Winnie Mandela (27 page)

It was Swanepoel’s turn again. He asked why she was resisting, told her they had already spread the message that she was cooperating fully with the police, had agreed to work for them in future. Her political career was over, she would have not a single friend in the ANC, he said, adding sarcastically that she should be grateful that they were keeping her company all night long, because they knew she suffered from insomnia. She felt herself floating into unconsciousness and thought she would die. Her eyelids drooped, her head slumped forward. Swanepoel thumped on the table and shouted: ‘For God’s sake, give us something! You can’t die with all that information! Not before you have told us everything!’

By the fourth day, she started passing blood in her urine. Four days and nights without sleep were taking their toll. She knew she was close to breaking point. Her whole body shook, and there was a severe pain below her left breast. As a wave of blackness engulfed her, she thought: Who will take care of Zeni and Zindzi?

When she came to, Swanepoel was standing over her. He was the one she feared the most. As soon as she opened her eyes, he began shouting. She was nothing but a bitch! She did everything for money! She pretended to care for her people, but she took their money to buy clothes! Her husband was in prison! Who was she tarting herself up for? Did she think they didn’t know? Poor Nelson must have been desperate to pay so much lobola for a woman like her!

Winnie flinched. Some of Swanepoel’s words stung her to the quick. They made her sound like a cheap opportunist, but they were wrong. She had no money, and she was always struggling to keep head above water. She relied on other people for food, and for money to keep her children in school. The clothes were gifts from women who were also in the struggle. They wanted to imply that she was no good to her people because she liked to feel and look good, but they knew nothing about her. She needed to look good because it was important for her spirit, and it had nothing to do with anyone else. As a woman, it was important to feel good
about oneself, and the worse matters got, the more dangers she faced, the more important it became to hang on to that.

Swanepoel’s voice penetrated her thoughts and she drifted up, as if through water, then forced herself down again, blocking out the voice that fell on her like physical blows.

She was fainting more frequently, and knew it was nature’s defence against the unendurable. But as soon as she came to, she was put on her feet and the interrogation continued, for five days and nights, without respite.

Winnie and Rita Ndzanga were the last of the twenty-two detainees rounded up on the same night to be interrogated. Because they were both banned, they were seen as more prominent activists, and the police had wanted to extract as much evidence as possible from the others first. Barred from attending meetings or gatherings, both women had made use of go-betweens to keep abreast of what was happening and to convey messages on their behalf. When Winnie failed to respond to the questions put by Swanepoel and his colleagues, they told her Rita had already talked, that they knew everything about meetings at Ndou’s storeroom, in Diepkloof, in Alexandra. They told her not to be a fool, that she would stand alone in the dock, since all the other detainees had already agreed to testify against her.

Rita Ndzanga, who had been forced to leave her four small children at home when she was arrested, and whose husband later died in detention, was severely tortured. She described the experience to Joel Carlson years later:

A white security policeman began to hit me; I fell down; I then began to scream; they closed the windows; I continued screaming; they dragged me to another room hitting me with their open hands all the time … In the interrogation room the security police asked me what makes me not speak. They produced three bricks and told me to take off my shoes and stand on the bricks. I refused to stand on the bricks. One of the white security police climbed on top of a chair and pulled me up by my hair, dropped me on to the bricks, I fell down and hit a gas pipe. The same man pulled my hair again, jerked me and I again fell on to the metal gas pipe. They threw water on my face. The man who pulled my hair had his hands full of my hair. He washed his hands in the basin. I managed to stand up and they said, ‘On to the bricks.’ I stood on the bricks and they hit me again while I was on the bricks. I fell, they again poured water on me. I was very tired, I could not stand the assault any longer.
³

Having done everything they could to force Winnie to confess, her interrogators played their trump card. She was drifting in and out of consciousness when she suddenly heard piercing, agonising, inhuman screams from the next room, again
and again. Swanepoel told Winnie that the screams were from one of ‘her brave men’. By the time they were through with him, Swanepoel said, he wouldn’t be of much use to anyone. He knew the man would talk, and soon.

