The case of Themba Mabotha amplified the suggestion that Winnie had become a police agent. He had been an askari at Vlakplaas, and after he escaped he made his way to Winnie’s home. Since Mabotha had compelling information about the activities of the hit squads operating from Vlakplaas long before they were exposed in November 1989 by the Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad, the question had to be asked: Why was he not smuggled out of South Africa for debriefing by the ANC’s intelligence department?
De Kock made it clear that Winnie’s high profile had made her a priority for attention by the security forces. Her attitude and courage infuriated the authorities, he said, and she was regarded as a thorn in their flesh.
Senior Superintendent André Kritzinger, formerly a captain in the Soweto Security Branch, said he had compiled a dossier of some thirty crimes implicating Winnie in the late 1980s, and believed he had enough evidence to charge her with high treason, harbouring terrorists and unlawful possession of firearms. However, Witwatersrand Attorney-General Klaus von Lieres had declined to prosecute her.
While the likelihood was raised that Winnie escaped prosecution due to an official directive from an unidentified source because she had secretly begun collaborating with the police, there was easily as much evidence that the authorities had simply decided to surround her with a phalanx of informers, and leave her be to exploit the increasing possibility of a split in ANC ranks between her supporters and critics.
The police had manipulated Winnie’s image for decades. Gordon Winter disclosed in his book Inside Boss that the security police began spreading rumours that she was a BOSS spy in the early 1960s. Former security policeman Paul Erasmus told the TRC that there was an ongoing smear campaign against Winnie serious enough to destroy her marriage, and that as late as 1994, disinformation was spread in an attempt to prevent her election as a senior ANC office bearer. A number of British politicians, including Tory members of parliament, had helped disseminate the rumours, said Erasmus.
In January 1998, the Weekend Argus published an interview with Winnie in which she spoke candidly about a number of personal issues, and reiterated her deep commitment to the liberation struggle. She said the most difficult time in her life had been when she was in jail, but she had always believed it was her responsibility to maintain Nelson Mandela’s name and legacy, and to that end she had sacrificed her youth and her freedom. Asked whether it had ever crossed her mind to get a divorce from Mandela, she said no, even though twenty-seven years was a lifetime for a young woman. She had been offered jobs abroad, by the United Nations, among others, and could have fled South Africa many times. But, she said, she had a deep conviction that her main purpose was to remain in the country, for the sake of both Mandela and the cause for which they fought. Her biggest regret was not being able to give their children a normal life. It haunted her, day and night, that she hadn’t been there for her daughters.
Throughout the years of political persecution, Winnie often lamented the deprivations her children had to suffer. Thus, it was not surprising that she went to battle in February 1998 to preserve their heritage – not for the sake of politics, but as a family legacy. A dispute had arisen over ownership of house No. 8115 in Vilakazi Street, Orlando West. The unassuming township street was the only street in the world to boast the homes of two living Nobel Peace Prize laureates, namely Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. However, neither of them lived there any longer. Winnie had turned the Mandela house into a museum, which she opened in December 1997 and which drew up to 1 000 visitors a day. Mandela’s daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, were directors of the museum, but the problem was that the house did not belong to Winnie. A year earlier, Mandela – who had originally moved into the house on a ninety-nine-year lease – had donated the property to the Soweto Heritage Trust, along with approval for Winnie’s eviction as, he said, he had given the house to the people of South Africa.
For Winnie, however, this was the house to which she had gone as a young bride, where she had brought her newborn daughters, and where she endured years of victimisation, first as Mandela’s wife, then as an advocate of political change in South Africa. From here she was sent into exile in Brandfort, and this was the house to which she had dreamed of returning for eight long years.
After fruitless negotiations with Dr Nthato Motlana, Winnie’s old friend and chairman of the Trust, she took legal action to prevent her children from being deprived of what she believed was rightfully theirs.
In the upper echelons of the new South Africa, as in the old, there was little empathy for Winnie’s wishes and feelings. Yet again, she and her children would have to make a personal sacrifice in order that the nation be served.
