Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  She had the teachings of her paternal grandmother, too, who was bitter at the way white people had barged into Pondoland and taken over the region—including the trading store her grandmother had run. Her grandmother had been horrified at some of their habits. Normal people went to the toilet in the forest, but not whites. They went to the toilet in their houses. Can you imagine! She gave them a special name, meaning People Who Toilet Inside Their Own House.

  Winnie’s mother, Gertrude, who had died when Winnie was ten, had been a teacher, like Winnie’s father. Gertrude’s mother-in-law resented her for being light-skinned, and she disparaged her own grandchildren as being related to those whites. She could be cruel, whipping their ankles with her stick, but Winnie and her siblings loved her anyway, in spite of that piercing pain.

  Winnie’s father, Columbus, had been strict. He later became an entrepreneur but was then the head of the local school. His family treated him at home just as they would at school, standing if he came into the kitchen while their mother was preparing a meal and not sitting in his presence. Winnie did not have a home life where her parents got down and played games with her. He wouldn’t hug his children, but he would stroke them sometimes and talk to them with a wise air. He was old-fashioned in some ways and a modernizer in others—not unlike Mandela perhaps—as he had rejected the role of chief, preferring instead to be the school principal, while encouraging independence in his daughter, whom he had named Winifred because he admired the industrious ways of the Germans, and Nomzamo, which meant One Who Will Endure in the Face of Trials.

  It was Columbus who had identified the caring nature of his daughter, seeing her bring home local children who needed support with school fees. He would always help them but he dissuaded her from an early ambition to be a doctor because, he said, she would only be treating people for money. If she really wanted to help people, Columbus advised Winnie, she ought to become a social worker.

  Many fathers would have wanted to keep their daughters close, pending a suitable marriage, but Columbus found Winnie a place far away where she could continue her education. Her grandmother, she says, was only too glad to be rid of her. The Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work had been operating out of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg since the early 1940s. The first graduation ceremony had been held there in 1943.

  When Winnie stepped off the train at the city’s Park Station in 1953, she hoisted her suitcase on to her head, carrying it down the platform as she was used to transporting containers of water from the river back home, balanced with the aid of coiled cloth. She had been warned about the city tsotsis and didn’t dare carry the case in her hand for fear it would be snatched.

  She could not miss the look of horror in the face of the white woman, the wife of the school’s Professor Hough, who was waiting to meet her. If she had not already felt like a naive girl from the country, that look would have done it for her. She was taken to stay at a hostel on Hans Street, the Helping Hand for Native Girls, where she soon befriended another resident, Adelaide Tsukudu, and found that she was dating her “brother” from Bizana, Oliver Tambo. Adelaide and Winnie shared a room together and often wore one another’s clothes.

  Esme Matshikiza, whose husband Todd was a well-known jazz musician and composer, had herself graduated from the Hofmeyr School and would pass Winnie sometimes on the way to work, noting how her style of dress, even the way she carried her bag, marked her out as a girl from the backwoods. She would see Winnie occasionally at BMSC dances, often with a young man, Barney Sampson, whom Winnie dated for a while. Barney would be dancing with exuberance, smiling all over his face with pleasure at being with this country beauty. Later, when Winnie became a social worker too, she and Esme would sometimes have professional meetings to discuss cases and Esme would be most impressed by how serious and particular Winnie was.

  Winnie’s course at the Jan Hofmeyr School was somewhat removed from contemporary social work training. She studied all the things one might expect, such as problems of family life, public health problems and administration, personal health and hygiene, law and social legislation and modern penology. But in addition there was native administration, biblical introduction and Christian social teachings (Winnie had been raised as Methodist by her fanatically religious mother), folk dancing, storytelling, PE and, for all women students, those two essential prerequisites for good social work intervention: cookery and needlework.

