Mandela, The Myth and Me Storyville

This programme contains strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

MAN TYPES

CROWD CHEER AND SING

Dear Tata Mandela, I must have been seven years old

when I first heard your name, Nelson Mandela.

You were this mysterious figure who captured my imagination.

You came to symbolise our struggle for freedom.

I stand here before you

not as a prophet,

but as a humble servant of you, the people.

Growing up in a village in Limpopo in the 1980s,

my late grandmother spoke about you

as this revolutionary who was going to free us from apartheid.

She always spoke in harsh tones

for fear of being detained or killed.

I was warned never to mention your name, even to my friends.

You became my hero, and from that moment, I was curious about you.

All the images of you were banned,

so I started to imagine you as this character from folk tales -

half-man, half-beast, with one huge eye in the middle of your forehead

that could see everything, an all seeing-eye.

You were strong and you would crush your enemies.

I remember going to town with my grandparents in the 1980s.

I remember being confused

as to why my grandparents stood at the window to buy stuff,

while white people went right into the store.

I witnessed a few times

how young white kids spoke rudely to my grandparents.

Their humiliation was palpable, their anger was silent

and their pain was unbearable.

Every nation bears the burden of history and memory.

What should we remember and what should we forget,

and who decides?

Tata Mandela, did you have to take on a different identity

and become a new person in order to transcend the past?

Nelson Mandela has amazing magnetism.

When you're in his presence, he looks at you and he greets you,

and you think he recognises you.

You think he knows who you are, and sometimes maybe he does

because you're a very familiar face.

Sometimes he has no clue, you know, and that's fine.

But he has that leadership quality, that magnetic quality,

that photogenic quality that makes a leader loved.

The people's man.

I wanted to write this letter to him.

So I wrote this letter and it was published "Dear Madiba",

just saying how I felt about his five years in office.

When he saw me the next day he said,

"Hmm, you've written me a love letter, hey?"

I said, "Yes, sir, I thought I should write you a love letter".

So he says, "Well, I think I should get you to marry me".

And of course we just laughed, you know?

He was always very, very charming and flirtatious,

but also very...I mean, anybody who says

"Oh, he's all conciliatory and loving, and wonderful",

I don't see that.

He is ice cold...

and as, you know, as cold as ice.

Cold as ice!

I tried to argue with Madiba a couple of times,

and you had to be pretty brave to try to stand up to him.

Nobody else really stood by,

everybody was very quiet.

People didn't want to cross him.

He had an anger about him, a strong temper.

He's forgiving, and if he flared up with you,

as he did with me on two occasions,

and you went to complain to him afterwards,

you then found him smiling and giving you a nice little pat on the back.

"Ronnie, don't worry about it. What I said, I said in that meeting.

"Now, don't worry about it. Forget it."

But he had achieved what he set out to do, to demolish my argument.

Really wonderful.

His face, his eyes,

we see the, I think, the non-violence principle,

and the quite sort of wise thinking

reflects in his face and his eyes.

This one almost seems like a kind of monk, fasting for this target,

something like that.

I felt like he would look stern.

He'd look like a stern person,

somebody who lives within his principles,

eats vegetables or water, you know, something like that.

He enhances in me the desire to be good in the way he talks

and the octave that he uses, or his voice.

I have to say, with it comes...

a frustration of some sort.

The frustration I have when I see on the television

all these, you know, stars standing next to him.

Does it make them feel better about, you know, themselves, or...?

I have no idea, I just feel that there's something wrong, really,

going on with that.

There isn't enough space for the revolutionary,

there isn't enough space for arguing,

for taking up arms, there isn't enough space

for talking about land and real redress in that narrative.

No, we only have space for the man who doesn't like suits, and children.

So even the icons of that narrative

exist in this kind of teddy bear old man,

laughing, crying, soft selves.

There is a perception that South Africa is a miracle country,

but there were no miracles.

People fought for freedom and people paid a huge price.

The land is stained with blood.

REPORTER: 'This is Mandela's first television interview.'

'I asked him what it was that the African really wanted.'

The Africans require, want,

the franchise, on the basis of one man, one vote.

They want political independence.

There are many people who feel

that it is useless and futile

for us to continue talking peace and non-violence

against a government whose reply is only savage attacks

on an unarmed and defenceless people.

