← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Mandela: five correspondents' stories
00:27:31
Nelson Mandela: five correspondents who'll never forget how their own stories came to...
Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
James Robbins
Hello. This is from our own correspondent, a download from BBC Radio. And here with the latest addition is Kate Adye.
- [00:07]
Narrator
Hello. The skies are grey over Johannesburg this morning, the flag still fluttering at half mast. This is a nation deep in mourning after the death of its most famous citizen. Thousands of bunches of flowers have been left outside Nelson Mandela's home, where he died on Thursday. The tributes are still coming in. President John Mahama of Ghana said he was the greatest African who ever lived. President Assad of Syria, who's currently fighting a revolt against his rule, said Nelson Mandela's life was an inspiration to freedom fighters and a lesson to tyrants. In the correspondence world, there are many, many stories about the former South African president. Fergal Keene was our man there in the years before the historic election in 1994 which brought white rule to an end, those were violent times in the black townships. The future looked ominous.
- [01:03]
Fergal Keane
To know the man, it is necessary to know the Times. South Africa, 1991. A winter of foreboding. Coming in from the airport, the radio was reporting another attack by unknown gunmen in a Soweto squatter camp. Within 24 hours, I was standing in the same camp and watching as a woman struggled to cover a corpse with some pages of an old newspaper. A thick rivulet of blood ran from the body into the little gullies that the rain had cut in the dirt pathway. The wind rose and swept away the newspaper and threw dust over the body. And the woman? She struggled to cover it once more. He is my son, she told us. May 1991. Black South Africans were dying in their hundreds. And many of us, observing the deepening crisis, wondered if there could ever be a peaceful settlement. And then came one of those moments upon which history turns. It was a Saturday. I'd taken my dogs for a walk in the bush and was driving back into Johannesburg when my pager went. The message said, simply and brutally, chris Hanney dead. Shot by right wing. My stomach churned. Hanni was the most popular of the ANC leaders after Nelson Mandela. He was the leader of the organization's military wing and a hero to the youth of the township. If ever there was a moment that could tip South Africa, it interracial war, this was it. On the radio, a local station was playing Bob Dylan's Blowin in the Wind. There was the most tangible sense of fragility that morning. A nation that was not yet a nation, but a collection of warring factions paused in shock. For many millions of black and brown South Africans, there was a feeling of Rage. For whites, the overwhelming emotion was fearful. And all who had invested in peace, who had put their faith in the language of non racialism, waited for the backlash. But cometh the hour, cometh the leader. Radio stations across the country paused in their broadcast to announce a special address from the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela. I was sitting in my car, driving into the townships. I pulled to the side of the road. Other drivers were doing the same. There were people sitting in their dusty yards, gathered around transistors. And then the familiar the cries of our nation are heard from old men who bury their sons and daughters, wives who weep for their husbands, communities who endlessly bury young and old, infants and pregnant women. He said this killing must stop. And then, critically, he declared, no one will desecrate his memory by rash and irresponsible actions. The people heard Mandela and they obeyed. There would be no revenge. There were more hard days ahead, another year of frequently fractious negotiation and continuing violence before the first democratic elections in South Africa. But that April morning of Mandela's intervention should be a day of remembrance for all South Africans. In my years reporting from the country, I met Mandela on many occasions and I was lucky to interview him at some length. He was not a saint, nor did he ever pretend to be. In private and sometimes in public, he could be wonderfully self deprecating. Mandela understood that he was an icon and he used this status in the name of his people's struggle. But that is a very different thing from creating a personality cult for the sake of power. My fondest memories of Mandela center on his humanity and vulnerability. Like the morning he announced his separation from his wife Winnie. I was ushered into his office and caught in his expression a look of profound melancholy. All the years in jail, the life devoted to struggle had accumulated to this wrenching moment. There was none of the usual Mandela confidence that morning, only a man alone with the private grief and regret that no cheering crowds could ever assuage. I recall another occasion when he comforted the BBC family in Johannesburg. My friend, the television correspondent John Harrison, had been killed in an accident while covering the unrest that night at his home, as grief stricken friends and colleagues gathered, there was a telephone call. The voice at the other end said, this is Mr. Mandela. I wonder, could I speak with Mrs. Harrison? Mandela liked John Harrison. I think he respected his humanity and his courage. Now that Nelson Mandela himself has gone, it is these qualities I remember about him above all others.
