Young Mandela

by David James Smith

During the election campaign in 2009, Mandela was twice wheeled out onto the ANC platform to support the campaign of Jacob Zuma, who has since become the country’s president. Both incidents involved Makgatho’s son Mandla, who was himself seeking a position with the ANC—the first Mandela to do so since his grandfather.

  The Mandela Foundation and the second-family daughters did their best to prevent the appearances, fearing they had been poorly organized and would be detrimental to Mandela’s declining health. There was no open discussion about the appearances beforehand. After the second appearance, in Johannesburg, there was a stand-up row at Mandela’s home between Mandla and Zindzi, who had rushed there earlier that day, just too late to physically stop Mandela being taken out by Mandla.

  Just as the wine label logo was perceived to be exploiting the name for commercial gain, now it seemed as if Mandela was being exploited and made vulnerable in his old age, for the political gain of others. That, at least, was how it looked to the Foundation and to the second family. Mandla would argue that he was entitled to make decisions concerning his own grandfather, and who would stop Mandela from supporting the ANC?

  Among the first family, there is resentment towards the Foundation and those around Mandela who seem to stand between them like a barrier. Ndileka said her grandfather had created a prison around himself and was too old now to break it down. Mandla feels the Foundation have failed to represent Mandela in the way the family would have liked and were too caught up with him as an individual. Maki, apparently, has tried to become involved in the Foundation and has been refused a role.

  Mandla said that, for a long time, people would never have known Mandela had other children, beyond Zindzi and Zenani, which in many ways goes to the heart of the problem: the first family felt invisible after Winnie and her children came along, and especially so during the struggle years while Mandela was on Robben Island.

  Mandela had given enthusiastic support to Mandla when he became installed as local chief at Mvezo, the community where Mandela’s own father had been deposed, sixty years earlier. It may have looked as if Mandla was using this modest power base as a platform for his own political ambitions. No doubt Mandela has been waiting all his adult life for someone in the family to follow in his footsteps. During Mandela’s twenty-seven years in prison, it had been Winnie and Zindzi in the main who had kept the family name alive. The first family were never involved in either a public or a political role, partly at the wish of Evelyn.

  Meanwhile, there had been times when Maki could not help herself and allowed her bitterness and private hurt to seep into the public domain, particularly around the time of her father’s release. She told Femina magazine in 1990 that she and Makgatho, who was then still living, were from the neglected side of the family, overshadowed by Winnie and her daughters. She had had limited contact with her father after the divorce from Evelyn and never developed a father-daughter relationship. “I really know him very little that way.” She said she’s had moments of real bitterness and anger towards Mandela for not being there.

  Fatima Meer says that she believes Maki had “inherited” her mother’s bitterness towards Mandela. In that Femina interview, Maki acknowledged that Evelyn had been bitter and angry towards her father too.

  Maki could not understand why Mandela had to go to prison. Why couldn’t he just have gone into exile, as many others did, and why did he have to come back, when he knew he was bound to be caught? She questioned his motives. Perhaps he was not as selfless as the saintly image suggested. In her view, his motivations were a mixture of the self-aggrandizement that afflicts people in liberation struggles and the simple ambition that she could recognize in herself.

  “I doubt that my father wanted to become a hero. I think he felt that with the exodus of ANC leaders somebody had to stay behind and be the galvanizing force inside the country. How could the struggle survive if they were all living elsewhere in exile? I think he decided to make that sacrifice and risk a prison sentence or even death.

  “Of course there is a price-tag attached to the decision in terms of the effect on his family but it was something he was prepared to do.”

  After he went to prison, if the children ever needed anything, he would say, go to Mama Winnie, but, Maki said, things never happened with Mama Winnie the way her father thought they happened. This caused friction. Meanwhile, her own mother had been sidelined. He ought to have known better. “You know my grandfather had four wives. My father knows full well what happens in that situation. You can’t delegate one wife to see to everything concerning all the other children as well as their own. You are creating problems.”

