Winnie Mandela (36 page)
In Swaziland, she was given a welcome fit for a queen. She had been refused a passport, but the Swazi officials allowed her to cross the border without any formalities. A fleet of twenty limousines awaited her, and as she crossed into Swaziland the drivers all hooted a resounding welcome. Her future son-in-law was the first Swazi prince who had chosen a royal bride, and a special state reception was held in Winnie’s honour. She was overwhelmed by the red carpet treatment, pomp and splendour, and as the guest of honour, felt a little like Cinderella after the long years of deprivation.
Winnie knew that by marrying Muzi, a banker, Zeni would not only be well cared for, but would escape the vitriolic attention of the South African authorities. An added bonus was that as a member of King Sobhuza’s family, she was accorded diplomatic status, which among other advantages allowed her the right to have contact visits with Mandela. When Zeni visited her father after the wedding, he was allowed to touch one of his family members for the first time in fourteen years.
Though Winnie felt restored on her return to Brandfort, the desolation of Phatakahle was all the more striking after the opulence of her retreat in Swaziland. Visitors came less often, and she felt increasingly besieged. She had befriended some of the township residents, but the differences in their interests and backgrounds were all but insurmountable. Winnie was desperate for the intellectual and political stimulation of Soweto, and fearing the degeneration that came of constant disappointment and frustration, she concentrated all her efforts on the township projects she had begun, and which had made giant advances in the face of the harassment and negative propaganda against her.
Accounts of the grim conditions in Phatakahle brought a steady stream of reporters and photographers to Brandfort. White residents were angered by the negative reports about their town, but their black counterparts were amazed and intrigued by the spotlight on Winnie and their own, previously ignored circumstances. People who had never heard of Brandfort before sent messages of support and sympathy to Winnie, along with gifts and donations. Having the Mandela name and the accompanying media attention spread to a part of the country that had never really known either, was certainly not what the security police had envisaged. Furthermore, it was clear that Winnie’s presence was having an unwelcome effect
on the people of Phatakahle. She was stirring dormant feelings of self-respect and dignity, reminding them with her conduct that they were human beings like any others, and that the spirit could be sustained even in the face of assaults on one’s physical well-being. She showed the downtrodden that they could be black and proud, and persevere despite seemingly insurmountable odds, which was no mean feat, considering the extent of their resigned submission.
When the police saw township residents flocking to Winnie’s house, wandering in and out to talk to her, they decided some action was needed to halt this communion. Their solution was the erection of a fence around Winnie’s house, much to her delight. When a foreign newspaper reported on the stark contrast between Winnie’s house and neighbouring structures, the municipality put up fences around all the houses in the immediate environment. The rest of the township was ignored, but the residents were counting their blessings. The fences were the first improvements in the township in decades, and esteem for Winnie continued to grow.
Ill-informed residents who neither knew nor understood that the government’s agenda was to isolate Winnie admired her for managing to get things done. It was almost comical that the security police’s stringent efforts to quarantine Winnie actually enhanced her stature. As their strategy escalated, it continued to boomerang. When they noted that there was much merriment and spirited conversation around the communal tap when Winnie went to fetch water, the mere possibility that she could be spreading ANC propaganda sparked a flurry of urgent planning to devise ways of keeping her indoors.
The answer, the police decided, lay in providing Winnie with her own water supply. Convinced that this would prevent her from mixing with – and corrupting – township residents, they sent workmen to extend the water pipes from the street to a tap outside Winnie’s door. No other house in the township had a tap, and her neighbours were agog as they watched the unthinkable materialise before their very eyes. The security police’s solution was yet another moral victory for Winnie, and an unintentional but welcome boost for her morale.
After a few months in Phatakahle, Winnie had identified countless opportunities for social assistance to her hopeless fellow residents. As soon as the tap was installed, she started turning the barren soil around her house into a garden, encouraging her neighbours to follow her example. Practising the thrift she had learned as a child, she saved every seed and pip, planting them in her garden and distributing seedlings to other residents. Even though her closest neighbours were security policemen, their initial animosity faded as their wives and children got to know, and like, Winnie. They, too, gratefully accepted her gifts of seedlings, and soon fruit trees were taking root on the plots around Winnie’s house. She asked her visitors to bring seeds and planted vegetables, flowers and shrubs, and when curious passers-by stopped to watch, she gave them seeds and advice on how to grow them.
