John Higgins: Your time in Nelson Mandela’s presidential office. What can you tell us about that extraordinary period?
Jakes Gerwel: Those five years were in many senses more interesting than any traditional research professorship. I was secretary of the cabinet in that Government of National Unity with the ANC, National Party and Inkatha together: three historical enemies. To be there with those parties, working together; it was a remarkable South African experience.
But your question was more about working with Mandela himself. Mandela as a leader throws up epistemological questions. We all cherish him and lionise him as this leader, which he really was, but he himself had a sense of collective leadership.
He always raised the issue of how does the individual relate to the collective, how is the individual’s experience and conduct influenced by the collective, and how does it feed back to the collective?
What I remember most of all about Mandela as decision-maker is his ability to project himself from the present, the moment in which he had to make a decision, into the future and almost being able to stand at that future point and look back on the effect of a decision.
Any of his generation, that Robben Island generation at least, would probably have taken the same positions that he did; but he had in addition this uncanny ability to not just reflect but, as it were, “forwardflect” on a decision.
JH: Observing from a distance, and just, say, from reading Mandela’s autobiography (1995) what is so striking is his quite extraordinary depth of self-reflexivity. As you say, the capacity not only to step outside yourself and really take in other people’s viewpoints, but also to think through how the consequent decision might look in the future, what its implications are in the real sense and then also take those into account, is startling.
JG: Yes. And then there was his anthropology. He had this genuine belief, and he often argued with me about the provability of it, that human beings are essentially “good-doing beings, beings who do good”.
He made the argument that if you are able to follow human beings from the moment they get up in the morning until they retire at night, you would find that most of them do the proper things most of the time and that the erring is an aberration. And he really acted on that. Of course, this attitude also helped to lay the basis for the furthering of social cohesion and national unity in the country.
He is a remarkable human being. I just sit back and marvel about what makes a human being, and what are the factors, what are the conditions, that can make a human being like that. And the other thing, of course, he also believed that other people are like him, in that concept of acting.
But he is a good politician. If you asked me the difference between him and Desmond Tutu, the two icons of our transition, it is that Mandela is a politician through and through. He understands party politics and politics to the fingertips. He is not a saint and he often made that point. He is a hard politician. But he uses power, he uses his political agency for the good.
JH: Yes... such an extraordinary figure. One often wonders, and I’m sure you wondered it as well, just what the psychic mechanisms are for becoming like that. What happened to all the pain and trauma that he suffered? How did that come through, was it – or how was it – transmuted, changed into something else?
JG: In all the years that I worked with him, in government and then after he left government; that’s over 18 years that I worked more closely with him than most others. And we often spent quite a bit of time together, not just on official business. In all of those years, he never expressed a word of bitterness.
If he had bitterness, he worked with it, he internalised it and buried it away. He would sometimes say to me, “Some things are better not to dwell on.” That is the way he dealt with it.
One could say, for instance, that he had been incarcerated and victimised by the Afrikaners, Afrikaners having been the masters of the apartheid state, but he had great appreciation for Afrikaners, and for individual Afrikaners.
JH: Partly why I ask this is because of the role in your own development of Black Consciousness thinking, and the great emphasis in that placed on the psychic dimensions of oppression and subjugation, and the consequent importance of facing and getting through that.
JG: There was a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of psychological liberation, as Biko would often emphasise. A part of that was not to be the victim of your suffering and not to be the victim of those who perpetrated it against you. Mandela often made that point: “To be bitter would be to allow yourself to be kept imprisoned.”
He rose above that by the generosity of spirit . . . Mandela was so generous in his relationships with those who could be described as the adversary. If you talked about the enemy, which he didn’t regard as an enemy, he would say, “Be kind to your enemy, be kind to your adversary.”
People often talk about Mandela’s values and what they learnt from him. And often, when we had these long debates at the Nelson Mandela Foundation about what are the core values of Mandela, I would say that the thing that I remember him teaching me was: “Jakes, never let your enemy choose the terrain of combat by reacting in anger. If you act in anger to anybody, even if it’s your friend, you are allowing that person to choose the terrain.” So all this was a combination of genuine principled morals with a great tactical sense.
Jakes Gerwel died in November 2012. Between 1994 and 1999 he was the director general of the Office of President Nelson Mandela. One of South Africa’s most respected citizens, he was a public intellectual, academic, bureaucrat and business person. He was born and raised on a sheep farm in the rural Eastern Cape.
John Higgins holds the Arderne Chair in Literature at UCT. He is a member of the Academy of Science of SA and Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study fellow.
The New South Africa at Twenty: Critical Perspectives (UKZN Press), edited by Peter Vale and Estelle H Prinsloo, is available in most bookshops, as well as online (Loot and Amazon), and directly from the publisher.
