Winnie Mandela (31 page)

I need a neighbour who will live
A teardrop away
Who will open up when I knock late at night
I need a child who will play
A smile away
Who will always whisper I love you
To be my mummy
.

When Winnie’s banning order expired in September 1975, the police informed her that it would not be renewed. At first she refused to believe them, wondering
what tricks they had in store. But after a few weeks, she accepted, albeit cautiously at first, that she really
was
free, for the first time in thirteen years. She could associate with other people, go wherever she wanted, entertain visitors at home, even address meetings – though she said she would never consider herself truly free while her people remained in bondage to the apartheid system.

After more than a decade of isolation, it was as though Winnie had been brought back from the dead. Invitations began arriving for her to speak at meetings and appear at rallies. The first was a reception arranged by Fatima Meer, a sociologist at the University of Natal who had been subjected to lengthy periods as a banned person due to her anti-apartheid leadership in Natal. She and Winnie had been instrumental in establishing the Black Women’s Federation, which was also later banned. Winnie was to be the keynote speaker at the Durban meeting, and when she arrived on Sunday 12 October, she was met by hundreds of supporters and well-wishers who carried her shoulder-high through the airport terminal. Outside, a group of traditional Zulu dancers performed a welcoming ceremony, and as Winnie’s motorcade drove through Umlazi, cheering residents lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the ‘other’ famous Mandela.

At the crowded YMCA hall, more than 1 000 people of all races roared a welcome for Winnie, who was regal in a Xhosa tribal dress. It was a daunting experience for her to appear in front of a crowd and make a speech again after having been gagged for so many years, but she quickly recovered her confidence, and her address was a triumph.

Winnie was back in the land of the living.

When Fatima took Winnie to the airport the next day, someone pointed out the Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, pulling up in his official car. Fatima deliberately steered Winnie towards the vehicle and, while the minister was gathering his luggage, audaciously introduced herself and presented Winnie to him. The minister beamed at the two women and said he was pleased to meet them, as though nothing was more normal than sworn adversaries making small talk. Winnie seized the moment and asked Kruger when he was going to release Mandela. His reply stunned her. Wagging a finger of reproach at her, he said: ‘That’s up to you.’ What, Winnie asked, did she have to do with her husband being freed?

‘You must behave yourself,’ said Kruger as he walked off.

In her next letter to Madiba, Winnie told him everything about her exciting time in Durban, even the encounter with the minister, though she had no idea how much would be censored. Nelson, in turn, wrote that he wanted to see Zindzi, who was almost fifteen. Prison regulations prohibited visits by children between the ages of two and sixteen, and Madiba had not seen any of his children for years after being sent to Robben Island. This was a source of great sorrow to him, but with the exception of Thembi, who had been killed, each of the children
had reappeared in his life as soon as they turned sixteen. Zindzi was the youngest; she had been a toddler when he last saw her at the end of the Rivonia Trial, and he was impatient to see the young woman she was becoming.

In their letters to one another, with the help of codes and hints and their lawyers acting as intermediaries, a plan emerged. Winnie would alter Zindzi’s birth certificate to show her age as sixteen, so that she could see her father. It proved relatively easy for Winnie to doctor the document, and she duly applied for permission to visit Mandela. But the whole subterfuge was almost scuppered by Winnie’s stepmother Hilda, who went to visit Mandela a few weeks earlier, and was bemused when he told her excitedly that he would be seeing Zindzi soon. Surely, said Hilda, that could not be so, Zindzi was not yet sixteen. Mandela realised that no one had told her about the ruse and tried to gloss over it, but Hilda stubbornly would not let it go, and in her best schoolteacher’s manner, lectured Mandela about his miscalculation. Eventually, he could do nothing but widen and roll his eyes to signal a warning to her. She seemed to get the message, and changed the subject.