Tata Mandela, how do you feel about interacting

with the very same people who once labelled you as a terrorist?

There are MPs, Conservative MPs, who, in their student days,

used to wear "Hang Nelson Mandela" badges,

for whom Mandela was a terrorist and they wanted him,

if not locked up for ever, then probably executed.

Now he's everybody's favourite uncle, he's the hero.

There was confusion and controversy

here in the United States

as to whether Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

I would never have used such a characterisation, but many did.

But you'd never find anyone in the United States

who would even want to admit that they did that.

The question of how he helped to resolve, peacefully,

the conflict in South Africa, is one of his greatest achievements.

But it mustn't be permitted to conceal

this militant man of the people.

MANDELA: I have fought against white domination.

And I have...

I was a teenager when I first heard your voice.

Someone made me listen to your Rivonia trial speech.

It was inspiring, and I listened to your voice again and again.

..of a democratic and free society

in which all persons will live together

in harmony and with equal opportunities.

It is an ideal

for which I hope to live for,

and to see realised.

But, my lord,

if it need be,

it is an ideal

for which I am prepared to die.

When I was born, you had already been in prison for over a decade

and yet in my grandmother's eyes, you were a hero.

I never questioned her wisdom.

My grandmother was overprotective of me

and I stayed in the house all the time with her.

Most of the time, nothing happened,

but once in a while I would see an army truck driving past

carrying young, white soldiers, their guns sticking out.

I would feel my grandmother's hand tugging at mine

as she dragged me away into the safety of the house.

DEMONSTRATORS SING

Tata Mandela, while you were incarcerated,

young people driven by a sense of urgency and yearning for freedom

took the apartheid regime head on.

Some had been inspired by your example of militant youth.

Some were killed, while others were detained.

Do you know what happened to some of that generation?

For three months, we were in hiding,

and after three months they found us and arrested us.

I was a young journalist

and I suddenly found myself in this...in the belly of the beast

of what was apartheid.

And so then they did exactly what I was fearing,

that they would use my pregnancy in the whole interrogation process.

Basically, they tried to wear me down,

interrogated me constantly, etc.

But then, eventually, when they couldn't get me to co-operate

and this time I did have information,

and this time it was very definite information,

they finally came up with this idea

that they were preparing this chemical for me to drink

that would burn the baby from my body.

That was probably the hardest moment for me,

because that was the moment when I had to decide,

"What are the choices that I make? Do I let my child die,

"or do I let my child live and send a whole lot of people to jail?"

It was almost like no choice.

I decided to say to them

"Well, do what you have to do. Do what you have to do."

Of course, I remember them clearly. I remember their eyes.

I see the eyes of very cruel, vicious men.

Sometimes in a crowd, I see them. Of course it's not them,

but I see somebody who looks like one of them, and then I'm terrified.

The one that tortured myself and my husband

and others in '85, he actually met with my husband,

and he sent a message to say, you know,

something like he wanted bygones to be bygones,

and he wanted to find out how my child was.

How can you find out how the child was that you wanted to kill?!

Tata Mandela, whenever I go back to my village, I get depressed.

I'm moved by the poverty,

and shocked at the cemeteries bursting with my childhood friends.

Should I dare ask, whose freedom is it?

Was the struggle for all or was the struggle for a few?

I couldn't believe it. It was impossible.

When they told me that my sister had died in the bomb blast,

I wouldn't believe it because my sister was not the military type.

She was very feminine, and liked clothing and socialising.

I could not imagine my sister doing military training

and getting involved with bombs or guns.

I dismissed it immediately.

When we got to the mortuary, they led me round the corridor,

which curved to your left.

And...

there was a cloth over my sister's body,

and they opened it up and asked me to identify her body.

At first, it didn't look like her

and they said it was the best they could do to put it together.

Her eyes were out of her sockets.

Her mouth was open.

Um...

I was...I lost my emotions. I couldn't cry, I couldn't...

It was almost like I was...

I was a broken human in the sense of having no emotions.

I'm an artist, I've been to art school.

And I've tried drawing my sister.

And I can only draw what I saw in the morgue.

I can't draw my sister as a whole person.

South Africa was created by its people,

not by one individual's greatness.

There were too many sacrifices, and it was a unified struggle.

And we can't give all the glory to one person.

