My Life, My Love, My Legacy

by Coretta Scott King

  I made ending apartheid a priority of the King Center, and a personal one as well. In the mid-1980s, the resistance to apartheid was moving so slowly in the United States that it had to be embraced by the African American community to gain momentum. In 1982, when I addressed the World Council of Churches in Vancouver, I had met with Desmond Tutu, who was then secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, and with Rev. Allan Boesak, a well-respected antiapartheid activist and president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. The two men had wanted to work with me, and I’d wanted to visit South Africa, and I understood that their churches could provide the right kind of sponsorship for my trip. Having a host for a visit was very important, because visiting South Africa was a delicate undertaking, laden with political complexities. Tensions between the apartheid regime and the majority black populace were high.

  In 1983, when Reverend Boesak spoke at the King Center to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I renewed the subject of a trip to Soweto and to Cape Town. “I will be attending the United Nations International Women’s Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985,” I told him. “I really would like to come to South Africa on my way. Could either you or Bishop Tutu host the visit?” But, strangely enough, neither Reverend Boesak nor Bishop Tutu responded to that request. In 1985, while I was attending that conference in Nairobi, some of the other attendees there, insiders in the Free South Africa Movement, briefed me on the reasons for the cold shoulder concerning my proposed trip to South Africa. They told me that Randall Robinson, a very talented man and the head of TransAfrica and one of the leaders of the Free South Africa Movement, and Jesse Jackson had been working to turn some of the black South Africans against me, because they were working in the region and considered me to be infringing on their turf.

  At the time, I didn’t think much about what I’d been told. But the next time I saw Rev. Boesak in Atlanta, he did not seem eager for me to come to South Africa. In fact, it seemed that he was deliberately delaying me. In a conversation with Andy Young, Reverend Boesak intimated that it might take six months or more to plan my trip.

  “Baloney.” That was the response from Stoney Cooks, Andy’s top aide, when I told him what Reverend Boesak had said. “You need to go right now,” Stoney added. “It’s not like you don’t know anything about South Africa. You have held conferences on it, given speeches, and written numerous columns on sanctions and apartheid. You need to go now.” He was right, of course, but one cannot just up and go to South Africa without some of the main leaders in Soweto, such as Boesak or Desmond Tutu, hosting you. So since they did not honor my request, I did not go at that time.

  Still, I could not drop the issue. I was troubled in my spirit by the unrest in South Africa. The very instability that was complicating my plans was drawing me to travel there, because I understood the power of strategic nonviolent opposition. One of my board members, who was agonizing over the same situation, asked, “Of all the things we’re doing with nonviolence and teaching nonviolence, why can’t we help South Africa?” And I said, “I think we can.”

  I appointed a committee to come up with a plan, a program, and a way by which we could address the problem of apartheid. Perhaps a visit to South Africa would be helpful. Therefore, we proceeded to plan a trip, and I selected a group of people who I thought represented different segments of the community: Rev. Barbara Skinner, a member of the board of advisers, who could help us on our fact-finding mission with women; Christine King Farris, for education; Carol Hoover and Bob Brown, both King Center board members and business persons; Bernard Lafayette, to help advise on nonviolence training; and my son Martin III for youth outreach. In the end, we had about thirteen people ready for the trip. One of them was Ronald Quincy, a State Department representative who had been a White House Fellow and who later became executive director of the King Center.

  As we prepared, we consulted Andy Young on the culture and the correct protocol. “What you’re trying to do is very difficult,” he told us. “It’s almost impossible. If you go, you have to talk to everybody. You have to talk to the enemy, President Botha, and when you talk to one set of people, other groups will get angry with you. They won’t speak to you. But I think if anybody can be successful in doing it, you can.”

  We also followed protocol and sought information and a briefing from the U.S. State Department. I let President Reagan know my plans, so that when I returned, I could tell him what I’d done and try to get his support; we hoped to get him to come around and support a strong antiapartheid act. I also called on Vice President Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz, telling them about our plans and asking for their advice and support.

  Secretary Shultz encouraged the trip, as well as my plans to try to see Nelson Mandela. If I went over there and didn’t try to see Mandela, he told me, people would ask why I hadn’t at least made an attempt. He also said that the only way I could arrange that meeting was through then-president P. W. Botha. He added, “You and Dr. King stood for the philosophy of nonviolence and forgiveness. It would be a powerful thing if you could get permission to see Nelson and Winnie, and the three of you could be together. Can you imagine what that photograph would look like, going around the world? It would send a powerful message of unity and support for the Mandelas.”

  “Well,” I told him, “we will try.”

  So, through the King Center, we made an appointment with President Botha. At our meeting, I planned to bring up the question of visiting Mandela. The State Department assigned a person to go with us, which was very helpful. In those days, many South Africans were deeply suspicious of visitors, and my people were very upset about my not taking security.

