Change
Perhaps something in my childhood suited me to Nelson Mandela.
When I was growing up, my mother often had severe spells of depression where she would simply cry for days or stay in bed and be depressed. We were never neglected but I do remember her sadness. One felt disempowered to do anything about it, not understanding what it was.
My mother is to this day one of the most decent, softly spoken, ladylike people I know. She has never sworn or used foul language in my presence. She has never spoken in a degrading manner to or about anyone, not even people that made her angry or people that harmed her in any way. She has calmness about her and reserves her extreme emotions for her inner self. I also never recall her being overly happy or excited about anything and she is moderate by nature. Her time spent in the orphanage while she was growing up obviously taught her to hide her emotions. It altered her. I recognized that burying of one’s self in my years with Nelson Mandela later in life. He too had to suppress his emotions to survive prison.
My dad often got frustrated with Mom’s depression and they would end up arguing about it and fighting because my mom would be so passive. My dad is a social person, the more the merrier, while my mother likes her own space and not socializing too much. I inherited that anti-social tendency from my mother. None of us realized just how troubled my mom really was.
One Friday afternoon, after playing at a friend’s house, I returned home to an empty house. When I opened the kitchen door I heard mom’s car in the garage. I didn’t open the door to the garage but merely slipped into the house, lounging around. After a while, I heard that the car was still in the garage, idling, but I didn’t hear her opening the garage door to leave. I decided to go and look what was happening. When I opened the door between the house and the garage I vividly remember my mother resting her head against the window of the car, the car idling; she seemed asleep. I rushed to the car door and tried to open it. It was locked. I then noticed a pipe from the window and traced it to the car’s exhaust. Only then did reality hit home. She was trying to commit suicide. I screamed and cried all at once and tried to force the door open.
I was twelve years of age and had little strength to make an impact. I slammed against the window but she didn’t react and the rest of the events I cannot remember. I know that I called my grandmother and my gran arrived quickly because she lived around the corner. I don’t know how my mom got out of the car to her bedroom, I don’t know at what time Anton, my brother, came home or when the doctor arrived or my mom’s best friend came. I don’t remember if and who called my dad, who was travelling on business again. I don’t remember where he was and I don’t remember how they got hold of him – cellphones were not yet invented at the time. I do remember that this was the last day I smelled anything in my life. And that smell was gas. Doctors say that from the shock my body’s ability to smell was shut off, a psychosomatic reaction to trauma.
My mom was admitted to a clinic for people suffering from depression, and stabilized. I was left constantly wondering why she would decide to leave me, just as she had been by her mom; wasn’t I good enough? Did she love me enough to live? Was it me and my brother’s endless fighting as siblings that drove her to do that? I was never angry at my mother, perhaps rather sad, and I felt abandoned.
Those events in the gas-filled garage in 1982 determined my relationships for ever. I am constantly terrified I will be abandoned. Left alone. So I overcompensate. I sacrifice myself to please people, hoping and trying to avoid a situation in which I find myself abandoned. And with the fear of abandonment comes the constant need for affirmation. It is not an ideal recipe for relationships of a romantic kind but it is ideal when you dedicate your life to your job and the world’s most iconic statesman. In a strange twist, Nelson Mandela needed someone to devote themselves to him. To help him. He needed someone who was always there. Available to support him and to be depended upon. We complemented each other in a slightly co-dependent way. My need to please fitted with his need for absolute loyalty.
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But this was still to come. In 1988 I turned eighteen and completed school. The news was dominated by reports of killings of either policemen or ‘cadres’, as liberation fighters were referred to. Not a month passed without a bomb blast somewhere in the country. It became such a common occurrence that one later doesn’t pay attention to numbers. There was death everywhere. South Africa was on the brink of a civil war. Violence erupted more often than not, and for the middle-class white Afrikaans people perhaps going to war against black people seemed like the only solution.
For me, though, life continued as before. My father had asked me: ‘What do you want to study?’ I had no idea, but since I was always engaged in cultural activities at school I opted to study acting. He gave me a definite ‘No’ and said that unless you are Sandra Prinsloo – one of South Africa’s most successful and admired actresses – you had no chance at succeeding in the performing arts. It was my life’s dream to become an actress. From childhood I remembered role-playing to be a secretary whenever I accompanied my dad to his office at weekends. My father convinced me, like most Afrikaner parents would have done at the time, to opt for a career in which job security took priority over following your passion, and I decided to enrol for a three-year National Diploma as Executive Secretary at the Technicon (now the Tshwane University of Technology) in Pretoria.
In September 1989, almost a year after my eighteenth birthday – the age at which South African citizens become legitimate voters – a general election was held. It excluded black people. No coloured, Indian or black people were allowed to vote under the apartheid laws. In South Africa’s last national race-based elections the National Party lost ground and only managed to secure 48 per cent of the vote. The National Party had ruled since 1948. Its policies were based on apartheid, segregation and the promotion of the Afrikaner. People who supported them were known as Nats. Being a stern conservative, even more conservative than the Nats, I voted for the Conservative Party in 1989.
