491 Days

by Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie; Kathrada, Ahmed; Kathrada, Ahmed

  When I was in detention for all those months, my two children nearly died. When I came out they were so lean; they had had such a hard time. They were covered in sores, malnutrition sores. And they wonder why I am like I am. And they have a nerve to say, ‘Oh Madiba is such a peaceful person, you know. We wonder how he had such a wife who is so violent?’ The leadership on Robben Island was never touched; the leadership on Robben Island had no idea what it was like to engage the enemy physically. The leadership was removed and cushioned behind prison walls; they had their three meals a day. In fact, ironically, we must thank the authorities for keeping our leadership alive; they were not tortured. They did not know what we were talking about and when we were reported to be so violent, engaged in the physical struggle, fighting the Boers underground, they did not understand because none of them had ever been subjected to that, not even Madiba himself – they never touched him, they would not have dared.

  We were the foot soldiers. We were their cannon fodder and it was us who were used as their political barometer each time they wanted to find out how the country was going to react. They tortured us knowing that it was going to leak to the country and they wanted to test the reaction. Tata could not comprehend how I had become so violent in the eyes of the police. They knew that I was involved with the military wing of the ANC and they knew I was a leader of the struggle underground. They knew I saved soldiers who infiltrated into the country.

  But we learnt all kinds of tricks to protect ourselves against them. I learnt then that ‘the nearer the danger, the safer the place’, which is the first thing they are taught in the military. It was him, Tata, who always repeated that ‘the nearer the danger, the safer the place’, so I hid the cadres next to the police stations. Not one of those cadres was arrested, and they were right under their noses. If I had a very dangerous unit, which was in the high command and involved in special operations, I hid them around the police station. And they could not catch me because I discovered that the only way to survive those days was to operate alone. There was always a danger of getting someone killed by merely associating with them. That is why I never knew their real names. I never knew the names of the units that infiltrated the country. When they came into the country I gave them my own combat names so that they did not coincide with the names they used in the camps and they would not know who was who. These are people who are generals in the South African army today who hold the highest offices in government but they must tell that story themselves.

  We and the enemy hunted each other at sunset – our daybreak was 6pm. We operated right through the night; it did not matter where I was. Daybreak was nightfall. We reversed the hours in the same way we had to reverse the values of society.

  Zindzi and Zeni would ask questions, especially Zindzi. She was a very troublesome child; she had a very enquiring mind. Her sister did it in a more sombre and dignified way. Zeni was always the princess. She was born like that. When her father used to play with her as a baby, he addressed her as ‘Princess’. That is how she became ‘HRH’ and she is still HRH today. That is how we addressed her. Zindzi was a tomboy and she was always asking, ‘Ma, you know? You know you are a liar.’

  ‘Why darling?’

  I always give the example of Tat’uSibeko, my next-door neighbour, a Zulu from Zululand and one of those real traditional types. And so Zindzi came in, she was about five or six, and she said, ‘Mummy you said all the daddies are in jail. Why are the daddies in jail?’

  I said, ‘Because they are fighting for us to also be able to live in town.’ You could not use the word ‘free’ because the children did not understand. ‘They want us to have nice houses and also live next to the shops in town.’

  And then she said, ‘But then why is Tat’uSibeko next door at home? Why hasn’t he gone to fight for that?’ And then she went on to say, ‘But Mummy, the other children say people who are in prison are bad people.’

  What do you say? This is a five-, six-year-old with an enquiring mind. Both of them would confront me with these questions so the values of society were reversed to the extent that as they grew older the fathers who were not in jail were ‘collaborators’ – it was ‘wrong’ not to be in jail, you were a ‘collaborator’. It was right to be in prison; it was not that if you steal you would be arrested and you would go to jail. You could not use that example so we had to use religious examples and say, ‘You know if you do wrong things your angel is watching. You know God does not want you to do bad things, that’s why we have to pray, that’s why we have the Lord’s Prayer. You mustn’t do bad things.’ We could not use imprisonment for right and wrong because then they would have regarded their father as a criminal and how would you get that out of a child’s mind? No matter how she gets educated later on in life, what you teach the child as a mother in the formative years is what sticks. There was propaganda from the nationalists that their father was terrorist – he was a killer.

  And how do you change those values later on in life? People do not realise how tough it was to bring up children in those years. They have led conflicted lives and they have turned out to be who they are. You do not know how many times parents like us fell on our knees and thanked God that they turned out to be who they are. It was touch and go – the child could have turned out to be a criminal. In fact, the child could have grown up to blame you. When they discovered the truth, they could have told us, ‘How dare you?’ So, ‘Mummy and Daddy gave us up and chose the world and chose the country, chose to fight for the people? These people?’ Can you imagine what that would have meant to our families if they had turned out to have such questioning minds? At what point do you, as a parent, decide that you would fight for a cause that is thankless sometimes, but you know you are fighting for human dignity?

