But there were occasional scares about Mandela’s health. The Red Cross inspectors saw him on their annual visit in March 1977, together with a doctor, and reported that he “looked poorly, was slow in speaking and in all his movements. BP 180/100, regular pulse rate 78/min. After sublingual administration of 2mg of Valium he felt and looked better and the pains had diminished.” The doctor saw him again on the following day. He looked well, felt much fresher and had no more pains but was still tired. The Red Cross had the impression that “Mr. Mandela did not like to complain about his health and should be kept under close observation.”68
Mandela was certainly dismissive of minor ailments. “I don’t believe very much in medicine,” he said later; nor, he added, did his doctor, Motlana.69 But he could be too stoical. Once when he was pulling bamboo on the shore he slipped and fell, injuring his knee, which became swollen. The specialist told him not to allow the pain to get the better of him: “Just use that leg.” After he had limped for a long time the pain disappeared, but the knee never fully healed, and it would give him much trouble twenty-five years later.70
In 1979 he discovered a virus “had been eating up my eye,” but after he saw a specialist it disappeared: “The poor creature,” he told Winnie, “had no idea of just how strong in me is the will to live.” In the same year, while playing tennis, he felt a sudden pain in his heel, which was given urgent medical attention: the prison authorities, he wryly noted, were worried that he might die in prison. He was taken to Cape Town, handcuffed and surrounded by warders, on a rough crossing during which (he told Winnie) “an army of demons seemed to be on the rampage.”71 A young surgeon removed a bone fragment which dated back to his time at Fort Hare, and insisted that he stay overnight in the hospital, where he enjoyed the attention of the white nurses and the atmosphere of racial equality. He concluded that “science had no room for racism.”72
On July 18, 1978, Mandela celebrated his sixtieth birthday, with speeches from comrades such as Sisulu and Kathrada. He received only eight messages from family and friends. One came from Govan Mbeki’s son Thabo, to whom he could not safely respond, and another from Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to whom he wrote a warm reply, recalling their friendly meeting in 1960 and saying he felt like a thirty-year-old.73
The birthday rang around the world. Winnie was not allowed to visit him, but she was more than ever his spokesman, presenting the image of dedicated wife and long-suffering activist. “He’s as upright and proud as the day he was arrested,” she told the New York Times. “Oh, he’s just divine.” She received piles of birthday messages from both governments and individuals abroad, prompted by E. S. Reddy of the UN’s Special Committee on Apartheid, who had called for the occasion to be celebrated.74 From Britain, antiapartheid campaigners sent ten thousand birthday cards (which never arrived). The London Times called Mandela “the colossus of African nationalism.”75
In 1980 Mandela was at last allowed to resume his LL.B. course at London University, which had been suspended four years earlier: he planned to tackle jurisprudence, international law, African law and mercantile law or family law, he told Winnie, and reckoned he would hold the record for long-term studies.76 He received an unexpected tribute from the same university the next year when students proposed him as a candidate for Chancellor. He did not expect to get a hundred votes, he told Winnie, let alone the seven thousand he eventually received: he lost out to Princess Anne, who was supported by the more conventional students and academics, prompted by the Vice-Chancellor, Lord Annan, but he enjoyed the long-distance royal rivalry, which he thought would inspire Winnie in her small house in Brandfort, “turning that miserable shack into a castle, making its narrow rooms as spacious as those of Windsor.”77
Mandela was now receiving more news of the outside world. By February 1978 prisoners were allowed to hear tapes of selected South African radio news, though still heavily censored. “The general policy pursued,” Mandela wrote to a friend, “is still that of isolating us physically and spiritually from the outside world.”78 But at last, in September 1980, he could receive his most precious contraband: newspapers. Prisoners were allowed to get the Cape Times and the Afrikaans Die Burger, and later the Johannesburg Star, the Rand Daily Mail and the Johannesburg Sunday Times. But they were full of holes cut out by the censors, and he found the reporting very incomplete.* “I have some rough idea of what goes on in the country and the world,” Mandela told Dr. Motlana. “Occasionally the news coverage is quite good and some of the editorials and feature articles are fairly objective and outspoken. But most of the time the best editorials and reviews leave many pertinent questions unanswered. The greater and more decisive part of our political work is done from underground or behind the scenes, and the mass media are generally not aware of it.”80
Mandela was himself learning wider lessons from the University of Robben Island. Constantly up against other prisoners, he became more sensitive to other people’s insecurities and resentments—like a business executive exposed to “sensitivity training,” but extended over years. He seemed much less arrogant: no longer the chiefly autocrat, but the flexible democrat who could listen and take note of the majority view. He was insistent on loyalty to the ANC: the only grounds for leaving it, he told Maharaj, would be the abandonment of the struggle against apartheid.81 But he was always reaching out to other groups, trying to find common ground in the context of the nation.
