The World

In February 1990, the US secretary of state, James Baker, discussed the reunification of Germany and the expansion of NATO. In September, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification and allowed Germany to join NATO. He could have extracted much more while he still had 300,000 troops in the country, but he needed the western loans to run his state. Now he had missed his chance. The Americans were dizzy with victory. When Gorbachev tried to lay down the parameters of Germany’s relationship with NATO, Bush (now president) told Kohl, ‘To hell with that. We prevailed and

they didn’t.’ It showed a lack of imagination. Russia could have been coopted into the EU, even NATO. After all, victories do not last for ever. ‘In victory,’ advised Churchill, ‘magnanimity.’

The ‘Wall’ fell in Africa too. On 5 July 1989, Nelson Mandela, almost seventy-one, newly fitted with a suit after twenty-seven years behind bars, was driven out of prison and taken to meet Die Groot Krokodil

– the South African president, P. W. Botha – at his residence Tuynhuys, where Rhodes had stayed, for a secret chat. To Mandela’s surprise, the Crocodile, who as coloured affairs and defence minister had enforced apartheid for decades, was ‘courteous and deferential’ as they discussed history. ‘Now I felt there was no turning back.’

Mandela was right: the fall of the Iron Curtain meant the end of proxy war in Africa. America and the USSR no longer supported their egregious allies, yet their downfall often destroyed the existence of their states: in Zaire – Congo – the fall of America’s long-reigning ally, Mobutu, triggered a scramble for power and for minerals that lasted for thirty years.^*

Mandela was returned to prison; Crocodile resigned in favour of a new Nationalist premier, F. W. de Klerk. On 13 December, ‘I was taken again to Tuynhuys,’ wrote Mandela, where he realized de Klerk ‘was a man we could do business with’. On 9 February 1990, de Klerk told Mandela ‘he was making me a free man’ and then poured them both a tumbler of whisky: ‘I raised the glass in toast but only pretended to drink; such spirits are too strong for me.’ The day after at 4 a.m., Mandela rose. He had befriended and charmed his Afrikaner guards, who had ‘reinforced my belief in the essential humanity even of those who kept me behind bars’. He embraced them. At 3 p.m., Mandela, joined by Winnie, walked out of the prison. ‘When a TV crew thrust a long dark furry object at me, I recoiled.’ He had never seen one. ‘Winnie explained it was a microphone.’

As he emerged to meet his ANC comrades, ‘I could see the question in their eyes: had he survived or was he broken?’ His marriage was broken: Winnie, unable to resist the strain of loneliness, the bruise of repression and the temptations of power, had had affairs and led a vicious gang terror in Soweto where her bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, had killed opponents, even children. ‘She married a man,’ said Mandela graciously, ‘who soon left her, became a myth,’ but then the myth came home and was ‘just a man’. It was his greatest regret: ‘When your life is a struggle, there’s little room for family.’ His children had lost their father and when he returned ‘he was father of the nation’. Mandela divorced Winnie and, at eighty, he met someone else, Graça, the widow of Machel, dictator of Mozambique, announcing, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’

Mandela embarked on a world tour, meeting his old backers Castro and Qaddafi, who had funded the ANC, and new backers, led by Harry Oppenheimer, the liberal magnate, owner of De Beers diamonds and Anglo American gold mines, who helped buy his new house. Mandela had started as a Thembu prince, become a Communist revolutionary and then developed into a humanist liberal democrat who, inspired by Gandhi and MLK, was determined to create a ‘rainbow nation’ of white and black people. Astonishingly, after forty years of vicious repression, he achieved this without any massacre or flight of whites – an achievement without parallel that was the fruit of his personality. A peace and conciliation committee listened to testimony about the repression by South African security agents – and forgave their predations. Where Gandhi had failed to achieve peaceful transition, Mandela, elected president in April 1994, succeeded.