Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Fatima Meer remembered her as a strong attractive woman who’d had a rough personal life. Meer guessed that Mandela was attracted to her strength and leadership.

  By 1953, Fatima and her husband, Ismail, were living in a two-roomed house on Umgeni Road in Durban and remembered meeting Mandela’s wife Evelyn for the first time when she came to Durban from Johannesburg to study midwifery at the King Edward VII Hospital.

  Quite why Evelyn went to Durban rather than remain in Johannesburg is not entirely explained. By now she and Mandela had a second son, Makgatho, born in August 1950, and an established life in Orlando. It seems in part that she was motivated by personal advancement, as Fatima Meer explains that Evelyn had always wanted to become a midwife but marriage, babies and lack of finances had conspired to deny her the opportunity. By 1953, things were becoming easier: Thembi was six and had started school; Makgatho was a toddler; and Mandela’s mother was there to help. Mandela had started work as an attorney and the family was no longer entirely dependent on her income.

  Evelyn was, she would say, happy in her love for her husband and secure in his love for her. Fatima recalled that Mandela and Ismail Meer would come to collect Evelyn from the nurses’ quarters, where she was staying at the hospital in Durban, and take her back to the Meers’ home for snatched weekends with her husband. The Meers would give up their one bedroom to offer their guests some privacy.

  Fatima Meer also remembered those weekends when she found Evelyn “a simple person, a good person, nice, very sociable; very easy to get to know and very easygoing.” Meer believed Evelyn had come to Durban because that was the only place she could get access to the course she wanted to take. She was not aware of any tension between Evelyn and Mandela; it seemed an easy-going relationship.

  There must have been something still between them, as Evelyn was pregnant again when she returned to Orlando towards the end of 1953. Their daughter, born the following year, was named Makaziwe, in tribute to the daughter who had died in infancy five years earlier. Evelyn said that her early Anglican beliefs had weakened during her marriage. According to her, her husband was not keen on religion, but she had prayed to God for a daughter to replace the one she had lost. The arrival of the second Makaziwe restored her faith and brought her back into the Anglican Church. She gave Makaziwe a second name, Phumla, meaning God Has Rested Her Soul.

  Returning to Johannesburg from Durban, Evelyn initially believed she was returning to a committed marriage and family, but gradually began to realize that things had changed. Mandela started staying out all night, claiming he was on ANC business.

  When she questioned him about it, he said, “No policeman asks questions like you.”

  Seven

  MANDELA’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Long Walk to Freedom, was first published in 1994, the year he became president of South Africa, but it owes its origins to events on Robben Island twenty years earlier. It was in 1975 that his friend, comrade and fellow inmate, Ahmed Kathrada, first proposed a memoir to boost the growing cult of Mandela and inject some momentum into the stagnating battle against apartheid. Mandela would be sixty in 1978 and the plan was to publish the book to mark his birthday. It would have to be written in secret on the island prison and concealed until it could be smuggled out by Mac Maharaj, who was about to be released.

  The enterprise began in typically disciplined fashion. Mandela would write during the night in his usual longhand and each morning he would pass the finished pages to Mac, who would copy them in miniature using a ballpoint pen to reduce the text, so that he could get between eight and ten pages of Mandela’s expansive script onto one side of business paper. Mac would leave margins around the lines and cut the sheets into strips for ready concealment. Mac would then hand Mandela’s original to Kathrada, who would read it and make notes, then pass it on to Walter Sisulu, who would do the same. Mac would raise queries with Mandela too, and corrections would be noted on both the original and the copy.

  Mac eventually left Robben Island with sixty sheets of miniaturized text sealed inside the covers of books, notebooks and a large clip file. The originals were buried in tins in the Robben Island garden, where some were discovered by warders in 1978. Mandela, Kathrada and Sisulu suffered a lengthy loss of privileges as a punishment.