Mandela: principled tactician
Jakes Gerwel: Those five years were in many senses more interesting than any traditional research professorship. I was secretary of the cabinet in that Government of National Unity with the ANC, National Party and Inkatha together: three historical enemies. To be there with those parties, working together; it was a remarkable South African experience.
But your question was more about working with Mandela himself. Mandela as a leader throws up epistemological questions. We all cherish him and lionise him as this leader, which he really was, but he himself had a sense of collective leadership.
He always raised the issue of how does the individual relate to the collective, how is the individual’s experience and conduct influenced by the collective, and how does it feed back to the collective?
What I remember most of all about Mandela as decision-maker is his ability to project himself from the present, the moment in which he had to make a decision, into the future and almost being able to stand at that future point and look back on the effect of a decision.
Any of his generation, that Robben Island generation at least, would probably have taken the same positions that he did; but he had in addition this uncanny ability to not just reflect but, as it were, “forwardflect” on a decision.
JH: Observing from a distance, and just, say, from reading Mandela’s autobiography (1995) what is so striking is his quite extraordinary depth of self-reflexivity. As you say, the capacity not only to step outside yourself and really take in other people’s viewpoints, but also to think through how the consequent decision might look in the future, what its implications are in the real sense and then also take those into account, is startling.
JG: Yes. And then there was his anthropology. He had this genuine belief, and he often argued with me about the provability of it, that human beings are essentially “good-doing beings, beings who do good”.
He made the argument that if you are able to follow human beings from the moment they get up in the morning until they retire at night, you would find that most of them do the proper things most of the time and that the erring is an aberration. And he really acted on that. Of course, this attitude also helped to lay the basis for the furthering of social cohesion and national unity in the country.
He is a remarkable human being. I just sit back and marvel about what makes a human being, and what are the factors, what are the conditions, that can make a human being like that. And the other thing, of course, he also believed that other people are like him, in that concept of acting.
But he is a good politician. If you asked me the difference between him and Desmond Tutu, the two icons of our transition, it is that Mandela is a politician through and through. He understands party politics and politics to the fingertips. He is not a saint and he often made that point. He is a hard politician. But he uses power, he uses his political agency for the good.
JH: Yes... such an extraordinary figure. One often wonders, and I’m sure you wondered it as well, just what the psychic mechanisms are for becoming like that. What happened to all the pain and trauma that he suffered? How did that come through, was it – or how was it – transmuted, changed into something else?
JG: In all the years that I worked with him, in government and then after he left government; that’s over 18 years that I worked more closely with him than most others. And we often spent quite a bit of time together, not just on official business. In all of those years, he never expressed a word of bitterness.
If he had bitterness, he worked with it, he internalised it and buried it away. He would sometimes say to me, “Some things are better not to dwell on.” That is the way he dealt with it.
One could say, for instance, that he had been incarcerated and victimised by the Afrikaners, Afrikaners having been the masters of the apartheid state, but he had great appreciation for Afrikaners, and for individual Afrikaners.
JH: Partly why I ask this is because of the role in your own development of Black Consciousness thinking, and the great emphasis in that placed on the psychic dimensions of oppression and subjugation, and the consequent importance of facing and getting through that.
JG: There was a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of psychological liberation, as Biko would often emphasise. A part of that was not to be the victim of your suffering and not to be the victim of those who perpetrated it against you. Mandela often made that point: “To be bitter would be to allow yourself to be kept imprisoned.”
He rose above that by the generosity of spirit . . . Mandela was so generous in his relationships with those who could be described as the adversary. If you talked about the enemy, which he didn’t regard as an enemy, he would say, “Be kind to your enemy, be kind to your adversary.”
People often talk about Mandela’s values and what they learnt from him. And often, when we had these long debates at the Nelson Mandela Foundation about what are the core values of Mandela, I would say that the thing that I remember him teaching me was: “Jakes, never let your enemy choose the terrain of combat by reacting in anger. If you act in anger to anybody, even if it’s your friend, you are allowing that person to choose the terrain.” So all this was a combination of genuine principled morals with a great tactical sense.
Jakes Gerwel died in November 2012. Between 1994 and 1999 he was the director general of the Office of President Nelson Mandela. One of South Africa’s most respected citizens, he was a public intellectual, academic, bureaucrat and business person. He was born and raised on a sheep farm in the rural Eastern Cape.
John Higgins holds the Arderne Chair in Literature at UCT. He is a member of the Academy of Science of SA and Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study fellow.
The New South Africa at Twenty: Critical Perspectives (UKZN Press), edited by Peter Vale and Estelle H Prinsloo, is available in most bookshops, as well as online (Loot and Amazon), and directly from the publisher.
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