Free Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin Page A

settlement with the ANC, with this man Mandela? Try to find out his views on communism . . . and then try to find out, are Mr. Mandela and the ANC interested in a peaceful settlement? For we also have deep suspicions about what they would be interested in.”
    Barnard’s first meeting with Mandela was held in the office of Pollsmoor’s commanding officer. As Barnard remembered it, recalling Kobie Coetsees first impressions, “Mr. Mandela came in and I saw immediately that, even in an overall and boots, he had a commanding kind of presence and personality.” The two men sat down, both understanding that the real purpose of this meeting was to become acquainted, to develop a relationship that could sustain the political negotiations that might follow. They made some small talk—Mandela asking him what part of South Africa he was from and Barnard inquiring after his health—and agreed to meet again.
    Before they did, however, Barnard ruled, just as Coetsee had done, that Mandela should be kitted out in clothes more befitting a man of his stature. As Barnard explained, “Talking about the future of the country in overall and boots: this was obviously not acceptable. We arranged with Willie Willemse, the commissioner of prisons, that at any future meeting he would be clothed in such a way that it serves his dignity and his pride as a human being.” It was not only on the matter of clothes that Mandela should be accommodated, Barnard decided. A more fitting meeting venue was required. “Mr. Mandela had to be on a par, as an equal, at any future meeting, this much was clear to me. I remember saying with Willie Willemse that we could never again hold such a meeting within the prison building. That would not create an equal situation.” From now on, Barnard and Mandela would meet in Willemse’s home on the Pollsmoor grounds rather than in his nondescript office.
    This began with the second meeting, at which Mandela turned up for dinner at the Willemses’ dressed in a jacket. “He was a wonderful guest,” Barnard recalled, his natural reserve thawing at the recollection. At these meetings, Willemse’s wife cooked delicious meals, wine flowed, and the two men talked for hours about how to end apartheid peacefully.
    For his part, Kobie Coetsee came to the conclusion that keeping this prisoner in prison was as improper, and as unhelpful to the talks’ broader goal, as dressing him in prison clothes. Not that he was being treated badly at Pollsmoor. Compared to the claustrophobia he had learned to endure on Robben Island, his cell in Pollsmoor felt like the open sea. But where he went next was a cruise luxury liner.
    The worse the Botha regime treated the blacks out on the street, the better it treated Mandela. He could have protested. He could have raged at Barnard, made demands, threatened to call off the secret talks. But he did not. He played the game, because he knew that while his power to intervene in contemporary events was practically nil, his potential to influence the future shape of South Africa might be immense. And so when in December 1988 General Willie Willemse, the top man in the South African prison service, informed him that he would be moved from his big lonely cell in Pollsmoor to a house inside the grounds of a prison called Victor Verster in a pretty town called Paarl, an hour north by road in the heart of the Cape wine country, Mandela raised no objections.
    He traded his cell for a spacious home under the supervision of—or rather, looked after by—another Christo Brand, another Afrikaner prison guard who had been with him both in Pollsmoor and on Robben Island. His name was Jack Swart and his job was to cook for Mandela and to play the butler, opening the door to his guests, helping him organize his diary, keeping the house tidy and clean. The kitchen was ample and fully equipped, including devices technologically unimaginable when Mandela went to prison. He was allowed to receive visits from