  Maki said she had learned to channel her anger with the help of spiritual beliefs. She would try to talk to herself and tell herself, well, at least he believed it was for a good cause; or, he’s not perfect, he has weaknesses too. Her mother was highly religious, she said, as a Jehovah’s Witness while Maki would go to church but was no longer really a full member.

  In the Wits archive is a letter Mandela wrote in the late 1970s to his friend and white liberal comrade, Helen Joseph, asking her to support Maki but warning her that Maki was a Watchtower follower and passionately religious: “I have always believed that religious values should be quietly observed and not publicly advertised.”

  He must have been thinking too of Evelyn, who used to go door to door in Orlando with The Watchtower, when she was still living in Orlando East after the divorce, before her return to the eastern Cape. Ndileka recalls being dragged round with her and having no choice in the matter, as Evelyn locked up the house behind her when she went out so they could not stay behind. She was a disciplinarian and morally strict, denying her children such leisure activities as going to see films because they were too worldly.

  Although Ndileka did not recall Evelyn being openly negative about her ex-husband, she would, however, betray her feelings with little comments, such as letting them know when she felt she was being abandoned, if the children and grandchildren went off to see Mandela at Christmas. “Oh, Rolihlahla is very lucky, he sees you people just grown up.” Whilst some bitterness was there, Evelyn did her best not to pass it on.

  It appears that Maki’s outpourings of discontent at the time of her father’s release, while naturally human and perhaps understandable, had been politically awkward, creating doubts about her reliability and motives. It certainly seemed as if the first family were looking for reparations, in some way, and Mandela had sought in his last years to make provision for all his offspring. But, as Beryl Simelane said, what’s done is done, and cannot be undone.

  While some at the Foundation would admit to having made mistakes and were therefore trying to improve their role, there was no doubt that they were also trying to rise above political and familial sensitivities and act objectively in Mandela’s own best interests. There were closer links between Foundation staff and Winnie’s daughters but the Foundation were still trying to reach out to the first family, while sometimes meeting suspicion, even outright hostility.

  In many ways, of course, the same losses that Zindzi could articulate in terms of her longing for the father she never had were the losses the first family had known too.

  Ndileka could have been speaking for Zindzi when she said that it had taken her a long time to be reconciled to her relationship with Mandela and how much she had wanted it to go beyond what it is. “Through therapy I learned to accept that it will not go further. I was looking for a grandfather I could go and talk rubbish with, go and consult, go to a restaurant. That just didn’t happen.”

  It is now too late and too hard for Mandela to get beyond cursory inquiries about how she is doing at work. His short-term memory has gone and he has a few tales that he tells his grandchildren, already many times over. They always pretend it is the first time that they have heard them and laugh at the anecdotes. Zindzi’s experience has been the same. No doubt the first and second families got to hear the same stories.

  He had given his best year
s to the struggle, and this was all that was left now, for his family: the same harmless yarns replayed many times over by Mandela while the triumphant narrative of his life was being endlessly recounted by others who never stopped to think of the sacrifices and the hurt he had forced on those around him. Mandela made his own choices—he did what he did with his eyes open. It could be said that Thembi, Makgatho and Thoko were unwitting martyrs to the cause. Thembi, Makgatho, Maki and their children might have been the invisible Mandelas in the struggle for liberation but they were not uninvolved, after all. The price was high for them. Higher than most.

  Ten

  MANDELA MUST HAVE been proud of his young bride and was evidently pleased to be able to invite friends and comrades to share his new and improved domestic circumstances at number 8115, even if he was not always sensitive to Winnie’s feelings, as she learned to run a home on their dwindling resources while struggling to get used to her husband’s ways. She had known what she was getting into when she married him, of course, but even so, it was hard to accept that family was so unimportant in the scheme of his life.“You just can’t tear Nelson from the people, from the struggle,” she would later say. “The nation came first. Everything else was second. But in the little time we had together, he was very affectionate.”

