The 1960s would hold numerous hardships for the Mandela family, both personally and politically, but as the decade began, Winnie had no inkling that the international spotlight would fall as much on her as on Nelson. In cities across South Africa, there was growing interaction between the white intelligentsia and educated blacks, Indians and coloureds. The National Party could not allow a multiracial society to take root, as this would seriously challenge its policy of segregation, and those who practised free association were labelled communists.
Nelson and Winnie had become close friends with Paul and Adelaide Joseph. Paul was a senior member of the Indian Congress, had been active in the Defiance Campaign and was one of the defendants in the Treason Trial. Adelaide and Winnie were both members of the Women’s Federation, and had attended a course in public speaking arranged by Hilda Bernstein and Helen Joseph, a white woman of British descent who was to become one of Winnie’s closest friends. But Winnie didn’t feel the need for formal instruction on how to get her message across, and suggested that she, and other activists, should simply speak from the heart when expressing their views on the injustices they opposed. She was right. When she made her first public speech after joining the Women’s Federation, she made such an impact that her audience composed a song in her honour there and then. Her candid, shoot-from-the-hip delivery became one of her trademarks, and her public addresses reflected an innate insight and natural empathy that could not be learned.
Nelson’s professional life was under tremendous strain, and by the end of 1960 his law practice had all but ceased to exist. More and more of their friends went into exile, and their vibrant social network was in tatters. Winnie bravely soldiered on, meeting the many challenges of being a young mother, wife and working woman, supporting her husband morally, politically and financially. She was often alone. Mandela regularly spent the night in Pretoria after consultations with his legal team, and when he did come home, Winnie had to share him with the ANC. Many a meal was interrupted by telephone calls, and he often had to meet with other ANC leaders or arrange bail for members.
Sometimes they would see one another only for a brief period in the morning, when he dashed into the house to take a bath and change his clothes before joining his co-accused in the Treason Trial. Winnie later said she couldn’t recall a time when they had a truly normal family life. As Nelson had warned her before they got married, the struggle always came first, but this did not prevent him from being a loving husband and father, even though his wife and children always had to share him with the nation.
At times, though, he could be infuriating, such as when he returned from court with a group of people and blithely told Winnie he had invited them to taste her wonderful cooking – at a time of the month when there might be only a single chop left in the fridge! He had no sense of the practical demands of domestic life and never even had a bank account, but Winnie never resented his commitment to the struggle, and in between all her other duties, found time to further her own involvement.
She greatly admired Lillian Ngoyi, prominent in the ANC and another accused in the Treason Trial, and learned much from other prominent ANC women such as Albertina Sisulu, Florence Matomela, Frances Baard, Kate Molale and Ruth Mompati. She also developed good relationships with Hilda Bernstein – the only member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) to serve on the Johannesburg City Council for three years during the 1940s – and Ruth First, an academic, editor of several radical newspapers and author of several books. She and her husband Joe Slovo, an advocate, played leading roles in the liberation struggle. Ruth was killed by a letter bomb in Mozambique in August 1982.
But more than any other woman, it was Helen Joseph who influenced Winnie, despite the thirty-year difference in their ages. Winnie regarded Helen as a mother figure, and was grateful for the advice and support the older woman offered. Helen had become politically active during World War II, and had founded a number of civil rights organisations that made her a target of the police Special Branch. She and Lillian Ngoyi were the only two women accused in the Treason Trial.
By 1959, serious tensions within the ANC reached crisis proportions. As president of the Youth League, Nelson knew that some of the members were becoming increasingly disgruntled, challenging the ANC’s moderate policies, which they condemned as ineffective. A major bone of contention was a proposed alliance with the CPSA and white liberals, and Mandela spent many a night reasoning with the dissidents until the early hours of the morning in a bid to close an ever-widening rift.
