You Must Set Forth at Dawn (44 page)

One after the other, suspect voices were censored, in response to pressure from their governments. Nyerere submitted to some diplomatic arm-twisting from Lagos, and I was successfully excluded from one speakers list after another. Walter Rodney, the author of the seminal work
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
suffered a similar fate, even though he was actually resident in Tanzania. He was “invited” by the Tanzanian government to absent himself from Dar es Salaam during the conference. To pass the time, I did my best to demonstrate solidarity with a liquid product of that socialist nation, this being the most affordable accompaniment to Tanzanian cuisine: some Roman Catholic priests, fooled by the climate and soil of the Dodoma region in northern Tanzania, had engaged in a valiant effort to cultivate grapes and—table wine! Perhaps that product has improved since then, but, like the experience of a gathering that was intended to breathe new life into the pan-African movement, I was rewarded only with a sour taste in the mouth and a prolonged sense of corrosion of the stomach lining.

LISBON WAS, OF COURSE, a different setting and a far more composed affair: a North-South dialogue. It seemed a perfect pointer. If North and South could dialogue, so could South and South or, in my immediate context, ANC and Inkatha. That a senior member of the ANC was also participating in the conference was a further signal that the stars of dialogue were in the ascendant. I had begun with brief but encouraging snatches of discussion with Nyerere as we sat on the podium, the coffee breaks and reception being hotly contested for by far too many claimants. The ex-president was leaving Lisbon that very night, so I had to seize the few minutes in between the speeches of other members of the panel, and over interjections from the floor. I promised that I would get in touch with him through his secretary, call on him in Tanzania if necessary. It would be no exaggeration to claim that I had engaged his interest—or at least that he was intrigued by the idea.

The ANC delegate was, however, the immediate target. As the conference ended, I asked him to take a walk with me toward my hotel, little suspecting that I was about to undergo a renewed induction into a troubling mind-set that bears so much responsibility for the deadly strains of revolutionary rhetoric. I had encountered it on numerous occasions, but perhaps it was the setting of the preceding exchanges of the day, an encouraging contact with that man of vision Julius Nyerere, one of the least doctrinaire of progressive leaders on the continent, that left me so ill prepared. For the bespectacled, flaxen-haired, fortyish white militant responded to my plea that a solution be quickly found to the internecine killings with this: “The ANC is still at war. Nelson Mandela is like a general of an army. Generals cannot pause to take note of the loss, or potential loss, of lives—it's all entered into their calculations in advance.”

Aghast, I looked at his pale face lit by the safe streetlamps of a safe Lisbon avenue. It was smug and self-righteous, a composure that, paradoxically, approximated a Buddhist state of the resolution of all the seeming contradictions of a world of pain and strife. It required no thinking; I knew at once that this marked the end of that dialogue. I abandoned my plan to stop at a bar and engage him in a productive discussion, preferably over some Portuguese tapas and
vinho verde.
Denial of my right to free speech by Nyerere—whom I deeply admired in any case—was one thing. Collaboration—indeed, rhetorical justification of internecine slaughter in the name of revolutionary theology— was another. I turned abruptly. It was a most inauspicious beginning to the promise of a diplomatic career.

“Well, good night,” I said. “Try to remember, however, that it is not people like you who are getting killed. And it is not your community that is being destroyed.”

He looked shocked; perhaps the thought had not occurred to him till then. More likely, no one had ever uttered words in his hearing that conveyed this simple, stark truth. The following morning, he called me and promised to see what he could do within the ANC Executive Committee on his return to South Africa.

My hunt continued for a sympathetic and influential mind within the ANC. All that we sought, after all, was that both Mandela and Buthelezi should know that there was an avenue that could be used to meet discreetly—just meet, talk, and hopefully discover that there was no forked tail hidden beneath either pair of trousers.

I encountered several dead ends and near misses. Thanks to my former student Henry Louis Gates, Jr., then a full-fledged professor at Cornell University, I learned that Winnie Mandela was to attend an investiture at Duke University, where she would also deliver a lecture. I headed for that beckoning rendezvous, posting messages ahead. By the time I arrived in North Carolina, Winnie had called off the event, owing to some emergency recall from home, and traveled back to South Africa.

Buthelezi was also a near miss. The chief had been tracked down in Canada and was expected to remain there for some days before traveling on, consumed with his mission of jettisoning the “collaborationist” label that stuck to him stubbornly. I was then in London. Based on his schedule, transmitted by the Nigerian Mission in Ottawa, I flew to Canada and found that our planes— most probably—had passed each other in the ozone layer. This was getting tiresome, but it was too late to complain. In addition, to one blinded by the dazzle of the prize in view, the quarry always seemed no further away than the arm could reach. There was a fast connection to London to be made through New York, and thus to that city I headed on the next available flight. This time, however, I had learned not to place all reliance on the intelligence network of embassies or be at the mercy of the sudden dispositions of these moving targets. Armed with his phone number and hotel address, I took the precaution of first calling Buthelezi from the airport while awaiting the flight to London.

It was just as well. Buthelezi was packing his bags and would shortly head for Gatwick Airport en route to Johannesburg. All the party leaders appeared to be on the move, even the still-ruling National Party of F. W. de Klerk, preparing for the first postapartheid elections, raising funds, and seeking international recognition and/or understanding of their policies. The ANC, for instance, had mounted a campaign to overcome the general perception of its being a Communist-dominated organization. De Klerk was propagating a scheme for opening up the Nationalist Party to non-Boers, nonwhites. Buthelezi was contesting his “collaborationist” label.

