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For years of my life, Nelson Mandela was in prison. He was imprisoned on Robben Island. He was a mystical figure to all of us. He was released from prison in 1990, and he became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, and I would like to share with you the story of my association with Nelson Mandela working on a variety of projects.
I was invited to dinner by two individuals, Irene and Clive Menell, in their beautiful home in a place called Wynberg. They had invited me and five others to join them for dinner with Nelson Mandela. Mandela wanted to ask me to do something really quite special, which was to become president of the University of the Western Cape.
In the course of the dinner, I learned a lot of things about him. I mean, dinner with six was quite special. You’re quite close to him. You can see what he’s doing. And he just has this presence. He just [00:01:18] exudes charm, confidence, sincerity. He comes from a royal background. He’s authentic and he is also physically a big man, a former boxer. He breathes oxygen into a room. He doesn’t suck it out of the room. He does background reading on his guests. He asks questions about your family. So quite an overpowering kind of experience to have dinner with him actually, which is of course a very intimate thing to do with anybody. I discovered that he likes Vin de Constance, which is a very sweet wine that Napoleon also liked.
I, in the end, did not become president of the university because I didn’t think it was right for me at the time, and essentially said no to Mandela on that particular issue, and he never held it against me.
His office followed up with a further request for me to run constitutional rights workshops for minority populations. They were fearful of black majority rule, and for the Indian [00:02:27] and colored populations in particular. The colored population from which I come are the descendants of slaves, and not seen as black within the context of South Africa, so they’re called colored. Mandela’s office wanted me to run workshops to essentially reassure those populations that they will not be discriminated against and that they need not fear black majority rule, and the only way in which one can guarantee that is to persuade people that a constitution, which protects individual citizens’ rights against state abuse, is the best way to have that protection, as long as you enforce the Constitution. It requires separation of powers. It requires a strong judiciary that’s willing to, in fact, speak up when the rights are being threatened.
So we ran workshops. Mandela started the process by giving the keynote address at a conference we organized. I was really happy to write the speech for him and speech writers will tell you it’s a particular skill. You need to place yourself in somebody else’s [00:03:42] shoes. You have to suppress your own ego, and you have to essentially align with that person’s manner of delivering words, get the cadences right, and so on and so forth. So it’s a really interesting exercise. I got to know Mandela extremely well because I wrote that speech for him.
I had a more formal request from his Minister of Home Affairs to lead a task team to rewrite South Africa’s immigration laws, which were discriminatory based on race and ethnicity and origin. Essentially, South Africa under apartheid wanted only Anglo-Saxon Protestants to come and keep everybody else out so that had to be redone. And then we had to set up a system of refugee protection. They didn’t have such a system because nobody obviously during apartheid wanted to flee to South Africa. They wanted to flee from South Africa. And so we established that. That was a major policy intervention both in terms of de-racializing and taking ethnicity and origin out of the [00:04:52] immigration laws, and then establishing a new Refugee Protection Act, funded, by the way, by the Canadian government.
So to lead a task team for Mandela’s government became an immensely valuable thing for me to do as a person and given my academic background as a specialist in labor migration, which I was at the time, to be able to use my skills to contribute to South Africa’s new panoply of laws that was befitting a constitutional system of governance.
There was a really interesting effort at the time to involve the white right wing in the negotiations for the new South Africa. This takes us back to the period before the elections were held in 1994, between Mandela’s release in 1990 and 1994 we were in a transition. We did not have a single government, so things were in flux. Most of our efforts were to get all the [00:06:14] important constituents in the countries to be part of the new election, making sure that everybody was in the tent, doesn’t matter what your political opinions were. So if you were white and you had right wing ideas or black with right wing or left-wing ideas, everybody had to be inside the tent. We had two constituencies that were very resistant. One was the Zulu-based party that Mangosuthu Buthelezi ran called the Inkatha Freedom Party. They were resistant. They didn’t want to participate for a variety of reasons. And the other was the extreme right wing on the white population side. The person who led the white right wing was the head of South African Defense Force. So he was head of the army, Constand Viljoen was his name. He believed that white South Africans should get a homeland of their own. So they wanted their own territory. We had different views, obviously, but that’s what he wanted.
