Title: Winnie and Nelson, Portrait of a Marriage
Author: Jonny Steinberg
ISBN: 9780008353797
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
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Is this a good book? Yes, it is a bloody good book. Is it a masterpiece, as was A Man of Good Hope? No, its descriptions are, but its analysis is sometimes flawed. Would I recommend it as a purchase and as a read? Without a doubt.
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I’m sure that anyone who read Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope knows that they had read a masterpiece.
When I finished it and had recovered, I mentioned to a friend that I believed that Steinberg was Nobel Prize material.
Then we heard that he had a new work on the way and that it was a combined biography of the two Mandelas. Plainly this was a departure in type of subject for Steinberg, who has to date eschewed writing about well-written-about people, and instead told our story through little-heard-of characters – plainly, the Mandelas are not that. This looked to be very interesting.
Then the reviews began to be published. I have found 12 while hardly even searching. There is not another non-fiction writer in South Africa who could muster that. And they ranged from praising to downright euphoric – any other writer would have Rian Malan’s review printed, framed and on his/her study wall.
Why then do I have reservations?
When I read it the first time, I felt discomfort. Pull yourself together Rory, read it again. I did. Same feeling, and I had now located the section that left me disturbed – it was the ending.
But to get there, we have a lot to read first.
So let’s go.
“Winnie and Nelson” is presented in eight sections.
The first is an Introduction, and is particularly important in that, in it, Steinberg lays out his modus operandi for the whole book – he is going to present the story as he is told it, and then, thoroughly and meticulously, he is going to inspect what he has heard and correct it in the light of more and more research. The book will be a slow read, as Steinberg approaches all issues from a variety of angles before leading us to what he feels is the real story.
The second and third sections are about the early years of Nelson, first, and then Winnie, and the years before they met.
The fourth section covers the period of their early life together, up until about the end of the Rivonia trial. The next covers Winnie’s horrendous jailing and on until about 1970. And the fifth covers the period of Winnie’s banishment to Brandfort and Nelson’s period in Pollsmoor.
The penultimate section takes us through to Nelson’s release and after, and ends at the final collapse of their marriage following the uncovering of a letter from Winnie to her then-lover, Dali Mpofu.
The final section is a twenty-page conclusion.
The sections do not follow exact timelines, as Steinberg is weaving two biographies into one, and that does not easily follow a straight line. My recounting of some of this story below is thus not exactly following Steinberg’s flow, but also brings in some material from elsewhere when, to me, it seems to be valuable.
We start with Mandela’s youth.
Nelson’s father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa Mandela, had four wives, Nelson’s mother, Nosekeni, being the third. Gadla was with Nelson’s mother when he died of what was probably tuberculosis. Nelson was twelve at the time, and watched his father’s last gasps.
In an act born out of poverty, desperation and utter selflessness, Nosekeni then walked her beloved Nelson to the great place of the regent to their Thembu throne, and left him there as the ward of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the regent. What she had then done was to ensure that Nelson would go to school, something his half-brothers never did.
And attend school he did – firstly at Clarkebury, then Healdtown, two excellent Methodist schools. And thereafter, in 1939, to Fort Hare University to do a Batchelor of Arts Degree. Here, unfortunately, the wheels fell off, for in Nelson’s second year and prodded on by his nephew, Kaiser Matanzima whom he (Nelson) adored, he was expelled for participating in an election to a student body that he had then refused to join in the midst of widespread revolts about food.
His regent was predictably furious, and soon announced to Nelson and to his son, Nelson’s close friend Justice, that he, the regent, had chosen two girls, and that Nelson and Justice were to wed them.
Unwilling to participate in these arrangements, Nelson and Justice stole two of the regent’s cattle, sold them in the market, and with the proceeds fled to Johannesburg, where they arrived in the autumn of 1941.
What now to do with their lives?
Nelson had a relative in Johannesburg, Garlick Mbekeni, who introduced him to a young (he was six years older than Nelson) estate agent by the name of Walter Sisulu. (56). Sisulu asked Nelson what he now wanted to do and heard Nelson out, hearing that he wanted to be a lawyer. Sisulu then introduced Nelson to a contact with whom Sisulu did business, an attorney named Lazar Sidelsky. And so Nelson Mandela began work as a clerk at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, attorneys, at the starvation wage of 2 Pounds a month. The next year, 1943, Nelson enrolled for a law degree at night school at Wits University.
Initially, his living arrangements were terrible, but fortunately, Sisulu allowed him to move into Sisulu’s house, shared with Sisulu’s mother and sister, in Orlando, southwest of Johannesburg. This was to be “the most convivial (home) he was ever (to) know”. (70). Here he met Oliver Tambo, later to be his partner in their law firm, and Evelyn Mase, soon to be his first wife. They married on 5 October 1944 with Evelyn four months pregnant, in a civil ceremony with hardly anyone in attendance.
Their son, Madiba Thembekile, was born in 1945, and on the basis of Evelyn’s job as a nurse, they moved into a three-roomed house, 8115 Orlando West. (Mark that address, we will hear a lot more about it – it seems greatly ironic that this address, later to be the home of the Mandela United Football Club and its founder, Winnie Mandela, came into the Mandela orbit thanks to Evelyn Mase).
In 1948 a second child, a girl, was born to Evelyn and Nelson, but tragically she died at nine months of age.
It was at the Sisulu house, in 1943 that Mandela became blooded into politics. For there were regular meetings here, between a number of young men, all determined to move the sluggish African National Congress into a more militant and confrontational role in South Africa’s politics. These young men included Anton Lembede, AP Mda, Kush Ngubane, and, of course, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson. At the ANC National Congress at the end of 1943 they got the organisation to agree to the formation of a Youth League, and this they formed on Easter Saturday 1944 with Lembede as President, Tambo as Secretary and Sisulu as Treasurer. In 1949 this grouping structured a coup in their mother body, and their candidate, Dr Moroko, ousted Dr Xuma as President of the ANC, and Walter Sisulu became the ANC’s first full-time Secretary-General.[1]
Things moved fast now. In 1949 Nelson left Wits without a degree. Heartbroken, his dream of becoming an advocate was over – the best he could now aspire to was to be an attorney. The next year he became President of the Youth League, and in 1951 he qualified as an attorney. At the end of that year, the ANC’s Congress adopted the concept of a Defiance Campaign to happen in 1952, and Nelson was made Volunteer in Chief. He was now to be the public face of the most determined campaign ever run by a black political movement in attacking white domination in South Africa.
The campaign was seen to be a great success. Before the campaign, the ANC had about 7000 members. In a few weeks of 1952, it encouraged 8362 persons to accept jail in defiance of various apartheid laws. At the end of 1953, the ANC could count 28900 members. Its leaders were fulsome in their praise for the campaign.[2]
Mandela spent two nights in a police cell and emerged as a national figure. He and Oliver Tambo opened their practice as attorneys in mid-1952, the first black-owned and run attorney’s practice in South Africa. For the first time, Nelson began to prosper. A “two-tone Oldsmobile, the paintwork pastel green, the hubcaps walled and brilliant white” (ix) now conveyed a young lawyer with bespoke suits from Alfred Kahn, Johannesburg’s foremost tailor.
Regretfully his newfound prosperity did not encourage monogamy. Steinberg records affairs with Ellen Molapo, (107), Lilian Ngoyi (107) and Ruth Mompati (112) and leaves us with the feeling that these were the tip of an iceberg. While a third child, a son Makgatho, was born in 1950 and a fourth child, a daughter they named Makaziwe, in 1954 Evelyn was endlessly distraught by Nelson’s careless philandering, and their marriage was plainly collapsing.
In February 1955 a friend of Nelson’s informed him that Evelyn had requested him to report Ngoyi to the police as she was planning to leave the country on ANC business without a passport, information Evelyn could only have got from Nelson, and which could have seen Ngoyi jailed. Evelyn had also given this man money to purchase muti that she could slip into Nelson’s food, to make him love her again. (107). Furious, Nelson left the marital bed and refused to eat any food prepared by Evelyn. She later claimed assaults followed, which he denied.
The Congress of the People was put together in 1955, and the Freedom Charter that flowed from it provided the state with a document that, as far as it was concerned, was sufficient grounds for a set of sweeps, raiding homes and confiscating documents, and gathering information. By late 1956 155 persons were arrested to be tried together in what became known as the Treason Trial. Nelson was one of them. This trial was to grind on for nearly five years, and it drew nearly all of the energies from the huge number of accused. Nelson’s legal practice began to wind down, as did his marriage.
