Mandela Nelson - The end of apartheid: diary of a revolution

This book seeks to provide an insiders account of the end of apartheid, based on a host of meetings which, as British ambassador to South Africa, I had at the time with the main actors in this drama PW Botha, FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and with many other less well-known figures, who also played important parts in getting rid of a fundamentally abhorrent system sooner and with less bloodshed than most outsiders had dared to hope. There are plenty of heroes in this narrative, along with some cases of pure evil.

Before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, he was told by Helen Suzman of the efforts the British government had been making to help secure his release. When he was released, he needed and received our help in a number of very practical ways. Above all, he sought our support in helping to overcome problems in the negotiations with the government. He did so because he felt that, at this time, we had more influence than others with FW de Klerk and his colleagues, telling me on one occasion that he regarded us as the principal supporters of the negotiating process that, however, was played out entirely between South Africans.

The portrait of Mandela that the reader will find in these pages is not the conventional hagiography. He could be dogmatic and at times distressingly partisan. Egged on by his colleagues in the ANC, he was at times unfair to De Klerk and forgetful of what he owed him. As he confessed to me, he also made a major mistake in failing for nearly a year to meet with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who had refused to negotiate with the government until Mandela was released.

Yet my admiration for him was second to no ones. Having had the chance to get to know him well before many others, I never ceased to be impressed, and at times amused, at the effect he had on normally hard-boiled visitors, who almost invariably became weak at the knees in the presence of the great man.

As Desmond Tutu observed of him, this diamond had just one flaw, which was to put his trust in colleagues who did not always deserve it. He did so not just out of loyalty, but also from political calculation. Mandela was conscious of the fears of his ANC colleagues in Lusaka that he might start negotiating with the government on his own, and also that the township youth and half his colleagues in the national leadership had more radical agendas than he did. This led him at times to engage in rhetoric and defend positions he did not really believe in, telling me, in one very revealing encounter, that a leader who lost the support of his followers would have nothing better to do than write his memoirs.

Mandela was a far wilier politician, and could be less saintly, than some other portrayals would have us believe, though he did indeed have some saintly characteristics. For at the time there were two Mandelas: in public, much of the time, there was the harshly aggressive, apparently unquestioning spokesman of his party, reading out speeches written by the apparatchiks; and then there was the authentic Mandela, generous in spirit, libertarian by instinct, and inspirational to everyone he met including me. He used this dual personality quite deliberately to keep his supporters in line behind him. When the chips were down, as in his response to the assassination of Chris Hani, it was the real Mandela who came to the fore.

The reader will find in this account of a series of meetings with him a fundamental difference of approach between Mandela and those of his colleagues whose overriding objective was to win power and hold on to it. Much as he revered the ANC, Mandela, as he showed in government, did not believe in the supremacy of the party over the institutions of the country, including the judiciary and the press. He told Helen Suzman and others that he was relieved that his party did not achieve a two-thirds majority in the first democratic elections, as he wanted there to be no temptation to change the constitution. The least power-hungry of political leaders, he flatly refused to serve more than one term as President.