When he was released in February 1990 after more than twenty-seven years in prison, it was generally accepted that Mandela had developed his reconciliatory vision during the long years behind bars. In fact, as early as 1959, when he fell into bed too exhausted and exasperated to sleep, he would tell Winnie that the dissidents seemed incapable of grasping that black racism in retaliation for white racism would never result in a country that was free and fair for all, but would tear South Africa apart. For him, the challenge was always to find a way for people of all races to live together in harmony. He worried about opportunists who saw the struggle as a vehicle for adventure, and didn’t understand the tremendous patience, effort and hard work that were needed to normalise an entire society.
In November 1958, a militant group with strong Africanist leanings broke away from the ANC, and in April 1959 formed the Pan Africanist Congress. Their leader, Robert Sobukwe, was a university lecturer, and a strong and charismatic leader. He saw the PAC as the ANC’s rival for black support, but the organisation never managed to muster enough of a popular following to take the lead in the liberation struggle.
The restrictive pass laws continued to evoke opposition, and the ANC planned to launch a national protest on 31 March 1960. The Mandela home in Orlando West became the campaign headquarters, and Winnie threw her full weight into the preparations. Then the PAC announced that it, too, would organise anti-pass protests, but ten days earlier, on 21 March.
Winnie didn’t go to work that day, staying home so that she could monitor radio reports of the PAC campaign. But except for news that Robert Sobukwe had been arrested, there was no reference to the PAC campaign, which had drawn fairly large support in Cape Town but little response anywhere else. That afternoon, one of Winnie’s colleagues in the Women’s League, Beatrice, burst into the house and told Winnie hysterically that the police were shooting people in Sharpeville. Beatrice lived in Vereeniging, ninety kilometres south of Johannesburg, and Winnie realised at once that she would not have driven that distance unless something was seriously awry. But Beatrice was so distraught that it took a while for her to tell Winnie what had happened.
That morning, Beatrice had heard that people were gathering in Sharpeville, the black township a few kilometres outside Vereeniging, and had decided to see for herself what was going on. By the time she arrived, some 5 000 people had congregated outside the police station, but, Beatrice said, they were doing nothing except mill around and talk, and someone told her they were waiting for an announcement about the pass laws. At noon, said Beatrice, a large contingent of police arrived in armoured cars, and from time to time helicopters swooped low over the crowd, which paid little attention to this activity. Suddenly, Beatrice heard gunfire, and within seconds people were screaming in terror and running in all directions, while shots rang out and dead and wounded people fell to the ground. Beatrice rushed to her car and drove to Soweto as fast as she could.
News of the massacre spread like wildfire through Soweto, but details only emerged in the days that followed: sixty-nine people dead, including ten children and eight women, most of them shot in the back, and another 176 wounded. In the wake of the Sharpeville shootings, riots broke out in the Cape Town townships of Langa and Nyanga. In Langa, where thousands of blacks took to the streets, the police killed fourteen people and wounded dozens more. Condemnation from both inside and outside South Africa was swift. The police had shot and killed blacks before, but not on this scale. The
United Nations Security Council passed a resolution by nine votes to none (with Britain and France abstaining) that condemned the South African government for its actions, and called for the introduction of measures that would promote racial harmony and equality.
The ANC leaders anticipated that the government would use the crisis as an excuse to clamp down on black political activity, and decided to send a senior representative abroad to ensure that the organisation’s voice would still be heard. Their choice fell on Oliver Tambo, and six days after Sharpeville he left in haste for Botswana, from where he would make his way to London via Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana.
The ANC’s reading of the situation proved correct. The government declared a state of emergency, banned a host of political organisations, including the ANC and PAC, and rounded up 2 000 activists. Among them were Nelson Mandela and Chief Albert Luthuli, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while he was in prison.
