Winnie Mandela
Page 30
There was little that Winnie could do to improve her own lot, however. In May 1982, she received an anonymous letter, reminding her that two of her acquaintances, Petrus Nzima and his wife, had been killed by a car bomb in Swaziland – and warning that the same could happen to her. It was an ominous reminder that there were people who would like to see her dead, and that assassination had to be something the authorities had contemplated more than once. It did not escape her notice that this particular piece of mail, unlike all her other letters, had not been intercepted by the security police. Her life had often been threatened, however, and she did not pay undue attention to this latest attempt at intimidation. But a few days later, when she went to start her minibus, she saw a length of electrical wiring dangling from the battery. She called her neighbours, who told her they had seen suspicious-looking men at the vehicle late the night before, and that when they went to investigate the men quickly left. Some of Winnie’s friends contacted the media, and reports of an apparent attempt to rig her vehicle with a car bomb were published both in South Africa and abroad. Just three months later, Winnie’s acute awareness that mortal danger was never far away was reinforced when a parcel bomb killed Joe Slovo’s wife, Ruth First, in her office in Maputo.
The ‘Free Mandela’ campaign brought foreign emissaries from various countries to Winnie’s humble house in Brandfort. Never afraid of speaking her mind, she was harsh in her criticism of President Ronald Reagan’s policy on South Africa when American diplomats visited her. The German ambassador was received more amicably, and after his visit, he regularly sent food parcels to the residents of Phatakahle. He also gave Winnie a battery-operated television set, and apart from providing her with an additional source of information and much needed entertainment, the appliance brought an element of magic to the township. Wideeyed children, squealing with delight, came to watch their favourite programmes, transforming Winnie’s house into a makeshift local cinema. When her neighbours crowded into the tiny lounge to watch TV, she, curbed by her banning order, stayed in the bedroom.
In October 1982, Piet de Waal, Winnie’s friend and attorney, called at her house to deliver an urgent message. He found her virtually unconscious, delirious with pain and fever from an infection in the leg she had injured in the car accident six months earlier. He called the local doctor, who ordered that she be admitted to hospital immediately, as her life was in danger. After getting the necessary permission from the police, arrangements were made for her to be rushed to Universitas Hospital in Bloemfontein. But special permission would first have to be obtained, as the hospital was only for whites, and Winnie obstinately refused. She would rather die, she said, than apply for special privileges – and if she had to go to hospital, it would have to be in Johannesburg. Her doctor made it clear to the security police that unless she received the proper treatment, soon, there was a good chance that she might die. The security police, in turn, knew they could not afford the international outcry that would erupt if she did die as the result of being refused permission to travel when she needed urgent medical attention. Eventually, and reluctantly, they agreed that she could be flown to Johannesburg, where she was admitted to the Rosebank Clinic, a private hospital that accepted patients of all races.
Emergency surgery was carried out on Winnie’s leg, and she spent seven weeks in hospital recovering. As always, the security police were close at hand, and monitored her every visitor. When she was discharged, five police cars were waiting outside the hospital to follow attorney Ismail Ayob’s car to the airport. However, the last flight to Bloemfontein that day was fully booked, so Ayob took Winnie to spend the night at his home.
During the course of the evening, he and his wife realised that Winnie was far too weak to take care of herself in Brandfort, and Ayob sought permission for her to return to her house in Orlando West until she was stronger. The security police refused, but Winnie, true to form, defiantly told Ayob to take her to house No. 8115, anyway.
