Prologue PROLOGUE
They made us work on Holy Saturday because we were the rookies. I didn’t mind. I was twenty-two, a gangly kid from a South African backwater, and all I wanted to do was work.

The newsroom was empty when I walked into our offices on 47 Sauer Street, Johannesburg, at 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 10, 1993. It was my first day as a reporter at one of the most prestigious English-language daily newspapers in South Africa, the Star. Over the next nine days I would end up witnessing the greatest story of my life. It was a story that would bring together a man who has been called the world’s last great hero, his fierce opponent, and a whole group of characters across the country’s political and racial divide to save the emerging new South Africa from collapse and civil war.

I wasn’t even a proper rookie. I was in the third month of my six-month training at the journalism program run by the paper, a floor down from the newsroom where my heroes churned out thousands of words daily. Two days before, three of the twelve students had been called upstairs. The head of the journalism school and the editor of the weekend newspaper, the Sunday Star, told us to report for duty on the Saturday before Easter. We were to do the “donkey work,” as the senior journalists referred to it: hourly calls to the police to check for crime updates, answering the phone for tip-offs about political killings, and checking the wire feed for breaking news.

“You won’t really be needed,” said Chris van Gass, the gentle head of the journalism school, before heading off for a weekend of bird-watching. He was right. The Sunday Star ran big exclusive features, not trivial reports of murder. That was for the daily paper. Making crime calls for the Sunday Star was almost useless.

So, just after 10 a.m. on Holy Saturday I was sipping my tea and reading that day’s edition of the paper when the news editor rushed up to my desk.

“Get a car! Go out to Dawn Park now!” she said, agitated. She was holding out a transport authorization slip so I could get a vehicle from the carpool. I stared at her, waiting for a briefing.

“Don’t just stand there!” she said. “Chris Hani has been assassinated outside his home in Dawn Park!”

I went cold.

Chris Hani, the chief of staff of the military wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), was no ordinary man. A recent survey had found he was the most popular Black leader in South Africa after Mandela himself. He was a hero in the townships, where young people would turn out in large numbers to hear him deliver fiery speeches. If my generation, already referred to as “the lost generation” by sociologists because of our disrupted education and alleged hopelessness about the future, had a hero, then it was this man. Charismatic, energetic, articulate, he had built a reputation as a brave guerrilla fighter during his twenty-seven years in exile. He was also loved by the intelligentsia, who were in thrall to his ability to discuss Marxism in one breath and Sophocles in the next.

He was hated by large swathes of white South Africa for his allegiance to communism and his uncompromising stand for racial justice. He helped direct the ANC’s armed struggle, infiltrating the country with guerrilla fighters from the organization’s exile camps to set off attacks, like the bombing of the air force head office in Pretoria in 1983. Yet Hani was not a warmonger. He saw the possibility for a new South Africa, one within the grasp of freedom- and peace-loving citizens. In the months before that fateful Saturday he had been a key member of Mandela’s team negotiating with the government to end apartheid and usher in nonracial democracy. He called for peace everywhere he spoke.

When the news editor told me Hani was dead, one thing was clear as the crisp blue autumn sky that day: the pain and the anger in the Black community would be deep, so deep that it might trigger a new racial war worse than the one Mandela and his comrades were trying to end.

The world was changing, and so was South Africa. In 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had collapsed, bringing the Cold War to an end. The year before, after forty-two years of formal apartheid modeled on the US’s Jim Crow laws, talks had begun between Nelson Mandela’s ANC and the whites-only government led by President F. W. de Klerk to transform the country into a multiracial democracy. It was a time of hope after three decades in which the ANC had been banned, thousands of its leaders incarcerated or exiled, and those antiapartheid activists still inside South Africa detained, tortured, or disappeared. But the now–three-year-old democracy negotiations had been slow, punctuated by bitter sectarian violence. For three years, South Africa had been in limbo, as talks progressed, reached stalemate, or broke down completely. Political prisoners and exiles returned home, and yet the land they returned to was hardly freer than the one they’d left. Freedom was messy. And it was taking too long. In June 1992, as political violence escalated, the democracy talks were called off. Hope in the morning was followed by despair in the evening, with no sense of what the next day would bring.

Yet just nine days before the devastating news of Hani’s murder, the talks had been restarted and all sides once again had high hopes for progress. Now, with the assassination of Hani, the talks could very well collapse, with militants on both sides taking up arms again. Throughout that day, as the anger mounted and talk became loose, as right-wingers drove to the Communist Party head office in central Johannesburg and shot up its façade and their friends taunted Black people in the streets, my feeling of dread increased.