I was a leader of something called Institute for Democracy in South Africa at the time and our job was to [00:07:25] bring the warring parties together as a technical support agency and we had to get Mandela to speak to Constand Viljoen. They had to sit around a table because they had to participate in the election. So what you have to imagine is the head of the South African army, a very, very, very strong army at the time, together with somebody who was not yet elected president, Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress party, together to talk about how they’re going to resolve this particular issue. And it really comes down to the following, that when it was time to serve tea, Mandela actually got up and served Constand Viljoen with a cup of tea. So here you have this extraordinary man, who spent 27 years in prison for his principles, wanting to meet with a person who did not want a democratic South Africa to happen, and represented a powerful constituency in the country. So powerful, they could sabotage the entire effort. And given the race relations in [00:08:27] the country, where whites were dominant and blacks were supposed to be subordinate, the most extraordinary black person gets up to serve a white man tea. Now, the symbolism of that is extraordinary, and it completely softened that man’s heart, Constand Viljoen. That was an extraordinary act. They then saw one another as human beings with the same desires and the same wish for future South Africa and began negotiating.
In the end, Mandela said to the general, your army is far more powerful than ours, and we will never defeat you on the battlefield, but I want you to remember three things. The first is that you can’t kill us all. You just can’t. And us is not just South African black people, black people on the continent. The second is that history is on our side. It’s not on your side. You are isolated, pariah in the world, and the third thing you should remember is that we are mutually [00:09:35] interdependent. All the talents and assets of everybody must be put together in order to have a real future. And the white population has enormous education and technical assets. I won’t judge you for why you have it in such abundance, but we need you.
And they kind of stared at one another realizing the powerful interdependence that South Africans have. He did say that since you want a white homeland, well, I think there should be an avenue for you to pursue that. If you have enough support that’s demonstrated, and if you are able to convince the majority of your constituency. They created a little white homeland that was in the middle of the desert that didn’t go anywhere called Orania, but the fact is, the outcome of that meeting was that Constand Viljoen then participated in the election.
If you think about today, and comparisons globally, just to realize how important that was for us, that we actually established something called the Conservative Dialogue. We wanted to [00:10:50] talk to right wing people. We wanted to understand their concerns and their interests, not dismiss it, not talk down to people, but to actually hear what the concerns were and try and meet those concerns where there’s an alignment with good democratic principles. It’s a really important thing to do if you want unity. If you want division, then you’ve got a problem in the future and you’re leaving that problem to your children to solve.
I went on to become the co-editor of Mandela’s presidential speeches, which we then published, now in three editions, by Little, Brown and Company. The idea for it came from the Minister of Education at the time, to whom I served as an advisor, Kader Asmal, who wanted to give Mandela, Madiba as we called him, his 85th birthday present. And we thought, wow, what would be nice for him to have? So, a colleague of mine, David Chidester, was a professor of religious studies at the University of Cape Town says, why don’t we look at his best presidential speeches, organize it in some kind of thematic way, ask Kofi Annan, who was head of the UN at the time, and Bill [00:12:07] Clinton to write forwards. And then we gave it to Mandela for his 85th birthday.
What was great about Mandela as an individual was his complete honesty, his sincerity, his resilience. I admire him greatly. He had weaknesses. He used to say, I’m not a saint, you know. When he was president, he was president in a certain way as a great leader among global leaders, but he was essentially a global leader. Day to day government he left to others and people criticize him for that sometimes. He was by no means perfect, but he was exemplary in ways at a time when South Africa needed it, and he was very clear about wanting to set an example.
He turned up in court one day when he was charged by the head of South Africa’s Rugby Union for being racially discriminatory in his actions as president and he was asked to appear in court. He was furious about being asked to appear in court.[00:13:18] And, his legal advisor had an ongoing debate about why he should appear in court. And in the end, he said, yes, I need to set an example that I am not above the law.
He insisted on only serving one term, on a continent where there are lifelong presidents and prime ministers. He wanted to set an example. We wish he stayed another because that would’ve embedded the democracy even more. But he was 72 when he first became president. So, he would’ve been 77, which if I think about the leaders today is possible, but he wanted to set an example.