In the early hours of 30 March, a familiar banging on the door heralded a police raid on the Mandela home. Half a dozen armed security policemen turned the house upside down, confiscating practically every document in the house. Nelson had been compiling a family history and legends about his ancestors, and even those notes were taken. He never saw them again. The police had no warrant but they arrested him and refused him permission to call his lawyer. When Winnie asked where he was being taken, they would not tell her.
After less than two years of marriage, Winnie was alone, her husband in jail, and any semblance of normal life was gone forever.
Before Tambo left the country, he asked a friend, Hymie Davidoff, to close down the practice of Mandela and Tambo. Davidoff sought permission from the authorities for Mandela to assist him over weekends, and, astonishingly, they agreed. Every Friday afternoon he was driven to Johannesburg from Pretoria by a Sergeant Kruger, and back again on Monday morning, having slept in the police cells at Marshall Square. Kruger was a decent man who treated Mandela well and shared with him the snacks he bought to eat during their weekly drives. Mandela was surprised that Kruger left him alone in the car while he went into a store, and at first thought how easy it would be to escape and be swallowed up by the crowds of people on the pavements. But an unspoken code of honour developed between the two men and Mandela never broke it, not even when Kruger relaxed his guard to the extent of allowing his prisoner to go to the café on the ground floor of the office building on his own. Kruger also allowed Winnie to spend time with Mandela at the office on these working weekends.
She visited her husband in Pretoria several times, taking Zenani with her. She was just over a year old, starting to walk and talk, and some of the prison warders allowed her father to hold and cuddle her. At the end of each visit, Winnie had to brace herself to wrench an unwilling, and clearly puzzled, Zeni from her father and go home without him.
With the ANC now banned, Winnie’s positions had ceased to exist, but the organisation simply went underground and there was still a great deal of work to be done. Indeed, officials who had escaped detention took on the additional responsibilities of those in prison, and were busier than ever. Among those arrested was Joe Matthews, who had been asked by Nelson to give Winnie driving lessons. In his absence she decided to teach herself, practising in the driveway of her home. During one such session, she demolished most of the garage door but, undeterred, decided the next step was to drive in traffic. She thought it prudent to have someone accompany her, and Mandela’s secretary, Ruth Mompati, was her first choice. They were good friends, and Ruth was pleased when Winnie offered to drive her to work one morning.
Within minutes of lurching into the heavy peak hour traffic, however, Ruth realised that Winnie had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Ruth clung to her seat in terror as other drivers hooted furiously and Winnie dodged one car after another. Against all odds, they reached Ruth’s office safely, but she told Winnie she would never set foot in a car with her again. Somehow, Winnie persuaded her to change her mind, and Ruth acted as navigator for the learner driver until she was ready to take her driving test. But she needed a licensed driver to accompany her to the test grounds, and since her friends were either at work or in jail, she asked a pump attendant at the filling station where she had become a regular customer to go with her. Nelson was both surprised and pleased when he learned that she had passed the test at her first attempt, though he was less happy, when he finally arrived home, about the state of the garage door. Three years later, the car that had survived Winnie’s driving lessons was destroyed when someone planted a bomb in it. The perpetrator was never identified.
The government crackdown had left little doubt that Oliver Tambo would have to remain in exile for an indeterminate time, and the ANC had to find a way for his wife, Adelaide, and their two small children to join him. Winnie was closely involved in planning their escape, but found it distressing and emotionally draining. Adelaide was one of her dearest friends, and she dreaded losing her. It took three months of careful planning before Adelaide, on foot and disguised as a peasant woman, crossed the border into Swaziland with her daughter Thembi and son Dali, just eighteen months old. She had no travel documents and had to wait for almost a month before Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, sent an aircraft to fetch her.
They had to land in the Belgian Congo (later renamed Zaire) to refuel, and Adelaide unwittingly became embroiled in what was about to erupt into a full-scale civil war. Following independence from Belgium at the end of June 1960, the rich mining province of Katanga had seceded from the Congo, and Belgian troops had been flown in to restore order and protect hundreds of Belgian nationals. Heavy fighting broke out, and in July, 4 000 troops from Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco and Tunisia were airlifted into the strife-torn area under the banner of the United Nations to support the Congolese forces.