  When Tata was arrested in 1962 and I got my first banning order, it had no name – ‘Mandela’s wife’ was banned and confined and the rest of the world did not know who I was. I could never say anything that was from myself, my own mind. It was possible they did that deliberately, but my reaction was that if you have arrested the man you must destroy what he left behind. I took that as a direct attack on women and that we were useless – our husbands were our voices and in their absence the struggle would end. To the prisoners, if they did not have the support of their families that would have been their end. I realised how important the support of family is when you are in prison.

  When Tata was arrested on 5 August 1962, I decided, ‘I will fight them to the last drop of my blood. I am going to fight them and I am not going to let them break me. I will never let them break me.’ I was aware of the fact that suddenly I discovered, ‘Oh, I have no name now’ – everything I did as ‘Mandela’s wife’. I lost my individuality: ‘Mandela’s wife said this’, ‘Mandela’s wife was arrested’. It did not matter who the hell I was; it did not matter that I was a Madikizela; it did not matter that I was a human being. And it was understandable to the oppressor that whatever they did to Mandela’s wife, she deserved it. So I thought, ‘My goodness I’ve grown up a princess in my own home; I come from the Royal House of Pondoland; and suddenly I’ve lost my identity because of this struggle. I am going to fix them. I will fight them and I will establish my own identity.’ I deliberately did that. I said I was not going to bask in his shadow and be known as ‘Mandela’s wife’; they were going to know me as Zanyiwe Madikizela. I fought for that. I said, ‘I will not even bask in his politics. I am going to form my own identity because I never did bask in his ideas.’ I had my own mind.

  I realised that, my goodness, if you are married you lose your identity completely. I became a nobody and I had grown up walking tall in my home. I had been taught by my mother and my father that I must walk tall. I am me; I am black; I must be proud of my blackness. My father taught me the history of our country; he taught me about the nine Xhosa wars; he taught me the role the Pondos played in the liberation struggle; he taught me what happened when the 1820 Settlers came into the country and how Van Riebeec
k landed in the Cape in 1652. I heard all this history from my father and then I came here; I am a nobody. Not on your life. No, I am going to be who my father taught me to be. I am going to walk tall. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was one of the 29 wives of my great-grandfather, who was a chief. My grandmother was the first woman to wear shoes in Pondoland in those days and when she bragged about these shoes it turned out that they were sneakers. But she was the first of the chief’s wives to wear shoes and she hated the people who came with silky hair, blue eyes and with those light skins. She hated them because she had been a shopkeeper. She was the first of the chief’s wives to have one of those stalls in the rural areas – I do not remember now what they used to be called. But she was the first to own a shop and when these people came, she lost that shop, she lost that land. She hated them. My mother was light skinned, very light skinned, and as a result we were not our grandmother’s favourites because most of my sisters had the same skin as my mother. My grandmother was very, very anti-white. So you can imagine me having this grandmother, with my father teaching me this history and I grew up learning that we must walk tall, that in fact Africa is ours, and Africa was stolen from us by these people who came and took our grandfather’s land.

  There were these two backgrounds and then I come to Johannesburg. I was a young social worker. I got married to this man and here I was taken back again to my grandmother’s days when she taught me to walk tall. So when the authorities banished me to Brandfort as far as they were concerned that was just the last act to bury me forever, but I was never as active as I was in Brandfort. I presented a public picture that I was in banishment and the international community was singing our name all over the world. I recruited from the Free State like you have never known. The apartheid system formed the homelands and each homeland had its own pseudo passport called incwadana yoku ndwendwela (small book of visiting). These travel documents were not recognised by any other country in the world, not even by the protectorate sister states. So the people would travel to these bordering countries and leave this so-called travel document at the border and they had an arrangement with the homeland governments that the people would be allowed to go to those countries and when they returned to South Africa then they would pick these documents up. Every week I had soccer teams from Brandfort going to play in Botswana and Lesotho. Brandfort was close to both Lesotho and Botswana. They left those travel documents at the borders and they never came back. The authorities were so stupid not to realise that they were not coming back into the country. They were so keen to have these pseudo travelling documents recognised that it never occurred to them that there must have been bags full of these travel documents at the borders. I recruited more people from Brandfort than I had ever done in Soweto.

  Because I was under house arrest in Brandfort, I had to sign in at 6pm every day. Especially over weekends, I would sign in at 6pm and then get back to the house, change, dress like an auntie who was selling apples and get into the car, a different car. I sometimes went to Soweto. I recruited right through the night in Soweto from Brandfort. At about 5am I was back on my bed, sleeping, and they always came to check at around 5.30am. By 6am they are in front of the house to see if I was going to get up and I would go out – the toilets were outside – and yawn and stretch myself. I would act as if I had been sleeping – meanwhile I had been in Soweto the whole night. They taught us to do things like that. We really became criminals.

