By
Nadira Naipaul
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Trial
of unity: Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie arriving at the Rand Supreme
Court, Johannesburg, in 1991 to hear charges against Winnie of kidnap and
assault against 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi
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My husband had been reluctant to come
here but then he had followed his instinct and it had brought us to the Soweto
door of the mystifying Winnie Mandela, a much celebrated and reviled woman of
our times.
Looking out at her garden, I wondered
how long we would have to wait to see her. We were in a stronghold of sorts,
with high enclosing walls and electronic gates which were controlled from
inside a bunker-like guardhouse. There were tall muscular men dressed in black
who casually appeared and disappeared.
In the late Eighties, Winnie's thuggish
bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, terrorised Soweto. Club
"captain" was Jerry Richardson, who died in prison last year while
serving life for the murder of Stompie Moeketsi, a 14-year-old who was
kidnapped with three other boys and beaten in the home where we would soon sit,
sipping coffee. Winnie was sentenced to six years for kidnap, which was reduced
to a fine on appeal.
Members of the gang would later testify
to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Winnie had ordered
the torture, murder and kidnap of her own people, and even participated
directly.
Winnie used to live, before she was
famous, down one of the narrow, congested streets with small brick and iron
sheet houses. Soweto is still a predominately black township: tourists come in
buses to gawp at the streets linked to freedom, apartheid and Mandela.
Winnie now has an imposing fortress on
the hill. The garden is full of trees and well-manicured shrubs. We walked
straight into a small cluttered hallway. It was full of the man: Mandela. He
was everywhere. Presents, portraits, honorary degrees and letters covering
every empty space on the walls.
There was an air of expectancy as we
entered. Our fixer had arranged this meeting with Winnie (or Mama Mandela, her
township name) through her confidant and admirer. He is a young man in his
early forties who is a well-known television presenter here and clearly an
ardent devotee.
He sat us down and talked softly about
her. The politics of his generation, he said, had been defined by this woman.
Her courage, her fire and her sheer stubbornness had made them men. They saw
how unafraid she was and the risks and humiliations she was willing to absorb.
These humiliations had not ended with apartheid. She was discarded, demonised
and betrayed, he said.
My nerves were playing up: my husband
does not like to be kept waiting at the best of times. He is punctilious and
has been known to walk away from a delayed meeting, leaving me to deal with the
fallout.
It was at that moment she appeared,
tall, carefully attired in soft grey, wearing her signature wig. She held
Vidia's outstretched hand and asked him to sit next to her. She flashed a smile
in my direction. The air was electrified by her presence.
I did what was expected of me. I asked
her if she was happy with the way things had panned out in South Africa. Winnie
looked at my husband. Did he wish for the truth? She had heard of him. He
pursued the truth or the closest he could get to it.
No, she was not happy. And she had her
reasons. "I kept the movement alive," she began. "You have been
in the township. You have seen how bleak it still is. Well, it was here where
we flung the first stone. It was here where we shed so much blood. Nothing
could have been achieved without the sacrifice of the people. Black
people."
She looked at Vidia expecting another
question. He said nothing, but his dark hooded eyes shone and she carried on with
her eyes firmly locked onto his face. "The ANC was in exile. The entire
leadership was on the run or in jail. And there was no one to remind these
people, black people, of the horror of their daily reality; when something so
abnormal as apartheid becomes a daily reality. It was our reality. And four
generations had lived with it - as non-people."
As she spoke, I looked at her thinking
she was, at 73, as her reputation promised, quite extraordinary. The ANC had
needed this passionate revolutionary. Without her, the fire would have been so
easily extinguished and she had used everything and anything to stoke it. While
some still refer to her as Mother of the Nation, she is decried by many because
of her links to the Stompie murder and other violent crimes during the
apartheid era, and a conviction for fraud.
"Were you not afraid?" I
asked instinctively, but then I regretted this foolish query.
She looked towards my chair. Her grey
glasses focused on my face. "Yes, I was afraid in the beginning. But then
there is only so much they can do to you. After that it is only death. They can
only kill you, and as you see, I am still here."
I knew that the apartheid enforcers had
done everything in their power to break this woman. She had suffered every
indignity a person could bear. They had picked her up in the night and placed
her under house arrest in Brandfort, a border town in Orange Free State, 300
miles from Soweto. "It was exile," she said, "when everything
else had failed."
At this remote outpost, where she spent
nine years, she had recruited young men for the party. "Right under their
noses," she said to Vidia, laughing with the memory of it. "The only
worry or pain I had was for my daughters. Never really knowing what was
happening to them. I feel they have really suffered in all this. Not me or
Mandela," she said.
Her two young daughters had never quite
understood what was really happening. Bad men went to prison. Their father was
in prison but he was not bad. "That anguish was unbearable for me as a
mother, not knowing how my children coped when they held me in long solitary
confinement."
Zenani, now 51, and Zindzi, 50, remain
very much in the background, having no wish to enter politics themselves,
Winnie said. Nelson Mandela is no longer "accessible" to his
daughters and they have to get through much red tape just to speak to their
father, she told us.
Winnie brought up his name very
casually, as if it was of no real value to her: not any more.
"This name Mandela is an albatross
around the necks of my family. You all must realise that Mandela was not the
only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in
prison and died. Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle, and there were
others in the leadership too, like poor Steve Biko, who died of the beatings,
horribly all alone. Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning
young revolutionary. But look what came out," she said, looking to the writer.
He said nothing but listened.
It is hard to knock a living legend.
Only a wife, a lover or a mistress has that privilege. Only they are privy to
the intimate inner man, I thought.