And so my dialogue with Buthelezi took place over the phone—I have yet to encounter him physically. He spoke volubly, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable and objective, but came through as a man deeply aggrieved and hurt—Nelson Mandela was right. Buthelezi forcefully reminded me that, despite having acceded to the “homeland” policies of the apartheid government, he had stoutly refused to accept the offer of the status of an “independent” nation—unlike other Bantustans—by which the regime had sought to consolidate the apartheid ideology and weaken liberation thinking. It had created a false sense of national sovereignty; the ruse was so transparent to the world that it remains a mystery even today that any prescient leader could pretend to have been taken in by its touted theology of mutual cultural and political respect:
separate but equal.

“My big brother,” said Buthelezi, “I am only too happy to do anything to bring me closer to my very own senior brother, whom I have always considered my leader. You may inquire of the de Klerk government. Throughout, I insisted that I would not talk to any of them until Brother Mandela came out of prison. Unlike the others, I refused to accept this spurious self-government. What for? Our leader was still in prison. Brother, I am glad it is someone like you calling me, and if there is anything you are able to do to bring us both together—are you sure we cannot meet before my flight? Maybe if you flew into Gatwick, we could have some minutes together before I take off.”

I assured Chief Buthelezi that I could not perform the magical feat of getting into London before he took off, not even if I took the Concorde. I heard his sigh of disappointment. Whatever other impression I received of the KwaZulu chief, this much was certain: he was truly eager to seize any chance of mediation.

Buthelezi sounded most embittered. He felt that he had not been duly appreciated, that his strategy for confronting apartheid had been misunderstood, unjustly misrepresented, and vilified. We spoke—or more accurately, he spoke—for nearly an hour, and the burden of it all was that a wedge had been driven between him and Nelson Mandela by “the hothead extremists” of the ANC. “Those people hate me!” he wailed. “They want to destroy me!”

As I admitted to Nadine Gordimer when I succeeded in contacting her in turn, I detected strains of paranoia even across the transatlantic circuit. Chief Buthelezi accused the ANC of committing atrocities against his people; I reminded him, very gently, that the ANC had accused his KwaZulu warriors of virtually the same crime. In the end I asked him once again: Would you meet Nelson Mandela if such a meeting could be brought about? His response was a most grateful yes. There was no coyness, no playing hard to get. Buthelezi was ready for dialogue.

MY LAST CONVERSATION with Nadine Gordimer administered, without doubt, the ultimate chagrin of my “diplomatic” shuttle. I was now armed at least with Buthelezi's consent and could not wait to convey this to her. She, like Nelson Mandela, had already warned me of the ANC's fervid democratic catechism— I encountered it so often, delivered like a creed of religious submission, that I would mentally recite it even as it was intoned by yet another ANC affiliate, including one or two of its writers. It went beyond liturgy, however. Indeed, it effected, and was acted upon with, such conformity, being virtually synonymous with “party discipline,” that it could be counted upon to prevent Nelson Mandela from taking any step without the full approval of the Executive Committee. Nadine was therefore hesitant but agreed to lay “The Plan” before the ANC—Mandela and Buthelezi to Nigeria or wherever, secretly ferried thither in one of Babangida's presidential fleet.

Some days and several more postapartheid funerals later, I was off to Cairo to lay ambush for a heavyweight pair from within the ANC caucus, courtesy of information from my “reformed” Marxist acquaintance of the Lisbon exchange—or was it in fact Nadine? I am no longer certain. Perhaps the unexpected softening of the formerly doctrinaire revolutionary of the Lisbon encounter had imbued in me an inordinate optimism. No matter, I sought help from the embassy in Cairo, specifically requesting the young man who had rescued me from the near debacle of the All Africa Games. He had been posted away, but his replacement was only too eager to lend himself body and soul to the scheme. He succeeded in tracking down the elusive ANC voyagers, who, it appeared, were on a fund-raising mission. The young diplomat also sent a message home in case there was need for a rapid follow-up by Babangida or his foreign minister. I was not overanxious to meet the two travelers without an intermediary or at least some indication about their probable disposition. Nadine could help, and I was due to phone her anyway, since she had finally undertaken to lay the proposal—albeit without great enthusiasm—before the next meeting of the ANC Executive Committee. That meeting had now taken place.

It was indeed a most expectant one-man intervention force that made the call, joined by the embassy official, who had entered into the spirit of the chase. It was the briefest of my telephone exchanges with Nadine on the subject, but it had the effect—perhaps because of her own ambiguous position over the project—of transporting me vividly into the distant conference room where Nadine had introduced the initiative. I could almost swear that I saw each face seated around a table at the other end of the continent as the putative life expectancy of “The Plan” was summarily terminated. Nadine gave off a kind of throaty giggle; it was either a subconscious echo of the guffaws that had rent the discussion room or an embarrassed reaction of her own. Still, she eventually broke through her giggle to report, “The meeting broke up in a bout of derisory laughter.”

I think a spasm of shock must have surged across my face because the diplomat sitting across the hotel room half rose from his chair, appearing more concerned with my well-being than with any message from a distant South Africa. He looked anxious as he asked me if I was all right. My reply was a revelation of my inner projections, even to me: “She's just informed me that they are laughing all the way to the cemetery.”

Of course, those were not Nadine Gordimer's words. They were, however, the words I used also when I telephoned Oje Aboyade at home to signal the termination of my mission that very night. I asked him to be certain to transmit the message to Babangida just as I had phrased it and to let him know that I now considered the idea stillborn and was returning my meddlesome self to more rational pursuits. I was not born for the diplomatic world.