But Mandela longed for physical contact, and poured out his emotions in letters which were quite unlike his measured political messages. “At my age I would have expected all the urges of youth to have faded away,” he wrote to Winnie when he was sixty. “But it does not appear to be so. The mere sight of you, even the thought of you, kindles a thousand fires in me.” “I spent a lot of time on this day thinking of you,” he wrote in June 1980. “Every time I do, I literally glow and long to embrace you and feel the electric shocks that your flesh rubs onto me, your navel and heartbeat.” He was sensitive about his age: “I am not used to seeing parts of my body loose and sagging as if I am sixty-two,” he wrote to Winnie in December 1976. “You know well that I am only forty-five and hardly anyone will have the courage to challenge that statement when I resume my exercises.”19 But Winnie was more conscious now of the difference in their ages: “Nelson is sixty-three now,” she told the journalist Allister Sparks in 1982, “and I am like a young girl, still longing for the experience of married life.”20
Despite his apparent self-sufficiency in jail, Mandela seemed dependent on Winnie’s support. “Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love,” he wrote the month before, “I would have fallen apart many years ago.” And two months later: “Your love and devotion has created a debt which I will never attempt to pay back.” He felt luckier than some of his fellow inmates: “Not all of us are as fortunate,” he wrote in February 1980. “But I’d like you to know that you have spoiled me very much and a spoiled baby is always difficult to control.” “There is far less steel in me than I had thought,” he told her in June 1980. “Distance and two decades of separation have not strengthened the steel in me and [have] deepened my anxiety over the family.”
Mandela liked to remember Winnie’s violent jealousy as well as her love: “like a Penelope whose chastity has been questioned.”21 He recalled to Zindzi how he had once been asked to give an attractive woman a lift to Sophiatown, and Winnie had retired to the bedroom shaking with anger; or the time when he was waiting in the office to see a beautiful secretary, and she had discovered him and dragged him out. “Today we’ve a high-souled and tolerant shepherdess,” he reckoned, rather prematurely, “who has made a man of me.”22 He had always admired strong women, and when Winnie wrote to him about 1979 being Women’s Year he reflected on the powerful women emerging around the world: Simone Veil, the President of the European Parliament, and Rosalyn Carter, the American First Lady, who “seems to be wearing the trousers”—not to mention Margaret Thatcher. He looked back to earlier female rulers like Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great, but preferred the new women who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.23
Winnie appeared on the surface to have overcome the isolation and hardship of Brandfort, with as much self-control as Mandela. In May 1979 she vividly described her “little Siberia” to her friend Mary Benson in London: “The empty long days drag on, one like the other, no matter how hard I try to study. The solitude is deadly, the grey matchbox shacks, so desolate, simply stare at you as lifeless as the occupants, who form a human chain of frustration as they pass next to my window. From the moment the bar opens until it closes at eight p.m., they are paralytic drunk.” “How grim that must sound,” she went on, “yet there’s something so purifying about exile.… What could be greater than being part of such a cause no matter how infinitesimal our contribution is.”24
Winnie was making use of her experience as a social worker to build up such communal activities as a crèche, a sewing group and a clinic, assisted by donations which flowed in as journalists and diplomats began to visit her. She started studying for a degree in social work by correspondence, but faced many obstacles. “I feel disappointed and even disgusted for I know that social work is second nature to you,” Mandela wrote to her. “To get your degree would be such a compensation for the rough and raw deals that you have experienced during the last twenty-two years.”25
Visitors found Winnie indomitable. “I was gladly surprised and impressed by her very pleasant disposition, her calmness and complete composure,” said her old friend Ellen Kuzwayo when she met her again in 1982. “Her charm, her singing laughter, her unchanging face and her ever-present dignity are those of the Winnie Nomzamo of the 1950s when I first met her.”26
But Winnie’s public image was misleading: she was not quite the upright and controlled heroine that she seemed to the world; and some friends thought the exile in Brandfort, and her ordeals in jail, had fundamentally changed her. Away from reporters, and unknown to Mandela, she was behaving more recklessly, flaunting her fame in white shops, suddenly erupting into violence and drinking more heavily. The mayor of Brandfort, who ran a liquor store, said: “She comes in here to buy things, champagne, Cinzano, things like that.” Her bills were said to amount to R3,000 a month.27 Her righteous contempt for the police, together with her international acclaim, were combining to give Winnie a heady sense of being above any law; and in the armory of the ANC she was becoming a much looser cannon—which would soon be firing off some dangerous explosives.
