Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 24

1956–1957

EVER SINCE the Congress of the People in June 1955, and the subsequent raids, the government had threatened mass arrests and charges. In April 1956 the Minister of Justice, C.R. Swart, told Parliament that the police were investigating a serious case of high treason, and that about two hundred people would eventually be arrested. But ANC officials were inclined to dismiss the urgency. In November 1956 the President of the Transvaal ANC, E.P. Moretsele, told his conference: ‘The whole affair is an election stunt to win them votes. In all probability the Nationalists will carry out their threat, but they are in no hurry to do so, for the election takes place two years from now.’¹

There was some hurry. A month later, early in the morning of 5 December 1956, Mandela was awakened by loud knocking, and found three white policemen at the door with warrants to search the house and to arrest him on a charge of high treason. Over the next ten days another 155 leaders of all races within the Congress alliance were arrested on the same charge.

Mandela was not altogether surprised, but he was not prepared for a marathon trial which would cripple his political activity and his law practice for five years. Most of the prominent participants of the Congress of the People were now in jail – with some important exceptions, including Dr Dadoo, Yusuf Cachalia, J.B. Marks and Govan Mbeki. Trevor Huddleston, the monk who had been honoured at the Congress and who would have given the accused a special Christian respectability, had been recalled to Britain by his superior. The Liberals, having stayed away from the Congress, were also not included in the arrests, and as a result nearly all the whites at the trial were communists, which gave credence to the government’s allegations of a Marxist conspiracy – and also gave the communists a new prestige among Africans as fellow martyrs who shared their sacrifices for the cause.

The mass arrests marked the end of the ‘phoney war’. On the night before they took place, the black Johannesburg writer and journalist Can Themba was, as he put it, ‘doing my routine round-up of the shebeens with my news nose stuck out’. In one he came upon a drunken gathering which included three prominent ANC activists, Robert Resha, Tennyson Makiwane and Lionel Morrison, who were accusing a fellow boozer of leading a dissolute life. They decided to hold a mock-trial, with Resha as defence counsel and Makiwane as prosecutor. Themba joined in as the magistrate, and after lively pleadings found the accused guilty. The next morning all three of the activists were arrested for high treason. When Themba described the shebeen scene in the next issue of Drum, which appeared while the suspects were preparing their defence, Mandela was furious with him for showing his Congress colleagues in such a frivolous light.²

There was nothing frivolous about the arrests. Mandela had joked with his arresting officer Detective-Constable Rousseau, but the policeman had warned him, ‘You are playing with fire;’ Mandela had replied, ‘Playing with fire is my game.’³ The police were determined to humiliate the prisoners, who were eventually all collected together in ‘The Fort’, the legendary prison on the hill looking over Johannesburg. All of them, including venerable dignitaries like Luthuli, Z.K. Matthews and James Calata, were ordered to strip naked in the outdoor quadrangle, where they waited for an hour for a white doctor to question them, shyly not looking at each other, revealing their bellies and trying to cover their private parts. Mandela, conscious of his own fine physique, remembered the proverb that ‘Clothes make the man’, and reflected that if a fine body was thought essential to leadership, few of the prisoners would qualify: ‘Only a handful had the symmetrical build of Shaka or Moshoeshoe in their younger days.’ His Natal colleague Masabalala (Martin) Yengwa draped himself in a blanket and recited a traditional Zulu praise-song honouring Shaka. The other prisoners listened in delight, and the staid Chief Luthuli exclaimed in Zulu, ‘That is Shaka!’ and began to chant and to join in the dance with the others – though most were in fact not Zulus. ‘We were all nationalists,’ Mandela reflected, ‘bound together by love of our history.’⁴

The prisoners soon found compensations for their detention. Like most of the others, Mandela had long been banned from meetings and travel, and now he had a rare opportunity to exchange views with friends from other cities. The prisoners soon organised lectures about the current crisis and the history of the ANC. In themselves they comprised a living history of Congress, with veterans like Calata and Matthews alongside young activists from Sophiatown such as Robert Resha and Peter Ntithe, and members of old ANC families like Tennyson Makiwane.⁵