Five years after being dragged from her home in the middle of the night, Winnie was back – and as soon as her presence became known, hundreds of people lined up outside to see her. Already in breach of her banning order, Ayob advised her not to irk the security police any more than necessary, and to receive only one person at a time. Winnie complied, but her initial excitement at being home was soon dampened. The soul of Soweto had changed. On the surface, the township was still the same – an overcrowded, noisy city with endless rows of identical houses, thousands of people queuing for trains and buses, impatient taxi drivers hooting and swerving around potholes in the roads – but the people, and the atmosphere, were different. British prime minister Harold Wilson had once observed that a week was a long time in politics – and she had been gone for more than five years. She had tried to stay in touch with individuals and follow political developments as closely as possible, but there was no substitute for personal involvement, and she was alarmed to find that Sowetans were embittered and far more resentful and polarised than they had been before the 1976 uprising. People made it clear that they had set their sights on total political change, and would settle for nothing less. Imprisoning their leaders and banning their political parties were seen as no more than temporary setbacks. The South African government had introduced crisis management measures, one of which was the accelerated creation of a black middle class as a buffer against the ANC, still seen as a communist organisation. Another was pressuring the so-called front-line states into refusing support for the ANC. But, by taking the temperature of Soweto, Winnie became more certain than ever that she would live to see change; that the day would come when Madiba and Oliver Tambo would be free to lead their people; that justice would ultimately prevail.
While she was in Johannesburg, Winnie had a meeting with the head of the Security Branch, Major General Johan Coetzee. He had been a young constable when Winnie was first banned twenty years before, and was now the man who held sway over her very life. Winnie asked him why they had banned her in 1962, since she had done nothing except be Nelson Mandela’s wife. He quoted her an Afrikaans proverb, which amounted to presumption of guilt by association. Winnie was dumbfounded. As with so many tactical blunders committed by the security police against Winnie at Brandfort, hindsight would show that by embarking on their ill-founded and unconsidered crusade against her in the early 1960s, the authorities had created their own worst nightmare.
When Winnie returned to Brandfort after an absence of several months, she still had difficulty walking, and Mandela arranged with Ayob to use funds from an award made by the Austrian government to buy her a car. A shortfall in the price of the spanking new red Audi was made up by Dr Motlana, Yusuf Cachalia and Ayob himself.
Soon after going back to Phatakahle, the security police served Winnie with a summons for violating her banning order by staying in Orlando West during her recuperation, and raided her house. Helen Suzman, who happened to be visiting at the time, witnessed the three-hour search, during which the police confiscated books, documents and anything even remotely linked to the ANC, including a yellow, green and black crocheted blanket and the jewellery that had been made by the women in Winnie’s sewing group. When news of the raid appeared in the international press, twenty-six leading American politicians sent her a quilt patterned on an old Pennsylvania Dutch design that was said to ward off evil spirits.
Notwithstanding the persistent harassment, Winnie’s visitors found her as indomitable as ever. Sally Motlana waxed lyrical about her old friend, and predicted that no one would ever succeed in sidelining Winnie, whether they banished her to a homeland, desert or forest. ‘This woman is so dynamic, she will make the birds sing and the trees rustle wherever she goes. You can be sure of that,’ said Sally.2 When her old friend Ellen Kuzwayo saw her in 1982, she was surprised and impressed by Winnie’s composure. Her charm, dignity and singing laughter were still those of the woman she had come to know during the 1950s, said Ellen.
In his biography of Mandela, Anthony Samps
on writes that, nevertheless, some of Winnie’s friends thought the twin ordeals of jail and exile had, indeed, wrought unwelcome change in her. In Brandfort, there were rumours of reckless behaviour, violent outbursts and alcohol abuse. If that were true, nobody did anything to help or harness a woman who was almost certainly in the early stages of an emotional breakdown, not even when the signals became louder. In July 1983, a woman from Phatakahle laid a complaint against Winnie for allegedly assaulting her nine-year-old son. The boy said Winnie had hit him with a belt, and that the buckle had caught him on the head, causing a deep cut. Winnie said the boy, Andrew Pogisho, had stolen a tricycle from her house, and had fallen while running away from her. The magistrate found the evidence inconclusive, and Winnie was acquitted.
