Winnie Mandela (25 page)

J
OHANNESBURG WAS A CESSPOOL
of informers, and Winnie was surrounded by spies. The security police crackdowns had pushed all black political activity underground, but Winnie remained high on the list of suspects plotting the overthrow of the apartheid government. They saw her as both an intermediary between the ANC leadership on Robben Island and the grassroots supporters, and as an instrument that could be used to demoralise Mandela. They spent an inordinate amount of energy hatching plans to achieve their objectives: neutralising Winnie and breaking Mandela’s power.

Winnie yearned for the man she loved, for his support and the normal life that was lost to her. ‘I had been looking forward to leading a married life one day and having a home; it sustains you,’ she said.
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She knew her only hope of remaining sane was to focus her attention on helping others – particularly those with ANC links. While assisting the families of detainees, she heard about a large group of political prisoners at Nylstroom, most of them from Port Elizabeth, 1 120 kilometres away. Obviously, the distance prevented them from receiving many visitors, and Winnie heard that they also received little mail. Knowing that families were often deliberately not told where their loved ones were taken after being arrested, and how distressing it was for prisoners not to hear from their families, she set to work.

She managed to find out the names of the long-distance prisoners and enlisted the help of various women in Soweto, who wrote to them as ‘family members’ and visited when they could, taking basic necessities such as soap, toothpaste and toilet paper, just to make their incarceration a little more bearable. Through Helen Joseph and the Anglican Church, she also arranged that those who could not be visited were sent money by postal order, ostensibly from family members. Maude Katzenellenbogen volunteered to help, and Winnie’s small efforts to provide humanitarian aid for those in distress were added to a growing list of transgressions that would soon be used against her. In due course, she would learn the truth about Katzenellenbogen, under truly horrific circumstances. Winnie also enlisted the aid of one of her friends, Mohale Mahanyele, who
worked for the US Information Agency, to print and distribute pamphlets for the ANC. This, too, would backfire.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the security police recognised Winnie’s strength and ability to lead, and they feared her influence. That was the impetus for their relentless efforts to crush her, and according to undercover agent Gordon Winter, General ‘Lang Hendrik’ van den Bergh, the head of BOSS, was hell-bent on stifling the political life of this troublesome woman.

On the night of 12 May 1969, Winnie woke to the familiar banging and shouting that signified a raid. She rose with pounding heart, and as she opened the door, policemen poured into the house, searching every corner.

There was unusual excitement when the raid yielded a copy of
Black Power and Liberation – A Communist View
, but even textbooks Mandela had used as a law student, his typewriter and the clothes he had worn during his trials were seized. Zeni and Zindzi were home for the school holidays, and the police lifted them, terrified, out of their beds and searched the mattresses and bed linen. After turning the entire house upside down, Major Johannes Viktor, the officer in charge, ordered Winnie to pack a bag, as she was being detained and would not be coming back ‘for a long time’. Having been dragged off to prison at all hours of the day or night, Winnie had taken to keeping a small suitcase packed with necessities next to her front door, so that she could grab it on the way out when needed.

‘Detention means that midnight knock when all about you is quiet,’ she said later. ‘It means those blinding torches shone simultaneously through every window of your house before the door is kicked open. It means the exclusive right the Security Branch have to read each and every letter in the house. It means paging through each and every book on your shelves, lifting carpets, looking under beds, lifting sleeping children from mattresses and looking under the sheets. It means tasting your sugar, your mealie-meal and every spice on your kitchen shelf. Unpacking all your clothing and going through each pocket. Ultimately, it means your seizure at dawn, dragged away from little children screaming and clinging to your skirt, imploring the white man dragging Mummy away to leave her alone.’
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Zeni and Zindzi began to cry, but the police would neither allow her to comfort them nor make arrangements for their care. Ignoring her heartfelt pleas that she could not leave the children there, unattended, they jostled Winnie to the door, where rough hands prised the screaming children from their mother’s side and someone said they would drive them to the home of one of Winnie’s sisters. Winnie was taken away, her daughters’ terrified wailing still ringing in her ears. Zindzi and Zeni were nine and ten years old respectively, their father was in prison and they would not see their mother again for eighteen months. Winnie was not yet thirty-five and Mandela had been on Robben Island for five years.

When the police refused her permission to contact her lawyer, relatives, friends – or even her clergyman – Winnie began to steel herself for what she knew must come next. In terms of the Terrorism Act, No. 83 of 1967, the brainchild of Prime Minister John Vorster, the South African police could arrest anyone suspected of committing acts that endangered the maintenance of law and order, or of conspiring or inciting people to commit such acts. The legislation was structured in such a way that almost any opponent of the South African government – including children – could be arrested without a warrant, detained for an indefinite period of time, interrogated and kept in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer or relative.

To all intents and purposes, Winnie Mandela had ceased to exist. Only her small daughters knew that she had been taken away by the police. She was taken to Pretoria and placed in solitary confinement. Winnie didn’t know that she was one of twenty-two people arrested in coordinated countrywide raids that night. They were the first detainees held under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act.

When the door of her cell clanged shut, Winnie strained her ears, but all she heard was an occasional faint cough and the distant sound of prison doors slamming open or shut.

News of her detention reached Mandela almost immediately, but it took attorney Joel Carlson the best part of a day to find out where Winnie was being held, and on what charges.

In his autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom
, Mandela wrote: ‘Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality – all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.’

The United Nations’ definition of torture is ‘aggravated and deliberate forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Torture may take the form of beatings, rape, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, burning, mutilation, extended solitary confinement, starvation, sham executions and more. In apartheid South Africa, it was primarily employed as a form of social control, subjugating entire communities through terror and intimidation by destroying the trust upon which nations are built.