19
A quiet exit
POLITICAL PUNDITS INTERPRETED the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s damning indictment of Winnie as a sign that her public life had finally expired. Like both the apartheid authorities and the ANC leadership after them, the commentators misjudged her resilience and popular appeal, though the TRC’s findings unquestionably cast a shadow over her credibility and future conduct as head of the ANC Women’s League and a member of parliament.
Over the years, Winnie received many tributes for her unflinching support of Mandela and the struggle. In the mid-1980s, Lutheran bishop Manas Buthelezi, then president of the South African Council of Churches, said she had suffered and been punished because her life symbolised the striving of black South Africans for justice and liberation, and suggested that Winnie ought to be counted among the heroes who had martyred themselves for their beliefs.
Two days before the twentieth century drew to a close, the Xhosa king, Xolilizwe Sigcawu, presented her with the Hintsa Bravery Award in recognition of her role in keeping the struggle fire burning while other leaders were jailed or in exile.
Winnie’s millennium message was that she would continue to fight against poverty and unemployment, and for the upliftment of women and children. As the lone voice of criticism from within the ranks of the ANC she injected a powerful element of reality into the ruling party’s politics, and as a parliamentarian she showed that it was possible to support, even represent, a political party and government without being a slave to obedience and loyalty. She was, in fact, unrelenting and unapologetic in her criticism of the government, and never let an opportunity pass to castigate them.
In June 2000, she attended the funeral of two pupils who had been shot and killed by police during a protest against evictions in the township of Alexandra, north of Johannesburg. She said it felt as though she was burying Hector Petersen all over again, and that her presence was an act of repentance on behalf of the government she represented. Shortly afterwards, she annoyed and embarrassed the government and angered white South Africans by travelling to Zimbabwe and publicly voicing sympathy and support for the so-called war veterans who were invading and seizing white-owned commercial farms. President Mbeki had been under considerable pressure to intervene in the crisis in Zimbabwe, or at the very least level public criticism at Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government, but had studiously avoided doing so in favour of ‘quiet diplomacy’ behind the scenes. Winnie was fully aware that her actions infuriated the government and the ANC, but as always the sound of her own drum dictated the route she followed.
In July, she arrived at an international AIDS conference in Durban wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘HIV-positive’, and joined demands for the government to supply free anti-retroviral medication to the millions of South Africans infected with the deadly virus. Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, had been at war with AIDS activists ever since the president publicly espoused the views of dissidents who claim that poverty, not the virus, causes AIDS, and that the anti-retrovirals are toxic. While Mbeki offered a stunned international community intellectual rather than scientifically based arguments to justify his stance, Winnie addressed some 3 000 people at a rally on the urgent need for people with HIV and AIDS to have access to the life-giving drugs. In
a hard-hitting speech, she compared the battle for AIDS treatment to the struggle against apartheid, roundly condemned the health department for failing to provide access to affordable medication, and said that while the government wasted its time with rebel scientists, South Africa was facing a social holocaust.
In accordance with the habits of a lifetime, Winnie was invariably to be found where there was suffering or injustice, regardless of time or distance. Women’s issues remained a priority, and as president of the Women’s League she visited farm workers employed under appalling conditions in Limpopo Province, attended the funeral of Edith Erens, a young girl who had been murdered in Johannesburg, and on 9 August – National Women’s Day – led a dramatised event to commemorate the historic anti-pass march on the Union Buildings in 1956. Far from waning, Winnie’s star continued to glitter over the political landscape, as a member of parliament, head of the women’s movement and member of the ANC’s national executive and national working committee. But controversy was never far from hand, and with little love lost between Winnie and Mbeki, it could be only a matter of time before their differences spilled over into the public domain.
