Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin

laid the trap, Mandela lured the major into it. Gingerly, he steered him into his cell, casually mentioning that he had a little problem, one that he felt sure the major would not wish a rugby man like him to endure. He told him that he received more food for lunch than for dinner, and for this reason he had gotten into the habit of keeping some of his lunch until the evening came. The trouble was that by then the food was cold. But there was a solution, Mandela said. He had heard about a device called a hot plate. It seemed like just the thing to resolve his dilemma. “Major,” he said, “would it be at all possible for you to help me obtain one?”
    To Brand’s surprise, Van Sittert capitulated without a struggle. “Brand,” he ordered, “go and get Mandela a hot plate!”
    He got all that and more, meeting again secretly with Kobie Coetsee, this time at his home. The minister, anxious to afford Mandela the dignity he saw he deserved, arranged for the prison authorities to dress him in a jacket for the first time in twenty-three years, and to drive him over not in a prison van but in a stately sedan. At this second encounter the content of the discussion was more explicitly political. Coetsee, pleased, reported to Botha that prison did indeed seem to have mellowed Mandela, that he was not the firebrand terrorist type anymore, that he seemed willing to explore an accommodation with the whites.
    Mandela was rewarded with more privileges. Brand and Van Sittert were astounded to receive orders that Mandela be taken on drives around Cape Town. A small committee of Botha’s confidants who were in on the secret talks (Coetsee; Niël Barnard, the head of intelligence; and one or two others) feared that if they let Botha’s full cabinet know about the talks, someone might leak the story to the press. Even so, they considered it so important for Mandela to start getting acclimated to life outside prison that they even authorized his prison minders to let him go for short strolls on his own, mingling with unsuspecting locals. Once Christo Brand took him to his home, to introduce Mandela to his wife and children. Another time, two other prison officers drove him all the way to a town called Paternoster, seventy-five miles north of Cape Town, on the Atlantic Ocean. As Mandela strolled alone on the town’s pristine white beach, a bus-load of German tourists suddenly appeared. The two prison officials panicked, fearing he would be recognized. They need not have worried. The tourists, enraptured by the wild beauty of the setting, snapped photos, ignoring the gray-haired black man nearby. Mandela could have rushed into their midst and jumped on their bus, in search of political asylum, but he didn’t want to get out of prison just yet, despite the clamor that had been building around the world for his release. He could do more good, he saw, by staying inside, talking.

CHAPTER III
    SEPARATE AMENITIES
    Justice Bekebeke was an angry young black man in November 1985, one of millions. Tall and stick-thin, like an African carving, he had a courteous manner and a soothing baritone voice that when he spoke carried a wisdom, hard won, beyond his twenty-four years.
    Paballelo was where Bekebeke lived, a treeless township five hundred miles north of Mandela’s Cape Town prison and five hundred west of Johannesburg, on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in the back of beyond. A black township in South Africa was always paired with a white town. But while the townships invariably had a lot more people in them, only the white towns appeared on the maps. The townships were the black shadows of the towns. Paballelo was the black shadow of Upington.
    Upington was a stark caricature of an apartheid town. An incurious visitor to a big city like Johannesburg might have missed the system’s crasser racist edges. But in Upington those edges were sharp and blatant—“Slegs Blankes” (“Whites Only”) signs at the public toilets, bars, drinking