By Mick Krever, CNN
In his first interview since Nelson Mandela’s death, Cyril
Ramaphosa – the late president’s closest confidant during the negotiations that
brought an end to apartheid – said that the man known by his clan name of
Madiba was “nearly everything to many South Africans.”
“He's been a father of the nation, the builder of the South
African new nation,” he said. “And he has been a mentor, a comrade, a friend, a
reconciler.”
Ramaphosa is now deputy leader of the African National
Congress. It is no secret that he was Mandela’s preferred successor when he
left office in 1999, and Ramaphosa may yet become president of South Africa one
day.
When Mandela was still in prison, during the 17 years that he
would eventually serve, the future president decided to reach out unilaterally
to the apartheid government.
“Whilst he was in prison, he saw the conflict rising and
rising on an annual basis between the oppressor and the oppressed,” Ramaphosa
said.
The only way the cycle could be ended, Mandela decided, was
through negotiations with the hated regime.
“And he reached out to them. He reached out to [South African
President] P.W. Botha without even discussing it with his other colleagues in
prison” or the exiled ANC leadership.
“And for some reason, he knew that they would trust him so
much that they would know he would not be selling out or going out on a whim of
his own.”
Botha was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who seemed more open to
talks, but they were by no means a walk in the park.
“They were quite tough, and anybody who has negotiated with
Nelson Mandela or against Nelson Mandela – I would have felt a great pity for
them,” Ramaphosa said.
“Whatever he negotiated he made sure that he stuck to
principle and he won the argument. But at the same time, he always gave an
allowance to his counterparty to go away from the negotiating table having
obtained some measure of victory or something that he can sell to his side.”
“So he was a negotiator par excellence.”
Ramaphosa was lead negotiator for the ANC, and says that
there was so much violence at the time it was “a miracle” that a deal was
reached.
“Nelson Mandela just stayed the course and said the victory
for all our people – even those who will have departed – would be to bring an
end to the nightmare of apartheid.”
And it really was a nightmare.
The regime’s will was “enforced through the jackboot, through
removals, as they embarked on their social engineering,” he said.
“They moved people from where they had been born, where they
had grown up, and moved them to the dusty, arid parts of the country.”
Ramaphosa and his family, too, were forcibly moved out of
Johannesburg.
“Trucks would just arrive in the morning and just load up
everything that you possessed, destroyed the houses, and you were just moved,”
he said. “Because they were making way for white people to live peacefully
without being disturbed by the presence of black people in a particular area.”
“Black people in South Africa knew no rights…They lost their
property, they lost their dignity, and they also lost their lives.”
Mandela was able to overcome that reality and forgive “not
only his jailers, but also his oppressors.”
He has taught all of South Africa to be “a forgiving nation”
and “walk along the path of reconciliation.”
“This is the moment when as we put him to rest, all of us as
South Africans, will be saying, ‘Let us reconcile, let us transform our country
to properly build it into the South Africa of Nelson Mandela's dreams.’”
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