  For practical experience during her course Winnie returned to the eastern Cape where she took a three-month internship collecting case studies. While she was going out and about, she came across the local chief, Mandela’s cousin, K. D. Matanzima. She made such an impression on him that without ever asking her whether she liked him or not, he decided she would make a good wife and sent a deputation to her father to open negotiations for her hand in marriage.

  Her father wanted to know what was going on. Who were these people? He sent the deputation away and said he would wait to hear from Winnie. A more traditional father might have been flattered by the approach and might not even have bothered to consult his daughter. Winnie could only tell him that while she had been practicing in this chief’s area he had taken an interest in her but there was no relationship between them. From Matanzima’s perspective, his conduct was perfectly normal and customary. However, Winnie knew he had wives already and had no intention of becoming wife number three or five, or whatever it was.

  She returned to Johannesburg, graduated and started work at Baragwanath Hospital while continuing to reside at the Helping Hand. One day, in 1956, Winnie was at Park Station with Adelaide to meet Oliver Tambo. As they sat in the car a tall man came up whom Tambo introduced as his partner in his law firm. The two men talked for a while about legal matters. That was the first time Winnie met Mandela. Nothing came of the meeting.

  Winnie used to catch a morning bus to Baragwanath and would wait at the bus stop on the other side of Park Station. She often saw Mandela, driving past, either picking up somebody or dropping them off—she never knew who or which it was. She was unaware whether he noticed her or not (he would later say he had) and didn’t check to see whether he was looking her way as she always had her nose in a book. She especially liked reading biographies.

  Once, her bus was late. She was standing there waiting when Mandela pulled up and offered her a lift, which she accepted. He dropped her at the hospital. Still nothing further happened between them and perhaps never would have done, if it had not been for a bizarre encounter some time later.

  Out of the blue, K. D. Matanzima wrote to her at the Helping Hand hostel to say he was coming to Johannesburg to visit a relative and wanted to see her at an address in Orlando. It was clear to Winnie that Matanzima still wanted her for a wife. She resolved to go to the house in Orlando to refuse him and settle the matter. When she knocked at the door, she nearly fell backwards when it was opened by Mandela. The house was number 8115. Mandela was startled when he saw her. Matanzima had told him he was expecting a visitor but without saying who it was. Winnie was embarrassed and so too, it seemed, were the two men. Everyone sat awkwardly through a hurried meal, no one able to say anything, before Winnie was taken back to the hostel by a driver.

  She met Matanzima the following evening at the home of another of his relatives in Killarney. There she told him politely that she would not become his wife. It seemed to her that he had never been turned down before.

  Seeing her at his home must have triggered something in Mandela as he called her at the hospital soon after and asked whether she would meet him to discuss something in relation to the Treason Trial. Winnie said Mandela did not pick her up himself from the hostel but sent his comrade, Joe Matthews, instead. In fact he never came to the hostel, she could not say why. Joe Matthews was younger, she said, so perhaps that was more comfortable for Mandela. It was a girls’ hostel and Winnie herself was still young, perhaps twenty-one at the time, while Mandela was approaching forty. He was like an elder, so she called him Tata.


  Joe Matthews collected her in Mandela’s Oldsmobile and took her to the law offices where she sat while Mandela finished his work. She would learn subsequently to sit quietly with a book in the waiting room, elbow to elbow with clients. That first day she was nervous, the country girl with this famous man she had heard about at school, who was even a patron of the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work. They drove out past the hospital into the veld and went for a walk. If she had been a city girl she might have worn sneakers but instead she wore sandals. When the strap broke, he took her hand to steady her, as a father might a daughter, according to Winnie.

  Mandela was smarter then, smarter than the man people knew later, she said. He was young and energetic. He was serious, humane, kind, gentle, compassionate. Not once did Winnie ever see him charging clients, for whom life was vicious. Winnie could see that, even though Mandela thought social work far inferior to the world of the law, he had some of the instincts of the social worker. Mandela would sit patiently, listening to each of his clients and their individual concerns; no problem was too small to solve.

