By John Carlin
Nelson Mandela passed away Thursday
night. John Carlin in his new book ‘Knowing Mandela,’ reveals why he never
forgave the former wife who has visited his bedside.
Two weeks before Nelson Mandela’s
release from prison in February 1990 I went to see his wife, Winnie, at her
home in Diepkloof Extension, the posh neighbourhood of Soweto where the handful
of black people who had contrived to make a little money resided. It was known
as Baverly Hills to Soweto’s other presidents.
Winnie’s home, funded by foreign
benefactors, was a two-floor, three-bedroom house with a garden and a small
swimming pool. The height of extravagance by black standards, it would have
more or less met the aspirations of the average white, middle-class South
African.
Zindzi, Winnie’s slim and attractive
second daughter, was 29 but looked younger in a yellow T-shirt and denim
dungarees. It was 9.30 a.m. and she was in the kitchen frying eggs. She invited
me in and started chatting as if we were old friends. The truth was that I had
not scheduled an interview with Winnie. I had just dropped in to try my luck.
But Zindzi saw nothing wrong in me giving it a shot.
Mum, she said, was still upstairs and
would probably be a while. As I hovered about waiting (and, as it turned out,
waiting, and waiting friends of Zindzi wandered in for coffee and a chat.
Completing the South African middle-class picture, a small, wizened maid in
blue overalls padded inscrutably around.
Finally, Winnie made her entrance,
Taller than I had expected, very much the grande dame, she displayed neither
surprise nor irritation at my presence in her home. When I said I would like to
interview her, she responded with a sigh, a knowing smile and a glance at her
watch. I said all I would need was half an hour. She thought a moment, shrugged
her shoulders and said: “OK. But you will have to give me a little time.” She
still had to put the finishing touches to her morning toilette.
The picture presented to me by mother,
daughter, friends and cleaning lady was of a domesticity so stable and relaxed
that, had I not been better informed, I would never have imagined the depths of
trauma that lucked beneath.
Winnie had been continually persecuted
by agents of the apartheid state during the 1970s and 1980s; she had borne the
anguish of hearing her two small daughters screaming as the police broke into
her home and carted her off to jail; she had spent more than a year in solitary
confinement. Trusting that her confused and stricken children would be cared
for by friends; she had been banished and placed under house arrest far away.
But she was back, her circumstances altered dramatically for the better now
that Mandela’s release was imminent.
One hour after her first entrance, she
majestically reappeared, Cleopatra still needed her morning coffee, and
motioned me to wait in her study while she withdrew into the kitchen. I had
five minutes to take in the surroundings.
On a bookshelf there was a row of
framed family portraits, a Christmas card and a birthday card. Only a month had
passed since Christmas, but nearly four since Winnie had turned 53. I could not
resist taking a closer look.
I opened the Christmas card, which was
enormous, and immediately recognised Nelson Mandela’s large, spidery
handwriting. “Darling, I love you. Madiba,” It said. Madiba was the tribal name
by which he liked to be known to those close to him. On the birthday card he
had written the same words.
If I had not known better I might have
imagined the cards had been sent by an infatuated teenager. Once we began our
interview. Winnie took on just such a role, playing the tremulous bride-to-be,
convincing me she was in a state of nervous excitement at the prospect of
rekindling her life’s great love.
Close up she had, like her husband, the
charisma of the vastly self-confident, and there was a coquettish,
eye-fluttering sensuality about her. It was not hard to imagine how the young
woman who met Mandela one rainy evening in 1957 had struck him, as he would
later confess, like a thunderbolt.
The Mandela the world saw wore a mask
that disguised his private feelings, presenting himself as a fearless hero,
immune to ordinary human weakness. His effectiveness as a leader hung, he
believed, on keeping that public mask from cracking. Winnie offered the greatest
test to his resolve. During the following years the mask cracked only twice.
She was the cause both times.
The first was in May 1991. She had just
been convicted at Johannesburg’s Rand Supreme Court of assault and accessory to
kidnapping a 14-year-old black boy called Stomple Moeketsi, whom her driver had
subsequently murdered. Winnie had been led to believe, falsely as it turned
out, that the boy had been working as a spy for the apartheid state.
Winnie and Mandela walked together down
the steps of the grand court building. Once again the actress, she swaggered to
the street, right fist raised in triumph. It was not clear what she could
possibly have been celebrating, except perhaps the perplexing straight off to
jail and would remain free pending an appeal.
Mandela had a different grasp of the
situation. His face was grey, his eyes were downcast.
