THE CHORAL ADULATION OF MANDELA@ 100 WAS NOT ALL

HONEST.
Jabulani Mzaliya

Mandela’s 100 years centenary articles were so choral in their erudition that they ignored that
Mandela, and the phenomenon that he was and still is today, nearly did not happen. Dark forces,
on their own or abetted by the Colgate-smiling National Party negotiators did not only put
hurdles on CODESA but were also complicit in the massacres and mass murders akin to
genocide in the period leading to April 27 1994. That these murders were not categorised as
genocide is because of the different meanings that print capitalism attaches to the deaths of
Black people versus White ones. It was a conflict five times bloodier than Northern Ireland and
of a Beirut-scale.

The appending phrase - had he still been alive - is disingenuous because his enemies and
enemies of democracy, including the Hang Mandela! Brigade had never imagined him being
released and running a successful democracy. Even those who had wanted Mandela to rot in a
Robben Island prison joined the choir of singing his adulation on what would have been his
100 years of life.

Ngcaweni (Let’s right the writings about “righteous” Mandela – The Star, Thursday, July 19
2018) alerts us to the obvious but avoided fact. He states:

“A further complication was that Apartheid negotiators were not honest brokers so that the
biggest task for Mandela was to nudge them towards a settlement quicker. They soon
realized that unless they stopped the massacres and unrest, the whole negotiations process
would collapse. They had more to lose than the oppressed.”

Mandela’s release was not through de Klerk’s kindness as the popularized (rather than popular
narrative), coerces us to believe, but was through pressure from both the international domain
and internal struggles. International pressure had taken long to be effective because powerful
States, such as the United States and the United Kingdom were ambivalent, at best, and
supportive of the Apartheid Government at worst. The addition of financial sanction, driven by
American banking sector rather than the United States Government, led to a National Party
rethink.

The strong United States Government was weak in this case such that its corporate citizens and
civil society showed it its corporate citizens and civil society showed it the light. When the
Apartheid Government finally collapsed, it was the US Government that basked in the glory of
having had a large hand in its demise, leaving behind its corporate citizens and civil society
who had been at the front, even when these had supported the anti-Apartheid struggle at great
sacrifices to their lives and their finances.

The internal combustion fired by internal dissent and open defiance, led by the United
Democratic Front (UDF) and the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) became unbearable for
the Nationalist Party Government. Gone was P.W. Botha’s Rubicon speech bravado of “Do
not push us too far”. The whole Hitlerite edifice of a rule that would exist for a thousand years
was dealt a severe blow. Like Hilter, the National party had never thought they would be out
of power, and that a Black President was but a dream. Many of those who thought a Black man,

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however good a leader he is was too beneath them to be their President were also profuse in
their adulation for Mandela@100.

No less than the Foreign Minister of the decaying Apartheid State, Pik Botha, had proclaimed
the impossibility of a Black President, meaning he never accepted that Mandela would ever
assume power in South Africa, not because he was a bad leader, but because he was Black.
Hypocritically, the Foreign Minister was the first in line to join Mandela’s ANC after it was
unbanned. I do not know where the erstwhile Foreign Minister disappeared to, but he to, must
have been profuse in his adulation for a Mandela @100, a Mandela he never thought would
one day be his President.

Liberal thinkers diagnosed the earlier release of the eight ANC leaders in October 1989
(including Jafta Masemola of the Pan Africanist Congress) as the “testing of the waters”. But
in essence, it was a carefully laid out strategy to release the eight leaders so that they would
form an ANC leadership outside prison to isolate the more popular Mandela still in prison. The
expectation was that a Bishop Muzorewa-type of leader would emerge from the eight as it had
become clear that the internal Muzerowa (whose name I will not mention because of his
litigious nature) had become the National Party’s unpredictable and uncontrollable
Frankenstein monster.

The Massacres I have referred to, not only limited to Makhutha, (21st January 1997) and
Boipatong (17th June 1992), and Bisho 7th September 1992) but to many others which took
place in the back of the beyond and never got media attention, were carefully and timeously
orchestrated to derail the negotiations process. There were perfectly timed train massacres and
taxi rank shootings to create national fear and mass panic to detract and to weaken the ANC
from the negotiations process.

