Winnie Mandela (9 page)

The two women drove their charge to the Helping Hand Hostel. It was a weekday, and although still early morning the streets were alive with people, traffic and noise. For Winnie, it was love at first sight. In an instant she knew that
this was where she belonged, among the fashionably dressed throngs, the cars and the imposing buildings.

The hostel had been set up by the Congregationalist American Board to offer safe and alternative accommodation to domestic workers, who often lived in tiny rooms in the backyard of their employers’ homes. In time, teachers and nurses also came to live there, and a section was reserved for students such as Winnie, who would stay in the hostel for the next four years. The authorities waged a constant battle to move the facility out of the white residential area into one of the black townships, but this would only happen some years later.

After Mrs Phillips and Mrs Hough had settled her into her new home, some of the other students took Winnie into the city to show her around. She was mesmerised by the elegant shop window displays, especially the beautiful clothes and shoes. But she also realised that just beyond the glamorous façade, the ugly face of poverty cast a dark shadow over the city. For the first time in her life she saw beggars on the streets, some blind or crippled, huddled in hopeless bundles on the sidewalks, dressed in rags, hands outstretched for coins from passers-by. All the beggars were black.

Despite the marked contrast to her life in Bizana, Winnie adapted quickly to her new surroundings. Hostel life suited her, being used to an extended family and years at boarding school. She soon made friends and began to copy the examples they set.

Many of the girls used cosmetics, creams and fragrant toiletries, sleeping in nightdresses and slipping into dressing gowns in the morning. Winnie slept in her petticoat and dressed as soon as she arose. The other girls routinely dressed, undressed and showered in front of one another, but at first Winnie’s decorous upbringing prevented her from doing the same. Gradually her roommate, Sarah Ludwick, who was slightly older, introduced her to modern underwear and sanitary products, comfortable pyjamas and sheer nightgowns, high-heeled shoes and elegant dresses.

The hostel was comfortable, companionable and centrally situated, and Winnie realised she was privileged compared with the vast majority of black women in Johannesburg. Rural women worked hard and lacked many comforts, but they were relatively protected, shielded by tradition and convention from the demands and challenges of cities divided by apartheid. Live-in domestic workers were separated from their families, while factory workers endured harsh conditions. From conversations with the working women living in the hostel, Winnie learned that black women in the city all had two things in common: long hours and pitiful salaries. As weeks turned into months, Winnie began to understand more fully her father’s commitment to teaching his pupils about the injustices inflicted on black South Africans. She wrote long letters to Columbus, questioning the
fairness of a system that allowed whites to live in comfortable homes set in elegant suburbs, while blacks were crowded into neglected townships, denied the right to live and work where they pleased, or enjoy the many benefits reserved for whites alone. When Columbus replied, it was to remind her to focus on her studies, and that politics was not for girls.

But Winnie found it impossible to ignore the rising tide of black politics. Most of the students at the Hofmeyr School were members of the ANC, and they often discussed among themselves the struggle against racial discrimination. The ANC was actively organising, and there was growing support for a black trade union movement, though it would be thirty years before one was recognised. Torn between a desire to become actively involved in the political movement and the need to fulfil her father’s expectations, Winnie concentrated on her studies, using whatever spare time she had to read and learn about political developments. Her father had paid her tuition fees for the first six months in advance, but if she performed well enough she might be considered for a scholarship, which would greatly ease the financial burden on Columbus. Nancy, too, was working hard to help pay for Winnie’s education, stripping the bark from wattle trees in her father’s plantation and selling it to a white man from a tannery in Durban. Trade in the bark, used in shoemaking, was illegal, but the little money Nancy made provided Winnie with much-needed money for books, stationery and personal items. Nancy also sent Winnie her first pretty dresses after Winnie wrote and told her that her clothes were totally unsuitable for city life. She sent some pictures torn from magazines to illustrate what was fashionable, and Nancy immediately bought material from the local store. She asked their cousin, Nomazotsho Malimba, who was a dressmaker, to make clothes for Winnie like those in the pictures.