Then fate intervened. “One afternoon in early March 1957”, (x), Nelson, with his Oldsmobile in the car park, was in a roadside delicatessen when Adelaide Tshukudu, fiancée of Oliver Tambo, came in and asked him to buy some snacks for those outside in Oliver’s car, as they were all hungry and penniless. He agreed and delivered the goodies himself. On the back seat of Oliver’s car was a stunningly beautiful girl of 21 years, whom Nelson had previously noticed at a bus stop. (ix). Her name was Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, and she was about to become a central part of his life for his remaining 56 years on our earth.
Winnie was also a Transkeian, having been born in Bizana in 1936. Her parents, Columbus and Gertrude, were both schoolteachers and her large family (she had seven sisters and a brother) moved often, as her father was posted from school to school. When Winnie was nine her mother died.
Her father saw much special in this daughter and ensured that she was to receive a good education at Shawbury, a Methodist mission school, where Winnie matriculated top of her class.
After matric, Columbus enrolled her in the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, and she graduated as a social worker in 1955 and began working in Johannesburg. Her boyfriend at this time was Barney Sampson – but then, along came Nelson. Torn between these two men, and busily two-timing them both, Winnie eventually chose Nelson, who meanwhile had divorced the devastated Evelyn, just before the equally devastated Barney attempted suicide on losing Winnie.
Winnie and Nelson were married on 14 June 1958 at Columbus’s home in the Transkei. Columbus was far from happy: “Why is she marrying that old man… Especially one who will spend the rest of his life running away from the police and sleeping in the bush”, “You have chosen him against my wishes, and so you will become a witch”, he included in a far from gracious wedding speech. (137, 140).
Like all black persons, Winnie had since her early years been confronted by the humiliating consequences of being black under apartheid.[3] She needed no encouragement from her new husband to get involved in the business of fighting this horror. In October, four months after her wedding, and now pregnant, and specifically against the advice of Nelson, she joined a delegation to protest the extension of the pass laws to women and was thrown into jail. (142/3).
The women had all agreed not to ask for bail in their first two weeks. Sleeping on the floor at the Johannesburg Fort, showers were filthy, conditions were terrible, and Winnie began to bleed. Had it not been for her fellow detainee, Albertina Sisulu, a nurse, she might well have lost her child. Tambo and Nelson arranged bail for them all, and thankfully it ended well. (143). Four months later Zenani Mandela entered our world.
By now there had been a break in the ANC, for in 1958 the Africanist section led by the charismatic Robert Sobukwe had left the mother body. It was an intoxicating time with many African countries wriggling free from their colonial masters, and Sobukwe’s PAC proudly proclaimed that they would take power in South Africa by 1963. (150). Suddenly the ANC had competition in the business of winning black support.
The first PAC protest ended in the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960. The ANC immediately realised that trouble lay ahead, and Oliver Tambo was delegated to leave South Africa and begin the ANC’s mission abroad. He arrived in what is now Botswana on 28 March.
Half of the Mandela Tambo legal practice was now gone. Three days later a state of emergency was declared, and the other half of Mandela Tambo went to jail, as a state of emergency detainee. Tambo was to be out of the country for 30 years, and Mandela was in jail for five months. He was, however, occasionally allowed out of prison to attend to matters at Mandela Tambo. His kindly guard, Sergeant Kruger, allowed Winnie to visit him, and in these hurried moments Zindziswa was conceived. (156). She was born in December 1960.
Nelson was now in three headlocks simultaneously: he was still a defendant in the interminable Treason Trial, he was a state of emergency detainee, and his legal practice was floundering – he closed it in 1961. Winnie found life no easier: she had an infant daughter to care for, she was again pregnant, she was the sole breadwinner and had been dismissed from Baragwanath Hospital when she was detained, she had a husband in court to support, and when Nelson returned from prison at the end of August, there were endless ANC visitors to 8115 Orlando West, and catering was expected of her. (156).
At the end of March 1961, the Treason Trial ended, and Nelson and all the defendants were acquitted. A rowdy group of ex-defendants, including Nelson, arrived from the court at 8115 Orlando West, and while they were celebrating in the street, Joe Modise went inside and asked Winnie to pack a bag for Nelson, as he was to be away for “just a few days”. As Steinberg notes, “He returned 29 years later”. (162).
Nelson was in hiding as the ANC began its armed struggle in 1961. Then he spent the first six months of 1962 travelling through Africa, drumming up support for the ANC in a world now more sympathetic to the PAC. On returning home he reported to the ANC’s working committee at Liliesleaf farm, and then headed off for Durban and Chief Luthuli. On his way back to Johannesburg, accompanied by Cecil Williams, they were stopped at a police roadblock and immediately arrested. The police knew of their movements. He was later to blame this information leak on Winnie. (177).
Nelson got five years in prison for leaving the country without a passport and inciting people to strike. He was transferred to Robben Island, from where he was later brought forward as accused number one at the Rivonia Trial, where, as is well known, he and his comrades were all sentenced to life in prison. He again arrived on Robben Island in June 1964. Between here, Pollsmoor and Victor Verster Prisons, he was to spend the next 26 years.
If that was what the future held for Nelson, as horrible as it was, it was nothing in comparison to what lay ahead for Winnie.
On 28 December 1962, when Nelson had been on the run, the state delivered to Winnie her first banning order. By its writ, she was confined to Johannesburg, could not attend any institution of education, could not be in a meeting of more than two people, and couldn’t be quoted in any media.[4] Police raids on 8115 Orlando West became commonplace, and, to cap the misery, their furniture was repossessed for payments Nelson had forgotten to make, or couldn’t make.
A young member of both the ANC and the Communist Party, Brian Somana, had been tasked by Nelson to drive Winnie and the girls around and had repeatedly brought Winnie to Liliesleaf to be with Nelson when he was underground. Unbeknown to them, he had been picked up and interrogated in June 1963 and had been turned by the security police. With the Rivonia trial nearing its conclusion, and most expecting the defendants to face the death penalty, Winnie made a tragic mistake – she took Somana into her, and Nelson’s, bed. When friends advised her to end this, she showed the obstinacy that was to become her hallmark.
Somana was, in October 1963, driving her car with Winnie and the girls in it, when they picked up Fikile Bam and Marcus Solomon, both on the run. Winnie had promised to see them safely out of South Africa. They were quickly stopped at a police roadblock and Bam and Solomon arrested. Bam blamed this on Winnie’s inept behaviour and Somana’s treachery, and told Nelson this, in high fury, when he arrived on Robben Island to serve his sentence. When Nelson had thought this through, and the possibility of Somana’s double-dealing in disclosing the whereabouts of both the Liliesleaf farm and Nelson’s trip to Natal, Nelson told Sisulu and Kathrada that he was to divorce Winnie. Nelson obviously later changed his mind, and Steinberg could not work out why. (208/209).
Winnie’s life was now overwhelmed by challenges, for she was clearly determined to help youngsters leave the country to join the ANC, and to give clandestine help to MK guerrillas in the country, whatever the price – and there was a huge price for her to pay for this. She was dismissed from her successive places of employment – first the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society, then from a school for black journalists, then from the office of the Dean of Johannesburg, then from the office of an attorney – nobody would hang on to her, given the immediate pressures the security police put on them. She had to earn a living, but couldn’t. (218).
And neither could she find a school for her girls. Both a Roman Catholic nursery school and later a ‘coloured’ school in which she enrolled the girls under false names, turned them away when the inevitable pressure came. Eventually, the girls were schooled at the Waterford Boarding School in Swaziland, the enormous cost met by two British benefactors. (218).
In December 1964 Winnie had a lucky break, for she met, in a group of people who had begun meeting at 8115 Orlando West, Peter Magubane, a young and talented documentary photographer. Quickly Peter replaced Somana in Winnie’s affections, but not before gunshots and the burning of Peter’s car. But replace Somana he eventually did, and he and Winnie became inseparable from December 1964 until May 1969. (219). He proved to be an honourable and wonderful companion, who sacrificed so much to look after Winnie.
In 1965 Winnie was dealt another banning order, and she could no longer go anywhere except for Orlando West. Now the security police sent two pretend-comrades into Winnie’s life, and incredibly also, Nelson’s. They were apparently ‘husband and wife’, Maud Katzenellenbogen and Moosa Dinath. (210). Their goal appeared to be to work through the Mandelas to find out the modus operandi of the Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), the Europe-based donor network that funded lawyers to defend politicos in South Africa. Maud was sent to ingratiate Winnie, and Moosa was put onto Robben Island, to get to Nelson. Eventually, both became distrusted and failed in this task. But the placement of spies into Winnie’s circle now became a routine and regular occurrence.
As bad as all of the above was, what was now ahead of Winnie Mandela was hell.
“And then Winnie was arrested. They came for her at about 2 a.m. on May 12 1969, storming through her front door in great numbers, turning her home inside out. They took her away in front of her daughters, who were left in the house alone… Winnie’s underground network, about which the police had always had intimate knowledge, was being brought to heel”. (226).
She was held in terms of the 1967 Terrorism Act, which allowed almost indefinite detention without trial, and gave the detainee no rights to visitors or even lawyers.
They held Winnie initially for seven months. She spent it all in solitary confinement, with no contact with anyone but her interrogators. Her only comforts were three threadbare and dirty blankets, a water bottle, a mug and a sanitary bucket. The cell had one light bulb, on twenty-four hours a day.
She was interrogated by Theunis Jacobus Swanepoel, a man as ruthless as he was ugly. He let her wait two weeks for his first arrival. Then he interrogated her non-stop for five days and nights – if she looked like falling asleep, an officer would clap his hands next to her ear. Mercifully, she was not beaten, but she rapidly began to collapse – heart palpitations, dizziness, swollen hands and feet. Swanepoel was not distracted by her agonies, he piled on the questions, and even promised her and Nelson a comfortable release to the Transkei with their children – if she was willing to make a radio broadcast calling on ‘black people’ to abandon their illegal struggles and work for a better future within the law. (233). She wouldn’t and didn’t.
If Winnie had an abiding memory of Swanepoel, it was of his hatred. She later told a journalist “It was (through Swanepoel) that I discovered the type of hate I had never encountered before in my life… He taught me how to hate him… By the end of my interrogation, I knew that if my own father or brother walked in… and was on the other side… if I had a gun, I would fire.” (322).
There is no doubt that Swanepoel broke her – as stubborn as she was (and Winnie was very stubborn) when Swanepoel had another detainee dragged into the adjacent interrogation room and tortured, it all became too much. She signed a letter to IDAF telling them that Nelson’s recommended lawyer was not to be trusted and that IDAF should brief one Mendel Levin (Swanepoel’s recommendation) instead. (233). And she talked – what she said we’ll never know, and it no longer matters. But who could criticise her?
Winnie and twenty-one co-accused came to trial in December 1969. By now Winnie had repented of recommending Levin, and Nelson’s recommended attorney, Joel Carlson, was appointed and he assembled three council – David Soggot, George Bizos and Arthur Chaskalson (could you ever find better?). Quickly they battered the state’s case, and in February the state abandoned mid-trial, and the judge acquitted and freed all the accused. They began to leave the courtroom, astonished.
But Winnie’s ordeal was far from over – they were rearrested at the door of the court, and Winnie was dragged back to her cell.
Back to solitary confinement, timeframe unknowable. “Winnie fell into deep despair”, writes Steinberg. (239). She contemplated suicide and began to lose weight and physical condition. At the beginning of May, she was taken to security police headquarters in Pretoria for more interrogation. Even they were shocked at her condition and called a doctor, who had her hospitalised. Here a staffer informed her of the protests that were happening ‘outside’ about her endless detention. This buoyed her up and got her courage back, and she welcomed her return to court in September.
On 15 September she and her co-accused were all acquitted. “She had been in jail 491 days, some 400 of them in solitary confinement. Now she was to resume life at 8115 Orlando West”. (241).
The state’s vengeance however continued unabated – they immediately slapped a five-year banning order on her and some of her co-accused, and also on Peter Magubane. Her first banning order had restricted her to Johannesburg, her second to Orlando – this one restricted her to her home, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. And they were determined to police it. She couldn’t work.
Soon Winnie “became dirt poor”. (255). Eventually, a ‘white debt collector’ named Frederick Squire employed both Winnie and Peter, and managed to juggle their shifts so that neither broke their banning orders. (255). To make some family time possible, Peter would drive to their home in the morning and pick up the girls and some lunch. He would then park near their offices, and on her lunch break, Winnie would emerge, inspect the neighbourhood, and then enter the back of Peter’s van and the four of them would enjoy a lunch break together.
They got away with this only three times, and then the police arrived in numbers. Winnie and Peter were both charged with breaking their banning orders and again endured a trial that lasted two years. At the end of the trial, both were sentenced to six months in jail, which Winnie served in the women’s prison in Kroonstad. They were released on the same day in April 1975.
Their banning orders lapsed five months later, and incredibly they were not renewed. Steinberg believes that this was a decision the security police took because an informer had reported that Thabo Mbeki, who was running the ANC’s operations in Swaziland, had let out that they did not trust Winnie or her judgment – letting her run loose could be more damaging to the ANC than detaining her again. (256).
Peter could again be a photojournalist, and Winnie could travel and speak publicly. And she was still enjoying this freedom when Soweto, and South Africa, exploded in June 1976.
Days before Soweto exploded on 16 June, Winnie delivered a speech in the Naledi Hall in Soweto to a group of parents who were concerned about the build-up of tensions in the local schools. Here we see a very assertive, even aggressive Winnie: “Events in our locality have reduced us parents to shame. It is an absolute disgrace that our children fight battles for us… You will agree with me that our young generation will spit over our graves, our generation of cowards”. (259). Soweto blew up 8 days later.
Of course, Winnie was detained – again. First, her house was petrol bombed, then, on 13 August, she was detained. Back to the Johannesburg Fort until the end of the year. And, in January, another banning order.
The security police’s next move was dramatic and unexpected.
“At dawn on May 16, 1977 a score of police officers descended on Winnie’s house. They swarmed inside, stripped its innards and loaded them onto the back of a truck. Nelson’s law books, Winnie’s linen, her clothes, the crockery in her kitchen, her dining table, her bed – everything that was not stuck down. They drove her and Zindzi southward, across the Vaal River and into the Free State, stopping after a five-hour journey in the hamlet of Brandfort. Outside a two-roomed house, a house without electricity, without water, without heat in this, the start of winter, they deposited mother and child. Winnie was handed her banishment order: she was to remain in this place, it stipulated, until December 31, 1981 more than four and a half years hence”. (269).
If the police thought they could dump Winnie and run, they had completely underestimated her. Her belongings would not fit into this tiny house, and she and Zindzi were dirty and cold. When she had finished haranguing them, they found a garage downtown for her excess belongings and paid for Winnie and Zindzi to bath at the town’s hotel.
These were important victories, but they were small ones. They still went to bed, cold and alone, at 3 a.m. in the miserable little house, in a township where almost no one spoke either Xhosa or English; in a house filled with eavesdropping devices and no telephone or municipal services; in a town where black folk couldn’t enter the major downtown stores, and constrained by a banning order that allowed no-one but her doctor or lawyer to enter her home. She was to live like this for eight years.
By 1979 Winnie had “descended into the deepest depression”. (284). Nelson, after a visit from her, wrote to Zindzi that “her happiness is very much in your hands”. Ismael Ayob, her attorney, after visiting her noted that “he had seldom seen a person so deep in despair”. She told him that she was going to die in Brandfort, and Nelson would die on Robben Island. (284).
Then a miracle happened. A young white doctor by the name of Chris Hattingh, who had a predominantly black practice in nearby Welkom, wrote to her and asked if he could help her in any way. They met, and clicked. From day one he began visiting Brandfort almost daily and supported her financially as best he could, and he would sneak her out of her township in the dead of night for fresh air. Most likely they were lovers, certainly he offered her meaningful employment in his large practice. Delighted, she humbled herself and filled in the reams of paperwork to get permission to work despite her banning order. Finally, on 5 March 1979 the last of the paperwork was signed. At 8 that night Hattingh closed his practice and set off to see Winnie.
He never arrived – instead, his sister got a call in the night to be told that Chris had died in a car crash. Neither she nor Winnie ever believed the ‘official story’ – that he had hit a cow – and neither could get the official autopsy report. Winnie wrote that “they killed him and got away with it”. His sister agreed. (286). Shortly after his tragic death, Zindzi confided in the family doctor that Winnie was drinking heavily. (287).
Winnie used her long years of banishment to attempt to set up a variety of community projects. With Operation Hunger she started a crèche and with her Johannesburg friend Dr Abu Baker Asvat she set up a clinic. She tried a soup kitchen, a gardening collective and a sewing club. All with mixed success. Did she have the energy, the resources and the determination to push them to success? I doubt it.
Where her heart increasingly was, was in the sending of young men through to the ANC in exile. While Thabo Mbeki had called for her isolation, Chris Hani, running the ANC’s Lesotho operation, called Winnie to send him recruits – which she gladly did. The results were horrifying – Hani later told Mac Maharaj that, of the twelve people Winnie had sent them, ten were plants. Winnie was again, as always, surrounded by hidden enemies. (290).
And she was surrounded by the international press, for Mandela’s beautiful wife, banished to live in a dusty township amid a strange community that was scared to make her welcome, presented a story that displayed apartheid’s cruelty so clearly as to be irresistible. Winnie’s every move now made international television. She was the bearer of the Mandela name, and use it she would, and film it they also would.
There was one moment of glory in all this horror and difficulty.
For, “on an August morning in 1980, Winnie Mandela arrived on Robben Island with an infant in the folds of her blanket”. (296). It was a four-month-old girl, Zindzi’s firstborn and Nelson’s grandchild. Prisoners were not permitted any visitors under the age of sixteen – but Winnie was never impressed with that sort of rule, and had successfully hidden the infant from the inspectors that governed the boarding of Robben Island’s visitors in the Cape Town docks.
At this stage, Nelson had what one might call a ‘personal jailer’, a twenty-year-old lad by the name of Christo Brand. Brand was responsible for Nelson’s visits and visitors, and he ushered Winnie to meet with Nelson (no contact visits were allowed, she was behind a screen of thick glass and spoke through a microphone). Brand however, insisted that Winnie leave the infant in the waiting room. Winnie, astonishingly, agreed to do that without a fuss.
Brand had to monitor the visit by sitting behind Nelson and listening to everything through a receiver. When Nelson was told that his granddaughter was in the next room, he turned to Brand and begged Brand to let him see the child. Brand would have lost his career at the age of twenty if he had agreed, and bluntly, and repeatedly, he refused Nelson’s increasingly desperate entreaties.
Eventually the visit was over, and Winnie and the child left for the visitors’ centre to catch the ferry back to Cape Town. Brand accompanied her. She tried to thrust R200 into his hand, begging him to somehow show Nelson the child. He pushed the money away and asked to hold the child, as, he said, he had never held an African baby.[5] He then asked Winnie to accompany him back to the waiting room, for, he said, they had forgotten to get her a permit for her next visit, the Christmas visit. Winnie followed dutifully, and Brand locked her in the booth, and with the microphones now turned off, and the visitor’s window now closed, Winnie, and everybody else for that matter, could see and hear nothing of what was to happen.
Brand walked around the back, and presented Nelson his grandchild.
Of this, Brand later wrote: “There was an incident where I took a risk so great, and achieved something so dear to him, that it formed a bond between us for life”.[6] (Brand was part of most major events in Mandela’s later life, always on Mandela’s invitation – including one that was without Nelson’s invite – his burial in Qunu. Nelson was an extraordinarily loyal friend).
As South Africa moved into the 1980s, changes began to manifest in Winnie.
She took another lover, this time a “strikingly beautiful twenty-one-year-old man”, Steinberg notes. (316). His name was Malefane and he was a Rastifarian artist, and friend of Zindzi’s. As his friendship with Winnie developed, he moved to Brandfort and, although from no particular political background, he began to travel all around South Africa, recruiting young men to be brought to Brandfort for further transporting out of South Africa, to the ANC in exile. It was another ill-conceived Winnie project. Possibly a dozen youngsters arrived as a group – straight into the arms of the expectant police. (318).
In January 1985 Malefane left Winnie and returned to a girlfriend in Soweto. Winnie followed him and confronted him at the home of a friend. She attacked him physically in the house – when he got her outside to cool her off, he was horrified to find two youngsters he knew from Brandfort there, one with a crowbar and the other with an axe. “Kill the dog!” Winnie shouted, and he just escaped with his life. (320/321).
By now Winnie’s extraordinary qualities of courage, determination to survive against any odds, charm and plain doggedness had been joined by a flipside of ruthlessness, anger, cruelty and drunkenness. She had learned hatred at the knee of the master, Theunis Jacobus Swanepoel, and now, after twenty-seven years of desperation to survive, she came blazing through – easily provoked, easily furious, often intoxicated, and now also capable of great cruelty. This all was a deadly cocktail brewing inside her, and it was to blow up in late 1985, as our country entered its most bloody year of confrontation.
For PW Botha’s great “reform”, the Tricameral Parliament, had galvanised thousands, millions, of South Africans into revolt. It started peacefully, but by late 1984, in the Vaal Triangle just south of Johannesburg, and in Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, the match was struck in the tinder, and wide-scale bloody insurrections began.[7]
Winnie quickly made a decision. Her Brandfort home had been burned down in August 1985 (she blamed the security police, they, in an internal memo, blamed her, for they believed that she wanted an excuse to decamp back to Johannesburg). (323). As Soweto began to revolt, “Winnie defied her banishment order and went home to 8115 Orlando West”. (323). Winnie was back in town.
By 1985 apartheid had only five eventful years to go, and all over South Africa and the world literally millions of people were doing something, anything, to end it. Disinvestment of companies and investment funds; sanctions on arms sales and other key goods; withdrawal of banking facilities; sports and cultural boycotts; anti-apartheid rock concerts; the ANC’s intensification of its armed struggle; press exposure of torture, assassinations and regional destabilization programmes; Cuban and Russian involvement in the Namibian War of Independence; and most particularly, our townships were aflame – it was now all happening. The apartheid animal was stumbling, and the vultures were circling.
Winnie and Nelson now applied their energies in different directions. Nelson took on the dangerous but necessary task of attempting to open up channels of negotiations, between government and ANC, for not much else was possible for a man serving a life sentence in an apartheid prison; and Winnie, well, her experience over the last twenty-seven years had shown her that negotiations were a waste of time – the government would never negotiate away its control. Power had to be taken from them, and that meant guns. Husband and wife, off in different directions.
Nelson’s opening happened in September 1985, when he was hospitalised to have his prostate removed. On recovering, he had an unexpected visitor – Kobie Coetzee, the Minister of Justice. The meeting was cordial and mannerly and discussions were not in any way political. However, it left Mandela convinced that negotiations, between the government and ANC, were possible but not inevitable. Someone had to take the risk of beginning them, and he felt that weight on his shoulders.
When he returned to Pollsmoor he found himself in a new suite, and this time by himself. Initially unhappy, Mandela quickly realized that this loneliness removed the restraints of requiring consensus from his colleagues should he begin negotiating. He set about beginning talks with the enemy, unconstrained by the need for endless discussions with his comrades, and permission for everything.
“We had been fighting against white minority rule for three-quarters of a century. We had been engaged in the armed struggle for more than two decades…It was clear to me that military victory was a distant if not impossible dream. It simply did not make sense for both sides to lose thousands if not millions of lives in a conflict that was unnecessary. They must have known this as well. It was time to talk”.[8]
These talks were impossible for a prisoner to control, and they came and went with the political winds of government. But Nelson hung on in there, and by the end of the decade, Mandela had met with Kobie Coetzee at least fifteen times, and with the government’s official team led by forty-eight times.[9] No, he didn’t “sell out” – in fact, he cut no deals at all that the ANC did not know about and would not later finalize – but he dragged the government into genuine negotiations by sheer force of personality and his obvious integrity. To have done this, as a man locked up in a prison cell, can only be described as miraculous.
Winnie, as we have noted, chose a different route.
For her first three months back in Soweto, Winnie kicked up no dust, the authorities watched and ignored, and the international press waited for the police to be heavy-handed, but they were careful. Then on 3 December 1985, a funeral of 11 youths killed by the police happened in Mamelodi, and a Mercedes arrived just as the funeral proceedings were closing down. It was Winnie, late as always, but it was her. The youth were exultant.
She brought them “love from those you sent outside to help fight for this liberation that has led to our burying our children… I bring you love from your leaders inside prison… This is our country, the blood of these heroes we buried today shall be avenged”. (324).
The police now could not but act. They arrived at her home with an order compelling her to leave Johannesburg. She was defiant – she had nowhere else to go. After an intense shouting match they lifted her off her feet, carried her to their vehicle and drove her to the Holiday Inn at the Joburg International Airport. They ordered her to remain there indefinitely. As they left, so did she.
They came back and back. She was charged with contravening her banning order, her car was forced off the highway in another desperate arrest. When she returned from court to a friend’s home, vast crowds of youths arrived, as did the press cameras. Nobody could raise a crowd and the cameras like Winnie could.
Then, incredibly, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in Bloemfontein, at the time the highest court in the land, ruled that a banning order like the one Winnie was ignoring so successfully, was inadequate as the reasons supplied in the order were flimsy and vague. Winnie was now a free actor.
She celebrated this new freedom by delivering three speeches on 13 April 1986 and they catapulted her onto the front pages of every newspaper. The hideous execution by fire, which began in Uitenhage near Port Elizabeth in 1985 and was by now happening in townships all over the country, called ‘necklacing’, got its first public promotion in South Africa and it was from Winnie. “We have no guns. We only have stones, boxes of matches and petrol… Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country”. (326).
Sisonke Msimang has demonstrated that what Winnie said on that day was no different from much that was pouring out, repeatedly, from the ANC in Lusaka.[10] In fact, it took another year of international outrage to cause Oliver Tambo to declare in 1987, “The necklace as a form of punishment should stop”.[11] But Winnie had promoted it here, a year earlier, and in front of microphones. It was an act of anger and defiance quite without parallel.
The next month the State Security Council discussed what to do with her. Their decision was ‘at present and especially because of her indiscriminate remarks, it is tactically not desirable (to again ban her)’. As Steinberg writes, “Her enemy was happy for her to continue talking”. (328).
In October 1986 a group of youth in Winnie’s neighbourhood brutally murdered a young lady who had done jail time for her involvement in the 1976 uprising. Her outraged brother assembled a rival group, and it looked like Orlando West was destined for war.
Winnie intervened and brought the two groups to her home. Here she fed and clothed them, and then she brought in Patson Banda, a legendary Soweto goalkeeper, and asked him to turn these youth into the Mandela United Football Club.
Seldom has a community project, born from such noble intentions, gone so badly wrong.
Banda rapidly could not see out the Club’s needs, and he proposed a relative to take his place. His name was Jerry Richardson, and in March 1987 Richardson took on the Club. From that day until the conviction of Winnie for kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in 1991, club members, including Richardson, were, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “involved in at least eighteen killings” and a large variety of assaults and kidnappings.[12]
We need not dwell on all this bloodshed – please read the TRC report referenced below if you need the gory details – but two issues need some exposition:
*A white Methodist minister, Rev Paul Verryn, moved into a Soweto manse, and immediately threw his home open to homeless persons and political refugees. (379). Winnie became convinced that Verryn was sodomising these black youngsters, had a number abducted and brought to her, accused them (and Verryn) of sodomy, and had them beaten terribly when they denied this. Verryn’s name was smeared disgracefully by Winnie, and the youngsters were assaulted within an inch of their lives. One died (see below). Two subsequent inquiries, one by the Church and another by the courts in the later murder trial of Jerry Richardson, found not a shred of evidence with which to criticise Verryn.
*A young teenage boy, known as Stompie Seipei, was one of the abductees. He had a particularly gruesome death at the hands of Jerry Richardson who later was convicted and jailed for his murder. Seipei had apparently confessed to having sold out four guerrillas in Parys when he was ten years old. He was brutally assaulted for days, and then Richardson and another cut his throat with a pair of garden shears and dumped his body. Richardson, in his amnesty application to the TRC, claimed that this was done on Winnie’s orders, and she was informed of the murder after it had been affected. He also admitted that he was a police spy.[13]
This murder led to considerable community outrage. Stompie’s body was found and lay for five weeks, unidentified, in a state morgue until a state pathologist, acting on a hunch, checked his fingerprints. They were found to tally with those on Stompie’s identity card. (389).
By now Winnie had compounded her many activities of bad judgment with another – for she had taken to her bed Johannes Mabotha, an ex-MK operator who she, Winnie, had been warned was now a spy. As the publicity for Seipei’s death gained traction, she sent Mabotha to Botswana to report back that the real Stompei was in an ANC camp there. Of course, Mabotha could go nowhere near an ANC camp, and he wandered around the western Transvaal until his money ran out. Winnie agreed to telegram him more, to a nearby Post Office. On arrival there, he fell into the hands of the Soweto Security Branch, who had been tapping Winnie’s phone.
Apparently, he had double-dealt his new masters also, and his behaviour had led to the death of two policemen. His Vlakplaas boss, Eugene de Kock, was called in. Eight horrible months followed for Mabotha until de Kock executed him and destroyed his corpse. (391).
That these many crimes had originated from her two homes (community fury saw 8115 Orlando West burned to the ground in July 1988 (375) – Winnie had meanwhile built a mansion in Beverley Hills, Soweto and moved the ‘Club’ in there) is indisputable, and that she controlled all major matters in these homes is also clear.
Thus we have it, as Paul Trewhela has described: “The famous residence of 8115 Orlando West served simultaneously… as a safe house for returned MK guerrillas, a weapons dump, a barracks for the Mandela football squad, a prison for recalcitrants, a punishment yard in which innumerable beatings were administered and a transit camp from which the executioner set forth”.[14] Add to that: “a den of spies, all unaware of the other” and we have a reasonable idea.
How was this allowed to go on?
Within the police, the Minister, Adriaan Vlok, wanted to prosecute Winnie, but for high treason. A 650-page docket of prosecution was prepared and handed to the attorney-general of the Witwatersrand in 1988. He did not act on it. Niel Barnard, the head of the team negotiating with Nelson, later said that they did not want to jeopardize these delicate negotiations by prosecuting Nelson’s wife. (420).
On the other side of the fence, the UDF made a number of fruitless interventions, both to try to bring Winnie to heel (all dismal failures), and to rescue persons they knew to be held in her home. Eventually, they tired of her evasiveness and began a campaign against her. A counter-campaign swiftly followed – from the ANC in Lusaka. Murphy Morobe and Sydney Mufamadi went to Lusaka for consultations. Steinberg reports that an informer at this meeting quoted Oliver Tambo: “We are governed by a desire to protect Nelson and his role”. (393).
Both sides of the fence would no longer try to restrain Winnie, both to spare her husband in jail.
And the man they were trying to protect from this reckless philandering and ruthless criminality? He was better informed than they realized, and utterly distraught.
What could he do?
“In 1964, his first year on the island, Mandela had been allowed only one visit – from his beloved Winnie – and he could receive two letters”. So writes the man who knew him best in those dark years – his ‘personal jailer’ Christo Brand.[15] Visits were, Brand writes, “his lifeline, the core of his ability to survive and remain sane”.
Gradually they became more frequent. By the 1980s he was allowed two visits per month of forty minutes each by two people at a time.
But it was Winnie’s visits that really mattered. On the day of her visit, “Mandela would be anxious from dawn to see that the weather was clement (otherwise the ferry would not sail)”.
“Only once he knew that the ferry was running and Winnie was on her way would he be calm… I would escort him down the track to the visitor’s centre and, if he saw a flower, a white Namaqualand daisy, he would pluck it carefully and lay it on the shelf on his side of the viewing glass where Winnie could see it. He loved her deeply and romantically and, even though we were two big men marching in uniform down a prison track together, with dog handlers on either side of us, I never found it amusing or foolish to see him pick a tiny flower. It was part of him, all man and all feeling”.[16]
But these meetings were often hard work. He demanded that Winnie send Zindzi to the University of Cape Town. She hardly lasted a few months – Winnie had her back home, in the service of MK. Nelson was furious – but Winnie could not talk in a monitored meeting of what she and Zindzi were up to, and neither could Nelson talk of his negotiations. So discussions were of family, inevitably also money, all predictable, but enormously stressful to a man both in jail and helpless, and hardly helpful to his wife, battling unimaginable odds alone in the outside world.
Her infidelities were, to Nelson, understandable but nevertheless also massively painful. Mabotha had hardly disappeared when Winnie fell in with a twenty-seven-year-old Wits student leader, Dali Mpofu. That Mpofu was living with a girlfriend he had impregnated, held neither of them back for a second. Nelson was informed and wrote to Winnie, demanding that she get ‘that boy’ out of the house. (411). She, of course, never followed instructions.
In late August 1989, Nelson’s elder daughter, Zenani, and her husband Musi visited Nelson. This meeting is clumsily recorded but the facts on file seem correct. Nelson berated Winnie for one infidelity after another, and he listed them all. Further, he blamed his capture in Natal and Fikile Bam’s capture in Johannesburg on Winnie’s casual conversations with a lover who was a spy. He criticised her use of money and her influence on Zindzi. He is now a lonely and burdened man, and his daughter in this visit, was spared none of the tensions that existed deep down in his soul. (397).
Three months later, he and Winnie are again enjoying cordial visits, and Steinberg concludes that “it appears that Winnie had mollified him as he reached the brink of divorcing her”. (398).
Little did either of them know, but two short months later, he was to be a free man.
Steinberg correctly wastes little time on the details of Nelson’s release, as they are well-known. But he does put two new issues on the table.
Firstly, Winnie was late in leaving Johannesburg on her way to join him for his release as she would not board the chartered plane – Murphy Morobe of the UDF was on board, and he had been part of the UDF’s campaign to criticise the behaviour of her Football Team; (407), and secondly, she had brought Dali Mpofu along for the ride, and he ended up in the central group standing with Nelson when he made his famous speech from the City Hall balcony. (411). Worse was to follow, for Winnie now threw discretion out of the window, and conducted her life with Mpofu at her side. When Nelson appointed her as head of the ANC’s Social Welfare department, she appointed Mpofu as her deputy. They spent many days and evenings together. (428).
Steinberg contrasts this with a vivid description of Nelson’s first night home in Johannesburg. The Mandela team landed at a private airport and were to make their way to a triumphal return to Soweto. But the crowd at their home was already too large, and growing by the minute. A house near the airport was hastily arranged, and their children, grandchildren, the Sisulus and others of the Mandela Reception Committee gathered there. Winnie was unwilling to spend the night ‘in the suburbs’, and she and the children left for Soweto. Nelson’s friends also departed, and he spent his first night in Johannesburg in an anonymous house in the middle of nowhere, all alone.
Three months after Nelson’s release, Jerry Richardson appeared in court charged with the murder of Stompie Seipei. As Steinberg notes, “It did not go well for Winnie”. Witness after witness reported on Winnie beating them, then turning them over to the Football Team for even worse. “Each described, with ominous precision, the violence metered out to Stompie Seipei”. (419). In less than a month, judgment was delivered. Richardson was guilty of murdering Seipei, and Winnie had been “present when the young men and Seipei were beaten, for at least a part of the time”. (419). No longer could Winnie escape the courts.
The authorities of the day were preparing to charge Winnie, and Steinberg was now preparing his first case against Nelson.
On 17 September the attorney general of the Witwatersrand announced that Winnie would face trial. She was charged with four counts of kidnapping, and four of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. She had seven co-accused.
Her trial began before it began, with the main fund that supported lawyers to defend political arrestees in South Africa, the International Defence and Aid Fund of London (IDAF), refusing support as, to them, the trial was criminal and not political. Nelson waded in, and they changed their position. They reversed this change when Winnie’s attorney presented an exorbitant account. Then two representatives of the Coca-Cola Corporation arrived at IDAF, and offered to pay the bill. The trial went on. But without a number of key witnesses and a number of Winnie’s co-accused, who had disappeared, one ended up in custody in Zambia. Two other state witnesses admitted to being too scared to give testimony.
Judge Michael Stegmann forged on, however, and on 13 May 1991, he found Winnie guilty of kidnapping and accessory after the fact to assault. (442). The following morning he sentenced her to six years in jail, a sentence that Desmond Tutu described as “shockingly severe” as he rushed to her defence. She was never to serve it, as an appeal a year later suspended the custodial aspect of it.
“In the wake of her trial, Nelson Mandela banished his wife from her place in his heart”, Steinberg writes. (445).
In mid-November he announced that they were to separate, and after a night of great drama Steinberg whispers (and RW Johnson shouts – that, in a drunken state, she defecated in their bed)[17] that Nelson fled their Soweto home for the luxurious comforts of Douw Steyn’s mansion in Johannesburg’s northern (i.e. white) suburbs, where he lived for some months (446).
In September of the next year, Barbara Masekela, a stalwart friend and member of Nelson’s personal staff, phoned Nelson and said she had a copy of a letter Winnie had written to Mpofu. At his request, she drove to him with it, and at his insistence, she read it to him. It was devastating. (450).
The affair, Winnie/Mpofu, was put clearly in writing. She also admitted embezzling ANC Welfare Department money to pay over to him, and that this was now under investigation. And she wailed about Mpofu’s continual affairs with others.
When Barbara had finished reading, she noticed that Nelson was now inscrutable. When she left, he called his old friend George Bizos over. “Would he please go to Winnie… and ask whether the letter was hers?” (453).
He did, and it was. She wailed, burst into tears, and sobbed that she had been betrayed. (454)
She was down, Steinberg notes, but nowhere near out. (454).
Through all this, Steinberg has been simultaneously creating his first case against Nelson.
It rests on five issues.
Firstly, shortly after Nelson was freed, an election at the Orlando West branch of the ANC had seen Winnie gain no position there. Nelson was unhappy, and he press-ganged a group of friends, apparently greatly discomforted, to create another branch with Winnie as Chair.
Secondly, to provide her with a position in the ANC’s Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region, he had organised a number of friends to attend the provincial conference, to observe the vote to intimidate delegates to ensure Winnie’s appointment.
Thirdly, he had appointed her as the ANC’s head of Welfare, a national appointment.
Through these three processes, he ensured his wife’s positions at all three levels of the ANC.
Fourthly, when IDAF refused to fund her trial, he personally intervened with IDAF’s Director, Horst Kleinschmidt, and had the IDAF board change their decision.
And fifthly, when the IDAF subsidy fell through on inflated invoices from Nelson’s attorney, he had organised a company to pay Winnie’s legal costs.
As Steinberg writes: “Nelson Mandela was a year out of prison. He had corrupted the democratic processes of his organisation; he had wounded a fund to which he, personally, owed an enormous debt; he had received covert money from a private corporation”. (425).
These arguments seem to me to be threadbare.
Firstly, the ANC branch election. Having served on ANC branches, may I comment that anyone so foolish as to wish for such an appointment should be left to pursue their insanity in peace. There are, nor ever have been, at ANC branch level, no resources with which to do the humblest administrative tasks. No state money is in play, only the voluntary contributions of the members of the branch. Office is a hollow appointment with ill-defined responsibilities and endless critics. And it is all just an internal ANC thing, sheltered from the real world. To help someone to office here is to give them nothing, and if Nelson did that, and the ANC accepted it, the matter ends there. It is, only, an internal ANC matter.
Secondly, the loading of the Regional elective conference to ensure a position for Winnie.
When Helen Suzman was to retire as the MP for Houghton, she told me that she had proposed Irene Menell to be her replacement. However, at the nomination meeting, Tony Leon arrived with buses full of buddies and carried the nomination.
With respect, this is as old as politics – packing a nomination meeting to ensure the job for a buddy. Internal ANC matters only, also.
Thirdly, her appointment as ANC head of Welfare. From what Steinberg has already written, surely it is clear that Winnie is a politician to be kept busy, or all hell would break loose. (Was it Herbert Hoover: “Keep her inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in”?). And she carried with her an enormous constituency of young black voters. And she was a trained social worker. I’d say, ‘clever appointment’. And again, an internal ANC thing – no public money at play.
Fourthly, Nelson’s pressure on IDAF to see Winnie’s trial as ‘political’.
In the 1980s I worked in the defence team in a number of IDAF-sponsored trials. I was called in after a guilty judgment had been passed when youngsters (and they were all young township men) had been found guilty of murder, and faced the possibility of the death penalty – I was used to create the information required to develop a case for mitigation, to help avoid the gallows.
My memory of those horrible events was of groups of youngsters, all hopelessly under-parented and under-schooled, whose entire politicisation was slogans, freedom songs, and deep societal grievances. If asked who Govan Mbeki was, you would draw a blank. The ANC – yes. Mandela – yes. Beyond that – not much. They would prowl the townships at night, awaiting an instruction to burn down a particular house, or to murder a particular “sell-out”. They had no idea who had given the instruction, but at that time, that was how things worked – and a house would be torched, or a person murdered.
