Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  A group of women including Winnie, Adelaide and Amina Cachalia had gone for “lessons” in public speaking from their white comrades, Hilda Bernstein and Helen Joseph. Adelaide always felt uncomfortable with Hilda, the wife of Rusty, who seemed to feel intellectually superior and could put others down with ease when she chose to. One day the black and Indian women had rebelled, asking why they had to be taught to speak by white people when they were the ones who were oppressed and could learn to speak for themselves. The white women didn’t like it.

  Amina Cachalia suspected that it took Winnie a while to get used to Mandela’s interracial world, that she was not used to mixing with white or Indian people. Amina remembered the public-speaking classes too and how Winnie would sit leafing through a fashion magazine while the rest of them talked about subjects like Lesotho. Hilda Bernstein would ask, what’s wrong with Winnie, why isn’t she interested? Amina did not think she was uninterested, just gauging her position.

  Mandela began taking her to Sunday lunch at the home of Michael (Mick) Harmel, whose wife, Ray, made Winnie’s wedding gown. The Harmels’ teenage daughter Barbara sometimes worked at Mandela & Tambo during the summer holidays. Barbara had been a red-diaper baby, as she put it, the child of communists. She did not find life at home very easy, had a difficult relationship with her mother and was all too aware of the tensions in her parents’ relationship. Barbara describes it now as “a shit marriage.” Her parents had been a total mismatch, Ray from a working-class family and Mick from the bourgeoisie. He told his daughter he had only married her mother because he was romantic about the working class. Her friend Ilse, the daughter of Bram Fischer, used to call Mick loskop— “loose-headed.” He was all over the place, he had flings and many felt he treated his wife abysmally, though Barbara saw both sides and was aware that he was often on the receiving end of her mother’s harsh criticisms.

  Suddenly, Barbara found she had a soul mate in Winnie who appeared to have no time for the political conversations at the dinner table. Barbara was looking for an escape too. She would always feel tongue-tied and shy around Mandela and the equally urbane, charming Bram Fischer. So the two young women would slope off upstairs to Barbara’s bedroom where they would lie on the bed and talk, or pore over “girly stuff” such as the postcards and letters from Harmel’s pen pals around the world—from communist countries, naturally. Winnie seemed to adopt her, like a ready-made big sister, picking up on Barbara’s troubles. She would often call during the week as well, and would always remember the names of Barbara’s teachers or the school friends she had fallen out with. Barbara describes Winnie then as a sweet young woman, shy, though not naive, and for a while their friendship was the most divine thing in Harmel’s life.

  Barbara Harmel remembered being with her mother and father at Winnie and Mandela’s engagement party in Orlando, the three of them the only white people there. Barbara had been invited to the wedding in Bizana but her parents said she couldn’t attend, because it was during term time. Still, she remembered the bridal gown and the pre-wedding photographs that Comrade Eli Weinberg took of them all in June 1958. Weinberg, a white Jewish communist banned for his activism, lived across the road from the Harmels and was trying to scratch a living as a photographer for African weddings. He had a studio at home, so there were always cars outside delivering African wedding parties. Barbara used to wonder how people who were poor could spend so much on their weddings. Mick told her that when you have nothing there are specific occasions you go to town on: weddings and funerals among them.

  The photographs Weinberg took were not conventional ones shot at the event, but staged before or after the ceremony. In the case of Mandela and Winnie, they were taken at the Harmels’ home, with the Harmels in the photographs too. Mandela is sitting in the center; on one side of him is Winnie and on the other side Ruth Mompati.

  Ruth was at the wedding in Bizana on June 14, 1958, making the journey as one of a group who shared two cars to pool the petrol costs. Duma Nokwe and his wife, Tiny, were with her, as was Lilian Ngoyi. Amina Cachalia was invited but couldn’t go. Fatima Meer must have been at the wedding as she gives a dazzling, first-hand account of the festivities in her biography of Mandela, beginning with the party traveling down from Johannesburg after Mandela has been granted a six-day reprieve from his banning order, leaving just enough time for five days of feasting and celebrations.

