Nelson Mandela's release was a day of triumph for him – and disaster for me

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/11/nelson-mandela-release-disaster

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The day Nelson Mandela walked out of the grounds of Victor Verster prison after 27 years in jail, 25 years ago today, was presumably one of the great days of his life. It was one of the worst of mine.

Related: FW de Klerk's legacy in question on anniversary of Mandela's release

I was in Cape Town for the Guardian to cover history in the making – the biggest story of my career. And not just mine. It was going to be the biggest story journalism had ever known, the biggest human interest story the world had ever seen – and I was going to report it.

I was prepared, of course. I knew Cape Town like the back of my hand. He was going to speak from the City Hall to the crowd on the Grand Parade — the old military parade ground built by the Dutch, back in the 18th century. I had booked a room, on the fifth floor of a hotel tucked discreetly around the corner.

My computer was open on the table, switched on, all systems go for the writing and transmission of my doubtlessly golden prose.

Now here I was, Zeiss binoculars in hand, a discrete micro-cassette recorder in my pocket (in case he offered me any whispered confidences), slap bang opposite the gates of Victor Verster prison, waiting for the Old Man, as he was known.

Well, everyone knows what happened next. Everyone saw what happened. Nearly everyone, that is. I hardly saw a thing. All that I know for certain is that a voice cried out, “there he is”. There was something like a collective sigh, a woman’s voice let out a piercing scream behind me and pandemonium broke out as the camera people stampeded.

Everyone knows what happened next. Everyone saw what happened. Nearly everyone, that is. I hardly saw a thing.

By the time I got to the spot where I’d thought I’d get a glimpse of him, all that was left was the receding roar of his motor escort and a cloud of dust. The rest of the world had it all, through the lenses on board the helicopters clattering overhead and the cherry-picker mobile hydraulic lift behind me. But on the ground ? Forget it.

“The speech,” I thought to myself, as I headed for my car. The photographers could have the first appearance – I was a wordsmith, after all. The speech would save me. This was the man who had made the statement from the dock at in the Rivonia trial, one of the great speeches of our, or anybody else’s, era. (Listen to it here)

He’d had more than quarter of a century to prepare a few more words. The Gettysburg Address? Forget it.

By the time I had made it through the traffic jams back into the city, it was about heart-attack time. I hardly glanced at the crowd in front of City Hall, sprinting instead up to my hotel room for a hurried check-in call to London.

“How much time?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve got plenty of time – 20 minutes ?” said a voice reassuringly.

Down I sprinted, around the corner and burrowed into the heaving crowd. It was so tight I had to struggle to get my wrist up to read my watch.

Fifteen minutes to deadline. The sound system seemed to have packed up. No, he was still inside, nobody had seen him. What was I going to write?

Colour? I needed colour.

Squirming my way free of the crowd I rushed around the side of it.

Paramedics working on bodies. I looked around in bewilderment. The boom of police shotguns as they opened fire on criminals taking advantage of the frenzy to loot the city and its inhabitants. Instinctively I reached for my wallet and my ID. Nothing there. I’d been pick-pocketed.

Ten minutes to deadline. Back I ran, around the corner, up to the room.

I stared at the blank screen and it stared back. The telephone rang.

“Where are you?” asked the Guardian foreign editor, 6,000 miles away.

“In my hotel around the corner.”

“You’d better get down there. He’s walking out on to the balcony. We’re watching him now.”

Down I sprinted, around the corner, elbowing my way into the massed flesh again, struggling to release my pen and pad above my head. I stared open-mouthed as he began his speech. I couldn’t hear a word. The mother of all speeches was lost in the roar of a human sea.

I cobbled something together, of course. But a professional would spot the panic in the introduction, following the old adage – “If you don’t have an intro, give them the time”.

And there it is, in the cuttings: “It was 4.16pm South African time on Sunday, February 11 1990, when he finally came out of prison after 27 years .”

Related: From the archive, 12 February 1990: Nelson Mandela: A man whose time has come at last

To tell the truth, I thought that was the end of my waiting for Mandela. I’d done my time and he’d done his. He was already in his 70s. He might be an icon, a living testament to the past, but that, surely, was that. Younger men would take over and finish off the liberation struggle – the Chris Hanis, the Cyril Ramaphosas, the Pallo Jordans.