  He would leave the house early, often after going for a run, and come back late with a group of colleagues, unannounced, whom he expected her to feed. “Darling, I brought my friends home to taste your lovely cooking.” There might be ten people with him and one chop in the fridge. “I used to be reduced to tears,” Winnie wrote in her memoir, Part of My Soul, “and he would laugh and run around looking for a packet of tinned fish from the local shops. He is just like that. He never had a banking account. He couldn’t possibly have one.”

  She became the butt of his dry—dare one say, old-fashioned—sense of humor, as she would recall, on occasions when people asked where he had found this little girl. He might tell them that he was Winnie’s political savior or, worse, that he had married her only because she had promised to bring him some compensation cases for his law practice. “He pulls those jokes with a very straight face—you would have to know him to understand.”

  Rica Hodgson recounts a meal she and Jack, her husband, had gone to at number 8115 not long after Mandela and Winnie were married. He was mad about her, Rica remembered. When the Mandelas were dining at the Hodgsons’ apartment in Hillbrow, Rica had said she’d never eaten an African meal and wouldn’t he offer them an African meal one day. Sure, he had said, come for lunch on Sunday, or whenever it was. So Rica and Jack had made a rare white foray into Orlando and found themselves eating roast chicken, roast potatoes and vegetables, followed by fruit salad and cream. That’s not an African meal, Rica had complained, you could have had that at my place. Come on, Rica, said Mandela, what did you want me to do, go out and dig grubs for you?

  Winnie complained of losing her identity, becoming “Mandela’s wife,” and perhaps sought to reassert her independence in the car, during driving lessons with her husband. “Impatient teacher” meets “headstrong pupil” was how Mandela characterized it. During a particularly fraught lesson he got out and stalked home.

  But perhaps the most significant source of stress in the Mandelas’ young marriage was the Treason Trial. The mass raids began on December 5, 1956. The arrests had been very carefully planned, with Dakota military planes waiting in Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town to fly those arrested up to Johannesburg where they were all imprisoned together at the Fort. There were 144 arrests on the first day, among them Mandela himself, who was in bed when the police knocked on the door of number 8115 before dawn. They woke everyone up and searched the house after telling Mandela he was charged with “High Treason,” according to the warrant, and should pack a few things as he was being taken into custody. He knew the arresting officer, Head Constable Rousseau, and teased him as they drove into the city, Mandela sitting unrestrained in the front passenger seat: “What would happen if I seized you and overpowered you?”

  “You are playing with fire, Mandela.”

  “Playing with fire is my game.”

  Mandela was obliged to strip and line up with his fellow detainees against the wall. They stood in the cold for over an hour, awkwardly naked, young and old alike, including Chief Luthuli who had been brought from Natal and Professor Matthews. Mandela recalled for Anthony Sampson that M. B. Yengwa got hold of a blanket to wrap around himself and began singing a praise-song honoring the nineteenth-century Zulu leader Shaka. Luthuli, himself a Zulu, said, that is Shaka! He began singing too and dancing, and they all then joined in. A white doctor appeared and asked whether any of them were ill, which they weren’t. They were ordered to dress and locked into communal cells.

  Within a week there were 156 detainees, comprising 104 Africans, 44 whites and Indians, an almost even number of each, and 8 coloreds. They organized themselves into an instant society, a congress of the people, fittingly, since the charges arose from the Freedom Charter, with sessions of physical exercise, lectures, debates and inspiring sessions of communal singing led by Vuyisile Mini.

  Mosie Moolla relates that Oliver Tambo, who was also a renowned singer, helped to organize the Fort choir in an impromptu performance of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” conducted by Tambo himself with Mini’s glorious baritone soaring above the throng. Joe Slovo, who was among the white accused, recalled that the defendants were divided by race within the cells, with the whites being given more space and better bedding than the others. There were three drums of food at mealtimes and each had a sheet of paper floating on the top as a label: Congress One was the pot for whites with well-cooked chunks of beef or pork; Congress Two for the Indians and coloreds was porridge or vegetables with some fatty pieces of meat, probably the offcuts from the whites’ pot; while Congress Three was the African pot with no meat in it at all, just a mixture of pap and beans. Slovo was among those in the white section who, he said, lay idly in their beds listening enviously to the singing from the African cells.

