Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Winnie was all too conscious of her political responsibility and name: “I was ready to deputise for Nelson,” as she put it. “I had to think so carefully what I said—as his representative.”6 She had some close women friends, including Helen Joseph, the veteran of the Treason Trials, and Fatima Meer in Durban, but she could be overbearing toward senior political women like Albertina Sisulu, and she often rashly looked to new men friends for support.7 Most ANC activists were detained soon after Mandela’s arrest, and Winnie longed for political allies. “Anyone who showed any kindness was taken at face value,” as George Bizos put it.8 But Winnie was in a social and political minefield, with spies and informers everywhere. She was especially friendly with Brian Somana, a journalist whose wife soon afterward divorced him, naming Winnie as an adulteress, which she denied. Somana had earlier been close to ANC leaders, but after detention he had been turned by the police, giving away his ex-colleagues, and was suspected by some of revealing the hideout at Rivonia.9

  It was in this confused state that Winnie made her first visit to Robben Island in August 1964, immaculately dressed, traveling with Albertina Sisulu. She had a brief half-hour encounter with Mandela in a bleak shed near the harbor, out of sight of the cells.10 She was forbidden to speak Xhosa or to discuss anyone outside the immediate “first-degree” family. She and Mandela shouted through the window, while warders watched and listened on both sides, interrupting if they heard an unfamiliar name. Mandela, worried that Winnie had grown thinner and was under obvious stress, urged her to stop dieting. “Oh, our men are shrinking here!” said Albertina Sisulu as they were being taken away. “But their spirit is so strong.”11 Mandela went back to his cell frustrated and bewildered by the lack of any physical contact with his wife. He could not stop worrying about Winnie, though he did not betray his emotions to his comrades.

  Back in Johannesburg, Winnie was encircled by spies. The police had virtually crushed black political activity, but they saw her both as a likely underground channel and as a means of demoralizing her husband. And the “Dirty Tricks” department run by the secret service chief, van den Bergh, was determined (according to his agent Gordon Winter) “to stifle the political life out of this troublesome woman.”12 Winnie was banned from leaving Johannesburg, which prevented her from visiting her children’s schools: she claims she never met a single one of their teachers. And the children, she said, “kept being expelled once it was discovered who they were—but they were toddlers, they knew nothing. People were petrified.”13 They were eventually sent to a convent school in Swaziland, out of reach of the South African police. They thought the school, Our Lady of Sorrows, was well named, and Zindzi complained that nobody was caring for them.14

  It was two years before Winnie was allowed another visit to Robben Island, under still stricter supervision, tailed by the police from the airport to the boat. The warder James Gregory watched her talking to her husband through the glass, “like seeing life through a 1950s black and white television screen.” She behaved with great decorum and dignity, Gregory said, but he was amazed to see “the woman with a pride as fierce as any lioness, with tears rolling down her cheeks.”15

  Mandela was worried by the hounding of the girls from school to school, and at this meeting they reluctantly agreed to send them to board at Waterford, a new multiracial school in Swaziland—with the help of Helen Joseph and Winnie’s new friend Elinor Birley, the wife of the ex-headmaster of Eton.16 Mandela worried that Winnie could be too trusting, but he did not ask her about boyfriends: “That was a question one had to wipe out of his mind,” he said. “One must not be inquisitive. It is sufficient that this is a woman who is loyal to me, who supports and who comes to visit me, who writes to me.”17

  Back in Johannesburg, Winnie was charged pettily with having failed to report to the police in Cape Town, and given a suspended sentence of a year’s imprisonment—which cost her her precious job as a social worker. She was under constant pressure, and was beginning to turn to violence. One day a police sergeant invaded her bedroom in Orlando without knocking: she threw him on the floor (as she told it), and the dressing stand fell on him, nearly breaking his neck. She was charged with resisting arrest. Mandela, she recalled, had once warned her: “Zami, you are completely and utterly undisciplined! You need a great deal of taming!” Now there was no one to tame her. At her trial her lawyer George Bizos warned her to behave like a lady, not like an Amazon; and the magistrate acquitted her.18

