Winnie Mandela (37 page)

A tree is chopped down
And the fruit was scattered
I cried …

The book won a prize of $1 000 in the US, and critical acclaim from prominent literary figures such as Alan Paton.

When Mandela turned sixty on 18 July 1978, the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid called for the occasion to be celebrated internationally. Anti-apartheid activists in Britain collected and sent 10 000 birthday cards, but not one was delivered to him. Winnie had been refused permission to visit Mandela, and he was allowed only eight birthday messages from family and friends – one of them, interestingly enough, from Govan Mbeki’s son Thabo, who would succeed Mandela as South Africa’s president two decades later. In the absence of his family, Mandela’s close friends and fellow detainees, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada, made the relevant congratulatory speeches on Robben Island.

Reporting on the event, the London
Times
called Mandela ‘the colossus of African nationalism’. It was a dramatic departure from the pervading view, eight years earlier, that the ANC had died, and the leadership with it. Winnie’s determination to keep the struggle alive was paying off, but at staggering cost.

For Mandela, her support had become more important than his life’s blood, and he often acknowledged this. He idealised Winnie, admired her tenacity and concern for others under the most difficult of circumstances, and frequently reminded her how much he depended on her. ‘Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love, I would have fallen apart many years ago,’ he wrote in one of his letters to her. ‘Your love and devotion has created a debt which I will never attempt to pay back.’

Winnie had formed a friendship with another one of Brandfort’s Afrikaners, a local doctor, Chris Hattingh. He provided her with some financial assistance, and in October 1978 offered her employment in his practice, but she struggled for months to get permission from the authorities to take the job. While she waited, Winnie was told by Hattingh that he was being followed by four men in a car. Winnie was convinced it was the security police. Finally, she was granted permission to start working for Hattingh on 1 March 1979.

But on his way to Winnie’s house that morning, Hattingh had a fatal car accident.
Winnie was distraught. No other car had been involved in what appeared to be a freak accident, and for a long time after his death, rumours persisted that his friendship with Winnie had cost him his life. Three months later, she wrote to Mary Benson: ‘They killed him and have got away with it – like the Steve Bikos, but this one is worse, as the world will never know. I haven’t got over the shock yet, and I never knew I could grieve so much for someone other than my own kind. In a way, it’s taught me a depth of love which might have been superficial and ideological, now it’s real and honest for those who identify so completely with us.’ Hattingh’s sister had become friendly with Zindzi, but was scared away by the security police.

After Zindzi left, Winnie took a lodger, a young artist friend of Zeni and Zindzi by the name of Matthews Kganitsiwe Malefane, or MK. He had initially come to visit and stayed, taking on the role of major-domo, and assisting Winnie with the many projects in the township. He also painted when he could and his pictures brought in a little money. Since he did not have the necessary permit to live in Phatakahle, he was arrested and charged with being there illegally, but the court ruled that he was entitled to stay as a lodger and member of the household.

Winnie continued ceaselessly, almost frenetically, with her efforts to uplift the community. On the one hand, this was a natural extension of her role as a social worker, and stemmed from her commitment to improving the lot of her people in any way she could, but it was also a classic manifestation of long-term exposure to trauma. Research has shown that trauma survivors often have an overdeveloped sense of being able to cope, as though doing a good job would prove that hideous experiences had been overcome. At the same time, filling the present with activity helped to lessen anxiety about the chances of surviving similar trauma in the future.

Being confronted with death, as Winnie had been over the course of many years, and especially during the 1976 uprising, also leads people to re-evaluate the meaning and purpose of their own lives, to develop a new value structure and an enhanced appreciation of life itself. Winnie wrote to Mary Benson that she was regularly taking stock of herself. Zindzi’s presence had served as a buffer against the pain and loneliness, but after she left, life in Winnie’s ‘little Siberia’ was reduced to deadly solitude and long, empty days that dragged on, one much like another. But no one was allowed to glimpse her soul-destroying loneliness, and to the outside world she showed nothing but a stiff upper lip, her bright smile and courageous defiance.

