Mandela charms South African business leaders
Mandela charms South African business leaders
MIDRAND, South Africa (Reuter): Black-tied, hard-eyed and deep-pocketed, a creamy layer of South African big business came to meet Nelson Mandela. Many left their hearts behind with their chequebooks.
Preaching reconciliation while throwing election darts at President F.W. de Klerk, the leader of the African National Congress wowed his audience in a glittering ballroom on Thursday night, bringing 800 men and women to their feet in an ovation.
The triumph at a campaign fundraiser indicated surprising depths of potential ANC support among South Africa's super- wealthy and privileged, for decades the class enemies of the struggling masses who have made Mandela their patron saint.
"He's amazing. Twenty-seven years in jail and no bitterness," said 53-year-old printing company boss Dennis Cochius, an Afrikaner like those in the white governments that created apartheid and persecuted the black majority.
"His sincerity is what touched me. He is one of the great statespersons of all time, in the category of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan."
Mandela, 75, would doubtless be taken aback to find himself in the same class as the two great conservatives, given that governments for decades had labeled him a communist terrorist, too dangerous to the establishment to be allowed to roam free.
But he clearly enjoyed himself at the 500-rand (US$140)-a- plate dinner which contributed at least 400,000 rand ($114,000) to the ANC's campaign war chest in its battle against de Klerk's National Party for the first all-race election in three weeks' time.
He was ushered into the ballroom, festooned with ANC colors below the chandeliers, by a choir of children singing a peace song which began "Twinkle, twinkle, little star..."
Alternately charming, witty, sober and sarcastic, he laid out the ANC's vision of a non-racial future in which blacks would be advanced and whites encouraged to stay to play a full part in the development of a democratic nation.
The dinner-jacketed men and gowned women, whites and blacks from a Who's Who of big business, laughed uproariously as Mandela laid into de Klerk -- "the most professional squealer in the country" -- and his onetime all-powerful National Party -- "a mouse against the ANC's elephant".
They chuckled at his tales from the campaign trail, fell silent as he recounted the evils of past white oppression, became somber as he appealed for their prayers on the eve of a crucial summit with de Klerk and rejectionist Zulu leaders.
Finally, beside their silver salvers and corsages of rosebuds in ANC yellow, they gave him a standing ovation the likes of which no South African black resistance leader had ever experienced from the rich and beautiful of his own land.
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