  Winnie remained banned from any political activity, but she could not keep away from it. She was helping the families of ANC women who had been jailed, and rashly arranged to print and distribute pamphlets for the ANC with the help of her friend Mohale Mahanyele, who worked for the U.S. Information Agency. The police, now armed with the drastic powers of the Terrorism Act of 1967, were still determined to get Winnie. They laid an elaborate trap through their informers to provide her with a network of false friends. They included an Indian crook named Moosa Dinath, whom Mandela had originally recommended to her, not knowing about his criminal record, and his girlfriend, Maud Katzenellenbogen, who were using Winnie to try to penetrate the Defence and Aid Fund in London, which supported detainees. They also provided Winnie with an attorney, Mendel Levin, who turned out to be a government supporter with a shady past. On May 12, 1969, Winnie was arrested with twenty-one others whom she had rashly involved in her pamphlet-distributing operation. The police spy Gordon Winter, who had befriended her, had intercepted all their communications.19

  The police came for Winnie at dawn, hauling her away from her children. “They were grabbing my skirts,” she remembers, “screaming, ‘Mummy, don’t leave us! Mummy, where are you going?’ ”20 She was held in solitary confinement in Pretoria, in a small cell with a bucket, a plastic bottle of water and a Bible. Later she was interrogated for five days and nights by the notorious torturer Swanepoel about her contacts with the ANC and communists, and with her women friends in jail.21 The police had already extracted confessions from other prisoners, including Mohale Mahanyele, who had turned state witness. “I could not believe his total betrayal of the cause we both worked for,” Winnie said later.22

  The flamboyant lawyer Joel Carlson, whom Mandela had asked to represent her, was allowed to see her and her fellow prisoners after they had spent two hundred days in solitary detention. They had not been allowed a bath or shower, and were kept in cells five feet by ten feet, sometimes with only ten minutes a day for exercise. “They said the food was inedible and could only be eaten when they were driven to it by hunger.” The police pressed Winnie to make a radio statement calling on the black people to abandon illegal struggles and to cooperate with whites; in return Mandela would be released to the Transkei. She refused. “Winnie wavered between sanity and insanity,” wrote Carlson afterward, “and never quite knew whether she would be able to live through her first period of detention.”23

  At last, in December, she came up for trial with the other twenty-one in Pretoria, on broad charges under the Suppression of Communism Act, including reviving the ANC and receiving instructions from Mandela on Robben Island.24 After two months the prosecution was withdrawn, but they were immediately rearrested, and charged again in June 1970 under the Terrorism Act—by which time Winnie was in the prison hospital suffering from malnutrition, bleeding gums and fainting fits. In October she and the twenty-one were again brought to trial: but their counsel Sydney Kentridge was able to show that the indictment was almost identical with the first one, and the case collapsed.25

  After thirteen months in solitary confinement, Winnie was still further out of control. On the surface she seemed extraordinarily carefree and vivacious. Joel Carlson, who gave a party for her release, remembers her “filled with laughter, excitement and gaiety.”26 She was gaunt, but with her eyes looking all the bigger. She insisted that she had gained strength from the ordeal. “I got more liberated in prison,” she wrote later. “My soul has been more purified by prison than anything else.”27 But her
liberation had a double edge. “After that experience I never had respect for anyone in authority,” she explained. “I then realized the brutality of apartheid and the fascisms of our harassment by the state.… I knew at that point in time that I would not hesitate to use violence to attain my ideals.”28 Some former admirers thought she had been unhinged. As Helen Suzman put it: “They turned her from a warmhearted person into a mad creature.”29

  On Robben Island Mandela learned something about Winnie’s ordeal from newspaper cuttings the warders deliberately left in his cell. It was almost his worst moment when he heard that she too was in jail, under grimmer conditions than his. He had found his own brief solitary confinement “the most forbidding aspect of prison life … there is no distraction from these haunting questions.” He felt helplessly guilty at not being there to defend Winnie. But he tried to keep cool and to remember that they were paying the price for being committed to the struggle.30 And he and his colleagues had to admire Winnie for her courage in keeping the struggle alive, despite all the risks. “However rash Winnie was,” said Bizos, “they were proud of her.”31