  He invited Winnie during their date to become involved in organizing the Treason Trial fund-raiser, which she did, along with Ruth Mompati and one other. The function was held at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, with a performance by the Manhattan Brothers. There was trouble at some point between some gangsters and the bullets started flying. Mandela was not present—he was banned and could not attend gatherings.

  Winnie places the date of this dance in 1956, which does not fit as the Treason Trial only started, abruptly, on December 5, 1956, following the 156 arrests. Even more confusingly Winnie says she graduated from the Jan Hofmeyr School in 1955 and began work at Baragwanath Hospital early in 1956 when she first met Mandela. The graduation certificate that was awarded to Winnie is clearly dated December 9, 1955, but in the archives of the magazine Drum there is a photograph of Winnie taken at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre during her graduation ball and that photograph is dated a whole year later, December 1956. When shown the photograph, Winnie could not explain the disparity in the dates but immediately recalled that the white dress she was wearing at the ball had later been worn by her room-mate Adelaide at her engagement party to Oliver Tambo.

  It seems likely that Mandela and Winnie had that awkward dinner and then their first date early in 1957 and that the Treason Trial fund-raiser took place on Friday, March 29, 1957, at the end of yet another dull week of hearings at the trial itself.

  Z. K. Matthews wrote regularly to his wife, Frieda, during the trial and she reproduced the letters in her slender memoir, Remembrances. On Wednesday April 3, 1957, he wrote to tell her about the function he had attended at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre the previous Friday night:

  It was held to raise funds for the Treason Trial and was well attended. Over 200 pounds was raised which was alright [sic] for the Fund but there were so many tsotsis present that it was obvious that there would be trouble before the end. The Manhattan Brothers were performing and that part of the affair was OK, but when the dance started I told Chief Luthuli that we had better depart as some of the tsotsis were playing about with revolvers. Shortly after we left the shooting started and several people were injured by stray bullets. Bakwe [their son, Joe Matthews] had not attended as he is banned and our lawyers had instructed all banned people not to attend any gatherings. This place [Johannesburg] is such a terrible place that one never knows what might happen to one.

  This must be the same dance that Winnie organized, with gun-toting tsotsis and none of the banned leaders in attendance. Winnie claimed it had raised £25,000, but £200 sounds considerably more realistic.

  Further confirmation is to be found in the 1970 letter from Robben Island that Mandela sent to Winnie, in which he described how he had dreamed of her “convulsing your entire body with a graceful Hawaiian dance at the BMSC.” It reminded him, he said, of the concert they had organized there in 1957 when they were courting.

  Mandela’s application to divorce Evelyn was finalized on March 19, 1958. Two months later, on May 25, 1958, the engagement of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela was reported in the African newspaper, Golden City Post. It was the week’s “No. 1 social announcement,” proclaimed the Post. “The party is being held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. P. Mzaidume at Orlando West.” They were Winnie’s aunt and uncle, and she had by now left the hostel to live with them. In an unpublished photograph taken at Mandela and Winnie’s engagement party, he is wearing a blazer with polished buttons, while she looks resplendent in a long green dress he had bought for her.

  When it came to their marriage, there was no conventional proposal, not even a traditional approach to the bride’s family. It has been written before that Mandela simply pulled the car over one day and asked her to marry him but, according to Winnie, even that was an exaggeration. He had in fact spoken to her while he continued driving, not asking, but telling, her that she was going to be taken by her uncle, Alfred Mgulwa, to Bizana on Saturday so that she could report to her father that she was getting married and ask him to arrange a date. Mandela then gave her a slip of paper with an address and told her the woman would make her wedding dress. This turned out to be Ray Harmel, the wife of Mandela’s white communist colleague, Michael Harmel. “He never asked me!” Winnie said. “But it was part of the life. I enjoyed it.”

  Nor did Winnie ever ask Mandela whether he was free to marry her. She was unsure of his marital status, she said, but just assumed he couldn’t come to her if he already had a wife. She couldn’t ask him, and never did ask him, but in time, when he saw that she was concerned, he did speak to her about it.