Winnie, Zeni and Zindzi visited Robben Island together in December. A full year had passed since Nelson had last seen Winnie, and this was their first meeting after her imprisonment at Kroonstad. It was also the first time since he had gone underground in 1961 that the four of them had been together as a family, but the joy of reunion was marred by the awkwardness of the long separation. Nelson was enchanted by Zindzi, and amazed at how closely she resembled her mother. But the visit stirred an acute sense of loss in all of them, and Nelson, in particular, was wracked by guilt at not having been there for his wife and children and deeply conscious of how much he had missed. He wondered whether Zindzi harboured anger and resentment over the fact that he had chosen the cause of his people over his own family, and went out of his way to make her feel special and at ease. He asked about her life, school and friends, and told her his memories and recollections of her as a little girl. When he mentioned that she had rarely cried, he noticed that she was struggling to hold back her tears.

Mandela continued to rely on Winnie as the mainstay of his life, both as his wife and political partner. He poured out his love and longing for her in deeply romantic and touching letters, often hinting at physical intimacy, baring emotions he had always kept carefully hidden from others. His many friends and relatives did their best to boost his spirits, but Winnie remained his primary source of strength – and political information. She never failed to convey news in their special coded language, and not only Mandela but all the other prisoners looked forward to her visits eagerly, knowing she would share insights and information that they otherwise might not receive.

The authorities had given Winnie a reprieve in so far as the banning orders
and house arrests went, but that did not mean they had stopped persecuting her. In January 1976, Winnie sent Mandela a message that her application for a visit had been turned down, on the grounds that he did not wish to see her. Mandela was aghast and immediately made an appointment to see Lieutenant Prins, head of the Robben Island prison. He lodged a strong protest against the lie, but Prins, clearly disinterested, responded that he thought Winnie was just seeking publicity. Then he made a derogatory and very offensive remark about Winnie, and for the first time in twelve years on the island, Mandela lost his temper. He was on the verge of physically assaulting Prins when he regained control of himself and unleashed a verbal barrage on the warder instead, calling him both dishonourable and contemptible. The next day, Prins charged him with insulting and threatening the head of the prison, but on the day the case was due to be heard, the authorities withdrew the charges.

If Winnie had proved only one thing during her solo crusade, it was that she was no shrinking violet. She refused to be intimidated by the threat that her banning order could be reinstated at any time, and used every opportunity to speak out against the regime and the mainstream media. At the meeting in Durban in April 1976, she commented on the discriminatory reaction of the media to the banning of blacks and whites, a subject on which she could speak with some authority. While media outrage had shaken the rafters when eight white student leaders were banned, the same newspapers had offered no more than a muffled tut-tut when an equal number of black student leaders were banned.

Winnie made no pretence of respecting anyone in authority following her harrowing experience in prison, and some of her friends thought she had actually become slightly unhinged. Far from crushing her, the apartheid government had created a truly formidable adversary, who remained unflinching in her opposition. ‘You cannot intimidate people like me any more,’ she said emphatically.

To the annoyance and alarm of her opponents, far from having been bludgeoned into submission, Winnie was emerging as a major player on the political stage, a protagonist in her own right and with her own support base. To the downtrodden masses, she had become a heroine, an African Joan of Arc: a leader to be reckoned with. And despite anything her detractors said, she was keeping the Mandela name alive, both inside South Africa and beyond. It was Peter Magubane who would later voice what many black South Africans had long believed: without Winnie, Mandela could not have remained what he was. When journalists could not write about him, Winnie saw to it that they were kept up to date about his problems and his progress. Winnie, said Magubane, was the only person who had stood by both Mandela and the ANC without wavering, the only one who had dared the authorities to try to stop her. There was never any doubt, he said, that if she had to, Winnie Mandela was prepared to die for the liberation struggle.

 

I
N 1975
,
PORTUGAL
'
S WITHDRAWAL
as the colonial power in both Mozambique and Angola ushered in a significant period of political change and upheaval in southern Africa. With only South Africa, South West Africa and Rhodesia still under white minority rule, blacks at the southern tip of the continent were filled with hope, and there was a sudden surge of militant expectation, especially among the youth.