  Winnie was ill—it sounded like stress—and took a day or two to recover before finally taking the ritual hot bath and slipping into her wedding dress. Relatives leaped into a joyous dance as she stepped out into the morning sun. The ululations of Winnie’s grandmother led the chorus as she left for the church in a car decorated with the colors of the ANC.

  The service was thoroughly African with Xhosa hymns and a minister dressed in animal skins. The celebrations continued with dancing and singing at the family’s ancestral home, at the burial ground beside the kraal. Mandela presented head cloths to the older women in Winnie’s family as they danced up to him in turn to receive their gift, ululating their thanks. The bride’s party walked around the kraal led by young women to emphasize the bride’s virginal purity. Mandela’s group formed a parallel procession while Winnie’s grandmother danced energetically with “sweat trickling down her cheeks and nose” in what appeared to Meer to be a final tribute to life and fertility.

  A lament was intended to signal the sadness of Winnie’s departure from her family but she was too happy to respond with tears.

  “How can she cry?” said her sister-in-law. “She has found a prince.”

  Dinner was served from the three-legged pots by the kraal, a dish of umngusho— samp (dried corn kernels) with beans—and salads. The party moved on to the town hall of Bizana where there were speeches. Winnie’s father warned the newlyweds that their marriage would be no bed of roses. “Be like your husband,” he told his daughter. “Become like his people and as one with them.” The cake had fourteen tiers. Fourteen! Thirteen of them were cut into pieces for the guests. The fourteenth tier was wrapped for Winnie to deliver to her husband’s ancestral home at Qunu. Events now moved so quickly that the fourteenth tier was never delivered and remained at number 8115, where it was kept in the bottom of a cupboard in a green plastic container with a cream-colored lid. Winnie would bring it out every year on their wedding anniversary and light a candle, her daughter Zindzi relates. It smelled so good, she said, that they couldn’t wait to eat the damn thing. No, Winnie, would tell her, we are waiting for your father’s release. The cake was destroyed when the community torched the house in the 1980s, at the height of Winnie’s infamy.

  Mandela’s mother had not attended the wedding—possibly as a gesture of disapproval—but was waiting to greet them when they arrived back at number 8115 for another round of feasting just in time to beat Mandela’s six-day curfew.

  Tribesmen from Mandela’s clan later came from the eastern Cape and gave Winnie a welcoming new name, Nobandla. Within a few weeks of the wedding she discovered she was pregnant. She went back to work at Baragwanath Hospital while Mandela resumed his role as a defendant in the Treason Trial. Winnie was about to join him in the criminal justice system.

  She was arrested for the first time in her life that October, after joining the ANC women from Orlando at a public protest against passes for women outside the Native Commissioner’s office in Johannesburg. Some 2,000 women assembled and over two days more than 1,200 were arrested, most ending up in the police cells at Marshall Square. Winnie was held there herself for some two weeks.

  “I have married trouble,” Mandela told his advocate friend George Bizos. He had not tried to stop Winnie from taking part, but had warned her of the potential consequences. He was almost proved right—she did lose her job as a result and it looked as though she might lose her baby too, as she started bleeding in the cells. Albertina Sisulu, one of the leaders of the protests, together with a nurse, both took care of her and the bleeding eventually stopped.

  They
were relieved when Zenani (meaning, What Have You Brought?) was born at Baragwanath on February 5, 1959. Mandela was at the Treason Trial in Pretoria at the time, but at least he had been there to take Winnie to hospital the night before. In a letter to Zenani, he later described how he had come home late and “found Mummy highly restless.” He and Aunt Phyllis had taken her to a maternity ward.

  Your birth was a great relief to us. Only three months before this [it was actually longer] Mummy had spent fifteen days in jail under circumstances that were dangerous for a person in her condition. We did not know what harm might have been done to you and to her health and were happy indeed to be blessed with a healthy and lovely daughter. Do you understand that you were nearly born in jail? Not many people have had your experience of having been in jail before you were born. You were only twenty-five months old when I left home [at the end of March 1961] and though I met you frequently thereafter until January 1962 when I left the country for a short period, we never lived together again.