The government, desperate to counteract black political aspirations, had invented a ‘tricameral’ parliament, aimed at forging an alliance with coloureds and Indians. But the exclusion of blacks provoked a fresh wave of violent unrest and stayaways, and for the first time troops were deployed in the townships, where police were clearly losing the battle. White members of parliament from the Free State began agitating for Winnie’s removal from Brandfort, blaming her for a new mood of defiance within the black labour force and community. Winnie ignored the furore and continued, unapologetically, to preach the gospel of black pride and political rights.
But the mood of white South Africans was changing, too, even in the most unexpected quarters. Winnie received a letter from a young Afrikaans policeman who had been involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. He said he had been experiencing inner conflict over the political situation in the country, and that he had disobeyed orders to shoot at the 1976 rioters, firing over their heads instead, because, even then, he could not conceive of shooting children his own age simply because their skin was a different colour. He followed the letter with an unexpected visit to Winnie, but parked his car some distance from her house and told her his parents would ‘kill him’ if they knew how he felt. Students from the University of the Free State, one of the bastions of conservative Afrikaner youth, approached Winnie for information about Black Consciousness. They said they wanted to know what was going on in the hearts and minds of their black peers, and had started campus discussions on the burning political issues facing South Africa.
To the average black person, even those actively working for change, it might have seemed, for most of the 1980s, that there was little hope, but once in a while positive signs touched the lives of some, including the Mandela family. Since the sentence in the Rivonia Trial was handed down in June 1964, no family member except Zeni, thanks to her diplomatic status as a member of the Swazi royal house, had been allowed any physical contact with Nelson. But in May 1984, when Winnie and Zeni went to visit him, Warrant Officer Gregory informed both Mandela and Winnie, mere moments before they met, that they could see one another in the same room – and would be permitted to have physical contact.
It had been more than two decades since they touched one another, and the experience was so unexpected that they simply stood there, their arms around one another, without saying a word. For Winnie, this relaxation of the rules was the clearest sign yet that she should dare to hope Madiba would be freed. She still cherished the top tier of their wedding cake, and she vowed anew that on the day he walked out of prison, they would complete the tribal formalities of their marriage ceremony.
Back at Brandfort, another surprise awaited her. After seeing Winnie run a rudimentary clinic for years from her tiny house, the Methodist Church had decided to add two rooms and a bathroom to the back of the house, so that she would be able to run a proper facility. In addition to the basic assistance Winnie herself provided to those who were ill, she had arranged with two doctors, her own physician, Joe Veriava, and a friend of his, Dr Abu-Baker Asvat, to make regular visits to Phatakahle to treat patients in need of more specialised care. Asvat had his own mobile clinic, a caravan full of medical supplies, which he financed himself and used to visit squatter camps to help those in need. Now he would also have adequate facilities from which to work in Brandfort.
Winnie’s surprise was complete when Fatima Meer told her she had arranged for electricity to be installed in the house. For the first time in almost eight years, Winnie would once again have some of the basic commodities she had left behind in Soweto, and new projects as outlets for her energy. The crèche she had started was still housed in the Methodist church hall, and was now attended by close on 100 toddlers, and suddenly the municipal authorities announced that they would make land available for the building of a youth centre, something Winnie was looking forward to. But, as usual, good news was quickly followed by bad. In June, Zindzi’s boyfriend and the father of her second child, Zondwa, attacked her, stabbed her in the head and left her for dead in the veld. Winnie was given permission to travel to Johannesburg to be with her daughter, who spent several days in intensive care after a scan showed possible brain injury. Her family and friends tried to protect her privacy by saying she had been injured in a car accident, but the police, who knew the truth, leaked the details to the media.
Unlike her sister, Zindzi had no special credentials, and she became almost as much a victim of the Mandela name as her mother. Though she shared her parents’ opposition to the pass system, she had hoped to continue her studies in Swaziland, but once she turned sixteen she needed a passport in order to do so. And she could not get a passport without a reference book.
