Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Winnie was subsequently convicted of four charges of kidnapping and a charge of accessory to assault. She was given a five-year prison sentence but never served any time. The assault charge and the sentence were both overturned on appeal. The case was heard after Mandela’s release and he announced their separation in 1992, between the conviction and the appeal: “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you appreciate the pain I have gone through.”

  Clearly, Winnie was involved in terrible deeds and was quite possibly implicated in murder, actions far beyond excuse or justification. It seems that she spiraled out of control and became a party to savage violence. Savage, not in the racist sense, but in its purest form, like the behavior of the white English public-schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. Savagery is what happens when we have been stripped of our humanity, when the primitive instincts inside us all are laid bare. That was the brutalizing effect of apartheid, allowing for the special importance that the white regime had placed on destroying Mandela’s wife—that naive, country girl from Pondoland.

  Back in the days of relative innocence, the Sisulus certainly believed that Winnie had treated Evelyn’s children differently than her own. Thembi had never seen eye to eye with her and there is little warmth between Winnie and Maki, now the sole survivor of the first-family children. Beryl, Walter Sisulu’s daughter, said she had access to photographs showing Winnie’s own children, wrapped up in warm coats, while Maki was in just a little jersey, in the middle of winter. Maki apparently believed that Winnie had tried to keep her away from her father. She was bitter, but not just towards Winnie. “Bitter” may barely do justice to the great pain Maki must be carrying.

  Maki would not agree to be interviewed for this book, apparently because it would cause her too much hurt (though others of a more Machiavellian view think it may be because she wants to tell her own story, in her own book, one day) but a close relative, her niece Ndileka, the daughter of Thembi, agreed to talk. There is no doubt that Fatima Meer was right when she had written of the frost that settled on Thembi’s heart, following his parents’ divorce.

  In an account for Meer, Makgatho spoke of the difficulties the first-family children had faced after their parents’ separation and how he had sided with his father, while Thembi, he thought, had sided with their mother.

  In 1958 Thembi was home from school. We used to go to daddy’s office and we would drive to Orlando with him. Then one day we stopped somewhere and we picked up Winnie. She was very friendly I thought. What a pretty lady. She was talking and her eyes were shining. I liked her. We met her many times after that, usually at daddy’s office. I thought nothing about it. Then one day daddy told us that Winnie was going to be our new mother. That seemed strange to me. I talked about it with Thembi later. I said to him, daddy is going to stay with Winnie and Winnie is going to be our new mother. It upset Thembi, but he said nothing.

  Then when I went to visit daddy in Orlando West at our house, I heard my aunts and my grandmother talk about daddy’s wedding. They were all very excited and they were making big plans.

  I continued visiting daddy after his marriage and to spend weekends with him. Winnie was okay to me. I regarded her as my mother, like my father wanted me to, and this upset our mother. She didn’t want me to go there at weekends, but I went.

  According to Ndileka, her father, Thembi, believed Mandela had treated Evelyn very shabbily. Money loomed large among the issues between them all later. Not knowing the detail of the divorce settlement, Thembi believed his father had not given his mother “a cent out of his purse.” According to Ndileka, there was once a physical fight between Thembi and Winnie and there was no love lost between them. Of course it is not unusual for a child to resent her father’s new partner, especially in such strained circumstances. Winnie denied any fight with Thembi—their relationship had always been close, she said.

  When Thembi moved to Cape Town it was certainly not to be closer to his father on Robben Island. He married Thoko in 1964, soon after she became pregnant with Ndileka, who was born in February 1965. Together they ran the shebeen and the profits were used to support his family, in particular, says Ndileka, to educate and clothe Makgatho and Maki, Thembi’s brother and sister.

  Ndileka went to live with her grandmother in Cofimvaba in the eastern Cape. She was running a store there, which she had called maliyavusa— “money leaking” or perhaps “the scent of money.” It had once been run by a white German but the introduction of the Transkei Bantustan Homeland had closed the area to all but Africans who had been born there. The pickings were plentiful, for those who were happy to join in. K. D. Matanzima—the Homeland chief minister himself—had evidently driven Evelyn around and told her to pick any store she fancied.

  As Ndileka said, Evelyn, being highly religious, was deeply disapproving of Thembi’s business as a bootlegger and took the attitude that no granddaughter of hers was going to grow up in such a dissolute environment. But she could not refuse the proceeds of the shebeen, because she needed the money, while Makgatho and Maki were being educated in Swaziland.

  The first family, those who survived, believed that Winnie used to be given money by Mandela for all five of his offspring but it never migrated through to the first-family children. Even in later years, when Ndileka and her sister were studying, they would struggle to get money via Winnie that was supposed to be coming to them from Mandela. According to Ndileka, she gave up her studies in frustration at not being able to obtain the money, whilst her sister Nandi would have quit business school in Cape Town if not for the support of Ndileka and Evelyn. What the first family could not have known was of the very real difficulties Winnie herself faced obtaining any money at all to support the whole family.

