I was lucky enough to be taken on a tour of the Groote Schuur estate in Rondebosch last year. Among the scenes that have stayed most vividly with me are the bedrooms of Marike and FW de Klerk, which are precisely as they left them.
His is resolutely a boy’s room, all mottled greens and dark wood; I would not have been surprised to see fishing rods and a half-built model aeroplane. Hers is an explosion of floral: the bedspread, the curtains, the cushions scattered on the chairs, each of them crammed with pastel-coloured flowers. I felt I was on the film set of Pleasantville or The Truman Show. I’d never come across a scene so surreally his and hers.
Whenever I think of FW de Klerk since then, those Groote Schuur images beckon. His decision to unban the ANC, to withdraw from the unity government: it is all inseparable from that green bedroom now. There is something in those scenes so resonant of the culture of the elite that presided over apartheid, of their decision to negotiate a retreat, of who they were as people.
It is not just De Klerk and apartheid. It is true of all studies of leaders and of leadership. You don’t know enough about a governing elite and its personnel until you know how they live.
I felt it too in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto house. Every available space was cluttered with mementos from her public life: photographs of her posing with the celebrities who courted her, the medals and honours and tokens she received, the legions of cards. Literally hundreds of beacons of her career battled for space.
I got the sense, more powerfully than I could have in any other way, of her single-minded dedication to the theatre of public life. We would scarcely know of her had she not possessed that dedication. It is what steered her through the dark years of torture and internal exile. Seeing the essence of a person in her house is a profound experience.
I will also never forget first reading Richard Stengel’s account of when he was directed to Nelson Mandela’s bedroom only to find that the great man was taking a nap. The bed was enormous, pristine, and almost entirely empty; Mandela was occupying one tiny corner of it, lying on his back, arms at his side, taking up as little room as humanly possible. It struck Stengel that this is how a person lives after 27 years in jail: constricted, almost inconceivably economical, using hardly any space at all.
That image of how a man with power occupies his bed, of how he sleeps, is priceless. Which brings this column to the present. The ANC will choose a new leader in 2027. That leader may go on to become SA’s president. It’s hard to call now who he or she will be, but first in line is the incumbent deputy, Paul Mashatile. If we subtract all that he has said and look only at what we know of how he lives, what image does he convey?
The R37m Gauteng home and the mansion in Constantia, both bought by his son-in-law; the lavish suite of offices at Melrose Arch, replete with a bevy of besuited waiters; the Atlantic seaboard colossus owned by the controversial Edwin Sodi. None of this suggests wrongdoing, but it does speak of what a person values.
Until recently SA hadn’t had presidents who were especially interested in money. Apartheid’s leaders were comfortably upper-middle class. Mandela had barely a cent to his name when he walked out of prison; from his fame he acquired just enough wealth to manage his complicated life. Thabo Mbeki was plainly never animated by acquiring a lot of money.
How that changed in 2009. After all SA has been through since then, a man with Mashatile’s tastes should trigger every alarm in reach. His style, his sensibility, the spirit of his life really are caricatures of the era from which SA is trying desperately to depart.
History repeats itself, as Karl Marx said, first as tragedy, then as farce. It is not as if SA hasn’t had an abundance of warning.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.