She also cultivated a lawn, digging up the grass growing around the street taps and planting it in her garden. It was excrutiating manual labour, but Winnie, pushing a wheelbarrow and spade down the dusty streets, kept at it.
The lush green lawn transformed Winnie’s little plot. Her endeavours became known as the garden project, and with her own home as proof that it could be done, she persuaded a group of township women to join her in growing their own vegetables. This not only provided them with much-needed food, but also altered the appearance of the drab and dusty plots, with tufts of green soon sprouting everywhere. When the Council of Churches heard of her efforts, they donated seeds for the women to share, and while some people were too lethargic to bother with a garden, the efforts of those who responded encouraged more and more residents to become involved.
Winnie’s banning order placed no restriction on communication with children, and they came from far and wide to come and play on the grass. The fact that she could talk and laugh with the children alleviated some of her loneliness and isolation, and when mothers walked their little ones to her home, she seized the chance to offer them counsel on nutrition and child care. Before long, one at a time, as dictated by her banning order, women were bringing their babies to Winnie for advice and treatment when they were ill.
White doctors in Brandfort had set aside consultation hours after 5 pm for black patients, but few could afford the cost of a visit, and when people began queuing to seek Winnie’s help, she told her friends and supporters that she would like to start a clinic. Dr Motlana, Archdeacon Rushton and others provided her with basic medical supplies so she could treat minor problems like coughs, colds or upset stomachs, and administer basic first aid. She used some of the cash donations to buy baby food to try to reduce the high infant mortality rate. There was no room in her tiny house for the supplies, so she kept them on top of a cupboard in the lounge. As word spread, sick and injured people increasingly lined up at her door. The security police regularly took down their names, but this didn’t scare them off. Police or no police, they needed help, and they got it from Winnie. Many of those who sought her aid were elderly, and with no jobs or income they were literally starving.
To her horror, Winnie discovered that the fathers of some of the starving children in Phatakahle were white men from Brandfort, who refused to acknowledge their existence and were wholly unconcerned about their fate. She set up a soup kitchen to feed pre-school children, the elderly and unemployed. For the first time in living memory, hot meals were available to Phatakahle’s destitute, and soon they, too, formed a queue at Winnie’s door for a daily bowl of soup. Then older children from farms in the district, who had to walk long distances to school and back, often on an empty stomach, heard about the soup kitchen, and joined the
queue. Although she was struggling to feed an increasing number of people, Winnie refused to turn them away hungry. Some days she fed up to 200 people. When she ran out of soup powder and other ingredients, the queues would disappear, but as soon as donations of fresh supplies arrived, the people would return. When Winnie’s visitors and sympathisers asked what she needed, she said soup powder, and when the Black Sash heard about her feeding scheme, they sent her large sacks of it.
In time, with the help of Operation Hunger, other organisations and individuals, the township’s poor could always find a meal, but Winnie continued to introduce new projects to improve the living conditions of Brandfort’s black population. While she was in town one day, she was shocked to see that blacks were buying single slices of bread, because that was all they could afford. She decided instantly to teach a group of women how to bake bread, which they sold to the people of Phatakahle at cost price. The bakery project was another popular and enduring success.
However, the gratitude and relief of black residents were not echoed by the white community, which had benefited from selling food and clothes to them. As her popularity rose on one side of the road, it declined on the other. When she realised that many women left their small children at home alone when they went to work, Winnie asked the Methodist minister for permission to use a room on one side of the church as a daycare centre. She recruited four women to run the centre, which opened with twenty children. Soon, Winnie’s friends were donating toys and books, and more than seventy toddlers were able to play and learn under supervision, and receive balanced daily meals.
