Appointing new leaders, Deng retired, keeping only the chairmanship of the China Bridge Association. But he remained Paramount Leader, and confirmed his policy of political power with economic freedom before he died at ninety-two. Deng had created a template for Chinese power, Gorbachev an accelerating momentum towards Soviet disintegration. Only force could stop it.
NEW AFRICA: MANDELA AND JJ, MENES AND ISAIAS
In September 1989, Poland elected a non-Communist premier; East Germans probed the borders; within the USSR, Georgians, led by a mad-eyed Shakespeare professor and former dissident, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, voted for independence as their own minorities, Ossetians and Abkhazians, fought for their own states; Armenians and Azeris clashed. At least Gorbachev’s rival, Yeltsin, was disintegrating too. On the 28th, he turned up extravagantly drunk at Gorbachev’s birthday party with a bouquet and tried to gate-crash. Bodyguards roughed him up and threw him into the Moskva River. ‘The water was terribly cold,’ said Yeltsin. ‘I collapsed and lay on the ground … I staggered to the nearby police station.’ Gorbachev’s allies claimed that Yeltsin’s mistress had thrown a bucket of water over him; his allies saw an assassination attempt. The Yeltsin threat was clearly over.
At 11.30 p.m., Berlin time, on 9 November, East German leaders, pressured by the opening of the Austria–Hungary border and then by huge demonstrations, planned quietly to open the gates in the Wall, but bungled the announcement, sparking joyous demonstrations as people suddenly poured through the gates and started to tear down the Berlin Wall with axes and bare hands. In Dresden, as crowds stormed Stasi headquarters across East Germany, an astonished KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, aged thirty-seven, burned secret files and then started the miserable drive home to Leningrad. In Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Communists were swept away in velvet revolutions. Some were less velvety than others: on Christmas Day 1989 in Bucharest, Romania, a frightened but defiant sexagenarian couple were dragged out of the belly of an armoured personnel carrier. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife Elena had ruled Romania since 1965. Now Ceaus¸escu was overthrown by his own comrades and the people in a shootout with his Securitate agents and quickly sentenced to death. Four soldiers were assigned to shoot them separately, but they insisted on dying together, singing the Internationale. They died mid-verse.
In February 1990, the US secretary of state, James Baker, discussed the reunification of Germany and the expansion of NATO. In September, Gorbachev agreed to the reunification and allowed Germany to join NATO. He could have extracted much more while he still had 300,000 troops in the country, but he needed the western loans to run his state. Now he had missed his chance. The Americans were dizzy with victory. When Gorbachev tried to lay down the parameters of Germany’s relationship with NATO, Bush (now president) told Kohl, ‘To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t.’ It showed a lack of imagination. Russia could have been coopted into the EU, even NATO. After all, victories do not last for ever. ‘In victory,’ advised Churchill, ‘magnanimity.’
The ‘Wall’ fell in Africa too. On 5 July 1989, Nelson Mandela, almost seventy-one, newly fitted with a suit after twenty-seven years behind bars, was driven out of prison and taken to meet Die Groot Krokodil – the South African president, P. W. Botha – at his residence Tuynhuys, where Rhodes had stayed, for a secret chat. To Mandela’s surprise, the Crocodile, who as coloured affairs and defence minister had enforced apartheid for decades, was ‘courteous and deferential’ as they discussed history. ‘Now I felt there was no turning back.’