But the government refused to issue one, offering one feeble excuse after another for several years, before finally telling her to apply for an identity document in her ‘homeland’ of Transkei. Zindzi refused to do that, as it would have meant forfeiting her South African citizenship, and when not even intervention by Helen Suzman was able to secure her a pass, she took matters into her own hands.
In June 1981, she managed to obtain a legitimate travel document, albeit via irregular channels. But the ruse was discovered and the document confiscated, and Zindzi abandoned her plans for further study in Swaziland. She went to work for the Institute of Race Relations instead. Later, she enrolled as a student at the University of Cape Town.
At intervals throughout the 1980s, Winnie received various international awards in recognition of her contribution to the struggle. Haverford Quaker College in Philadelphia gave her an honorary doctorate, and, unable to accept the award in person, she asked Zeni and her old friend, Adelaide Tambo, to do so on her behalf. The Caribbean state of Grenada invited her to the celebrations marking their first anniversary of independence, and she shared the Freedom Prize – awarded by two liberal Scandinavian newspapers, the Danish Politiken and the Swedish Dagens Nyheter – with Helen Suzman. In October 1984, Zeni and her husband travelled to Denmark to receive the award on Winnie’s behalf, and played a tape recording of her acceptance speech to the audience.
By the end of 1984 the South African government, confronted by a struggling economy and violence that threatened to spiral out of control, was forced to rethink its policies. On 31 January 1985, President PW Botha made a dramatic and very public conditional offer of freedom to Mandela. He chose parliament as the platform for his gesture, but made it clear that Mandela would have to renounce violence and the armed struggle in order to unlock the prison gates. Mandela requested an urgent meeting with Winnie and Ismail Ayob to convey his response, and they visited him on Friday 8 February.
Two days later, at a rally organised by the United Democratic Front (UDF) in Soweto’s Jabulani Stadium, Zindzi read the statement Mandela had prepared. It was the first time in more than twenty years that South Africans had heard any direct message from the ANC leader, and as Zindzi spoke the words, ‘My father says …’ the packed stadium shook with cheers. By the time she had finished, many of the people at the rally were in tears.
Mandela rejected the conditions imposed by Botha, but emphasised that negotiation was the only way forward for South Africa.
Momentous as the events of that week were from a po
litical standpoint, they were overshadowed, for Winnie, by personal grief. Her sister Irene had died, and Zindzi had sent her father a telegram to tell him the news, but the letter of comfort he wrote to Winnie did not reach her until two weeks later. Though not as close to Irene as she had been to Nancy, Winnie had become more emotionally vulnerable with each passing year, and the timing of Irene’s death had been unfortunate, coinciding as it did with the offer for Mandela’s freedom. As always, politics had taken precedence over personal matters, but this time Winnie had been left feeling lost and spent. In a letter to Nelson on 20 February, she bared her soul:
I returned in the early hours of today after almost three sad weeks of the most emotional storms in our life of separation. I however had one thing to look forward to, the letter from you which I knew would make my year. I knew it would reconstruct my shattered soul and restore it to my faith – the nation. Moments of such self-indulgence bring shame to me at such times when I think of those who have paid the supreme price for their ideological beliefs. Some of those fallen ones were dearer to me than my own life.
The letter was there, dated 4.2.85. I’m rereading it for the umpteenth time. Contrary to your speculation at first, I do not think I would have had the fibre to bear it all if you had been with me. You once said I should expect the inevitable fact that the struggle leaves debris behind; from that moment those many years ago, I swore to my infinitesimal ego that I would never allow myself to be part of that political quagmire.
If life is comprised of the things you enumerate and hold dear, I am lost for words, due to the fact that in my own small way life feels a little more monumental, material and demanding of one’s innermost soul. That is why the love and warmth that exude from you behind those unkind concrete grey monotonous and cruel walls simply overwhelm me, especially when I think of those who in the name of the struggle have been deprived of that love.