Her personal experiences had led Winnie to the conclusion that Afrikaners would never treat blacks as equals, since they regarded them not as human beings but as little more than cheap labour. She was convinced that Brandfort’s Afrikaners were neither interested in, nor concerned about, the dire circumstances in the ghetto on their doorstep. Then she met the De Waals.
Ismail Ayob, Winnie’s attorney in Johannesburg, had advised her to make contact with a lawyer in Brandfort, so that he would have someone on the spot with whom he could liaise in matters concerning her situation. There was only one attorney in Brandfort, Piet de Waal, and when Winnie went to his office to introduce herself, he was speechless – and she noticed that his hands were shaking. An old friend of the National Party member of parliament Kobie Coetsee – who had a farm near Brandfort and would later become Minister of Justice – De Waal was loath to accept Winnie as a client, but Ayob pointed out that he was compelled by legal ethics to represent her, since he was the only lawyer in Brandfort and she could not leave the town. De Waal apologetically explained his unfortunate and embarrassing position to Coetsee, to Jimmy Kruger and the police
in Brandfort, but gradually his attitude began to change, and in time he and his wife, Adéle, were so struck by Winnie’s intelligence and charm that they came to regard her as a friend. Adéle, in particular, identified with Winnie’s loneliness in a strange place, offered her books to read and invited her to visit at any time, even to use her bathroom so that Winnie could take a hot bath.
Whereas many whites were deeply committed to apartheid, there were also a significant number who, as a result of the system’s credo of divide and rule, never met or spoke to any black people except their maids and gardeners, and therefore were never challenged to question either the government or their own prejudice. Adéle de Waal, néé Retief, was a descendant of Piet Retief, the revered Voortrekker leader who had been murdered by the Zulu king, Dingane, when he and a delegation of Afrikaners attempted to buy large tracts of farmland in Natal. When she – like Bram Fischer, also a member of a prominent Afrikaner family – extended the hand of friendship to Winnie, a ‘terrorist’, other whites in Brandfort shunned her. Adéle took their rejection in her stride, and she and Winnie became good friends. But when Winnie met Adéle’s parents, her elderly father told her, solemnly, that they bore her no grudge. Winnie was stunned by this rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of whites in general. If anything, it was she who might have offered forgiveness, not them. She graciously let the moment pass, and in later years said she had learned a lot from and through Adéle de Waal, things she would otherwise not have known or understood about Afrikaners.
While Winnie was making every effort to come to terms with life in Brandfort, Zindzi was showing signs of discontent and depression. Not even the fact that her boyfriend, Johannes (Oupa) Seakamela had moved in with them seemed to help. He was of great assistance to Winnie, and made many improvements to the house. He installed a kitchen sink and tap connected to the outside pipes, so that, at last, Winnie had running water inside the house. Oupa also helped her put up shelves, carpet the floor and stencil a pattern on the lounge wall so that it looked like wallpaper. Gradually, as money became available, Winnie added necessities such as a paraffin refrigerator and a gas stove. A ginger cat took up residence and a coop in the backyard housed a well-wisher’s gift of chickens. Oupa also laid a path from the kitchen door to the gate, and Zindzi wrote their names in the wet cement, creating a permanent memorial of their stay.
But Zindzi could not settle in Brandfort. Before leaving Johannesburg she was being treated by a psychiatrist for depression, and the cessation of treatment, combined with the incessant attempts of the police to intimidate her, aggravated her condition. She had passed up an opportunity of going to Wits University, and she and Oupa had a daughter, Zoleka, but eventually the constant police harassment became too much for her. When her relationship with Oupa fell apart, she announced that she was returning to the house in Orlando. As much as
she had been a comfort and company, Winnie realised it would be best for Zindzi to leave. Back in Soweto, she dedicated herself to her dream of becoming a writer, and made impressive progress for such a young person. Jim Bailey, the owner of
Drum
magazine, offered her a position as columnist for his new women’s magazine
True Love
, and she continued to write poetry. In 1978, she published a volume of her poems,
Black as I Am
, which opened with this poem about her father:
