Winnie’s top priority was the care and welfare of Zeni and Zindzi, as well as Mandela’s three older children, Makaziwe, Thembi and Makgatho. They had already suffered greatly as the result of their father’s imprisonment, and Makgatho, in particular, was struggling to come to terms with his absence. Evelyn’s children had a good relationship with their stepmother, and before her banning order it was Winnie who fetched the children from their school in Manzini, Swaziland, for the holidays. After she was banned, Nelson’s friend, Brian Somana, would pick them up.
As time passed, life became a lot harder for the boys. They changed schools and could go home only once a year. When they spent school holidays in Swaziland, Makgatho was puzzled that they could not stay with the principal, Father Hooper, in his large, empty house, but had to live with his maid, whom they called Ma Mashwana. With five people in her own family, her small two-roomed house was overcrowded, but the Mashwanas became a surrogate family for the Mandela boys during the long school year. Later, Walter Sisulu’s son Zwelakhe joined them, and the boys built their own separate hut. Their lives were further complicated by the fact that they didn’t have passports. But they learned from their friends how to cross the international boundary undetected, and would take either a train or a bus to the border, walk into South Africa at night and then be taken to Johannesburg from Piet Retief by an Indian taxi driver.
Winnie’s many responsibilities weighed heavily on her, and she was grateful that she could carry on working. But the banning order complicated her life in numerous ways. In order to cope, she developed two personalities – in company, she hid her problems behind a brave face and brilliant smile, but in private she grew increasingly anxious and lonely. Winnie had never really been alone in her life, surrounded first by her own family, then by friends and fellow students, and, most recently, the throngs of people that gravitated to her after her marriage to Nelson. At times she feared the loneliness would drive her mad, and she tried to counter it by helping those in need and working so hard that she was totally exhausted when she fell into bed at night. With most of Mandela’s close associates in exile, in prison or in hiding, people in trouble often appealed to Winnie for assistance. One of them was Ruth Mompati, and at last Winnie could return the favour of Ruth’s help when she was learning to drive.
After Mandela’s arrest, Ruth was instructed to remove all the files from his office before the police seized them. Naturally, the police had then started looking for Ruth, and she went to Winnie for help. While he was on the run, Nelson had once stayed in a house directly opposite a police station, bargaining on the fact that the police would hardly think he would be hiding right under their noses. Now, applying Mandela’s logic, Winnie took Ruth into her own home, even though it was under surveillance. When Winnie left for work in the morning, she would lock the door behind her, as though no one else was home. Meanwhile, inside, Ruth was finalising what she could and referring pending cases to other lawyers. One day, a number of men arrived with a furniture truck. They said they were from Levine’s Furnishers and had come to repossess household goods on which the instalments were overdue. Mandela had bought the furniture on a hire purchase agreement, and somehow had neglected to make provision for continued regular payments after his arrest. Winnie had received no final demand or notice of repossession, but every piece of furniture was removed. Even the linoleum on the kitchen floor was taken, and when Winnie arrived home, all that was left were books, bedding, clothing and her kitchen utensils. She fought back her tears, swallowed her pride and borrowed a small paraffin stove from a neighbour to make supper for the children. Afterwards, she spread blankets on the floor, where she, Ruth, Zeni and Zindzi huddled together.
But Winnie didn’t sleep. She wracked her brain all night to come up with a solution to this latest problem. In the morning she went to see Godfrey Pitje, a lawyer who had been an articled clerk with Nelson, and who owed him a number of favours. He agreed to lend her enough money to buy some basic items of furniture, and though it took a long time, she repaid him out of her small salary every month.
Shortly afterwards, Ruth went into exile in London, where she worked for the ANC for many years before being transferred to Lusaka. Winnie lost yet another friend, but she did not begrudge Ruth the opportunity to escape to safety, and she had left just in time. The police began raiding the house regularly, and would certainly have arrested Ruth. The yelling and bright lights shining through the windows that heralded every raid terrified the children, and it became increasingly difficult for Winnie to comfort them while strange men rifled through their possessions and made ominous remarks. But frightening and unsavoury as these early raids were, they were just the beginning of years of harassment and victimisation.
9
The Rivonia Trial
WITHOUT WARNING, Mandela was moved to Robben Island at the end of May 1963. No explanation was given to him and Winnie was not even informed of his transfer until she arrived to visit him at Pretoria Central Prison. Even then, she was told only that he had been moved, and it took a number of enquiries to find out where.
Ironically, even though he was a convicted prisoner, Nelson was in a far better situation than Winnie, who was entirely at the mercy of the security police. He had been absorbed into a system that was regulated by strict rules and regulations that dictated how prisoners were to be treated, and, in addition, he knew the law and was a well-known political figure. Mandela used these factors to his advantage, and he had barely set foot on Robben Island before making it abundantly clear that he would tolerate no transgression of the rules. He sternly told a warder who had tried to assault him that if he so much as laid a hand on him, the matter would be taken to the highest court in the land, and that when Mandela was finished with him, the warder would be as poor as a church mouse. No prison official ever laid another hand on him.
