Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Another is Mandela, sitting writing in a notepad at a small table in that bare-brick room, just as Arthur Goldreich remembered him:

  It was exactly like a cell, I mean it was like a Buddhist monk’s cell when you have this notion of someone who has given up the vestiges of a [normal] life and that was prior to devotion and faith and trust and service. This room was an epitome of that kind of service, unenhanced and monklike, absolutely pure in that sense also, of course, which certainly impressed me. You know, I wasn’t that young, I was in my thirties and I had a family, and I thought that we were treating Mandela badly but obviously correctly.

  I had this kind of thing, this conflict in my mind, about the image and what we were doing and it’s still with me… Yes, look, it had a bare floor, bare walls, no decoration whatsoever. A table, a modest small table, a hard chair and a bed. That was it and a place for some books, I remember, because he read all the time. And he really was very diligent… there were very many books in the house… but I can’t remember Madiba coming out of this place and going to the house to go through the books. We would be talking and I would say there’s this and this and this, and that’s about the things we talked about, so I would bring him books but he never intruded, in that sense, in that world.

  The Goldreichs, who paid an implausibly low rent of 100 rand a month, established some form and order at Liliesleaf as they set about joining the country set. People who knew them—but did not know of their secret life—were surprised at how rapidly they had risen in the world and wondered where the money came from. Hazel’s cousins, the Rochmans, were not alone in feeling they had been dropped, or were no longer good enough for them, as they were not invited to the new address. The real reason, no doubt, was that they were being shielded from the potential fallout.

  All the Goldreichs started horse-riding, though Hazel soon gave it up as it was not her thing—“I thought to myself, why should I suffer”—while Arthur kept a horse at Liliesleaf and would stride around in jodhpurs and riding boots, accessorized with yellow gloves. Hazel thought of the people around them in Rivonia as “more English than the English” hunting, shooting and fishing types, which was exactly the role Arthur slipped into. “The idea was to give the impression that one didn’t really care about anything very much and just enjoyed oneself. We had a good time, we entertained.” Hazel was happy to be involved and to play the role. She felt it was necessary and, besides, she liked being at Liliesleaf. Arthur set up his studio there and continued to paint. That, too, the bohemian, was part of his persona.

  Len Lazarus, who lived nearby and was related to Hazel by marriage, used to visit the Goldreichs with his wife and guessed something was going on when he recognized the gardener as Nelson Mandela. Lazarus, in thrall to Arthur and his larger-than-life character, was quite envious when Arthur let his guard slip once or twice—you can imagine how he must have been bursting to tell—and would say, you know, I’m doing dangerous work. Lazarus wished he could be doing something exciting, too, though not too dangerous.

  What a contrast, between the two worlds of Rivonia, between the superficial carry-on of the dressy dinners, cocktail parties and idle, flippant conversations, and the subterranean plotting for an armed struggle. Such role-playing and subterfuge must have been hard to sustain.

  Hazel Goldreich remembers her mother coming round and seeing Michael Harmel at the house.

  “What’s he doing here?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’s just come to measure for the curtains.”

  Hazel’s mother was not fooled. “Don’t give me that, he doesn’t do curtains.”

  The Goldreichs had comrades for dinner and drinks as well as the posh locals, but tried not to mix the two groups. There were occasional parties where they all rubbed shoulders. Amina Cachalia could recall going to the housewarming with her husband, Yusuf, a big buffet lunch with lots of people standing around drinking and chatting.

  Mandela liked being at Rivonia and afterwards always spoke affectionately about the experience. At the trial in 1964, he referred to it as the ideal place for a man who lived the life of an outlaw. “Up to that time I had been compelled to live indoors during the daytime and could only venture out under cover of darkness. But at Liliesleaf I could live differently and work far more efficiently.”

  Hazel Goldreich recalled that Mandela would have meetings or sit writing during the day and then emerge in the late afternoon or early evening to roam the grounds, often in the company of her small sons, Paul and Nicholas, and the Goldreichs’ dogs and geese.