In January 2001, the Sunday Times acquired and published a letter she had written to Deputy President Jacob Zuma in 1999, asking him to intervene after President Mbeki attacked her from the podium at an ANC meeting in Durban and accused her of gossiping about his private life. She told Zuma that she had been hurt and shocked by the president’s barbs, and yet again the media trumpeted the end of Winnie’s political career.
Considering that she had charged in the letter that the ANC was plagued by intrigue, infighting and backstabbing, that the party leaders were systematically persecuting her and that she had been ‘grievously maligned’ by Mbeki, predictions that she had finally gone too far were not without foundation. But yet again, Winnie confounded the critics. A few weeks after the letter was leaked to the media, she was honoured with other famous Sowetans as a Soweto legend.
But as the year progressed, it became clear that Winnie’s travails were far from over. Her financial affairs came increasingly under the spotlight, and by mid-1992 she was enmeshed in various probes into alleged irregularities and misconduct.
The government had announced in 1998 that it was considering taking action against Winnie to recover R170 000 for the unauthorised use of an official vehicle that had been damaged, and another R100 000 for an unauthorised trip she had made to Ghana. At about the same time, Absa Bank obtained a judgment against her for defaulting on a R500 000 loan she had taken, using the Diepkloof house as security. In May 2001, the Sunday Times reported that Winnie was at the centre of a R1-million scandal involving the ANC Women’s League. She went to court to seek an injunction against publication of the report, but acting judge Geoff Budlender – who had taken Kenneth Kgase’s statement after he escaped from Winnie’s home in 1989 – ruled that the article was not defamatory. The newspaper revealed that the police were investigating loans made by the beleagured Saambou Bank to non-existent employees of the Women’s League, on the basis of recommendations sent to the bank on Women’s League letterheads. One of the loans had evidently been made to Winnie’s daughter Zindzi.
Shortly after the report was published, Winnie was admitted to hospital suffering from high blood pressure, and, in her absence, police raided her home, ostensibly in search of documents related to the loan investigation. But the alleged fraud was knocked off the front pages by an extraordinary encounter, captured on camera by television news crews, during a Youth Day rally at Orlando Stadium on 16 June to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soweto student uprising.
Winnie arrived an hour late, and as she stepped from her car, the crowd began chanting her name. Mbeki, the guest of honour, was not amused by the outpouring of support, which disrupted a speech by the chairman of the National Youth Commission, Jabu Mbalula. The president was visibly infuriated by what happened next.
Making her way to her seat on the stage, Winnie stopped behind Mbeki’s chair and bent down to greet him with a kiss. The usually urbane Mbeki roughly pushed her aside, knocking off her baseball cap in the process, then snapped angrily at her. Home affairs minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi left his seat on the stage, picked up Winnie’s cap and placed it gently back on her head.
That night, and for days afterwards, television viewers throughout the world froze as the scene was replayed over and over. If there had been any lingering doubts that relations between Winnie and Mbeki were strained, this unsavoury public demonstration made it quite clear that all was not well with South Africa’s head of state and his predecessor’s former wife. The media fuelled the fire by reporting that a senior police officer believed Winnie had grounds to lay a charge of assault against the president, or possibly a case for crimen injuria, since her dignity had been impaired by an incident in full view of a large crowd of spectators and the international media. Women’s rights campaigners and organisations accused Mbeki of doing immense harm to their work and the progress they had taken years to make by undermining the message that physical domination of women was not acceptable.
But the sympathy and support Winnie enjoyed was a temporary reprieve. It seemed there were fires to be put out wherever she turned. She was in hot water with the South African Revenue Service about her income tax, and First National Bank confiscated about R1 million from her because she had failed to repay a loan. Winnie filed an urgent high court application to prevent the bank from attaching funds in investment accounts belonging to her and her company, the Heroes Acre Foundation. The application was dismissed, and the bank threatened further legal action to recover an additional R100 000 which she owed. In September, the media reported that Winnie allegedly owed more than R50 000 to the Johannesburg municipality for electricity, and had to make arrangements for payment through her attorney. In October, she was arrested by the specialised commercial crime unit on charges of fraud and theft relating to the Women’s League loans.