  I also obtained a briefing from some of the U.S. lobbyists for the African National Congress (ANC), the lead party against apartheid, as well as from some ANC activists in South Africa, such as Oliver Tambo. When I spoke to them about nonviolence, I put it this way: “You know that economic sanctions are a form of nonviolence. You do not have to pick up a gun. Withdrawing your patronage is a weapon Martin used all the time. We didn’t cooperate with people who discriminated against us, and who were doing evil and unjust things to us. If we can get sanctions against South Africa going in the United States, this would be a nonviolent tool.” I think such explanations were helpful in showing an alternate vision; many people at that time did not see sanctions in this light.

  If the goal is ending a violent and unjust regime, do you treat your enemies as persons beyond human understanding, as unworthy of any interaction? Do you designate them hopeless cases and slam the door? I see it as a crucial article of faith in nonviolence that even the most violent of adversaries can be approached in a true spirit of reconciliation. When he first organized his nonviolent resistance campaigns, Mahatma Gandhi held frequent meetings with Boer general Jan Christiaan Smuts, his principal adversary in South Africa. Gandhi once said, “In a nonviolent conflict, there is no rancor left behind, and in the end, the enemies are converted into friends. That was my experience in South Africa with General Smuts.”

  In 1985, at a time of national and international boycotts and protests against companies that invested in South Africa and calls for government sanctions against South Africa, I was arrested along with Martin III and Bernice in a protest against apartheid at the South African embassy in Washington, DC. At last, in 1986, it was time to go to South Africa. I had accepted an invitation to the enthronement of Bishop Tutu, who was about to become Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa’s legislative capital, located in the southernmost part of the country. Accompanied by my board members, I flew into Harare, Zimbabwe, on September 2, 1986, to attend the Conference on Non-Aligned Nations. While there, I met with President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia; President Quett K. J. Masire of Botswana; President Samora Machel of Mozambique; Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe; Oliver Tambo, past president of the Non-Aligned Nations conference; and my good friend Indira Gandhi, all of whom were members of the nonalig
ned nations. All agreed that whatever sanctions were imposed against South Africa, the United States must help provide economic aid to keep the country and the region from collapsing. From there, I went on to Johannesburg, South Africa, where I attended a dinner for Leon Sullivan, a Baptist preacher from Philadelphia who was a major player in helping businesses in South Africa work out fair labor practices. I also met with several South African businesspeople and civil and community leaders across racial lines. We also held international prayer breakfasts in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

  When we arrived in Cape Town, however, we found that there was trouble brewing with regard to our arrival. Carl Ware, a top executive for Coca-Cola who had worked extensively in South Africa, called me; he said the word on the street was that Winnie Mandela and Rev. Allan Boesak were not going to meet with me because I had an appointment to see President Botha. I was also told that some black activists thought my meeting with Botha was aiding and abetting his murder and repression of black South Africans, a very serious and dangerous misconception.

  Several sources also told me that Randall Robinson had called ahead and told people that I had been ill-advised, didn’t know what I was doing, and was in South Africa “to stir up stuff.” Bishop John Walker, the dean of the Washington National Cathedral, also in Cape Town for Tutu’s enthronement, was so worried about what he had heard that he knocked on my door at my hotel one night to share his concern for me. “I am so upset, because we don’t want your image tarnished by the negative things being said,” he told me. He went on to say that the statements in question seemed to be coming from Randall Robinson and Jesse Jackson.

  Randall had been working with TransAfrica on the problem of apartheid for a long time, but I had also been working on this problem for a long time. I’d even tried to work with Randall. Whenever he called a coalition together, I was there. I was at all the press conferences. I was at all the marches. I made statements. I was very actively involved. I’d even asked him for a briefing before I left for South Africa, but his strategy appeared to be to try to turn the fellows against me—and to question the potential of nonviolent protest in South Africa.

  In any event, at a ceremony following his enthronement, Bishop Tutu graciously introduced me, the only person he introduced at that service. He also gave our delegation front-row seats across from his family. I had eight or nine people with me: Martin III, Christine, Carol Hoover, Ebenezer Church pastor Joseph Roberts, and several others. We have beautiful memories of that service.

  When I finally had a chance to talk to Desmond, I said, “I want to understand what the problem is. I was trying to meet with President Botha because I wanted to see Nelson Mandela, and I was told that meeting with you and the president was the only way I could do it.”

  Desmond told me, “You see, there’s nothing wrong with your meeting with our national president. I have met with him, but the problem is, because of killings that have taken place this year, some groups will take your meeting and use it against us. The enthronement is an act of reconciliation, and that’s enough for them to focus on right now.”

  What Desmond was telling me fit in with what I’d been told Randall and Jesse were saying. Finally, I called off my meeting with Botha. I also called off a meeting with Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, because I knew he was having problems with the ANC. The ANC had even said that if someone met with Buthelezi, he or she could not meet with the ANC. I took my board’s advice and chose not to go ahead with the meetings.

  In the aftermath of my visit to South Africa, I had a meeting with Randall and some of my board members. It was one of the most insulting meetings I ever attended. “Why did you go over then when you did not know what you were doing?” Randall demanded. He accused me of setting the Free South Africa Movement back ten years. He took aim at Bob Brown, a businessman on my board, who he claimed was dictating my actions in South Africa. Randall’s accusations did not sit well with me. I remember defending myself firmly. Adding to my agitation was the fact that my board members did not defend me. Not even Walter Fauntroy, who was the first chair of the King Center board and whom I helped get elected to Congress. They all just sat there and listened.