After two weeks in the Fort, the prisoners were taken to the temporary courtroom which had been prepared for the trial. The old Drill Hall in the centre of Johannesburg was a forbidding military relic, with a corrugated-iron roof half-lined with hessian and a quaint gabled façade overlooking a parade ground. Mandela and the other prisoners were driven there in police vans escorted by troop-carriers; crowds of sympathisers were waiting for them outside the hall, and others inside watched them emerge into the improvised courtroom. Can Themba described the scene: ‘The accused came up in batches of twenty, some of them cheerful, some sullen, some frightened, some bewildered, some consumed in high wrath … When Nelson Mandela, attorney, came up he hunched his shoulders and seemed to glower with suppressed anger.’⁶

The magistrate was F.C.A. Wessel, an elegant, silver-haired Afrikaner from Bloemfontein. He began speaking, but it soon became clear that his words were inaudible without loudspeakers; the hearings were adjourned until the next day. When the prisoners returned they were put inside a huge wire cage built in the courtroom; the defence lawyers immediately objected, and the cage was eventually dismantled.

At last the chief prosecutor began reading the 18,000-word indictment. The charge of high treason was based on speeches and statements made by the accused over the previous four years, beginning in October 1952, when the Defiance Campaign was at its peak, and continuing through the Sophiatown protests, the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter, which formed the main basis of the charge. The prosecution argued that the accused conspired to overthrow the government by violence and to replace it with a communist state; but they had to prove the violent intentions.

Mandela reflected how often treason had recurred throughout South Africa’s short history. In both world wars some Afrikaners had rebelled against war with Germany, taking up arms on the enemy’s side, and had been tried for treason. The Afrikaners in office had been reluctant to execute their own people, and when Dr Malan’s government came to power it had released all those convicted of treason during the Second World War, most notably the notorious Nazi Robey Leibbrandt. But Mandela knew that the Nationalists would be much harsher towards their black enemies. He did not think the government genuinely believed that the accused were guilty of treason: the Freedom Charter, after all, enunciated principles which were accepted throughout the civilised world. He thought the whole trial was a frame-up, and that the government merely intended to put the Congress leaders out of action for several years.⁷

He soon realised that the trial would be much more prolonged than he had expected. On the fourth day the 156 prisoners were released on bail of £25 for blacks, £250 for whites (‘Even treason was not colour-blind,’ Mandela commented), the money being guaranteed by supporters.⁸ The court adjourned until January 1957, and the accused were allowed to return to their homes. But it was clear that their lives would be disrupted for a long time to come.

The preliminary hearings, which began in January 1957, were intended only to establish whether there was a sufficient case to go for trial before the Supreme Court: but this process was to stretch over nine months and three million words, before any of the accused had even been examined or cross-examined. After the initial high drama of the arrests, the hearings soon settled down to an eerie combination of tedium, humour and menace. Day after day through the sweltering summer the ritual continued under the tin roof. Each morning Wessel, the courteous magistrate, would enter, lightly touching the corner of his desk as he passed, and the tousle-haired prosecutor Van Niekerk – Joe Slovo called him ‘Li’l Abner’ – would resume his indictment in a monotone.⁹ Most of the accused managed to maintain their sense of humour. When Kathrada passed a strip cartoon about Andy Capp – the cloth-capped male chauvinist in the London Daily Mirror – to one of the comrades he replied that he couldn’t see its relevance to Marxism-Leninism; Kathrada suggested it might help people to understand the lumpenproletariat.¹⁰

The trial soon dropped out of the headlines, and white Johannesburgers forgot about the supposed threat to their survival which was being examined in their midst. Watching it day after day, I had to keep reminding myself of the trial’s real significance as a succession of Afrikaner and black policemen revealed their incompetence and ignorance. The chief defence lawyer Vernon Berrangé, a former racing driver and fighter-pilot, was a sharp and theatrical questioner who shot down much of the evidence presented by barely literate detectives and spies. Writing from prison, Mandela recalled that he had been nick named ‘Isangoma’ (diviner) by the accused.¹¹ Berrangé achieved his greatest coup when he cross-examined the state’s ‘expert witness’ on communism, Professor Murray, and quoted a passage which Murray condemned as ‘communism straight from the shoulder’. It turned out to have been written by Murray himself.

The farcical nature of much of the evidence concealed the trial’s real danger: ‘These proceedings are not as funny as they may seem,’ the magistrate warned the giggling suspects at one point.¹² Mandela was worried by the frivolity of some of the young accused: when Lionel Morrison and others put up an umbrella to protect themselves from the leaking roof, he reproved them sternly.¹³ He was well aware of the high stakes, and knew that the humiliations of the police would only harden the government’s determination to put the ANC out of action.