For the next seventeen months, Winnie Mandela would be subjected to extreme emotional, psychological and physical torture. For most of this time, she was held in isolation in an icy cage: four cement walls, a cement floor and a cement ceiling, lit by a single naked light bulb. Her bed was a coir mat on the floor, and three filthy blankets suffused with the stench and stains of urine were her only protection against the biting chill of early winter. When she unfolded a blanket, bugs crawled over her arms and legs. She flung the blanket into a corner,
but then realised she would have to use it. Gritting her teeth, she rolled up one blanket to use as a pillow and slept under the other two. The only other items in the cell were a plastic bottle of water, a mug and a sanitary bucket without a handle. Winnie, whose standards of cleanliness bordered on the pathological, was revolted by the conditions. In addition to using the bucket as a toilet, she had to wash over it, which she did by pouring a little water from her one-litre ration onto her hands and vigorously rubbing her hands and face, then pouring a little water onto her panties to sponge her body, because there was nothing else.

For the first 200 days, she had no normal contact with another human being. She heard no other voice, spoke to no other living soul. The first few days were the worst of her life. She had only her thoughts for company, and she was overwhelmed by excruciating uncertainty and insecurity, a sense of hopelessness, the feeling that this was the end.

It was deathly quiet, and the silence became another instrument of torture.

The light burned constantly and there was no way of knowing whether it was day or night.

Time had no beginning and no end. She was trapped in an infinite vacuum of nothingness.

Winnie had nothing to keep her hands or mind occupied, except troubling thoughts of Zeni and Zindzi. Their cries echoed over and over in her mind. She beat her head with her clenched fists to try to kill the mental images that came unbidden. Where were her children, what had happened to them? What if the police had not taken them to her sister, but thrown them out of the vehicle somewhere? If only she could know that they were safe. In helpless frustration she rolled her hands so tightly into fists that her nails bit into the flesh. From somewhere deep in her subconscious came Mandela’s voice, telling her he was proud of her courage, and she realised she could not afford to lose control of her senses. She had to think clearly, try to remain lucid, no matter what. She sat on the mat, prayed aloud and talked to herself. She lay on her stomach, turned onto her back, rolled onto her side. She got up, sat down, got up again, sat down again. She tried to remain rational, to analyse the situation objectively and not give in to panic. The knowledge that she could be kept there indefinitely, denied any contact with anyone, could drive her over the edge. She had to find ways of driving off the utter despair hovering over her like vultures waiting to feed on carrion. She had to come to terms with her revulsion over the conditions in the cell that made her want to scream and bang her head against the wall. She started pacing up and down the tiny cell. Four steps from one end to the other, three steps from side to side. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. One, two, three, four. One, two, three.

She made a ninety-degree turn. One, two, three. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. One, two, three, four. Turn. One two three four. One two three. One two three
four. One two three. Turn. One two three. One two three four. One two three. One two three four. Turn. Onetwothreefour. Onetwothree. Onetwothreefour. Onetwothree. Turn. Onetwothree. Onetwothreefour. Onetwothree. Onetwothreefour. Turn. Onetwothreefouronetwothree. Onetwothreefouronetwothreeturnonetwothreeonetwothreefouronetwoonetwooneoneoneone. She felt dizzy, she needed air, she needed to see whether the sky was blue and bathed in sunlight, or cold and dark and dotted with stars.

In the morning her body felt sore and bruised from a long night on the cold cement. She started doing the Canadian Air Force exercises for women, which she had always done at home. It helped to focus her mind on something other than her surroundings. But without decent food or proper rest, she tired quickly. Her obsession with hygiene was the most difficult obstacle to overcome. It was many days, perhaps weeks before she was given a small plastic bucket with water to wash herself. She was certain it, too, was a sanitary bucket, because it smelled dreadful. The entire cell stank. Her sanitary bucket was removed once a day for emptying, but was never properly cleaned. At mealtimes her plate of food was placed on top of the stinking bucket. She started dreading the sound of the cell door being unlocked, even though that was the only time she saw another person. The three locks had to be opened with three different sets of keys. After what felt like an eternity of meshing and grinding, a white wardress would kick open the door and a black prisoner would dash in, put the food on top of the sanitary bucket and dash out, not even glancing at Winnie. Then the locks were turned again, one after the other, mocking her, sealing her fate again and again.

Breakfast was porridge, often not properly cooked, and without sugar or milk. Lunch consisted of whole maize cobs, and supper was porridge again, sometimes with a small helping of spinach, slimy and unwashed. Winnie shuddered when grains of sand crunched under her teeth. On Sundays, a small piece of tough pork, with more fat than meat, was added to the porridge. The only drinks were black and bitter coffee, or a beverage made from maize and served in clay pots. The food was clearly not meant to sustain, but literally just to keep the prisoners alive. Even behind bars, apartheid reigned – coloured and Indian prisoners were also given bread, tea and sugar, but black detainees never saw such luxuries.

Winnie scratched the dates on her cell wall, but the complete isolation and utter silence made it difficult to keep track of time. The days could be measured only by the three meals she received, and sometimes she got confused, uncertain whether the food was for lunch or supper, so she started marking every day as soon as she got her plate of breakfast porridge.

Two weeks after she was arrested, the police began their interrogation. Ironically, she was relieved when they came to fetch her. At least she would be with other
people, hear their voices, escape from the endless hours alone in the claustrophobic cell. But her relief was short-lived. Her chief interrogator was Major Theunis Jacobus Swanepoel, described by many prisoners before Winnie as a skilled torturer, who had been implicated in Babla Saloojee’s death in detention. Joel Carlson had described him as a man with an evil soul, and said Swanepoel made him shudder. Winnie knew that she would have to draw on all her resources, courage and resolve to survive whatever lay in store for her.