In the desultory anti-apartheid days of early 1976, the central quadrangle at Robben Island witnessed a compelling morning drama. As most prisoners headed off to the quarry to break rocks under South Africa’s diamond-bright sky, a tall, silver-haired African in his mid-fifties and a younger firebrand of a fellow prisoner stayed behind.
They had been signed off hard labour with a sick note, but that was a ruse. After more than a decade on the rocky island off Cape Town, Nelson Mandela was working with “Mac” Maharaj on his clandestine autobiography. Day after day they haggled over changes to the text of what was to become Long Walk to Freedom. Mac would then incorporate them in the draft he had hidden, before smuggling it off the island on his release later that year. They also argued about just about everything under the sun – ideology, ethics and the “struggle” of course – as Mac has done for 50 years and more in the cauldron of South African politics, most recently as the spin-doctor of President Jacob Zuma.
When I arrive at his home in a nondescript Durban apartment block, just a street away from the Indian Ocean, the rhetorical inferno seems dimmed. It was his first morning home after emergency surgery for lung cancer. Mac was always, I recall from his days in Mandela’s cabinet when I first encountered him, an inveterate smoker. The surgery was a success but for a while it had been touch and go. A lung started leaking. Mac’s kidneys collapsed. He recalls feeling as if he had a log across his lungs. He looked back over his life, sensing he might not have long. “Then one night I coughed up so much blood I could begin to breathe . . . ”
Old friends are bustling around to celebrate his return. “I am Sunny,” says one twinkly-eyed friend, shaking my hand. “Or maybe I should introduce myself by my old underground name, Bobby.” He, too, had been on Robben Island. Mac walks stiffly over to a high-backed chair and points me to a sofa. As I look up at him, he laughs; he is taking a leaf out of Mandela’s book. Mandela had told him that as a lawyer he had learnt the value of having a higher chair than a client. When they were revising the autobiography, “Mandela always went and sat on a concrete slab, and my seat was much lower. One evening I said to myself, this thing has got to stop. So the next day I rushed out before he could get there and sat on the concrete slab. Then he came. For the next two days we did no work except to argue about who should sit on the brick!”
Maharaj, who grew up in a Hindu family in the small industrial town of Newcastle as apartheid was gathering force, is now 80 and one of the last survivors of the “golden” generation of Robben Islanders. In the early 1960s he was a forger, “travel agent” and bomb-maker. Before his 12 years on Robben Island he suffered appalling torture at the hands of the police, including being suspended by one ankle out of a seventh-floor window. For 15 years after Robben Island he was underground again as an ANC “super spy”. Through all this he holds a unique record as confidant of three of the last four party leaders: Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s leader in exile, Mandela, and now Jacob Zuma whom he served until April this year as spin-doctor, defending sometimes rather shabbier matters than he might have anticipated when he embraced liberation politics in the 1950s.
Half a century has passed since the heady days of independence when dozens of former African colonies gained their freedom. Listening to Mac’s account is to recall how far sub-Saharan Africa has come – and how far it still has to go. “The 1950s, 60s . . . our assumption was ‘get rid of the foreign ruler and everything will be hunky dory’. Our assumption was that development would be a walk in the park. We were all novices . . . ”
When he arrived in London with £5 in his pocket to study at the LSE he bridled at the paternalism and casual racism of the era. His first lodgings were in Notting Hill, where the notice said: “For coloureds only.” So, when Guinea’s independence leader Ahmed Sékou Touré took charge, “Was I chuffed? Yes! A prime minister riding a bicycle. Here’s a prime minister who produces a party congress document, says, ‘We haven’t got funds, we haven’t got this, but we’re going to develop because we have the main asset: human capital.'” He cites Touré to concede how wrong you can be: Touré became one of the continent’s more repressive dictators.
