perception that he was doing so.
While, to the best of our knowledge, Mandela never said so in writing, indications are that – during his sojourn at Victor Verster at least – he knew his conversations were being recorded. On several occasions – faithfully reflected in the transcripts – he warned his visitors that they were ‘not alone’, and they would then start whispering. Sometimes, he switched on a noisy overhead fan, or tuned his radio to a music station. As a result, long and presumably vital passages in those conversations are not on record. Whether he ever used this knowledge to try to mislead his captors, or send them implicit messages, is not clear.
The transcripts begin in 1984 – two years after Mandela and his four fellow Rivonia trialists were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland. This helps to corroborate that, due to mounting international and domestic pressures, the situation surrounding Mandela – and the government’s strategic perception of it – had begun to change.
The cottage at Victor Verster Prison was particularly heavily bugged, and there were even bugs in the garden. At that stage, as the Coetsee archive reveals, Mandela was pursuing an extensive campaign to influence the views of other political prisoners, those who had just been released or were about to be released, as well as other internal (and, as it turns out, external) political leaders. Clearly, knowledge of what he was saying to them was meant to provide his captors with ongoing ‘feedback’ – information to be utilised for adjusting the continuing and increasingly pressured political process.
A mini-industry must have arisen around this activity. Transcribing taped conversations is tedious and time-consuming, and a number of prison staff must have been involved. Sometimes, when a particular conversation or meeting was thought to be politically critical, transcripts were called for and provided to Coetsee and other political role players within a day.
This helps to account for the uneven quality of the transcripts. Some were well recorded and transcribed. Others were poorly recorded, and transcribed by prison officials with a limited knowledge of English. Some deficient transcripts contain handwritten corrections, sometimes by more than one person. All these problems create layers of uncertainty that present the researcher with significant difficulties. Some sense can be discerned, but faithfully reproducing parts of these transcripts would simply have produced unreadable results. We therefore decided to provide edited versions of these transcripts, which we refer to as ‘plausible reconstructions’. Clearly, they cannot be taken as entirely faithful renditions. At the same time, though, we do believe they capture the gist of those conversations.
Sometimes, breaks occur in the transcripts when tapes are changed. One transcript of a conversation in the Victor Verster cottage mentions a tape being changed ‘on the Revox machine’ – a high-quality reel-to-reel tape recorder in use at the time. Presumably, other tape recorders were running as well, but the eavesdroppers seldom succeeded in constructing seamless records of the conversations. Of course, they could not ask their subjects to stop talking while the tapes were being changed.
At least one conversation with a group of visitors in the cottage at Victor Verster Prison was taped not only by the Department of Prisons but also by the National Intelligence Service (NIS). One file in the Coetsee archive contains two transcripts – a complete one by the Department of Prisons, and the other, selected pages from an NIS transcript which the prison officials identify and acknowledge.
This indicates that Mandela’s conversations – at least those in the cottage – were not only recorded by the prisons service, but also by NIS. Indeed, Niël Barnard, director-general of NIS at the time, confirms this in his book Secret Revolution: Memoirs of a Spy Boss (2015), and also claims that Mandela was well aware of it. (Barnard formed part of a secret government working group that held a series of discussions with Mandela from 1988 onwards about his political beliefs.) Yet Barnard’s account contains some anomalies. After briefly citing several conversations between Mandela and some of his visitors, he goes on to say:
‘How did we know what Mandela and his comrades told each other in the cottage at Victor Verster? Well, no intelligence service worth its salt will not record such vital historic conversations – especially if it formed part of those conversations. And no true freedom fighter – after all, Mandela was the founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe – would be so naïve as to think his conversations with a spy boss would not be recorded. Mandela was not born yesterday.’1
The clandestine recordings were an open secret, Barnard continues, and he and Mandela never discussed the matter directly. Some of the warders at Victor Verster were aware of this and probably told Mandela about it, but he never mentioned it or raised any objections. This was probably because Mandela was aware that he was not the elected leader of the ANC and did not have a mandate to conduct discussions with government representatives. As a result, Barnard argues, the taped conversations might have been an insurance policy that would enable him at a later stage to show which undertakings he had made, and which not.
Barnard claims that, ironically, the surveillance strengthened their mutual trust. During a few conversations at the cottage, Mandela took his arm and said: ‘Let’s go outside and talk under the tree.’ But the tree was also bugged. ‘When we got there, I looked up at the branches and said: “Let’s rather talk elsewhere in the garden.” He smiled, and we walked away together.’
While inconsistent in some respects, this passage seems to confirm that NIS recorded two kinds of conversations – those between Mandela and the government working group (including Barnard), and conversations between him and other visitors. However, it also suggests that this was done by NIS alone. Barnard must have known that at least some of the conversations were also being taped by Coetsee’s surveillance system within the prisons service. Why he does not acknowledge this is unclear.
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On 18 July 2012 the Rivonia trialist Denis Goldberg, who spent 22 years in Pretoria Central Prison, and other members of the Ex-Political Prisoners’ Association commemorated Mandela Day by planting trees outside the cottage at Victor Verster Prison. Goldberg and the other former prisoners were taken on a tour of the cottage by Warrant Officer Jack Swart, Mandela’s personal chef during that time. During the tour, Swart pointed out a hole in a tree where a microphone had been placed to record Mandela’s ‘every conversation’. He also showed the visitors a small room just off the kitchen which, he said, was the only room in the house which was not bugged.2
Talking to a reporter, Goldberg expressed concern about several aspects of South Africa’s post-apartheid order. However, he added that anyone who said South Africa should have righted itself in the 18 years since the first democratic elections in 1994 was mistaken. ‘They didn’t read history. History takes time. Sadly, 18 years is nothing.’3
1
Let the games begin …
‘All that is required of Mandela now … is that he should unconditionally reject violence as a political instrument. This is, after all, a norm which is respected in all civilized countries of the world …’
ON THURSDAY, 31 January 1985, State President P.W. Botha announced in parliament that the South African government was prepared to consider Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, provided he was prepared to renounce the use of violence for political ends.
While this was less well known, the government had made numerous offers to release Mandela in previous years.1 However, all of these hinged on him accepting release to the ‘Republic’ of Transkei, which would have amounted to a tacit recognition of the apartheid homelands system, and isolated him from his own movement as well as resurgent political resistance in ‘white’ South Africa.
At that stage, the Transkei was governed by K.D. (Kaiser) Matanzima, Mandela’s nephew, who had decided to collaborate with the homelands system. He offered Mandela a comfortable home, but also undertook to ensure that Mandela would ‘abide by the law’. In this setting, Mandela would have been marginalised to the point of becoming a forgotten man, which – for a time – is clearly what the authorities (and probably Matanzima) wished to achieve. For these reasons, Mandela consistently rejected these offers, or simply did not respond.
Botha’s