In the midst of this escalating crisis, the aircraft carrying Adelaide Tambo and her children landed in Katanga. Crew and passengers were immediately arrested, and Adelaide spent an anxious night in a Congolese prison. The next day, highlevel negotiations secured her release and she was able to continue her journey to Ghana. Finally, three months after leaving South Africa, she joined her husband in London, and while Oliver went about setting up the external wing of the ANC, she found a job as a nursing sister and made a home for her family. It would be many years before she and Winnie saw one another again, but they remained close friends, and Adelaide was one of Winnie’s staunchest supporters.
Mandela was still in detention when he was called to give evidence at the Treason Trial in August 1960. The entire country was riveted by what he had to say, and even Winnie, who had a good idea of how he would present his case, was captivated. Many political analysts believe that the way he set out the ANC’s policies and actions during his evidence in chief and cross-examination established his reputation and leadership qualities, not only in South Africa, but around the world. At the end of August, the five-month-old state of emergency was lifted, and Mandela was released.
Winnie revelled in the joy of having her Madiba home again. The Treason Trial continued, but she cherished the evenings, when he came home. For a while their lives were almost normal, but time was running out for Soweto’s uncrowned royal family. One Sunday morning, Adelaide Joseph witnessed at first hand the adulation of the ordinary people for Mandela. Driving through the township, Nelson’s car was recognised immediately by men, women and children, who waved and shouted in greeting, calling out ‘Mandela! Mandela!’ as he passed. Adelaide said later that it was then that she knew, without a doubt, that he was the man South Africa needed, and she was always struck by the fact that neither Nelson nor Winnie ever forgot ‘the people down at the bottom’. During Mandela’s long years in prison, Winnie made it her business to visit the families of other political detainees and arrange financial aid for them because, she said, they were not the Mandelas or Sisulus, but the ordinary, ‘forgotten’ people.
In stark contrast to Verwoerd’s predictions about the Bantustans, resist
ance to apartheid was intensifying. In Pondoland, both the Mandela and Madikizela families felt the impact. In parts of the region, people suspected of collaborating with the government were assaulted, some even killed. In Tembuland, resistance that had first become apparent in 1955 was growing fiercer. Winnie was especially concerned about the situation in Pondoland, where a serious uprising was brewing. The media essentially ignored the growing tensions, but visiting relatives and friends brought first-hand accounts of the unrest, and the news spread via the ‘bush telegraph’.
In Bizana and other troubled areas, many people vehemently opposed the establishment of a Bantu Authority to replace the traditional Bunga. Pondo tribesmen were deeply suspicious of the Bantu Authority, which intensified when the government amended the Land Trust Act and allowed the Bantu Authority to decide on the distribution, zoning and fencing of land. Grazing lands were divided arbitrarily, and in some cases fences were erected across graves in family cemeteries. This was sacrilege to the Pondo and caused widespread outrage. Another highly emotive issue was the culling of cattle, which, the Bantu Authority claimed, was essential to promote conservation. But the Pondo found it difficult to understand why the number of cattle they could own had to be limited, while no such restrictions were placed on white farmers. There was also widespread unhappiness over the forced resettlement of large numbers of people to areas that were already overcrowded, and where soil erosion was a serious problem. It seemed to fly in the face of the supposed concern about conservation. People had farmed on the same land for generations, and became convinced that the Bantu Authority wanted to force them off the land to work as cheap labour on white farms and in the mines. In an attempt to halt the resistance, the Bantu Authority offered financial compensation to tribal chiefs to enforce the legislation. Some chiefs agreed, and this, in turn, gave rise to even greater opposition. A number of Pondo tribesmen formed a body called Intaba, which means mountain, to organise opposition to the Bantu Authority.
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