Meanwhile, parliament’s ethics committee had launched an investigation into Winnie’s failure to declare all her business interests. As accusations of impropriety mounted, Winnie’s fate and future became one of the hottest topics in South Africa.
In December, the murder of another former president’s ex-wife, Marike de Klerk, briefly moved Winnie off the front pages. Though poles apart in their lifestyles and political convictions, the two women had shared a unique bond, having supported their husbands to the pinnacle of public life, then losing them to divorce and marriage to other women. Unfortunate scheduling saw a memorial service for Marike coincide with the state funeral for erstwhile defence minister Joe Modise, and Winnie chose to attend the De Klerk service in what could have been perceived as a snub to the ANC. As if to underline her apparent chagrin, she told the media that Marike de Klerk’s murder was an indictment against crimeridden South Africa, and perhaps God’s way of awakening the country to the reality of daily life.
In February 2002, Winnie lost her two-year legal battle over occupancy of the house in Orlando West, and was ordered to vacate the premises. Within a week, another judgment against her was granted, this time for repossession of her luxury Mercedes Benz, for which the instalments were in arrears. Her lawyers seemed to be in court almost every week, and it was hard to imagine that any silver lining lurked behind the gathering dark clouds. In June, personal tragedy struck with the death of her friend and political ally, Peter Mokaba. The ANC said the firebrand youth leader had died of acute pneumonia linked to a respiratory problem, but there was widespread speculation that he had died of AIDS. Mokaba had survived rumours of being a police informer and controversy as the chief proponent of the inflammatory youth rally war cry, Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer – officially declared hate speech in mid-2003 – before taking his seat in parliament and on the ANC’s national executive. Winnie, who had been one of his most loyal supporters, was sidelined at his funeral and prevented from speaking, apparently on the orders of Mbeki.
By the
middle of 2002, Winnie’s life was no longer merely punctuated with accusations of misconduct and financial infractions, but had become a seemingly endless battle against them. In July, the other accused in the fraudulent loan case, Addy Moolman, went on trial. Witnesses testified that they had signed blank application forms and had never been employed by the ANC Women’s League, although their loan applications stated that they were. Other information on the forms also turned out to be false. The police established that only five of the seventy beneficiaries of the loans had, in fact, worked for the Women’s League. A forensic expert confirmed that the signature on letters supporting the loan applications was, indeed, that of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The charges of theft against her arose from the fact that applicants were obliged to take out and pay the premiums on non-existent funeral policies.
In November, on the eve of the Diepkloof house being auctioned to cover the R1 million she owed Absa, Winnie’s lawyers managed to come to an agreement with the bank, and her home was saved. A month later, despite the litany of charges and accusations levelled at her, Winnie was again among the nominees for election to the ANC’s national executive.
But 2003 would be a watershed year for this apparently indestructible woman. After being bombarded for months by the media with salacious details of the case, few were surprised when a Pretoria magistrate found Winnie guilty as charged on forty-three counts of fraud and twenty-five counts of theft. On 25 April she was sentenced to five years in prison, with one year suspended, but seasoned regional court magistrate Peet Johnson ruled that she would serve an effective eight months of the sentence in prison, followed by community service. As so often in the past, public opinion on the outcome of the case was deeply divided, with whites generally favouring a spell in prison, and blacks vehemently opposed.
Adding to the controversy was the fact that the magistrate found no evidence that Winnie had personally benefited from the fraudulent loan scheme. In fact, he underlined the fact that she had acted like a modern-day Robin Hood to help the poor. Winnie has made no secret of her disdain for legislation based on the indifferent principles of a free-market economy that allow little grace for those who lack assets. Not for the first time, she had taken the law into her own hands to help those marginalised by endemic poverty. Her enormous debts, too, had been run up on behalf of the legions of needy who rely on her for assistance.
Winnie Mandela Page 37