The messages of these orchestrated attacks were clear: if you dislodge the National Party from
power, you are investing in chaos, the likes of which has never been seen. It was to cause
despair which would make the population think the bad Egypt we were experiencing was better
than the Promised Land we have never seen. The assassins and the hired White hands who
Blackened their faces and spoke no Black language and who wreaked havoc at train stations
and taxi ranks, were also profuse in their adulation for Mandela@100.

It should be remembered that the civil war in the then Natal and KwaZulu Homeland, itself
suffering the print capitalism of being referred to as the low-intensity warfare and Black-on-
Black violence because the National Party could not agree to the existence of a civil war even
under its diminishing watch, was at its height. With blood still on their hands, many of the
“generals” and “commanders” of these massacres have also been profuse in “celebrating” the
Mandela’s centenary chorister-singing.

The storming of the World Trade Centre on 25th June 1993 by the right-wing fringe would not
have taken place if the National Party Government had wanted to stop it. It is inconceivable
that a State-machinery with so much power resources and intelligence even as they were
receding through their inconsistencies, could not have detected the planned invasion. That they
could not follow up to arrest those responsible for the invasion proved that there was a political
will to exploit any opportunity to catch the ANC negotiators off guard. On the contrary, Eugene
Terreblanche roamed the vastness of the country with gay abandon. Many of Terblanche’s
supporters were profuse in their adulation for Mandela @100.

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As Ngcaweni points out in his Star article, Chris Hani’s assassination was aimed at derailment,
but specifically at fomenting a civil war to overlay an existing mini-civil war in the then Natal
and KwaZulu Homeland. In the list that was found by detectives after Hani’s assassination,
Mandela’s name topped the list. It is not far-fetched to suggest that there might have been many
assassins on the prowl and Mandela might have been saved by the vigilance of his security
detail. Hani, out of his selfless kindness had let his guard down by releasing his bodyguards to
enjoy their Easter holidays. Many who supported the assassin, Janus Walus and the co-
conspirators such as Clive Derby-Lewis were profuse in their adulation of Mandela @100.

But this was not confined to a plot on Mandela before he became President. In 2013, The
Telegraph reported that a “Boeremag” plot to assassinate Mandela was uncovered long after
he had been out of power. The plotters wanted to eliminate him because he was seen as a
“peacemaker.” These White supremacists were sentenced to a period of 35 years for the plans
they hatched in 2002.

Mandela avoided the roadside detonators which would be activated by a fish line by using a
helicopter. The judge in the trial admitted that had the plotters succeeded, they would have
plunged the country into chaos. They may still be harbouring these ambitions of undoing the
democratic experience, but in the cacophony of a false Mandela nostalgia displayed on July
18, 2018, they have been cowered into hiding their evil intentions.

The Boeremag plotters were not trying something new. In 1998, the late Ronnie Mamoepa told
the TRC hearing of efforts to poison Mandela before his release. He said:

“What is clear is that a leading scientist engaged in these inhuman experiments in the same
way as those who served the Nazi regime in Germany. If ever there was a programme that
truly typified the genocidal programmes of the apartheid regime, this was it.”

The Shell Massacre was a blight on the democratisation road of our country. Many people who
died should not have died. The African National Congress got wind that the demands of His
Majesty The King were a ruse for the IFP to attack the ANC Headquarters. Many of these
demands were to add weight to one major demand: KwaZulu should remain as it was – a
separate state alongside a new Apartheid South Africa. Buthelezi seemed to be ruing the missed
chance of independence ala TBVC “states”. There was also wind that the marchers would
ignore the permission granted by the police. The march’s leaders were intent on passing
through Shell House even when this was according to their permission, out of their route.

Inkatha had asked and had been permitted to end their march in Library Gardens. To show that
there were intelligence agents involved, Ed Tillet, ex-IFP spokesperson then working for
Telkom, informed march leader Themba Khoza that agents provocateurs had infiltrated the
marchers. Ed Tillet braggingly assured South Africans that he had also got the same
intelligence information from “foreign intelligence”. How a Telkom official was linked with
foreign intelligence was part of the jigsaw puzzle of the dark forces that were unleashed against
an imminent democracy.