Mac is no romantic. The cold war was a disaster for Africa. Money poured in but to prop up proxies, not for development. Nothing was addressed in a “fundamentally sustainable way”. No one was taking into account that if you built, say, Zambia’s Kariba Dam, you had to set aside maintenance. “You can’t do that if you wait for the right day. There will be nothing.” So, I say archly, it was quite lucky that South Africa gained its independence in the 90s and not the 60s? “Exactly,” says Mac. He checks himself. “But I don’t want to put it like Tutu would, that it’s a good thing that Mandela suffered, because he became a reconciler.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has long maintained that Mandela’s 27 years in prison gave him the time to mature from a radical to the reconciler who emerged in 1990. Mac disputes this with a passion and embarks on a lengthy interrogation of Mandela’s record. There is no doubt, he insists, that Mandela’s embrace of reconciliation was rooted in his thinking years earlier and in the party line.
The more he argues, the more his voice regains its timbre. Probing, prodding, questioning all the way, he addresses the “next wave” in the 60s when “the answer” was to follow the path of Gaddafi and seize power. Mac readily accepts the Libyan dreams were dashed but, “it’s easy to say what he [Gaddafi] should’ve done, that he had the resources and where he should have put them. At the time there was no question of infrastructure development.” This he argues – rightly, surely – remains a vital issue for Africa. Back in the 60s, however, the ANC, was suffused with dreams of copying Castro and Gaddafi and defeating apartheid with a guerrilla army. It was Mao, Mac recalls, who introduced a note of realism, telling Walter Sisulu, Mandela’s close friend, that South Africa seemed far from ripe for revolution. “When we turned to the armed struggle [in 1961], we thought it would be over in six months.
“After we landed in prison, Wilton Mkwayi every New Year would get up and greet us from his cell shouting and welcoming the new year and saying, ‘Don’t worry chaps, five years and we’re going to be out.’ And then one day somebody got fed up and shouted back, ‘Wilton I’ve heard this nonsense so many times.’ And Wilton said, ‘I’ve never told you when the five years begins.'”
. . .
Sometimes the tone on Robben Island was Socratic, sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes sulphurous. There were particularly heated battles between a Stalinist faction and Mandela. But for Mac there was no question who had the last word. “So what must I do?” Mac recalls asking mulishly, after Mandela had persuaded him he needed to study the Afrikaners if he was to have any hope of defeating them. “He said, ‘Learn the language.’ OK, I say, I’ll learn. ‘No, learn their poetry, understand their culture, because I am talking about understanding.'”
In this, Mandela led from the front. Mac recalls Mandela raising prisoners’ complaints with General Steyn, the visiting head of correctional services, “an extremely polite man . . . in a black suit with a hat, spotless white shirt . . . General Steyn turns round and says, ‘Mr Mandela, you are not in a five-star hotel, you are in prison.’ And I’m listening and saying, ‘Oh boy, that man is in trouble.’ Mandela says, ‘General, you and I are at war. In a war nobody can predict who is going to win, but one thing we know, that at the end of the day we will have to meet, even if it is for you to accept my surrender. How that happens will be determined by how we treat each other.’ Steyn changed overnight.”
In the 1980s, as Soviet power waned, the ANC’s thinking matured. “We learnt to cut out the judgmental claptrap. The reality was that Africa was not developed. They [individual countries] had enormous problems of their own. Every experiment took us one way, and they sometimes took us two steps forwards and one back, and sometimes one step forward and two steps back.” But even so, in May 1994, when Mandela took the oath of office, the ANC was not ready, Mac says, to adjust from the politics of protest to the responsibilities of power.
Just over two decades later South Africa is transformed. The one-time pariah is a launch pad for global business to expand into the continent. It sits at the top table of emerging powers, a new member of the Brics, the group of countries that aspires to be an alternative power bloc to the west. A black middle class has moved into the business heart of Johannesburg, the former preserve of the white minority. But the ANC’s metamorphosis has further to go. It still has a comfortable majority but it is stagnating and suffers the malaise of many other liberation movements that on assuming power, fail to distinguish between party and state. The controversy over Nkandla, the rural home of Jacob Zuma, which has been expanded at state expense, has been widely depicted as exemplifying this trend.