  Winnie was banned once again, for five years, but eventually received permission to visit Mandela—for only half an hour. She returned to Johannesburg in poor health, with bronchitis and high blood pressure, but was still being persecuted. Mandela learned with anger that the police had kicked down her front door and hurled bricks at the window. White sympathizers who befriended her were harassed in turn, and some were put off by Winnie’s paranoid moods and her escapades. Joel Carlson became exasperated by her unreliability, and warned her against political involvement; when she ignored him he gave up, and left for America. She would continue to be rash in her choice of friends. One of them, the journalist John Horak, helped look after the children, but his more serious career was as a police spy. (He later claimed that Winnie turned him into a double agent working for the ANC.)32

  The police still harassed her and the children. “Many times when the girls came home from school,” Winnie recalled, “they found the house locked and had to look in the newspapers to see if I was detained.”33 Since 1970 Mandela had kept up the pressure for her bans to be lifted, and in 1974 he asked for the police to be restrained, and for Winnie to be allowed a firearm to protect herself. The police headquarters could not recommend a gun: “Mrs. Mandela is known to be impulsive, quick-tempered and inclined to lose control.”34

  Winnie had gained much moral support from her friend Peter Magubane, the Drum photographer, but he too was persecuted: he had been betrayed by Gordon Winter and was detained for 586 days, many in solitary confinement.35 He remained loyal to Winnie, and in May 1973 he drove Zeni and Zindzi to meet her near the lawyer’s office where she was working. The police saw them, and charged Winnie with illegal communication. She was sentenced to six months in Kroonstad jail, which was less harrowing than her solitary confinement, and she had proper food and weekend visits from the children.36

  On Robben Island, Mandela was agonized when he heard about this new imprisonment. He could not concentrate on games, he told her, because he was thinking of her in jail. “Although I always try to put up a brave face, I never get used to you being in the cooler,” he told her later. “I will never forget the desperately distressing experiences we had from May ’69 to September ’70 and the six months you spent in Kroonstad.” He gave her some advice which reflected his own strict self-discipline in jail:

  You may find that the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings. In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education … but internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being: honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, purity, generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve your fellow men—qualities within the reach of every soul—are the foundation of one’s spiritual life … at least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you. Regular meditation, say of about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be very fruitful in this regard. You may find it difficult at first to pinpoint the negative factors in your life, but the tenth attempt may reap rich rewards. Never forget that a saint is a sinner that keeps on trying.37

  Mandela tried to organize the family from his jail while Winnie was in hers. Her sister Nobantu Mniki was looking after the house in Orlando, which he told her to cling to until Winnie returned. He warned Winnie that she would return to an atmosphere which might be “more chilly and glum,” but reassured her: “Difficulties break some men but make others.” He arranged for Nobantu to “prepare a dinner of ox tongue and tail and dumplings and champagne to wash it down” on the day she came out.38 “I wish I could be home the day you return,” he told Winnie, visualizing the feast. “I would then put you to bed with a song or two. Thereafter I would listen directly to you for days on end as you relate your experiences from Oct. 14 to Apr. 13. I would take you back to the very last day I saw you as a free man in July 62.” He seemed elated just by thinking about it: “I feel like one who will live for another hundred years.”39

  The two girls were confused: “Our house was an extension of the police station,” said Winnie.40 While Winnie was in jail Mandela warned Zeni: “The wicked criminals that have repeatedly attacked Mum and ruined her health may now concentrate on you and Zindzi.”41 They were cared for by friends, including Peter Magubane and Winnie’s sister Nonyaniso, who were both in turn imprisoned. Fatima Meer in Durban helped out, to Mandela’s relief: “I would have been quite sure that … they would not be orphans as long as you were alive,” he told her.42 But Fatima found the girls difficult. “They were rarely happy with the arrangements,” she recalled, “and often complained or became the targets of their benefactors’ complaints.”43