Mandela took heart from a bus boycott in Alexandra, which began a week after the treason arrests – fourteen years after the boycott which had so impressed him when he had lived in Alexandra in 1943. Once again, black commuters walked twelve miles a day rather than pay an extra penny on the buses. The ANC, as Luthuli admitted, had no part in organising the boycott; it could only claim that it ‘helped create a climate of resistance in which such action could take place’.¹⁴ But the boycott threw up new local organisers outside the courtroom, including two ANC activists, Thomas Nkobi and Alfred Nzo, who later became prominent leaders. Eventually the government had to give way to the boycotters by passing a special bill requiring employers to subsidise the bus fare. It was the first Act of Parliament in the forty-seven years of the Union to have been passed as a result of African pressure, and it reminded Mandela that boycott could be a powerful instrument, but as a tactic, not a fixed strategy: ‘The boycott is in no way a matter of principle,’ he wrote in Liberation the next year, ‘but a tactical weapon.’¹⁵

Mandela kept a lower profile in the courtroom than Luthuli, Matthews or Sisulu: he never featured in the coverage of the left-wing paper New Age, the main chronicler of the trial.^* His tall figure, immaculately dressed, carrying a briefcase and talking with slow deliberation, always seemed aloof from the rest. He still had some of the style of a proud chief who had been caught up with a slightly louche urban crowd. Mandela’s later biographer Mary Benson, who worked with him on the Treason Trial Defence Fund, saw him then as a rather slick young man, and ‘did not take him very seriously’.¹⁶ But the defence lawyers noticed that he had a quiet authority over his fellows, who often sought out his legal advice; and his own testimony would reveal how deeply he had considered his commitment to the cause.¹⁷

Z.K. Matthews, with his rigorous legal mind, listened to the trial with growing contempt: ‘These chaps seem to think that I am the mastermind of the ANC campaign, with everyone else doing what I want,’ he wrote to his wife Frieda. ‘How wrong they are!’ He watched the semi-literate police presenting their incoherent evidence in muddled English and producing supposedly incriminating documents like a 1956 calendar or a notice saying ‘Soup with Meat’. He saw how the Afrikaner hatred of blacks was linked to their resentment of English disdain: ‘It is amazing how deeply the Afrikaners resent the superior attitude of the English. They are making us suffer too because they think we have sold our souls to the English.’ But he worried that in ten years’ time ‘the hatred of the African for the European will be worse than the hatred of the white man for the black’.¹⁸

The long Treason Trial brought the various racial groups inside the courtroom much closer together. ‘I doubt whether we could have devised so effective a method of ensuring cohesion in resistance and of enlarging its embrace,’ said Luthuli.¹⁹ ‘We didn’t realise we had so much in common,’ said Paul Joseph, an Indian ex-factory worker from a humble background who became a friend of Mandela. ‘The trial created a cohesion which didn’t exist before.’²⁰ The Africans found themselves pressed together with whites, Indians and Coloureds in roughly the same proportion as the population of the country. It was just the kind of multi-racial partnership many of them had been advocating. Whatever propaganda motives had led the government to bring the accused to trial, they could now spread their own counter-propaganda that this was a united, genuinely non-racial movement.

During the daily lunch-hour the accused shared their sandwiches and devised recreations, including the ‘Drill Hall Choir’, and discussed their arguments and problems. When they went home in the evenings they were made to feel like heroes rather than traitors, with free drinks in shebeens and parties given by white and Indian well-wishers, which extended their contacts and friendships among the other races. Bram Fischer and his wife gave dinners for black leaders, including Luthuli and Mandela, where they met his lawyer friends; Joe Slovo and Ruth First held parties at which Africans, Indians and whites drank, jived and embraced, apparently oblivious of colour. They joked about being hanged for treason, and seemed unconcerned about spies, even welcoming the local CIA agent Millard Shirley, an engaging and gregarious American who was ostensibly writing a book (‘My Mother was a Missionary’) but was always turning up at ANC functions.²¹ But the courage of the ‘traitors’ was real enough. Some of the accused may have been careless or histrionic – ‘peacocking’, as Africans called it – but the courage and the danger were real enough. In jail later, Mandela remembered one of the defendants’ white liberal benefactors, Ellen Hellman, the Chairman of the Institute of Race Relations, arriving in the courtroom to discuss fund-raising. He began to compliment her on her elegant outfit, but she cut him short: ‘Mr Mandela, just tell me in simple terms, what do you want, what do you want?’²²