When she was awarded the Martha Washington bursary, things changed for the better, and Winnie threw herself with abandon into activities offered by the college. She proved especially good at netball, shot put, javelin and softball, and earned a host of nicknames: ‘Steady but Sure’, ‘Commando Round’ and ‘Pied Piper’, referring in turn to her round face and long nose; and ‘The Amazon Queen’ and ‘Lady Tarzan’ because she solved many problems using her physical strength. She also joined the Gamma Sigma Club and met students from the University of the Witwatersrand, St Peter’s Seminary and the Wilberforce College.

Winnie’s closest friends were Marcia Pumla Finca and Harriet Khongisa, while Ellen Kuzwayo, an older student, assumed the role of chaperone, protecting the younger girls from unwelcome male attention. Ellen would later become a well-known social worker, political activist and writer, but as students the four were inseparable. Together they took cookery lessons at the sprawling old Wemmer complex, run by the Johannesburg city council, where blacks traded traditional herbs, clothing, foodstuffs and traditional drinks. Winnie also learned to dance,
joined a choir and attended Non-European Unity Movement meetings at a hall in Doornfontein. She realised just how much she had grown when Professor Phillips invited her to a dinner for a group of American professors who were visiting South Africa, and wanted to meet ‘the rural student’ they had heard was adapting successfully to city life and doing well in her studies. She talked to the American academics and answered their many questions in perfect English, and after dinner they expressed their disappointment to Professor Phillips that ‘the rural student’ had not been present. They were more than a little surprised to learn that the unsophisticated tribal girl they had been expecting was, in fact, the eloquent young woman they had met. This was Winnie’s first exposure to Western prejudices about Africa, and she was both proud to have been taken for a city girl and shocked to realise that people from abroad assumed everyone from the rural areas to be raw and unrefined.

Though she still thought of herself as a country girl, Winnie certainly did not believe that this automatically made her backward or in any way inferior, and her intelligence, enthusiasm and the compassion she brought to field projects soon gained her recognition as the school’s star pupil.

Practical experience was a key component of the social work course, and Winnie’s first assignment was at the Salvation Army home for delinquent girls, Mthutuzeni. Where Winnie came from there was no such thing as a delinquent girl. Some were more challenging than others, yes, but none had real problems with their parents or would have dared to run away from home to make their own way. But the girls at Mthutuzeni all came from broken homes or were orphans. They suffered from depression, were argumentative, and some were totally uncontrollable and confused, with no sense of their place in the world. Winnie found that she could get through to some of them, not by applying the theory of social work she had been taught, but by getting them involved in sport, and her first practical course ended successfully.

Winnie was easy-going, and her warmth and sunny nature helped her to make friends easily. Many of the friendships she formed during her early years in Johannesburg would remain intact for decades. The other students often teased her for not having a boyfriend, but photographers soon discovered her beauty. They often visited the hostel in search of pretty models for ‘glamour shots’ in the popular magazines aimed at black readers. She became a firm favourite and was frequently asked to pose for the cameras. She saw her participation as a bit of fun, but one of those who photographed her was Peter Magubane, who would become an acclaimed lensman and a lifelong friend.

Winnie had been in Johannesburg for some months before she first went to Soweto. The sprawling township’s name was a contraction of South-Western Townships, of
which there were twenty-six, with a combined population of more than a million people. She and some friends made the twenty-five-kilometre trip in a bus, and Winnie’s introduction to the vast and unattractive place that she would grow to love and call home, was a shock. The Helping Hand Hostel was in Jeppe, a clean, safe suburb, with electricity and street lights that came on after dark. Late-afternoon Soweto, and the area around as far as the eye could see, lay under a grey cloud of smoke from thousands of fires. There was no electricity in most of the township, and people cooked on open fires, or on coal or paraffin stoves. There was a pervading odour of kerosene in the air, and the dirt roads were riddled with potholes. It was growing dark, and the blackness spread unhindered, cloaking row upon row of identical matchbox houses. Some sections of Soweto were less squalid than others, but the majority of residents lacked not only comfort, but also the basic amenities. Some of the tiny houses sat proudly in minute gardens with neatly tended flower and vegetable beds, and inside they were clean and surprisingly cosy, the odd piece of good furniture polished to a soft gleam. When Winnie’s work took her into the townships later, she was filled with respect and admiration for the courageous efforts of the residents to create homes from such inhospitable surroundings.

