14 - Breaking barriers, monitoring and mediating
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2021
Summary
The phone rang. Mary and I looked at each other. We were alone in Beyers Naudé's house. It was mid-March 1990 and Beyers had left for a meeting with members of the ANC delegation to the first ‘talks about talks’ with the De Klerk government. The ringing stopped. We were waiting for [Methodist minister] Tom Mbabane to take us to his home in Soweto. We had corresponded when Tom was detained and we looked forward to meeting him and his wife Agnes. The phone rang again. I hesitated but then Tom arrived and so I didn't answer.
Tom drove us to his house in Orlando. It was opposite the Mandela home so he and Agnes took us across to meet the housekeeper and look around. While we were talking in the back yard, Nelson Mandela himself came in. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments that no one could have foreseen … He spoke with us for ten minutes, and without any sense of false piety, asked for our prayers for the coming talks … We promised we would pray. We told him we were staying with Beyers Naudé and he said, ‘Oh, is that so? I’ve been trying to phone him but there is no answer at the house.’ I don't know what I would have done if I had picked up the phone and the caller had said, ‘This is Nelson Mandela’!
Robin Hutt, 2000By the time Robin and Mary Hutt stayed with the Naudés, Beyers had an elder-statesman role in preparing the ground for negotiations and for the National Peace Accord. Ilse Naudé was focusing less on the national talks and more on local conflict, planning a programme for Robin and Mary in the Midlands area of KwaZulu-Natal, which was in a state of conflagration. The Harms Commission had begun a national investigation into state-sponsored hit squads, following former police captain Dirk Coetzee's revelations about Vlakplaas, and allegations of a ‘third force’ fomenting the violence in KwaZulu-Natal were escalating. Law and order in the province had substantially broken down. In the preceding four years, it was estimated that at least 3 500 people had been killed and up to 50 000 driven from their homes in the political conflict between Inkatha supporters (supported both overtly and covertly by state forces) and non-Inkatha people (for the most part ANC/UDF supporters, but not entirely).
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- The Secret ThreadPersonal Journeys Beyond Apartheid, pp. 207 - 233Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2018