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Nomzamo Winifred Mandela

Apartheid was structured in many ways to humiliate, degrade, incapacitate and destroy the possibilities of black South Africans.

Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela was at the time of Stompie Moeketsi’s death one of the most famous women in the world, up there alongside Mother Teresa and as widely photographed as Princess Diana. Tall and strikingly beautiful at 51, Winnie Mandela was revered and honoured at home and abroad as the Mother of the Nation, the wife of an authentic political hero, and the subject of countless hagiographic newspaper, magazine and book profiles that portrayed her as a living martyr to the black liberation cause in the fight against the evil of apartheid.1 Her husband, Nelson, was at that time more mythical than real: he was serving a life sentence imposed at the 1963–4 Rivonia Trial for his part as leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in organising armed resistance to white minority rule. While few people outside Robben Island knew what he looked like, news photos of Winnie and international news reports about her were commonplace. She brought to the outside world a flavour of Nelson’s thoughts and of his state of mind.

Winnie had suffered harsh reprisals for the beliefs of her husband, with whom she had lived for only a short time in broken spells of marriage before he was detained and sentenced to life imprisonment. She once lamented: “I think I am the most unmarried married woman.”2

After Nelson’s arrest in 1962, his wife became the public and international face of the internal struggle to end apartheid. She was subjected by the police and the authorities to a series of legal banning orders which prevented her from living, working and socialising like any ordinary person. She was prohibited from publishing statements or addressing more than one person at a time; she was subjected to house arrest and terrorised by constant police harassment and arbitrary detention.

In May 1969 the security police burst into her home and arrested her. As she was dragged off, her daughters, then aged ten and nine, clung to her skirt, begging the police to leave their mother alone. Winnie was then imprisoned without charge for seventeen months under the 1967 Terrorism Act, a draconian piece of apartheid legislation which allowed police to detain individuals indefinitely for questioning without access to a lawyer. “Terrorism” was broadly defined and, because there was no requirement under the Act to release information about those being held, many people just went “missing”. One estimate put at eighty the number of people who died while being held under the Terrorism Act.3 For most of her imprisonment, Winnie Mandela was held in solitary confinement. For one continuous period of 160 days she was not allowed a bath or a shower. Her sanitary bucket was emptied once a day, but was never properly cleaned. Her plate of food at mealtimes was placed on top of the foul-smelling bucket.4 She was interrogated by one of the most notorious apartheid-era security policemen, Major Theunis Swanepoel. “Solitary confinement,” she later wrote, “was designed to kill you so slowly that you were long dead before you died … You had no soul anymore, and a body without a soul is a corpse anyway.”5 One of her biographers wrote that Winnie considered suicide.6

All charges against Mrs Mandela were dropped in February 1970 after she had spent 17 months behind bars.

She was detained again in August 1976 for five months under another harsh apartheid law, the Internal Security Act, which criminalised any organised black political opposition. Imprisonment under the Act required no proof to be offered or charges to be made: it needed only an autocratic declaration by the Minister of Justice, with no appeal permitted. She was released in December 1976, following which the security police strengthened their surveillance of Winnie and served her with an extended banning order before devising for her a new kind of punishment. They decided she had to be removed far from the centre of black resistance in Soweto. “Only if she were to be far from Johannesburg – not in prison, where she had a record of rallying other prisoners and encouraging defiance, but isolated in some remote spot – could she be neutralised,” wrote one biographer.7

Twenty police raided Winnie Mandela’s small “matchbox” house in Orlando West at four o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 16 May 1977. As police poured through her home, emptying cupboards and wardrobes and carrying furniture outside, she thought she was being redetained under the Internal Security Act. But at the local police station, where she was surrounded by heavily armed guards, the commander, Colonel Jan Visser, told her that this time she was neither being charged nor detained. Instead she was being banished to Brandfort, 360 kilometres south-west of Johannesburg in the Orange Free State – on the direct instructions, said Visser, of Jimmy Kruger, the hard-line (even by apartheid standards) Minister of Justice.8 Kruger was determined to crush her. Mrs Mandela was told she would have no legal recourse against the order. She was terrified that she would disappear without trace, as had others before her who had been removed to remote places without any means of communication.

During her nine years of exile in Brandfort, Winnie was not allowed a telephone. Only towards the end of her banishment was she allowed to visit her husband regularly in jail on Robben Island. Friends, colleagues and journalists visited her only with difficulty.