Winnie, however, was just beginning to understand how vulnerable and exposed to abuse she was. In May she was arrested for attending a gathering, but when the case was heard, she was acquitted. She had written to Mary Benson that the police had resorted to fabricating evidence against her.
In June, she was given permission to visit Nelson on the island – for thirty minutes, after a journey of 1 400 kilometres from Johannesburg and a ferry ride across ten kilometres of choppy sea from Cape Town harbour. She found conditions on the island abhorrent. The ‘visitors’ room’ was a rickety shelter built right on the shore, with double wire mesh separating prisoner and visitor. There was nowhere to sit, and she and Nelson had to stand for the entire half-hour. The worst was that all she could see of him through the distorting mesh was an outline, and they had to raise their voices to hear one another, with white warders standing by and listening to the entire conversation. They were allowed to speak only English or Afrikaans – Xhosa and other indigenous languages were forbidden, because the warders could not understand them. And they were warned in advance that if they touched on any topic except family matters, the visit would be terminated immediately. Winnie was severely depressed when she left the island, her sole consolation that she had been able to establish for herself that Nelson was well, and that he had been glad to see her.
Barely a month after his abrupt relocation to Robben Island, Mandela found himself being whisked back to Pretoria, again with no explanation. The government issued a terse press statement claiming the move was for his own protection, because PAC prisoners on the island had threatened to assault him, but it wasn’t long before the truth came out.
Since December 1961, the ANC had carried out sporadic acts of sabotage against symbols of apartheid, including Bantu Administration offices, both to hurt the government and in the hope that the instability would deter foreign investors. On 1 May 1963, the new Minister of Justice, BJ Vorster, introduced the iniquitous ninety-day law that allowed security police to detain people in solitary confinement for successive periods of ninety days at a time. In practice, this could – and did – mean that political activists were held f
or an indeterminate period, ‘until this side of eternity’, as Vorster said, without being charged or brought to court, and with no access to family members or legal representatives. Over the next two decades, thousands of people would simply disappear without trace and be interrogated mercilessly by the security police until they offered ‘satisfactory’ information. Veteran parliamentarian and human rights champion Helen Suzman described the process as ‘torture by mindbreaking’. Among those held in detention without trial was Albertina Sisulu, the first woman to feel the wrath of the ninety-day law. The scope for abuse was self-evident, and the first death of a detainee was that of Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle, allegedly found hanged in his cell on 5 September 1963.
Amid all the signs of a renewed crackdown, the ANC was planning its most ambitious opposition yet. Operation Mayibuye would encompass sabotage and insurrection, authorised at the highest level within the movement – but rigorous questioning of detainees had given the security police enough information to plunge the ANC into crisis.
On 11 July, a seemingly innocuous dry cleaner’s delivery van drove up to Lilliesleaf Farm. A young security guard tried to stop the vehicle, but was overwhelmed by heavily armed police who jumped from the vehicle. In one fell swoop, they arrested Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and Arthur Goldreich. Joe Slovo and Bram Fischer, who sometimes went to the farm several times a day, were not there at the time, but in the days following the raid, many other key members of the ANC were picked up. Those arrested at Lilliesleaf had been betrayed by one of their own, Bruno Mtolo, and since he had been privy to Mandela’s movements prior to his arrest in 1962, many people later came to believe that he had also betrayed Mandela. The penalty for treachery was often death, and, later, the brutal township necklace, a tyre doused with petrol, set alight around a person’s neck, would become the most frequently used weapon of retribution against ‘sell-outs’.
Four prominent ANC detainees – Goldreich, Harold Wolpe, Abdullah Jassat and Mosie Moolla – provided a triumphant respite from the general gloom within the organisation by staging one of the most audacious escapes in South African legal history. Held under close guard at Marshall Square police headquarters in Johannesburg, and with the government trumpeting the arrests as a major coup, Goldreich noticed that one of the young policemen guarding them seemed worried and depressed. He struck up a conversation with Johannes Greeff, who was only eighteen, and learned that he was desperately in need of money to pay for repairs to a friend’s car, which he had damaged in an accident. Goldreich seized his chance, and magnanimously offered to arrange for young Greeff to get the money. Greeff helped him make a telephone call, ostensibly to arrange the funds, but in reality Goldreich used the call to alert his contact that they were planning an escape. By the simple action of allowing Goldreich to use the telephone, Greeff had already crossed the line, and the prisoners were quick but careful to exploit this unexpected opportunity. They bided their time, establishing a friendly relationship with Greeff while prosecutors toiled into the night to prepare the case that would convict them, and when the moment was right, offered Greeff a large sum of money to help them escape. He concurred.
Ann-Marie Wolpe, Harold’s wife, had organised many of Winnie and Nelson’s clandestine trysts when he was on the run, and she was given the task of arranging the getaway once the escapees got outside. She arranged that a car be parked some distance from Marshall Square to take them to a safe house in Johannesburg until they could leave the country. On the night in question, everything went according to plan, but it took the four men longer than expected to make their way to the getaway car, and the driver became more and more nervous until, convinced that the plan had failed, he drove off without them. When the four fugitives arrived at the designated spot and found no transport waiting, they had to improvise, and decided to split up. Two Indians and two white men together on the streets of Johannesburg in the dead of night would almost certainly attract the wrong attention, so they took off in opposite directions.
