During the 27 years of his incarceration, Nelson Mandela was among the most spied-on human beings in history.
On Robben Island, where he served the first 18 years of his sentence, his cell was bugged. When he was moved to Pollsmoor prison, each of his visits was recorded and either transcribed or paraphrased by prison officials. Summaries of what he and his visitors said found their way into literally thousands of top-secret memos.
The cottage he moved to on the grounds of Victor Verster Prison in the late 1980s was laced with recording devices. Even the tree under which he sat in the garden was wired for sound. Two rival teams of bureaucrats scrupulously wrote down what he said, one from the prisons service, the other from the national intelligence service.
For all the energy the apartheid government invested in monitoring him, how much did it actually learn? This question struck me the other day when I came across two different accounts of the same meeting that took place in Mandela’s Victor Verster cottage in December 1989.
The occasion was a visit to Mandela by a delegation of senior trade unionists, among them Cyril Ramaphosa.
The first account, reproduced in Jan-Ad Stemmet and Riaan de Villiers’s new book, Prisoner 913, is a diligent summary of the meeting penned by the prison official listening in. It sticks faithfully to the substantive content of what was said. Mandela stated, for instance, that while FW de Klerk was serious about reform, his aim was to modernise apartheid without destroying it. He also said that if the government were to meet the conditions imposed by the ANC, the two sides should talk.
The other account is Ramaphosa’s, shared with a confidante shortly after the encounter took place. Before meeting Mandela, Ramaphosa had told his confidante that he was going “to tell the old man to stop talking to the enemy”, as his interlocutor would remember it years later. At the time, rumours about Mandela’s engagement with the government were swirling around the activist circles.
Months earlier, Govan Mbeki, who had spent years with Mandela on Robben Island, had said that he could not be trusted and had urged activists, Ramaphosa among them, to cut all ties with him. These details aside, Mandela was on the brink of exercising enormous power and activists simply did not know him; they wanted urgently to take the measure of him. These first encounters with him at Victor Verster were thus of the utmost importance.
After the December meeting, Ramaphosa’s interlocutor asked him whether he had “told the old man to stop talking to the enemy”. Oh no, Ramaphosa reportedly replied. Mandela walked straight up to him, asked after his wife and his children by name, discussed his wife’s career, his children’s schooling. Ramaphosa, drowning in charm, was unable to interrogate Mandela about anything.
This exchange of course occurred before the meeting formally began. It was mere chit-chat, and so the prison official taking notes decided not to record it. But for Ramaphosa it was probably the most instructive moment in the encounter. For what he had witnessed was both more ethereal and more powerful than anything disclosed by the substance of a discussion. Mandela had showed him that he was an astute reader of personal currents, that he could use charisma to dictate the outcome of an exchange. Ramaphosa had learned, in other words, that Mandela was supremely skilled.
The then justice minister, Kobie Coetsee, who had pored over every report of his prisoner’s conversations, was clueless about what was going on. He would write in a memo at that time that Mandela was a spent force and that his organisation would soon cast him aside.
Perhaps if the official taking notes had been a more perceptive human being, Coetsee would have been given a better picture. But that is quite an ask for a harassed prison warder. As things stood, the avalanche of listening devices and the phalanx of listeners illuminated nothing.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.
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