Winnie Mandela (38 page)

Winnie was livid, but for once she was in a position to hit back. She and Dr Motlana sued Mathlare for defamation, and the judge ordered him to pay each of them R3 000 in damages, make a public apology and withdraw the allegations. Soon afterwards, Mathlare and his wife moved to Botswana.

For Winnie, the outcome of the court action was not enough. Mathlare had worked closely with her and Dr Motlana in both the Black Parents’ Association and the ANC, and during the 1976 uprising he had toiled side by side with them to treat injured children, and all three had been detained at the same time. She needed to find out why Mathlare had told such blatant and damaging lies about his old friends. Discreet enquiries revealed that Mathlare had been broken under torture, and had agreed to falsely implicate Winnie and Motlana in the uprising.
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Having been subjected to the rigours of solitary confinement and torture herself,
Winnie had some sympathy for those who were unable to withstand the tactics employed by the security police.

Amid all the hardship and tragedy, Winnie’s sense of humour was her saving grace. In the most trying circumstances, she could usually find something to laugh about. Even security policeman Gert Prinsloo, the bane of her existence, became a source of entertainment when he began drinking heavily, possibly to counter the effect of years of boredom induced by watching Winnie and having little or nothing to report. Winnie believed that Prinsloo’s surveillance duty had become more of a punishment for him than for her, and for a time she was wryly amused by his antics when he would stagger into her house and search the tiny cupboards, even under the carpet, for illegal visitors. After a while, though, his absurd behaviour became an irritation, and Winnie complained. Prinsloo was duly transferred, but lest Winnie imagine she had scored any kind of victory over the security police, his superior officer made a special trip to Phatakahle to impress upon her that Prinsloo had merely been moved to another post, not demoted.

Winnie’s life changed significantly when she became a grandmother. In the space of a few years, Zeni had three children and Zindzi two, and in keeping with tradition, they regularly stayed with their grandmother. The silence and solitude of her small home was invaded by laughter and chatter, and for Winnie, who had always adored children, they were an endless source of joy and comfort. In part, their presence made up for the many years of separation from her own daughters while they were growing up. Her grandchildren often stayed with her until they were old enough to go to nursery school, after which they visited during the holidays.

After years of hard work, Winnie also began to reap the rewards of the many projects she had initiated in Phatakahle. The trees she had planted during her first months in exile started bearing fruit, and she had the gratification of picking peaches in her own garden. In spring and summer, the trees framed the small, uninspiring house in soft, green foliage and it stood as an oasis in the monotony of the desolate landscape and drab, unvaried architecture of the township.

In March 1982, she was involved in a car accident, suffering a leg injury that appeared superficial at the time, but would later have life-threatening repercussions. Mandela was told by the prison authorities about the accident, but given no details. On 31 March, his attorney and friend, Dullah Omar, visited him and filled in the details. That night, without warning, Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni were told to pack their things, and were whisked to the mainland. Mandela’s stay on Robben Island was over – he would spend the next six-and-a-half years at Pollsmoor Prison.

When Winnie visited him there for the first time, she saw the Cape in all its splendour. Her trips to Robben Island had followed a set route: airport–police headquarters–harbour, and she had seen nothing of the beauty for which the
peninsula was known throughout the world. But the road to Pollsmoor, in Tokai, wound through the upmarket southern suburbs of Rondebosch and Constantia, along thoroughfares lined with sturdy oak trees planted by colonists 200 years before, and fringed with tracts of open veld covered, at certain times of the year, with the spectacular Cape flora, including the colourful proteas and gentle-hued heather. Winnie’s heart ached when she compared the lush scenery to the dusty, overcrowded landscape of Soweto, Phatakahle and other townships.