As the blood-curdling screams flooded the room once more, Winnie finally broke. What had they been doing to her sister and her friends? How could she carry on resisting if it was causing others so much suffering? She knew she was the one they really wanted, no one else.

Finally, she said the words they wanted to hear, that she was guilty of everything they had accused her of, and that she would confess. She begged them to let the others go. Swanepoel was so excited, he didn’t care that she heard him tell his colleagues that their strategy had worked. They had her.

Winnie felt sick. It had been a ploy. Or had it? Were they torturing her comrades just to get to her? It no longer mattered; she couldn’t carry on if there was the slightest possibility that her defiance was causing harm to others. All the interrogators and other policemen flooded into the room to celebrate her capitulation, and witness her humiliation. They began reading to her from piles of papers, asking for details and confirmation. All she said was, ‘Yes, it was me, yes, it is true.’ She admitted to calling meetings, writing and sending letters. Anything, anything not to hear those horrible screams again. They showed her a sheaf of correspondence. Letters sent to and from Maude’s address. She wondered how they had got hold of them. She had to explain cryptic messages and decipher her own and others’ handwriting. They drew conclusions, which they asked her to confirm. Like an automaton, she said ‘yes’ to everything. They seemed to know the name of every person to whom she had ever written. The interrogation went on for hours until, finally, Swanepoel said it was enough, they had what they needed, and Winnie was returned to her cell.

After being awake for five days and five nights, she could not go to sleep, and lay there for some time, muttering incoherently. When they brought her food, she said it was poisoned, and refused to eat. She had diarrhoea and was vomiting into the bucket. When she finally fell asleep, her rest was fitful and she awoke screaming from horrific nightmares.

It took days before Winnie regained some equilibrium. Severely traumatised, she had to start the slow process of reclaiming her life. She vaguely remembered the interrogation, and the fainting spells towards the end. She had no recollection of being brought back to her cell and thought it must have happened during one of her blackouts. In solitary confinement once more, she forced herself not to think about the horror of her interrogation. She tore one of the blankets to shreds, then wove the threads together as her grandmother had taught her to do when she was a child, making traditional mats with a grass called
uluzi
. For days she knitted the strands together, undid them, wove them together again. To keep
her hands and mind occupied she unpicked the hem of her dress. When there was nothing else left to do, she scoured the cell inch by inch to see if she could find an insect. Once, she found two ants, and spent the whole day playing with them on her finger. The wardress noticed and switched off the light, plunging the cell into darkness.

As she slowly clawed her way back to normality, Winnie’s innate defiance returned, and with it a white-hot anger. She had been in solitary confinement for weeks, and she knew her torturers hoped the isolation would drive her mad. In her newfound rage she thought of ways to register her protest at the horrific treatment meted out to her and other prisoners. She even thought of suicide, but she knew she could not do that to her children, and realised that she would also play right into the government’s hands if she did take her own life.

One thing Winnie could no longer ignore was the fact that she had been betrayed by Maude Katzenellenbogen.

One morning, a security policeman opened Winnie’s cell door, threw a Bible on the floor next to her and said, ‘There, pray to your God to release you, but you better pray in Xhosa, not in English!’ Afrikaners were extremely emotional about the language issue. Most blacks did not speak Afrikaans, unless they learned a little at their place of work, and after the apartheid government came to power, many refused on principle to use the ‘language of the oppressor’. For Winnie, and many other black people who had been educated at mission schools, English was a natural choice after their mother tongue, but, conversely, many Afrikaners, especially in the public service, could not speak English well, sometimes not at all. She had seen Major Swanepoel raging like a mad animal at times when he could not understand her or express himself adequately in English, and she believed the language issue was at least partly responsible for the friction between black and white.