Mac concedes a careerist “get-rich-quick” impulse is thriving. “They think if they can wear a Breitling watch, if this watch is worth half a million, fantastic.” But, he adds, beware western hypocrisy. “What are the rich Africans spending their money on? We are into conspicuous living. You can condemn us for that but it was what many countries have been through, and they still do it. Some of the people in Britainwho made their wealth in the industrial revolution as really harsh employers redeemed their reputation by their charity work. Then you had the carpetbaggers in the US. We did not identify the problem early enough. We as South Africans and everyone declared our transition as a miracle. And we began to think [the problems] will be resolved as time goes on. So for me the issue is not one of disappointment. The issue is, have we identified the problems correctly? And do we have solutions to them?”
It is only when I raise the record of the president that Mac bridles. Zuma, a fellow Robben Islander, was tireless in the 90s in bringing peace to the troubled province of KwaZulu-Natal, but his time in government has been deeply controversial. He had to step down as deputy president and face criminal charges after Schabir Shaik, an old family friend, was convicted of making illegal payments to him. Mac deflects my implicit critiques by relating the “total excitement” at the hospital when the president visited him in his bed and contrasting that image “with the dominant image presented by many opinion makers” of a vacillatory leader.
His eyes flash, however, when I touch on Zuma’s finances. ANC “comrades” came back from exile “with no pension, no work experience”, he reminds me. “Some went to friends. Others went to people who were relying on us to help them.” In 2003 Mac himself was embroiled in controversy over his connections to Schabir Shaik, the businessman who made payments to Zuma. Mac was accused of having accepted from Shaik a free family trip to Disneyland seven years earlier, when Mac was Mandela’s transport minister. Mac’s wife, Zarina, was separately accused of using Shaik to channel more than half a million rand through his companies to her company, contravening exchange control regulations.
And Nkandla? An official report recently found that the president benefited unduly from the improvements, which cost R246m. They were officially justified on security grounds but included a vast swimming pool and other adornments. Mac stops just short of criticising the president: “I’d say this is the biggest weakness of the administration. From the beginning I said to him, ‘President, prepare yourself for repayment.’ This was before the report came out. And I said, ‘If you have a problem, I’m sure that in your present position it won’t be difficult to raise [the money]’. He said, ‘No I did not ask for those security enhancements. I’m not paying.’ We know how stubborn each of us can be. And we know each of us has a blind spot. But however this thing pans out, what is important is we create a culture of taking responsibility for our actions.”
Mac is close to South Africa’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is vying to be next in line. The trade union leader turned business mogul lost out to Thabo Mbeki as Mandela’s successor as ANC leader in 1997. Mac all but breaks the ANC taboo on formal endorsements: “He’s a fantastic negotiator, he’s got an enormous capacity to stay focused on 10 issues. I think he will probably make a good president, [although] I’m not ruling out that even when he becomes president you find some major cock-up takes place.”
Mac has been talking for three hours and is tiring. As we break for lunch his son, Milou, 33, briefly joins us. He has had nervous breakdowns, is on treatment and, friends say, embodies the price Mac paid for his long years undercover and on the run.
In one burst of Robben Island fireworks, Mac accused Mandela of being a “feudal aristocrat masquerading as a scientific socialist”. Years later Mandela wrote that, “Sometimes what he says is painful to hear but, painful or not, Mac will plough on with little regard for the niceties. He is not seeking favour from me; he is looking out for the protection of my integrity.”
So has he been as “painful” to Zuma? “The circumstances have changed. [Time] was a luxury we had in prison. You could debate for weeks on end. In government, whether with Mandela or Zuma, the opportunity to have that kind of discussion is minimal. We’ve got phenomenal challenges. The ANC can meet them but they are all dividing on who should be the next leader. It’s a waste of energy. When somebody asked me once how I looked at prison I said, ‘What a bloody privilege!'”
* Alec Russell is the FT’s news editor, a former South Africa correspondent and author of ‘After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa’
(c) 2015 The Financial Times Ltd.