  Meanwhile, the memoir, as written on Robben Island, was never published. So far as can be ascertained, it was not much supported by Oliver Tambo, the ANC leader in exile, and it was also criticized by the Slovos and the Indian leader Dr. Yusuf Dadoo. Mac says Joe Slovo did not feel it gave him due credit for his role in starting the military wing known as MK. The actual copy that Mac smuggled out was lost and has never been found. An incomplete version that had been put on disks was used by Mandela as the basis for Long Walk.

  When Mac was asked whether readers would have learned much about the real Mandela if they had been able to read the original, he said, no, that was part of the problem: Mandela’s reluctance to give of himself. Mac used to joke with him about that on Robben Island.

  “Madiba, this thing is shaping up to be a fucking political instrument.”

  Mandela asked, what do you want?

  Mac said, this is not a biography—the man, the person has got to come out.

  Mandela said, what do you mean?

  Mac said, well, your wife, what kind of persona was she, what did you do after your first marriage broke up, before it broke up?

  Mandela said, no, I refuse.

  Mac pushed him.

  Mandela said, no, I don’t discuss that with young boys like you. (Mac was then around forty.)

  Mac went to Sisulu and appealed to him to intervene, saying, he’s got to start talking, he’s got to write about it. After some discussion Sisulu agreed that Mac had a point and went to speak to Mandela.

  A few nights later Mandela wrote a note to Mac that said, in that section where I write about the break-up of my marriage, insert the following sentence: “And then I led a thoroughly immoral life.”

  Mac read the note the following morning and went to Mandela.

  What is this?

  Mandela said, what I told you.

  Mac said, I want to know who you led this immoral life with.

  No, said Mandela, I won’t talk about that.

  The reader will search high and low in Long Walk to Freedom for any reference to Mandela’s immorality. History had been revised. By the time it was published, he was on his way to becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected leader and was already widely regarded as the world’s elder statesman—perhaps our greatest living beacon of moral authority. An admission of immorality might have detracted, or at the very least distracted, from his heroic reputation—especially when the “immorality” began during and not after the end of his marriage.

  There is no doubt that this reputation has at times been irksome to members of his family. It is possible to detect in the newspaper interview that Evelyn, his first wife, gave to Fred Bridgland after Mandela’s release in 1990 a desire to do him in, by telling the world what he was really like, about the Mandela she had known, as opposed to the Mandela of near sanctity that he had by that time become in the popular imagination.

  Evelyn would certainly be justified in thinking that Long Walk was rather more generous and forgiving towards Mandela than it was to her. Understandably, perhaps, the book is neither open nor honest about these highly sensitive, personal matters.

  Evelyn later told Fatima Meer and Fred Bridgland that after her return from Durban, Mandela started bringing home his secretary, who would follow him into the bedroom. Although the secretary was unnamed, it was in fact Ruth Mompati. There was also an unidentified other. That other “other woman” was Lilian Ngoyi.

  I could not put my finger on it at first, nobody would tell me. Then the gossip reached me. Nelson, I was told, was having an affair with a woman member of the ANC. I knew this woman and admired and liked her. She visited us often and I got on well with her. I did not believe the rumor at first but, unable to
bear it, I turned to Nelson. Who else could I have turned to? He was angry that I questioned his fidelity. The woman [Ngoyi] was an important ANC leader and that was all there was to it, he said. The gossip continued and there were those who tried to console me by claiming he was bewitched.

  There was also another woman [Mompati] and this one started coming home, walking into our bedroom, following him to the bathroom. What was this all about I demanded and declared that I would not allow it, that if she had work to discuss with him she should confine it to his office and not pursue my husband into my house in that unseemly manner.

  In fact, as she explained to Bridgland, Evelyn warned Mandela she would pour boiling water over Ruth Mompati if she came to the house again. “Nelson was enraged. He moved his bed into the sitting room. He grew increasingly cold and distant. I was desperate. I went to see Walter. I don’t think he ever forgave me for that. He accused me of broadcasting our problems. He stopped eating at home and took his washing to a cousin. Then he started eating out.”

