Word: mandela
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...tale of the secret negotiations began with a coincidence: Winnie Mandela, on her way to see her husband, who was in a hospital recovering from prostate surgery, happened to be on the same flight to Cape Town in 1985 as Kobie Coetsee, then South Africa's Justice Minister. She boldly marched up to the plane's first-class section and engaged the Justice Minister in conversation. The following day Coetsee paid an impromptu, unannounced visit to the world's most famous political prisoner. Mandela, dressed only in his hospital gown, greeted Coetsee not as his jailer-which he technically...
Once back in prison, Mandela bombarded Coetsee with letters urging contacts between the two sides, which had never officially talked to each other. A secret committee was set up including Coetsee, Mandela and Niel Barnard, the head of South Africa's intelligence service. Mandela pressed for a meeting with South Africa's President, P.W. Botha, known as the Great Crocodile for his blustery temper. An off-the-record courtesy call was finally arranged in 1989. So anxious was Barnard, the intelligence chief, about the meeting that seconds before the two men were to shake hands, he knelt down...
Sparks' skillful weaving of myriad strands-Mandela's secret sessions with the committee, the clandestine talks in England between the African National Congress and the government, the back-channel communications between Mandela and the a.n.c. in exile, the trepidation of Botha and the apparent transformation of his successor, De Klerk-possesses the drama and intrigue of a diplomatic whodunit. Sparks uncovers fresh details about Mandela's secret outings around Cape Town with his jailers (one of whom covertly brought the grandfatherly prisoner home to meet his two small children), the vital role of Mandela's courtly lawyer, George Bizos...
...Unlike Mandela, who often exhorts South Africans to forget the past, Sparks wants them to remember. The object lesson of his narrative is not how complicated the negotiating process was but how dicey and tentative, how easily it might have gone off the rails. Divisions within the a.n.c. and the National Party proved more dangerous than discord between them. During the narrative, Mandela and De Klerk emerge not as ideologues or saviors but as hard-headed pragmatists and canny politicians...
...Sparks brings his story up to the present with a more perfunctory account of the events since Mandela's release, it becomes clear that he is an unabashed optimist about the future of his country. South Africa, he suggests, is a kind of laboratory for the future of race relations around the world. He predicts that the "unique balance of mutual dependency" that made apartheid unworkable will bind the nation together in a kind of multiethnic harmony. Like Mandela, Sparks believes that what unites black and white in South Africa is greater than what divides them...