NELSON MANDELA & F.W. DE KLERK

By PAUL GRAY James Gaines, Joelle Attinger, Nelson Mandela, F.W. De Klerk

Two days before receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, African National Congress (A.N.C.) President Nelson Mandela entertains visitors and well-wishers at the Grand Hotel in Oslo, Norway. Tall, exquisitely tailored, he dispenses soft handshakes and his world-famous smile. The 27 years he spent in South African prisons seem somehow to have left him younger than his 75 years; he looks well + rested and benign. The mention of a newborn baby boy makes him beam. Because of his confinement, he did not get to see his own two youngest daughters grow up, and since his release he has kindled a love affair with his grandchildren. Gradually, as Mandela begins to talk of how his fellow Peace Prize winner, South African President F.W. de Klerk, has ''disappointed'' him during their long, tortuous negotiations toward a new, free, just South Africa, his sunny demeanor fades. Once started on this subject, he has trouble stopping. His voice rises; the smile becomes a scowl. Blacks have been killing other blacks in gruesome ways and growing numbers back in his country, and Mandela says he knows who is partly to blame: ''There is no doubt that the National Party is involved in violence; we have got very solid evidence.'' Two days after the Nobel ceremony, De Klerk, 57, sits in an ornate suite in another Grand Hotel, this one in Rome, Italy, where he awaits an audience the next day with Pope John Paul II. For someone who has just been heralded and laureled as a peacemaker, De Klerk falls into moods that border on the bellicose. He is irked at his co-recipient and dissatisfied with what he takes to be the world's misunderstanding of himself. Smaller, more delicately featured than he appears in photographs, the President nurses a Scotch and cannot resist complaining. He feels Mandela has upstaged him in Norway and maligned him in general. He, the son and grandson of National Party leaders who helped erect the artifice of apartheid, has traveled further from his heritage than anyone could have predicted. He has dismantled the past and prepared his nation for democracy. And what does he hear from Mandela, the A.N.C. and others? That he is a foot dragger, unconcerned with the injustices and violence suffered by blacks in his land, even, perhaps, secretly instigating such turmoil; that he is not an architect of progress but at times its impediment. ''If I start defending myself on that,'' De Klerk says, hunching forward in his chair and clenching his teeth, ''I would also have to go on the attack.'' The mutual bitterness and resentments between De Klerk and Mandela are palpable. How could these two have agreed on anything -- lunch, for instance, much less the remaking of a nation? In one sense, the answer is simple. Mandela and De Klerk perfectly meet the first precondition of peacemakers: they do not like each other very much. Harmony is only intermittently an issue between friends; the intractable messes of human coexistence are left for enemies to hammer out. In attempting to do this most difficult thing, Mandela and De Klerk have been forced into a fascinating pas de deux, coordinating their steps while not so secretly resenting the necessity of their partnership. ''Mandela and De Klerk,'' says A.N.C. spokesman Carl Niehaus, ''were delivered to each other by history.'' Neither one, in the season of their triumphs, seems grateful for the gift of the other. But those triumphs are immense. These unlikely allies created the conditions for an event the world could not have foreseen only a few years earlier. ''Our goal is a new South Africa,'' De Klerk told the audience at the Nobel awards ceremony. From the same platform, Mandela proclaimed, ''We can today even set the dates when all humanity will join together to celebrate one of the outstanding victories of our century.'' That victory was not easily won, and the mutual enmity between Mandela and De Klerk may be due in part to battle fatigue. There is another reason. Both men knew that their collaboration would, if successful, lead to political rivalry between them. De Klerk the incumbent and Mandela the challenger are now active candidates for the presidency of South Africa. Thanks to their work, the election scheduled for April 27 will embrace all the nation's citizens, including the previously disenfranchised blacks who, numbering 28 million, make up 75% of the population. Given the stunning majority of potential black voters, Mandela is regarded as a shoo-in. Not by De Klerk, who seems determined to prove that he has not negotiated himself out of his job. But it is not just casting eyes at the same prize that has made Mandela and De Klerk so uncomfortable together, so prone to display visceral anger toward each other's words and deeds. (They are not, after two dozen meetings, even on a first-name basis; it is ''Mr. Mandela'' and ''Mr. President.'') The task they have been forced by circumstances to undertake in concert has tested their characters in fiendishly exasperating ways. Both De Klerk