I think the citing of the presence of agents provocateurs was a pre-emptive justification for the
rerouting of the marchers to Shell House. It would be easy for the Inkatha to say those who
went off route were not their members. The conflation of Inkatha marches with the march of
the Zulus was at the centre of the revelation of agents provocateurs. Inkatha would be able to
say they had no control over what was a Zulu march while at the same time coupling the

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demands of the Zulus with those of Inkatha. Tillet’s revelation and his use of the Telkom title
showed the extent to which the apartheid state roped in its business entities to reverse the march
to democracy. The old hands in the State-owned entities were also profuse in their adulation
for Madiba@100.

Mandela warned the police to protect both person and property of his organisation. The then
Commissioner of Police, Johan van der Merwe promised to do so, but on the day of the march,
only one policeman was visible. That single policeman left the Shell House precinct as soon as
he saw the surging Inkatha supporters. When Mandela confronted van der Merwe about this
deliberate neglect, the Commissioner had no words to say. The police generals who were in
cahoots with van der Merwe to plunge the country into chaos have found a shield in the
widespread “admiration” of Mandela@100.

How one policeman was supposed to protect Shell House from traditional (and modern),
weapon-carrying pumped-up amabutho (wrongly referred to by the media as impis) was
inconceivable. It could only be described in the inner culture of the Apartheid security forces
to compromise to the point of death, those within their rank who might have disagreed with
them.

It might well be that the lone policeman was amongst a few who were still conscientious to his
duties, and to be sent as a singular protector of the whole of Shell House building might have
been to expose him to the danger of the marchers deliberately. These types of behaviour were
not uncommon behaviour among the Apartheid security forces. He would be just a statistic in
the desperate efforts by the Apartheid regime to hold onto power at all costs even as it was
pretending to be negotiating in good faith with its major adversary.

The National Government had wanted the IFP marchers to invade the ANC Headquarters,
destroy information and render the organisation ill-prepared to continue with the negotiations
and ignite a civil war. That Mandela had a Plan B of stationing the ANC protectors to protect
the building if the police did not come was a testament to his vision and lack of trust of the
police. Some of those who orchestrated the failed Shell House invasion were profuse in their
fake adulation for Mandela@100.

The last-minute middle-of-the night passing of the Ingonyama Trust Act was not because of de
Klerk’s sudden love for His Majesty the King. On the contrary, the enactment was to entice the
Zulu “nation” to the side of the National Party in the elections that were to take place a day or
two later. Signed in the middle of the night (Former President Zuma was not the first one to
decide in the middle of the night), the deceptive manoeuvre caught Black South Africans by
surprise. But they were excited by the prospect of voting for the first time in their lives that the
collaborative decision between the IFP and the National Party went unnoticed. Those who
secretly signed the deal in the middle of the night were also profuse in their fake adulation for
the late icon@100.

The “international experts”, led by Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington, federalist in their
disposition, were called to mediate in the impasse caused by the Inkatha Freedom Party’s
impossible secessionist demands. The early departure of the members of this team, except for
Professor Washington Okumo, orchestrated by the dismissal attitude that African National
Congress and National Party negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer respectively, were
a signal of the futility of the mediation.

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How Okumo missed his plane back, and how he was separated from the international team on
their exit, and how he miraculously “bumped into” the leader of the IFP at the airport after
“missing” his plane was a rare “luck” in politics. It did the trick of facilitating the participation
of the IFP in the elections. At the time, the effort to accommodate the IFP promised the National
Party an ally against Mandela’s ANC. Dryden of the Independent raised the fact that the
meeting might not have been perchance and the IFP leader might have been looking for a climb
down from the brinkmanship. According to Dryden, the professor spelt out the end of his
political career if he did not join in the elections, and that the future government would not
treat him kindly if he boycotted the elections.

