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"Clearly," says U.S. Ambassador William Swing, who was a junior diplomat in South Africa in the mid-1960s, "there has not been a time in my association with this country that the prospects for a settlement along just lines have been as favorable." Yet Pretoria is notorious for its habit of taking two steps backward for every step forward. De Klerk is urging against unrealistic hopes. But if he fails to fulfill at least some of the expectations, he will risk a powerful backlash that could wreck any prospect for progress in the near future.
What private understandings, if any, De Klerk and Mandela may have already reached is a tightly guarded secret, but indications are that the two leaders have come to respect each other. "Mandela had the impression that De Klerk was a man he could do business with," said Azhar Cachalia, treasurer of the A.N.C.-allied United Democratic Front. "But he also made the point that history is not simply made by people who are good and honest. Whether the National Party as a whole will shirk its past, he is not able to say." For his part, De Klerk confided to colleagues that Mandela is "a man of integrity, a man you can trust."
Freedom will mark a great personal triumph for Mandela, who has repeatedly refused offers for his conditional release and never wavered from his demand for a multiracial South Africa based on a system of one man, one vote. When Botha announced in 1985 that Mandela could go free if he simply renounced the A.N.C.'s armed struggle, Mandela defiantly replied, "Let Botha show that he is different. I cannot and will not give any undertaking. Only free men can negotiate."
A year later, with South Africa reeling from two years of unrest that left 5,000 people dead, the government acceded to Mandela's request for top-level political talks, initially focusing on the release of political prisoners. But a historic 45-minute tea with Botha last July, the first and last meeting between the two men, seemed only to show how little they had to say to each other.
Following De Klerk's election, according to a Cabinet minister, the government's talks with Mandela took on real meaning. In October they worked out the release of eight political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu and other A.N.C. leaders who were convicted along with Mandela in the Rivonia treason trial a quarter-century earlier.
For the past three months, Mandela has pressed the government to meet the A.N.C.'s terms for negotiations. "He has told the government that he does not want to leave prison empty-handed," says one of Mandela's lawyers, Dullah Omar. "Otherwise, he would report to A.N.C. headquarters that three years of discussions have been a waste of time."
Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory."