Winnie Mandela (22 page)

On Monday 20 April 1964, the defence began presenting its case. No one, least of all the accused themselves, expected the verdict on 11 June to be anything but ‘guilty’. The question, however, was what sentence would be handed down. Would they be condemned to death, or would their lives be spared? And if they were to live, how long would they spend in prison?

That night, Mandela, Sisulu and Mbeki discussed the final strategy with their lawyers. No matter what the sentence, they would not appeal. If they were given the death penalty, they knew there would be mass protests, and an appeal would not only rob the expected demonstrations of their drama and momentum, but might lessen the impact of international demands for the ANC leaders to be released. On the other hand, if the death sentence was not handed down, the judges might decide on appeal that the court had erred, and impose the death penalty themselves, leaving the prisoners with absolutely no room to manoeuvre.

It was a calculated gamble, but they were adamant that they would not appeal, regardless of the sentence. Court procedure dictated that the judge would ask Mandela, as Accused No. 1, if he could offer any reason why the death penalty should not be imposed. Mandela would reply that he was secure in the knowledge that his death would be an inspiration to the cause to which he had devoted his life.

Nelson Mandela prepared himself to die.

His young wife prayed desperately that he might live.

Two days before Nelson and Winnie’s sixth wedding anniversary, on Friday 12 June, the accused entered the court to learn their fate. Mandela waved to Winnie and his mother, the two most important women in his life, sitting together and united in love and fear, knowing that whatever the outcome of the day’s events, he would not be going home. The defence offered two pleas in mitigation of sentence, one by well-known advocate Harold Hanson, and the other by internationally renowned author Alan Paton, who was also national president of the Liberal Party, a devout
Christian and an outspoken opponent of violence. Hanson said although the methods used by the ANC were illegal, their aims were not, and he reminded the judge that his people, the Afrikaners, had also resorted to violence in order to attain freedom. Paton made the point that while he was an advocate of peace, the men before court had been faced with only one of two alternatives: to bow their heads and submit, or to resist by force. If they were not granted clemency, he said, the future of South Africa would be bleak. The men in the dock were the last credible ANC leaders alive, and, as such, the men with whom the government would one day have to negotiate.

Sadly, Paton did not live long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled.

Judge Quartus de Wet, judge president of the Transvaal, looked ill and nervous as he deliberated his decision. Then came the crucial point, when he asked Accused No. 1 if there was any reason why the death penalty should not be imposed.

In an address that lasted four hours, Mandela painstakingly explained the injustice of apartheid, the painful contrasts between the lives of white and black South Africans, and the aspirations of the ANC. The silence in the courtroom was absolute as he looked directly at the judge and delivered one of his most powerful and famous statements: ‘During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’

Though awe-inspiring, his chilling words signalled to Winnie that he was ready to sacrifice his life for his beliefs. In that instant, she knew instinctively that he was already lost to her and their children. She clung to what she knew was true: that it was a just cause and demanded total dedication. But with every fibre of her being, she hoped and prayed that she would not have to face the future as the widow of a martyr.

Despite a deathly quiet in the courtroom, the judge’s voice was almost inaudible when he uttered the fateful words: ‘The sentence in the case of all the accused will be one of life imprisonment.’

He had spoken so softly that most of the spectators had not heard him at all, and Dennis Goldberg’s wife, Esmé, called to him and asked what the sentence was. ‘Life!’ he called back with a grin. ‘Life! To live!’

Mandela turned around and beamed at the gallery, searching for Winnie’s face in the crowd, but there was chaos, and he couldn’t see her. People were shouting and the police were pushing and shoving at the crowd. Then the prisoners were ushered out of the courtroom to the cells below.

There was no doubt that the continued protests and international pressure
saved the ANC’s leaders from the gallows. But life imprisonment meant literally that – in South Africa, political prisoners did not qualify for parole or early release.

For Winnie, the agony was over, but the ordeal had just begun. Nelson’s life had been spared, but it was stolen from her forever, and she faced a long, bleak future alone.

The
New York Times
commented: ‘To most of the world [the Rivonia men] are heroes and freedom fighters, the George Washingtons and Ben Franklins of South Africa.’

A report in
The Times
of London said, prophetically: ‘The picture that emerges is of men goaded beyond endurance … The verdict of history will be that the ultimate guilty party is the government in power – and that already is the verdict of world opinion.’

No one who was at or near the Palace of Justice that day could forget the sound of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ echoing through the heart of Pretoria, the seat and symbol of government oppression. It sent shivers down Winnie’s spine. Mandela had always found the anthem beautiful and moving, but now it took on new meaning as a hymn of farewell to the ANC leaders, and a reminder that they were blanketed with the devotion of their people.

In a retrospective of that day published in the London
Observer
on 20 March 1983, former
Rand Daily Mail
editor Allister Sparks wrote: ‘I fully expected to see a shaken Mrs Mandela emerge from the courthouse. But no. She appeared on the steps and she flashed a smile that dazzled. The effect was regal and almost triumphant, performed in the heart of the Afrikaner capital in her moment of anguish, and the crowds of Africans thronging Church Square, with Paul Kruger’s statue in the middle, loved it. They cheered, perhaps the only time black people have ever summoned the courage to cheer in that place.’

In the midst of the crowd, Winnie’s thoughts turned to her daughters. Zeni was five, Zindzi a year younger, and as they waved goodbye to their father, she was acutely aware that they would be grown women before they saw him again. Her heart ached as never before, but suddenly, someone grabbed her shoulder, and she turned to face a security policeman who barked at her: ‘Remember your permit! You must be back in Johannesburg on time!’ She was dumbstruck. How could anyone think about anything except the human tragedy playing out in front of them? Not even a drop of empathy with a woman who had just lost her husband, nothing but the cruel need to remind her that they still had the upper hand, that they controlled her life. Momentarily, Winnie lost control, and kicked the huge policeman, hard. He showed no sign of noticing, possibly putting the blow down to the jostling of the crowd.