Like so many other Black South Africans, politics was my life. I was born at a Johannesburg gold mine where my father had worked himself up from underground laborer to wages clerk. We lived on the mine’s compound for Black families, hemmed in between the packed single-sex hostels of the Black laborers and separated from the white families of the mine managers. When I was two, we were kicked out because the apartheid government designated the land on which our home stood for “whites only.” Those notorious segregationist signs went up everywhere. We moved to the Blacks-only dormitory suburb of Soweto, the famous sprawl of townships to the south of Johannesburg. Four years later, on June 16, 1976, police shot and killed at least 176 schoolchildren protesting being taught in the language of their oppressor, Afrikaans. We lived a few streets down from Morris Isaacson High School, one of the three schools where the students began protesting. That evening my parents moved us to my aunt’s home in a small, impoverished rural village in the far north of South Africa, hoping that the state would leave us alone. Eight years later, my brother was in police detention for protesting against apartheid. All four of my siblings became ANC political activists.

The final three years of my schooling were disrupted by political protests. After a national State of Emergency was declared in 1986 (there was a partial State of Emergency in 1985, covering areas designated as volatile), more than 13,000 people, some as young as eleven, were detained without charge for a month or more in just the first six months. The release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation organizations in 1990 gave us hope that apartheid was on the way out. Many young people like me had envisaged a future in which our entire lives would be overshadowed by apartheid. We could either work within its racial constraints, cowed and policed at every turn like our parents, or leave the country as exiles. Now, we believed freedom was coming. We could finally live. I applied for a job at the Star, my own small investment in a future people like me could believe in.

On April 10, 1993, the hope that I had for that future seemed naïve. The streets convulsed with rage. That afternoon, I drove to Soweto with a photographer. Burning cars barricaded the road.

By nightfall, as I walked through the city back to the apartment I shared with friends in the fast-changing flatland of Hillbrow—once a white neighborhood, now increasingly Black—accounts of violence were spreading. Police reported that at least one man had been shot at one of the many impromptu gatherings to commemorate Hani. Residents said that three people had been killed. The ANC said another man had died fighting police. In the Strand, near Cape Town, an angry crowd had burned to death two white men who had ventured into the Lwandle township. Similar reports came from across the country. On the radio, white callers were jubilant, saying Hani had lived by the sword and deserved to die by it. Leaders called for calm, yet the anger seemed to increase. So did the violence. Alone at the apartment late that evening, I felt loneliness and dread. My roommates had all gone home to spend the long weekend with their families. One of them, Saul Molobi, had launched the first antiapartheid organization in my rural village. I wondered if it would be safe for him to return to Johannesburg.

Three decades have passed since Hani’s death, but every year, around Easter, I have thought about that day and those that followed. Today it may seem as if the defeat of apartheid was inevitable, but it was not. Extremists in De Klerk’s cabinet and in Parliament armed hit men and galvanized paramilitary groups. There isn’t a point in South Africa’s transition to democracy when the country was as much on the edge of a return to all-out war as it was that week. The old forces of racism and segregation were refusing to die. People were prepared to set the country on fire to retain the apartheid system.

Mandela once told Richard Stengel, the American journalist who collaborated with him on his autobiography, that “the book that I would really like to do, after Long Walk [to Freedom], is a book about how close South Africa came to civil war.” The closest was in those days after the assassination of Chris Hani.

This is the story of that second week of April 1993. I have re-created the events of those days based on the words of the main actors—through their testimony in court, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in writings, interviews, and through original reporting of my own—as well as in the words of those around them. I wanted to write this story because, at a time when the world seems to be regressing to the divisions of the past and exhibiting selfish forms of leadership, Nelson Mandela and—to a lesser but important extent—F. W. de Klerk offer us lessons in how to listen, learn, collaborate, and lead in a complex and perilous situation. Leadership matters. And ethical leadership—whether in corporate settings or schools or government—can be the difference between going to war and doing something much more difficult: making peace. Mandela and De Klerk, despite provocations, despite their own fears, failures, histories, and doubts, chose the path of peace. I don’t know where South Africa would be today if they hadn’t.

Nelson Mandela is a hero. He’s revered across the globe. But we tend to forget that he was also human. One of his most famous quotes was a denunciation of the pedestal he had been put on: “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” In that week Mandela displayed human frailty: he prevaricated, he stalled, he was booed, and he grieved. Yet he kept trying. That’s leadership: it’s messy, unglamorous, hard.

I also wanted to write about the dangers of hate and extremism. The story of what happened in 1993 reminds us that we dare not forget the danger they posed then, and pose today, to our present and our collective future. They are on the rise now, in South Africa, the United States, Europe, across the globe. Where once they operated in the shadows, the forces of illiberalism now sit in parliaments and in executive positions, pulling us to the extremes on any number of issues from immigration to race, gender, health care, reproductive rights, and so many others. The need for ethical, values-driven leadership such as that displayed by Mandela in that week has never been as urgent as it is today.

I grew up on stories told to me by my parents and my older brother, who introduced me to books that ranged from murder mysteries to political thrillers. The story of that week has always seemed to me like a political thriller unfolding in real life, full of complex heroes and awful villains and unpredictable twists. It’s a bloody good yarn. It’s worth telling.