The Nats were beginning to talk about reform: allowing black people to vote, bringing an end to the Group Areas Act and discrimination against people based on the colour of their skin. The Conservative Party opposed any change to apartheid laws and that year they became the official opposition, securing 31 per cent of the white vote. Though the total population at the time was estimated to be in the region of 30 million (there are no official figures available because black people were not counted as citizens), only about 3.1 million voters (all white) were registered, of which just over 1 million voted for the National Party’s reform policies.
Unbeknown to anyone, Nelson Mandela had had his first meeting with the then President, P. W. Botha, on 4 July 1989. Mr Botha was known to oppose black majority rule, yet his willingness to meet with Mr Mandela set the tone of concessions to be made. At this point Nelson Mandela was spending his twenty-sixth year in prison. He had become the figurehead of the oppressed in South Africa even though very few people really knew him apart from his cadres. He was becoming the symbol of freedom for the masses in South Africa, even though the pictures that appeared of him were from the 1960s or were sketches of what people imagined he looked like at the time. No one was allowed access to the prison to ever take photographs of the ageing Nelson Mandela.
P. W. Botha abruptly resigned as President in August 1989, a month before the elections, after he felt that the then Minister of Education, F. W. de Klerk, had not consulted with him after a meeting he had with President Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia. Mr Botha felt undermined and resigned; Mr de Klerk was appointed Acting President for the month prior to the elections.
At this time, Nelson Mandela had been moved to Victor Verster Prison in the Paarl, close to Cape Town. He regularly met with President de Klerk and Mr de Klerk announced the release of the first long-serving political prisoners barely a month after becoming President. This was a landmark in South Africa’s history: change became inevitable. I knew nothing about the prisoners being released and I can hardly remember that I paid attention to the announcement. These prisoners included Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni, Raymond Mhlaba and Ahmed Kathrada among others, some of Nelson Mandela’s closest friends and colleagues. Who could have imagined that I would later adore some of these prisoners.
On 2 February 1990 President de Klerk announced the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela after being imprisoned for twenty-seven years. February in the north of Pretoria where my family lived is one of the hottest months in our summer. I was swimming in our pool when my father came outside and the fact that someone was watching me distracted my attention. I could see that he had something on his mind. ‘Yes Dad . . . ?’ I said. He just looked at me and after a few moments of silence he replied, ‘Now we are in trouble. The terrorist has been released.’ My response was: ‘Who’s that?’ and he replied: ‘Nelson Mandela.’ I had no idea who it was or what this meant to us. I could sense that he was worried but I continued swimming and left him to ponder about his announcement.
It was only much later after I had joined the Presidency that Mr Mandela told me that Mr de Klerk visited him a few days before the announcement of his release. He unceremoniously told Mr Mandela that he was free to go. Mr Mandela indicated that he couldn’t leave immediately and that he needed to afford his people time to allow them to prepare for his release. He asked for an extra few days to allow people on the outside to prepare. If someone told me ‘You are free to leave’ after twenty-seven years I would ignore courtesy and run out, yet Mr Mandela wanted to stay to allow his people time to prepare. I often asked him whether he wasn’t scared that the government could change its mind in those extra days. He looked at me, surprised that I would mistrust people in that way, laughed and then said ‘No.’
It was of course only much later that I could comprehend what actually happened in South Africa at that time. Little did I know that Nelson Mandela was already aged seventy-one when he was released. Little did I know that he lost his mother and his son during his incarceration and that he was not allowed to attend their respective funerals at the time. The fact that he was a human being, a person with emotions, didn’t cross my mind. All I knew was that we were in trouble, because my dad said so.
By 1992 the white National government called a referendum to decide on the future of apartheid. But, of course, whites only were allowed to vote in the referendum. The apartheid system that had been implemented in 1948 was withering. The white population was asked to express themselves in support or against the reform policies started by President de Klerk. Very few people shared the notion that reform would go further than they anticipated, but it was clear that apartheid was losing its few remaining supporters in the international community.
A total of 2.8 million whites voted in the referendum; 1.9 million were in favour of reform and an election in which non-white South Africans could vote; 875,000 of my compatriots voted against the abolishment of apartheid. I voted ‘NO’ too. And I was proud of it. This was my contribution, I thought, to ensuring that the country remained governable. There was always this white Afrikaans fear that if the country was run by blacks it would become ungovernable and that they would run the whites into the ocean, take revenge for what whites denied them of for centuries.
