'Mandela and the General': The secret negotiations that brought apartheid bloodshed to an end

Former Independent journalist John Carlin and illustrator Oriol Malet take a fresh look at the history of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle – and the secret talks that kept it from becoming even more of a bloodbath

I was immensely fortunate to be a foreign correspondent based in Johannesburg, working for The Independent, from 1989 to 1995.

From the privilege of the journalist’s front-row seat, I witnessed the drama of Nelson Mandela’s journey from prison to the presidency, the difficult death of the racist tyranny known as apartheid, and the establishment of democracy in South Africa for the first time since the arrival of the first European settlers in 1652.

Not all the descendants of those settlers were happy to see power finally slip from their grasp, least of all a group of bitter, fearful, and heavily armed farmers who, under the leadership of a retired general called Constand Viljoen, vowed to go to war to stop black rule.

Mandela’s lifelong quest for freedom had pitted him against one implacable adversary after another, but none was to prove more dangerous than Viljoen, a legendary military leader in the eyes of many white South Africans.

Mandela knew that should he fail to defeat the general and the far-right cause he embodied, the dream of a democratic South Africa was in mortal peril; the nightmare, he warned, was that his country would “drown in blood.”

Mandela responded as his instincts and his temperament demanded: he fought not with arms but with words; he resorted not to violence but to reason and charm.

In what was to be the last great challenge in his life’s mission to liberate black South Africa, he set himself the seemingly impossible task of meeting face to face with General Viljoen and persuading him not only to disarm, not only to call off the war, but to embrace the new, post-racial political order.

In putting together the story of Nelson Mandela’s implausible seduction of Constand Viljoen I have drawn on numerous personal encounters with Mandela and, still more revealingly, on a conversation I had with the general himself at a beachside bar in Cape Town several years after the fateful events described in this book.

I also met the general’s identical twin brother, Braam Viljoen, who played a discreet but critical role in bringing about peace in South Africa.

‘Mandela and the General’, by John Carlin and Oriol Malet is published by Plough