After a few months in their old matchbox house Mandela and Winnie moved into the big house in Beverly Hills, a more spacious part of Soweto, which Winnie had had specially built for them, with seven bedrooms and a conference room with a boardroom table for twenty-five. “See how right he looks in this house,” said Winnie, “and his wife built it for him, all by herself.”14 But Mandela had always been uneasy about the house’s extravagance, and its upkeep soon proved a financial burden—particularly after October 1990, when an unnamed donor stopped payments.15
On New Year’s Eve Winnie organized the “Bash of the Year” at the big house, with five hundred guests who included Sisulu, Tutu and Slovo: but Mandela appeared uneasy, and gave an unfestive speech, warning that schoolchildren must go back to school after the holidays. Winnie liked to depict the big house as a family love nest for the children and sixteen grandchildren. But stories emerged of her stumbling home in the small hours, and having to be carried to bed. The media were beginning to portray the famous couple as a national melodrama. They wondered, said Fatima Meer: “How could a god-like hero live with a witch-like wife?” Mandela, said John Carlin of the London Independent, was “blinded like Samson by love, seduced like Macbeth into betraying his better nature.”16
The ANC leaders faced a growing dilemma. They were well aware of Winnie’s political appeal, particularly to the young. Mandela recognized that she had a populist flair that he lacked. Tambo saw her as a crucial link with the young and unemployed: he realized that some of Winnie’s militant friends had dubious connections, but the ANC needed them inside their tent. And the support of Winnie and the firebrands was important to aspiring leaders, including Thabo Mbeki. Fatima Meer saw the Mandelas’ marriage more threatened by the ANC power struggle than by their personal relations.17
The political partnership still had its own electricity. “Lunching with the Mandelas, you could feel a real pact between them,” said one of his aides. “He seemed obsessed by her—and fascinated by his own obsession.”18 But Winnie resented Mandela’s total commitment to the movement. “The ANC just took him over completely,” she complained later. “He had been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to only respond to the call of the organization.” From the start she was shocked that Mandela should call de Klerk “a man of integrity,” and claimed she argued with him about it on their first trip abroad: de Klerk was “just as much a murderer as P. W. Botha.” When Mandela called for his supporters in Durban to disarm themselves, she was furious: “I threw up my arms,” she recalled. “You can’t call upon the ANC to throw their spears into the sea whilst they’re being killed by the enemy and our people are dying in hundreds.”19 While Mandela wanted to end the armed struggle, Winnie liked to wear a kind of MK uniform, and talked about “shooting our way to freedom.” She threatened to go back to the bush herself to fight the white man. But Mandela remained conciliatory to her: people outside the National Executive, he explained, did not find it so easy to understand the decisions.20
The “she-elephant” (“Indlovukazi”), as Winnie was called, was becoming increasingly out of control. The ANC hoped to restrain her by bringing her inside the organization, and in September 1990 they unwisely put her in charge of ANC welfare. It dismayed many large donors, including Bishop Trevor Huddleston, the Chairman of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, who thought Winnie was not reliable in handling large sums of money. Mandela defended her, saying that the opponents of the appointment could be counted “on the fingers of one hand.”21
But Winnie had her own grudges against many ANC leaders, particularly those who had publicly condemned her after the murder of Stompie Seipei in 1988. She attacked Cyril Ramaphosa, and mocked Murphy Morobe as a friend of Indians: “It’s Morobe or me,” she told Mandela. She saw a cabal trying to tame Mandela and break up the marriage. “They worked very hard to destroy that link with the family,” she explained later, “because they wanted a Mandela who is what he is today. I was extreme, very extreme.”22
Winnie was due to come up for trial early in 1991 for the abduction of Stompie and five others in December 1988 (see Chapter 26). The preparations aroused intense speculation, with stories of witnesses disappearing or leaving the country. Some politicians and diplomats worried that Winnie’s prosecution would undermine Mandela’s morale, and de Klerk was rumored to be trying to pressure the Attorney General to drop it. But Mandela publicly welcomed a trial to settle the matter, and accused the government of deliberately putting it off while the press judged her instead.23 When she was eventually charged—with kidnap and assault rather than murder—Winnie predictably retorted that it was part of the pattern of police harassment, which “has never been a surprise to the Mandela family or to myself or to the oppressed people of South Africa. I know I have personally been their barometer through which they can measure the wrath of the people.”24 Alfred Nzo, the ANC Secretary-General, condemned it as a political trial, which violated the spirit of the agreements with the government.
Mandela wanted Winnie to have the best possible defense. He asked George Bizos to take it on, and expected the costs to be paid by International Defence and Aid (IDAF), which was largely financed by the Swedes. But both the Swedes and the Chairman of IDAF, Trevor Huddleston, were doubtful that her case was eligible. In October Mandela rang the IDAF director, Horst Kleinschmidt, in London, clearly concerned that the funds had been refused. Kleinschmidt, as he reported to IDAF, “felt uneasy and awkward beyond description,” and explained that IDAF might soon be dissolved anyway. Eventually the Swedes were persuaded to pay much of the heavy cost of the trial, while part was paid by President Qadaffi of Libya. But the argument, said Denis Herbstein, the historian of IDAF, “drove a wedge between the ANC and the IDAF board that soured relations once and for all”;25 and IDAF people were hurt that Mandela never mentioned them in his autobiography.
