South Africa's history would have been very different without Nelson Mandela

 

The news of Nelson Mandela's death brings back personal memories of a time when South Africa could have gone in many directions. The South Africa we see today owes much to the philosophical evolution and personal example of one man. It would have taken very little for the country to have turned out as another Zimbabwe or even another Somalia.

My first visit to South Africa was in the tumultuous summer of 1993. I was then a student at Oxford University and had somehow managed to get myself funded to work on a development project in a remote tribal "homeland" for two and a half months. My passport still read "Not valid for the Republic of South Africa", although the Indian government had removed restrictions just a few weeks earlier. My visa was not stamped on the passport but was given on a separate sheet of paper.

The South Africa I visited was still heavy with the reminder of the apartheid era. Racial segregation had been abolished only a few months earlier, but public toilets still read "White" and "Coloured". Nelson Mandela had been freed, but the white-run government was still in place. I lived and worked in the tribal homeland of KaNgwane along the Swaziland border - one of the many nominally autonomous reservations created for the black population (it is now part of the province of Mpumalanga). However, even in the remote savannah grassland and hills of the Low Veldt, there was palpable tension in the air.

To the outside world, South Africa's internal tensions appeared as black-versus-white. However, the situation on the ground was much more complicated. The white population was split between those who favoured the changes and those who clung to hopes of some form of return to segregation. There were also the old suspicions between English-speaking whites of British origin and Afrikaans-speaking whites of Dutch origin. The wounds of the Boer wars of 1880-1881 and 1899-1902 had still not been completely healed.

The black population was similarly divided on tribal lines. The Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party was suspicious of the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela and many ANC leaders are from the rival Xhosa tribe). As the apartheid regime crumbled, these rivalries increasingly spiralled into bloodshed. In just one of the incidents, dubbed the Boipatong massacre, 40 people were killed and many more were injured. By the summer of 1993, all sides were stockpiling arms. My camp was on the route used to smuggle arms from nearby Mozambique and on one occasion my pickup truck (locally called a "bakkie") was hijacked at gun point. Luckily, I was not driving it at that time, but my co-worker had to walk back many miles to camp. The vehicle was found abandoned a few days later.

As if this was not complicated enough, there were other groups including Indians and those of mixed race. The latter formed a large segment of the population in the western half of the country, but found themselves stuck in a cultural and political no-man's land. The Indian population was scattered, but it formed a significant concentration around the eastern city of Durban (Mahatma Gandhi had been thrown out of the train in nearby Pietermaritzburg). Although it had faced discrimination under apartheid, the industrious community had come to control much of the country's retail and wholesale trade and had become fairly prosperous. Not surprisingly, all other groups resented them. In fact, as I found out, virtually every group suspected that the Indians were funding their rivals!

Over that summer, I witnessed riots at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, attended political rallies in seething townships, and listened to the regular hum of distant gunfire. A white-supremacist group even managed briefly to take over the World Trade Centre, Kempton Park, where multi-party negotiations were taking place. South Africa was a country on the boil and I met many white families who were making plans of leaving the country and moving to the United States, Britain and Australia.

As I think about that period, it becomes clear how easily the country could have gone into a spiral of violence and retribution. It is Nelson Mandela's extraordinary achievement that he was able to somehow reconcile the country's many internal contradictions and carry people along with him. Equally commendable is the fact that, unlike many leaders of newly freed countries, he did not yield to the temptation of holding on to power till his death or of starting a dynasty. Modern historians tend to be dismissive of the "Great Man Theory" of history and argue that it is history that creates great men - but I think an exception should be made for Mandela.