the NP was a pushover in the constitutional negotiations or, in the journalist Patti Waldmeir’s words, ‘the Boers gave it all away’.26 In response, Coetsee says one has to look at areas where the NP negotiators succeeded.
This includes the issue of whether or not the provinces should be retained. He then claims that Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer had agreed that there would be no provinces, but that they might be considered at a later stage. Stalwarts in the NP (which seemed to include Coetsee) went to F.W. de Klerk and threatened to walk out if he did not dig in his heels. De Klerk agreed, and the provinces were retained. ‘We succeeded also because we read the innards of the ANC correctly, that there were more people that would feel safe within the provincial structure than there were people who would feel safe outside.’
O’Malley: ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’
Coetsee: ‘That is a different story, my friend, that is a different story, and I’ll tell it to you one day.’
He goes on to say that he was a spokesperson on this issue, and by then he had become annoyed by the way in which ‘certain things’ were lost by the wayside through backroom deals. He was certain the ANC would agree to provinces, even when Ramaphosa and Meyer had agreed that there would be no provinces, but they could be reintroduced at a later stage. ‘We pushed and I pushed, knowing that there would be forces inside the ANC that would accept it.’
O’Malley: ‘How did you know there were forces within the ANC that would accept [this]?’
Coetsee: ‘I’m just saying to you that I knew. I don’t think it’s necessary for us to record this at this point of time. But I knew. And we pushed and we succeeded.’
Lastly, the O’Malley interviews also go some way towards explaining why people found Coetsee so exasperating. He does indeed talk in an elliptical way, while also switching freely between topics, and moving backwards and forwards in time. At times, O’Malley too is confounded. Amusingly, Coetsee reveals that he is well aware of his trademark style and its power to annoy and confuse, that he derived pleasure from this, and deliberately used it to his political advantage. All this comes together in a single passage. Coetsee tells O’Malley that, at some (typically unspecified) point (but presumably in the early 1980s), he received visits from two opposition luminaries: Helen Suzman, veteran liberal parliamentarian, and Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, then the official opposition in parliament. Suzman spoke to him about releasing Mandela, and Slabbert about releasing dissident Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach. He hints that they influenced his political thinking.
Eventually, he told them that, with the approval of P.W. Botha and the cabinet, he was going to change the policy relating to the release of ‘security prisoners’, as he called them. He would announce this in an extended committee session of his vote – Justice and Prisons – in the Senate, instead of the more prominent House of Assembly. He would announce that ‘there’s going to be a change in policy, and I stipulated the conditions which will lead to the release of Mr Mandela, although I’m not going to announce that as such. But the first person to benefit would be Breytenbach …’
He contacted Slabbert and told him there was one condition, namely that he and Suzman should not be ‘jubilant in the press’. Botha did not want to be embarrassed. And he would always honour them (Slabbert and Suzman) for honouring the agreement – ‘they listened to me, they walked out, not a smile on their faces, knowing that this was the beginning. And you must get Hansard of my announcement there, and you will see it was couched in a style which people say belongs to me, you couldn’t read it there but it was there. You understand what I’m saying?’
O’Malley (clearly confounded): ‘This was on the release of Breytenbach.’
Coetsee: ‘Yes, but it was changing just the policy, and the rest followed … The press wrote a few lines on it, they didn’t realise what they were writing, and I enjoyed the situation …’
What is beyond doubt is that Coetsee decided to start talking to Mandela, albeit under a general brief from P.W. Botha to resolve the growing problems surrounding ‘security prisoners’, comprising mounting legal claims and court cases as well as rapidly escalating international pressure on the one hand, and pressure from the Breytenbach family – who knew Botha – on the other. Added to this, as F.W. de Klerk later remarked, long-term ‘security prisoners’ were due for some kind of parole in any case. The only sticking point was whether they would continue to advocate political violence after their release.
In this context, the Coetsee archive also reveals, quite startlingly, that Coetsee proposed the unconditional release of Mandela and numerous other ‘security prisoners’ to the State Security Council in December 1984 – four years before Mandela met P.W. Botha, and five years before he walked out of Victor Verster Prison.
It seems clear that Coetsee (assisted by his prisons management team) took the initiative to move Mandela into separate quarters in Pollsmoor Prison, away from his colleagues, thereby creating space for more uninhibited talks with government representatives, as well as the later decision to move home to a cottage in the grounds of Victor Verster Prison, a ‘halfway house between prison and freedom’. While this might have been with Botha’s knowledge – and could hardly have happened otherwise – it attests to the autonomy and room to manoeuvre that Coetsee had appropriated. And after those steps, there was no turning back.
Coetsee spoke to O’Malley (and perhaps Patti Waldmeir) more freely than to anyone else. At the same time, there is no record of him disclosing to anyone that he had created an extensive surveillance apparatus around Mandela, and monitored his conversations in prison for a number of years. This remained a secret until 2013 when, as recounted elsewhere in this volume, the historian Jan-Ad Stemmet opened the first of a stack of cardboard boxes containing Coetsee’s papers at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs (ARCA) at the University of the Free State.
As noted previously, monitoring conversations with at least some ‘security prisoners’ was standard practice. Moreover, in the light of Mandela’s unique and growing stature, a degree of additional surveillance could have been expected. But why the 913 file (Mandela’s real prison number) assumed such massive proportions, and what exactly Coetsee sought to achieve by building it, remains a mystery. Given this, the archive itself – with its startling revelations, unexplained gaps, and remaining mysteries – may well be Kobie Coetsee’s most fitting and lasting legacy.
Eavesdropping on Mandela
ALL MANDELA’S conversations were monitored – in other words, they took place in the presence of a warder, who made written notes. This was done on standard printed forms titled ‘The monitoring of conversations’ (Gespreksmonitering), but sometimes also on lined government-issue A4 paper. Indications are that this was standard practice, at least for certain categories of prisoners.
On Robben Island, visitors spoke to Mandela (and other prisoners) through a partition, and this regime also held sway at Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison. It was only in May 1984 that Mandela was allowed a ‘contact visit’ with his wife, Winnie Mandela, their eldest daughter, Zenani (Zeni), and one of his grandchildren, which meant they sat in a room with no partition, and he could embrace them for the first time. It can be assumed that visible monitoring continued.
In Mandela’s cottage at Victor Verster Prison, his conversations were monitored by a warden who sat in another room, out of sight of his visitors. This often seemed to be Major Charl Marais, who came to know Mandela and his responses to certain issues very well. (Indeed, towards the end of Mandela’s sojourn at Victor Verster, Marais skipped writing out certain passages, noting that Mandela’s views on these issues were ‘well-known’ or ‘had already been recorded’. As some transcripts show, Mandela also sometimes called him in during conversations with visitors to ask him to attend to some or other issue, such as the issuing of passports for family members and others.)
What was thoroughly unusual was that at least some of Mandela’s conversations were also recorded, and more completely transcribed. These were funnelled to Kobie Coetsee, who would decide whether or not to pass them on to the State President or other government role players.