As Nelson and the other ANC leaders were driven away in a fortress on wheels, Winnie kissed the palm of her hand and waved it at the vehicle. Zeni and Zindzi
solemnly followed her example, blowing kisses at their father, even though he could no longer see them. And then the prisoners were gone, and hundreds of cars made their way back to Johannesburg as if in a giant funeral procession.

To add to her woes, Winnie was again in trouble with the tribal elders. They had wanted her to take
muti
from a witch doctor into court in her shoe, to protect Madiba from the white man’s retribution. Torn between wanting to show respect for her elders and her own beliefs, she had seriously considered accepting the small vial of brown, oily liquid that looked as though it contained hair, but in the end she could not bring herself to do it. She knew that it could not possibly affect the outcome of the trial, but after Nelson was sentenced the elders accused her of selling him out to the white man, of not wanting him to be free.

But tribal displeasure was just one of the tribulations that beset Winnie’s life from the moment Nelson went to jail. Never again would she have peace of mind or know tranquillity.

Mandela’s life, by contrast, would settle into a familiar and predictable pattern, albeit a harsh one. And he would be safe, shielded by regulations that were closely monitored by organisations such as Amnesty International and the Red Cross. It would be a life of deprivation, to be sure, but there would be compensations: solitude that was conducive to studying, writing and planning, and, in time, a slow trickle of victories against the system. He would also be part of a unique fraternity, bound to one another by a common goal, shared distress and colourful symbolism. Every night, before the lights were turned out, Pretoria Central Prison would resound to the swelling chorus of black prisoners singing freedom songs. Seconds before the lights were dimmed, the singing would stop, plunging the entire jail into silence. Then, from cells throughout the building, men would shout
‘Amandla!’
and others would thunder the response,
‘Ngawethu!’
It was a rousing war cry from hundreds of throats, reminding all the political prisoners that however long it took, power would be theirs, one day.

Winnie saw Nelson once more before he was taken back to Robben Island. She was heartbroken, but, as always, he managed to restore her spirit and imbue her with fresh courage. And, as before, he warned her to beware of the difficulties that lay ahead: malicious rumours, police traps, the potholes of being a young woman without a husband. He expected, said Mandela, that Winnie would live up to his expectations.

He and his comrades were confident that growing international pressure would ensure that they served no more than ten years in prison. Their lawyers agreed, and one police officer even went so far as to predict that world outrage over his life imprisonment would force the government to release Mandela within five years. The prisoners and the pundits were all very wrong.

The government was making calculations of its own, and arrived at the
conclusion that in just a few years, a Mandela out of sight would also be out of mind, the ANC a spent cause, abandoned by foreign supporters. For a while, it seemed they might be right. In 1964, the London
Times
mentioned Mandela fifty-eight times, a year later only twice, and in 1966 not at all. The
New York Times
referred to him twenty-four times in 1964 and not at all in 1965 or 1966 – and a single reference in 1967 was to Winnie, not Nelson. After that, the international media all but ignored both Mandela and the ANC. Western governments had effectively written off the organisation, and in South Africa there was barely a trace of Mandela’s name in the media. Moreover, resistance inside South Africa seemed to have been crushed. The ANC was going through one of its darkest periods, and Nelson Mandela was sliding into oblivion.

Winnie, however, had pledged to keep his name alive, and she was not about to abandon him or the struggle for liberation.

She began applying for permission to visit Nelson as soon as he was transferred to Robben Island. As a ‘D’ category prisoner he was entitled to only one visitor and one letter every six months, but for Winnie and Albertina Sisulu, both ‘banned’ persons, special leave had to be granted by the Minister of Justice to travel to Cape Town at all. The first letter she wrote to Nelson was almost totally blacked out by the prison censor, and little more than the salutation and closing were legible by the time it reached him. The same applied to the letters he sent her.

Two months after he returned to the island, she was granted permission to visit. Barred from associating with other passengers on the ferry, she had to make the voyage from the Cape Town docks below deck, and suffered an attack of claustrophobia. As she walked towards the prison buildings, she noted that the armed guards in the watchtowers faced outwards, towards the sea, and realised that escape from this rocky island would be impossible. She walked down the gravel path to the visitors’ waiting room, and, when her name was called, made her way down the narrow passage, past the thick, uneven glass of the small windows through which the distorted faces of the prisoners on the other side looked like frightful apparitions in an impenetrable void. She was deep in thought, wondering how many times she would tread the same disconsolate path over the course of a lifetime. Someone called to her that Nelson was down at the end, jolting her out of her reverie, and then she saw him, his face beaming with his dear and welcoming smile.

Every visit to Robben Island was taxing and emotionally draining. More often than not, relatives were given less than twenty-four hours’ notice that a visit had been approved, and it was never clear whether this was due to bureaucratic inefficiency or a deliberate attempt to make life as difficult as possible for the families of political prisoners. Often, however, the short notice made it impossible for visits to take place, as loved ones could not make the long journey to the Cape
in time. Winnie always dressed with great care when she visited Mandela, and no matter how much strain she was under, tried to hide her feelings from him. With two warders standing directly behind her, and three behind Nelson, their thirty-minute conversations were anything but private, and precious minutes were sometimes wasted when the warders insisted on knowing their relationship to some of the people they mentioned. Despite this vigilance, they had a secret code that allowed Winnie to pass on snippets of crucial information about political developments, but most of the time they talked about the children and other family members.