# Free Nelson Mandela

# Free

# Free

# Free, free, free Nelson Mandela. #

I remember being in London.

It was not long after I'd come out of hospital

after I was blown up in 1988.

And it was the Free Mandela concert at Wembley.

# Free Nelson Mandela

# Free Nelson Mandela

And I didn't know what you do at a pop concert.

I'd never been to one.

I belonged to the classical music and jazz kind of grouping.

Do you stand up? Do you wave?

70,000 young people and me, and it was fantastic.

# Free Nelson Mandela!

And the cheering just went on for hours and hours.

These were supposed to be the yobbos,

the youth of England who had no idealism,

only interested in material things.

And here they were, inspired by that individual.

So it wasn't anything that he actually said in particular

that they were responding to. It was what he stood for.

The symbol of Mandela became, in that sense,

more powerful than the reality of Mandela.

I remember the day you were released from prison vividly.

By then I was a teenager, living with my mother in Johannesburg.

I watched your release on television.

When you finally came out, you looked normal, like my grandfather.

You looked frail, but you were waving and smiling at the crowds.

I remember, when he came out of prison

I was there, covering the story.

The great anxiety for a lot of people

was that he simply couldn't possibly live up

to this enormous legendary myth that had been built up about him.

Yet the remarkable thing was,

as we saw in that very first press conference

on the morning after his release, at the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

he actually exceeded the myth.

He has this sort of tremendous sense of himself,

like a great Shakespearean or Greek dramatic hero.

RADIO NEWS JINGLE

'Good morning.

'It's expected that only family members

'will be visiting Madiba in hospital today...'

I must say, I was disappointed by the image I saw of you.

I always imagined that as my superhero,

you would somehow find a way to break down the prison walls.

You would lead an army made up of our people.

We would then walk through my village,

arms aloft, victorious after defeating the enemy.

But I was surprised by the restraint and gentle tone of your voice.

Where was the fire in your voice? Where was the anger?

MANDELA: Your tireless and heroic sacrifices

have made it possible

for me to be here today.

I therefore have placed

the remaining years of my life

in your hands.

CHEERING

I remember hearing people singing as they marched past my mother's flat.

There was such an excitement.

I had so many unanswered questions.

You had just come out of prison after 27 years.

You had sacrificed all - your wife, your children and your career.

I went to join the crowd. The spirit of the moment took over.

We were very focused

on South Africa being the centre of the world in those days.

And I knew at that moment, our world had changed.

And it was an unknown future.

But it had to be a future that was better than our past.

BABY CRIES

Politicians remind people from time to time that "You're free.

"1994 freed you. Nelson Mandela freed you", you know.

They drum that into people's minds and they end up believing it.

Even though they stay in the dampest place on earth,

surviving on pap and cabbage every day,

living in the most degrading and appalling conditions,

they will believe that they are free.

And the answer would be: Freed from what?

Nelson Mandela was a mantra.

They used the words "Nelson Mandela" as shorthand,

a shortcut to mean the solution to all our problems of apartheid,

of colonialism, of impoverishment, of life and its hassles.

BOYS CHANT

The songs, the chants became a rallying call.

Nelson Mandela was seen as the person who would save us,

save these kids.

Not save them from political inequality,

but pull them out of these lives of poverty and misery,

of shit education, of suffering, of violence.

Tata Mandela, I remember catching glimpses of the violence

that happened in the 1990s after you were released.

The media headlines screaming Black On Black Violence,

but behind the scenes, the apartheid force were at work

sowing divisions, turning brother against brother.

Thousands died.

There were also the right wing groups

trying to set fire to the country, to stop the march of history.

I have hazy memories because I was confronting my own demons.

My mother started falling ill

and I watched her life fall apart.

Politics did not seem that important after all.

I have read that without your leadership,

the country would have descended into a civil war.

My experience of our war was very intimate, very close up.

It was people in hand-to-hand combat,

often using rocks and bricks as weapons, Knobkerrie sticks,

spears made from reinforcing rods.

And that's how people killed each other, the vast majority,

by touching each other.

That's horrible,

because you know that there's fear, there's eye contact.

You're making eye contact with a killer,

and you're talking about this thing.

It's the smell of human blood.

It's got a distinctive, horrible smell,

nauseating and rich and terrible.

And the sounds. Intimate sounds of people killing each other.

You can't get them out of your head.