and Mandela are attorneys, skilled in the art of compromise. Both also have stubborn streaks and strong, entrenched opinions, shaped in large measure by their very different South African pasts. For De Klerk, a fourth-generation Afrikaner and hence a beneficiary of white privilege under the old system, change has meant revoking the legacy of his forebears. He vehemently denies, however, that he has done so, and he claims that his father, who died in 1979 after serving in three apartheid-enforcing governments, ''would agree with me today.'' Still, De Klerk was not a born reformer. During his rise through the ranks of the National Party, he allied himself with its verkrampte, or ''closed- minded conservative,'' camp. He was a pragmatic politician, eager to press the flesh and do the deal. He proved cautious in his personal life as well. He married and stayed married to his college sweetheart. An earlier generation of South African leaders liked to relax by hunting big game; De Klerk took up golf. One thing that rankled Mandela's supporters throughout the talks was De Klerk's dogged refusal to condemn the principle of apartheid. The President will admit that the system led to injustices, particularly the forced removals of blacks from places legally declared off limits to them. ''That is where it became wrong, where it became morally unjustifiable, where it became an impairment on the dignity of people.'' Even so, De Klerk speaks wistfully about ''grand apartheid'' as a system that might have worked in South Africa had all the nation's diverse ethnic and tribal groups accepted geographic separation voluntarily. Mandela, a child of the oppressed majority, finds this notion hateful. It has been the labor of his life to overthrow apartheid, not because it didn't do its job but because it was morally repellent. Part of Mandela's irritation with De Klerk seems to stem from this fundamental disagreement over why change was necessary. True, Mandela largely achieved through negotiations his vision of a nonracial, majority-ruled South Africa. But to ensure success, Mandela was compelled to forgive conduct toward himself and all South African blacks that his own moral code tells him is unforgivable. That he bowed to such compromise is testimony to the fact that the Nelson Mandela who walked with such dignity out of prison in February 1990 was not the same firebrand who had been placed there 27 years before. Born into the royal family of the Thembu, a clan of the Xhosa tribe based in the Transkei, Mandela was trained as a boy to rule someday as a chief. Instead he became a lawyer and an A.N.C. militant. It was just a few months after then A.N.C. leader Chief Albert Luthuli was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize that Mandela urged the party leadership to take up arms. Committed to nonviolence, Luthuli was deeply ambivalent about the proposition. . Mandela remembers Luthuli finally telling him, ''We are going to keep to nonviolence, but we give you permission to go and start the organization to embark on armed actions. You will report to us from time to time on the progress you're making, with the understanding that the organization as such is not going to be involved.'' As a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the A.N.C., the young Mandela participated in acts of violence. But the attempt to maintain the fiction that the A.N.C. was uninvolved was quixotic. The government had already banned the organization in 1960; by 1962 Mandela was under arrest, and two years later he was sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage. Several interesting changes occurred during Mandela's long, long incarceration. For one thing, his enforced isolation slowly transformed him into a mythic figure. Incommunicado, without the opportunity to speak out on specific issues, Mandela in his silence became South Africa's most persuasive presence: an inspiration to blacks, a recrimination to whites. What is more, he sensed the moral power his confinement had conferred. Mandela had always been willing to talk; violence was his recourse when the other side would not listen. One day in 1986 he sat down and wrote a letter to the government proposing a dialogue on the nation's future. This gesture received a secret but surprisingly willing response from President P.W. Botha, a hard-liner on apartheid who nonetheless had begun to sense his country's escalating dilemma. Apartheid was collapsing of its own inherent absurdity. Moreover, the outlawed A.N.C.'s 1984 call to make South Africa ''ungovernable'' had been answered by a surge of black demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. To put down such unrest, the government had to use increasingly brutal police and military actions, many of them filmed by news cameras and televised to appalled viewers around the globe. These ugly spectacles increased international pressure for economic sanctions against South Africa. Whites saw their nation becoming an international pariah. Realizing he needed Mandela, Botha arranged a meeting with him at the presidential residence, Tuynhuys, in