Really it was all over by 1990, when Mr Mandela was released. It marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of a country where ‘one man one vote’ would apply, irrespective of the colour of your skin. But it all kind of passed me by as I was enjoying the life of being a student – the partying and late night studying to catch up on work that fell behind as a result of such partying. I had no involvement or even thought about politics or where South Africa was heading, even though I knew that apartheid had ended and that black people were free to move as they please. At social gatherings we sometimes referred briefly to what was unfolding in South Africa but never with informed detail and all playing on each other’s white Afrikaner fears that, indeed, ‘we were in trouble’. That was the totality of my understanding of the political situation and I wasn’t bothered much.
I do recall driving to my uncle’s farm in Ellisras in the north over Easter in April 1993 when we heard the news on the radio that Communist Party leader and chief of staff of the military wing of the ANC, the charismatic Chris Hani, had been killed. For whites in South Africa the communists held the real threat to our safety, security and financial future. Somehow Nelson Mandela was also considered a communist. Because South Africa, or our white world, was dominated by religion and what the church dictated, it was unthinkable that the Communist Party would ever occupy a legitimate space in South Africa. We were a capitalist state in which the whites owned and controlled all the resources.
When I asked my parents later about Chris Hani, I was told that it was a big mistake by whoever initiated his killing because even though Hani was a communist, surely he was a better deal for the white people than the so-called terrorist Mandela. I was confused by my parents’ pronouncements because to me anything communist posed a serious threat, and even though Nelson Mandela had not been officially named a member of the Communist Party, surely Chris Hani was more dangerous, being the leader of that party? According to my parents, Chris Hani had exhibited some tolerance towards white people, probably because he hadn’t been imprisoned on Robben Island like Nelson Mandela, and therefore they obviously assumed that he didn’t have the hatred Mr Mandela supposedly had.
Little did we know, or care, that Mr Mandela had no bitterness. He had secretly been talking about negotiations with the government from prison, determined to bring about a peaceful transition. As Ahmed Kathrada, one of Madiba’s closest friends and a fellow prisoner, said, ‘Forgiveness is a choice.’ One inherently always expects the worst and we expected Nelson Mandela to live up to our expectations.
It was during these riveting and dangerous political times that I fell in love and got engaged. My aspirations were limited to getting married and having children, like most young Afrikaans women my age. I was only twenty-two years of age but it didn’t matter. I had also graduated and I started my first job at the Department of State Expenditure in 1992 as a secretary. A few months into the job I became bored and asked for a more challenging position. I was transferred to the Human Resources division within the same department as an administrative clerk, working in mid-town Pretoria.
Apartheid had ended but life continued unchanged. We didn’t feel the end of apartheid in our everyday lives. We still ‘lived’ apartheid even though politically changes started to emerge prior to the 1994 elections. Violence and unrest continued in far off communities, and we were continuously confronted with the pictures of dead people in rural areas. The violence was no longer only black against white but now also due to tensions between the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party. The IFP was the ANC’s biggest rival at the time.
Then my engagement ended. I was distraught and lost. What I usually do when relationships fail is that I throw myself into my work, completely and utterly, as a way of dealing with pain.
On 10 May 1994 South Africa’s first democratically elected black President was inaugurated. I was twenty-three years of age and putting in every extra hour of overtime to build my career in the Human Resources department of the Department of State Expenditure. Even though the day of his swearing in was a public holiday, I was on my way to work to put in extra time. There was hardly any traffic and people avoided the streets out of fear for the outbreak of violence following the inauguration of the ANC government, which was seen as the enemy to all white people, even those whites who voted in favour of reform and for apartheid to end. An ANC government in power meant that the majority of our leadership would change to black people, and that seriously challenged white supremacy. It was pay-back time and we expected black people to settle scores with us whites for centuries of oppression. Military vehicles were visible everywhere in the suburbs and police cars ready to respond on instructions. Still, this didn’t affect my life and I found myself safe in the comfort of my office during the inauguration. As long as the police, still from the previous regime, were visible in the streets, surely we were safe. I do recall driving home seeing black people along the street and people smiling, looking happy, cheering and dancing. My thoughts were simple: Yes, you can now do as you please but please don’t kill us tonight because we are white.
Prior to the elections some white people collected tinned food and perishables out of fear of civil war, violence and disruption. We expected black people to take over the country and now deprive us of basic services, that they would raid shops and create absolute chaos, sabotaging water and power supply to white suburbs. People stocked up and gathered bottled water, candles, tinned food and whatever would last them and be needed in an emergency. We expected revenge.
But that night nothing happened and we all woke up the next morning, went back to work and to our normal way of life, untouched by the previous day’s events and whoever was leading this country. Life continued in a strangely unaffected way. We still had our house, we were still alive and water still came from the tap. Nothing was there to indicate that soon the very foundations of my life, my ignorance, my beliefs, my values were to be shaken up and tested. Little did I know that I would emerge from that paranoid, white cocoon of fear and denial and that the man who would lead me out of that – gently holding my hand – would be Nelson Mandela.