  Others around her were not so easygoing. She recalled how Oliver Tambo had warned her. “Zami,” he had said (that was her home name; even Mandela called her that), “Zami, just make sure you are not hurt. The life you are embarking on is going to be an uphill road. I want you to take a decision yourself if you want to go through with it.”

  Fatima Meer has written how Winnie’s boyfriend, Barney Sampson, took it badly when she gave him up for Mandela and attempted suicide with an overdose, but Winnie claims she had long finished with Barney by then. He was just a young boy and she had been taught to be wary of young men. “That’s how I ended up with this old man.” It was her grandmother’s lore—the young boys in Johannesburg were tsotsis.

  Fatima Meer described Winnie reaching Bizana and talking first to her father’s second wife, showing her one of her photographs of Mandela, dressed for boxing, and saying, this man wants to marry me and I have come to get your approval as I also want to marry him. When she told her stepmother his name, she inhaled sharply. “I hope it is not Mandela of the ANC?” Winnie’s stepmother told her she was mad.

  Her father, she said, seemed happier that her husband-to-be was older and thought that Mandela would protect his young daughter. But he took his time to give his approval after Winnie’s older sister rebelled against the relationship and shared the view of their grandmother, who warned her, “You are going to look after that man’s children. All he wants is a maid to look after his children while he’s in prison.” As Winnie said, they were all prophetic and Winnie knew everything they said was bound to happen but she had become hooked on the struggle too. “I had no dreams of a castle where I would live happily thereafter with my prince. It was a cause and I think the reason for that was the brutal, bitter apartheid that rendered us nobodies; and the fight for dignity, the fight for your worth, was much bigger than your personal life,” she recalled

  With permission granted, Mandela sent two relatives to negotiate the lobola over freshly slaughtered meat and beer with Winnie’s male relatives.

  Even then, in those early days, Winnie provoked strong and widely differing opinions in all who met her. It certainly seems that people were often threatened or distracted by her looks. When Mandela introduced Winnie to some of his comrades at the Treason Trial, Ahmed Kathrada told him afterwards, “Such beauty does not go with a revo
lutionary.” Mandela reported the remark to Winnie, who thought the idea was nonsense. Until she came to Johannesburg, she said, she had not known she was supposed to be beautiful. Back home in Bizana, her family were always making adverse comments about her appearance, insulting her for not having the looks of a true African.

  Mandela sent Winnie to meet the Meers in Durban. When Fatima went to collect her from the station, she saw a beautiful young woman emerge from the compartment. Winnie was vivacious and bubbly but shy, and she had a handbag full of photographs of Mandela, which was how Meer knew there was a romance brewing. Meer never understood at the time why Mandela had sent Winnie to see her but some months afterwards was able to ask Winnie herself when they were detained together during the state of emergency. “Didn’t you know?” said Winnie. “He sent me to stay with you to get your approval as he was thinking of marrying me.” He had never mentioned that to the Meers.

  Ruth Mompati has said that she did not detect any shyness in Winnie and recalled her as politically aware but not particularly active at first. Yet it seems Winnie was soon involved alongside the ANC women, the wives of Mandela’s comrades. The journalist and activist Joyce Sikhakhane said that Winnie was very militant, carrying herself like a queen, and none of the “old girls” liked her. She broke with the usual way of doing things. (Maybe Sikhakhane was muddling the young Winnie with the later Winnie and the terrible controversies that enveloped her.)

  In spite of everything that happened later, everything Winnie might have done or been involved in, Adelaide Joseph never lost the great respect and regard for Winnie that she had formed from their first meeting in 1958. She was lovely to look at, shy and humble. Having to grow so quickly and take so much on must have been hard for her. Adelaide recalled that Winnie would address meetings at Gandhi Hall in Fordsburg and would stand among the women of FEDSAW. When she walked into a hall, people would start singing songs about her and Mandela, making up songs in praise of them, right there.