  It was a thankless job; you were not fighting to gain anything personally – at least those of us who were not aspiring to positions in government and to enrich ourselves. Those of us who were so young in the struggle were hooked. It was like opium. Fighting for freedom in the ANC was the greatest thing in your life. You knew there could not have been any greater reward than the freedom of your people. We did not know it was a thankless job and people were fighting to be presidents.

  I would do it all over again. I realised that that is what a liberation movement is all about actually. That is why it is called a ‘struggle’. Those who were fighting for their own positions and things were really fighting differently from us. You accept the fact that there will always be the Oliver Tambos, the Chris Hanis, the Nelson Mandelas and the Sisulus of the day. My personal mentor was always Tat’uWalter Sisulu whom I grew up worshipping as a young bride because he was like a father to Tata and Tata revered him. When I was newly married, Tat’uSisulu sold watches and jewellery. He was so humble. We would go and pick him up every day. He lived in an ordinary house in the township and we hardly realised what would ultimately happen to those people. We never had dreams of them being in government and being presidents and that is why up to his dying day Tat’uSisulu never wanted any position in government. He refused and even turned down positions within the ANC. He was that type of person: unassuming, fighting for the liberation of his country. The liberation of your fellow man was the greatest reward and that is how Tat’uWalter used to talk and that is how Chief Albert Luthuli was and I was so blessed to know all of them.

  I used to cook for them, these big men. I only realised their stature long thereafter. I just worshipped them as my leaders. I used to cook for J.B. Marks and Moses Kotane in that little house in Orlando. I even used to cook for Gatsha Buthelezi when he would come with the king of the Zulus and they would have dialogues with Tata through the night. At that time they were starting to form Inkatha, which was originally a structure that was meant to be used in the light of the Youth League. Buthelezi was going to use Inkatha to fight apartheid from within. That is why originally the colours of Inkatha were the colours of the ANC. He was one of the greatest fighters in his day and he was entrusted, with Matanzima, with fighting the system from within. And that is what people do not know.

  Looking back as a parent, you feel you do not deserve this forgiveness because you cannot explain yourself to the children and you fear that they would never understand. You are lucky that they understand so much anyway; that they do not begrudge you. And what makes things difficult, of course, is when they see that what is happening today to other people is all about enrichment and it was never about self-sacrifice. They cannot even understand why I live in Soweto, really. They do not understand that it was a statement on my part. I made a conscious decision that I was going to live in Soweto instead of moving to the suburbs. I fought for my children to lead the kind of normal life they could live anywhere, but I will die in Soweto. The only time I am in the suburbs is when I am in hospital.

  I felt strongly that this journal and these letters needed to be published in this way, exactly as they were written at the time, so that my children and my grandchildren and whoever else reads them should please see to it that the country never ever degenerates to levels such as those. It is for their future. Right now, people like myself who come from that era become petrified when we see us sliding and becoming more and more like our oppressive masters. To me, that is exactly what is happening and that is what scares me.

  Throughout the years of oppression, I think my feelings got blunted because you were so tortured that the pain reached a threshold where you could not feel pain anymore. If you keep pounding and pounding on the same spot the feeling dies, the nerves die. I can feel us sliding back to that right now.

  Johannesburg

  November 2012

  Twenty Years in the Life of Winnie Mandela

  1957

  Winnie Mandela, a twenty-year-old social worker from Bizana in the Transkei, meets Nelson Mandela, a young lawyer who is banned and on trial for high treason.

  1958

  Marries him when he is given four days off his banning order and restriction to Johannesburg to return with her to her family home in Bizana for the ceremony. She participates, while five months’ pregnant, in an anti-pass protest and is arrested and detained for two weeks.

  1959

  Gives birth to her first daughter Zenani.

  1960

  Gives birth to her second daughter Zindziswa.

 
; 1960

  The ANC is banned, making it illegal to promote its aims.

  1961

  Her husband is acquitted of treason and goes underground.

  1962

  Is banned and restricted to Johannesburg for two years. Her husband is arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

  1963

  Is arrested for breaking her ban by attending a gathering. She is acquitted. Her husband is put on trial for sabotage.

  1964

  Her husband is sentenced to life imprisonment with Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni.

  1965

  Is banned for five years and restricted to Orlando township. She is forbidden from preparing any document and requires special permission to visit her husband.

  1966

  New restrictions forbid her from participating in the preparation of printed material.

  1967

  Is acquitted on a charge of resisting arrest.

  1967

  Is sentenced to twelve months in prison for failing to give her name and address to the security police. The sentence was suspended for three years but she had already spent four days in prison.

  1968

  Her mother-in-law dies and she attends the funeral. Nelson Mandela is visited on Robben Island by his wife for the last time before her arrest.

  1969

  At 2am on 12 May, she is detained by police under the Terrorism Act. In July, while in prison, she receives news that her stepson was killed in a car accident. She is charged for promoting the aims of the ANC.