It was the first time since Thembi’s death that Winnie had seen Nelson, and there was so much to talk about – and so little time. How do you encapsulate two years in thirty minutes? How do you console the man you love for the loss of his son? How do you make any decisions when there is no time to explore any one issue? How do you express longing for one another’s physical presence with two hostile strangers listening to every word? They barely had time to even touch on the most important matters and reassure one another as best they could before the warder said ‘Time’s up’ and Winnie had to leave.
She walked back to the ferry in a daze, struggling to keep her composure, trying to focus on getting to the airport and home. She felt weak and disorientated, and ineffably tired. She feared that she might collapse, and willed herself to reach the relative safety of her home, praying that it would not have been left in disarray by yet another raid.
She made it back to Orlando, probably as much through sheer determination as anything else, but once she shut the door behind her, the tidal wave of heartache and anxiety, frustration and trauma that had been welling up over the past few years, hit her. At the age of thirty-six, Winnie Mandela had a heart attack.
The illness compelled Winnie to rest and take care of herself. She emerged from a period of recuperation with restored vitality and energy – and she would need it. The security police were sorely frustrated that their attempts to silence her and keep her behind bars for as long as possible had failed. Until they had collected enough information to act against her again, they would have to be content with a renewed campaign of dirty tricks and harassment. During a raid on her home, they found her sister, brother-in-law and Peter Magubane (who was also banned), and charged Winnie with breaking her banning order. Her younger sister Nonyaniso was arrested for being in Johannesburg without a permit and given seventy-two hours to return to the Transkei. Sometimes, the police invaded Winnie’s house four times in one day. Mandela lodged an appeal with the Minister of Justice for Winnie’s ban to be lifted, but got no response. She might have been released from prison, but Winnie was living under siege.
During the early 1960s, the ANC was a vibrant and fast-growing organisation. Despite the apartheid government’s repression and stifling legislation, it had been possible to organise national campaigns and conferences, stage the momentous Congress of the People, adopt the Freedom Charter, establish representation abroad, launch Umkhonto we Sizwe, and kindle international recognition and support. By 1970, however, the movement had been reduced to little more than a nuisance factor. At the end of 1969, a secret American intelligence report assessed the ANC’s political influence as weak, and noted that the organisation had been widely infiltrated by government agents. American historian Thomas Karis wrote that the ANC had become little more than a shadowy presence, and when Washington Post correspondent Jim Hoagland visited South Africa in 1970, he found that Luthuli, Mandela and Sisulu were ‘perceived dimly, as if they belonged to another time, long past and long lost’.
Mandela later acknowledged that during this period scant attention was paid to him or the ANC, and in November 1970 a draft ANC document conceded that the organisation was moribund. The leadership recognised that black people had become politically reticent, tsotsis were paid for information, and there were spies and informers everywhere. The Rivonia prisoners’ worst fears were turning into reality. Ever since their imprisonment on Robben Island, they had been afraid that removal of the leadership from the political stage would see a parallel retreat from the ANC by supporters both in South Africa and internationally. As media reports about the liberation struggle slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether, their concerns proved warranted.
Between the ANC and oblivion stood the lone and battered figure of Winnie Mandela.
In the political vacuum created by the virtual withdrawal of the ANC from the political arena, a new brand of black opposition evolved, and Winnie was one of the few members of the ANC’s top echelon to embrace it. The next generation of young and angry blacks gravitated towards Black Consciousness, and Winnie, with her instinctive populist approach, had little difficulty identifying with the concept. She understood and empathised with the anger of the youth, and they, in turn, trusted and looked up to her, surreptitiously visiting her and seeking her counsel. From what she saw and heard, she realised that ways had to be found to accommodate the new mood and aspirations of young black activists under the banner of the ANC. It would not be easy, and Winnie was the only person who could act as the link between the Old Guard and the Young Turks. Since any political conversations were strictly prohibited, Winnie could not discuss the situation with Mandela, and had to be content with relaying her cryptic messages to him, then formulating his equally arcane responses into proposals that would be acceptable to the youth.
The government had long since ceased to regard Winnie merely as a branch of their vendetta against Mandela. Challenged initially by her refusal to capitulate, then by her growing political involvement, they recognised her strength and power and she became a target in her own right. Her avowed commitment to keeping both the struggle and Nelson Mandela’s name alive was gaining momentum. Meanwhile, in seclusion on Robben Island and with no way of playing a direct role in politics, the ANC leaders increasingly focused their attention on survival of the spirit. Mandela, especially, concentrated all his efforts on preparing himself and the others for the day when they would be free men. He knew that some of them might not live long enough to see that day, but this did not deter him. He was single-minded in his determination that the political prisoners would use the time in prison to further their studies, so that they would emerge as educated intellectuals.