- [05:44]
Narrator
Fergal Keene a generation earlier, the death in police custody of Steve Biko, the Leader of the Black Consciousness movement, caused outrage in South Africa. A post mortem examination revealed Bikot had died from severe brain damage. The newspaper editor, Donald Woods, a friend of Bikot's, accused the Minister of Justice and police, James Kruger, of being directly responsible for his death. The events of that year, 1977, reminded people all around the world of the plight of thousands of other black activists, people like Nelson Mandela, who were locked up in prisons around the country. John Simpson was our correspondent there. At the time.
- [06:27]
John Simpson
When I was a young man, Nelson Mandela was just a name and nothing more. A name that people wrote on walls, on pamphlets, handed out in the streets, on placards, at demonstrations. He was jailed a few months before I went to university, and so I was always aware of him. But by the time I arrived in Johannesburg to be the BBC correspondent 15 years later, I. I found that in his own country, his name didn't seem to count for much. The Soweto riots, though past their most ferocious, were sputtering dangerously on. And young demonstrators were still coming out onto the streets to attack the police with rocks and petrol bombs. It was a grim time altogether. The high water mark of apartheid. I talked a lot to the demonstrators. They had no great political ideas and they certainly didn't follow the anc, Nelson Mandela's party. They thought the old ANC leadership in exile was completely irrelevant. The white ministers and officials of the National Party who had put him away felt the problem he had once represented had been sorted out. They had locked him up and thrown away the key. If for some reason you wanted an interview about him. There was always one particular junior minister who was prepared to be wheeled out to tell you that Mandela was a thoroughgoing terrorist who deserved to stay in jail for life. The Minister's name was FW de Klerk. And one day, still another 14 years or so into the future, he would do the necessary deals with Mandela to release him, agree the ground rules for the first one man, one vote election in South Africa and join a coalition government with him. But in 1977, the newspapers, even the liberal ones, scarcely ever printed Mandela's name. That was probably the lowest point in his political fortunes. He was forgotten, irrelevant, politically dead. Only his wife, Winnie, kept his memory going. At that stage, she seemed pretty magnificent, Very different from the troubled, violent Persona she later took on. Interviewing her was the closest at that stage I could come to reporting on the man himself. Yet because of the ludicrous conditions which the apartheid regime constructed to cope. Cope with dissent, I couldn't talk to her inside a building or in the presence of another person. In the end, feeling rather embarrassed, I went to the depressing little town of Brantfort, where she'd been exiled, and yelled some questions at her. Across the necessary gap of several metres, she shouted back the answers. I'd obeyed the letter of the law, but I was still arrested, taken to a police station, cautioned, and afterwards investigated by the much feared security police. Everything and everyone to do with Nelson Mandela was dangerous, off limits. That was how the white government wanted it. And then, of course, years later, the government realized that Nelson Mandela was the one person it had to talk to if power were to be handed over peacefully. He was released and went to live in Soweto. And it was there, nearly 30 years after I'd first heard about him, that I finally came to see him. It was getting dark and I was hopelessly lost. There were no street signs in Soweto then and scarcely any maps of it. I was starting to feel scared, not so much because there was a lot of crime there, but because I was now seriously late. I was genuinely worried that Nelson Mandela would be annoyed and that the immensely favourable view I'd had of him for so long would be utterly destroyed. Never take a politician as a hero, I'd always told myself. They're inclined to let you down. I found his house. Eventually. The door opened and yellow light shone all round me. Come in, come in, said a warm, familiar, very personal voice. My apologies were waved away by a long, regal hand. Typically, instead of allowing me to stammer out the admiration I felt for him, he got in his own words of kindness and appreciation first. Right from that moment, I understood why Nelson Mandela was what he was. It was the way he looked you straight in the eyes and spoke just to you, to the person you would like to be, perhaps, rather than the one you actually were. It was 29 long years since he'd been imprisoned. He'd become perhaps the most revered person on earth. History had come right in the end.
