When Nelson Mandela took his seat as the first democratically elected president of South Africa at the opening of Parliament in Cape Town in May 1994, I had the rare privilege of being an official gatecrasher in the president’s box, in an upper gallery to the left of the speaker’s chair.
It was a great vantage point from which to observe the new South Africa coming into being, in the very chamber where apartheid had been cast in stone just a few decades before, and where its draconian detail was refined and redefined over and over again while the leaders of the people sat on Robben Island, in Pretoria Central prison, or surfed the uncertain waves of exile.
It was also the very chamber where Hendrik Verwoerd, credited with being the architect of separate development, had been slaughtered by one Dmitri Tsafendas in 1966 while confidently steering the apartheid ship of state.
The walls of the chamber were adorned with paintings of all those dinosaurs, jowly white men with unsmiling, downturned mouths who had held the power of life, death, banishment, urban removals, bantustanisations, influx control and indefinite incarceration in their hands.
Down below, on the floor of the chamber, were the country’s new parliamentarians, slapping each other’s backs and slowly taking their seats where the backsides of the oppressors had been planted not long before.
It was a highly symbolic moment. I remember thinking that it would have been an even more symbolic moment if I had been able to see what the chamber had looked like in the old days, when South Africa was more or less a white, one-party state, and a pretty uncivilised one at that. I longed to make some sort of comparison with the scene of jumbled jubilation that was unfolding before my eyes.
But of course in those dim and surprisingly distant days neither the gaudy black members of Parliament who were now trying so hard to look relaxed in their new roles of power down below, nor the bizarre collection of visitors (of which I was one) assembled in the president’s box up above, would have even been allowed through the door. Not the black ones, anyway. And not the communists like Joe Slovo, either.
It was mind-boggling. It was a tremendous sea change. And Tata Walter Sisulu, all 80 wonderful years of him, hobbling away down the corridor with all the other special guests when it was all over, took my mother by the arm and said, ‘Esmé, this is the greatest revolution that there has ever been. It is greater than the American Revolution. It is greater than the French Revolution. It’s even greater than the Russian Revolution.”
Those of us who were standing around him smiled the indulgent smiles of youth. The old man was entitled to his moment of exaggeration.
But when you think about it, was he really exaggerating?
He had seen a dream that he had probably never dreamed about in all its concrete consequences come true.
Not only had we just witnessed Sisulu’s protégé Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela striding into the old apartheid chamber, preceded by an imbongi yelling his heart out as he shook the motley collection of skins gathered about his person, and taking his place on the hallowed presidential seat to the right of the speaker of the House of Assembly.
There down below, too, among the milling throngs of African National Congress MPs, were Sisulu’s wife Albertina, his eldest son Max, and his daughter Lindiwe (all performing with more dignified restraint than most, it must be said) taking their parliamentary places in this former place of apartheid exclusion as well.
Tata Sisulu had the right to express a moment of atypical pride and extravagance. He wasn’t going to say it himself (but he wasn’t going to object if anyone else did it for him, either) but he was the one who had engineered the whole thing. What a moment of triumph after a long life of suffering, love and dedication.
In a radio tribute on the morning after Sisulu died, Mandela recounted one of his famous anecdotes. ”Don’t get involved with that man Walter Sisulu,’ I was warned when I first arrived in Johannesburg [from the Transkei]. ‘If you do, you will end up spending the rest of your life in jail.’ Of course, I ignored this advice.”
Well, the miracle that no country but South Africa can boast is that they did spend almost a lifetime in jail, but they survived to come out triumphant and went on to see the dawn of a new dispensation. They had lived to tell the tale.
What was most astonishing, sitting in the president’s box on that historic day, was to see how they had done it. For both Mandela and Sisulu had insisted that among the official guests invited into the privileged enclosure should be a number of their former warders on Robben Island.
So there were these middle-aged Afrikaner guys with their middle-aged Afrikaner wives and their middle-aged shoes and trousers shaking hands and exchanging hugs with not only Tata Sisulu, but the likes of Terror Lekota as well. And all of them very happy to see each other again.
I don’t know if I will ever get my head around this. These were the same guys who were trying to beat the hell out of Sisulu, Mandela, Lekota and the others. Yet somehow they, and not the prisoners they were supposed to be subduing, were the ones who were tamed — not into submission, but into full agreement with our cause. Or at least into respect for the men they were dealing with — which is a start.
So it was true that we were seeing a revolution unfolding before our eyes that day in Parliament.
And it is also true that Tata Sisulu, for as long as anyone can remember, has been the quiet, purring Rolls-Royce engine of that revolution.
And it is also true that the world, and our post-apartheid approach to politics in particular, will never be the same now that he is gone.
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