But of course, in retrospect, it was just the beginning of the legend, a 27-year overture. And I, as an appointed eye-witness to history, was to have a lot more waiting to do. Waiting for his divorce. Waiting for the outcome of the negotiations to form a new South Africa; the election; his inauguration; his presidency.

During his years of imprisonment he had effectively been the man in the iron mask, but now he had the best-known face in the world. And, with all the waiting – and despite my efforts to stay out of the way – I found myself, perhaps inevitably, becoming a part of the story, if an obscure one.

The Winnie Mandela scandal was one instance. Word leaked out of Soweto that residents were furious about the disappearance and possible killing of a young activist, Stompie Sepei, last seen in Winnie Mandela’s care. Details of the scandal were given to me off the record by a lawyer who was trying to sort the whole mess out. Terrified by the implications of the scandal — at the idea of besmirching the Mandela name — I faxed a copy to the family lawyer at the time who, by his account, immediately passed it to Winnie Mandela.

Subsequently I realised that within two hours of my having sent the fax the key witness to the murder of Stompie Sepei, Soweto physician Dr Abu Baker Asvat, had himself been murdered at his surgery allegedly by armed robbers. Did my fax play a part? Did the realisation that the story was about to break result in his murder, to make sure he was kept quiet?

Sometimes, it seemed, it could be impossible to get out of the way of the Mandela story.

And then – by his account – I was credited with bringing an end to his presidency. During his first and only term as head of state the Guardian briefly owned a small newspaper in Johannesburg, the Mail & Guardian. As the Guardian’s correspondent in Johannesburg, I had an office there and was good friends with the co-editors, Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim.

The M&G was a feisty little paper and from time to time I greatly enjoyed helping out. One day Harber rushed in to say that they were short of an editorial. Could I do one? I wrote a piece, sucked out of my thumb as the saying has it, suggesting Mandela stand down at the end of his first presidential term, as an example to his successors on a continent blighted by “presidents for life”.

Mandela did, of course, stand down and, when asked subsequently why he had done so, replied with a mischievous grin: “Because the Mail & Guardian told me to.”

On another occasion I found myself introducing him to part of his own past, when a local film company asked me to help arrange a meeting and to interview Mandela and the man who nearly had him executed, the former attorney general of the Transvaal, Percy Yutar.

It was a fascinating encounter, with Yutar desperately assuring a skeptical Mandela that he had saved the great man’s life.

I even had fun with Mandela. For about two years I wrote the Dear Walter papers for the M&G, modelled on Private Eye’s Dear Bill letters. It was ostensibly a correspondence between Mandela and his aide and friend, Walter Sisulu. Friends urged me not to write it, on the grounds that nobody could satirise a man of such nobility. But I had no intention of doing that. As a satire on those surrounding Mandela it worked wonderfully. Both men seemingly enjoyed it; Sisulu even sent one of his daughters to the book launch for an autographed copy of an anthology.

Sisulu had Parkinson’s disease at the time, as did I. And it is in connection with that disease that I think I will best remember and most miss Nelson Mandela.

Parkinson’s, like many other disabling illnesses, can be said to be a form of imprisonment, in which one’s shaking limbs are the bars through which one gazes, in Oscar Wilde’s words, “with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky”. Imprisonment by itself is not necessarily a bad experience. As Solzhenitsyn once observed, “I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: ‘Bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life’.” But in combination with a sense of guilt and regret imprisonment – real imprisonment – must be torture.

Looking back over what is publicly known about Mandela’s 27 years inside, it often strikes me that he was a person haunted by a sense of personal failure despite his undoubted public triumph. He himself has singled out, as his particular failure, the abandonment of his family.

Perhaps the most agonising experience he suffered in this respect must have been the death of his eldest son, Thembi, in a car accident. As an adult Thembi had never visited his Mandela in prison, seemingly out of a sense of resentment towards his father. Mandela’s account of how he battled to contain his grief, with Sisulu silently holding his hand in his prison cell, provides the most moving moment in Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom.

Mandela once observed that some people are made by prison, others are broken by it. He, of course, was made by it. Which is what made him, in turn, a man for whom it was worth waiting.

David Beresford is living with Parkinson’s disease. This article was written before Nelson Mandela’s death