The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation

by Justice Malala

Overview

A “gripping and important” (The Guardian) account of nine tumultuous days, as the assassination of Nelson Mandela’s protégé by a white supremacist threatens to derail South Africa’s democratic transition and plunge the nation into civil war.

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was in power sharing talks with President F.W. de Klerk. After decades of resistance, the apartheid regime seemed poised to fall...until a white supremacist shot and killed Mandela’s popular heir apparent, Chris Hani, in a last desperate attempt to provoke civil war.

Twenty-two-year-old rookie journalist Justice Malala was one of the first people at the crime scene. And as he covered the growing chaos of the next nine days—the protests and police brutality, reprisal killings and calls for paramilitary units to get combat-ready—he was terrified the assassin’s plot might succeed.

In The Plot to Save South Africa, Malala “masterfully” (Foreign Affairs) unspools this political history in the style of a thriller, alternating between the perspectives of participants across the political spectrum in a riveting, kaleidoscopic account of a country on the brink. Through vivid archival research and shocking original interviews, he digs into questions that were never fully answered in all the tumult at the time: How involved were far-right elements within the South African government in inciting—or even planning—the assassination? And as the time bomb ticked on, how did these political rivals work together with opponents whose ideology they’d long abhorred—despite provocation and their own failures, doubts, and fears—to keep their country from descending into civil war?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982149741
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Justice Malala is one of South Africa’s foremost political commentators and the author of the #1 bestseller We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How to Stop South Africa Losing its Way. A longtime weekly columnist for The Times (South Africa), he has also written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Financial Times, among other outlets. The former publisher of The Sowetan and Sunday World, he now lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Editorial Reviews

Fast-paced, gripping, and expertly crafted, this book reads like a political thriller. A brilliant, moving, and extraordinary account of nine days that shaped a country and a continent, with the entire world looking on.”
—Toluse Olorunnipa, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of His Name Is George Floyd

“This is a dramatic work of history, prodigiously reported and beautifully crafted. Justice Malala is a first-rate storyteller, deftly weaving history with a narrative that reads like a novel. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of King: A Life

“Malala is one of a group of outstanding South African journalists who came of age around the birth of democracy.... The Plot to Save South Africa wonderfully captures the spirit of that time.”
—Financial Times

“Magnificent, furious, nuanced, and un-put-downable. Malala steers us through the hatred, the grief, and the courage that shaped one nation-shaking week. The result is a searing thriller, a deeply moving work of investigative journalism, and a mesmerising reminder of what leadership can achieve—and what South Africa almost squandered.”
—Andrew Harding, prize-winning author of The Mayor of Mogadishu

“A riveting chronicle about the triumph of leadership over despair.”
—Air Mail

“While one must certainly admire the research that went into this book, it is also necessary to laud Malala’s craftsmanship. The writing is gripping.... He is adept at using the novelist’s sense of place and atmosphere. He knows how to create tension-filled scenes. His unfailing eye for detail helps him capture the essence of the characters who parade across the stage he sets up.”
—City Press (South Africa)

“Trenchant.... Malala masterfully weaves the different threads of the story.”
—Foreign Affairs

“Heart-wrenching at times, Malala's immaculately researched account underscores the power of Mandela’s great leadership in unimaginably difficult times.... Relevant, compelling, and instructive.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“A suspenseful nonfiction thriller featuring valuable firsthand observation.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Doggedly researched and immersively told, this is a fascinating study of a nation on the brink.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

02/27/2023

On Apr. 10, 1993, a white supremacist assassinated African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela’s protégé, Chris Hani, intending to “ignite a race war that would put a stop to all attempts to end apartheid in South Africa.” In this gripping account of the killing and its aftermath, journalist Malala (We Have Now Begun Our Descent) documents how Mandela and South African president F.W. de Klerk worked together to prevent the country from descending into chaos and rein in the most extreme factions of their respective constituencies, including de Klerk’s hawkish Minister of Law and Order, Hernus Kriel, and Mandela’s fiery confidant Bantu Holomisa, military leader of the Transkei homeland. Interspersing the narrative with snippets of South African history, Malala covers the unrest from the perspectives of ANC leaders, government ministers, far-right agitators, grieving citizens, and those who kept the channel of communication between Mandela and de Klerk open. Despite Mandela’s anger at de Klerk’s failure to acknowledge his government’s past role in covert assassinations, he kept his focus on securing the free and fair elections that would ultimately lead to majority rule in South Africa. Doggedly researched and immersively told, this is a fascinating study of a nation on the brink. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-02-02
A focused study of a key moment in South African history when “people were prepared to set the country on fire to retain the apartheid system.”

In his latest, longtime South African journalist Malala, author of We Have Now Begun Our Descent, homes in on the days following the assassination of African National Congress leader Chris Hani by a right-wing fanatic in April 1993, a fraught time that would determine whether the nation would descend into more racial violence or attain a peaceful transition of power. As president of the ANC, Nelson Mandela was involved in ongoing discussions with F.W. De Klerk and his National Party government. However, with the assassination of Hani, the chief of staff of the military wing of the ANC, the talks were disrupted, and violence seemed imminent. Malala, a well-respected journalist, was a rookie reporter at Johannesburg’s English-language daily, the Star, and he was right in the middle of the political upheaval during those perilous days when the country tottered on the brink of civil war. In this page-turning account, the author moves chronologically, beginning with the shooting of Hani outside his Dawn Park home by a pro-apartheid extremist, aided by conservative parliamentarian Clive Derby-Lewis. They believed that making peace with “terrorist” Mandela was a form of “selling out” Whites and Afrikaners. Despite the angry backlash that erupted in the Black townships, suppressed violently by the government forces, Mandela repeatedly appealed for peace. A night vigil for Hani involved numerous important speakers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela; the same was true at Hani’s funeral, but no South African government officials attended. The assassins, while linked to pro-apartheid organizations, were not proven to have been tied to a wider conspiracy. After Hani’s death, however, the Transitional Executive Council set the date for the first multiracial election in South Africa. The author includes a cast of characters, list of relevant organizations, and a timeline.

A suspenseful nonfiction thriller featuring valuable firsthand observation.

Kirkus Reviews