Gradually, Winnie was beginning to understand what lay at the heart of black political aspirations, but apart from attending a few meetings of the Trotskyist Unity Movement with her brother, she avoided getting actively involved. Nelson Mandela was the patron of Hofmeyr College, and the school’s motto was ‘Know Thyself’. The students, including Winnie, came to associate this concept with his name. The hostel residents introduced Winnie to the ANC’s slogans and literature, as well as the idea of a trade union movement. Invariably, the names of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Duma Nokwe were mentioned, along with that of the ANC president, Chief Albert Luthuli.

Johannesburg was exciting beyond Winnie’s wildest expectations. The political undercurrent created an atmosphere of breathless anticipation, as though the world was poised to undergo great change. The ANC was the star player in this unfolding drama, holding protest meetings and endless debates about the aims and success of a policy of peaceful protest. Many of the organisation’s followers disagreed with the passive approach, which the government flatly ignored, and demanded action. Winnie discovered daily newspapers and became an avid reader – as were her fellow students and residents – of the
Rand Daily Mail
, seen as a ‘liberal’ white newspaper. Another favourite was the black newspaper
Golden City Post
, which was soon to be banned.

In 1955, excitement mounted with preparations for the Congress of the People. Meetings were held across the country, delegates were appointed, and the people’s grievances and demands recorded. The National Action Council invited
all interested organisations to submit suggestions for inclusion in a freedom charter with the following message: ‘We call upon the people of South Africa, black and white – let us speak together of freedom! Let the voices of all the people be heard. And let the demands of all the people for the things that will make us free be recorded. Let the demands be gathered together in a great charter of freedom.’

The congress took place on 25 and 26 June 1955. It was a massive gathering at Kliptown, outside Johannesburg, and people from all levels of society were represented by the 3 000 delegates. The overwhelming majority were black, but there were more than 300 Indian representatives, 200 coloureds and 100 whites. It was a vibrant, colourful event. Women wore Congress skirts, blouses and scarves, the men Congress armbands and hats. No one took any notice of the dozens of policemen and Security Branch members taking notes and jotting down names. The Charter was read section by section, and adopted by acclamation. On the afternoon of the second day, as the final vote of approval was to be taken, dozens of policemen suddenly swooped, pushing people off the stage and confiscating every document and piece of paper they could lay their hands on. They even confiscated the signs advertising ‘
SOUP WITH MEAT
’ and ‘
SOUP WITHOUT MEAT
’. A police officer announced that they suspected treason, and that no one was to leave without permission. While the police interviewed each delegate in turn, the rest loudly and jubilantly sang ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’.

Despite the government’s orders that the congress be broken up, it was a landmark event in the political struggle and sent out a clear call for change. It was also the first and last gathering of its kind for forty years. Increasingly stringent legislation prohibited a repeat of such cooperation until the early 1990s, but the Freedom Charter survived as the blueprint for a future, democratic South Africa, and immortalised the maxim: ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.’ It was a moderate, non-inflammatory document, but the government nonetheless declared it a criminal offence to publish copies. For the ANC, the Freedom Charter was the equivalent of the American Declaration of Independence, and throughout the liberation struggle the organisation remained loyal to its objectives.

In their final year at Hofmeyr College, students had to do practical fieldwork. Winnie was sent to the Ncora Rural Welfare Centre at Tsolo in the Transkei, run by a Mr Zici, himself a graduate of the college. The centre served a large, poverty-stricken community south of Pondoland, as well as Tsolo – the area from which Nelson Mandela came. It was also the seat of Chief Kaiser Matanzima’s royal kraal. Before going to Tsolo, Winnie went home on holiday. At the end of her break, Professor Hough and his wife unexpectedly arrived at the Madikizela home. They had made the long journey from Johannesburg, and then to Tsolo, to
ensure that Hofmeyr College’s star pupil was well settled. The conspicuous arrival of the white couple in a smart car caused quite a commotion in the community, especially when it emerged that they had come to fetch Winnie, but she took it in her stride. Columbus’s love and confidence had equipped her to grow into a self-assured young woman of whom her father was immensely proud.