Her next project was a sewing group, called
Lift Up Your Home
. Interested women gathered in the Methodist church hall, where they learned to sew, knit, crochet and embroider. In adherence to her banning order, Winnie sat in a room by herself, and taught the women one by one. A security policeman watched closely, to ensure that Winnie broke no rules of her detention. Some of her pupils developed excellent skills, and started thinking of an outlet for their crafts, which could provide them
with a small income. Winnie’s many friends were ever supportive, and Professor Harvey van der Merwe, a Quaker who lectured at the University of Cape Town, arranged for the donation of two new sewing machines. Winnie used cash donations to buy another four, second-hand machines, and Ismail Ayob sent her an enormous bale of black cloth, from which the women made school uniforms that were sold to parents who paid for the garments in two or three instalments. In appreciation of her support, the women made Winnie some beaded jewellery in the ANC’s yellow, green and black, which was later confiscated by the police during a raid on her home.

While working in her garden one day, Winnie heard screams from the veld opposite her home. She rushed into the long grass, just in time to rescue an eleven-year-old girl from a rapist. When she found out that the child was an orphan, Winnie took her in and cared for her, thus setting the stage for a new project: the rescue and rehabilitation of orphans, strays and juvenile delinquents.

Not all of Winnie’s endeavours were successful, and she was realistic enough to accept that they could not be. Some of the young offenders turned their backs on the opportunity to reform, but she refused to become disheartened. The child she had saved from a rapist started going to school, and stayed with Winnie for a number of years.

Throughout her time in exile, Winnie’s friends were constantly amazed by her irrepressible optimism and perseverance. Dr Motlana once observed that while he and others who visited her became depressed by the conditions under which she was living, Winnie herself was always cheerful, and nothing seemed to get her down.

In stark contrast to what the government had set out to achieve, Winnie’s banishment diminished her support not one iota. Opinion polls taken during her first two years in Brandfort showed that she was the second most important political figure in the country after Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. It was Rita Ndzanga who voiced what many people felt: despite the fact that Winnie was in Brandfort, she remained firmly in people’s hearts.

I
N 1980
,
THE END
of the bloody guerrilla war in Zimbabwe, followed by democratic elections that saw a landslide victory for Robert Mugabe, ushered in a new era of hope for black people in southern Africa. Whites, on the other hand, generally viewed the demise of yet another minority regime as a portent of doom for the subcontinent. The South African government had not only supported the illegitimate government of Ian Smith, but had poured millions of rands into the election campaign of Bishop Abel Muzorewa in the hope of ensuring a ‘friendly’ black government on its northern doorstep.

Deeply involved in an escalating war in Angola and the South West Africa operational area and facing ongoing unrest in black townships closer to home, the government now also had to contend with renewed grassroots demands for Nelson Mandela’s release.

In March, Percy Qoboza’s
Sunday Post
launched the ‘Free Mandela’ campaign, initiated by the ANC in exile from Lusaka. The United Nations Security Council joined the call for Mandela to be released after eighteen years in prison, and, before long, the cause was resonating around the world, despite the fact that many foreign supporters knew so little about the ANC leader that they thought ‘Free’ was his first name.

Surprisingly, the campaign found growing support among white South Africans who had begun to realise, as Zindzi told a rally at the University of the Witwatersrand, that a free Mandela was the only pragmatic alternative to a bloodbath. Former BOSS chief Hendrik van den Bergh, stripped of his power as the result of the Information Scandal (which, inter alia, exposed the fact that the government had been funding the daily newspaper,
The Citizen)
, caused ructions in high circles when he told a Johannesburg newspaper that Mandela had never been a communist – and he, after all, should know.