When Winnie finally came up for trial in February 1991, Mandela gave her maximum support, which he saw as a husband’s duty, and urged his friends to turn up: on the opening day the audience included Joe Slovo, Alfred Nzo, Chris Hani and Fatima Meer. Only a few resisted: “I was moved by his loyalty to her,” said Amina Cachalia, “but she wasn’t worth it.”26 From London the Tambos sent messages of solidarity: “We know you have told the truth,” wrote Oliver to Winnie. “Whether the court decides in our favour or against us, you will continue to have our confidence and love.”27
The four-month trial had its own dramas, with disappearing witnesses and changing testimony. Winnie tried to distance herself from the Mandela United Football Club, and stuck to her alibi, that she was back in Brandfort on the night of Stompie’s beating. The defense lawyers were puzzled by the apparent constraint of the prosecutors. “Somebody tried to sabotage the case,” the assistant prosecutor van Vuuren testified seven years later. “The security police obviously did not give us the evidence that should have been available to destroy her alibi.”28 Just after the murder the police had enough evidence to arrest Winnie, as the prison records show. But were they withholding it to protect a possible First Lady, or keeping back ammunition for a future bombardment?
Winnie herself spent five days in the witness box, remaining self-possessed and poker-faced, the judge observed, while showing herself to be “a calm, composed, deliberate and unblushing liar.” The judge accepted her alibi, while finding her guilty of conniving in the assault, with a “complete absence of compassion towards the victims.” He sentenced her to six years. She appeared unabashed as she left the court with her fist clenched. Mandela, listening to the verdict in court, appeared much more upset, but did not question the judgment: “Once an appeal has been made, it is proper to leave the matter in the hands of the court.” Winnie continued to insist that the judge “was not trying me as an individual. He was trying the ANC, criminalizing the ANC and attempting to alienate me from the ANC.”29
Winnie appealed against the verdict, and in June 1993 the Appeal Court would deliver its judgment: it confirmed her conviction for kidnapping,
but decided she was not an accessory to the assaults. And after “careful and anxious” consideration the court reduced the sentence to only two years’ imprisonment, suspended, and a fine of R15,000 (about £3,000). The penalty was surprisingly lenient, but the judgment (including the acceptance of Winnie’s alibi) would not be corroborated by the findings of the Truth Commission five years later. The Stompie murder still would not go away.30
Winnie was losing some of her political following. At the ANC’s Durban conference after the trial she was elected to the National Executive; she tried to become President of the Women’s League, against the advice of Mandela, who thought she would fail—which she did. In August the ANC reorganized its welfare department to cut back her powers. Winnie was becoming still more defiantly headstrong, consorting with her young lawyer lover, Dali Mpofu, with an openness which humiliated Mandela. When she planned to fly to America on a supposedly official trip he asked her not to go: she not only disregarded him, but took Mpofu with her; when Mandela rang her in New York, Mpofu answered the phone.31
Mandela faced a new crisis when Winnie suddenly turned against Xoliswa Falati, her old ally against Paul Verryn in the Stompie affair, and threw her out of her house in Soweto. Falati appealed to Mandela, who thought Winnie had been unfair to her; he turned up at the house to find a reporter from the Sowetan newspaper, with a photographer recording Falati shut out of the house. Mandela tried to persuade the reporter to drop that story, and then asked the night editor of the Sowetan, Moegsien Williams (later editor of the Cape Argus), to see him at the big house. Williams arrived to find Winnie hosting a big party to celebrate the engagement of her daughter Zindzi to Zwelibanzi Hlongwane, a Soweto businessman, with champagne corks popping, while Mandela sat sadly in his study, looking distraught. He implored Williams to spike the story, which he thought could damage Winnie’s chances in the appeal. Williams was deeply upset but could not suppress it. The next Monday, March 30, 1992, the Sowetan blazoned the story of Winnie’s wild behavior, setting off a new wave of speculation about the Mandela marriage.32
Falati took her revenge on Winnie by retracting her supportive evidence in the trial: she now alleged that Winnie had not only connived in the torture of Stompie, but had ordered the murder of other enemies, including Abubaker Asvat, the Indian doctor in Soweto who could have contradicted her alibi. And Winnie’s driver John Morgan also now contradicted his own evidence, to claim that Winnie had led the assault on Stompie.33
Mandela could not now ignore Winnie’s misdeeds. On April 13 he summoned a press conference where, flanked by his two oldest friends, Tambo and Sisulu (who had not tried to influence him), in front of the television cameras, he paid tribute to Winnie’s fortitude and contribution to the struggle, but went on to announce that because of their differences and tensions “we have mutually agreed that a separation would be the best for each of us.” He added: “I part from my wife with no recriminations. I embrace her with all the love and affection I have nursed for her inside and outside prison from the moment I first met her.” He rose to leave with a look of total desolation: “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you appreciate the pain I have gone through.” It was the closest he ever came to publicly expressing his private tragedy.