Cape Town in July 1989 -- Mandela had been slipped out of prison for the purpose. The two issued a joint communique committing themselves, in general terms, to peace. A month later, Botha, whose authoritarian style had impeded real progress, was nudged out of office by party leaders. Though he was no one's idea of a revolutionary, De Klerk had carefully watched Botha's struggles to accommodate irreconcilable forces and had clearly seen that half measures were hardly going to bring domestic peace and renewed economic growth. De Klerk also had a natural interest in his own political future. In 1985 he had asked two consultants what he should do to succeed Botha; they both told him to soften his image on the necessity of preserving apartheid. This, cautiously, he began to do. Upon taking office, De Klerk announced, ''Our goal is a totally changed South Africa.'' In December 1989 he convened a historic bosberaad, or bush council, at which he won his Cabinet's authorization to lift the government's ban on the A.N.C. and to release Mandela in February of the following year. Then came the hard part. Shortly before Mandela was freed, he and De Klerk met for the first time, again at the presidential residence in Cape Town. Things went well, both men now recall. Like partners in a soured marriage looking back to the heady days of courtship, they remember how pleased and surprised they were by each other's responsiveness, courtesy and willingness to cooperate. ''We immediately started talking freely to each other,'' says De Klerk. ''He met me on a basis of equality and discussed issues objectively,'' Mandela notes. ''I was tremendously impressed.'' Once out of prison, Mandela commended De Klerk as ''a man of integrity.'' Months later, he retracted this judgment. As the intense bargaining between them began, Mandela was first startled and then outraged to discover that De Klerk was not a meek facilitator of historical inevitability but a tough, grudging opponent. De Klerk kept attempting to insert into any proposed power- sharing agreement checks and balances that would still give whites some guarantees of a voice in future governments. Mandela bridled and complained that the National Party ''keeps looking for ways to exercise power even if it loses a democratic election.'' Both men have tempers that are ordinarily tamed in public. In private, however, they grew increasingly angry with each other. De Klerk flew into rages at the charge that he did not care about township violence -- as if, Mandela suspected, he could not stand being scolded by a black man. And Mandela's stony reserve sometimes dissolved as well. A Mandela aide commented about some of these torrid sessions: ''I sometimes feel sorry for De Klerk after the old man bullies him.'' Their disagreements became so acrimonious that Mandela and De Klerk at one point broke off all personal contacts, communicating only through letters and public statements. But both had invested too much in the process to let it founder. Shrewdly, they delegated the day-to-day haggling to subordinates. And the leading understudies, government minister Roelof Meyer, 46, and A.N.C. secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa, 41, eventually came through with the crucial compromise: an agreement to establish a government of national unity for five years after the first free elections in April. Full-scale majority- rule democracy would arrive, with some time allowed for all South Africans to get used to it. In perhaps their finest moment since their first meeting, De Klerk and Mandela recognized the wisdom of this plan and made critical concessions. De Klerk dropped his insistence on building in some form of white veto over majority rule. Mandela relinquished his demand for a strong centralized government and accepted a form of federalism that grants nine provinces some attributes of autonomy. And then both men, despite private disappointments over details, energetically sold this plan to their people. The exact nature of what Mandela and De Klerk together have achieved may not be clear for many years. The nation they share has an explosive history of racial, ethnic and tribal violence. Can an infant democracy heal the searing wounds of past injustices and bind up all the diverse people of South Africa? Sometimes against their wills, instincts and self-interests, Mandela and De Klerk have nevertheless made that question their nation's most urgent concern. And both deny they deserve much individual credit for what they have done so far. ''I think it would have been possible for others to do the same,'' says De Klerk. Mandela argues that his success was really the triumph of the A.N.C.: ''I don't think there is much history can say about me. I just want to be remembered as part of that collective.'' Both are too modest. If the chain of events they have set in motion leads to the conclusion they both want, then the future will write of them -- as it will of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin if their vision is realized -- that these were leaders who seized their days and actually dared to lead.