The banishment order was roughly the equivalent of being removed to the Soviet Union’s Gulag. Brandfort was in 1977 a small and dreary white Afrikaner dorp, a rural town in the middle of nowhere with one main shopping street and one old-fashioned hotel reserved for whites only. Winnie was put in a tiny house, number 802, in Phathakahle, Brandfort’s segregated black township, which had a population of five thousand living in chronic poverty with a high rate of infant mortality. Situated as it was on the highveld, seasonal temperatures were extreme – freezing cold nights in winter and baking hot days in summer. The house had an earth floor and an outside pit latrine; there was no piped water or electricity.9

Mary Benson, a renowned anti-apartheid author and activist, wrote of Brandfort: “It was the most alien environment the state could have chosen: politically and culturally the essence of Afrikanerdom; indeed it was here that Hendrik Verwoerd (the architect of Apartheid) had spent formative years as his father hawked Bibles and religious tracts for the Dutch Reformed Church.” Another author described Brandfort as “a one-street hick town populated by 2,000 ultra-conservative whites”.10

Winnie’s forcible removal was meant to render her a “non-person”; it was intended that, for all practical purposes, she cease to exist. But the effect was the opposite. The Brandfort years instead focused international attention on her as a symbol of the white minority’s oppression of the black majority. She became widely regarded as a heroic one-woman resistance army at a time when Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, of which Mrs Mandela was a clandestine member, was largely ineffective as a fighting force. No peril, no obstacle, no threat seemed capable of destroying or stopping her. But Winnie’s odyssey became a two-part story – the first chapter, when she was cruelly oppressed; and, the second, when she did the oppressing, a Joan of Arc transfigured into a Lady Macbeth.

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Winnie, an English and isiXhosa speaker, was marooned in Brandfort among a population of Sesotho-speaking farm labourers whose wives worked as housemaids for local white Afrikaners. Alcoholism was rife in Phathakahle township. Depressed and bored, Winnie began drinking heavily, like many of her fellow residents, as a way of getting through the endless days. She was not short of money – thanks to donations that poured in from abroad, including one Cuban cheque for US$70 000.11 Matthews “MK” Malefane, a stylish young Rastafarian who lived with her, estimated that she spent about R3,000 each month on alcoholic drinks, including champagne and Cinzano, at the township liquor store.12 A black policeman began leaving crates of beer on her front doorstep.

Beautiful, banished and famous, she attracted the attention of the world’s press, and a procession of international celebrities, including US Senator Ted Kennedy and British actor and film director Richard Attenborough. But under the influence of alcohol, her behaviour became wild and erratic.13 It was largely hidden from public view and ignored by those around her. Malefane described how sometimes they drank together all night. On one occasion he turned a garden hose on her to help her sober up before Senator Kennedy arrived with an entourage. Over time she became paranoid and increasingly autocratic, and Malefane, who later became a successful businessman and television producer, claimed she sent people out to kill him when she thought he had moved out. He said her infatuation with violence had become well established before she moved back to Soweto, and he considered himself lucky to have escaped with his life.14

Mrs Mandela was allowed to return temporarily to Soweto in 1985 after her Brandfort house was heavily damaged in an arson attack. From its exile headquarters in Zambia the ANC ordered her to flout her banning order by remaining in Soweto once her Brandfort home had been repaired and see what the apartheid authorities would do about it.

The police took no action, and in early 1986 Law and Order Minister Louis le Grange lifted her restriction order, thus allowing her to return home permanently to Soweto. Le Grange warned newspapers, however, that they were not allowed to quote anything she said. In that sense, she remained a banned person.

Her homecoming coincided with a sustained period of rebellion across South Africa. A state of emergency was put in force as township youths engaged in open revolt against the state’s security forces. Violence had become pervasive, and Winnie appeared to stoke it in her speeches. “I will speak to you of violence. I will tell you why we are violent,” she said on her return to Soweto. “The Afrikaner knows only one language, the language of violence. The white man will not hand over power in talks around a table. Therefore all that is left to us is this painful process of violence.”15

Mrs Mandela, as far as the ANC’s exiled leaders were concerned, was now a loose cannon, still drinking and taking young lovers. Reports came back to the movement’s leadership that Winnie was totally disillusioned with the ANC and its struggle and that she had perhaps lost all hope: she no longer believed that apartheid would be overthrown in her lifetime or that Nelson would be released from prison. “Something fundamental had changed during her exile in Brandfort,” said Horst Kleinschmidt, an ANC activist who was for a time the guardian of the Mandela children during the Brandfort years before he was imprisoned for his activities, later escaping into exile. “She was no longer the shy, potential theology student.16 She was the Mother of the Nation, but at the same time something was going terribly wrong. She was more defiant than ever, often wearing khaki military-style outfits. She had become a lone wild card and her Football Club was forming.”17 Later there would be speculation that as a result of all the cruel treatment she had undergone she had developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), more commonly identified in soldiers returning from war zones. “Throughout the years of oppression,” she observed, “I think my feelings got blunted because you were so tortured that the pain reached a threshold where you could not feel pain anymore.”18

Nevertheless, the world press was entranced. Here was a genuine heroine, headstrong, fearlessly outspoken and enormously telegenic to boot. She was the subject of more than twenty New York Times stories in 1986 and made seventy appearances on network television. She was showered with movie offers and honorary degrees, even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.19

In Soweto she set up around her the so-called Mandela United Football Club, a kind of brigandage, with her as the boss that fed off the ills of township society. Members of the club came across, for the most part, as low-life thugs. From poor and difficult backgrounds, they were often illiterate and were easily manipulated by Winnie, who gave them a home, food, green-and-gold tracksuits and some attention. She easily persuaded them to carry out her demands. There followed a bizarre series of events and killings that involved the Football Club and culminated in Mrs Mandela’s trial for kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Moeketsi.