Above all he was reaching out to the Afrikaners. The warders—the only whites on the island—represented racial domination in its most absolute form; but Mandela was able to see them as individuals to whom he could relate, who could teach him about Afrikanerdom. He urged his colleagues to try to understand the Afrikaners, their language and culture. In his still-unpublished essay on Black Consciousness in 1978 he reminded of how the ANC’s past ignorance of and contempt for the Afrikaner had made it over-confident. He warned that the “black Englishmen” with their liberal education could be too readily influenced by the English, “who have their own reasons for despising the Afrikaner.” And with remarkable foresight, only two years after the Soweto uprising, he looked forward to a quite different future: “Today South Africa has almost three million Afrikaners who will no longer be oppressors after liberation but a powerful minority of ordinary citizens, whose cooperation and goodwill will be required in the reconstruction of the country.”82
The Afrikaner government in Pretoria had been receiving confidential reports from the prison authorities giving character assessments of Mandela. In June 1980 Jannie Roux, the Deputy Commissioner of Prisons, who had already had several conversations with Mandela, talked with him for two and a half hours, with particular interest since the agitation for his release. Roux reported that Mandela took strong exception to being called a “self-confessed communist” by the Prime Minister, P. W. Botha—though he was openly opposed to capitalism, private landownership and the power of big money, and was impressed by Soviet education. He appeared to see a place for white people in a future South Africa, but not as the holders of political power: he had in mind a five-year transition during which they would be accustomed to the transfer of power; but he understood Roux’s warning that whites would not just capitulate. “He appears to have relatively rigid thinking patterns [betreklik regiede denkpatrone],” Roux reported, “and it’s difficult to get him to accept an opposite viewpoint.” Roux sent a confidential report to the Minister, who noted: “This kind of thing must be immediately brought to my attention.”83
In February 1981 the Justice Department received a summary in Afrikaans about Mandela’s background. It said that he had so adjusted himself to prison regulations that he gave the impression of good behavior (“die beeld het van ’n gevangene wie se gedrag goed is”), and no contraventions of prison regulations had been recorded against him up to 1976.
He adopts a persistent [knaende] attitude by making repeated representations about conditions, but in a way that no steps can be taken against him. But this should no
t be seen as good behaviour: he gives the orders and then withdraws to regard his actions from a distance. Mandela sticks to his chosen course and influences everyone with him not to deviate from this.… It is clear that Mandela has in no way changed his position and that imprisonment so far has had no positive effect on him.84
The new Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, asked for further background, and was given a more detailed analysis, which made eleven specific points:
A. Mandela is exceptionally motivated and maintains a strong idealistic approach.
B. He maintains outstanding personal relations, is particularly jovial and always behaves in a friendly and respectful way towards figures of authority.
C. He is manipulative, but nevertheless not tactless or provocative.
D. There are no visible signs of bitterness towards whites, although this may be a fine game of bluff [blufspel] on his part.
