I started the discussion. If it is not successful, quite obviously you would be able to take the line, I saw Mr Mandela, it became clear to me that it was not possible to find a solution, I am telling this to the public, I tried, it doesn’t seem to me to be possible, so I cannot help you. So there is only a so-called win-win situation. See the man now so that we can take the process forward …’
At the root of Barnard’s issue with Coetsee, then, was a rival claim to ownership of the secret conversations which laid the foundation for Mandela’s release and, ultimately, his presidency.
Tony Leon, who rose meteorically in white opposition politics from the mid-1980s onwards, and later led the official opposition in parliament for a period of eight years, recalls his experiences of Coetsee in his political biography entitled On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa (2008). Among other things, it contains a brilliant, often disconcerting, account of the confused and brutal political environment of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the often chaotic constitutional negotiations.
He writes: ‘In my capacity as DP justice spokesman, I had got to know Coetsee reasonably well. However, no one (not even his wife, I sometimes suspected) really knew him at all. He seldom revealed his true thinking on matters, and managed to literally smile and wink his way out of many tight corners. However, he was certainly a reformist Justice minister and had the trust of De Klerk. He had been P.W. Botha’s first line of contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and his close proximity to Mandela and his then wife, Winnie, had also (in my view) led to her under-prosecution for very serious crimes.’24
He then recounts how, to his astonishment, in the course of the constitutional negotiations at Kempton Park, Coetsee leaked to him a draft agreement between Coetsee and the ANC legal negotiator Dullah Omar to the effect that all the Constitutional Court judges would be appointed by the President and cabinet. ‘In other words, the lynchpin of the new legal order would be open to blatant political manipulation, at the level of selection at least, and would simply ape the discredited appointment mechanism of the past. However, this court would be entrusted with far greater and more sweeping powers than any other in South Africa’s history.
‘In terms of the ANC–NP agreement (which I was to learn later, with some stupefaction, had been authored by Coetsee himself), the cabinet, with a likely and hefty ANC majority, and the president, undoubtedly Nelson Mandela, would handpick their own judges! Dumbfounded as I was by the agreement Coetsee had authored and agreed to, I was even more perplexed as to why he was the whistle-blower on his own compact.
‘I later learned that certain of Coetsee’s cabinet colleagues whom he had not consulted before inking his signature to the agreement were appalled at what he had done. He was clearly looking for an escape hatch, and while he would oscillate in all directions over the next few days, blowing both hot and cold on the document, he had apparently decided that I constituted the best getaway vehicle if he needed to resile from his commitments.’
Leon went on to launch a vigorous campaign to overturn the deal, proposing instead that Constitutional Court judges should be drawn from recommendations submitted to the cabinet by a Judicial Service Commission comprising members of government, the judiciary, and the independent legal profession. A political mini-storm ensued, in which Coetsee continued to play an uncertain role.
‘Die Burger, normally the staunchest NP press ally, thundered against Coetsee and claimed in a shattering editorial that his proposal amounted to the “castration of the constitution”. This, and the undoubled internal pressure mounting against him in his own ranks, led finally to Coetsee dropping his legendary equivocation. We were now, finally, on the same track.’
On Wednesday, 17 November 1993, with the midnight deadline for an agreement approaching, negotiations reached a frantic pitch. Cyril Ramaphosa finally agreed that the judges would be nominated by the Judicial Service Commission, and the President could not add any other candidates. More horse-trading followed; at around midnight on Wednesday, 17 November, the ‘much delayed and deeply contested draft constitution was put to the full plenary of the negotiations process, and passed with acclaim’. Leon writes that he felt a sense of relief and accomplishment, and that his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ were widely appreciated.
The next day, Thursday, 18 November, provided De Klerk and Roelf Meyer with a ‘major hangover’ when, at a 7 am cabinet meeting, senior members of De Klerk’s cabinet, including Tertius Delport, revolted against the terms of the constitutional agreement. A private discussion followed, in which De Klerk aimed to bring Delport and five or six other cabinet members on board. But things got even worse. Delport grabbed De Klerk’s lapels, exclaiming: ‘What have you done? You have given South Africa away.’ Eventually, De Klerk managed to preserve his cabinet’s unity. When parliament met the following week to debate the new constitutional agreement, De Klerk was ‘enraged’ when Leon suggested that the constitutional talks had finally put the lid on the NP’s coffin.
Leon recounts one last, poignant encounter with Coetsee: ‘Towards the end of 1999, I was in Bloemfontein when I received a call from Kobie Coetsee, by then retired from politics and again living in the city. He wanted to discuss a matter with me. We arranged to meet in the VIP lounge at the airport, shortly before my departure to Cape Town. I had always found the former minister of Justice elliptical and impenetrable; this meeting was no exception. He expressed deep concern about the ANC’s intention to “damage the constitutional settlement”. “We” should collaborate in its defence – but there were no specifics.
‘I went on to ask him what he had made of the TRC’s statement about the “strategic decisions with regard to the prosecution of Madikizela-Mandela” [for her alleged complicity in the killing of the young activist Stompie Seipei] being influenced by the “political sensitivities of this period”. He gave no direct response, simply fixing me with his sphinx-like smile. We were never to meet again – a few months later he died, on 29 July 2000.’25
It would be untrue, however, to say that Coetsee remains a total enigma. He was also interviewed by O’Malley on four separate occasions, over several years. He seemingly trusted O’Malley, and spoke to him candidly and at some length. It seems safe to say that he probably went some way towards saying the things he intended to record in his memoirs, which he was then working on but later abandoned.
Among other things, those conversations went far deeper than Carlin’s single interview, and reveal Carlin’s malicious comment about Coetsee to be materially misguided. Specifically, his conclusion that Coetsee was a person of ‘limited intelligence with no great capacity for original thought’ was quite incorrect.
Over the years, and at a distance, Coetsee emerges from these transcripts as a highly intelligent person who, in the course of a long career in some of the most important portfolios in the NP government from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – including defence, security, justice and prisons – built up a deep knowledge and understanding of the complex political processes that played themselves out in those key state functions in that period.
The interviews provide significant insights into Coetsee’s own beliefs and motivations; for instance, he says, he realised in the mid-1970s that separate development was both immoral and unviable. He continued to work in the NP, though, as he realised that ‘you can’t change anything if you’re not there’. He then went on to a sustained effort to ‘swap the sword for justice’.
The interviews also provide a fascinating insight into the real drivers of the NP government’s impetus towards reform, largely under P.W. Botha, from whom Coetsee took his orders, which have been widely misunderstood and undervalued.
However, in the ebb and flow of Coetsee’s conversations with O’Malley, interrupted and resumed over several years, they never got around to talking in detail about his activities in the crucial period from the mid-1980s onwards, when the conversations with Mandela began and the foundation was laid for his eventual release. Whether by accident or design, Coetsee said nothing about his massive, partly secret archive or the fact that it contained transcripts of many conversations between Mandela and his visitors over a period of six years – or that surveillance of ANC negotiators continued well after 1990, into the constitutional negotiations.
Or