The foreign secretary’s words slowly sunk in and intruded into his thoughts. He turned to look at his foreign secretary’s face in the light of the dancing flames.
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“There is a green poisonous snake by my feet,” said Pik Botha once again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a big mamba.”
President de Klerk sat up slowly in his chair. He hated snakes. He had an almost pathological fear of crawling animals in general. Back at the presidential residence, the servants knew they had to make a meticulous search of every nook and cranny every day for spiders, beetles, or any other insects. The same applied to those who cleaned the president’s office, his cars, and the cabinet offices.
He slowly craned his neck and located the snake. He felt sick immediately.
“Kill it,” he said.
The home secretary had fallen asleep in his lounger, and his private secretary was listening to music in his headphones. One of the bodyguards slowly drew a knife he had stuck in his belt, and struck at the snake with unerring accuracy. The mamba’s head was severed from its body. The bodyguard picked up the snake’s body, still thrashing from side to side, and flung it into the fire. To his horror de Klerk saw how the snake’s head, still lying on the ground, was opening and closing its mouth, displaying its fangs. He felt even worse and was overcome by dizziness, as if about to faint. He leaned back quickly in his chair and closed his eyes.
A dead snake, he thought. But its body is still writhing away, and anyone not in the know would think it was still alive. That’s just what it’s like here, in my country, my South Africa. A lot of the old ways, things we thought were dead and buried, are still alive. We’re not just fighting alongside and against the living, we’ve also got to fight those who insist on coming back to life to haunt us.
About every four months President de Klerk took his ministers and selected secretaries to a camp at Ons Hoop, just south of the border with Botswana. They generally stayed for a few days, and everything was done completely openly. Officially, the president and his cabinet gathered away from the public eye to consider important matters of various kinds. De Klerk had introduced this routine right from the start when he first came into office as head of state. Now he had been president for nearly four years, and he knew some of the government’s most important decisions had been made in the informal atmosphere around the campfire at Ons Hoop. The camp had been built with government money, and de Klerk had no difficulty in justifying its existence. It seemed he and his assistants thought more liberal and perhaps also more daring thoughts while sitting around the campfire under the night sky, enjoying the scents of ancient Africa. De Klerk sometimes thought it was their Boer blood coming to the fore. Free men, always linked with nature, who could never quite get used to a modern era, to air-conditioned studies and cars with bulletproof windows. Here in Ons Hoop they could enjoy the mountains on the horizon, the endless plains, and not least a well-cooked braai. They could have their discussions without needing to feel hounded by time, and de Klerk thought it had produced results.
Pik Botha contemplated the snake being consumed by the fire. Then he turned his head and saw de Klerk was sitting with his eyes closed. He knew that meant the president wanted to be left alone. He shook the home secretary gently by the shoulder. Vlok woke up with a start. When they stood up, his secretary quickly switched off his music cassette and collected some papers that were lying under his chair.
Pik Botha hung back after the others had disappeared, escorted by a servant with a lamp. It sometimes happened that the president wanted to exchange a few words with his foreign secretary in confidence.
“I think I’ll be going, then,” said Pik Botha.
De Klerk opened his eyes and looked at him. That particular night he had nothing to discuss with Pik Botha.
“You do that,” he said. “We need all the sleep we can get.”
Pik Botha nodded, wished him good night, and left the president on his own.
Generally de Klerk would sit there alone for a while, thinking through the discussions that had taken place that day and evening. When they went out to the camp at Ons Hoop, it was to discuss overall political strategies, not routine government affairs. In the light of the campfire, they would talk about the future of South Africa, never about anything else. It was here they had set up the strategy for how the country would change without the whites losing too much influence.
But on that night, April 27, 1992, de Klerk was waiting for a man he wanted to meet by himself, without even his foreign secretary, his most trusted colleague in the government, knowing about it. He nodded to one of the bodyguards, who disappeared immediately. When the guard returned a few minutes later, he had with him a man in his forties, dressed in a simple khaki suit. He greeted de Klerk and moved one of the loungers closer to the president. At the same time de Klerk gestured to the bodyguards that they should withdraw. He wanted them close by, but not within earshot.
There were four people de Klerk trusted in this life. First of all his wife. Then his foreign secretary Pik Botha. And there were two others. One of them was sitting right now in the chair beside him. His name was Pieter van Heerden, and he worked for the South African intelligence service, BOSS. But even more important than his work for the security of the republic was the fact that van Heerden played the role of special informer and messenger to de Klerk, bringing him news of the state of the nation. From Pieter van Heerden, de Klerk received regular reports about what was foremost in the minds of the military high command, the police, the other political parties, and the internal organizations of BOSS. If a military coup was being planned, if a conspiracy was under way, van Heerden would hear and inform the president immediately. Without van Heerden, de Klerk would be missing a pointer to the forces working against him. In his private life and in his work as an intelligence officer, van Heerden played the role of a man openly critical of President de Klerk. He performed skillfully, always well balanced, never exaggerated. No one would ever suspect him of being the president’s personal messenger.
De Klerk was aware that by enlisting the aid of van Heerden, he was restricting the confidence he placed in his own cabinet. But he could see no other way of guaranteeing himself the information he considered essential to carry out the big changes South Africa needed to avoid a national catastrophe.
This was not least associated with the fourth person in whom de Klerk placed absolute trust.
Nelson Mandela.
The leader of ANC, the man who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years on Robben Island off Cape Town, who had been incarcerated for life at the beginning of the 1960s for alleged but never proven acts of sabotage.
President de Klerk had few illusions. He could see that the only two people who together could prevent a civil war from breaking out and the inevitable bloodbath that would follow were himself and Nelson Mandela. Many a time he had prowled sleepless through the presidential palace at night, gazing out at the lights from the city of Pretoria, and thinking how the future of South Africa would depend on the compromise he and Nelson Mandela would hopefully be able to reach.
He could speak quite openly with Nelson Mandela. He knew that feeling was mutual. As human beings they were very different in character and temperament. Nelson Mandela was a truth-seeker of philosophical leanings, who used those qualities to achieve the decisiveness and practical drive he also possessed. President de Klerk lacked that philosophical dimension. He would head straight for a practical solution to every problem that cropped up. For him the future of the republic lay in changing political realities, and constant choices between what was possible to achieve and what was not. But between these two men with such different qualifications and experiences was a level of trust which could only be destroyed by open betrayal. That meant they never needed to disguise their differences of opinion, never needed to resort to unnecessary rhetoric when they were talking one on one. But it also meant they were fighting on two different fronts at the same time. The white population was split, and de Klerk knew everything would collapse if he could not manage to make progress bit by bit, by means of compromises that could be accepted by a majority of the white population. He would never manage to reach the ultra-conservative bastions. Nor would he ever convince the racist members of the officer class in the army and the police force. But he was forced to ensure they did not become too powerful.