E. He acknowledges his own shortcomings, but nevertheless believes in himself.
F. He is a practical and pragmatic thinker who can arrive at a workable solution on a philosophical basis.
G. He has a capacity for integrated [integrerende] and creative thought.
H. He has an unbelievable memory, to reproduce things in the finest detail.
I. He has an unflinching belief in his cause and in the eventual triumph of African nationalism.
J. He regards himself as called to the task and this elevates him above the average white who, according to him, has apparently lost his idealism.
K. He believes self-discipline, and continually taking the initiative, to be the prerequisites for success.
“There exists no doubt,” the document continues, “that Mandela commands all the qualities to be the Number One black leader in South Africa. His period in prison has caused his psycho-political posture to increase rather than decrease, and with this he now has acquired the characteristic prison-charisma of the contemporary liberation leader.”85
It was a remarkably accurate analysis of Mandela’s personality and thinking, which would help to change the Minister’s attitude toward his prisoner. But it gave no answer to the crucial question of what to do with such a formidable opponent. And it would be another nine years before Coetsee would release the “Number One black leader.”
*Some puritan groups imposed their own censorship: Harry Gwala forbade prisoners in his section to read the girly back page of the Johannesburg Sunday Times.79
21
A Family Apart
1977–1980
WINNIE WAS more than ever Mandela’s lifeline to the outside world. “Sometimes I feel like one who is on the sidelines,” he told her, “who has missed life itself.” But she could help to connect him. On her visits he eagerly asked after old friends, avoiding any political references. And each year he carefully totted up her letters and visits, now more often allowed: in 1978, he told her, he had a harvest of fifteen visits and forty-three letters, fifteen of them from her.1
She could also convey his views, as she interpreted them, to the outside world, through journalists who came to see her. “Winnie would visit Nelson and then discuss matters,” said Harry Gwala, “and if you said, ‘Nelson saw it this way,’ it would tend to be the law, because his name was venerated. That’s how Robben Island exercised influence.”2 She was always outspoken: President Reagan, she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1981, was “no friend of the black people.”
And she could give Mandela some indication of the political mood in the country after the Soweto uprising, as she was in the thick of it. Immediately after the first riots a Black Parents’ Association was formed in Soweto to liaise with the children, and Winnie joined the executive—as the only woman member—with other prominent Sowetans, including her neighbor Dr. Motlana. South Africa was in upheaval. The police killed hundreds of young blacks, and thousands escaped from the country. Winnie spoke out without inhibition: “We shall fight to the bitter end for justice,” she told a protest meeting in Soweto.3 Motlana, who would always remain loyal to her, was astonished by her fearlessness and her physical strength: “She has got the kind of guts I don’t have, many of us don’t have. She would stand before police captains with machine guns and tell them to go and get stuffed.… She is not scared of anything!” But he was also struck by her ability to control herself: “Sometimes she behaved like an Englishman, stiff upper lip, very dismissive.”4
The police still saw her as a mastermind of resistance: two months after the Soweto uprising, she was imprisoned in the Fort with other women, including Motlana’s wife, Sally. She found Winnie a great leader, defying the warders while reassuring the other prisoners: “She was for ever ready to listen, to smile, to comfort.”5 Winnie spent nearly five months in the Fort, to Mandela’s distress, without being charged, in squalid conditions though without the earlier brutality, before she was released in December. She returned to Soweto as militant as ever among her young friends, and still closely watched by the police.