To IDAF these trials were political – yet Winnie’s was not. She was, at the time, the only person inside South Africa and not in jail who was courageous enough to be clearly ANC. She was, absolutely and obviously, political. Nelson had a clear case to challenge the IDAF decision that her trial was only criminal, and should not be criticised for exercising this right.
Fifthly, the Coca-Cola money.
Politicians and corporate money. A horrible and dangerous combination. But a time-honoured one, and not, at the time, illegal or even in need of reporting.
When van Zyl Slabbert so noisily resigned from parliament four years before Nelson was freed, he used a large chunk of his pension payout to repay the loan he had taken on to purchase his Cape Town home – the loan was from E Oppenheimer and Co.
Nelson was besieged from the time of his release with offers of financial help. Slabbert mentioned to me that he had introduced Nelson to Donny Gordon, who was astonished that Nelson only asked for funding to appoint a secretary. As Gordon told Slabbert – “I thought I was in for a few million”.[18]
Nelson asked, Coca-Cola agreed, the money was used for an agreed purpose, and neither party complained – the matter is closed.
No, Steinberg’s first case against Nelson doesn’t hold up.
With Winnie’s letter to Mpofu we have reached the end of the penultimate section of “Winnie and Nelson”. There is just the twenty-page final section to consider. Entitled “Ends”, I wish Steinberg had not written it.
He concludes it, and the book, with the poignant image of the ninety-five-year-old Nelson on his deathbed, made doubly sad now by Nelson’s dementia. He had been married to Graca Machel for fifteen years, but, whether it was the collapsing short-term memory or the final statement of a lifelong deep and troubled love, he would only eat if fed by Winnie. To Graça’s great credit, that is what happened. Nelson and Winnie spent the last of his days together, alone. Then he was gone.
For South Africa, an era had passed. If we ever had a chance of a non-racial future, it was Nelson that we had to thank for that opportunity opening up. Now he was no more, and the vultures were circling. And their argument became that this extraordinary man had, in fact, sold-out black South Africans, by authorising a system where white privilege and ownership of property remained undisturbed, thereby ensuring enduring, and increasing, black poverty. This becomes Steinberg’s second case against Nelson. It’s a sham argument, designed to justify politically motivated devil-talk, and we must look at it.
Let’s consider two sentences:
“Possibly as many as 15% of United States voters believe that their 2020 Presidential Election was stolen from Donald Trump by Joe Biden and his election team by rigging voting machines to ‘flip’ votes cast for Trump to votes for Biden”;
”A significant number of young black South Africans believe that blacks in South Africa would today be financially much better off had Nelson Mandela not negotiated away their economic prospects, either from his prison cell (1985- 1990) or in the ensuing public negotiation process (1990- 1995) – in this process, Mandela was a sell-out to the future prospects of black South Africans, and a supporter of the continuing white control of the economy”.
Clearly, both of these sentences are true – they state that significant numbers of people believe these statements, and they do.
But the ‘truth’ of the proposition the first sentence entails is a falsehood, namely that Biden et al ‘organised’ voting machines to cheat. The matter has been before over twenty courts, and countless inquiries, and invariably the proposition of ‘voter flipping’ has been shown to have no basis in fact. That so many people still believe it, is a testimony to how many otherwise sensible people will cling to a belief if it is endorsed by a trusted and loved demagogue (in this case, Donald Trump).
I would argue that the same is the case for the second sentence.
Possibly this all began with a 2010 interview that Winnie gave to the London Evening Standard: “Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is still very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their lives in the struggle have died unrewarded”. (Steinberg suggests a more recent origin of this line of argument, but no matter). Frequently reference is made back to those clauses of the Freedom Charter that call for the nationalization of the mines and the banks, that these clauses were not implemented post-1994, and as such South Africa missed the opportunity of greater equality of wealth.
For this argument to hold, two propositions need to be proven:
- “Had the government nationalized the mines and the banks in the mid-1990s, black South Africans would have been significantly wealthier today”, and/or “The following opportunity was missed, that would have made black South Africans significantly wealthier today”; and secondly,
- “It was Mandela alone that caused the opportunity to be missed”.
Neither of these sentences are a true priori, both require a measured case of evidence to be presented, assessed and thereafter agreed upon or disagreed with.
This review has already gone on for too long, and to attempt to assess the potential of nationalization of mines and banks just won’t fit into what space is left. But let me say six things here:
- The Freedom Charter was created in 1955 during the heyday of socialism’s advance in the European democracies. Since then nationalization has had a very undistinguished record, including the nationalization of Anglo American’s Zambian copper mines (Anglo was paid a fortune in invaluable US dollars which they shipped to Bermuda, then used to set up MINORCO, and made billions from this company; while the Zambian copper mines collapsed and Anglo was brought back to manage them, at another fortune in costs).
- Fidel Castro called Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki to Havanna in 1986 to warn them that his attempts at nationalization had been unsuccessful and he warned against the ANC trying this on.[19]
- The USSR and the Soviet bloc had collapsed in economic turmoil in the late 1980s.
- The “Property Clause” in the newly negotiated South African constitution has prohibited expropriation of property without ‘just compensation’, and the newly established ANC government plainly had massive social programmes to fund, making the enormous costs of nationalization with compensation impossible – of note, the SA Constitution was passed through the South African parliament with near total agreement, including the agreement, if my memory is correct, of MP Winnie Mandela.
- Those who would still believe, as if it was an a priori truth, that nationalization would be a simple solution, should consider what South Africa would be like if our banks and mines today looked like Eskom or Transnet.
- Does a contemporary case for nationalization exist? If it does, it has escaped my desk.
Thus, the first proposition (above) is unproven – what about the second, Mandela’s sole responsibility here?
South Africa is the product of a constraining constitution. This controls the law of property and through that nationalization.
This constitution is the end product of two processes: firstly, an internal process in the ANC that Oliver Tambo began in the early 1980s, and which is well documented in Andre Odendaal’s recent book, Dear Comrade President[20] and in Albie Sachs’ Advancing Human Rights in South Africa.[21] These books take us up to the return of the exiles (who ran the ANC’s Constitutional Committee). Thereafter the long, fraught and complex national negotiation process (1990 to 1996) happened, and this is well summarised in the interminable (yet excellent) biography of Arthur Chaskalson by Stephen Ellmann.[22]
That the ANC team won the arguments with regard to the constitution was as much because they had had these years of preparation before 1990, as it was to the strength of the ANC team – Cyril Ramaphosa, Zola Skweyiya, Valli Moosa, Mac Maharaj, Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo and, particularly, Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos. Even Government negotiator Niel Barnard conceded that “(ANC) heavyweights like advocates Chaskalson and Bizos, for whom the government’s politicians with the exception of Tertius Delport, were simply no match”.[23]
Nowhere in either of these processes was Mandela a player. In the first process, he was not in Lusaka but was locked away in jail, and during the second, he was running the ANC and preparing for an election. He was not a constitutional negotiator, he did not write South Africa’s constitution on the back of an envelope in Victor Verster Prison, and, while plainly he was in agreement with both the process and its result, it is both superficial and malicious to present possible constitutional failure as a Mandela-alone issue.
Why then is this done?
It is done because it suits the political purposes of our local demagogue, Julius Malema, the principal loudspeaker on this issue, and it is believed for the same reasons so many in the USA believe Biden stole Trump’s election – because our demagogue believes it, so do we. Don’t bother with evidence.
It is the business of non-fiction writers to dig and dig again, for the truth. Steinberg is meticulous in advancing reasons, often multiple options of reasons, for the behaviour of Winnie and Nelson in the earlier sections of his excellent book – it is startling that he presents this “Mandela sell-out” stuff in his last section without even scratching the surface of the issues. No doubt he would be outraged at the suggestion that he is doing Julius’ work for him, but that is what has happened here.
Thus, Nelson survives Steinberg’s second charge.
It is a widely held opinion, coming from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and dozens of others, that Nelson Mandela is the greatest politician of the twentieth century. Steinberg has twice risen in prosecution of this idol, and in both cases, he has not won a ‘guilty’ verdict. Nelson’s reputation has survived unscathed. He remains the greatest political figure of the twentieth century, and he’s ours.