  In a letter from Robben Island, twenty-five years later, he said the whole place reminded him of the happiest days of his life: his childhood. Of course, the vast rural landscape of his earliest years must have been when he felt the greatest freedom—a place to escape to from his cell. As he wrote in another letter to the same correspondent, “The country boy in me refuses to die, despite so many years of exposure to urban life. The open veld, a bush, blade of grass and animal life make it a joy to be alive.”

  In late 1961 his days of freedom were already numbered, but he must have known he could not stay ahead of the police forever.

  * * *

  It would not be surprising if today Mandela in some way feels possessive of his time at Liliesleaf and, indeed, has an understandable attachment to his past experiences in general, as well as some concern when he fears they are being exploited.

  Liliesleaf is now part of what might broadly be called the Mandela heritage trail and has been re-created as a museum site commemorating the events that took place there over twenty months in the early 1960s. The original look and feel have been elegantly re-created with considerable attention to detail, under the stewardship of Nicholas Wolpe, the son of Mandela’s former friends and comrades, Harold and AnnMarie Wolpe.

  Much of the Mandela heritage trail is in the hands of Mandela himself, or has been created in partnership with his Nelson Mandela Foundation. The latter has become a key resource while successfully positioning itself as what it calls “a Centre of Memory,” maintaining its own substantial archive while also attempting to become a hub for the many other archives and historical collections attached to universities, libraries and various other state institutions around the country.

  The new South Africa will probably never stop coming to terms with the old South Africa, certainly not so long as its painful past of cruel subjugation continues to intrude upon the present. History is always important, obviously, but somehow it seems even more important to this young country, which was born of so much blood and turmoil. Behind the broad sweep of events lie the individual stories of suffering and tragedy, sometimes triumph and heroism. In the great African tradition of oral storytelling there seems to be a limitless capacity for the country to record its past.

  If the key is truth and reconciliation, then the latter is both a gesture of humanity and a matter of political will, while the truth is in the detail—a matter of fact; a question of perspective.

  Not everyone around Mandela is happy about the idea of his Foundation—not least those members of his family who feel sidelined, once again, by its existence. Yet the people who surround him there seem mostly genuine and well-meaning in their intent and sense of purpose, whilst liking to have some influence and a role in events concerning their namesake. Nic Wolpe struck a defiant note of independence during his development of Liliesleaf, which set in motion a certain tension between the two camps—Liliesleaf on the one hand, Mandela on the other—and aroused suspicions that Wolpe was somehow exploiting history to feather his own nest.

  It perhaps did not help that he built himself an enormous office—not much in the spirit of a monk’s cell.

  As has already been said, Mandela does not lose his temper often but in 2003 he came on an official visit to see the progress of the site at Liliesleaf. As they walked along side by side, Mandela asked Wolpe about the Liliesleaf book he had heard that Wolpe was planning.

  Wolpe already knew Mandela thought he had a bo
ok planned as one of Mandela’s aides had mentioned it. There was no book. Wolpe had told the aide this and now he told Mandela the same thing. Mandela roared, “Are you calling me a LIAR!” Wolpe is no stranger to the occasional outburst of ill-temper himself but later described how terrifying it was, being the focus of this brief explosion of Mandela’s anger. He could only answer, humbly, that he was telling the truth.

  Mandela did not go to the opening of Liliesleaf, possibly because of either his health or his schedule. Some rapprochement has since occurred, however. In 2008, Mandela’s two glamorous and charming daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, came to Liliesleaf, bringing with them their mother, Winnie, and a considerable family entourage.

  Zindzi, who was still under a year old in late 1961, has no memory whatsoever of Liliesleaf and, as already stated, has no memory at all of her father before the mid-1970s when she was able to visit him for the first time on Robben Island. Zenani, who was at the time a walking, talking toddler of two and a half, has floating memories of geese and fields and walks with her father by the river. She spoke of Liliesleaf at the time as her father’s home.

