My life

The survivors told me their stories. The last speaker was a dignified woman who said her family had been identified to the rampaging killers as Tutsis by Hutu neighbors whose children had played with hers for years. She was badly wounded by a machete and left for dead. She awoke in a pool of her own blood to find her husband and six children lying dead beside her. She told Hillary and me that she had cried out to God in despair that she had survived, then came to understand “that my life must have been spared for a reason, and it could not be something as mean as vengeance. So I do what I can to help us start again.” I was overwhelmed; that magnificent woman had made my problems seem pathetically small. She had deepened my resolve to do whatever I could to help Rwanda. I began the first visit by any American President to South Africa in Cape Town, with a speech to the parliament in which I said I had come “in part to help the American people see the new Africa with new eyes.” It was fascinating to me to witness the supporters and victims of apartheid working together. They didn’t deny the past or hide their current disagreements, but they seemed confident that they could build a common future. It was a tribute to the spirit of reconciliation that emanated from Mandela. The next day Mandela took us to visit Robben Island, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his captivity. I saw the rock quarry where he had worked and the cramped cell where he was kept when he wasn’t breaking rocks. In Johannesburg, I called on Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who had been meeting with Al Gore twice a year on our common agenda and was almost certain to be Mandela’s successor; dedicated a commercial center named after Ron Brown, who had loved South Africa; and visited a primary school. Hillary and I went to church with Jesse Jackson in Soweto, the teeming township that had produced so many of the anti-apartheid activists.

By this time I had developed a real friendship with Mandela. He was remarkable not only because of his astonishing journey from hatred to reconciliation during twenty-seven years in prison, but also because he was both a tough-minded politician and a caring person who, despite his long confinement, never lost his interest in the personal side of life or his ability to show love, friendship, and kindness. We had one especially meaningful conversation. I said, “Madiba [Mandela’s colloquial tribal name, which he asked me to use], I know you did a great thing in inviting your jailers to your inauguration, but didn’t you really hate those who imprisoned you?” He replied, “Of course I did, for many years. They took the best years of my life. They abused me physically and mentally. I didn’t get to see my children grow up. I hated them. Then one day when I was working in the quarry, hammering the rocks, I realized that they had already taken everything from me except my mind and my heart. Those they could not take without my permission. I decided not to give them away.” Then he looked at me, smiled, and said, “And neither should you.”

After I caught my breath, I asked him another question. “When you were walking out of prison for the last time, didn’t you feel the hatred rise up in you again?” “Yes,” he said, “for a moment I did. Then I thought to myself, ‘They have had me for twenty-seven years. If I keep hating them, they will still have me.’ I wanted to be free, and so I let it go.” He smiled again. This time he didn’t have to say, “And so should you.”

The only vacation day on the trip came in Botswana, which had the highest per capita income in subSaharan Africa and the highest AIDS rate in the world. We went on a safari in Chobe National Park and saw lions, elephants, impalas, hippos, crocodiles, and more than twenty different species of birds. We got very close to a mother elephant and her child—apparently too close. She raised her trunk and sprayed us with water. It made me laugh to think how happy the Republicans would have been if they could have seen their party’s mascot watering me. Late in the afternoon we took a leisurely boat ride down the Chobe River; Hillary and I held hands and counted our blessings as we watched the sun go down.