  When Regina versus Adams (Faried Adams was Accused No. 1) and 155 others finally reached court, the inmates famously found themselves penned in by a wire cage, to which one of them attached a note, “Do Not Feed” (or perhaps “Don’t Feed”), as a reminder, if any were needed, that they were being treated like animals. The initial hearings were held at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg. To begin with, there were large crowds gathered outside in support. On the first day the police opened fire and, inside, the accused held their breaths at the sound of shooting. There were twenty-two reported injuries but no one was killed.

  In spite of the seriousness of the alleged offenses, bail was readily granted, albeit set on a sliding scale of £250 for whites, £100 for Indians and coloreds, and £50 for Africans. As a result, Mandela and all but a few of the accused were home in time for Christmas 1956, no doubt blissfully unaware of the long haul that lay ahead for the small proportion of them who would go to a full trial. The prosecution had estimated the case would take “six to eight weeks” but in fact it sprawled across fifty-one months, only finally coming to an end—with a full acquittal for all or withdrawal of charges—in March 1961.

  The state had spent months preparing the prosecution, assembling some 12,000 documentary exhibits and dozens of witnesses whose evidence occupied most of the subsequent year. In December 1957 the attorney-general withdrew charges against sixty-five of the accused, for lack of evidence.

  The defense attempted to have the charges against the remaining ninety-one defendants dismissed but, the following month, the court decided that there was a case to answer against them and the trial should go ahead. Potentially, Mandela and the other remaining defendants all faced the death sentence.

  By the time the trial proper had begun in August 1958—a couple of months after Mandela’s wedding—the proceedings had shifted to the Old Synagogue in Pretoria. The Crown hoped to prove a conspiracy but seemed uncertain and obfuscating when it came
to defining its nature, a weakness the defense lawyers were highly effective in exploiting.

  To all intents and purposes, the case was withdrawn altogether in October 1958 and wild celebrations erupted. The defense lawyers were carried out on the defendants’ shoulders, Rica Hodgson remembered, kissing Oliver Tambo who was taken aback at being kissed in public by a white woman. Ruth First called a spontaneous party that night at her home.

  As her husband, Joe Slovo, said, at a purely personal level their lives were very little different from those of the other middle-class whites who inhabited the “half-acre plots of posh suburbia.” The Slovos had servants, two cars, a gardener and a comfortable income swelled by the generosity of First’s parents, Julius and Tilly. Short of exile, he said, there was no way out of the trap of white privilege, nor any easy way to eliminate the social separation between the Slovos and their black comrades.

  Still, the Slovos could bring everyone together in a close approximation of equality at their parties, which were renowned for their music such as jazz and kwelas, the dancing and the free-flowing alcohol. As Rica Hodgson said, you never knew what tomorrow held, so you went out and had a marvelous bloody time.

  That night, said Slovo, their house was bursting at the seams by eight o’clock. Among the guests were the bishop of Johannesburg, Ambrose Reeves, and Trevor Huddleston who, like Rica Hodgson, was involved in the Treason Trial Defence Fund. Slovo said they should all have guessed the state would be keen to hit back after their humiliation at the trial. Sure enough, just before midnight, the police swarmed in through the windows and doors, bringing with them reporters from the Afrikaner press who later described the decadent scene that greeted them.

  “Many colors at party” was the headline in Die Burger. “A party at which whites, natives and Indians were present was held in a Johannesburg suburb last night. There were about 200 people present. White and non-white drank, danced, sang and chatted together. The police appeared at 10.30 p.m. In many of the cars white women rode with natives.”