Who could have orchestrated the fortuitous meeting between the two when it was clear that
Ramaphosa and Meyer had shown the team the exit door? Had the White-preferred Black
leader seen the end of his brinkmanship and he deliberately “perchanced” himself at the airport
where Okumo was? How do passengers, one in the domestic and the other in the international
section meet? Those behind these manoeuvres to limit the majority of the ANC, and perhaps
to ensure that Mandela was robbed of his imminent victory, were singing like a choir in their
adulation for the Mandela.

In spite of all the efforts, April 27, 1994, happened but anti-Mandela episodes and utterances
during Mandela’s 5-year reign continued as a residue of the Afrikaners and most Whites long-
held hatred for the man. Firstly, Mandela himself was cartooned as a baboon. Credit to
Mandela’s resilience and the powers to toss back the insults, coupled with his strong power of
embarrassing retort, he dismissed these baboon caricatures. It left the cartoonists with eggs on
their faces when Mandela said he was happy that he was so popular that even baboons wished
to be handsome like him. The cartoonists and their supporters were also profuse in their praise
for the Mandela@100.

Secondly, Black people who were exercising their rights of demanding salary increases and
better work conditions were told in their faces to go to ask Mandela. Many of these bosses were
profuse in their adulation for Mandela. It was not the kindness of the bosses’ hearts which made
them donate and PR their companies on the back of Mandela’s name. It is because the profits
they have made post-1994 than in the period before were so huge that the “donations” they
make to the Mandela projects are so minuscule to disturb their balance sheets. They may like
their profits and are profuse in their appreciation of a Mandela for them (the profits), but they
hate the democracy he brought about.

Thirdly, farm evictions continue unabated. Even as the White farmers selectively use
Mandela’s name as a sop for their perceived marginalisation and “genocidal attacks” they still
evict farm workers and tenants telling them that they can go to hell because there is no Mandela
to defend them and that they should ask the ANC for new resettlement land.

Even when the farm attacks affect White farm owners and Black workers and tenants, the
narrative of White genocide “after Mandela” continues and is now being spread throughout the
conservative global platforms. Black lives do not matter as the democracy-hating conservatives
travel all over the conservative world decrying their marginalisation and persecution in post-
Mandela South Africa. Just check the right-wing websites, and you will be deceived by the
purported aim of trying to portray every White South African as being on a perpetual run from
the blood smelling hordes of Black South Africans. But the reality will be dumbfounding:
Whites are wealthier, are free from their guilt and have more voice in this democracy than they
were pre-1994.

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Ngcaweni poignantly agrees with my choralization of the Mandela narrative. He says:

“Despite my opening remarks, Mandela is deservedly celebrated by the entire global

community – progressives tyrants, his persecutors, bigots, public servants and even
imperialists.”

I am fascinated by imperialists during the period in question. Two examples of imperial

broadcasting intervention come to mind. Firstly, when American Broadcasting Corporation’s
Ted Koppel interviewed Mandela, the audience was loaded with preselected conservative
questions. One questioner from the Conservative Party was flown from South Africa to
“expose” Mandela as a “communist lackey”. Another question was to force him into
negotiations with a collaborating Black leader just as his (the Black leader’s) party was
butchering communities in the then Natal and KwaZulu homeland and the greater parts of what
was then known as the PWV region.

How this Black leader was introduced into Koppel’s interview was a mystery. But it aimed to
catch Mandela off guard and to tarnish Mandela global audience as an opponent of peace in his
own country. Mandela retorted that he could not respond to the Black leader because their issue
was an internal matter which saved the day and exposed the conservatives for the opportunists
that they are. It pointed to the concerted efforts that conservatives both in South Africa and
abroad, would go to reverse the march that Mandela’s ANC was making towards taking over
power in 1994. Ted Koppel’s questions pandered to the conservative elements, and Mandela’s
retorts did not only “paralyze” Koppel (in Mandela’s own words), but pushed back the
conservative narrative. It further brought down Koppel, hitherto garlanded as a doyen of
journalists to being an ordinary journalist. These conservative elements were also profuse in
their adulation for Mandela@100.