We were so caught up in it,

these child soldiers who went to war on behalf of their neighbourhoods,

of their party, of their president-to-be, Nelson Mandela.

The negotiation process is completely in tatters.

I can no longer explain

to our people

why we continue

to talk to a government, to a regime

which is murdering our people,

which is conducting war against us.

We want arms! We want arms! We want arms!

I did not follow the negotiations,

as I was going through my own personal stuff.

I was a late bloomer. I had just discovered girls.

I was eligible to vote in 1994.

I was excited about the prospects of my country.

I thought that the elections and your victory would end the nightmare

that has haunted our people for centuries.

The elections meant freedom for our people.

At least, that's what I thought at that time.

SONG:

The Berlin Wall had fallen, Russia had fallen,

and that threat didn't exist any more.

Now all of us were inhabiting market capitalism. This was it.

This was the way it was going to be.

This was the beginning, the middle and the end.

Those battles were going on in the ANC, nationalisation was over.

Even if people were saying things about nationalisation,

no-one was listening.

If Mandela had, to use an English phrase,

cocked a snook at that, in other words,

shown a position of "Do what you dare,

"but we are going to at least ensure

"that the major bloodsuckers, those vampires, those mining houses,

"pay a restitution which will enable us

"to really help our people

"much more than we possibly can otherwise",

then we would have got away with it.

We would have gained that.

WOMAN: You know, Mandela is like Moses.

-TRANSLATOR:

-Nelson Mandela ist wie Mose.

Sowie Mose die Israeliten befreit hat, hat Nelson Mandela uns befreit.

Historians often mention the end of apartheid

and the fall of the Berlin Wall

as two major historical events of the 20th century.

The Berlin Wall might have fallen,

but many more walls still exist everywhere in the world.

Every day in South Africa, I'm aware of these walls that divide us

despite your promise to break them down.

WOMAN'S VOICE: ..Shot on 15th March, 1973.

Never, and never again

shall it be

that this beautiful land

will again experience

the oppression of one by another.

The sun shall never set

on so glorious a human achievement.

Let freedom reign.

God bless Africa.

I thank you.

CHEERING

I have gooseflesh.

I was there when Madiba spoke.

We knew it was an exalted occasion.

That was the time of "pinch me".

It was kind of unbelievable that in South Africa,

a country of so much division and hate

and at each other's throats,

and here came these eloquent, beautifully phrased words,

and it wasn't tub-thumping and promising everything to everybody.

We've seen him on film recently, and he's frail.

There's still that marvellous smile,

but progressively, the body is getting weaker

and we're beginning to live with the image of the person fading away.

I'll never forget being in front of the Union Building in Pretoria

on that marvellous day,

looking at all the other leaders from around the world,

and having the privilege

to represent the American people, along with many other Americans.

Good morning. Good morning.

-How are you?

-I'm very well. Yourself?

-I'm so happy.

-COLIN POWELL:

-But I saw it in a way that the others did not see it,

because I was a soldier.

What moved me so deeply, and what I've never forgotten,

is that the first ones to come up

were the generals of the South African Defence Forces,

the four men who were in charge of the South African armed forces,

leading their new Commander-in-Chief, Nelson Mandela.

And I said, "God, I've lived to see this."

If you look at many of the struggles,

the anti-colonial struggles,

the struggles against the empire, or against the colonies,

those who take power after it, generally through armed struggle,

end up being people who are unable to construct the democratic society

or the just society that they wanted or they said they wanted.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the President-elect of the Republic of South Africa...

They are unable to adjust their minds and their hearts

to a situation of creating a society that's not "Us against them,

"I'll kill you, you'll kill me, only one of us is right."

Mandela moves from one possibility of an armed struggle against a foe

that certainly deserves to be vanquished militarily,

to a transition to democracy which has been, I think,

one of the major issues of the last 30 or 40 years in our century.

Our feelings were that

"We are not going to speak to the apartheid regime

"for the crimes that they committed against us."

But our brains said "If you don't talk to these people,

"this country's going to go up in flames."

So we had to reconcile our blood with our brain,

our feelings with our logic.

And we decided that "Look, if we use violence,

"these people are stronger than us.

"And they will be able to hold the upper hand.

"But if we sit down to talk to them,

"they can never answer our case".

And that's what we did.