  As a child, Ndileka spent time around the shebeen during visits. She could recall how it would stay open until midnight serving illicit wine to Cape Coloureds out of big bottles that would have to be hidden under the house when the police came.

  In July 1969, Thembi was twenty-four and had yet to visit his father on the island across the water from Table Bay. Thembi was driving back from a trip to Durban where he had just bought a plot of land for a house. Next to him in the passenger seat of the car was Thoko, while the wife of Thoko’s brother Leonard was asleep on the back seat of the car. They were nearly at the end of a ten-hour journey through the night, just crossing the river by Beaufort West at around 9 a.m., when three cars collided. Seven people died, including Thembi. Thoko was the sole survivor.

  The loss of their first-born son prompted the only contact that ever took place between Mandela and Evelyn after the separation. Evelyn said she had earlier tried to visit Mandela in prison in Johannesburg, following his arrest in August 1962. He had refused to see her and she had gone away, humiliated. Now Mandela wrote to Evelyn, a letter composed in formal terms, in stark contrast to the letter he wrote on the same day to Winnie.

  To Evelyn he expressed his sincere condolences, knowing how devastating the cruel blow of Thembi’s death must have been to her. It was apparent from the letter that he had not seen or heard from Thembi in five years (he had last seen him in 1964 at the Rivonia Trial) and had not received a reply to a letter he had written to him two years earlier. He acknowledged Thembi’s financial support for his family, adding that he had looked forward to more correspondence between them and to meeting Thembi and his family when he left Robben Island. “All these expectations have now been completed shattered.”

  He articulated his feelings far more openly in the much longer letter to Winnie, which reveals just a hint of the distance that had opened up between father and son. “During the Rivonia Case he sat behind me one day. I kept looking back nodding to him & giving him a broad smile. At the time it was generally believed that we would certainly be given the supreme penalty & this was clearly written across his face. Though he nodded back as many times as I did to him, not once did he return the smile.”

  Mandela’s mother had died ten months earlier, in September 1968, aged seventy-seven
. He had been denied permission to attend her funeral and was again denied permission to attend Thembi’s funeral. Meanwhile Winnie had been imprisoned herself. The overall burden, he wrote to her, was too heavy for one man to take. “But I do not at all complain, my darling.”

  Ndileka’s mother, Thoko, never recovered from the psychological impact of the crash. She remarried after two or three years, to Phineas Nkosi, and had a third daughter, before Nkosi died of kidney failure in police custody in Johannesburg in 1982.

  Mandela’s daughter-in-law, Thoko, had first attempted suicide after the fatal car crash. Following the death of her second husband, she tried driving off a cliff, taking her third daughter in the car with her. Thoko suffered a knee injury, while the daughter was unharmed. She tried again to kill herself and failed, finally succeeding at the fourth attempt, drowning herself by jumping from the docks into Durban harbor in 2002. She had fought depression for a long time and Ndileka, who had become a nurse, was disappointed in herself at the end, for missing the signs that Thoko was about to try again to end her life. “But it didn’t matter—she had made up her mind.”

  Beyond the depression she had been a real character, said Ndileka, a bubbly person who could laugh happily, a laugh that rose up from the bottom of her stomach.

  If Makgatho had, as he said, sided with his father in childhood, that did not last through the years as he came to adulthood and struggled to shape his life around his father’s unrelenting scrutiny.

  It looked as if he had lost his way after being expelled from school, apparently for organizing a student strike. He initially appeared to have remained close to Mandela, describing to Fatima Meer how he had first visited Robben Island in 1967, when he was sixteen, after leaving school in Swaziland. He remembered how he could relax at Mum Winnie’s and play his records there, no doubt the same jazz records that Zindzi had sat and listened to with him. It had been Mum Winnie who had arranged and paid for his trip to the island. He had enjoyed seeing his father but was only allowed thirty minutes, which was too short. His father had asked him to stand back so he could look at him and said how tall and good-looking he had become. (Someone outside the family has described Makgatho as looking like his father—only without the charisma.)

  He had visited Mandela regularly on Robben Island after that until the mid-1980s when, he claimed, he got lazy. Meer suggests it was not laziness but his father’s constant urging to return to school that put him off. She cited a letter Mandela had written to a friend—Meer herself, perhaps—in 1974, complaining how Makgatho had lost his sharpness, could not pass his matriculation and was finding it hard to resist the attractions of city life. Mandela was keen to reawaken his son’s ambitions.

  Makgatho got married, to Rennie, and the couple had a child. When Rennie returned to full-time education in 1978, Mandela wrote to Maki, Makgatho’s sister, in the process betraying his view of his errant son: “The fact that Rennie is at school and her own decision will make Makgatho realize that he will be the only black sheep in the family. Keep writing and urge him to think of his future and to go back to college.”

  The black sheep.

  Makgatho tried to return to college in 1979 but could not get in without his matriculation. According to Meer, he was deeply frustrated and full of pain. It was around this time, perhaps, that he started drinking.

