Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  As to why she withdrew the petition for separation, there could be any number of reasons. It seems most likely, however, that the couple simply reached an understanding. It appears that Evelyn was hoping for reconciliation. The allegations of violence might have been politically awkward for him, as he was achieving ever greater public prominence as an ANC leader. In those days, divorce hearings could be reported and no doubt he must have been keen to keep certain details out of the court and the press.

  In the account she gave to Fatima Meer, Evelyn made no mention of domestic violence nor of her petition for separation, but instead related that Mandela had come to see her at her brother’s home, asking her to forget about the incident and return to number 8115. She did so, as she was desperate to save the marriage even if it meant clutching at straws.

  But there was no thawing of the freeze. That chilling, unbearable distance continued. I realised that I had no marriage. I moved out and went to live in the nurses’ quarters. Perhaps I imagined that if I reversed the situation, and I walked out, instead of him, he would come to his senses and that he needed me to keep the family together. If that was my feeling I was totally mistaken. Nelson never came to see me at the nurses’ home nor did he send any messages to me. I had initiated the separation. A year later I moved in with my brother.

  Perhaps if I had been patient, if I had tried to understand why he had turned away from me, perhaps things may have been different and I would still be his wife. He was the only man I ever loved. He was a wonderful husband and a wonderful father.

  It is hard to reconcile Evelyn’s account with the dates in her court claim. Perhaps she moved back home around the time the petition was withdrawn. She suggests she lived at the nurses’ residence for a year, but there is no mention of this in the court papers so it seems likely that the move came later, in 1956, as the “unbearable distance” continued.

  Evelyn went on to explain to Meer that the children would go back and forth between their two homes. Maki—the shortening of Makaziwe—was only two and too young to understand or be affected, and Makgatho at five was young enough not to be bothered. But Thembi, she says, was older—he was ten in 1956—and suffered intensely.

  Mandela agrees, in Long Walk, that Thembi was troubled, describing how he lost interest in studies and became withdrawn. “Man, that chap is quiet,” Sisulu had once said to Mandela of Thembi after taking him out. Mandela said Thembi took to wearing his father’s clothes sometimes after the separation as “they gave him some kind of attachment to his too often distant father.” Thembi was eventually sent away to school, opening up an even greater distance between them. In her book, Meer refers to the frost that settled in Thembi’s heart after his father had parted from his mother. At the time of his death in a car crash in 1969, Thembi had never visited his father on Robben Island, even though he was living just a boat-ride away in Cape Town. He had become a “bootlegger” there, in the words of his daughter Ndileka, running a shebeen together with Ndileka’s mother, Thoko, selling alcohol illegally to Cape Coloreds on 7th Avenue in the southern suburb of Retreat.

  Not one of Mandela’s children from either marriage ever followed him into politics, though both Zenani and Zindzi, his daughters with Winnie, have played a political role, making statements and public appearances from time to time.

  Meanwhile, Evelyn was continuing to delude herself, she said, that since there were children from the marriage, there was still a marriage. That changed, a year or more later, when a friend pointed to a notice in a paper. “Your husband is divorcing you,” said the friend.

  Evelyn said she had heard “vaguely” that Mandela was dating a social worker from Baragwanath Hospital but had thought it was just one more woman whom he would discard as he had the others. She went to see a lawyer and did not oppose the divorce, she said. “Since Nelson had never paid lobola he did not have rights over the children according to African law. That distressed him very much and he arranged with my brother to pay the lobola and my brother said since he had ill-treated me, he would accept it. So Nelson did one of those rare things, paid lobola after the marriage had ended. In fact he lobola’d the children.”

  When the divorce was finally granted and the marriage was formally dissolved on March 19, 1958, it was at the instigation of Mandela. He had begun the second round of proceedings on January 2, 1958 and a summons was served on Evelyn a week later, on January 9, leaving only a slender window of opportunity for her to have read in the newspapers that she was being divorced, as she later used to tell her family had been the case.

