Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  In five years of government he never sacked a cabinet minister for poor performance even though there was no shortage of candidates. The one casualty, Pallo Jordan, the Minister of Post, Telecommunications and Broadcasting, was known for his independence of thought and was said to have poor relations with Mr. Mbeki, Mandela’s deputy and effective prime minister. It was these two factors which were believed to have counted against him. After an outcry in the press he was reinstated in another cabinet post, but the lesson was clear for all who wanted to prosper in politics.

  The more opponent’s targeted weak links in the cabinet the more defensive Mandela became. He himself conceded the greatest disappointment of his presidency after he stepped down from office, when he acknowledged that he had utterly failed to combat the pressing challenge of AIDS. When his successor Mbeki’s controversial policy, which drew on the views of “Aids dissident” scientists, provoked international uproar, Mr. Mandela pointedly distanced himself from it.

  Ironically, in view of this admission, one of the bigger political scandals of his administration concerned an Aids education play. Commissioned by the Health Ministry, the playwright was allocated more than two million pounds of European Union aid money, much of which it emerged later had been frittered away. In a society lacking the most basic medical health care it was a crass misuse of money. But Mandela backed his minister, Dr Nkosazana Zuma. The display of loyalty was very much in keeping with the centralizing ethos of the ANC. Politicians in the most developed democracies bridle when criticized by the press. But there was also a personal element to his stance. His stubborn streak was no secret to members of the ANC. It was as if right at the end of his career he had let down his guard to reveal an autocratic tendency imbibed in the chief’s household where he was raised.

  In a continent with a record of intolerance like Africa’s the waiving of the principle of accountability set a worrying precedent, although the most prominent case of Mandela’s loyalty was also the most excusable or at least the most human.

  We had at least to admire her gall. Her voice was hesitant and her stance unassuming and yet she commanded the attention of everyone in the packed court. Her skin glowed. She looked a decade younger than her sixty-three years. For two days Winnie Mandela had sat in Johannesburg’s High Court as her husband had gone through the agony of parading their personal life in a bid to end their marriage once and for all. They entered the courtroom at opposite ends and sat only a few feet from each other but never exchanged a glance. She kept her face down on the first day as he took the stand and haltingly described how he had become one of the world’s best-known cuckolds.

  ‘Ever since I came back from jail not once has she ever entered the room whilst I was awake,’ he said. ‘I said that man and wife normally discuss their most intimate and personal problems in the bedroom. I told her there are so many issues, many of them sensitive, I would like to discuss with you, but she always refused. She is the type of person who fears confrontation. I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her.’

  Now, halfway through the second day, she had dismissed her counsel and the denouement was nigh. The time had come for Winnie to speak. It was like watching a Greek tragedy. The crowd in the gallery was the chorus; they filled the adjournments with agonized commentaries. The set, the benches of Johannesburg Supreme Court, was suitably simple and remained unchanged in every scene. The protagonists were no mere mortals. They were the most famous couple in the land. The journalists in the press bench were the audience. We knew how the drama would end, with the granting of a divorce, and yet first we had to go through a heart-churning series of scenes culminating in Winnie’s transparently bogus attempt to plead for more time to prepare her case.

  When Winnie married Mandela in 1958, in the briefest of interludes between the trials, bannings and imprisonments, which blighted forty years of his life, her father warned her she was marrying a man who was already wed to the ‘struggle’ and that their marriage would be under constant strain. He closed by saying she would have no choice but to follow him and that if he was a witch, she would have to become one too – a prediction that her critics would argue came true.

  In the early years of the Mandela marriage it is hard not to feel sympathy for Winnie. When they met in the early Fifties he was sixteen years her senior with three children from his previous marriage. As a marked man he could seldom spend two nights under the same roof. She was a headstrong twenty two-year-old who had already made a name for herself in Soweto as a social worker, and yet he was prone to lecture her as if she was a political cadre. Mandela says it caused him great pain when he was in prison to think of his children growing up without him. Time and again in his autobiography he writes of his guilt at his absence and ponders the politician’s hoary dilemma over how to divide one’s time between family and ‘cause’. In his case the argument was particularly acute. Winnie suffered appallingly for her connection with South Africa’s foremost political prisoner. The security police raided her house night after night in the grim pre-dawn hours. She endured repeated stints of solitary confinement. In 1977 she was banished to a remote rural township, 300 miles from Johannesburg, where she lived on and off for seven years until she broke her banning order and returned to Soweto.