Mandela was right: the fall of the Iron Curtain meant the end of proxy war in Africa. America and the USSR no longer supported their egregious allies, yet their downfall often destroyed the existence of their states: in Zaire – Congo – the fall of America’s long-reigning ally, Mobutu, triggered a scramble for power and for minerals that lasted for thirty years.*
Mandela was returned to prison; Crocodile resigned in favour of a new Nationalist premier, F. W. de Klerk. On 13 December, ‘I was taken again to Tuynhuys,’ wrote Mandela, where he realized de Klerk ‘was a man we could do business with’. On 9 February 1990, de Klerk told Mandela ‘he was making me a free man’ and then poured them both a tumbler of whisky: ‘I raised the glass in toast but only pretended to drink; such spirits are too strong for me.’ The day after at 4 a.m., Mandela rose. He had befriended and charmed his Afrikaner guards, who had ‘reinforced my belief in the essential humanity even of those who kept me behind bars’. He embraced them. At 3 p.m., Mandela, joined by Winnie, walked out of the prison. ‘When a TV crew thrust a long dark furry object at me, I recoiled.’ He had never seen one. ‘Winnie explained it was a microphone.’
As he emerged to meet his ANC comrades, ‘I could see the question in their eyes: had he survived or was he broken?’ His marriage was broken: Winnie, unable to resist the strain of loneliness, the bruise of repression and the temptations of power, had had affairs and led a vicious gang terror in Soweto where her bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, had killed opponents, even children. ‘She married a man,’ said Mandela graciously, ‘who soon left her, became a myth,’ but then the myth came home and was ‘just a man’. It was his greatest regret: ‘When your life is a struggle, there’s little room for family.’ His children had lost their father and when he returned ‘he was father of the nation’. Mandela divorced Winnie and, at eighty, he met someone else, Graça, the widow of Machel, dictator of Mozambique, announcing, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’
Mandela embarked on a world tour, meeting his old backers Castro and Qaddafi, who had funded the ANC, and new backers, led by Harry Oppenheimer, the liberal magnate, owner of De Beers diamonds and Anglo American gold mines, who helped buy his new house. Mandela had started as a Thembu prince, become a Communist revolutionary and then developed into a humanist liberal democrat who, inspired by Gandhi and MLK, was determined to create a ‘rainbow nation’ of white and black people. Astonishingly, after forty years of vicious repression, he achieved this without any massacre or flight of whites – an achievement without parallel that was the fruit of his personality. A peace and conciliation committee listened to testimony about the repression by South African security agents – and forgave their predations. Where Gandhi had failed to achieve peaceful transition, Mandela, elected president in April 1994, succeeded.
Soviet allies fell too: in Ethiopia in 1984–5, Mengistu’s atrocities, along with a drought, had caused a famine that affected over seven million people. He deliberately restricted food supplies to Tigray and Wollo, where resistance to his rule was most effective. Over a million died. Now in May 1991 Mengistu, abandoned by Gorbachev, fled into exile, leaving a civil war that was swiftly won by an alliance of ethnic rebels led by the Tigrayan Meles, who had rejected Hoxhaite Marxism and formed an alliance with the Eritrean Maoist Isaias Afwerki, which captured Addis. Meles embraced the zeitgeist, promising liberal democracy but ruling as autocrat for twenty years. He soon fell out with the demented Isaias, who converted Eritrea, an independent state for the first time, into a regimented personal domain, in which the entire population were conscripted and terrorized by secret police, a system the UN called a form of slavery: Afwerki ruled into the 2020s. After Meles’s death, the Tigrayans lost power to an Oromo, and the country again dissolved into ethnic fighting.
There was only one Mandela, but another gifted African leader, much less well known outside the continent, rescued his country after almost destroying it. JJ Rawlings, ruling from the Castle for a decade, was the dictator who in 1979 had shot his generals on the beach in front of the press. Now he reacted to the fall of the Wall. Economically he took advice from the World Bank, while politically he fostered a liberal democracy. The showman Rawlings, sporting fancy suits or traditional robes, founded his own political party and ran for president. On 3 November 1992, he won a free election with 60 per cent of the vote, winning a second term in 1996. Succession is the test, but when he had served his permitted two terms he retired at fifty-four, leaving Ghana as a thriving democracy and economic force – one of the successes of Africa. ‘At the risk of sounding immodest,’ reflected Rawlings, ‘Ghana wouldn’t have been brought out of the abyss without a visionary’ – a very flawed one for sure.