  Winnie found a new job as a social worker at the Child Welfare Society and went back to work when Zenani was five months old. She became pregnant again and suffered an early miscarriage, which Mandela attributed to the “acute tensions” of the trial.

  “I still remember one Sunday as the sun was setting I helped mum out of bed to the toilet,” he wrote to Zindzi in 1980. “She was barely twenty-five then and looking loving and tasty in her young and smooth body that was covered by a pink silk gown. But as we returned to the bedroom she swayed and almost went down. I noticed that she was sweating heavily and I discovered that she was more ill than she had revealed. I rushed her to the family doctor and he sent her to the Coronation Hospital where she remained for several days. It was perhaps one of her first dreadful experiences as a wife.” It would have been a baby boy and he was as tiny as Zindzi’s fist had been when he left her, Mandela wrote.

  Winnie became pregnant for the third time soon after and Zindzi was born at the Bridgman Memorial Hospital on December 23, 1960. Of course, Mandela was elsewhere at the time; it was the Christmas break in the Treason Trial and he had been called to the eastern Cape to see his son Makgatho, who was ill at school there. According to Winnie, he had contracted tuberculosis. Mandela broke his ban to drive through the night to collect his son and bring him back to Johannesburg into the care of Evelyn.

  Mandela did not know until he got home that Winnie had gone into premature labor. The baby was fine but Winnie was weak. Mandela remembered a story told by the Xhosa poet, Mqhayi, who returned home after a long trip to find his wife had given birth and suspected another man was the father. He rushed in with his assegai, ready to kill them both, but saw that in fact the baby looked just like him: u zindzile, he had said, meaning, you are well established. Mandela’s baby was well established too, hence her name Zindziswa.

  Her father went on the run, three months after Zindzi was born. She had no memory of him at all before her first visit to Robben Island in the mid-1970s. Zindzi was almost thirty when her father was freed but still entertained hopes that they could at last have the normal family life she had never known. She soon realized that was impossible. She accepted that people don’t really miss something they’ve only ever fantasized about.

  But how she had longed for that normal family, through all those years.

  Even before her father was freed, she was refereeing arguments between her two parents at visits and meetings. Heated exchanges. They both had foolish pride. He could be very angry and also very stubborn. One of his greatest weaknesses, said Zindzi, is that the first person who comes with a report is right. “I used to say, what type of lawyer is this?” What type of politician, too, one might ask. Mandela, a true democrat, was renowned for his listening skills, taking everyone’s opinion into account. In domestic matters, by the sound of it, he took a more dictatorial stance.

  Once Zindzi accepted that her parents could not be reconciled, it became easier for her to welcome Mandela’s third life partner, Mama Graca—Graca Machel, the widow of Samora Machel—into their family. Graca had made it clear to Zindzi, quite openly, the first time they met, that she would never occupy Winnie’s place in Madiba’s heart. That was something everyone is agreed on, even now—that Winnie was the great love of his life. But the new relationship had at least provided some members of the family with a stable emotional base. Graca was warm and affectionate, said Zindzi, while her father, though loving, was physically undemonstrative.

  Stability was notably lacking in all their lives. No wonder, as Zindzi said, “All of us—Madiba’s kids—have had rocky relationships. I filed twice for divorce, tried again, it fell apart. My sister was also having difficulties, she’s separated now. Makgatho also had a second marriage. There’s a pattern here.”

  Zindzi embraced Graca but still blamed her father for the troubles her mother had endured, holding him accountable for the unhappiness she had known herself throughout her disrupted childhood, through the years of isolation and harassment.

  Others have said they believed Winnie had suffered breakdowns, that she had a brother and sister who had experienced long-term psychiatric illness. Zindzi was sure her mother had suffered, and that she still struggles, with depression. It was hardly surprising.

  Winnie had done her best to shield it from her children, always maintaining a veneer of optimism around them, according to Zindzi. She was determined to be strong and expected the same of her children, too. “I don’t want to see you cry, especially in front of the enemy. Never show them you’re weak.” No tears, no therapy: that was not their way. “I fall apart in the shower but emerge with my head held high,” was how Zindzi put it.