Barely perceptible shifts in the attitude of the prison authorities made their lives somewhat more bearable. From 1970, the prisoners were allowed to have photographs of close family members. Winnie immediately made up an album and sent it to Nelson, and regularly updated the pictures of herself and the children, and later also their grandchildren. Mandela carefully pasted each new photograph into the album, which fellow prisoners often asked to borrow. Some of them seldom or never received visitors or letters, and the Mandela photo album became their only link with a lost family life, a ‘window on the world’, as Mandela called it. Eventually, the album had been paged through so often that it began to fall apart, and Mandela found that some of the photographs had been removed. Although this upset him, he forgave the photo thieves, reasoning that they were so desperate to have something personal in their cells that they could not resist the temptation.
The difference in the lives of the two Mandelas became ever more discernible. As Nelson retreated into a life of philosophy and academic zeal, Winnie was moving inexorably towards the front line of the battle against apartheid. In 1972, security policemen kicked down the door of her house, bricks were flung through a window, shots fired at the front door. She was watched more closely than any other banned person, and the campaign against her bore testimony to the fact that it had become a personal vendetta. The government was fully aware of the deadly blow it had dealt the struggle by jailing Mandela and other ANC leaders, and they did not want Winnie stepping into the breach. If anything, they wanted her out of the way and behind bars, and repeated efforts were made to get a criminal conviction against her, even though some of the charges bordered on the absurd.
After the police damaged her front door, three white sympathisers who had read newspaper reports about the attack called at her home and offered to lend her a guard dog for protection. The police, never far away, promptly arrested the callers and charged them with visiting a banned person. Winnie was charged with breaking her ban. When the dog was returned to its owners, a friend of Winnie’s, Angela Cobbett, a prominent member of the Black Sash, gave Winnie a German shepherd dog. She, too, was arrested for visiting Winnie, and the dog, Sheba, was poisoned soon afterwards.
Next, a group of Winnie’s friends employed and paid a nightwatchman to look after her, but he w
as powerless against the security police. On one occasion, three policemen entered the house while Winnie wasn’t there, despite the watchman’s attempts to prevent them. The next morning, he discovered that all the washing hanging on the line, including one of Winnie’s dresses, had been slashed with a knife. By now, Winnie was convinced that the police were paying people to intimidate or even kill her.
Children were exempt from the ban on communication with Winnie, and for a while her ten-year-old niece lived with her. One night, Winnie was awakened by a sound in her bedroom. She switched on the bedside lamp and saw three men approaching her bed. One was holding a wire noose. It had been many years since Winnie had stood her ground in childhood fights with the boys who were her playmates, but she was determined that if the intruders wanted to kill her, she would take at least one of them with her. As she sprang out of bed, charged with adrenalin and ready to do battle, her niece started screaming, and the three men fled.
Winnie telephoned her attorney and some friends, and on investigation they found that the burglar bars at one window had been sawed through, then carefully placed back in position. She had no doubt that this, too, was the work of the security police, but her friends insisted that she report the incident. The police took a statement from her, but, as she had known would happen, nothing ever came of it. Some time later, a bomb was thrown at the house and exploded against a side wall. Then the garage was burgled and the windows of her car were smashed. Finally, the car was stolen.
No one was ever apprehended for any of the numerous offences perpetrated against Winnie – all incidents of theft, housebreaking, assault, damage to property, bomb attacks and shots fired apparently baffled the usually efficient South African Police, who never solved a single case on behalf of the woman living at house No. 8115, Orlando West.
Zindzi, although she was only twelve, had witnessed enough to understand that the state was waging all-out war on her mother, and she appealed to the United Nations to protect Winnie. Both the UN secretary general and the International Committee of the Red Cross sought assurances from the South African government that Winnie would not be harmed. But her friends were not convinced, and decided that she needed more protection than the apartheid government’s word.
Horst Kleinschmidt was a member of the Christian Institute and later executive director of the International Defence and Aid Fund. Father Cosmos Desmond was a Franciscan priest who had been banned and placed under house arrest after writing The Discarded People, which exposed the plight of victims of forced removals that underpinned the government’s homeland resettlement scheme. Together, they directed construction of a wall around Winnie’s corner property. Many years before, Mandela had planted an evergreen hedge along the boundaries, but while he and Winnie were in prison, it had died, and only a few brown stumps remained. Horst instructed the builders to follow the original hedgerow as their guideline for positioning the wall. It should have been a simple enough undertaking but, predictably, the project was beset with problems.
Construction was well under way when municipal officials pointed out that the demarcation line was skew, and that part of the wall had been built on the neighbouring plot. The builders knocked it down and started again, but, again at an advanced stage, the constructor went bankrupt and another had to be found. Meanwhile, Winnie had noted that the wall would be of little use as a security measure, as it was nowhere near high enough to keep intruders at bay. Despite the underlying seriousness of the project, it became a source of great amusement to all involved, and helped to distract Winnie, for a while, from her many other problems. Increasing the height of the wall was a major operation, and inevitably the ‘wall committee’ ran out of money. There was another delay while additional funds were raised. Finally, the wall was completed – but no one had made provision for the cost of gates, and for a while the gaping holes where they were eventually installed rendered the wall entirely useless as protection against unwelcome callers.
In 1974, Mandela, anxious about the series of attacks on Winnie, appealed to the government to restrain the police, and asked that she be allowed to own a firearm. The police refused, arguing that Winnie was too impulsive and quicktempered to be considered a responsible gun owner. Having experienced their share of her angry response to intrusions, they obviously had no desire to encounter an enraged and armed Winnie Mandela.