  Evelyn told Meer that when the rift between her and Mandela became public, she was embarrassed and deeply pained. His sister Leabie and his mother Nosekeni, who were both still living with them, were also feeling the strain. Nosekeni went back to the Transkei. Several people have reported that she was very disapproving of her son’s conduct at this time.

  I don’t think she could bear to see our family torn apart. I went to see my brother who was then living in Orlando East. He spoke to Nelson and then said to me, “If the man has stopped loving you, if someone or something has killed that love, there is nothing you or anyone can do about it.” I realized for the first time I was losing my man if I hadn’t lost him already. Yet I made one last attempt. I went to see Kaiser Matanzima. Nelson admired him and was close to him. If Nelson would listen to anyone I thought he would listen to him. KD spoke to Nelson but Nelson’s reply was that he no longer loved me.

  Leabie spoke to Fatima Meer, telling her how painful it was to see the two people they respected turning on each other. “It was like the ground below us was breaking and we were falling.” Leabie believed it was ubuthi, as she called black magic.

  There is some dovetailing between the events as Evelyn described them and the brief account given by Mandela in his memoir. He identified the period after the birth of the second Makaziwe in 1954 as the moment when Evelyn first turned to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, although it appears that in fact what she experienced was a revival of her allegiance to the Anglican Church. “Whether this was due to some dissatisfaction with her life at the time I do not know,” he says, never, of course, intimating that his own infidelities might have had something to do with it.

  Evelyn began handing out the Jehovah’s Witness magazine, The Watchtower, and wanted Mandela to commit to God too, he writes. They often argued about her desire to live back in the Transkei. It was her faith versus his struggle and he was becoming convinced the marriage “was no longer tenable.” They struggled for the “hearts and minds” of the children too. While she sought to enroll them in her own beliefs, Mandela had decorated the house with photographs of political heroes and heroic events—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi and the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace. He taught the two boys about politics, prompting Thembi to join the Junior ANC, the Pioneers.

  Mandela acknowledges that he went out early and came home late but suggests that Evelyn was wrong in suspecting he was seeing other women. “Time after time I would explain what meeting I was at, why I was there and what was discussed. But she was not convinced.” In 1955 she told him he must choose—his marriage or the ANC.

  He concedes that he was short with Walter, who tried to speak to him on the subject, and suggests that Evelyn’s brother Sam was pompous and touchy when he also raised it. According to Evelyn, Mandela was angry with her for “broadcasting their problems” to friends and family.

  Finally, says Mandela, two weeks after he was arrested in December 1956—at the start of what would become the four-year cycle of the Treason Trial, when he and scores of others were accused of plotting to overthrow the government—he returned home on bail to find the house empty and silent. Evelyn had left with the children and had even taken the curtains. “For some reason,” he writes in his book, “I found this small detail shattering.”

  But so far as I can tell, that scene never happened and, in any event, is far from being the whole story. Evelyn told Fatima Meer that the brooding silence between them had come to a head over a row involving Thembi’s small daily allowance. It all exploded in a torrent of words.

  Meer has said she believed the neighbors had once had to intervene when there was “friction” between Evelyn and Mandela. Evelyn told Bridgland about the row over Thembi. “Later after another argument Mandela grabbed me by the throat and shook me and shouted at me. Some elderly neighbors heard the noise and came in to break it up.”

  According to Evelyn, Mandela told her he was leaving and wanted a divorce. It is part of first-family legend that she eventually found out Mandela was divorcing her only when it was reported in the newspapers.

  In fact, it was Evelyn who first began divorce proceedings against Mandela before he later took action against her. Two files have been released that comprise the record of their divorce. They contain a statement made by Evelyn, known as a Particulars of Claim, in support of her petition for separation lodged at the Native Divorce Court in May 1956. She alleged that Mandela had assaulted her on a succession of occasions over the previous ten months.