What now of Winnie? At the end of Steinberg’s book, what do we now feel about her?
In truth, Steinberg has unearthed two Winnies.
The first Winnie enters our reading in 1957 as a beautiful young woman, who is courted by and then marries a great struggle hero. She exits our reading twenty-eight years later, in 1985, with her husband having now been in jail for twenty-three of those twenty-eight years, when she ‘unbans herself’ and abandons her Brandfort banishment and returns to Soweto.
In between these two dates, but for a few momentary lapses, she is an exemplary human being, an African hero who endured more cruelty than possibly anyone in our torrid history has, and who, had she had a better lock on her bedroom door, would have entered history alongside Joan of Arc. The first Winnie Mandela is unquestionably a great national and African hero.
The second Winnie arrived back at 8115 Orlando West in 1985 and then waited nearly five years for her husband to return. In the seven years from 1985 until she and her husband separated in 1992, her impact on her, and our country, was totally different from what had happened before. Unquestionably our country was now in the grip of a blood-soaked war not of her making, (I have written in detail of the years 1985 and 1986 in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage – I doubt that Soweto was much different – it was a time of police death squads, endless detention and torture, counterbalanced by murder, fire, arson and cruelty, on the other).[24] Winnie quickly adapted to this age of horror, and ran programmes of mayhem of her own, albeit enacted by her ‘Football Club’.
The legacy of the second Winnie has plunged her name into great controversy. In an attempt to end the swirling rumours, in the late 1990s, she requested the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to convene a hearing on all matters surrounding her ‘Football Club’. “Her move appeared to backfire”, Steinberg has written. “One witness after another testified of the terrible deeds committed in her home… she sat stone-faced in the gallery, the remnants of her team at her flanks looking awfully menacing”. (461).
This precipitated the first of three explanations by her of these terrible events.
This first explanation comes from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Mrs Madikezela Mandela’s testimony before the Commission was characterised by a blanket denial of all allegations against her… she refused to take responsibility for any wrongdoing”.[25] This plainly was a conclusion only she believed – certainly the Commissioners were unmoved, and their report is damning.
The second explanation is equally fanciful, yet Steinberg gives it much space. This explanation places all the blame for the carnage on a division of the police named “STRATCOM”, short for Strategic Communications. The ‘leak’ here is an ex-security policeman, Paul Erasmus. Erasmus claimed, and this is credible, that Stratcom was created to run disinformation campaigns targeting ‘radical’ members of the ANC, of whom Winnie was number one, and that he was personally responsible for many disinformation leaks attempting to ruin her public image. All that is undoubtedly correct.
Winnie saw the opportunity to blame the whole sorry story on Stratcom. Starting with the Stompie Seipei murder, “Stompie was killed by (the state’s) own men (Jerry Richardson, now known to be a plant). Stompie was killed by their agents so that I could be blamed”. And more. The murders committed by members of her Football Club were also committed by Stratcom’s agents, all intended to destroy her reputation. (466). And the reporters who reported all this, including veteran journalists Thandi Gqubule, Anton Harber and Nomavenda Mathiane were all ‘doing Stratcom’s bidding’. (466).
A year after making these allegations Winnie died, making legal redress against her impossible. But action was taken against the Huffington Post and (surprise surprise) the EFF, who had reported and embellished these fabrications, and redress was won. Steinberg writes that “whether (these allegations) sound like paranoia, or whether, instead, it has the feel of a long-suppressed truth, depends on where you stand” (466) – fortunately the courts demanded more than footprints in the sand, instead requiring a factual underpinning of evidence, and, when this did not arrive, found against the Huffington Post and the EFF.
Winnie’s third explanation was that she was a soldier operating on instructions (coming from Lusaka) and that soldiers are not obliged to either explain or apologise.
There is a grain of truth in this explanation. As we have already noted, Msimang reports on repeated broadcasts from Lusaka that exonerated those killing mpimpis and others who stood in the way of liberation. The TRC report suggests that a number of those killed in the Football Club’s reign of terror were believed, on what evidential basis we have no idea, to be plants and spies. Some undoubtedly were, but not all. This explanation creates the smallest of openings, but it is an opening. As Churchill has gently written: “There is a particular type of anger reserved for those of a nation who were seen to have been warming their hands at the hearth of the enemy when their land was in distress”. Put more bluntly, impimpis know to expect no mercy when exposed. And from Winnie and her Club, they certainly got none.
Msimang makes a further point in mitigation. She notes that Harry Gwala was also trading in ‘reckless rhetoric’, and that he was implicated in assassinations and countless political crimes in his ‘territory’ the Natal Midlands. Yet he was called ‘The Lion of the Midlands’, and certainly escaped the scrutiny and the censure that befell Winnie. This Msimang[26] puts down to Winnie being female, and I have no doubt that is a substantially true part of the explanation. She was further handicapped by the public curiosity that followed from her name, and the easy headlines newspersons could squeeze out of stories about her.
How then can we pull together the first and the second Winnie Mandela, to get a composite picture?
RW Johnson, with his customary absolute certainty, asserts that Winnie belonged to one or other of the asylum and/or the prison.[27] The second of these two options was, as we have seen, tried by Judge Stegmann, to Desmond Tutu’s horror. But somewhere in the collective consciousness of South Africa (is it what Allister Sparks referred to as ‘The Mind of South Africa”?) it was decided that the first Winnie had done more than enough jail time already, that our prisons were now to be de-politicized, and that the horrible injustice of her 491-day jailing should not be repeated – it did not again happen. And, of course, that was the right decision.
Is this the clue? Does the extraordinary suffering and courage of the first Winnie absolve the horrendous cruelty of the second?
I leave it to you to decide that one. The whole, welded together Winnie, is like the country she suffered so to help create, marvellous and yet flawed. You load the scales of judgment. After you have read Steinberg’s book.
Is this a good book? Yes, it is a bloody good book.
Is it a masterpiece, as was A Man of Good Hope? No, its descriptions are, but its analysis is sometimes flawed.
Would I recommend it as a purchase and as a read? Without a doubt. It’s one of the best reads I have enjoyed in quite a few years.
And do I still believe that Steinberg is Nobel Prize material? I certainly do. Shoemaker, stick to your last. There could well be great things ahead.
Notes
[1] Rory Riordan, Apartheid’s Stalingrad, Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2022, p 31
[2] Rory Riordan, op cit, p 55
[3] South African History Online, SAHO, “Winnie Mandela” unpaginated.
[4] SAHO, op cit
[5] Christo Brand with Barbara Jones, Doing Life with Mandela – My Prisoner, My Friend, Blue Ear Books, Seattle USA, 2022, p 43.
[6] Christo Brand, op cit, p43.
[7] Rory Riordan, op cit, p 185ff
[8] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Macdonald Purnell, 1994, p 513.
[9] Mac Maharaj and Z Pallo Jordan, Breakthrough, Penguin Random House, Cape Town 2021, p 124.
[10] Sisonke Msimang, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, Jonathan Ball publishers, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 2018, pp 97-105.
[11] Sisonke Msimang, op cit, p 106.
[12] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report, volume two, Juta, Cape Town, 1998, p 581.
[13] Jerry Richardson, testimony at his amnesty hearing at the TRC, November 1999, reprinted on Politicsweb.
[14] Sisonke Msimang, op cit, p 108.
[15] Christo Brand, op cit, p 87.
[16] Christo Brand, op cit, p 87.
[17] RW Johnson, review of this book on Politicsweb
[18] Personal conversation, the writer and the wonderful Dr Slabbert (early 1990s).
[19] Rory Riordan, op cit, p 462.
[20] Andre Odendaal, Dear Comrade President, Penguin Random House, 2022.
[21] Albie Sachs, Advancing Human Rights in South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1992.
[22] Stephen Ellmann, Arthur Chaskalson, A Life Dedicated to Justice for All, Picador Africa, Johannesburg, 2019.
[23] Stephen Ellmann, op cit, p 391.
[24] Rory Riordan, op cit, p 191ff.
[25] TRC Report, op cit, p 578.
[26] Sisonke Msimang, op cit, p 13-14.
[27] RW Johnson, op cit.
See also:
Enter the lacuna: a review of Harry Oppenheimer by Michael Cardo
The post 8115 Orlando West and its people: a review of <i>Winnie and Nelson, portrait of a marriage</i> by Jonny Steinberg appeared first on LitNet.