APPLAUSE

We've been asked to say it doesn't matter, get over it.

We can just get over it.

We didn't matter, what happened to us doesn't matter,

how we feel doesn't matter,

how we've become the people we are doesn't matter.

The nonsense that still continues to happen,

who doesn't have power, the landlessness doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, let's just turn a new page.

Reconciliation, the expectation of forgiveness

and reconciliation without justice, is itself an injustice

that we're supposed to co-sign on.

I'm not co-signing on it.

Tata Mandela, can I confess to you that in moments of anger

and disillusionment, I fantasise about the revolution we never had?

I'm not saying this lightly, as war scars people for ever.

Do you think it is better to accept a dirty compromise than go to war?

Tata Mandela, do you ever have moments of weakness,

or anger and resentment,

when you want to line up your enemies against the wall

and shoot them?

When I was filming in Nigeria,

four people were killed as two bombs hit two newspaper offices.

I was terrified.

How do we engage with those who feel aggrieved

and are prepared to sacrifice their lives

and the lives of others to make their point?

I know what I'd like to do to those killers in Nigeria right now.

On the other hand, I would be grateful

for somebody who is able to do what I cannot do,

just in order to enable the entity to survive.

So it's on that axis that people like me are permanently crucified.

On one hand, we know what is needed,

what must take place

in order for the totality of society to survive.

But at the same time,

to preserve my own sense of balance in humanity,

I would like to see some of those slowly roasted on a spit,

you know, to serve as an example to all of us.

When I was lying in bed, recovering in hospital in London

after the bomb where I lost my arm and the sight in an eye,

somebody sent me a note and said,

"Don't worry, Comrade Albie, we will avenge you."

And I thought,

"Are we going to cut off arms and blind people in one eye?

"What good is that going to do me?"

And I said, "If we get freedom and democracy in South Africa

"and a rule of law, roses and lilies will grow out of my arm,

"and that would be my soft vengeance."

Tata Mandela, have you heard the whispers of our people

that those who butchered and violated their loved ones

got away with murder?

Where's justice for them?

Don't you think we should have had public trials, like Nuremberg?

Tata Mandela, we are not where we should be as a country.

We are living every day suspended between a dream and a nightmare.

Tata Mandela, what was the ultimate price of peace?

You cannot justify

the structural violence, the degradation,

the re-traumatisation that post-apartheid means,

precisely because you have refused to materially

transform and transfer power

by saying "It could have been so much worse,

"we would have been dying in the streets".

Well, you know, depending on who you are,

people are dying in the streets.

Whatever conditions of poverty and inequality exist in South Africa

would have been infinitely worse than anything we are today.

South Africa could so easily have become

a sort of Palestine, Israel, Sudan, Congo, or whatever.

"So your kids are actually going to be locked into poverty,

"I don't know what happened to your water,

"you're never going to get land -

"Oh, but how much luckier are you

"than people who get shot in the streets!"

It's insulting.

If there would truly be any reconciliation,

it's for us to say to our fellow whites in South Africa -

"Give back".

I think what we should be doing is to say from 1652,

how much wealth has been plundered from black people?

The land, the cows and, you know,

the dreams and ambitions that have been stolen from black people,

let us calculate that and put it in monetary form

and say "Ha! Collectively, all the whites must pay that back".

You know, then that will be a reconciliation.

Well, you cannot, you just cannot undo,

and you cannot make reparations for the crimes of centuries,

for the cruelties of centuries,

for the enslavement of a people in a far-off land.

Where do you begin?

We are here, we are where we are as a result of war,

and no amount of negotiation will bring about justice.

It will be war that brings about justice,

even at the cost of the ultimate sacrifice.

We are going to have to get justice done in this country.

Tata Mandela, I have a recurring nightmare.

It's a beautiful evening at a restaurant with a group of friends.

Men in balaclavas holding rifles storm into the restaurant

and start shooting.

I hide under the table. Some friends have been shot.

Some of their blood spills onto my face.

I try to wash it away, but it won't go away.

'Passengers in the last carriage,

'please move towards the front doors to leave the train.'

People across the globe associate you with peace.

I remember how you tried to use your status as a global icon

to stop the invasion of Iraq, but no-one listened to you.

I remember the only argument I ever had with him

was when he phoned me up to say,

"Peter, what Tony Blair is doing in Iraq is bad,

"it's not going to work".