  The allegations were never tested in court and Mandela made it clear he would have denied them, but they are dated and described in some detail in the files of Case 342. Mandela told Richard Stengel that Evelyn had distorted things in interviews. He denied the allegations outright to Ahmed Kathrada and said he had only ever held her when she threatened him with a red hot poker, and then only to twist it from her hand.

  Surprisingly, Evelyn made no allegation of adultery against Mandela when she filed her petition. Her reasons could be many: perhaps she lacked conclusive evidence; or perhaps her lawyers advised her that the allegations she had to make were serious enough on their own to make her case. She claimed he had deserted her in February 1955 and had since “cruelly ill treated and repeatedly assaulted her.”

  In July 1955, four weeks after the historic Freedom Charter conference in Kliptown, Evelyn alleged that Mandela had assaulted her by “hitting her with his fists in her face and knocking her to the ground and causing serious injury to her eye.” He had again assaulted her by “striking” her in August 1955 and then had hit her once more, in October 1955.

  In February 1956, according to Evelyn’s statement, Mandela had given her a week to leave the house. When she refused,

  he wrongfully, unlawfully and maliciously assaulted her by hitting her with his fists and choking her and attempting to kill her by strangling her. The Defendant [Mandela] further inflicted severe injuries to Plaintiff’s face and throat during the said assault. Plaintiff was compelled to take refuge with her neighbors who, after some difficulty, obtained possession of her clothing as at the time of the assault Plaintiff was dressed only in her nightdress.

  In March 1956, Evelyn’s petition claimed, he had ordered her to leave the house and

  threatened to kill her with an axe unless she left the house, in consequence of which Plaintiff [Evelyn] was compelled to take refuge with her neighbours and thereafter went to live with her brother, Samuel Mase at no 5818 Orlando East.

  By reason of the aforesaid assaults and unlawful conduct of the Defendant [Mandela] further cohabitation and living with him has become dangerous and intolerable and Defendant has moreover, refused to allow Plaintiff to return to the common home or to have access to her children.

  When she ran to the neighbors on March 25, 1956, she had left the children behind. She was now seeking custody, a formal separation and maintenance of £50 a month for her and the children, plus the return of the furniture and other goods she had contr
ibuted to the marriage.

  Mandela responded with his own petition that August—he had Nat Bregman as his attorney and Joe Slovo as his advocate—in which he denied the allegations of assault. He also announced his intention to defend the action, together with a counter-claim for custody and “restitution of conjugal rights failing which a decree of divorce on the grounds of Respondent’s malicious desertion.” He claimed Evelyn had left him to live with her brother, taking with her their daughter Makaziwe. She had, he said, agreed to allow the boys to remain with him but had since changed her mind and taken them from him.

  He argued that they would be better off with him as he had his mother at home to look after them while Evelyn worked full time. He had seen the children several times at her brother’s home, looking dirty and neglected. Samuel’s house he described as “congested” enough already, with his wife and their four children, forcing Mandela’s own three children to share beds and couches with their cousins. Besides, the boys’ school—he seemed to be making no claim to Makaziwe—the Seventh Day Adventist School, was just 150 yards away from his home at number 8115, while it was two miles away from Evelyn in Orlando East.

  A hearing was arranged and postponed. Then a second date was put back until November, with a provisional arrangement for Mandela to retain custody of the two boys, and give access to Evelyn. On November 5, 1956, Evelyn withdrew the case altogether, with no explanation given. That date was a month before Mandela’s Treason Trial arrest, and six weeks before his release on bail when, according to Long Walk to Freedom, he came home and found Evelyn gone and the curtains removed. In actual fact, she had finally left in the middle of the night, in March, ten months earlier, presumably leaving the curtains behind. It is just possible she went back and took the curtains down while he was remanded in custody.