"Mandela let us down. He agreed to
a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The
economy is very much 'white'. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave
their life in the struggle have died unrewarded."
She was pained. Her uncreased brown
face had lost the softness.
"I cannot forgive him for going to
receive the Nobel [Peace Prize in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in
hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his
heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle
was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given
rivers of blood. I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal".
We could believe that. The world-famous
images flashed before our eyes and I am sure hers. The burning tyres - Winnie
endorsed the necklacing of collaborators in a speech in 1985 ("with our
boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country") - the
stoning, the bullets, the terrible deaths of "informers". Her often
bloodthirsty rhetoric has marred her reputation.
"Look at this Truth and
Reconciliation charade. He should never have agreed to it." Again her
anger was focused on Mandela. "What good does the truth do? How does it
help anyone to know where and how their loved ones were killed or buried? That
Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here," she said
pointing to an empty chair in the distance.
"He had the cheek to tell me to
appear. I told him a few home truths. I told him that he and his other
like-minded cretins were only sitting here because of our struggle and ME.
Because of the things I and people like me had done to get freedom."
Winnie did appear before the TRC in
1997, which in its report judged her to have been implicated in murders:
"The commission finds Mandela herself was responsible for committing such
gross violations of human rights."
When begged by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
to admit that "things went horribly wrong" and apologise, Winnie
finally said sorry to Stompie's mother and to the family of her former personal
doctor whose killing she is alleged to have ordered after he refused to cover
up Stompie's murder.
Someone brought in the coffee and we
took the offered cups in silence.
"I am not alone. The people of
Soweto are still with me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has
no control or say any more. They put that huge statue of him right in the
middle of the most affluent "white" area of Johannesburg. Not here
where we spilled our blood and where it all started. Mandela is now a corporate
foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money and he is content
doing that. The ANC have effectively sidelined him but they keep him as a
figurehead for the sake of appearance."
The eyes behind the grey tinted glasses
were fiery with anger. It was an economic betrayal, she was saying, nothing had
changed for the blacks, except that apartheid had officially gone. As she spoke
of betrayal she inadvertently looked at a portrait of Mandela.
I looked at Winnie. Maybe she did not
know when to stop. Maybe that is the bane of a revolutionary: they gather such
momentum that he or she can't stop. I saw that although her trials and
tribulations had been recorded, the scars on the inner, most secret part of her
spirit tormented her.
But for Winnie the deaths, the burning
tyres around the necks of the informers and her own Faustian pacts perhaps made
Mandela and his vaunted wisdom look like feeble compromises from a feeble man.
No one could expect him to protect her or his children from his 27-year
incarceration but now he was out he had wanted peace. He had longings, perhaps
scars in the mind, fears and perhaps even wisdom that she could not match or
return.
The rumour rife in South Africa was
that she could not abide him or touch him during their two-year attempt to
salvage the marriage after his release in 1990. It was all too sad. And though
he had been prepared to forgive the past, his wife's affairs while he was in prison,
it had not worked. They divorced in 1996, having spent only five of their 38
married years together. Her anger was a mighty liability and her defiance was
too awful for words.
"I am not sorry. I will never be
sorry. I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything." She
paused.
I thought of the terrible shadow of the
murder of Stompie. Winnie had flung the stone that had cracked the one-way
mirror of apartheid. The "interrogators", the compromisers, were now
all unmasked and for what?
"You know, sometimes I think we
had not thought it all out. There was no planning from our side. How could we?
We were badly educated and the leadership does not acknowledge that. Maybe we
have to go back to the drawing board and see where it all went wrong."
This was Winnie the politician. This
was the phoenix. Publicly, the ANC leadership, who made her a minister in the
first post-apartheid government in 1994 and welcomed her back subsequently,
distanced themselves from her amid allegations of corruption (in 2003, she was
convicted of fraud and given a suspended prison sentence). But for the masses,
she spoke their language and remains popular with those who feel their
government hasn't done enough.
We could see why the ANC had needed
this obdurate woman. She was bold and had an idea of her worth. She was the
perfect mistress for the ANC in the bad times but then she became dangerous.
As we stood up to leave, we saw a
photograph of a young Winnie looking wistfully into the camera. She was ravishingly
beautiful and Mandela had sought her. But the battle was over. She had played
her part. It was over. She had been sidelined and discarded, but since the
freedom had not brought the promised dream for the vast black population, she
would continue to play her hand in politics. Of that I was sure. She was still
a woman who could reflect the dangerous part of a man's dream, whatever it may
be.
"When I was born my mother was
very disappointed. She wanted a son. I knew that from a very early age. So I
was a tomboy. I wanted to be a doctor at some point and I was always bringing
home strays from school. People who were too poor to pay fees or have food. My
parents never rebuked me or told me that they were hard-pressed, too."
She lit up talking of her past and of
early memories that had nothing to do with the struggle. And then she suddenly
turned towards Vidia and said: "But when I am alone I cannot help but
think of the past. The past is still alive in here. In my head." She
pointed to the brain.
Was it all nothing but a great loss? I
wanted to know. Part of me ached for her. As a woman I felt her great
transgressions and the pain. I wanted to tell her that if I had been Mandela I
would have forgiven her but I lacked the courage. What would Vidia say to me if
I did?
He was saying goodbye. My eyes were
filling. Instinctively she turned and looked into me and her eyes softened. She
walked towards me and pulled me into her embrace. "I know what you want to
say," she whispered into my ear, "and for that I am grateful."
Source:
London Evening Standard
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