  The terms of the settlement, which were promptly agreed with no exchange of accusations this time, gave Evelyn custody of all three children, with Mandela contributing £15 a month to cover their maintenance and their school fees. Evelyn kept the property that she had contributed to number 8115: two wardrobes, two beds, one dressing table, a dining-room suite of table, six chairs and a sideboard, a radio and a coal stove. Mandela also agreed to give her a lump sum of £50 and the title deeds to a plot of land he had bought back in Umtata. He was allowed to keep the sitting-room suite and “kitchen scheme” (all except the coal stove) at number 8115.

  By then, Mandela had met Winnie and was keen to clear his way to marry her. Winnie has said she was too shy to ask Mandela about his marital status. He was practically twice her age, an elder, and it wasn’t easy to have personal conversations with him. For a long time it has generally been believed, as some members of the first family believed, that Winnie must have been the cause of the breakdown of Evelyn’s marriage to Mandela. From the start, Winnie faced some resistance, even hostility, from some members of Mandela’s family and friends, because of her supposed role, and perhaps for other reasons too, such as her enviable youth and exceptional beauty. It was true that falling in love with her had prompted Mandela to seek a divorce, but of course his marriage was long over by then.

  The dates that mark the beginnings of Mandela’s relationship with Winnie are still not entirely clear. Winnie said that Mandela and Evelyn had been separated for five years by the time they got together, which is not true; it was more a matter of months than years, but still, it is clear there was a gap. Winnie was not to blame.

  In Long Walk, Mandela does refer to Evelyn as a very good woman, charming, strong and faithful and a fine mother. Mac Maharaj, who probably knows Mandela as well as anyone left alive, says he was always keen to speak of Evelyn afterwards with respect. When Mac told me this, I felt bound to point out that he had not apparently always treated her with respect at the time. Of course, it is entirely possible that Evelyn imagined all those stories of assault, out of malice or revenge, but the fact that she alluded to them outside the divorce papers, and that the neighbors were involved, lends at least some credence to her account.

  Then too, remember, they are only one side of the story.

  You may wonder whether Mandela ever reflected on those events afterwards and felt guilty about his treatment of his first wife. He has certainly expressed his guilt in recent years at not being there to support Winnie. Fatima Meer, who even at eighty remained an eloquent and incisive observer of her old friend, conceded she was not sure that he would feel guilty, as he was self-righteous, a patriarch—very patriarchal, in fact—so he wouldn’t feel guilty. He would always feel, in general terms, that he had done what he had to do and what was right at the time. She did not see him as a man to have regrets.

  Fatima Meer put it neatly in her book Higher than Hope when she described Mandela as extremely attractive to women and easily tempted by them. In her view, he probably did not believe a passing liaison would place his marriage in jeopardy, perhaps expecting Evelyn to be more tolerant and less puritanical. But those extramarital relationships cannot be dismissed as “passing liaisons” that a wife—even a 1950s wife—should have tolerated. Though Ruth Mompati denied it, people close to Mandela are confident in asserting that she had a child by Mandela during this period.

  In 2008, when Mompati was interviewed
in her home town of Vryburg, the town where she was then mayor, she was as wise and friendly as any octogenarian you could wish to meet, so it is not easy to now take issue with her. Nor is it the intention here to cast her as some kind of scarlet woman or mere decorative appendage to the Mandela story. She fought long and loyally for the ANC and made great personal sacrifices, leaving her home, her family and her children to go underground and be among the first women to receive military training for Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1962 she went to the Soviet Union for training in the handling of guns and bombs to become a military instructor. As a result she did not see her two sons again for eight years and hated the fact that white South Africa had forced her to choose between her children and the ANC. Then both children died only months apart in terrible and unrelated circumstances.

  However, once the difficult subject was raised and the tape recorder was turned off, she said that she knew people would say she had had a son with Mandela, but it was disrespectful to her then husband—they separated not long after—as well as simply not true. She did not, in so many words, deny the affair but she clearly stated that there had been no son. But there are others who are equally positive that there was a child. In fact, there is reliable oral testimony that Ruth used to speak about it herself—almost boastfully, it was said—while she was living in exile in the Zambian capital of Lusaka.