  For the outside world she was the indefatigable martyr whom everyone wanted to hear. In the dog days of the anti-apartheid movement in the early Seventies she was almost alone in refusing to lie down. She would shout at the policemen as they came to arrest her and even resist them. A local newspaper coined the nickname ‘Mother of the Nation’. Desperate to do their bit against apartheid, foreign donors showered money on her. Visiting delegations and journalists made the trek down to Brandfort to pay court.

  But the heady brew of politics and the impregnability of her position as Mandela’s wife seem to have had an intoxicating effect. She had been known for her impulsiveness in her child hood and had a reputation at school as a bully. As a student in Soweto she is said to have earned nicknames like ‘The Amazon Queen’ and ‘Lady Tarzan’. While Mandela was free, her spirit was in check. But once he was on Robben Island it became increasingly difficult for anyone in the anti-apartheid movement to control her. She developed a personality cult, spent all the money and, more dangerous still, nurtured the idea that she was above the law.

  Her sympathizers see her as a tragic figure brought low by circumstances beyond her control. Certainly the anti-apartheid movement inadvertently hastened her downfall. As with foreign aid to the Big Men leaders, much of the funding she received required no accounting. British aid helped to pay for her lavish mansion in one of the up market areas of Soweto. A police search of her house revealed uncashed cheques lying around in boxes. The South African security police did their best to weaken, brutalize and corrupt her. But the argument that in a normal society she would never have faced such temptation is an old and discredited defence. It is also an insult to the thousands of black South Africans who suffered appallingly, like Albertina Sisulu, the wife of Mandela’s close friend Walter, but did not lose their moral compass.

  Winnie’s precipitous slide into infamy accelerated in the midEighties, when she moonlighted in Soweto as a afiosi capo. In public she was the doughty face of resistance. In private she ran from her backyard the infamous ‘Mandela United Football Club’, a group of activists and hoodlums who terrorized the neighbourhood. The veil briefly lifted in 1988, when children from a school that had been attacked by her ‘club’ burned down her house. But her reputation started to suffer serious damage only in January 1990 with the discovery on a Soweto rubbish dump of the mutilated body of Stompie Moeketsi, a fourteen year old activist who had last been seen in her backyard.

  The ‘Stompie’ case led to the unravelling of a lurid tapestry of murder and assault, which enveloped the ‘club’- or at least it, led to the unravelling of some of the threads. The club coach, Jerry Richardson, was convicted of murdering Stompie. Winnie herself was convicted of kidnapping him a
nd three others and also of being an accessory to brutal assaults they suffered in her house. She was sentenced to six years in prison after the judge gave an excoriating assessment of her nature, describing her as a ‘calm, composed, deliberate and unblushing liar’. The sentence was suspended on appeal and later commuted to a fine. Other club members were convicted of a series of crimes including murder and assault, and there was a string of outstanding cases of unsolved disappearances linked to Winnie and her club.

  And yet, far from keeping a low profile while she waited for the result of her appeal, she embarked on a spending spree largely at the ANC’s expense. She had to resign as head of the ANC’s welfare department in 1991 after it emerged that £80,000 had disappeared from its account. Much of it is believed to have been frittered away with her deputy and lover, the young lawyer Dali Mpofu, with whom she had flown to America on Concorde the year after Mandela’s release.