Five months after her release, in May 1977, she was banished. On Robben Island Ahmed Kathrada heard from a Hindu priest that she had been picked up by the police and driven 250 miles to Brandfort, a bleak Afrikaner town in the Orange Free State where most of the blacks spoke Sotho, which Winnie did not understand. She and her daughter Zindzi, now sixteen, were dumped with her furniture in a small, bare house in the black township with no heating, no running water. “When I opened the front door there was a mound of dirt in the living room,” she wrote to Mandela. “Most of the windows have been knocked out and the toilet is outside.”6 In Brandfort Winnie was kept under surveillance, and was banned from meeting with more than one person. Mandela saw this banishment as a “brazen and shameless act.”7 “I can’t believe it,” he wrote to Zindzi. “Mum has lost almost everything; she’ll never get any job there except perhaps as domestic or farm hand or washerwoman; she’ll spend all her days in poverty.”8 He was convinced that the government had deported her to this bleak spot in order to force her to return to the Transkei, where she was born, to help give legitimacy to the “independent homeland.”9 But Winnie was contemptuous of the idea: “The audacity of it! If anybody should leave, it’s the settler government.”10
Winnie stuck it out in the Brandfort house—“my cells” as she called it—for seven years. Her neighbors were warned against mixing with her, while a police sergeant watched her constantly. When a man tried to sell her a chicken while she was talking to a neighbor, she was charged with attending a gathering. “In what other country would the price of chickens be entered as evidence?” she told the New York Times. “They probably thought I was buying a Rhode Island Red,” she joked later.11 She soon regained her fighting spirit, challenging the police, championing local grievances and enlivening the township with her bright clothes—some in the ANC colors of black, green and yellow. She refused to pay for her services and rent, on the grounds that the house was not her home but a jail.12
Winnie’s banishment did not diminish her national popularity: from 1977 to 1979 opinion surveys showed her to be the most important political activist after the Zulu leader Chief Buthelezi.13 And in Brandfort she gained some friends, not just among her black neighbors, but also among Afrikaners. She was befriended by an Afrikaner doctor, Chris Hattingh; but he was killed in a car accident—which some people suspected was engineered—and his sister, who had befriended Zindzi, was scared away by the police.14
Winnie also became friendly with Piet de Waal, the only lawyer in Brandfort, who was an old friend of the Nationalist M.P. Kobie Coetsee, who had a farm nearby. When Winnie needed a lawyer de Waal was at first reluctant to take the case, but her Johannesburg lawyer Ismail Ayob warned him that he was ethically obliged to represent her, since she could not move out of Brandfort. De Waal, very embarrassed, explained his “unfortunate position” to Coetsee, and also to the Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, and tried to get her banished somewhere else. His attitude gradually changed. When Winnie first came to his office he complained about
the huge crowd outside; but as she paid more visits he began to regard her as a friend, as did his wife, Adele, who came from a well-known Afrikaner family. They were amazed by this warm and intelligent black woman, and championed her against the police.
Piet de Waal’s advocacy of Winnie became more important in 1980, when Kobie Coetsee became Minister of Justice. De Waal began pressing him first to lift Winnie’s bans, and then to reconsider Mandela’s imprisonment. Coetsee began rethinking his attitude to Mandela. “You could say,” he observed later, “that’s where the whole process started.”15 But in the meantime the police did not let up in their persecution of Winnie and, through her, of her husband.
On Robben Island Mandela felt all the more guilty about not being with Winnie. He was always grateful to people who dared to visit her at Brandfort, like Fatima Meer and Amina Cachalia. For two years from 1976 he had anxious dreams about Winnie. He was haunted by one recurring nightmare, in which he was trying to get home from Johannesburg without transport, and had to walk to Soweto: he would race to his house, only to find the door open, with nobody inside, and would worry desperately about what had happened to Winnie and the children.16 “I had hoped to build you a refuge, no matter how small,” he wrote a month after her arrival at Brandfort, “so that we would have a place for rest and sustenance before the arrival of the sad, dry days. I fell down and couldn’t do these things. I am as one building castles in the air.” “You have spent twenty-one years of your best years,” he told her on their wedding anniversary in June 1979, “rolling about in the treacherous whirlpools of an unfriendly sea.” “Every time I see you carrying visible signs of suffering,” he wrote after a visit, “I am tortured by a sense of guilt and shame.”17 Winnie, on her side, was struck by Mandela’s insights and discipline. “He would have been one of the greatest psychologists,” she wrote. “He is a complete lawyer through and through. He is a perfectionist without imposing himself. He philosophises a great deal. This is his natural self.”18
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