- [11:20]
Narrator
John Simpson. Nelson Mandela was a prisoner during much of the apartheid era. And for many people on the outside, trying to work for a fairer South Africa, the sheer strain of trying to stay human in an inhuman system took a heavy toll. The apartheid laws reached into the most intimate areas of life. From dictating who you could legally eat, live or sleep with, to forcibly separating banned persons from their friends, families and jobs. Uncertainty and paranoia poisoned many social relationships. The rest of the Mandela family had to cope with a double strain through the long years of Nelson's imprisonment, dealing with their own private distress while trying to maintain a defiant yet dignified public face in the anti apartment struggle. Milton and Cosy's relationship with the Mandelas began much earlier and it had little to do with politics.
- [12:16]
Milton Nkosi
In the 1980s, while Nelson Mandela was serving his life sentence on Robben island, we were roaming the streets of South Africa's largest township, Soweto, his shadow looming large over us. No one dared mention his name, but we were all constantly thinking about him. Soweto is an apartheid creation. It is a cluster of mini townships. Mine and Mandela's is called Orlando West. This is where I spent my formative years at the height of white minority rule. Just the mention of his name could land us in prison because according to the state, he was a terrorist. But according to the people of Soweto and the wider world, he was a hero. The white minority regime just could not comprehend why on earth so many people were calling for the release from prison of a man they called a terrorist. Mrs. Mandela was determined to keep his name alive. She opened her house to all sorts of people as long as they were fighting for the liberation of black South Africans from the brutal oppression of apartheid. I was not one of those activists who frequented this self declared headquarters of the African National Congress. I went to their house as a neighbor and because I was a friend of his daughter Zinzi. She and her mother were not only black South Africa's first family, but they were beautiful too. They invoked the same sort of feeling most Africans have when they see Michelle Obama and her children. They were likable. Everybody wanted to be associated with them. We lived close by. My late father's home is 8182 Limbede street near the junction with Vilakazi Street. The Mandela family home, now a museum, is number 8115 Vilakazi Street. It's a small four roomed house made of red clay bricks, typical of the area. And this was the place he returned to after being freed from prison. He wrote about it in his autobiography, Long Walk to freedom. Number 8115 in Orlando west was the center point of my world, he wrote. The place marked with an X in my mental geography. When I saw it again, I was surprised by how much smaller and humbler it was than I remembered. But any house in which a man is free is a castle when compared with even the plushiest prison. Another person keen to keep Mandela's name alive was our history teacher, Mr. E.S. schluby. It was his job to teach us the heroism of the White Dutch settlers in the 17th century, led by Jan van Riebeeck. They arrived in a boat named the Dromedaries at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of the African continent. In the middle of this lesson, our teacher, a tall, hefty Zulu man with a deep voice, suddenly stopped and whispered to the whole class that there's another man whose name we should never forget. His name was Nelson Mandela. He told us that if we mentioned one word of this conversation, he would kill us. This part of the lesson may have lasted only a minute, but it stayed with us forever. Mr. Hlubi was not alone. My father, Henry Mtenjw Nkosi, once told us to listen to a song by Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte entitled Bathlee bonke et tilongweni. Bathlee bonke KWA non. It means simply, they are all languishing in jail. This song was about Mandela and his comrades, and the entire album had been banned by the apartheid authorities. It was illegal to listen to this LP of beautiful music, which was called An Evening with Belafonte and Makeba. So when Mandela was released In February of 1990 and returned to number 8115 Vilagazi Street, I was amongst the crowd there too. I was happy for him. And when he finally touched my hand in a brief handshake, it was a dream come true. A dream that began in the dusty streets of Orlando west many decades before. I thought of that line in Bob Marley's song, in this great future, how can we forget our past? Then, on 10 May 1994, I attended his inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president. Again, not only was I happy for him because he did a fantastic job of negotiating himself out of prison and eventually delivering freedom for his people, but because in the process, he liberated me too.