Not only was it a far simpler journey to visit Nelson at Pollsmoor than on the island, but conditions for their visits were a great improvement. They could both see and hear one another more clearly, and the warders were less obtrusive. Warrant Officer James Gregory, who was more sophisticated and courteous than many of his colleagues and showed consideration to both Mandela and his wife, supervised most of Winnie’s visits. Nevertheless, on her first visit, Nelson asked her to lodge a formal complaint with his lawyer about the conditions at Pollsmoor, which, he said, were worse than on Robben Island. He wanted the outside world to know that he believed the transfer had been designed to add to the hardship of the jailed ANC leaders. On the island they each had their own cell, and were allowed to exercise and mix with other prisoners in a communal area. Now, six of them were confined to a cell day and night, and there was no space in which to exercise. In addition, they were no longer allowed to send or receive telegrams. Since it took weeks, and often as long as two months, for a letter to be checked and passed by the censors, it had become imperative for telegrams to be used in the case of urgent matters, such as a death in the family.

Over the years, many of the concessions and privileges for political prisoners on Robben Island had been the result of Winnie’s protests, and she passed Mandela’s complaints on to his lawyer, as asked. She also wrote to her friend Mary Benson in London, who facilitated publication in some of the British newspapers of reports about the unfavourable prison conditions. Subsequently, conditions at Pollsmoor improved.

There was little that Winnie could do to improve her own lot, however. In May 1982, she received an anonymous letter, reminding her that two of her acquaintances, Petrus Nzima and his wife, had been killed by a car bomb in Swaziland – and warning that the same could happen to her. It was an ominous reminder that there were people who would like to see her dead, and that assassination had to be something the authorities had contemplated more than once. It did not escape her notice that this particular piece of mail, unlike all her other letters, had not been intercepted by the security police. Her life had often been threatened, however, and she did not pay undue attention to this latest attempt at intimidation. But a few days later, when she went to start her minibus, she saw a length of electrical wiring dangling from the battery. She called her
neighbours, who told her they had seen suspicious-looking men at the vehicle late the night before, and that when they went to investigate the men quickly left. Some of Winnie’s friends contacted the media, and reports of an apparent attempt to rig her vehicle with a car bomb were published both in South Africa and abroad. Just three months later, Winnie’s acute awareness that mortal danger was never far away was reinforced when a parcel bomb killed Joe Slovo’s wife, Ruth First, in her office in Maputo.

The ‘Free Mandela’ campaign brought foreign emissaries from various countries to Winnie’s humble house in Brandfort. Never afraid of speaking her mind, she was harsh in her criticism of President Ronald Reagan’s policy on South Africa when American diplomats visited her. The German ambassador was received more amicably, and after his visit, he regularly sent food parcels to the residents of Phatakahle. He also gave Winnie a battery-operated television set, and apart from providing her with an additional source of information and much needed entertainment, the appliance brought an element of magic to the township. Wideeyed children, squealing with delight, came to watch their favourite programmes, transforming Winnie’s house into a makeshift local cinema. When her neighbours crowded into the tiny lounge to watch TV, she, curbed by her banning order, stayed in the bedroom.

In October 1982, Piet de Waal, Winnie’s friend and attorney, called at her house to deliver an urgent message. He found her virtually unconscious, delirious with pain and fever from an infection in the leg she had injured in the car accident six months earlier. He called the local doctor, who ordered that she be admitted to hospital immediately, as her life was in danger. After getting the necessary permission from the police, arrangements were made for her to be rushed to Universitas Hospital in Bloemfontein. But special permission would first have to be obtained, as the hospital was only for whites, and Winnie obstinately refused. She would rather die, she said, than apply for special privileges – and if she had to go to hospital, it would have to be in Johannesburg. Her doctor made it clear to the security police that unless she received the proper treatment, soon, there was a good chance that she might die. The security police, in turn, knew they could not afford the international outcry that would erupt if she
did
die as the result of being refused permission to travel when she needed urgent medical attention. Eventually, and reluctantly, they agreed that she could be flown to Johannesburg, where she was admitted to the Rosebank Clinic, a private hospital that accepted patients of all races.