What I sensed with Nelson Mandela at that moment

was a great frustration

that he felt the invasion of Iraq by mainly America and Britain,

with other allies, was the wrong thing to do.

He thought it would be catastrophic,

and he thought it would undermine all that Tony Blair was doing.

And in many respects, if you look back, he was right.

Tony Blair never recovered, outside America,

the trust he'd had with the British public and the international public,

from the time he took the decision to go with George Bush into Iraq.

Do I think peace is possible? Of course it's possible.

My whole life has been devoted to peace.

Even though I'm a soldier and I had to fight,

I have always tried to fight

in a way that ends the conflict quickly,

so that we can get back to peace.

But the reality is, there are bad people,

there are bad systems in this world.

I was once asked why we didn't just use soft power,

why America used hard power.

Well, it was hard power that defeated the Nazis,

it was hard power that ended the conflict with Japan.

And what did America do after using hard power?

We rebuilt the nations that we'd used the hard power against.

We used soft power.

So I'm always for solving a problem without a war,

but if war comes, I'm the one who knows how to do it.

RADIO: 'Mr Mandela has remained in critical condition

'for six days at a Pretoria hospital...'

Tata Mandela, the invasion of Iraq

was immoral and based on lies.

I was in New York at that time

and my friends were going to march against the war.

I joined them.

He discovered that his jailers were human.

I believe, personally,

that you should not sit down with your enemies

unless they have shown real signs of repentance

and real signs of not being willing to redo what they were going to do.

In other words, they should show with their actions

that they are not going to repeat that experience.

Let's say that they have got rid of the apartheid of their soul,

the prejudice in their soul, the pettiness in their soul.

It happened that I was sitting in my chambers as a judge,

and the phone rings.

The voice says "There's a man called Henry.

"He says he has an appointment with you".

I said "Send him through."

And I went to the security gate with considerable excitement,

because Henry had phoned me to say

that he had organised the bomb in my car.

He was now going to the Truth Commission.

Was I willing to meet him?

I open the door and there's Henry, younger than myself,

also tallish, thin.

He's looking at me, I'm looking at him,

"So this is the man who tried to kill me", and I see in his eyes,

"This is the man I tried to kill."

We hadn't fought, we didn't even know each other.

We talked, we talked, we talked. It's a strange relationship,

meeting the person who tried to kill you.

And I said at the end,

"Henry, normally when I say goodbye to someone, I shake their hand.

"I can't shake your hand, but you go to the Truth Commission

"and tell them what you know, and maybe we'll meet one day."

And I still recall that as he walked back,

he was shuffling along like a defeated person.

I closed the door and he was gone. And I forgot about him.

About nine months later, I'm at an end-of-year party

and the music is playing very loudly,

and I hear a voice saying, "Albie, Albie".

My God, it's Henry.

He's beaming, and he comes up to me

and says he went to the Truth Commission and told them everything.

And I said, "Henry, I've only got to see your face

"to tell me what you're saying is true."

I held out my left hand and shook his hand.

He went away smiling, and I almost fainted.

I heard afterwards that he was bouncing around,

and suddenly left the party, and he went home and cried for two weeks.

And that moved me.

That moved me. He was becoming a South African.

He was discovering his own humanity and conscience.

Tata Mandela, I understand why, as a leader,

you opted for reconciliation, but where do you draw the line?

One day I was with a friend of mine

at one of my favourite restaurants in Cape Town.

He pointed at a man sitting with two women.

I immediately recognised him. He was talking and laughing.

It was Wouter Basson, nicknamed Doctor Death.

He is the former head

of the secret chemical and biological warfare programme

during the apartheid era.

I walked away, very angry.

How could you let men like him walk free and enjoy life?

The West sanctified him, and he accepted it.

And in return, he was generous

to people who had done all sorts of horrible things to him,

but more importantly, to the country as a whole.

I saw a photograph of you and Henry Kissinger together.

During my interview with Kissinger,

I was shocked when he told me

that he was not aware that anyone in the US administration

ever regarded you as a terrorist.

On actual day-to-day political things,

he had a lot of views with which I strongly disagreed,

but I understand them

because the communists

were the people who supported him

in the struggle for independence.

But the greatness of Mandela

was not whether he was a friend of Gaddafi, or of Castro.