- [16:47]
Narrator
Milton in Cozy While Mandela was a name to conjure with, for many black South Africans, the image that the country's whites had of him was very different. For them, he was for many years a bogeyman, a ruthless revolutionary plotting mayhem and violence, the red under the bed possibly even taking his orders straight from the Kremlin. Even as late as the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was describing him as the leader of a terrorist organization. It's worth remembering that at the time, the issue of who would come out top in South Africa was still very much seen through a Cold War prism. Many saw it as yet another African war by proxy for the global struggle of capitalism against communism. And for decades, the only endgame which anyone could envisage was a bloody civil war. A blanket of state censorship and misinformation muted many questions about how the country was being governed. Hamilton Wendy remembers just how thoroughly the regime managed to suffocate dissent and distort public understanding of what Mandela and the ANC were trying to achieve.
- [17:56]
Hamilton Wendy
My political education began with a hockey stick. It was June 1976 and South Africa was convulsed by the anti apartheid political uprisings that began in Soweto and spread rapidly through townships across the country. I was 15 years old and attending a whites only boarding school in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. While black youths erupted in rage at the injustices that a racist system forced them to endure, we white teenagers were largely terrified at what might happen to us and to our country in the face of such cataclysmic anger. After some heated discussion, the solution decided upon in my dormitory was to arm ourselves with various sporting accessories should the breathless rumors of the planned wholesale slaughter of whites turn out to be true. Deep in the middle of the night, I wasn't much of a cricketer, so the best I could do was place my hockey stick alongside my pillow. Late that night, a roaring of truck engines on the main road woke us up. We all sprung to the windows to watch army reinforcements moving into the black township on the hillside above our white town. Bright searchlights swept across the tiny houses and tin shacks. When I woke the next morning, I felt sad, frightened and ashamed that I had been so willing to believe the rumours of slaughter and that I had been so ready to fight. For months afterwards, the political debate swirled around our high school. Some boys vehemently supported racial separation, but many of us knew that apartheid was wrong and were against it. But most of us white boys who did think it was wrong had no real leadership. The ANC was banned and no one was allowed to publish or even to write the name of Nelson Mandela. As astonishing as it seems today, I was a politically aware teenager who was against apartheid. And yet, all through high school in the late 1970s, I had no idea that Nelson Mandela existed. Certainly some white children knew who he was, but most of us white kids were totally unaware of him. That was how effective the censorship of the apartheid state was. In those days, the separation between white and black was complete. There was no way for any of us youths, white or black, to imagine any other future for ourselves but bitter, ongoing racial conflict. The government hid from us that the ANC under Nelson Mandela was fighting for a non racial democratic South Africa. It was the height of the Cold War and the National Party government fed us propaganda that they were defending a Christian state against the evil of godless communism. Of course, not all of us swallowed that, but the power of the police and the state was such a. That the voice of Nelson Mandela was largely silenced as he broke rocks in jail on Robben island. Slowly, as the 1980s dawned, that began to change. It became increasingly difficult for the government to suppress the dissent and outright revolutionary resistance that was growing in the black population. The moment white rule started to crumble was probably 1985, when the then President, P.W. botha, refused to release Mandela unconditionally. That stubborn refusal contained within it the beginning of the end of white dominance. Slowly, like water dripping through cracks in rock, the fear and the violence and the ongoing cruelty needed to prop up apartheid began to seep into white South Africa's conscience. Many young men did as I did and left the country, refusing to serve in the apartheid military. It was only when I arrived in London in 1987 that I read something of what Nelson Mandela had written. I could barely believe what I was reading. I sat up on a train from London to Edinburgh, reading until my eyes were red and sore. It was an almost spiritual revelation to discover that the man who I had always been told was a communist terrorist in fact believed what I believed about South Africa. Here at last, was a vision of a shared future between black and white that was possible. And here was the man who could lead us if only he were freed. For the first time in my life, sitting on that cold, badly lit train, I was proud of being a South African. Less than A year later, P.W. botha himself met Nelson Mandela secretly, and the historic process began. Nelson Mandela gave me a new identity, a new belief in the possibilities for my country and for myself. But he can rest in peace. We no longer need him to lead us. We can take on the journey ourselves. And that is the greatest gift he has left us.