One of Winnie’s staunchest friends and supporters was Peter Magubane, the photographer for Drum magazine. His long association with Winnie had cost him dearly. Another one of those betrayed by Gordon Winter, he was detained for eighteen months, much of it in solitary confinement. But Magubane refused to be intimidated into turning his back on Winnie, and helped her in any way he could. In May 1973, he drove Zeni and Zindzi into Johannesburg to meet their mother during her lunch hour. While she and the girls were having a snack in Magubane’s minibus on the corner of Troye and Jeppe streets, Winnie was arrested for being in the presence of another banned person. Magubane was arrested as well. The arresting officer, Sergeant Van Niekerk, gloated that Winnie was going to prison for a long time for the offence, and said that this time not even her ‘friends in Bloemfontein’ would be able to help her.
Frustrated at every turn in their quest to remove Winnie from public view, the security police were scathing in their criticism of and contempt for the courts that either dismissed charges against Winnie or gave her suspended sentences. The Appellate Division in Bloemfontein, which managed to maintain its independence and integrity despite heavy political pressure, was singled out for special malice.
Van Niekerk’s prediction proved wrong. Winnie was sentenced to twelve months in prison, but the sentence was halved on appeal. Her daughters were in court when the initial sentence was handed down, and Zindzi burst into tears. As they left the building, Cosmos Desmond having paid Winnie’s bail, she reprimanded Zindzi sternly, telling her never again to show her distress in front of the white authorities, as it gave them the satisfaction of knowing they had succeeded in hurting one. Zindzi never forgot her mother’s words, and moulded her future reaction to hardships on Winnie’s philosophy.
It pained Winnie to know that Magubane was suffering as a result of his friendship with her and his unfailing willingness to help. She believed emphatically that the photographer was banned and periodically imprisoned simply because he offered support to Nelson Mandela’s wife and children, and not because he himself presented any kind of security risk. The police had successfully isolated Winnie from many of her old friends by threatening and harassing them, but when Magubane refused to yield to that kind of pressure, a more insidious approach was needed.
The authorities knew that any action taken against friends and family members was an indirect form of punishment against Nelson and Winnie. Through their collaborators in the media, reports of an inappropriate relationship between Winnie and Magubane began to surface, and, knowing that the innuendo and rumour would wound Mandela deeply, the authorities ensured that such reports came to his attention, despite the fact that he was not permitted to read newspapers. As before, he would simply find cuttings of all negative publicity about Winnie on the bed in his cell at the end of the day.
In September 1973, Winnie received news that her father was dying. She was granted permission to travel to the Transkei to see him, and took Zeni and Zindzi with her. Columbus was so frail that he could hardly stand or walk, but he was determined that he would not receive his daughter from his sickbed. Even in the final days of his life, he commanded respect and admiration, and insisted that Hilda help him dress in his best suit, which hung loosely on his emaciated body. Hilda also had to help him stand when he greeted his beloved daughter and her children, and despite the enormous effort it took, he told Winnie and the girls that this was how he wanted them to remember him – standing erect. Winnie, who had inherited his indomitable spirit, understood that he meant far more than the actual physical act. When she said goodbye to her father, Winnie kissed him, for the first and only time in
her life.
Winnie began serving her six-month sentence in the Magubane case on 14 October 1974. This time, she was better prepared than when she was dragged off to prison in May 1969. She arranged for her daughters, who were home from boarding school, to stay in the Orlando West house under the watchful eye of family members. Dr Motlana, one of their guardians, and other friends were close at hand, and Horst Kleinschmidt would take care of their financial needs. The terrible memories of the two little girls clinging to her, screaming, when the police took her away five years earlier, still haunted Winnie and her daughters, but this time they were better equipped to deal with the parting stoically.
For the first month Winnie was held at the Fort in Johannesburg. After that she was transferred in the dead of night – presumably to forestall any attempted escape or demonstrations by supporters – to the women’s prison at Kroonstad in the Free State. Unlike her previous sojourn in a penal institution, there was no solitary confinement, the food was decent, and Zeni and Zindzi were allowed to visit. She also had companionship. One of her fellow prisoners was a legend of the struggle, Dorothy Nyembe, who had been one of Mandela’s close friends. She was one of South Africa’s longest-serving female political prisoners, sentenced in 1968 to fifteen years for harbouring Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters.
Dorothy was a devout Christian and courageous to the core, and when Winnie arrived at Kroonstad she was already over fifty and had served almost six years of her sentence. Incarceration had taken its toll, and Winnie detected clear outward signs of suffering and sacrifice, but Dorothy’s spirit was strong, and she was as committed to the cause as ever. She was also a pillar of strength for her fellow prisoners. Winnie greatly admired Dorothy, who had significantly influenced her own political growth, and was especially struck by her lack of bitterness. Dorothy would recount how Mangosuthu Buthelezi had testified against her, but rather than being angry or vengeful, she was remarkably conciliatory towards the Zulu leader.
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