Koppel’s efforts were not the last. On his Australian trip, a television interviewer also waylaid
Mandela with a question from the same collaborating Black leader phoning from South Africa,
asking when Mandela would sit down with him to end the violence in KwaZulu and Natal. It
was not possible for these calls to television stations to be made without the influential
conservative groups which had made it their mission to reduce Mandela global exposure by
trying to elevate the collaborating Black leader to Mandela’s status. In July 2018, all of these
conservatives were profuse in their adulation for Mandela.

The conservatives were of the view that if Mandela was avoiding “sharing the platform” with
the collaborating Black leader South Africa (as an equal), then they would do all that was
necessary to bring this matter to foreign capitals where Mandela was on official visits. If
Mandela could be invited on an official visit to the US, then the conservatives preferred Black
leader of a post-Apartheid South Africa, who by this time had his foreign invitations reduced
by Mandela’s ascendancy, had to be manoeuvred into the visit by “sleight of hand”.

The liberal driven agenda of “creating equality” between the two, Mandela and the
collaborating Black leader, was the so-called urgency of the: “sharing of the platform”. The
thinking went that if the two leaders were seen on a peace stage together, the violence between
Inkatha and ANC supporters would miraculously cease forthwith. This was wishful thinking.
A simple meeting of the two men would not have ended the conflict which he was a proxy in
which forces external to it, in the form of rogue security forces elements, warlords, comtsotsis,
gun-runners, soldiers-of-fortune, askaris etc. had taken charge and had much to gain from it.

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Those that preached the gospel of a “sharing a platform” were throwing Mandela into his own
political Waterloo, but most importantly, they were trying to make him complicit in his own
assassination.

Firstly, in the planned visit by Mandela to Ulundi of automatic weapons (hidden under the
shields) on the day he was supposed to visit there was a display of how Mandela would have
been led on a garden path (rhyming beautifully with Ophathe), a geographical place of betrayal
well known to the Zulus. But Mandela and his stubbornness would triumph over the security
concerns of his minders. He did visit His Majesty the King in Nongoma, but there too the
exposure to assassination was evident when amabutho, pelted his helicopter to the total silence
of those who had advocated for the sharing of the platform.

Secondly, in the second planned “sharing of the platform” at Taylor’s Halt, in the Natal
Midlands, Mandela would have been throwing his bacon onto the fire that had already been lit
by warlords such as the late David Ntombela, Sichizo Zuma and others whose amabutho had
vowed that Mandela would not come out of Taylor’s Halt alive. When the collaborating Black
leader was incensed that Mandela backed out on the eleventh hour, it looked like he (the
collaborating Black leader had no clue what Mandela’s assassination on the already burning
Natal landscape would have had for the political future of the country. When ambitious leaders
become blind to the political futures of their own people, you then begin to agree that
sometimes politics is like law an ass.

It was a pity that Harry Gwala was cited as a stumbling block to the “sharing of the platform”.
If Gwala did warn against Mandela’s Taylor’s Halt sojourn, he did exactly what Mandela’s
security detail warned him about. On Mandela@100, the liberal media which wanted Mandela
to throw himself into the smouldering cauldron of Inkatha amabutho were profuse in their
adulations.

When a Mandela-who-sold-out narrative is being spread, many of the pretenders to his legacy
are merrily chuckling at their sleeves instead of defending it. So, while they “liked” Mandela,
they are also rejoicing at his castigation by ill-informed narratives of politicians who sold out.
You only have to have been around the period of negotiations to understand how Mandela led
the chiselling out a political settlement under difficult circumstances. Not that the naysayers
should be out to defend him, but they are guilty of the dishonesty of wanting to benefit from
the two polemics of a saviour Mandela and a sell-out Mandela. There can be no demonstrable
hypocrisy that the one that wants to benefit both ways.

In future, the ANC should clamp down on the charlatans who are using the Mandela name to
consolidate their position of economic power and Apartheid derived advantages. The
movement must proclaim Mandela as their own, dissuade those who want to appropriate his
name for self-serving reasons while allowing those who genuinely cherish his legacy to be
given adequate space to express their adulation.

Dr Jabulani Mzaliya taught Politics at the University of Zululand (the Umlazi-Durban

Campus). He currently works for the South African Government and writes this article in his
private capacity.