Mandela of S. Africa: Symbol of Struggle, Key to Peace

Twenty-five years ago Wednesday, when South African authorities arrested Nelson Mandela, they believed they had broken the African National Congress and brought to a quick end its “armed struggle” against minority white rule.

Today, Mandela remains a prisoner, serving a life sentence for sabotage in an effort to overthrow the government. But now the government of President Pieter W. Botha finds itself effectively a political hostage to Mandela.

Although locked away in a top-floor cellblock of Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town, Mandela, who turned 69 last month, is at once the symbol of blacks’ struggle against apartheid and, many believe, the key to an early and peaceful resolution of the prolonged crisis in South Africa.

Until Mandela and other black leaders are freed, say even the black moderates who generally cooperate with the government, no real negotiations can begin on a new, multiracial political system, and Botha sees negotiations as the only way forward for the country.

President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, urging Mandela’s freedom, have told Botha that with his release, the international community would support efforts at a peaceful resolution of South Africa’s problems and end its growing isolation.

Even many white South Africans, including prominent businessmen, clergy, academics and editors as well as the government’s liberal critics, now see Mandela’s release as perhaps the best chance they have at a breakthrough toward resolving the country’s future peacefully.

And Botha himself, attempting to break this impasse, has publicly offered Mandela his freedom several times in the last 2 1/2 years--but always on condition that Mandela first formally renounce violence in the struggle against apartheid.

This condition Mandela firmly rejects, arguing that as a prisoner he cannot freely negotiate what would be a major ANC concession.

If he came out of prison, Mandela has told the government in effect, it will have to be on his terms--complete freedom to lead his people and to speak for them.

If he were to enter into negotiations, it would also have to be on his terms: the abolition of apartheid, the legalization of the African National Congress, the release of other political prisoners, the return of political exiles and a commitment in principle to the one-person, one-vote democracy sought by the ANC.

Looking for ways to break the deadlock, two Cabinet ministers said last month that terms of Mandela’s release could be an item on the agenda for the “talks about talks” that the government wants to initiate in the next two to three months.

The government is also willing, one minister added, to talk with Mandela and other political prisoners during this preliminary phase. And a third Cabinet member acknowledged recently that he had held discussions with Mandela, but he refused to provide any details.

“Without Nelson Mandela and the other leaders still in prison, none of us can participate in any of these talks,” one black mayor said after meeting with government officials. “We would be seen as usurpers, and whatever we agreed to would be rejected by the community. . . .

“If there are even to be these ‘talks about talks,’ ” he added, “the government will have to deal with the Mandela issue as the first priority, but it is a difficult question because it leads immediately to that of unbanning the ANC and then to the ANC’s armed struggle. So far, there is no give on either side.”

Mandela’s importance was further underscored by a special Commonwealth commission, the Eminent Persons Group, that visited him in prison last year during its attempt to promote negotiations between the government and the ANC. It found him “a unifying, commanding and popular leader” and “an outstandingly able and sincere person whose qualities of leadership are self-evident.”

“To disregard Nelson Mandela by continuing his imprisonment would be to discard an essential and heroic figure in a political settlement in South Africa,” the commission said in its report. “His freedom is a key component in any hope of a peaceful resolution of a conflict which otherwise will prove all-consuming.”

Mandela and the exiled ANC leadership continue, however, to reject the government’s conditions for his release while keeping open the possibility of eventual negotiations.

‘Not a Very Good Deal’

“It is not that we don’t want to talk--because we do,” Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s information director, said in a recent interview. “What the Pretoria regime is offering is simply not a very good deal. Even with a few concessions, mini-concessions really, P. W. Botha is asking us to give up the military struggle just to sit down and talk while it gives us nothing in return.

“We say, ‘OK, let’s talk, without preconditions, about ending the violence and moving forward.’ And if they want to demonstrate their good will and to promote the peaceful resolution of the conflict in our country, then let them release Mandela and the other political prisoners, unban the ANC and lift the state of emergency.”

But the government continues to insist on the renunciation of violence, both out of principle and in recognition of sheer political realities.

“If we released Mandela unconditionally, as many people even in our own (National) party urge, and he resumes, as he would, what he was doing in 1962, what would we do then--rearrest him?” asked a member of Botha’s Cabinet recently, asking not to be quoted by name. “Imagine the outcry around the world, imagine the violence there could be here!”

There would be no point in freeing Mandela, other knowledgeable officials said, unless the government were also willing to legalize the ANC, outlawed in 1960, and to include it in negotiations for a new political system.

“When the state president says Mandela must renounce violence, he knows that it means rejecting the course the ANC has followed for a quarter of a century and a course that Mandela himself set for the ANC,” a senior official commented, “and that makes it very, very difficult.

