By Mick Krever, CNN
He was responding to the criticism by some that Mandela gave
up too much in the talks that brought down hundreds of years of minority white
rule.
“Rwanda would have been child’s play if we had a race war
here,” Maharaj said. “And there were times that we were on the brink of that.”
Maharaj would serve in Mandela’s cabinet, and is now
spokesman for President Jacob Zuma. When he was released from prison in 1976,
Maharaj smuggled out a draft of the manuscript that would become Mandela’s
autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
“We had dreamt of an insurrection, and an insurrection
movement was possible,” he said. “But it was the leadership of Mandela and the
ANC, which said, ‘No,’ keep your eyes trained on the negotiation.”
Maharaj said that despite all the hardship of political
imprisonment – including backbreaking work breaking stones – he was grateful
for the life he had been given.
“Whenever I go back and I reflect on Robben Island I only
think of the good times,” he said. “If we have been defeated I think we’d only
see the pain.”
“To me, I had free food, free board and lodge, free exercise,
plenty of sunshine, and I’m still alive. … I look back at my life and say,
‘What a privilege.’”
Part of the world’s fascination with Mandela stems from his
ability to have come out of 27 years of imprisonment with so little bitterness.
Maharaj said that he believed only 5% of his fellow political
prisoners came out bitter.
In prison, he told Amanpour, Mandela taught him how to take
on the apartheid enemy.
“Mandela honed himself by understanding the enemy. He taught
me in prison, and forced me to study Afrikaans, and read Afrikaans poetry.”
Maharaj said Mandela told him you must understand the enemy
in order to defeat it.
“What we learned by looking at the history of the whites,
which Mandela epitomized, was that the result of the war between the Afrikaner
and the British had left a legacy of hatred. And we wanted to avoid that.”
Twenty years later, and as South Africa grapples with a
reality without Mandela, many say that the promises of the Rainbow Nation have
not been delivered.
Maharaj, who works for the current government, said much more
time will be needed.
“We were conditioned for more than three centuries – every
ethnic group – to think only of their own and see the other with hatred and
fear,” he said. “We cannot remove that in 19 years.”
“What we achieved so far is more than what any other country
in its first 19 years of independence has achieved.”
“And I think that we have got a lot of mistakes, a lot of
acts of omission and as of commission. But that’s in the nature of work in
progress.”