The second and last time was nearly a
year later. The setting was an evening press conference hastily summoned at the
drab headquarters of the ANC. He shuffled into the room, sat down at a table
and read from a piece of paper, beginning by paying tribute to his wife.
“During the two decades I spent on
Robben Island she was an indispensable pillar of support and comfort… My love
for her remains undiminished.” There was a general intake of breath. Then he
continued: “We have mutually agreed that a separation would be the best for
each of us… I part from my wife with no recriminations. I embrace her with all
the love and affection I have nursed for her inside and outside prison from the
moment I first met her.”
He rose to his feet. “Ladies and
gentlemen. I hope you’ll appreciate the pain I have gone through and I now end
this interview.”
He exited the room, head-bowed, amid
total silence.
Mandela’s love for Winnie had been,
like many great loves, a kind of madness, all the more so in his case as it was
founded more on a fantasy that he had kept alive for 27 years in prison than on
the brief time they had actually spent together. The demands of his political
life before he was imprisoned were such that they had next to no experience of
married life, as Winnie herself would confess to me that morning.
“I have never lived with Mandela,” she
said. “I have never known what it was to have a close family where you sat
around the table with husband and children. I have no such dear memories. When
I gave birth to my children he was never there, even though he was not in jail
at the time.”
It seemed that Winnie, who was 22 to
his 38 when they met, had cast a spell on him. Or maybe he cast a spell on
himself, needing to reconstruct those fleeting memories of her into a fantasy
of tranquility where he sought refuge from the loneliness of prison life.
His letters to her from Robben Island
revealed romantic, sensual side to his nature that no one but Winnie then knew.
He recalled “the electric current” that “flushed” through his blood as he
looked at her photograph and imagined their caresses.
The truth was that Winnie had had
several lovers during Mandela’s long absence. In the months before his release,
she had been having an affair with Dali Mpofu, a lawyer 30 years her junior and
a member of her defence team. She carried on with the affair after Mandela left
prison. ANC members close to Mandela knew that was going on, as they did about
her frequent bouts of drunkenness.
I tried asking them why they did not
talk to Mandela about her waywardness, but I was always met by frosty stares.
Winnie became a taboo subject within the ANC during the two years after Mandela
left prison. Confronting him with the truth was a step too far for the freedom
fighters of the ANC.
His impeccably courteous public persona
acted as a coat of armour protecting the sorrowing man within. But there came a
point when Mandela could deceive himself, or the public, no longer. Details of
the affair with Mpofu were made luridly public in a newspaper report two weeks
before the separation announcement.
The article was a devastating,
irrefutable expose of Winnie’s affair. It was based on a letter she had written
to Mpofu that revealed he had recently had a child with a woman whom she
referred to as “a white hag.” Winnie accused Mpofu of “running around f***** at
the slightest emotional excuse … Before I am through with you, you are going to
learn a bit of honesty and sincerity and know what betrayal of one’s love means
to a woman … Remember always how much you have hurt and humiliated me … I keep
telling you the situation is deteriorating at home, you are not bothered
because you are satisfying yourself every night with a woman. I won’t be your
bloody fool, Dali.”
In private, Mandela had already endured
quite enough conjugal torture. I learnt of one especially hurtful episode from
a friend of Mandela some years later. Not long after the end of her trial,
Winnie was due to fly to America on ANC-related business. She wanted to take
Mpofu with her, and Mandela said she should not, Winnie agreed not to, but went
with him anyway. Mandela phoned her at her hotel room in New York, and Mpofu
answered the phone.
On the face of it, Mandela was a man
more sinned against than sinning, but he did not see it that way. It was his
belief that the original sin was to have put his political cause before his
family.
Despite everything, Mandela believed
when he left prison that he would find a way to reconcile political and family
life. Some years after his separation from Winnie, I interviewed his close
friend Amina Cashalia, who had known him since before he met Winnie.” His one
great wish,” she told me, “was that he would come out of prison, and have a
family life again with his wife and the children. Because he’s a great family
man and I think he really wanted that more than anything else and he couldn’t
have it.”
His fallout with Winnie only deepened
the catastrophe, contaminating his relationships with other family members,
among them his daughter Zindzi. She was a far more complicated character than I
had imagined when I chatted with her cheerfully in her mother’s kitchen over
fried eggs. At that very moment, in late January 1990, her current lover, the
father of her third child, was in a prison cell. Five days later he hanged
himself.