  She could see the pain behind her mother’s mask and felt her father was responsible. There was a period after his release when Zindzi did not have contact with him for two years. “I was really upset with how he was treating my mum. We can sit together and talk about things now. He’s mellower.” But when people ask her, how can he make it up to you, she says she wants things that can never happen, a walk in the park, a playful roll around on the grass. At least when she sees him with the grandchildren, that completes something for her. She has learned to define her life not by how much she has endured, but by how much she has overcome.

  Winnie had done much to shape her children’s view of the world, trying to be both parents at once, while keeping their father alive in their imaginations. He loomed large, said Zindzi, but was never real to her. They knew he was in prison for a good cause and they became politically aware from an early age. Their education was affected as they moved from one school to another, disguising their identities and even sometimes their appearance.

  Perhaps to compensate, or as Zindzi suggested, to protect them, Winnie always tried to make out that all the relationships in the family were rosy. She would never bad-mouth Mandela’s former wife, Evelyn, and told her own daughters they had two mothers, encouraging them to call her predecessor Mama Evelyn. Winnie would suggest it was an echo of Mandela’s father’s four wives, so that, like them, Madiba had also grown up with more than one mother.

  Winnie claims that, contrary to what she has read in books, she had a very good relationship with Evelyn. “He [Mandela] would write to me and tell me to go and look after his children. Even his first wife’s adult children, he would write to me and scold me if they were not in school. He was that type of person. He cares for everybody and it wouldn’t even occur to him to send the letter to his first wife. No, he does not consider things like that. And then of course he’s naturally very authoritarian.”

  The stepchildren, she said, were practically as old as she was at the time, but in fact Thembi was just thirteen when his father married Winnie in 1958. Makgatho was eight and Maki was four.

  Zindzi was surprised to discover in 2008 that Evelyn had actually lived at number 8115. Winnie had never made that clear. Even then, Zindzi thought that Evelyn had lived there only briefly before the separation, whereas in fact it had been her home fo
r nearly a decade. It was also not until she was older that Zindzi became aware of the tensions and resentments between the two sides of the family. Behind the scenes, the world of Mandela’s family was not so rosy, after all.

  Zindzi had little memory of Thembi, who had died in the 1960s, but she recalled sitting on Makgatho’s lap, listening to jazz, which he had introduced her to. He would read her stories by James Hadley Chase. He and his sister Maki would sometimes collect the two girls and take them to Evelyn’s house in Orlando East for the weekend. It seemed to Zindzi that they spent the whole time praying with Evelyn and grew up waiting for Armageddon.

  Those were not unhappy memories; she was just too young to understand what was really going on.

  The Sisulu children knew that things changed after Evelyn and Mandela divorced. Lungi remembered how they stopped going to number 8115 where they had formerly felt so welcome and at home. He was bhuti, brother, to Makgatho and Thembi. Lungi’s sister Beryl continued to believe that Winnie had been the catalyst that ended Mandela’s first marriage. Perhaps Albertina Sisulu had thought so too. It was never chummy between Albertina and Winnie, said Beryl. Of course the Sisulus were distantly related by marriage to Evelyn and were bound to be sympathetic to her position.

  Albertina Sisulu, by all accounts a kind, loving, open-hearted woman, must have hidden her feelings for Winnie, tending to her when she began bleeding during her first imprisonment after the pass protests, and working closely with her over the years.

  However, it is said that she had never forgiven Winnie for what she believed to be Winnie’s role in the events connected to the killing of Dr. Abu Asvat, at the Soweto surgery where Albertina worked, on January 27, 1989. Albertina had unwittingly let the two young gunmen into the surgery and was in the next room when the doctor was killed by a single gunshot. Asvat had been the last person outside Winnie’s circle, the members of her Mandela United followers, to see thirteen-year-old James Moeketsi Seipei, better known as Stompie, who was probably killed on January 1, 1989. The suspicion was that Asvat had been assassinated because he was a witness to the ill-treatment of Stompie that had taken place at Winnie’s home and could give evidence that pointed to the teenager’s murder.