  They both made several trips to see him there with Winnie in 1961. There was a spontaneous moment when they went into the cell-like room in 2008 and Winnie said, “My God, I remember this, there was a bed over there and a table over there.” She said that they had all slept together in that confined space: in fact, not just Mandela and Winnie and the two girls, but also Makgatho, Mandela’s son from his first marriage. “On the floor?” exclaimed Zindzi and Zenani. It must have been a long time since either of these daughters of South Africa’s first family had slept on a floor. Winnie admonished them straight away. It had been important, she pointed out, for them all to visit with their father and be together.

  Makgatho, who in 1961 was around eleven years old, faced many difficulties in later life, becoming an alcoholic and eventually contracting HIV-AIDS before his early death in 2005. This perhaps lends a poignant edge here to his recollection of his father, whom he called Tata, at Liliesleaf.

  We knew Tata was in hiding. I can’t say how I felt about it. It made me afraid. I couldn’t say then why, but now [he was recalling these feelings for Fatima Meer in the mid-1980s] I know I was afraid because I thought we could lose him. I was excited and happy when I saw him. We saw him at different places. Mum Winnie took us to see him. One time I went to stay with him at Lillies farm [sic]. There was a big house which was the main house and there were outbuildings. Tata was staying in one of the outbuildings. The white people were staying in the big house.

  Mum Winnie stayed one night and left. I stayed for a week, or it may have been two weeks. Tata and I swam in the pool and we went for long walks. He taught me to shoot with a rifle and bought me a pellet gun. He used to cook for me. Thembi [Makgatho’s older brother] was not with us. I didn’t know why he was not there. I didn’t think about it at the time. I saw a lot of Tata because I was close to mum Winnie then.

  I was very sad to leave Tata, but he told me I shouldn’t worry, that we should go to school in Swaziland and we would have no problems.

  As in other secret rendezvous with her husband, Winnie’s trips to Liliesleaf, frequently arranged by Wolfie Kodesh, would involve circuitous routes and changes of cars midway. She would often go via the Josephs’ home in Fordsburg, perhaps collecting one of Adelaide’s curries on the way, to take to Madiba, or stopping on the way back with some vegetables from the farm.

  They would not discuss where Mandela was hiding, but Paul would note that the car was covered in mud and had clearly just been on or near a farm. He knew too that his own house was under surveillance and feared Mandela would be found and caught. “They were all terribly careless but it was the early days of the underground movement, with a certain amount of romanticism.”

  When Winnie did not take food from the Josephs, she might cook for her husband at Liliesleaf, or Mandela would surprise her and prepare a meal himself. When that first happened she was suspicious that someone else must have cooked it for him and wondered whether he’d had another woman there. She at first refused to eat and only relented when he went into a detailed description of how he had cooked the rice, the chicken, the vegetables.

  Arthur Goldreich has recalled that there was an airgun at Liliesleaf and that he taught Mandela to shoot with it. Mandela, he said, soon became quite proficient. According to Mandela, the airgun had been his back in Orlando and Winnie had brought it to the farm for him. He and Goldreich would use it for target practice and for shooting doves. One day he was on the lawn in front of the house and took aim at a sparrow in a tree. Hazel Goldreich joked that he would never hit it, but he shot the sparrow and it fell dead onto the lawn. Her youngest boy Paul, aged around five, was there and said through tears, “David, why did you kill that bird? Its mother will be sad.” Mandela had been pleased with himself for hitting the bird the first time, but now felt ashamed.

  He has described the visits of Winnie and the children as giving him the illusion that his family life was still intact. Winnie tended to see them as the opposite: as a reminder of how fragile their family existence was and what they were missing.