The campaign was the first direct support that Winnie Mandela had received in almost two decades of tireless efforts to keep Mandela’s name, and the struggle, alive. Suddenly, the ANC leaders in exile realised that she was a highly marketable commodity, a tailor-made symbol of the struggle, who had single-handedly secured
donations of tens of thousands of dollars from international sources. Winnie had become an icon, the visible face of the liberation struggle at a time when the youth, in particular, had no idea what Mandela or the other jailed and exiled leaders even looked like. Winnie had sales value. She was a tragic heroine: a young and beautiful woman who had been jailed, tortured and banished; she was educated, eloquent and charismatic; she was loved and admired by the masses; and she was Nelson Mandela’s wife.

In addition, by exiling her to Brandfort, the security police had inadvertently placed her in a position to directly influence the future of South Africa. Her friendship with lawyer Piet de Waal would play a major behind-the-scenes role in political events when
his
old friend, Kobie Coetsee, became Minister of Justice. De Waal appealed to him to lift Winnie’s bans and to consider releasing Mandela, and Coetsee later acknowledged that it was De Waal’s representations on behalf of the Mandelas that set the process of real change in motion, and ultimately led to the democratic elections in 1994. Sadly, Winnie was never accorded the credit she deserved in this regard.

The increased media attention generated by the ‘Free Mandela’ campaign did not deter the security police one iota from harassing Winnie. In her book,
The Lady
, British author Emma Gilbey wrote that persecution of Winnie was ‘no more constructive than slowly pulling the wings off a fly’. Winnie had long since realised that she was not being targeted only as an individual, but also as the personification of black political aspiration.

In April 1980, a new round of school boycotts was launched in protest against Bantu Education. The government shut down hundreds of black and coloured educational institutions, including training colleges and universities. Major industrial action followed, with thousands of black workers going on strike, and the police reacted by sealing off affected areas and detaining hundreds of people. Many were also killed or injured when the police opened fire on protestors, and the situation deteriorated still further when black mineworkers – the backbone of the economy – joined the strike.

Isolated at Brandfort, Winnie was frustrated at having to watch the unfolding drama from a distance. Not only did she want to be in a position to know what was really going on, she desperately yearned to be where she was at her most effective – in the front line, with her people. But, since circumstances made that impossible, she concentrated on finding a job. She had introduced a number of community projects at Brandfort, but the terms of her banning order precluded any interaction with the various groups involved. She was heartened when the Bloemfontein Child Welfare Society offered her a position as a social worker, but, inevitably, the authorities refused to grant permission for her to travel from Brandfort to Bloemfontein every day to do the job. She had completed all the written requirements for her
academic degree, and all that remained was a course of practical fieldwork. Yet again, because she was not allowed to communicate with any groups of people, she was stymied. Moreover, her lecturers at the University of South Africa did not agree with her assessment that Brandfort offered sufficient scope for the casework she had to do. Unable to complete her social science degree, Winnie enrolled for a new course, in politics and communication. By day, she still spent her energy on improving the lot of Phatakahle’s people. With a sizeable donation from abroad she bought a second-hand minibus and put it to work as a mobile clinic, serving not only the township but also farm labourers in the district and blacks working in Brandfort itself. The vehicle did double duty as a soup kitchen on wheels.

In November 1980, Winnie’s older sister, Nancy, died of leukaemia at the age of forty-seven. Although Nancy had been living in exile in Botswana for several years, she and Winnie had stayed in touch. Since childhood, they had been closer to one another than any of their other siblings, and her death came as a terrible blow to Winnie.

Six months later, she was hit by another crisis.

After twenty years, Winnie could hardly remember a time when she had not been warring with the state over control of her life, and had come to stoically accept whatever the authorities threw at her. But no matter how many times she was stabbed in the back by those she considered her friends, each fresh betrayal wounded her as deeply as the first.

In May 1981, newspapers reported that Dr Aaron Mathlare had told the one-man Cillié Commission investigating the cause of the 1976 Soweto uprising that Winnie and Dr Nthatho Motlana had instigated the student riots. Mathlare testified that he had heard Winnie and Motlana instructing students to attack government institutions and bottle stores. He also claimed that Winnie and Motlana were having an affair.