  I prayed about all these events. I realize now that I didn’t do enough planning, but I also believe I was undermined. It was helpful to remember what Martin sometimes said when he preached a sermon entitled “Going Forward by Going Backwards.” In that sermon, he related the parable of Christ being left in the temple as a child. His parents journeyed a whole day before they realized that He had been left; to recover this precious treasure, they had to go back. Now, I told myself, I have to go back before I can go forward. I have to build more direct ties with all the leaders of all the groups involved in South Africa.

  We took quite a beating in the press for the on-again, off-again meetings with Botha, but I was optimistic about the good news we’d spread as we traveled the length and breadth of that tormented but mesmerizingly beautiful land. We built support there for economic sanctions, work stoppages, and an expanded Christmas boycott of downtown stores by blacks—all of which we presented as alternatives to guns. We also had a series of encouraging discussions with other white and black leaders, who expressed a desire for greater international cooperation.

  And I was privileged enough to have met Nelson’s wife, Winnie, who embraced me as a friend. Her words were a virtual torrent of pain as she shared with me how the apartheid system had stolen her life, how it felt to be denied the loving touch of her husband for twenty-three years, how she grieved over his forced labor in the Robben Island prison’s rock quarry, which was damaging his lungs and his vision.

  Most of the time, Winnie spoke about her husband, but she also talked about herself and her children. She described the brutality and the isolation she felt after being beaten in prison and then banished and dumped in a house some 230 miles away from her home in Soweto. The ramshackle structure had no running water or heat, and only dirt floors.

  “I had to live that way for eight years,” she told me. “I am a trained social worker, but I was not allowed to be employed. The plan was to break me emotionally and financially. My husband was taken; my livelihood was taken. But through the help of friends, my two girls, Zenani and Zindzi, were sent off to private school in Swaziland, where they could get a good education.”

  When Winnie talked about her children, her face relaxed. With pride, she told me of the marriage of her oldest daughter, Zenani, to Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini of Swaziland, who was the son of the Swazi king Sobhuza II. But she also expressed her sadness over her inability to spend more time with her first grandchild, whom Nelson had named Zaziwe, which translates to “Hope.”

  Winnie even shared with me some of the letters Nelson had written her. One read, “Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love, I would have fallen apart many years ago.”

  After that first meeting in Soweto, Winnie and I developed a very sisterly relationship. In 1992 we brought her to the Center for King Week to participate in a panel following the Center’s annual Salute to Greatness Awards Dinner, and she served as grand marshal for our King Week parade and march. Later in our private conversations during her visit, Winnie was very forthright, telling me directly that she came to the King Center to learn “the language of peace.”

  Still, though I have tremendous admiration for her, Winnie struggled with the central tenets of nonviolence. When her history is considered, I can understand this. Not only did she have to spend twenty-seven years of her thirty-eight-year marriage without Nelson, but the apartheid government regularly detained her. As she worked to keep her husband’s name and movement alive, she was tortured, subjected to house arrest, kept under surveillance, held in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison for a year and a half, and then banished to a remote town. Unfortunately, her reputation was damaged by charges of criminal behavior; it was also reported that, in 1986, she endorsed a local practice of “necklacing,” during which suspected t
raitors were burned alive inside automobile tires soaked in gasoline.

  I don’t know whether those charges are true, and naturally I could never condone such acts of violence. I can, however, identify with her as a woman who is the wife of a man who led a revolution. In terms of what we have to do to keep things going when our husbands are no longer on the scene, when they are in jail or murdered, such women have so much in common. Winnie kept Nelson’s memory and movement alive in the public eye. She held things together, and throughout her personal suffering (her jailing, banning, and torture), she reacted with so much strength and dignity. It is an awful thing to be banished and kept from your children. Who wouldn’t be emotionally scarred by that ordeal?

  Of course, I am also sympathetic to what Nelson went through. He is my hero. He led his nation into a democratic state and showed them that the ways you must behave once you become a nation versus being in a movement are very different. For him to go through all he did, come out of prison without being bitter and being able to show love to his enemies, I think he deserved whatever happiness he could get. And Winnie does, too. So when the news came, in 1996, that they were divorcing, I was sad but not necessarily surprised. To me, they were both good people who just could not make it. I think that in the years of separation, they grew apart. Winnie was so young when they married, and during Nelson’s imprisonment, they didn’t get to spend enough time together for their relationship to really bond them to one another.

  Nevertheless, when Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison on February 11, 1990, Winnie was by his side to rejoice. The whole world rejoiced.

  Shortly after Nelson was released, I received a call from Harry Belafonte. He told me that the ANC had asked him to ask me if I could coordinate and help raise funds for Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s visit to America. Of course I readily agreed. In fact, I had already invited Nelson and Winnie to the King Center. I turned to Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson first and asked him to head the committee. He told me he was busy with his crime program, but would support whatever I did.