Having fought for the right to speak their own language under British domination, Afrikaners saw it as an integral facet of their identity, and blacks who refused to speak Afrikaans were seen as a challenge to their authority. Of equal importance to Afrikaners was their religion, and Winnie was shocked by the policeman’s contemptuous disregard for the Bible, but not even the disrespectful way in which it was delivered to her could dampen her relief at having a way to pass the interminable hours alone. She had never thought it possible to do so, but she read the Bible from cover to cover during the long months in her cell. Sometimes it gave her a wonderful feeling of peace and tranquillity. At other times, depressed and dejected, she felt it was nothing but meaningless words. But on the bad days, too, she remembered the kind ministry of Father Leo Rakale, and often it was his words from the past that offered her comfort and inspiration.

In July, Swanepoel walked into Winnie’s cell and asked who Thembi Mandela was. She said he was her stepson. ‘Well, he is dead, he was killed in a car accident,’ Swanepoel said callously, and walked out.

Winnie sank to the floor and, for the first time since she had been arrested, she wept, heart-rendingly and unashamedly. She thought of the nineteen-year-old boy whom Nelson loved so deeply, and remembered him asking anxiously, on her last visit to Robben Island, if she had news of Thembi. Nelson had told her once, while he was underground, that he found Thembi wearing an old jacket of his that was far too big, and when they said goodbye at the end of the visit, Thembi told his father not to worry, that he would look after the family. She wailed for Thembi, who had lost his father, for Nelson who had lost his son – and for herself, locked up, unable to be with her husband to console him at a time when his heart was being ripped out. And because the man who had brought her the terrible news showed not a morsel of compassion, as though neither she nor Thembi deserved any. She knew the security police were a special breed, with a disregard for human life that enabled them to torture people to death for any reason, or no reason at all. She knew that neither all whites nor all Afrikaners were like that, but it brought her little consolation; and she was disturbed by the bitterness she felt towards Swanepoel and his associates, fearing that it would turn to hatred and that she would end up being no better than them.

Prison inmates have their own inventive ways of communicating with one another, and when word of Thembi’s death spread through the cells by way of this ‘bush telegraph’, Winnie received her first ‘correspondence’. It provided her with indescribable comfort.

When her sanitary bucket was returned the day after she was told of Thembi’s death, it had not been properly cleaned. That was nothing new, but when she later removed the plate of food from the top of the bucket, she noticed a piece of silver paper inside. She carefully removed the paper and opened it. To her surprise, it contained a note, expressing the sympathy of fellow prisoners on Thembi’s death. The last sentence read: ‘Mother of the Nation, we are with you.’ Winnie was genuinely surprised that, young as she was, people loved and respected her as a symbolic mother. She had no pen or pencil but she had found a pin, and with this she laboriously stencilled a few words on the silver paper and placed it back in the bucket. A feeling of triumph surged through her as she realised there was a way of communicating with others after all.

The next message was wrapped in a banana skin, again at the bottom of the bucket, and warned Winnie that Joyce Sikakane had been broken, and that the police were arranging to transfer her to Nylstroom where she would testify against Winnie. Joyce was a young reporter at the
Rand Daily Mail
, and a granddaughter of one of the founder members of the ANC, the late Reverend AM Sikakane.
When brutality had not persuaded her to yield information about Winnie, the police had switched tack and plied her with special privileges. They knew this made other prisoners immediately suspect a detainee had agreed to turn informer. With her pin, Winnie scratched a message on the banana skin: ‘Joyce, don’t you dare.’ Whether it was the message that did it, or a decision by Joyce herself, she refused to testify against Winnie.

Slowly, Winnie learned more about her fellow detainees. One day, after months of silence, she heard a woman singing in Xhosa from a nearby cell. She was sending a message, starting with, ‘My name is Nondwe’ and continuing to relate how she and others were detained. Through her song Winnie came to know that one of them, Michael Shivute, had died on the night of his detention, and another, Caleb Mayekiso, died nineteen days later.