Playing the Enemy by John Carlin

Author:John Carlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2014-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

"ADDRESS THEIR HEARTS"

1994

A simple, low-fat diet, vigorous exercise, fresh sea air, plenty of sleep, regular hours, practically zero stress: prison did have its compensations. It helped explain why Mandela's doctors confirmed the evidence of those who watched him in action during his spectacularly eventful seventy-sixth year: he had the constitution of a fit man of fifty.

Nineteen ninety-three had been eventful; 1994 was shaping up to be more arduous still. Mandela was getting up at 4:30 every morning as a matter not only of routine, but of necessity. The black and white right were still refusing to sign up for the elections, and threatened war if they went ahead without them; in the event that the first ever multiracial vote did go ahead on April 27, as scheduled, there was the matter of a national election campaign to occupy himself with, and assuming that passed off successfully, he would then have a country to run – one that would present all the usual problems faced by countries everywhere, plus the certainty that the fundamental problem of stability, the prospect of counterrevolutionary terrorism of some sort, would not be going away.

The good news was that Constand Viljoen was losing his enthusiasm for war. Since his call to arms at Potchefstroom he had developed – with Mandela's prodding – a sharper sense of the bloodbath he might unleash, and he was beginning to see that a black-led government mightn't be as apocalyptic as he had first imagined. Yet Viljoen continued to urge his people to mobilize for war. "If you want to argue with a wolf, make sure you have a pistol in your hand," was his motto. The problem was that he was not entirely certain anymore whether the wolf was a wolf, or a hound that could be tamed. He liked Mandela but had his doubts about the ANC; he worried that the leaders he was meeting with, like the ANC's wily number two, Thabo Mbeki, might be abusing his bona fides, might seek to trick him into selling out his people. And there was another thing. If the ANC was playing an elaborately deceitful game, if they really did mean to convert South Africa to communism and exact terrible vengeance on whites but were pretending not to, the SADF high command had fallen for it completely. General Georg Meiring, Viljoen's successor as head of the armed forces, had come out with a speech just before Christmas 1993in which he had pledged his support for the new constitution. (One inducement to do so was a threat from the progressive-minded chief of the air force that he would bomb him if he turned the army against the new order.) Viljoen now knew that if the Volksfront went to war they would probably face the might of the same military he had served with such distinction and pride. Certain sectors of the SADF might still be relied upon to fight alongside the Boer resistance, but short of a progressively less likely coup at the top, the institution appeared to be aligned with Mandela and De Klerk.

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