  The children were becoming more distant from their father, but remained loyal to their mother. When Zindzi was only thirteen she wrote to the UN’s Special Committee on Apartheid in New York, asking them to protect her: “The family and mummy’s friends fear that an atmosphere is being built for something terrible to happen to Mum.” When Winnie was sentenced two years later, Zeni said, “Now we are old enough to share her sorrow and grief with her.”44 Mandela wrote affectionately to the two girls, but was stern about schooling, and was worried that they might be spoiled by the examples of richer children at Waterford. “Judging from the girls’ letters, travelling to Europe and America has become quite a craze at their school,” he wrote to a friend in 1974. “I am tempted to remind them that they are my children, a fact that may place insurmountable difficulties in their path. But hard reality does not often coincide with the people’s wishes, especially when these people are children.”45

  After her release Winnie was eventually allowed to visit Mandela again, with both their daughters, in December 1975.46 Zindzi was only fifteen—a year below the minimum age for visitors—but Winnie forged her birth certificate. Mandela had not seen her since she was three, and prepared himself with a new shirt and carefully combed hair: “I did not want to look like an old man for my youngest daughter.” He was enchanted by Zindzi’s beauty and resemblance to Winnie: “I can imagine you sitting on my lap at home and having a Sunday roast with the family,” he told her. He reminisced about her babyhood, while through the glass she restrained her tears; but he noticed her reserve with a father who “seemed to belong not to her but to the people.” He felt that “somewhere deep inside she must have harboured resentment and anger for a father who was absent during her childhood and adolescence.”47 And he soon learned that Winnie could be jealous of his love for his daughters. When he wrote to her saying how beautifully they had grown up, he recalled to Fatima, Winnie was furious, as if this were treason, and retorted: “I, not you, brought up these children whom you prefer to me.”48


  He found it even harder to communicate with his two elder children, Maki and Makgatho, who moved between their mother, Evelyn, and their stepmother, “Mum Winnie.” Mandela had very limited news of them. With his memories of his own stepmothers, he seemed confident that they were all part of the same extended African family: he would remind them how Winnie had looked after them diligently while he was underground, and he reproved them for not being properly grateful.49 But they had a different view: “He didn’t realize that Winnie wasn’t doing what she promised him,” said Maki. “We were at war with Winnie.”50

  Mandela’s son Makgatho visited him on Robben Island when he was sixteen in 1967, and once or twice a year over the next ten years. But he was soon disappointing his father with his school record: he was expelled for organizing a strike, and kept failing his matriculation. Makgatho felt his father’s pressure to succeed, all the more after his elder brother, Thembi, was killed in 1969, but at twenty-four he could not face going back to school. “The real problem,” his father wrote from jail in November 1974, “is that at his age and in my absence he finds it hard to resist the attractions of city life.”51 He married Rayne Mosehle, who soon showed herself more studious than her husband, and more attentive in writing to Mandela. “It is not easy to write to a person who hardly ever replies,” Mandela told Makgatho.52 He told Rayne that his son was “in most respects a sweet lad. But one of his weaknesses is his failure to write even when serious family problems are involved.”53

  His daughter Maki visited Mandela in 1970, when she turned sixteen. She was a stronger character than Makgatho, more outspoken and more influenced by her mother, Evelyn, who had brought her into her own faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. After 1972 she often visited Evelyn in the Transkei, where Mandela’s nephew Kaiser Matanzima had found Evelyn a grocery shop to run in Cofimvaba. Maki excelled at school, but she refused to go on to university, and got married instead, to Camagu: she had two children by him before the marriage broke up a few years later. Mandela was sympathetic and helpful about the divorce, for which Maki was grateful. But he was disappointed that her greatest ambition was to be a nurse: “Those without real ambition and drive,” he warned her, “are left to work hard in inferior positions for the rest of their lives.”54