  Mandela was the one man who could have criticized Winnie with impunity. But instead, tom by his love and possibly guilt, he backed and even promoted her. His loyalty was easy to understand. They were passionately in love before he went to prison and her memory helped to sustain him during the bleak periods that assailed even as strong-willed a prisoner as Mandela. He realized they were growing apart during their long separation but when he emerged from prison he was desperate to believe in her. He continued to support her in the face of heated opposition from senior officials in the ANC. The careers of several high-fliers who had dared to say the un-sayable and criticize her over Stompie came to an abrupt halt after his release from prison. On the day of her sentencing he declared:

  ‘My faith in her has been fully vindicated.’ By the time he came to appreciate her flaws it was far too late.

  And so the pattern of scandal, sidelining and then recovery was set. Winnie was elected to parliament for the ANC despite the ANC’s pieties about a new moral order. She won a place in Mandela’s government as deputy minister of arts, science and culture. She lasted less than a year in his government after a succession of financial and political scandals, including attempted illegal diamond-buying and abuse of government funds and ministerial influence. But Mandela fired her very much as a last resort only after persistent attacks on his style of leadership and after she flouted his authority by flying to West Africa against his instructions. In 1997 she was back as head of the ANC’s women’s league as an irrepressible counterweight to South Africa’s hopes of entrenching a belief in the sovereignty of the law.

  All the while she proved herself a brilliant self-publicist. The more the white-dominated establishment criticized her, the easier she found it to play the race card and present herself as a victim of a racist campaign. Her defence of the common man in the townships was laughable in the light of her corrupt and extravagant lifestyle. Court papers in the divorce hearing suggested she spent £1,700 a month on clothes, £350 on cosmetics and over £2,000 on entertaining, massive sums in South Africa. But her politics were canny. The ‘Black Evita’, as she was dubbed by one satirist, gave the impression that while others talked, she ‘did’, arranging for running water and electricity to reach impoverished settlements. She was seen at all the right township funerals •lending an ear to grievances and disappointment with the new order. For millions of poor blacks she was a heroine.

  I followed her to a remote township in the KaNgwane homeland, on the edge of the Kruger National Park, shortly before the April 1994 election. She was the first and only big name in the ANC to campaign there. As her helicopter touched down, scores of people charged through the dust cloud to pay their respects. She was led to the podium as if she was a visiting queen.

  ‘If any of the promises I have made are not recognized when the ANC is in government, please come and fetch me,’ she said to roars of support. ‘I will lead you against my own government’ – a threat which many whites and even some in the ANC fear could yet return to haunt South Africa.

  Her opponents’ best opportunity to discredit her came in December 1997 at a special hearing of the Truth Commission into the activities of her football club. Her critics hoped that the sight of the relatives of dead and missing activists who had last been seen in her company might turn the tide against her. In the commission’s final report the ‘club’ was linked to at least eighteen killings and Winnie was considered ‘politically and morally accountable’ for these and other gross human rights abuses committed by the club. Many of the details emerged in heart-rending testimony at the hearing. But the process back fired badly. Winnie had astutely judged that the sight of her being quizzed by a panel of mainly white jurors would play in her favour among her supporters watching the proceedings in the townships live on television. For that very reason, it is suspected; she had specifically requested a public hearing. While outrage at her audacity reached new levels in the media, and lawyers derided her performance as contemptible, she coolly dismissed the allegations as lies or claimed her memory failed her.

  The hearing temporarily checked her career. She was due to stand as deputy president of the ANC at its congress ten days later, but, in a moment of high drama, on the day of the vote Winnie withdrew her nomination. The ANC leadership appreciated that her triumph would send all the wrong signals to the outside world. Many of them also had misgivings about her record. Delegates later told me that the word had gone round that she was not to be backed. Winnie, it seemed, had read the runes.

  Mandela gave the Truth Commission hearing a wide berth in marked contrast to his stance at Winnie’s kidnap trial six years earlier when he stood by her with a set face through day after day of embarrassing testimony. He had broken the shackles of his old relationship. He had a new love, Graca Machel, the widow of the former Mozambican president. To the delight of South Africans they behaved like teenagers on their first date, holding hands and shyly deflecting questions. No one could resent his new-found happiness; it had taken a long time in coming.

