From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

Good things -- from democracy in South Africa to major political interviews -- are often long in the planning. In May of last year, deputy managing editor John F. Stacks, while lunching in Manhattan with Johannesburg bureau chief Scott MacLeod, hatched the idea of conducting paired interviews with Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk. The sessions, Stacks reasoned, might be not only newsworthy but historic.

Returning to his post in South Africa, MacLeod swung into action to set up the interviews. He was hoping for a milestone to make the timing of the story most meaningful, and after last week's multiparty agreement on a date for the country's first free elections, he finally had one. Momentous occasions, however, can be the most difficult times in which to secure interviews, especially from two such important individuals. After much negotiation, De Klerk agreed to talk at his office in Pretoria. During the actual interview, he was outwardly relaxed, chain-smoking and joking about golf. For his part, Mandela consented to an even less formal face-to-face at his home in suburban Johannesburg. Dressed in a casual Harvard sweatshirt, Mandela graciously met TIME's interviewers in his driveway, and later took orders for tea and coffee.

The TIME correspondents and editors involved in arranging and conducting the interviews have personal perspectives on affairs in South Africa. Karsten Prager, managing editor of TIME International, hadn't been in South Africa since 1991, and noticed a change in the political climate: "One comes away from conversations with De Klerk and Mandela with the distinct sense that somehow, sometime, South Africa will be able to resolve its conflicts peacefully." MacLeod recalls that a few months ago, Mandela visited him at home and bounced the bureau chief's infant daughter on his knee. Says MacLeod: "I told Mandela that although South Africa had been a troubled country, we wanted Sophie to be proud of the fact that she was born here."

But correspondent Peter Hawthorne, a resident of South Africa for 30 years, has perhaps the most visceral connection to the story: while covering the unrest after Mandela's 1990 release from jail, he was struck with police bird shot, and the pellets are still embedded in his chest. "South Africans swing between moods of deep despair and cautious hope," says Hawthorne. "This week hope is again ascendant." It seems optimism comes from a place too deep for any firearm to reach.