Mandela’s first institute that he established was called the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and it funds the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital in Johannesburg, which is a specialist hospital in the country.
He established three institutes, right? The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, The Nelson Mandela Foundation, and what’s known as The Mandela Rhodes Foundation. But his first one was the children’s one. That tells you a lot. When he had [00:14:34] his birthday parties, he would invite close to 300 to 400 children from all across the country to come to his birthday parties because the man adored kids.
When he left office, he became a UNICEF ambassador, and people asked him, you know, why, why do you have the special love for kids? Which is a kind of a silly question to ask. And he said, well, I want you to imagine spending 27 years in a prison, never heard a sound of a child. Didn’t hear a child laugh or cry, or be playful, and so that creates a certain poverty in one soul. So that was the man.
I think about him when I encounter an experience in the world that reminds me of his wisdom. Things like always respect the language others speak because at the time in South Africa there were young black kids during the Soweto Riots. They were forced to learn Afrikaans and they started saying that Afrikaans is a language of the oppressor and Afrikaans should not exist, and that they don’t [00:15:43] respect people who speak Afrikaans.
Generally in the world, people associate Afrikaans with Afrikaners, white people, and Afrikaans is often seen as a white person’s language, partly because the apartheid regime imposed that language on black people and politicized it essentially. Now, the truth is that most people who speak Afrikaans are not white. And in fact, Afrikaans is my first language. Anybody born in the rural part of South Africa speaks Afrikaans. And in fact, it’s partly a slave language. There’s some key parts of the vocabulary that are Malaysian because of that history. He thought that language was the avenue into people’s soul, and he would say, don’t insult people’s language because language is what dignifies you and makes you human. So he learned Afrikaans in prison. When he came out, some of his speeches were given in Afrikaans. So that was Mandela’s magic in a way that for me was quite personal.
I often think about how smart he was as a politician, not by being insincere, but he could place himself [00:17:00] in somebody else’s shoes in a way that I think was incredible. His quite keen capability of understanding both the politics and the sort of culture of bringing people together.
One episode was when the South African rugby team, the Springboks, which is a sport dominated by white Afrikaans speakers, were playing for the Rugby World Cup in 1995, so that’s a year after South Africa’s election. Things had not settled down. There wasn’t integration happening yet, it was just the beginning. He was working hard to build a nation. And so the Springboks were playing against The All Blacks, the New Zealand team, and guess who turned up right at the beginning of the game? Nelson Mandela turns up wearing a Springbok jersey and a Springbok cap, and he goes up to the captain of the Springbok team right at the opening ceremony,
[Archival news clip]: The president to the captain.
and he shakes everybody’s hand and greets them in Afrikaans, and it was captured on television for all South Africans and the whole world to see.
[Archival news clip]: And Nelson Mandela is cheering along with the whole of the stadium.
It was unbelievable.
[Archival news clip]: A sea of flags. Wonderful moment for the whole of South Africa.
I suppose the day had to come when Mandela died. I was in Mauritius running a workshop when the news came over. A moment of great sadness. I was at the time both a member of Parliament and the chairman of the second largest political party, the Democratic Alliance in South Africa, and the leadership of all political parties were of course asked to come to his funeral. There was a lot of discussion behind the scenes well before Mandela’s funeral to do with the writing of his obituaries and how that funeral will be held. Will they put his body in a coffin and place a coffin in the train and let the train run from Johannesburg to his place of burial, which is his hometown Qunu? How that’s to be managed is a hell of an exercise.
So I went to his funeral in 2013 and that was in deep rural South Africa. Took quite a bit of effort to get there and it, of course, incredibly well attended. [00:19:35]
The sermon given by Archbishop Desmond Tutu was quite a moment.
[Archival news clip]: Desmond Tutu: We promise God that we are going to follow the example of Nelson Mandela.
At the funeral I met with Thabo Mbeki after falling out with him. I saw him and I went to greet him. He was very cordial and nice and given the circumstance, you know, burying Mandela, it was a moment of peace. That was Mandela’s shadow and still is. [00:20:18]