In mid-December TIME'S Jim Gaines, Joelle Attinger and Scott Macleod met separately with De Klerk and Mandela and asked them about common issues. Excerpts from the two interviews:

- DE KLERK: In prison, Mr. Mandela, probably had a perception of leaders of the National Party that was proved wrong when he met us. My first meeting with him in 1989 was fairly relaxed. We came to grips with some fundamental things, basically the need to solve the problem of South Africa through negotiation and recognizing each other as main players who would have to take the lead. MANDELA: I found Mr. De Klerk very positive, very bright, very confident of himself, and ready to accommodate the views I expressed. The National Party had announced a ((reform)) program in which they talked about ''group rights.'' I said to him, ''Look, this will introduce apartheid through the back door.'' He replied, ''Well, if you don't like it, then we'll scrap it.'' I smuggled a message to the A.N.C. leadership in Zambia and said, ''I think we can do business with this man.'' I did not expect that he was going to be so positive. DE KLERK: I don't believe I am irreplaceable. I don't believe he is irreplaceable. The fact is we were around, and we were the leaders. MANDELA: I was disappointed by him because he did things that I did not expect. Such as the question of violence. I said to him that if there is anything that will create bad blood between us, it is the slaughter of human beings with government connivance. That is the one thing that has created a great deal of friction between me and De Klerk. DE KLERK: A different approach from the A.N.C. could have prevented much of the grief. Mandela could have started negotiating sooner. They should never have embarked on acts of terrorism, killing innocent civilians; it had a dramatic effect on white public opinion. If they had refrained, we might not have had the state of emergency we had. Sanctions were quite counterproductive. They built a strong sense of nationalism: We will not allow the world to tell us what to do! MANDELA: In spite of my criticism, it must be acknowledged he has made a very important contribution to the transformation of an apartheid state to a nonracial society. MANDELA: When I was sent to jail, my mother got a terrible shock. She had never been to school, and valued education. She had in mind a dignified profession for me. I had to sit down and explain to her why I was in the A.N.C. She became so convinced that later she said to me, ''If you don't join other children and fight for our liberation, I am going to disinherit you.'' DE KLERK: My brother was a very liberal editor of a daily newspaper. He was criticizing us, he was urging us to do what we are doing now. My father ((a Cabinet minister in three apartheid governments)) would agree with me today; he died in 1979. I had discussions with him; at dinner, invariably, before we reached the sweets we got on to politics. He was a man who always looked for justice. He asked himself, If a plan cannot work, then it becomes immoral to continue something you acknowledge in your own conscience cannot work. MANDELA: Chief Albert Luthuli ((A.N.C. president, 1952 to '67)) believed in nonviolence as a way of life. But we who were in touch with the grass roots persuaded the chief that if we did not begin the armed struggle, then people would proceed without guidance. Armed struggle must be a movement intended to hit at the symbols of oppression and not to slaughter human beings. DE KLERK: Our cherished ideal was self-determination. Grand apartheid was the concept of ''separate development,'' bringing full political rights to the Zulus, the Xhosas and others: self-rule taking into account the diversity of identities. America is the only exception where the melting pot works. In the rest of the world, nation-states that have clear majorities of one ethnic group within the country have been the pattern. So I say separate development was morally justifiable if you look at it as a constitutional option. When apartheid started, the colonial powers weren't worried about black political rights at all. In America racial discrimination was thriving. MANDELA: The government did not want any form of demonstration from blacks, no matter how disciplined, how peaceful. Any demonstration was regarded as a declaration of war against white supremacy. DE KLERK: The A.N.C. would not have negotiated if they thought they could win the armed struggle. Their goal was to take over all power. MANDELA: Many of our staunch comrades, very militant, said that as a result of the armed struggle, many of our people were arrested, and we gave the regime the opportunity to destroy completely the movement inside the country. But what the government did was to send in their armored cars , and the soldiers went from house to house beating up people. We say that is no different. DE KLERK: I don't think it was a good idea to tell people where to live and to kick people out of particular townships. It became forced removals. That is where apartheid became morally unjustifiable. As it failed, it became more and more racist and less and less morally defensible. People's dignity was being impaired, and it brought humiliation. I have said time and again, ''We are sorry that that happened.'' MANDELA: I don't think it is necessary for De Klerk to apologize. It is what a person does to ensure that the most brutal system of racial oppression is completely eliminated from our society. DE KLERK: I don't want to sound vindictive, but I am relatively satisfied with the agreement. I don't see that we have made any fundamental concessions on principle -- practical concessions, yes. MANDELA: There is no question of compromising on majority rule. But there has been a demand for federalism. The regions can draw up their own constitutions. They can make their own laws and impose taxation. We did not agree with this. But we felt that in order to bring everybody on board, we should make certain compromises. DE KLERK: They have made major concessions. They were wise. Domination cannot work, or there will again be a struggle. MANDELA: There is no doubt that South Africans, black and white, are coming together. I have been addressing some of the most conservative sectors. Their response is so positive. One of the first questions is, ''When did you change your policy?'' I say, ''This has always been our policy.'' They say, ''It's not true. You have been a terrorist organization.'' Nobody who hears our policy can fault it. DE KLERK: Looking back, I wouldn't have done any of the fundamental things I did differently. I achieved thus far almost all of the goals which I set for myself within these past four years. I would hope that history would recognize that I, together with all those who supported me, have shown courage, integrity, honesty at the moment of truth in our history. That we took the right turn.

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Johannesburg and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washington