  There was disagreement between Maki—who wanted Makgatho in the eastern Cape with their mother, out of the way of the city temptations—and Mandela, who wanted him back in his studies. Mandela told Maki in a letter that Rennie’s success in education was all down to Mum Winnie, “who is keen to do everything in her power to help all the children attain their ambitions.” In truth, perhaps, they were not the son’s ambitions, but the father’s.

  Makgatho’s marriage foundered. He remarried and had another son. Ndileka says he was a broker at an insurance company for a time, while continuing to drink too much. She did not think he was an alcoholic by that stage but he sometimes indulged heavily. The family, with the help of Matanzima, got him back to Cofimvaba and the care of his mother, where he helped her to run the store.

  Seemingly more settled, he finally returned to study, taking up law at the University of Natal. He qualified and began working with the law firm of family friends. It was while he was doing his LLB, said Ndileka, that he finally descended into alcoholism and eventually went into rehab.

  Was it perhaps too much, doing law? No, said Ndileka, that wasn’t it. “He skipped through his law degree, he could get high marks without a battle.” She believed it was the internal struggle provoked by his father’s release that most affected him.

  “He perhaps thought he could pick up where they left off but there was this big void between them. My grandfather telling him how he wishes he was as strong as Maki and how he can’t say a thing to him because he’s an alcoholic. That really eroded Makgatho’s self esteem.”

  Ndileka’s view of Mandela is that he embraces weakness in others and takes strength from it. Thembi and Maki had their mother’s fighting spirit, something Ndileka believed she had inherited too, and could stand up to him. Makgatho did not have that strength. Mandela did not want to understand that alcoholism is a symptom of something, did not want to look at the root cause of his son’s problems. “He landed in that hospital bed because of my grandfather.”

  Ndileka does not know how long Makgatho had been HIV positive but she had known for about four years when he went into hospital at the beginning of December 2004. She recalled the Sunday lunch—a first-family tradition—just before his admission when he had suddenly seemed so unlike his usual self. Normally he would be the first to forgive Madiba, to say, “I think Tata has taken care of all of us equally,” but that day he had seemed very angry, perhaps over some dispute that had denied him a car that Madiba had agreed to buy him. “I don’t think Tata has taken care of us,” he said. He meant the offspring of the first family.

  So far as Ndileka was concerned, he went into hospital suffering complications from his alcoholism. He had contracted pancreatitis back while he was studying in Durban but now there were other problems too that were beyond fixing with surgery.

  He just deteriorated and there was nothing anyone could do. As the family gathered at his bedside, both Ndileka and her aunt, Maki, who were seeing the same therapist, wanted to try to bring Makgatho and his father together before he died. The therapist suggested that when Mandela was at the bedside, they take his hand and place it over Makgatho’s, because Mandela was unlikely to reach out himself in a physical gesture. As Ndileka said, “He’s not the person to say I love you.”

  When Mandela came to Makgatho’s deathbed, accompanied by Graca, Maki took his hand and guided it over Makgatho’s hand, so that they were physically touching, as the therapist had suggested.

  Mandela slid his hand away.

  “He was frozen,” said Ndileka who was there watching. “He just could not accept his own feelings. Grandad can be affectionate with strangers but he is completely cut off from his family. He’ll confide in his housekeeper about things he’s unhappy with but never to us. He’s an African man and to show feelings would be a weakness and he can’t do it.”

  Ndileka was angry that Mandela announced Makgatho’s HIV status to the world, in proclaiming that he had died of HIV AIDS. He might have been wanting to destigmatize the disease but that was his thing; it was about Mandela, not about his son, whose disease it was. So far as Ndileka was concerned, HIV might have been a contributing factor to Makgatho’s death, but it was not the whole story. The whole story was not something Mandela would have wanted out there.

  In other ways, too, Makgatho’s death had brought family tensions to a head.

  “Tensions were so high after Makgatho died that we didn’t even allow them to come and accompany the body. At the funeral we were like salt and water, chalk and cheese.” Ndileka says that the younger generation—Mandela’s younger grandchildren and great grandchildren—met afterwards and wanted to understa
nd why there was so much ill-feeling. The first-family children tried to explain to the second-family children who, reportedly, said that they had never heard those stories from their mothers. The first family replied that they could not deny their own experiences.

  There was talk of arranging a meeting between all the generations but, at the time of writing, that meeting has yet to happen. “We would be willing to meet and have an honest open debate,” said Ndileka. “The tensions are simmering but if you think they are simmering now, wait until he dies. Then they will come to boiling point. The fight for the soul of Rolihlahla has not even begun because the ANC claims he’s theirs, the Foundation say he’s theirs… ”

  As part of Mandela’s private celebrations for his ninetieth birthday in 2008, Maki and the first family organized a party at his ancestral home, in Qunu in the eastern Cape. They had earlier devised a Mandela family logo—apparently a bee or a wasp, the design was Makgatho’s and he was inspired by the name Rolihlahla—as if it were a marque or a brand and attached it to the invitations they sent out, as well as to labels for the wine they were to serve. Mandela wine. That was widely perceived as exploiting the family name. Neither Winnie nor her daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, attended the party.