“But this is really meant to be a return to that point before positions hardened on all sides and to engage in the dialogue that we should have begun way back then.”

Helen Suzman, a Progressive Federal Party member of Parliament, who has met several times with Mandela and regards him as both an impressive political leader and a moderate black nationalist rather than a Communist, said she most regrets that Botha has not already talked with Mandela. “It’s a real pity. Had the state president met him, it is possible that (Botha’s) views might be different.”

The government fears that widespread disturbances might follow Mandela’s release--rallies of a million people in Soweto, the black ghetto outside Johannesburg, marches on the capital, Pretoria, and a resurgence of violence across the country.

A year and a half ago, Pretoria approached the ANC indirectly proposing exile, or “an extended period of travel abroad,” for Mandela if he were released, according to those familiar with the contacts. The ANC, while rejecting exile, suggested quiet talks on the whole issue, including government fears of unrest after Mandela’s release. Such a move would have led to broader negotiations, these sources said, but this was not pursued.

The government has also proposed several times directly to Mandela that he go into exile, either abroad or in the Transkei, the nominally independent Xhosa tribal homeland where he was born and where his family have been the traditional rulers. But he has rejected those conditions, too.

Another government fear is that Mandela, although healthy and fit despite his age and long years in prison, might die behind bars. Greater unrest than the country has yet experienced could follow, according to political observers here, and his relatively moderate views would be lost.

“One cannot help but be impressed by his lack of bitterness and moderation in everything he says,” Suzman commented.

Gains Political Stature

Mandela’s repeated refusals to compromise, even to gain his own freedom, have added to his political stature, particularly among militant black youths who were born after his 1962 arrest and who have never seen or heard him.

Stories about Mandela’s strength of character, even in the face of harsh prison conditions, are now part of the political folklore of South Africa as those jailed with him, particularly on Robben Island, the prison colony off Cape Town, tell of his leadership.

Even his jailers and government officials have come to respect him, referring to him as “Mr. Mandela” and fussing over his health and conditions of his imprisonment. Hendrik J. Coetsee, the minister of justice, said after discussions with him that he was “carrying this burden (of continued imprisonment) in an admirable manner.”

“Historians will regard this as the time of Mandela, of a man who sacrificed his own freedom for a people striving for freedom,” his lawyer, Ismail Ayob, said in Johannesburg this week. “He is a man whose resolve remains unbroken.”

Mandela was arrested on Aug. 5, 1962, by security police at a roadblock at Howick Falls in Natal province while on the way to Durban, for leading 17 months of underground operations as the commander of Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing formed with the help of the South African Communist Party after the ANC was banned in 1960.

Despite an intensive manhunt, he had eluded arrest by using many disguises--he was acting as a chauffeur for a white ANC sympathizer when arrested--and by moving constantly as he oversaw a campaign of bombings and sabotage against government offices, particularly police and military facilities, and economic targets such as electrical substations.

The information that led to his arrest may have come from an American intelligence agent assigned to the U.S. Consulate General in Durban, according to reports published last year. The agent, who maintained contacts with the ANC and other leftist groups, reportedly told friends at a farewell party some months later that he had tipped off security police. Now retired in Colorado, the former diplomat has denied that he was involved in Mandela’s arrest.

Mandela was first tried, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of inciting a general strike in 1961 and leaving the country illegally to seek arms, money and other support for the ANC in Africa and Europe. In 1964, he and six others were convicted of sabotage--on charges the judge described as “tantamount to high treason”--and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mandela did not deny his role as an organizer and the commander of Spear of the Nation, but he attempted to justify the sabotage campaign, just as the ANC defends its limited guerrilla warfare today, as the only course left open to blacks to gain the equal political rights they sought.

Others Also Jailed

Jailed with him were Walter Sisulu, then the ANC’s general secretary; Govan Mbeki, its organizer in eastern Cape province and the father of ANC Information Director Thabo Mbeki; Ahmed Kathrada, an Indian youth leader; a white Communist, and three other black activists.

With the ANC outlawed and many of its top leaders jailed, the ruling National Party was confident at the time that, as a party newspaper put it, the government had thwarted “a diabolical plan to initiate a black revolution designed to lead to the surrender of the free white way of life.”

But Mandela’s importance has grown, rather than lessened, during his long years in prison. His political vision, as articulated at his trial, of a democratic South Africa without racial discrimination remains the guiding philosophy of the ANC and its supporters.

He is responsible for training two generations of activists who form the backbone of both the ANC and the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups inside the country. And for black youths he is the symbol of their determination to bring apartheid to an end, whatever the personal cost.