  A reminder of that fragility came when Makgatho was leafing through a copy of Drum, together with the older Goldreich son, Nicholas, and came across an old photograph of his father. He knew not to disclose his father’s name, but that was a heavy burden for a child to carry and now he blurted it out. “That’s my father.” When Nicholas didn’t believe him, Makgatho explained that his real name was Nelson. According to Mandela, Nicholas asked his mother whether Mandela’s name was David and she said it was. Nicholas then said that Makgatho had told him his father’s name was Nelson. Hazel was alarmed and told Mandela about the incident.

  Arthur Goldreich gives a different account in which his curious son, Nicholas, appeared in Mandela’s room hiding something behind his back.

  Your wife is Winnie?

  Yes.

  And these are your children’s names?

  Yes.

  So you are Nelson Mandela, said Nicholas, producing Drum from behind his back.

  Mandela took the young Nicholas into the grounds for a walk. Goldreich did not know what he said to him, but Nicholas must have learned something very important in his life that day as he became very responsible after that talk.

  Fifteen

  MANDELA REMEMBERS SITTING in the kitchen at Liliesleaf on “a warm December afternoon,” listening to the radio broadcast, from Oslo, Norway, of the Address by that year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the president-general of the ANC, Chief Albert Luthuli.

  It was a Monday. Just five days later, on Saturday, December 16, 1961, the bombs of the ANC’s (then unacknowledged) military wing MK would explode across the country for the first time. The armed struggle was about to begin.

  As Mandela said, the juxtaposition of violence with a Peace Prize was awkward.

  The listener, alone in his kitchen, Mandela was already familiar with the content of the speech, as he had discussed it with Luthuli before the chief’s trip to Europe. Luthuli had in fact asked Rusty Bernstein to draft the speech for him, apparently because he had been impressed by Bernstein’s call to the people in the early stages of the Freedom Charter Campaign. Bernstein’s role in the Congress of the People had been tricky for the ANC, and his contribution to Luthuli’s speech was not made public. There were many in the struggle, not just within South Africa but elsewhere among the African independence movements, who already thought Luthuli was too close to whites and was selling out to the imperial powers in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. They would have been even further displeased if they had known he had turned to a white man to write his speech for him (though in fact Bernstein says that little of his draft appeared in the final version).

  The historians Karis, Carter and Gerhart quote an unnamed African academic as telling them in 1963 that Luthuli’s acceptance of the prize had severely damaged his reputation among Africans.

&
nbsp; Still, it was a rousing oration delivered by an ANC leader standing proud on a Western rostrum, and that was definitely a poke in the eye of the Nationalist government. The announcement of the prize had been made, with commendable timing, back in October, just five days after the Nats had been re-elected for a fourth term of office. It was clear that the Nobel award had hurt the government as they conceded to international pressure and gave Luthuli permission to travel to receive it, while commenting that it had done so “notwithstanding the fact that the government realizes the award was not made on merit.”

  Luthuli had been denied permission to attend celebrations near his home, where the ANC activist and singer, M. B. Yengwa, had praised him in song as the great bull who had broken the fence and wandered far—as far as Oslo. He paid tribute to Luthuli saying, Nkosi yase Groutville! Nkosi yase Afrika! Nkosi yase world!—“Chief of Groutville! Chief of Africa! Chief of the World!”

  Many were proud of Luthuli’s prize and felt they had a share in it, seeing the award as not just for Luthuli but for the movement. An old MK soldier in Durban, Sonny Singh, recalled being among the vast crowd that ran behind and alongside the open Cadillac convertible that took Luthuli and his wife on a hero’s parade across Durban to the airport at the start of his trip to Europe.

  “Through all this cruel treatment in the name of the law and order,” Mandela heard Luthuli say over the radio,

  our people with a few exceptions have remained non-violent. If today this peace Award is given to South Africa through a black man, it is not because we in South Africa have won our fight for peace and human brotherhood. Far from it. Perhaps we stand further from victory than any other people in Africa. But nothing which we have suffered at the hands of the government has turned us from our chosen path of disciplined resistance. It is for this, I believe, that this award has been given.