  But Winnie was clearly far from finished. Through her name and her history she will be the keeper of the Mandela flame long after he has left politics. After her divorce she rekindled her maiden name and styled herself Madikizela-Mandela. But there is little doubt she will brandish the Mandela part to its maximum advantage. She may even return to government. There is a strong tradition in African politics of feisty women defying the establishment. In Zimbabwe it was a woman MP, Margaret Dongo, who was the first to break ranks from the ruling party and challenge Mugabe. After long years of chaos in the early and mid Nineties, Liberia turned to a woman, Ruth Perry, as an interim president before elections in 1997. She was briefly Africa’s first head of state and she set something of a trend as later in the year it fell to another woman, Ellen Johnson-Sirfeaf, to challenge the warlord Charles Taylor in the election. The cynical calculation in ANC circles is that Winnie will be needed in the years ahead to maintain public support.

  A few hours after Winnie’s testimony to the Truth Commission I sat in a shebeen (unlicensed bar) in Soweto discussing her performance with a band of late-night drinkers. Some had lived in her neighbourhood during the worst abuses of her ‘football club’ and were grudgingly prepared to admit that she had done wrong. But the consensus was that the past was the past, whatever she had done should be forgotten, and that ‘whites’ were guilty of a concerted campaign to bring her down. The racist jibes against Indians with which she had peppered her final remarks had struck an especially popular note.

  ‘So what about the pain she caused the “old man”?’ I asked the assembled company. ‘Could you vote for her ahead of him?’ The more sober heads prevailed: Mandela came first. But it was a close call.

  *

  One Friday morning, in March 1996, nearly halfway through Mandela's presidency, South Africans awoke to news in Johannesburg's Mail & Guardian of an extraordinary and hugely controversial new project. Danie de Jager, one of the principal state artists under white rule, who designed the statue of Verwoerd that overlooks his grave, was tipped to build a gigantic scu
lpture of one of Mandela's hands. The proposed 108-foot-high bronze of a hand breaking through prison bars was billed as the largest bronze cast in the world. It was to cost about eight million pounds. Compounding the controversy, the principal backers were businessmen who had made their fortune by selling quack medicines and skin-lightening creams to blacks.

  The plan was shelved in a storm of protest but the saga bolstered critics who suggested that Mandela's hero worship had gone too far and that it was blinding South Africans to reality. After so many bleak years it was always going to be hard for South Africans to see Mandela objectively, and after the disappointments of the post-Cold War 'New World Order' the rest of the world too was desperate for a story of hope. Indeed the more Mandela tried to play down hero worship the more it was thrust upon him. By the late Nineties his personality cult was assuming embarrassing proportions. Street-sellers in Johannesburg sold rolls of cloth emblazoned with Mandela's face. Journalists couched criticisms in delicate terms. A few days before his state visit to Britain I found myself on his lawn outside his Johannesburg home shaking my head ruefully with a group of British colleagues. We had just had an hour with Mandela and such had been our hero worship that we had failed to hit home with a single probing question.

  Bishop Desmond Tutu was almost alone in daring to criticize him. A few months into the ANC's first term in office he chided MPs for voting themselves high salaries and stepping on to the 'gravy train'. His attack prompted an irritated outburst from Mandela, who suggested the cleric should stay out of politics. Tutu was too seasoned a campaigner and too old a friend of Mandela's to take offence- or indeed take cover.

  'He [Mandela] is a very substantial pebble on the beach, but not the only pebble,' he told me in an interview to mark his retirement as Archbishop of Cape Town. 'It's very dangerous for everyone to put him on a pedestal and for him to be seen as unassailable. He's got faults.' Mandela did his bit to minimize the dangers of the cult. He was genuinely concerned by the implications of the assumption that he was indispensable. With the financial markets jittering every time he caught a cold, his exasperated staff booked him into a Johannesburg clinic for a three-day health check to prove he was fit and well. He regularly berated South Africans for putting him on a pedestal and begged them to treat him as an ordinary man. 'Like other leaders I have stumbled,' he wrote in a Johannesburg newspaper. 'I cannot claim to sparkle alone on a glorified perch.'