- [22:59]
Narrator
Hamilton Wenday, February 11, 1990. It was quarter past four in the afternoon, an hour later than the news crews assembled outside had expected, when Nelson Mandela finally walked to freedom after 27 years in prison. Holding his wife Winnie's hand, he smiled at the cheering crowds and punched the air in a victory salute before driving off to Cape Town, 40 miles away. At 8 o' clock that evening, Mr. Mandela appeared on the balcony of Cape Town City hall to speak to the 50,000 people who'd gathered there to help him celebrate his release. It was a day to remember for all of those present, among them our man James Robbins.
- [23:41]
James Robbins
It's quite hard for me now to remember the shock of seeing Nelson Mandela for the first time on that summer Sunday in the Cape.
- [23:48]
John Simpson
Why?
- [23:49]
James Robbins
Oh, simply because, of course, his face is now so very familiar. The face of a global hero in an age with surely very few of those. But back then, we had no idea what the prisoner who had spent more than a third of his life behind bars and walls would look like as he walked to freedom. Look at any picture of Nelson Mandela as he strode out of Victor Verstere prison. And remember that you're looking at the face of a man who until that moment hadn't seen a crowd of people for more than 25 years. But remember too, that the world hadn't seen him for a quarter of a century either. Photographs of Nelson Mandela were never allowed out of jail. There are a few smuggled images from the 1960s. Nelson Mandela on Robben island when he was still a young man. That's all I had as a reporter to go on. His image had been suppressed so ruthlessly and effectively in South Africa. In an instant, the release of Nelson Mandela undid all that. The face too dangerous to be seen, that winning smile and regal bearing were gazed upon by hundreds of millions of people all around the world that February Sunday. It was one of those moments of profoundly good news which sends shivers down the spine or brings tears to the eyes. If it was amazing for me to witness, the experience for him was beyond extraordinary. I remember the following day in Cape Town, with equal clarity, Nelson Mandela gave his first news conference in the rose filled gardens of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's lavish Cape Town residence, a fine colonial home built and intended for white clergy to be masters of. I sat among a group of journalists on high backed dining chairs in the brilliant sun. Suddenly it was my turn to ask a question. I introduced myself and said that I was from the BBC. Mr. Mandela interrupted when he heard those initials with the briefest oh yes, but said with such warmth it signalled to me a deep approval of my organization, an acknowledgment of what the BBC and the World Service had meant to him both before his imprisonment and when he'd finally been allowed to listen to the radio. Towards the end of it, my nervousness evaporated and so I asked Nelson Mandela about his very first impressions as he walked out to greet a hugely expectant world. Mr. Mandela replied that what really struck him was that so many white people had come to join the vast black crowd desperate to see him. Unsurprisingly, he associated white faces mainly with the faces of his jailers and also with the dour, unsmiling builders of the apartheid system of rigid and ruthless racial segregation, the apartheid system which he famously dedicated his life to ending a cause for which he said he was also prepared to die. But when Mr. Mandela spoke of his pleasure seeing so many white faces at the prison gates, I think he was also signalling to the world that he would from that day forward, lead all South Africans, regardless of colour, to freedom in a new nation. And it was suddenly clear to me in Cape Town in the midst of covering the extraordinary story of his release, Nelson Mandela had not really been the prisoner. All those years on Robben island in Polsmore and finally at Victor Vestaire Prison, the white people of South Africa had been the prisoners, prisoners of an ideology and prisoners of Nelson Mandela's conscience.
- [27:19]
Narrator
James Robbins joining Hamilton, Wenday, Milton and Cozy, Fergal Keane and John Simpson to give us their memories of Nelson Mandela in this special edition of from our own Correspondent. Goodbye.