Zindzi was very much her mother’s
daughter, inheriting her capacity to dissemble as well as her strength of
personality. The unhappiness and sheer chaos that she would endure in her own
private life, a mirror of her mother’s, found expression in a succession of
tense episodes with her father after he was set free.
One of them took place before friends
and family on the day of her marriage to the father of her fourth child, six
months after her parents’ separation. It was a glittering occasion at
Johannesburg’s swankiest hotel, with Zindzi radiant in a magnificent pearl and
sequin bridal dress. It seemed to be a joyous celebration; in truth, it
provided further evidence of the Mandela family’s dysfunctions.
One of the guests seated near the top
table was Helen Suzman, the white liberal politician and good friend of
Mandela. She told me that he went through the ceremonial motions with all the
propriety one would have expected. He joined in the cutting of the wedding cake
and played his part when the time came to give his speech, declaring, “She’s
not mine now,” as fathers are supposed to do. He did not, however, mention
Winnie in the speech. When he sat down, he looked silent and cheerless.
Maybe he had had time to reflect in the
intervening six months on the depth of Winnie’s betrayal. For more details had
emerged of her love affairs and of the crimes of the gang of young men
“Winnie’s boys,” as they were known in Soweto – who played the role of both
bodyguards and courtly retinue. They had killed at least three young black men,
beaten up Winnie’s perceived enemies and raped ;young girls.
Whether Mandela chose to realise it at
the time, he was the reason that Winnie never ended up going to jail. Some
years later, the minister of justice and the chief of national intelligence
admitted to me that they had conveyed a message to the relevant members of the
judiciary to show Winnie leniency.
Mandela’s mental and emotional wellbeing
were essential to the success of the negotiations between the government and
the ANC; for him to bow out of the process could have had catastrophic
consequences for the country as a whole. Jailing Winnie would be too grave a
risk.
Bizarrely, one of the guests at
Zindzi’s wedding, prominently positioned near the top table, was the “white
hag” Winnie had derided in her letter to Mpofu, and she was sitting next to a
man I know to be another former lover of Winnie’s.
It also would have been difficult for
Mandela to miss the menacing glances Winnie cast towards the “hag” although I
hope he missed the moment when Winnie brushed past her and hissed at her former
lover: “Go on! Take her ! Take her!”
When the band struck up and the newly
married couple got up to dance, Mandela, who had been standing up, turned his
back on Winnie and returned stiffly to the top table. Grim-faced for the rest
of the night, he treated Winnie as if she did not exist. At one point, Suzman
passed him a note. “Smile, Nelson,” it said.
In October 1994, five months after
Mandela had become president, I spoke to a friend of his, one of the few people
in whom he confided the details of his marital difficulties. The friend leant
over to me and said: “It’s amazing. He has forgiven all his political enemies,
but he cannot forgive her.”
During their divorce proceedings a year
and a half later, he made his feelings towards Winnie public at the Rand
Supreme Court, where he had accompanied and supported Winnie during her trial
in 1991.
As his lawyer would tell me later, he
was arbitrarily generous about sharing his estate, giving Winnie what was more
than fair. But he made his feelings bluntly known in the divorce hearing.
Standing a few feet away from her, he addressed the judge, saying: “Can I put
it simply, my lord? If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile
with the defendant. I would not … I am determined to get rid of this marriage.”
He did not shirk from describing before
the court the disappointment and misery of married life after he returned from
prison. Winnie, he explained, did not share his bed once in the two years after
their reunion. “I was the loneliest man,” he said.
The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough
wrote about the “terrible notions of duty” that boost the public figure but can
stunt the private man. It is impossible to avoid concluding that Mandela was
far less at ease in private than in public life. In the harsh world of South
African politics he had his bearing; in the family sphere he often seemed
baffled and lost.
Happily for his country, one did not
drain energy from the other. Thanks to a kind of self-imposed apartheid of the
mind, personal anguish and the political drive inhabited separate compartments
and ran along parallel lines.
As out of control as she could be in
her personal affairs, she possessed a lucid political intelligence and a mature
understanding of where her husband’s priorities lay, even if she was deluded in
attributing some of his qualities to herself.
“When you lead the kind of life we lead,
if you are involved in a revolutionary situation, you cease to think in terms
of self,” she said. “The question of personal feelings and reactions dues not
even arise, because you are in a position where you think solely in terms of
the nation, the people who have come first all your life.”
• Source: Sunday Times
Extracted from Knowing Mandela
by John Carlin
No comments:
Post a Comment