The greatness of Mandela was that he had this spiritual vision

to bring freedom to a country,

and treat what had been viewed as the oppressors as equals,

without vengeance.

By chance, I came across a play called Death And The Maiden.

It introduced me to the work of Ariel Dorfman and to Chile,

a country I knew so little about.

I began to read about the assassinations, tortures

and disappearances of activists.

I realised this could have been apartheid South Africa.

I've had one very significant experience.

Pinochet was dying in the hospital,

and there was a woman who was crying.

She was crying, it was ridiculous.

She was crying for her saviour, for Pinochet was dying.

And strangely enough, I felt this enormous wave of compassion for her.

I went up to her and said,

"I understand that you're mourning for your hero,

"because I went through the same process

"with Allende when he was killed, and I want to tell you

"that I understand what you're going through.

"What I'm asking is, can you understand what we went through?

"I'm offering you this as a possibility.

And she was speechless, she didn't know what to do.

And that woman had celebrated when Allende died.

That woman had celebrated when I was exiled from my country.

That woman had celebrated when people were being shot

and killed in the streets.

That woman had celebrated

when the judges said to women whose men had disappeared,

"Oh, he probably went off with another woman, that's what happened.

"That's why he's not around any more.

"We don't have him", you know?

That woman did all those things, I'm sure.

Not that I'm forgiving her.

There's a saying that in the country of the blind,

the one-eyed man is king. That idea?

Well, I don't think I have one eye in the country of the blind,

but I think those of us who have our eyes slightly more open,

slightly more open like this,

a sliver, that we can watch reality and see it.

I think those who have that

have an obligation to be more compassionate than those who don't,

because we know more. We've been through more.

So, Mandela, who's been through much more,

who's been through everything in some sense,

has gone through all the stages of revolution and of pain,

he's a man who has his eyes really open.

MANDELA: We face an enormous challenge.

We believe

that no South African should ever forget the crimes committed

in his name.

We, however, know

that we must forgive.

Tata Mandela, what do you do

with the people who committed atrocities,

some of whom do not show remorse?

What do we do with the foot soldiers that claim they too were victims

and were just following orders?

How about the leaders who claim that there was no evidence

that they ever gave such orders,

and that they were unaware that atrocities were being carried out?

What about family members,

friends, neighbours and lovers who betrayed one another?

What about men who violated women and raped them,

sometimes their own comrades?

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word,

and can be easily replaced

by a proper, positive term.

Neighbourly...

good neighbourliness.

Good neighbourliness.

LAUGHTER

Who's laughing?

Who's laughing?

REPORTER: You make no apology

for some of the things that happened when you were president?

I'm not here to apologise.

The whites never said sorry.

it was the blacks who said "Please, I beg you to say sorry."

You remember Bishop Tutu crying on TV, saying "I beg you to say sorry."

Fuck that! Fuck that!

They don't feel sorry? Give them what they know best.

You know? They don't feel sorry, give them what they know best.

And I'm saying, how is it

that the victim would be the one begging

for the perpetrator to say sorry?

Tata Mandela, I grew up in a Christian family.

I was constantly reminded that Christ forgave our sins

and that I in turn should forgive, but I struggled with forgiveness.

The ultimate force to change others' minds is affection,

love, forgiveness, not anger, not aggressiveness.

Forgiveness doesn't have to exempt one from justice.

You can have justice and forgiveness, all right?

If someone steals my watch and says he's sorry,

but he's still wearing the watch, what does that mean?

Or he doesn't even say, "I'm sorry",

like the majority of white South Africans.

He's wearing my watch that he stole, and doesn't say, "I'm sorry",

and I say, "I forgive you".

What kind of society are we building?

A sense of impunity, that you can get away with anything,

as long as you hold some kind of trump card.

I have a problem with that, quite honestly.

Forgive does not mean forget.

If you really forget, there's no basis for forgiveness.

Tata Mandela, when I went to Robben Island for the first time

I wondered, what happened to you there?

Did you have an epiphany? I have asked myself,

what is it about your story that's so remarkable?

But I can only guess.

How is it possible to come out of this grey and depressing place

and not show any sign of bitterness?

How is that possible?

Your prison cell is a shrine.

I have witnessed people break down and cry.

A few times I'd been there, I realised something disturbing.