There was also some interest from liberal South African businessmen. Luthuli and a few others, not including Mandela, were invited to meet Harry Oppenheimer of the Anglo-American Corporation. He politely told them that their demands for universal suffrage were too extreme, and that boycotts put off white support. They replied that they could not conceal their real demands, however unpleasant they might seem to whites.²³ Oppenheimer discreetly gave £40,000 to the Treason Trial Defence Fund.²⁴

Practical help from abroad was received from British and other well-wishers through the Defence Fund, which was launched by Canon Collins in London and Bishop Reeves in Johannesburg to cover legal and other costs. It was administered first by Hilary Flegg, then by Mary Benson, then by Freda Levson, with all of whom Mandela became friends.²⁵ Mandela was also heartened by the appearance as observers of many Western jurists, including Gerald Gardiner, the British barrister who later became Lord Chancellor, and by American solidarity, including a visit from George Houser of the American Committee for Africa, and gifts from Sammy Davis Junior.²⁶

But British and American diplomats in Pretoria continued to avoid meetings with the black opposition, lest they offend the Afrikaner government. Ambassador Byroade invited only whites to the US Embassy’s Independence Day party in July 1957, in contrast to the Soviet Consul-General’s open hospitality.²⁷ Successive British Ambassadors invited no blacks to their Queen’s Birthday parties, and made no direct contact with any ANC leaders: their diplomats relied on quoting journalists in their despatches, which made no reference to Mandela.²⁸ In London, South Africa had been under the Dominions Office, which had a cosy family relationship with the white Commonwealth who had been allies in the Second World War, and was more concerned with keeping lines open to Afrikaner nationalists than with African troublemakers; while the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was not yet grappling with the problems of Africa.²⁹

All through the Treason Trial Mandela had been existing in a strange limbo, between normality and danger; but his life had been further disrupted by a thrilling romance. When the trial began he had been leading a bachelor existence. His marriage with Evelyn had fallen apart, with recriminations on both sides. Evelyn would recall with some bitterness how Mandela would spend nights away without explanation, and claimed that he once nearly throttled her – a charge which Mandela emphatically denies.³⁰ She was more alienated as her husband became more political. After he was first arrested for treason, he returned home from prison on bail to find Evelyn departed and the house emptied, even of its curtains. Mandela had to try to reassure his two children, Makgatho and Makaziwe (Maki), who were deeply upset.³¹

Mandela’s friends speculated whether he would remarry, and he was often seen with eligible women. One of his female companions was Ruth Mompati, the resourceful secretary in his law office. Another was Lilian Ngoyi, the vivacious and forceful leader of the ANC Women’s League, who was one of his fellow-accused in the Treason Trial. Helen Joseph, who was close to both of them, thought how effective they would be as man and wife.³²

But it was not an experienced politician who was to capture Mandela, nor any of the other women he and Evelyn had quarrelled over, but a newcomer, a beautiful young social worker of twenty-two, sixteen years younger than Mandela.³³ Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela came from Bizana in Pondoland, part of the Transkei, where her father Columbus Madikizela was a headmaster. (It was also the home area of her hero, Tambo: ‘I was actually made by Oliver Tambo,’ she says now.³⁴) Winnie’s clan, the Ngutyana, was one of the most powerful in Pondoland. Her great-grandfather Madikizela had been a fierce chieftain in Natal until he fled from Shaka’s Zulu army to settle near Bizana. Her grandfather Chief Mazingi, a prosperous trader with twenty-nine wives, was converted to Methodism. Her mother, who was thought to have white blood, was passionately religious, and had nine children before she died when Winnie was aged nine, after which her father raised her strictly as a Methodist. He remained awesomely aloof, leaving Winnie’s two strong grandmothers to influence her most. Her father’s mother Makhulu taught her the ways of her ancestors, while her mother’s mother, ‘Granny’, was a staunch Methodist who made her own Western-style dresses. ‘She derived from Makhulu her imperious authority,’ said Winnie’s lifelong friend Fatima Meer, ‘and from Granny her love for smart clothes and an obsession with cleanliness.’³⁵

Winnie as a child had been strong-willed, rebellious and sometimes violent. Once she made a knuckleduster with a tin and a nail with which she hit her sister in the mouth: the wound had to be sewn up by the doctor. Winnie never forgot the thrashing her mother gave her for it. ‘It was survival of the fittest,’ she explained later. ‘I had to fight my brothers and sisters; I never had clothes of my own. There used to be a lot of physical fights. Looking back, I got quite ashamed when I was older.’³⁶ She excelled at school, and kept clear of politics: when her schoolfriends rebelled in sympathy with the Defiance Campaign, she stuck to her studies.³⁷

