alone at Pollsmoor, he opened talks with the government without telling anyone, because his colleagues "would condemn my proposal, and that would kill my initiative even before it was born."
He paid for it in suspicion, and in Boesak's charge that "there was no greater sin" than not consulting. Sampson does not soften the fact: he took his most critical decision alone. But the government that hoped to split him from his movement found it could not, and the talks he opened became the transition.
Tactic: Default to consensus. Reserve unilateral moves for decisions where asking permission would kill the idea before it could be tested — and expect to spend trust to make them.
Principle 3
Judge every weapon by whether it works
"For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon." This is the hinge of Mandela's code: the ends were fixed, the means were judged by results. "It is always the oppressor, not the oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle."
The code had a hard edge. He told a court that nonviolence was a principle so as not to give the prosecution a "loophole," and later admitted the truth to Stengel. His notebook accepted "reprisals against the population," and MK's car bomb killed nineteen. And yet Sampson credits his "lack of military ruthlessness" with the bloodless transition. The pragmatist did not become a terrorist, and he did not become a pacifist.
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Tactic, Not Creed
How Mandela's view of violence moved with circumstances.
1953
Tells a Sophiatown crowd violence is the only weapon; reprimanded.
To 1961
At the Treason Trial, the accused call nonviolence an "inviolate principle."
1961
Founds Umkhonto we Sizwe; begins with sabotage.
1985
Refuses to renounce violence as the price of release.
1993
After Hani's murder, channels rage into rallies "without resorting to violence."
Tactic: Separate your goals from your methods. Hold the goals fixed and review the methods coldly against results — and be honest with yourself, even when you can't be with the court.
Principle 4
Learn the jailer's language
"One must know the enemy's purpose before adopting a strategy to undermine it." Mandela studied Afrikaans and Afrikaner history in prison, made his comrades speak it to the warders, and agreed with one warder that "he would speak to me in English and I would answer in Afrikaans." A fellow prisoner described him in his cell with warders, "making the tea, giving biscuits, having long discussions... He would win these chaps over." When he needed surgery in 1985 he insisted on an Afrikaner doctor.
It paid off at the highest level. At his first meeting with P. W. Botha he talked about the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion and framed the conflict as "a struggle between brothers who happen to be different colors." He met every new commanding officer to evaluate his character. He assumed even the brutal Badenhorst had "a core of decency," and concluded that men behave like brutes when systems reward brutishness.
Tactic: Learn your adversary's language, history and grievances well enough to speak to them in their own terms. Treat the people who control your daily conditions as the most important relationships you have.
Principle 5
Refuse freedom with conditions
"Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts." Mandela refused Botha's conditional release in 1985, refused to renounce violence or abandon the Communist Party as the price of talks, and told de Klerk the ANC "would accept no preconditions." He would not desert "a lifelong friend at the insistence of a common opponent."
He came out five years later with nothing renounced. Sampson saw in this loyalty the edge he held "over other world leaders who had forgotten what they stood for" — though it also tied him to "doubtful allies."
Tactic: Don't negotiate from a position where you have already conceded the point at issue. Refuse preconditions, and make the other side's offer look like the obstacle.
Principle 6
Forgive as policy
Mandela's forgiveness was real, and it was also a tool. Lunch with his prosecutor, tea with Verwoerd's widow, an ambassadorship for a former jailer, the Springbok jersey — each reminded everyone, in Sampson's words, "that the balance had shifted." The more he reached out to individual Afrikaners, "the more he could divide and disarm them." "Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace."
He knew its limits. The jersey won a stadium; the rugby union still fought integration in court, and won. Forgiveness without change, he warned, leaves "the beneficiaries merely content in gratitude." So he paired gestures with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a multiracial cabinet.
Tactic: After a win, seek out the people who opposed you and treat them with conspicuous generosity. But don't mistake the symbol for the settlement; the structural change still has to be done.
Principle 7
Train temperament like a muscle
The young Mandela was proud, prickly and quick to anger — "When I want a confrontation, I ask for Nelson." The old Mandela restrained himself "in the face of humiliating provocations" so consistently that colleagues watched "with amazement." The change was trained, the way he had trained as a runner: "training counted more than intrinsic ability."
His method was explicit: fifteen minutes of self-examination each night; friends like Sisulu and Kathrada who "served as a mirror"; and a frank account of fear. "I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." The training was never finished — he nearly hit Lieutenant Prins in 1975 — and he never claimed it was. "A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying."
Tactic: Treat composure as a skill. Review your day nightly, keep at least two people who will tell you your mistakes, and put up a bold front when you must — without pretending to yourself that the fear isn't there.
Principle 8
Set your exit on the day you take power
Mandela tried to decline the presidency, accepted it on condition of a single term, and announced the limit early: "I did not want any uncertainty on this question." He let the party choose his deputy, handed Mbeki the running of the government, and gave up the ANC presidency two years early. "You don't lead by your position, but by the strength of your ideas."
The cost was a presidency that sometimes looked absent, slow on crime and corruption, candid about failures but "in no hurry to rectify them." The gain was a precedent: a liberation hero who left on schedule.
Tactic: If you take a position of power, announce your departure date early and publicly. The certainty disciplines your successors, your rivals and you.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Defeat your opponent without dishonouring him. The boy thrown into a thornbush learned how losing face hurts. The President flattered his prosecutor over lunch.
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Sometimes the shepherd must walk out in front. Consensus is the rule. Know the rare moment when it would kill the idea.
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Hold nonviolence as a tactic, never as a creed. "There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon."
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Know your jailer's language better than he does. Then use his own history to disarm him.
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Accept no privilege your comrades cannot share. Hand back the long trousers.
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Refuse freedom that comes with conditions. "Only free men can negotiate."
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Forgive as policy, not only as feeling. Saint or Machiavelli: it was both, and both helped.
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Set your exit date on the day you take power. "I did not want any uncertainty on this question."
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Don't mistake the symbol for the settlement. The jersey won a stadium. The court case was lost.
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Count the children who pay for the cause. "You are a father to all our people, but you have never had the time to be father to me."