Emergency surgery was carried out on Winnie’s leg, and she spent seven weeks in hospital recovering. As always, the security police were close at hand, and monitored her every visitor. When she was discharged, five police cars were waiting outside the hospital to follow attorney Ismail Ayob’s car to the airport.
However, the last flight to Bloemfontein that day was fully booked, so Ayob took Winnie to spend the night at his home.

During the course of the evening, he and his wife realised that Winnie was far too weak to take care of herself in Brandfort, and Ayob sought permission for her to return to her house in Orlando West until she was stronger. The security police refused, but Winnie, true to form, defiantly told Ayob to take her to house No. 8115, anyway.

Five years after being dragged from her home in the middle of the night, Winnie was back – and as soon as her presence became known, hundreds of people lined up outside to see her. Already in breach of her banning order, Ayob advised her not to irk the security police any more than necessary, and to receive only one person at a time. Winnie complied, but her initial excitement at being home was soon dampened. The soul of Soweto had changed. On the surface, the township was still the same – an overcrowded, noisy city with endless rows of identical houses, thousands of people queuing for trains and buses, impatient taxi drivers hooting and swerving around potholes in the roads – but the people, and the atmosphere, were different. British prime minister Harold Wilson had once observed that a week was a long time in politics – and she had been gone for more than five years. She had tried to stay in touch with individuals and follow political developments as closely as possible, but there was no substitute for personal involvement, and she was alarmed to find that Sowetans were embittered and far more resentful and polarised than they had been before the 1976 uprising. People made it clear that they had set their sights on total political change, and would settle for nothing less. Imprisoning their leaders and banning their political parties were seen as no more than temporary setbacks. The South African government had introduced crisis management measures, one of which was the accelerated creation of a black middle class as a buffer against the ANC, still seen as a communist organisation. Another was pressuring the so-called front-line states into refusing support for the ANC. But, by taking the temperature of Soweto, Winnie became more certain than ever that she would live to see change; that the day would come when Madiba and Oliver Tambo would be free to lead their people; that justice would ultimately prevail.

While she was in Johannesburg, Winnie had a meeting with the head of the Security Branch, Major General Johan Coetzee. He had been a young constable when Winnie was first banned twenty years before, and was now the man who held sway over her very life. Winnie asked him why they had banned her in 1962, since she had done nothing except be Nelson Mandela’s wife. He quoted her an Afrikaans proverb, which amounted to presumption of guilt by association. Winnie was dumbfounded. As with so many tactical blunders committed by the security police against Winnie at Brandfort, hindsight would show that by embarking on their
ill-founded and unconsidered crusade against her in the early 1960s, the authorities had created their own worst nightmare.

When Winnie returned to Brandfort after an absence of several months, she still had difficulty walking, and Mandela arranged with Ayob to use funds from an award made by the Austrian government to buy her a car. A shortfall in the price of the spanking new red Audi was made up by Dr Motlana, Yusuf Cachalia and Ayob himself.

Soon after going back to Phatakahle, the security police served Winnie with a summons for violating her banning order by staying in Orlando West during her recuperation, and raided her house. Helen Suzman, who happened to be visiting at the time, witnessed the three-hour search, during which the police confiscated books, documents and anything even remotely linked to the ANC, including a yellow, green and black crocheted blanket and the jewellery that had been made by the women in Winnie’s sewing group. When news of the raid appeared in the international press, twenty-six leading American politicians sent her a quilt patterned on an old Pennsylvania Dutch design that was said to ward off evil spirits.

Notwithstanding the persistent harassment, Winnie’s visitors found her as indomitable as ever. Sally Motlana waxed lyrical about her old friend, and predicted that no one would ever succeed in sidelining Winnie, whether they banished her to a homeland, desert or forest. ‘This woman is so dynamic, she will make the birds sing and the trees rustle wherever she goes. You can be sure of that,’ said Sally.
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When her old friend Ellen Kuzwayo saw her in 1982, she was surprised and impressed by Winnie’s composure. Her charm, dignity and singing laughter were still those of the woman she had come to know during the 1950s, said Ellen.