In 1953 Winnie came up to Johannesburg to become a social worker, living at the Helping Hand hostel in Jeppe Street and studying at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, above the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. She went around with two other attractive young students, Marcia Pumla Finca and Harriet Khongisa, together with Ellen Kuzwayo, an older student who later became a writer, who tried to protect them from predatory men.³⁸ Winnie was a bright student, and two years later she became the first black social worker at Baragwanath Hospital. She was sociable, spirited, fascinated by clothes and by shoes (which she did not wear until she went to secondary school). ‘I had to become a smart city girl, acquire glamour,’ she explained much later, ‘before I could begin to be processed into a personality.’³⁹

In Johannesburg Winnie went to a few meetings of the Trotskyist Unity Movement, to which her brother belonged, but stayed aloof from politics. One day when she visited a law-court with a friend she saw the towering figure of Mandela coming in to conduct a case, as the crowd whispered his name. Soon afterwards she was introduced to him at a delicatessen by Adelaide Tsukudu, a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital who was soon to marry Oliver Tambo. ‘I didn’t play Cupid,’ Adelaide insists, ‘and Winnie didn’t break up the marriage; it was already crumbling.’⁴⁰ Mandela was obviously fascinated by Winnie, and kept looking at her. The next day he invited her to lunch, on the pretext of asking her to help raise money for the Treason Trial Defence Fund. His friend Joe Matthews picked her up, and they lunched at Azad’s Indian restaurant.⁴¹

Mandela spent as much time as possible with Winnie, between the Drill Hall and his law office: ‘I was both courting her and politicising her,’ he remembered.⁴² He was able to wrest her away from a rival, who turned out to be none other than his opponent and nephew Kaiser Matanzima, and he introduced her to his political friends, including Indians and whites. In the midst of the treason ordeals, they were not sure what to make of this innocent-looking twenty-two-year-old, with her lively talk, her fascination with clothes and her big, soulful eyes, who seemed to belong to a quite different world. ‘She was very glamorous but terribly shy,’ said Paul Joseph’s wife Adelaide. ‘She was very innocent and naïve,’ remembered Yusuf Cachalia’s wife Amina. Mandela took Winnie to Rusty Bernstein’s house on Sundays, where she would sit in the Bernsteins’ daughter’s bedroom reading fashion magazines. ‘She was right outside the political circle,’ said Bernstein, ‘but Nelson didn’t worry about that.’⁴³ Winnie embraced Mandela’s political friends as her own: she stayed with Ismail and Fatima Meer in Durban, idolised Lilian Ngoyi, regarded Helen Joseph as a mother, and saw Tambo as a father-figure.⁴⁴ She was awed by Mandela’s air of authority as a hereditary chief ‘who would not listen to a woman … The way he walks, the way he carries himself he is in fact paramount chief.’

Mandela never formally proposed, but Winnie found herself swept into matrimony. Her family worried about the risks. ‘My father was totally against the marriage,’ she says now. ‘My sisters literally cried, and they begged me not to marry such an older man.’ They warned her that Mandela would end up in prison, and that she would be ‘just an instrument’ to keep the house going and to visit him.⁴⁵

But they were in love. Mandela had now divorced Evelyn, and in June 1958 he and Winnie were married, a year after they had met. Mandela was allowed a six-day relief from his bans to travel down to the Transkei for the wedding celebrations, first at the ancestral home of the Madikizelas, then at Bizana town hall, accompanied by friends including Ruth Mompati and the white communist Michael Harmel. In his speech Winnie’s father warned her that Mandela was already married to the struggle, and that if she wanted to be happy with her in-laws she must do what they did: ‘If your man is a wizard, you must become a witch.’⁴⁶ Mandela would lovingly call her a witch in his letters.