The children were suffering less visibly, but they were equally worrying: “I never stop thinking that some of the children are unable to fulfill their life dreams,” Mandela told Winnie in 1979, “simply because I am not there to help them solve their numerous problems.”28 He was preoccupied with their education, Kathrada noticed, to the point of blackmail: “When one seemed either reluctant or slow to carry out his admonitions, he virtually prohibited her from visiting until she satisfied him that she was studying seriously.”29
He was less worried about Zeni, his elder daughter by Winnie, after she became engaged to Prince Thumbumuzi, the son of the Swazi King Sobhuza, whom she had met at Waterford School. Mandela was concerned that Zeni was too young for marriage at eighteen, and that she had not finished high school: “Priority number one is your studies,” he told Zeni’s sister, Zindzi.30 But he was proud to be linked to “one of the most famous families in South Africa,” as he told Winnie, and he saw Sobhuza as a popular monarch who supported the ANC.31 With chiefly formality he asked his lawyer George Bizos to ask the Prince how he would support his daughter; Bizos reported that Thumbumuzi’s prospects were good, and that he was genuinely in love.
Mandela saw it as a dynastic marriage, between a Swazi prince and a Tembu princess.32 He was frustrated that he could not give his daughter away in the traditional marriage ceremony in 1977, but was thrilled by the birth of their daughter, whom he insisted should be called Zaziwe (“hope”): “We will not feel happy until you assure us that you have accepted the name.”33 He arranged for his old friend Helen Joseph, now seventy-three, to be godmother: in a photograph of the christening he “immediately spotted a tall lady who stood upright like a field marshal.”34 As the other godparent he chose, with characteristic forgiveness, the ninety-one-year-old Dr. James Moroka—the former ANC President who had betrayed him and other leaders of the Defiance Campaign in 1952 by branding them as communists.
Zeni’s new status as a foreign princess gave her the precious diplomatic privilege of being allowed to see her father in the same room, not from behind glass. When she arrived on the island with her husband and their baby daughter Mandela was able to embrace Zeni for the first time since his imprisonment, and held the baby with delight throughout the visit. He still worried, he wrote, about her “lack of ambition and finesse,” but was partly reassured after she left with her young family for America. And he was thrilled when more grandchildren arrived.35
Zindzi was more of a problem. Like Winnie she was spirited, bright and passionate. She was apprehensive when at the age of sixteen she first visited him in jail, but was reassured by his warmth: “Oh, darling,” he said, “I can see you now as a kid at home on my lap.… We started dreaming and dreaming and then I felt so free.”36 “She has a lot of fire in her, and I hope she will exploit it fully,” he told a friend afterward.37 But he worried about her in Brandfort, away from her friends, alon
e with her harassed mother. “How does poor Mum show her love to our last-born in a strange place where she has no income, where she faces numerous problems?” he wrote to her on her seventeenth birthday in 1977. “In such circumstances, is it at all correct to talk of a birthday?” He could be solicitous: when Zindzi was embarrassed by the prospect of attending Zeni’s wedding with bare breasts, following Swazi royal custom, he reassured her: “Your breasts should be as hard as apples and as dangerous as cannons.” And he was pleased when she told him that she wanted to become a writer, which was “a prestigious profession”: Jim Bailey, the owner of Drum, had invited her to become a columnist for his new women’s magazine, True Love, and she had also begun writing poetry.38 The next year, 1978, she published a book of poetry, Black As I Am, which began with a poem about her father:
A tree is chopped down
And the fruit was scattered
I cried …39
The book was awarded a $1,000 prize in America, and was well reviewed by Alan Paton and others. Mandela found the language simple and crisp, but advised Zindzi to polish the rough edges.40 He did not welcome the news that she planned to write a family biography; he had been distressed by recent controversial autobiographies by Margaret Trudeau, the separated wife of the Canadian Prime Minister, and Sophia Loren, his favorite film star, and he dreaded sensationalism: “A happy family life is an important pillar to any public man.”41
Mandela loved Zindzi’s visits to Robben Island. “You make a wonderful impression to me whenever I see you,” he told her in March 1979. “You were really striking in your pantaloons,” he wrote six months later. But behind her exuberance Zindzi was suffering from confusion and sporadic depression: she had to see a psychiatrist, and her studies were set back. Mandela tried to reassure her that moodiness was common, and was quite understandable in her circumstances. He praised her inquisitive mind and lovely sense of humor, and sympathized with her anger at her disrupted life. He urged her: “There are few misfortunes in this world that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will and the necessary skill.”42 But Zindzi did not have her father’s iron will: her writing had dried up, and she had backed off from going to Wits University. She had fallen in love with an odd-job man, Oupa Seakamela, by whom she had a daughter, Zoleka; she later had a son, Gadaffi, by a Rastafarian called Mbuyiselo, who would physically assault her.43 She left Winnie in Brandfort to go back to the family house in Orlando. Mandela was anxiously protective: he understood Zindzi’s longing to return to her childhood home, but did not want her to live alone: he hoped that an elderly aunt, or some friendly couple, might join her, but he knew that the police would harass anyone associated with the Mandelas.44
He also worried about his two eldest children by his first wife, Evelyn. “It was always a matter of deep pain,” said Fatima Meer, who remained friends with most of the family, “that those whom he loved … did not love each other as much as they should.” Makgatho, Mandela’s only surviving son, was still disappointing. After his wife, Rayne (“Rennie”), returned to her studies, Mandela hoped that he would realize that he was “the only black sheep in the family,” and asked Makgatho’s sister Maki to keep urging him to think of his future. “When he does actually enter a school I will do everything in my power to help him, but definitely not before that,” Mandela wrote in 1979.45 But Makgatho continued to resist education, which his father valued above everything.
Maki was hardly more communicative. Mandela was surprised, he wrote to her after his sixtieth birthday in 1978, that she should “attach no significance whatsoever to such important things as birthdays and Christmas cards.” In 1978, after her marriage collapsed, he urged her to divorce without delay: “You are still young with a bright future, if from now on you plan carefully and are really determined to go forward.”46 She eventually decided that “Life without a profession is futile,” and was admitted to Fort Hare in late 1978, “through Mum Winnie’s maneuvers.” She told him that this made her “the happiest soul.”47 He was very relieved, and advised her to read at least two newspapers a day.