For a time he seemed to have lost his confidence. The BBC correspondent Fergal Keane found him a changed man a week later, talking sadly about having to choose between his wife and the struggle.34 He began a new life, and moved into a house which had been bought for him by a friendly African head of state, and which his aide Barbara Masekela carefully prepared for him, hoping it would “hide his pain.”35 It was a spacious but faded suburban house in the rich white suburb of Houghton, with a big garden and guards in a gatehouse, but it looked unlived-in. Mandela appeared isolated, while his close friends were “tight-lipped and tense.”36 Sometimes he seemed able to talk only to his guards, or to white neighbors he would sometimes drop in on. He was, said one friend, “in a sea of loneliness.” He took solace from his grandchildren, with whom he could romp and relax, though their love was not always disinterested: “Around Christmas they remember they have a grandfather,” he explained. “They run around me and tell me how much they love me … and I know what question will follow: what are you going to give us?”37
Winnie still hoped for a reconciliation, and begged Fatima Meer—who remained friendly with both parties—to persuade Mandela to change his mind. But Winnie had now antagonized both her husband and the ANC, who insisted she resign from her official position. And there was another time fuse fizzling away that would finally demolish her relationship with Mandela. Back in May ANC investigators had begun to look into misappropriated funds involving Winnie’s lover Dali Mpofu when he was her deputy in the welfare department. They had come upon a passionate four-page letter that Winnie had written to him in March. In it she laid into Mpofu furiously for sleeping with another woman—“running around fucking at the slightest emotional excuse … before I’m through with you you are going to learn a bit of honesty and sincerity and know what betrayal of one’s trust means to a woman!” She had not been speaking with “Tata” (Mandela) for five months now, she said in the letter, and “the situation is deteriorating at home.” But more politically damaging was her reference to checks she had cashed for Mpofu in the name of the welfare department, which Mandela had asked to be investigated.
It was a gift to her enemies. A copy of the letter was sent to the Johannesburg Sunday Star and Sunday Times, which confirmed the handwriting as hers. Winnie tried desperately to get the letter back, in exchange for another document. But it had been shown to Mandela himself, who realized it was “incompatible with a marriage relationship.” It was published unedited by the Sunday Times on September 6, 1992, alongside a picture of Winnie with Mpofu. Four days later she resigned her positions in the ANC, “in the interest of my dear husband and my beloved family,” while blaming “a vicious and malicious campaign against me.”38
Mandela appeared to find the letter the last straw, a betrayal and insult he could not ignore. Some close friends worried that he might be breaking down. He seemed physically depressed and inert, reluctant to get out of bed. It was a few days before he recovered his poise, with the help of a demanding schedule which left him little time alone. He kept up some appearance of normal family life. In October 1992, a month after the letter had been published, Winnie organized a wedding reception for Zindzi and her bridegroom, Hlongwane, with 850 guests, in the ballroom of the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg. Mandela appeared, without saying a word to Winnie. As he sat grimly at his table Helen Suzman sent him a note across the room telling him that he was looking like John Vorster, the former Prime Minister, and must smile—which he briefly did.39 At the end of the party he made a moving speech. He described how one thread ran through the autobiographies of all freedom fighters: “their private lives with their families are totally destabilised.”
We watched our children grow up without our guidance, and when we did come out, my children, for example, said: “We thought we had a father, and that one day he’d come back, but to our dismay our father comes back, and he leaves us alone almost daily, because he has now become the father of the nation.” Again, one wonders whether it was worth it. But when those doubts come you nevertheless decided for the umpteenth time that in spite of all problems it was—still is—the correct decision that we should commit ourselves.40
32
Negotiating
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.
—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” 1920
NEARLY TWO years after his release, Mandela saw the opening of the negotiations he had been working for. On December 21, 1991, in the middle of the midsummer Christmas holiday, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) was held in the World Trade Centre, a futurist building like a warehouse near Johannesburg airport. “It was amazing,” said Helen Suzman; “people who’d just been in jail negotiating with the people who put them there. But they’d decid
ed on a new South Africa.”1 Many ANC delegates were still surprised to be sitting on equal terms with their oppressors: “I have spotted twelve policemen who were guarding me in jail,” said Murphy Morobe, who would later manage the convention. “Now they see me chatting amicably with the Minister of Defence and Chief of Police.”2
Two hundred and twenty-eight delegates had assembled from nineteen political parties. It was the most important gathering, said Mandela, since the convention in 1909 which created the Union of South Africa; but the delegates then were all white, while now most were black. There were some dangerous absentees, including right-wing Afrikaner parties and Chief Buthelezi, who had unreasonably demanded three separate delegations for the Zulus. But the first key to peace was to reach some kind of understanding between the ANC and the government.
Mandela Page 59