  A significant clue may be buried in her own narrative of how her two sons died, four months apart, either side of Christmas in 1997. Her youngest son, Tebogo, had a brain tumor and died not long before his fortieth birthday. Her older son, Mompati Neo Matsoane, asphyxiated suddenly. Although not epileptic, he choked to death on his tongue.

  His mother was then the South African ambassador to Switzerland. When she had spoken to him on the phone that final afternoon, they had been laughing and he had said, “Oh, you don’t know how handsome your son is this afternoon.” Ruth guessed he was up to some mischief. He died that evening. Unlike the death of his brother, the passing of Mompati Neo Matsoane was announced in a press release issued by the ANC. That I believe was the son of Mandela, born April 25, 1955, died January 7, 1998. Apparently he looked like his father.

  The story is known within Mandela’s family and there are suspicions there could be other women and half-siblings as well. Mandela’s daughter Zindzi has said that she thought of her father as a player when he was younger, with his cigarettes and his snappy dress, and she could certainly testify to his charm, as that was the first thing that struck her about him when they first met during her adolescence on Robben Island.

  Zindzi recalled an earlier Winnie in her father’s life, Winnie Matyolo, who is mentioned in Mandela’s memoir as one of his first girlfriends. The daughter of the Methodist minister by the Great Place in Mqhekezweni, she had loved Mandela then in spite of her older sister who ridiculed him as a barbarian, backward boy who was still learning to eat with a knife and fork. In his memoir Mandela had said they eventually went their different ways and drifted apart, but Winnie Toni (her married name) gave an interview to a Johannesburg newspaper, describing how they had reignited their relationship. This occurred after they were both married, when she was living in Johannesburg working as a nurse, and they would “steal moments of togetherness” when Evelyn was not around. Evidently, he had smuggled her into number 8115 during his first marriage.

  There were other women too, some with names that do not appear elsewhere in the record, stories that hinted at, rather than proved, affairs. At an ANC conference around 1953/54, a beautiful activist, Mrs. Malopo, was accused of not supporting the regional Transvaal president—Mandela—and stood up to deny the charge: “The president has been at my home,” she said, “and not only that, evile a siya katiba yahae ko lapen” (he left his hat at my house). It seems unlikely that anyone in the hall doubted the meaning of the euphemism. The Transvaal president must have had some public reputation in those days as a “ladies’ man.”

  Amina Cachalia describes Mandela as very tight-lipped about these matters even now and says that, in spite of their sixty years of friendship, he will not readily spill the beans. “If I ask him he denies it. When I asked him about Ruth he said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ And about Lilian, ‘You were my friend, she was my friend.’

  It has been said, though not by Amina, that he had a “glad eye” for her too, although their friendship had always remained just that. She was another beauty, politically active and married, of course, to Mandela’s close comrade, Yusuf Cachalia. She and Mandela would go around together sometimes. He once took her out to lunch in the suburbs near Bloemfontein and when they got there Lilian Ngoyi turned up too. Amina had the strongest feeling that the two of them had arranged the lunch and that Mandela had only brought Amina along as cover for the set-up. In spite of his tight-lipped denials, Amina has no doubt he had quite a few girlfriends.

  It appears that there was an occasion when Evelyn had returned home to find Lilian Ngoyi having supper with Mandela at their table. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn had been very upset. Ngoyi, according to Fatima Meer, was not among those beautiful women whom Mandela liked to charm and be around. Meer had seen her once with Mandela and he had introduced them to each other. Meer had observed that Ngoyi was a strong, attractive woman, but not feminine like, say, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. “Lilian wasn’t very feminine, she was statuesque, one might say manly.”