Mandela was worried that Maki’s husband, Camagu, was not supporting the children, and poignantly warned her about the traumas of divorce: the children would be “tortured by the stigma of growing up without the security of a home where both parents live together.” He urged Maki to be strong: “Divorce may destroy a woman but strong characters have not only survived but have gone further.”48 In some ways Maki was the most independent-minded of Mandela’s children, always ready to argue with him. “Don’t make me regret I am here,” he once wrote to her sadly. “I do not want to come to the point where I regret what I am doing. What I need to do is worthwhile, not only for you and the rest of the family but for all black people.”49
In the loneliness of his cell Mandela was often racked by remorse as he looked back over his earlier years. “One of the things that tortured me,” he said afterward, “was how I have treated people who have been very kind to me, specially when I was in difficulties, went out of their way to make me happy, under no obligation at all. Once I was a lawyer I forgot about them.”50 He would never quite lose that remorse: “I didn’t show sufficient gratitude to those who were kind to me when hard times were knocking at my door,” he said later.51
He gained strength from thinking about his children and his increasing number of grandchildren: he would often talk about them with his fellow prisoners, and would try to imagine their lives. “I am at my best when the sun goes down to rest and the big gates slam,” he wrote to Winnie. “This is the time for relaxation when I choose to gloss over my shortcomings and count my fortunes one by one instead.”52 But he desperately missed the physical contact which could express simple love between himself and his children, and soften the sterner side of his parental ambitions. “How can a child grow up,” he asked his friends, “without ever touching its father?”53 The steely political resolve that he had hardened in prison, which so inspired his comrades, did not easily mix with the softer side of parenting; and he would continue to blame himself for being an absent head of the family, who had sacrificed them for his political purpose. Already when he went underground in 1961 he knew that he was choosing a path which would separate him from any settled family life. But his isolation in prison distanced him from his children, and from Winnie, much more even than he realized at the time.
22
Prison Within a Prison
1978–1982
FROM HIS island prison, Mandela peered out at the mainland with very incomplete information, but with stubborn optimism. “The little that filters through these grim walls convinces us that our forces are making progress,” he wrote to his friend Sheila Weinberg in 1978. “Our people are fighting back courageously, so much so that I often wonder whether it is those inside or outside jail who suffer most.”1 “We have pestered almost every newcomer to the island about information relating to the political situation,” he told Rhadi, the wife of his old Durban communist friend J. N. Singh, the next year. “And we have constantly sought information about the men and women who are the driving force behind our organisation.”2
In his sixties, Mandela was very aware that he had to come to terms with a quite new generation, particularly after his arguments with the Soweto rebels. He desperately needed to keep in touch with the politicians outside, particularly with the ANC President, Oliver Tambo, who was now based in Lusaka and London, where his wife, Adelaide, and his children lived in Muswell Hill. Mandela was sometimes able to smuggle out political letters through visitors, departing prisoners or other intermediaries still not disclosed. He wrote to Adelaide (under the name Matlala) as a cover for Tambo (called by his middle name, Reginald). The censors soon rumbled this subterfuge, as he told Adelaide in 1980: “The department of prisons wants to break all kinds of contact between Reggie and myself.” But messages still got through.
Mandela’s first concern was that Tambo should not overwork himself, since he was not strong. “I appeal to
him once more to take a holiday, even for a fortnight,” he wrote to Adelaide in December 1980. He was also worried about Adelaide’s own health, after a fall which had required several operations and which might confine her to a wheelchair: “Only a woman of steel could have pulled through such a horrible experience.”3 But Mandela’s main preoccupations were that the ANC must hold together, and avoid the lethal rivalries which had undermined so many liberation movements; and Tambo must be the unquestioned leader. In 1978 some exiles were claiming that the Robben Island prisoners were critical of the handling of the struggle, and wanted to lead it themselves; but Mandela and Raymond Mhlaba wrote to Tambo denying this. Some prisoners, they conceded, had complained about the inactivity outside, but they appreciated the very difficult conditions, and accepted that the leaders in exile must move “cautiously and patiently.” They were confident that “the organisation has never been so strong in its history,” and were encouraged by “the high level of political consciousness on the part of our people who come into jail, including men in their early twenties.”4
Mandela knew that Pretoria was doing its best to divide the Africans, and to co-opt their leaders into the apartheid system. He was especially concerned about the new tribal homelands, or Bantustans, the showpieces of “grand apartheid” which were being offered “independence” under Pretoria’s control, with rich rewards for collaborators. The prisoners watched the process with agonizing frustration and anger. “With ‘independence’ for Bantustans,” wrote Walter Sisulu in 1976, “the Nats will have gone a long way in dividing our people along ethnic lines and further sown seeds that may well become a time bomb that will explode in our midst, long after the Nats and white minority rule have been vanquished.”5
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