THEPOLITICALTRANSITION
him from Robben Island to Pollsmoor prison in the Cape peninsula. Ini-
tially, he was accompanied there by Walter Sisulu and three other prison-
ers, but in 1985 he was placed alone in a different part of the prison, with-
out access to colleagues. Mandela rejected several offers of conditional
freedom and had no intention of becoming a moderate, but, believing that
it would be possible to negotiate an end to apartheid, he wrote to justice
minister Kobie Coetsee and requested an interview. In 1988, after they
had several sessions, the government appointed a committee comprising
Coetsee, two senior prison officers, and Neil Barnard, the director of Na-
tional Intelligence, to hold a series of meetings with Mandela. The com-
mittee urged Mandela to renounce the ANC'S commitment to the armed
struggle, its alliance with the Communist party, and its goal of majority
rule. Although he refused to do as they asked, his realism and his stress on
reconciliation between Whites and Blacks in a postapartheid South Africa
made a deep impression on the committee.?
In December 1988, recognizing that Mandela would probably become
the head of a transformed South Africa, the government moved him to a
comfortable house on the grounds of the Victor Verster prison near Paarl,