On a visit to Mandela early in 1976, Winnie managed to tell him in her coded language about the rising discontent and emergence of a new generation of young black rebels. They were both militant and Africanist, and regarded the older struggle leaders as moderates. Winnie warned Mandela that they were changing the nature of the struggle, and that the ANC should take them seriously.

The Black Consciousness movement had been established in 1969 by Steve Biko, a young medical student at the University of Natal, who was vehemently opposed to what he termed the paternalism of white liberals in the leadership tier of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This led him to form the all-black South African Students' Organisation (SASO), which soon attracted a significant following on black university campuses and also inspired teenagers still at school. In 1973 the government banned eight SASO leaders, including Biko. The ANC leadership was not enthused by Biko's initiative, but Winnie found both him and his ideals inspiring. She said Biko stepped into the political hiatus created by the ANC being banned and its leaders jailed, and she embraced the new pride in being black that had begun to surface. She became both a friend and supporter of Biko, and when he was in Johannesburg he always made a point of seeing Winnie, who was steadily shifting into a new political role.

Mandela found it intensely frustrating to be marginalised from politics and life in general at this crucial point in South Africa's history. He fluctuated between a desperate longing to get out of jail and resignation that he would spend the rest of his life there. His name had been carved on his cell door – to remind him, said Winnie, of eternity, that this would be the end of his life. His emotions see-sawed between guilt over not being able to protect and provide for his family – and continue the political struggle – and dreams of freedom. With other prisoners
like Mac Maharaj and Eddie Daniels he considered daring escape plans, and occasionally these went further than mere hypothesis. When one of the warders left a key lying around, Jeff Masemola made a soap imprint and fashioned a duplicate key, which would have given them access to sections of the prison not normally open to them, but they never used it. In 1974, Mandela, Maharaj and Wilton Mkwayi planned to escape during a trip to the dentist in Cape Town, but abandoned the idea at the last minute when they suspected that they were being led into a trap set by the police. The most ambitious plan was a proposal made by Eddie Daniels to the ANC leaders in Lusaka that a helicopter, painted in the livery of the South African Defence Force, should pick Mandela up on the island and drop him on the roof of a sympathetic foreign embassy in Cape Town, from where he could apply for asylum. They never received a reply from Lusaka.

If Winnie found it a burden to be the emotional keystone of South Africa's liberator-in-chief, she never said as much, and never complained. She was the one person with whom Madiba shared his inner fears and feelings, and his letters to her were the only record of his deep anxieties and longing, his every dream and aspiration. He had told her in 1964 that he would rely on her support to sustain him in prison, and more than a decade later, that still held true. In February 1976 he wrote that he thought of her as sister, mother, friend and mentor, and pictured in his mind everything that made her the person she was, physically and spiritually. He recalled that she had lovingly accepted the numerous difficulties of life with him, which would have defeated another woman; told her he carefully dusted her photograph every morning, for it gave him the feeling that he was caressing her as he had in the old days; reminded her of their special intimate habit of rubbing their noses together, and said he touched his nose to hers on the photograph to ‘recapture the electric current' that used to flush through his blood. ‘I wonder,' he wrote, ‘what it'll be like when I return.'

While their leaders were reminiscing about their lost lives and hankering for freedom, foremost in the minds of angry young blacks were their grievances against the Bantu Education Act, which, two decades after its introduction, was still a bone of contention. The system was widely despised and condemned, especially by young urban blacks whose parents had known the benefit of a superior education and had escaped what was indisputably schooling for servitude. Conversely, the youth had greater access to the media than their mothers and fathers had enjoyed, recognised the limitations of the education system imposed on them and became ever more determined to change it. Practically all Soweto's children seemed aware of the statement by the late Dr Verwoerd that except as labourers, there was no place for blacks in the white community. While white children were being taught mathematics and science, biology, German and Latin, black children were forced to learn arithmetic, agriculture (to prepare them for working on white farms),
Bible study, African languages (which would not equip them for university study) and Afrikaans. Their anger was fuelled by the introduction of a regulation that made it compulsory for certain subjects to be taught in Afrikaans rather than English. Apart from the fact that this would further limit their development, Afrikaans was deeply resented as the language of the oppressor.