The people who come to take a tour of this prison

do not seem interested in asking the names of your companions.

Their names and pain do not seem to matter.

Only your pain, only your story, only your experience.

I think he did take it too far,

but by that time I think, having won,

and having become what he was in the global village,

and being, you know, treated as a god,

he decided to behave like one.

What do you mean?

I mean that! That God can forgive, so if you believe you're a god,

then, you know, you forgive.

If everybody became President of the Republic,

it would be rather easy to forgive the people who hurt you,

because you'd become the president of the Republic, right?

What happens to the woman who is still in her hut,

and her son doesn't come home?

And she hears the murmurs of footsteps,

and she thinks "Maybe he's coming home,

"maybe the ghost is coming home."

That person cannot be consoled,

and we should not be made to believe we can console that person.

We can't console that person.

One of the testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Committee

that continues to haunt me is that of Charity Khondile.

At a time when often, black women were referred to

as being strong and forgiving,

she refused to forgive the man who killed her son, Sizwe.

PHONE RINGS AT OTHER END

Hello, how are you?

Can I speak to Mrs Charity Khondile?

It's Khalo Matabane.

I left a message on your voicemail the other day.

Hello?

When I started making this documentary

I wanted to find out if she still felt the same way,

especially since her son's killer recently died of cancer.

I was curious to know what happens

when the victim refuses to forgive the perpetrator, and then he dies.

What does the victim do with the anger?

What happens to a fury without a target?

Does the anger turn on the person who carries it?

Will you stand, please?

Are you willing to take the oath?

-Yes.

-Do you solemnly swear

that the evidence you will give before this commission

will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

I swear.

Thank you very much indeed.

He left the country

because he was frequently being harassed by the police

while he was still at Fort Hare University.

But somehow, we learnt that he was missing from Lesotho.

His father investigated,

and we discovered that he had been arrested, kidnapped, actually,

whilst he was phoning his girlfriend in Port Elizabeth.

So we didn't know what had happened.

I think it was in 1981. For nine years, he was missing.

After that, Dirk Coetzee confessed what had happened to him.

So we learnt that he was imprisoned, tortured, shot,

and that was it.

They had burnt the body for about nine hours.

They said they'd wanted to make sure there was not a bone left.

It was terrible.

They acted like cannibals, even saying his flesh smelt good.

They said they were drinking, and his flesh was smelling good.

That means they were almost eating him,

sort of making the cremation a ritual to their gods,

celebrating that they had killed a terrorist, one of their enemies.

It wasn't fair that these people should be forgiven

for this atrocity, because others are sent to jail for murder.

In this case, I didn't understand the amnesty thing,

why they had to be pardoned.

Well, they're saying they are political prisoners,

not murderers, that is what they were saying.

But I feel that they should be imprisoned also

and go to court and answer for this, just like anybody else.

Who kills must go to jail. I don't understand.

I'm just an ordinary mother.

I'm not in parliament, I'm in flesh.

After nine years, when my son was still missing,

they wanted us to say on the spot at the Truth Commission

that we'd forgiven those people.

I told them it wasn't easy to forgive, it took time,

but that didn't mean you weren't going to forgive.

At first you feel angry, then you forgive, but you do not forget.

Tata Mandela, I'm not sure after two years of making this documentary

that I understand you or the choices you made.

It is said that we are all shaped by our childhood.

So I travelled to your ancestral land in the Eastern Cape

in search of your traces and your footprints.

I must admit that apart from the beautiful landscape,

there was nothing remarkable about the area.

It was like my village.

It has occurred to me that perhaps we'll never understand you,

that you're our imagination

and that the truth about you lies in your contradictions.

Tata Mandela, I returned to my village

looking for clues about you in my past.

I realised that perhaps the journey has been about struggling

to reconcile my stories about you.

My childhood hero.

Tata Mandela, I am part of the generation that came of age

when apartheid was on its way out

and a new South Africa was starting to be born.

History weighs heavy on my shoulders.

I have bad memories, which I struggle with.

Tata Mandela, we are one of the most unequal societies in the world.

People are impatient. They can't wait any longer.

Our people feel that change is too slow

and the system favours the powerful and the wealthy.

There are protests everywhere, people demand change everywhere,

people demand freedom, real freedom everywhere.

What is the future? I don't know.

What I can sense is that we are sitting on a time bomb.