Astonishingly, just minutes after Goldreich and Wolpe started walking, a motorist stopped and offered them a lift. Furthermore, and by sheer coincidence, he turned out to be someone they knew and trusted! He drove them to their destination and promised solemnly to say nothing to anyone about their encounter. Moolla and Jassat experienced similar good fortune when they bumped into a friend, a waiter who was on his way home from work. He gave them temporary sanctuary until they could move to a safe house.
The next day, Ann-Marie Wolpe was arrested and questioned relentlessly, but she had genuinely not known the addresses of the safe houses that were to be used, and after twenty-four hours the police released her, none the wiser about where the four escaped men were hiding.
The newspapers printed every detail they could come up with and relied heavily on speculation about the whereabouts of the wanted men. Their photographs appeared in almost every newspaper, which added to the danger that they would be found, but for ANC supporters, victory was sweet. The police were smarting from the humiliating blow the four had struck, and searched everywhere. Special vigilance was applied along all the country’s borders, which the authorities knew the men would try to cross at some point.
But the fugitives bided their time, Goldreich and Wolpe moving from one house to another until they finally took refuge in a tiny cottage. Terrified of attracting attention, they scarcely moved, and were too afraid to even strike a match in case someone saw or heard anything and discovered their presence. Finally, they were hidden in the boot of a friend’s car and sneaked over the border into Swaziland, where they disguised themselves as priests. Wolpe called himself the Reverend Eric Shipton, and they pretended to be on a visit to missions in southern Africa. This made it possible for them to charter an aircraft, and in due course the two ‘churchmen’ made it all the way to England.
Johannes Greeff never got his money. He was arrested and agreed to help his colleagues set a trap for the man who was to deliver it. But Goldreich’s friends had expected this to happen, and simply never went to the rendezvous. Greeff was convicted of helping the four men escape, and went to prison.
Winnie was alarmed when she heard that Mandela was back in Pretoria to stand trial along with the leaders arrested at Lilliesleaf. All she could think about was that this turn of events would undoubtedly lead to his five-year sentence being extended.
On 9 October 1963, the accused were taken to the historic Palace of Justice on Pretoria’s Church Square for the opening day of The State v the National High Command and others, later known as State v Nelson Mandela and others, which would for evermore be called the Rivonia Trial. Near the Palace of Justice – restored to its former glory and used again as a court of law for the first time in forty years from mid-2003 – is a statue of Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic, who fought against British imperialism and oppression of his people in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The inscription on the statue, taken from one of Kruger’s speeches, reads: ‘In confidence we lay our cause before the whole world. Whether we win or whether we die, freedom will rise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds.’ Though the politics of Boer and black were worlds apart in the 1960s, the ANC could not have put their hopes and aspirations more clearly than the man with whose descendants they were now at war.
Mandela’s physical appearance shocked his family and friends. He had lost some twelve kilograms. Because he was a convicted prisoner he could not wear his own clothes to court like the other accused, and was forced to wear the prison uniform: khaki shorts and open sandals. It was humiliating and he loathed it. He bore little resemblance to the confident and well-dressed man who had so impressed the world with his eloquence during the Treason Trial, and even after his arrest in August 1962.
Winnie’s banning order was still in place, and she was refused permission to travel beyond Johannesburg to be in court on the first day of the trial – and to add to her distress, the police launched a raid on her home as well. The f
amily members of other accused were also targeted, both Albertina Sisulu and Caroline Motsoaledi having been detained under the ninety-day law. Sisulu’s young son Max had also been arrested. Imprisoning and victimising the wives and children of those involved in the struggle was a very effective way for the state to apply pressure on them; many were strong enough to handle almost anything the authorities did, but the harassment of their loved ones caused great despondency, and in some cases was successfully used to turn otherwise loyal ANC supporters into police informers.
Winnie appealed to the Minister of Justice for permission to attend Mandela’s trial. He agreed, but warned that she could be barred at any time if her attendance or behaviour caused any kind of disturbance. Not for the first time, she was struck by the irony that the same government which insisted that black people had no place in ‘white’ society, and encouraged them to preserve their own culture (within their designated homelands, of course), forbade her from wearing traditional Xhosa dress to court. But the government knew full well that traditional dress was more than a fashion statement, and that it evoked a level of pride they had no wish to confront in an already volatile situation.
The case against Mandela was largely based on documents that had been seized during the raid on Lilliesleaf Farm. He had often asked his comrades to destroy any papers containing possibly incriminating information, but enough of them had survived to provide the prosecution with evidence of his involvement in sabotage and MK’s activities. Surprisingly, the Rivonia triallists were not charged with high treason, as expected, but with sabotage and conspiracy, which meant the case could proceed without a lengthy preparatory examination. Treason charges also placed a far heavier burden of proof on the state. However, the maximum penalty was the same for both treason and conspiracy – death by hanging.
Winnie Mandela Page 16