Mandela returned to the constraints of the Treason Trial, and his beautiful young wife provided an exotic contrast to the sombre tedium and commitment of the courtroom. His dramatic appearances with Winnie, both with wide smiles, seemed to belong to showbiz rather than to politics, and his image acquired a new dimension: not just the lawyer and revolutionary, but the lover with the adoring partner. They were visibly fascinated with each other, with a sense of drama which was heightened, as in a wartime romance, by the obstacles and dangers they faced. Through his long years in jail Mandela would relish the times they could snatch together, and would recall their former life: ‘Do you remember the wonderful dish you used to prepare for supper? The spaghetti and simple mince from some humble township butchery! As I entered the house from the gym in the evening that flavour would hit me full flush in the tongue.’⁴⁷

But his marriage to a passionate girl, with her own demands, and with all the complications of three alienated stepchildren, did not provide the kind of stable home base which many of his political friends took for granted. Walter Sisulu still had Albertina as his ‘backbone’, subsidising his own meagre pay and sharing all his political commitment: ‘I could rely on her, and there was no complaining … she had mastered the situation in an amazing way, and that gave me wonderful courage.’⁴⁸ Mandela’s life with Winnie was more exciting, but more distracting, less predictable; while she was soon aware of how much politics dominated his life: ‘He did not even pretend that I would have some special claim to his time,’ she remembered. ‘There never was any kind of life I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life where you sit with your husband. You just couldn’t tear Nelson from the people: the struggle, the nation came first.’⁴⁹

Winnie very soon developed her own political ambition and instinct. ‘I discovered only too soon how quickly I would lose my identity because of his overpowering personality – you just fizzled into being his appendage, with no name and no individuality except Mandela’s … I vowed that none of this should apply to me.’⁵⁰ Her older friend Ellen Kuzwayo observed that she was drifting away from routine social work.⁵¹ She began to attend meetings where her white friends Helen Joseph and Hilda Bernstein taught black women about public speaking; but she soon burst out: ‘I don’t think we need to be taught how to speak. From our suffering we can just tell people how we feel.’ She began to find her own voice, with an expressiveness and empathy which amazed her teachers. And she began campaigning with a powerful populist instinct, bypassing the more conventional speeches of the ANC leaders. ‘She wasn’t bothered about being in the limelight,’ said her Indian friend Adelaide Joseph. ‘She wanted to be there with ordinary people.’⁵²

Winnie was soon drawn into the women’s struggle, which had been gathering momentum in the wake of the Defiance Campaign. It showed its strength when the government determined to make women carry the hated pass-books which controlled Africans’ movements, which until then had applied only to men. The ANC formed the Federation of South African Women, affiliated to its Women’s League, which by August 1956 organised a march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister, Hans Strijdom. The marchers arrived singing their militant anthem: ‘Strijdom you have tampered with women. You have struck a rock.’⁵³ Winnie joined the Orlando branch of the Women’s League, and was soon making her mark.

‘I’ve married trouble!’ Mandela told his lawyer friend George Bizos one day. Winnie, it turned out, had been charged with inciting other women against carrying passes. When asked to show her own, she had shouted that she would never carry one, and when a policeman came to her house with a summons she had assaulted him. ‘Have you married a wife or a fellow-agitator?’ Bizos asked Mandela. Winnie later explained that the policeman had entered her bedroom, where she was dressing to be taken to prison. She had ordered him out, he had grabbed her, and she pushed her elbow into his chin so that he fell on the floor. He then charged her with assault. Bizos took on the case, and she gave her evidence with a confidence and clarity which amazed the Afrikaner magistrate, who let her off.⁵⁴

Four months after their marriage, in October 1958, already pregnant, Winnie shocked Mandela by announcing that she would join a mass protest in Johannesburg, and ignored his efforts to dissuade her. She was arrested and jailed together with a thousand other women, keeping up their spirits in prison and making friends with two Afrikaner wardresses. Mandela arranged bail for her, along with others. Winnie had embarked on her own passionate political crusade. Later, Mandela would reprove himself for having been too preoccupied with his own problems to give her support and advice in the face of all her frustrations. As he wrote to her: ‘I then led a life where I’d hardly had enough time even to think.’⁵⁵

Some of Mandela’s old friends could never understand why he had chosen Winnie: they thought his leadership was being distracted by this aggressive ‘new woman’, who came from outside any ANC tradition, and that he had married too much trouble.⁵⁶ Yet there was clearly political as much as sexual electricity between the couple, as between the Peróns in Argentina or, later, the Clintons in America. Winnie’s impetuous assertiveness and crowd-pleasing oratory complemented Mandela’s more reserved campaigning, like a wilder descant to his steady bass. At social occasions, with their charisma and their sharp clothes, they were a model public couple of the late fifties, bringing an aura of American glamour to their politics as they entered a dance-hall, with the spotlight shining on them. Winnie was soon developing her own sense of theatre, and would soon appear as an Amazon of the revolution.