  Fortunately it seems that, even for Mandela, looks weren’t everything. Ahmed Kathrada recollected having been at his Kholvad House flat once with Mandela when they had a visit from a striking young woman, a Drum “cover girl”—Drum being the vibrant African magazine that captured and reflected the culture and politics of black South Africa in the 1950s. Kathrada struggled now to remember her name, but he had not forgotten how he and Mandela had been aroused by her presence, and then crestfallen when she asked them who the singer was that they were listening to on the gramophone. Anyone who didn’t recognize the baritone Paul Robeson was unworthy of their attention.

  Another bikini-clad Drum girl was the singer and actress Dolly Rathebe who came from Sophiatown. She was a contemporary of Miriam Makeba and her band, the Skylarks. When Abigail Kubeka, a former member of the Skylarks, was asked in 2008 about Dolly and Mandela, she leaned out of her chair at her elegant Soweto home, pretended to lift up the edge of the carpet and sweep that story underneath it, putting her finger to her lips and saying “Sssh.” That was all she was prepared to say.

  It appears that Dolly, who was ten years younger than Mandela, was among those who carried a torch for Mandela through the prison years and had hopes he might come to them after his release in 1990. By then, most people assumed, the game was up for Winnie, and Mandela would be looking elsewhere for comfort and companionship. Although Amina never said this herself, others suggested that she also might have had hopes in that direction. Evelyn’s granddaughter, Ndileka, noted that her grandmother never remarried, rarely spoke ill of Mandela, and always affirmed her continuing love for him. So perhaps she too was hopeful. Dolly, Amina, Evelyn and who knows who else? However, Mandela thwarted and surprised them all when he divorced Winnie and married Graca Machel instead, on his eightieth birthday in July 1998.

  A couple of years after Mandela’s release, Evelyn married a fellow Jehovah’s Witness, Simon Rakeepile, and became a Pioneer, creating an extra level of devotion to her religion. Her new husband was insistent that she took his surname, which, her family surmised, was because he did not want to live in the shadow of that “big name.” Both Dolly and Evelyn died in 2004.

  No one could ever accuse Mandela of not having lived life to the full. With hindsight, it rather looks as if he outgrew Evelyn as he soared professionally and politically, ascending to the peak of his young powers just as their marriage fell apart.

  There are those who will say that, far from being chauvinistic, Mandela was an early advocate of feminism, supporting the development of women in politics and encouraging the increasingly active role that many women began to play
in the struggle. Others noted his weakness for women, the particular way he would respond to them, especially the pretty ones, the manner in which he liked to charm them and, of course, the ways in which they used to fall at his feet.

  Whilst he might have left behind the rural African society of his origins, he carried with him the values of that world, which had its roots deeply embedded in hundreds of years of patriarchy, where men were free to have as many wives as they could afford and often sat around talking under the trees or in the kraal, making the big decisions, while the women did all the hard work. Men who were not tribal chiefs were still chiefs in their own domain and had been raised from boyhood to assume the superior role, while the girls stayed close to their mothers. No wonder the ANC Women’s League took charge of catering in the early days.

  Mandela was a revolutionary in many ways, but not as a husband or father. He had ingrained conservative values that he could not shrug off, even as he sought to bring down the government and smash the apartheid state. Ruth Mompati took exception to Mandela being described as old-fashioned. “Old-fashioned, what does that mean?” She said the ANC had championed women’s rights from 1953.

  But Amina Cachalia recalled that Winnie had once said to her that if Mandela had not gone to prison, if he had been home all the time, they would have been long divorced because of his old-fashioned habits.

  As he rose steadily in the world, Mandela was still getting letters from the Bantu Welfare Trust, asking for its debt to be honored. In their fourteenth debt-chasing letter to Mandela in March 1954, signed by one Quintin Whyte, the Trust reminded him of its loan in 1947 and his undertaking to commence repayments in 1948:

  On looking through our records I find that no payments have been made against your account and the secretary informs me that he has written several letters to you without avail. As this loan has been outstanding for a considerable time I am writing to inform you that unless we receive a substantial sum which will bring your monthly undertaking up to date in accordance with the terms of your contract with the trustees I shall be obliged to call upon your sureties to honor their undertaking.