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Nelson Mandela’s life-changing decision

The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Philip Roth

John Morgan drove a Mandela United Football Club kidnap team, on the orders of Winnie Mandela, to the Reverend Paul Verryn’s manse at sunset on Thursday, 29 December 1988, he told Dawn Barkhuizen. The kidnappers, wearing greatcoats to hide the guns they carried, were aboard Mrs Mandela’s blue Football Club VW minibus, donated to her by the German Embassy.

“We didn’t knock [on arrival at the manse],” said one member of the raiding party. “We burst in like police looking for notorious criminals. Stompie and three other boys were grabbed very roughly. There wasn’t much they could say. People were scared of the Mandela United Football Club. I tell you, when Winnie’s gang came, you needed to ask yourself if it was the end.”1

The dread felt by the people of Soweto of the Football Club – described by one writer as a loose aggregation of homeless teenagers and struggle fanatics bearing nicknames such as Ninja, Killer, Scorpion and Slash2 – was only too real. “At that time residents were frantic with fear of their sons being press-ganged by the Football Club,” wrote Nomavenda Mathiane, a prominent Johannesburg journalist. “Members of the club were openly walking around Soweto with machine guns over their shoulders, and people in Soweto were mystified as to why the police were laying off.”3

Stompie Moeketsi, 19-year-old Thabiso Mono, Pelo Gabriel Mekgwe, also 19, and 29-year-old Kenny Kgase were pushed through a hole in the fence at the back of the manse property. They walked two blocks to where John Morgan waited in the Football Club minibus to deliver them for interrogation by Mrs Mandela in a cabin behind her new detached house in Soweto’s Diepkloof Extension, an upmarket development for the middle class.

Thabiso Mono was bewildered by what was happening, but he was relieved when Morgan drew up outside Winnie’s home and they were told to go inside. “I had been supporting her wholeheartedly in the struggle [against apartheid], so I didn’t have anything against her,” Mono said in one of several interviews with me. “When we arrived there I said to Pelo that nothing can happen to us because we are at the house of Winnie Mandela, the wife of our leader … only to find out I was wrong.” Mono, Moeketsi, Mekgwe and Kgase were then hustled into an outside cabin to the right of a jacuzzi in the back courtyard of Mrs Mandela’s house.

Morgan told Barkhuizen that testimonies by Kgase and Mono at Winnie Mandela’s trial for kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Moeketsi were profoundly accurate, although Judge Michael Stegmann dismissed them as “defective”. Morgan, expanding on his original police statement, told Barkhuizen: “Mrs Mandela came into the back cabin and started asking the boys, ‘Why do you sleep with a European, a reverend? Do you let him fuck you, you dogs?’”

An assault began. Winnie struck the first blows, punching Moeketsi and Kgase, said Morgan. Other Football Club members formed a circle around all four boys and joined in the beatings before Winnie called for a sjambok and began whipping them.4 When they fell to the ground, they were kicked in their faces. The assaults, Morgan estimated, lasted about forty-five minutes. When the beatings ended, Jerry Richardson ordered the boys to wipe their own blood from the walls.

Morgan returned to Mrs Mandela’s house the following day, Friday, 30 December 1988, to perform his routine driving tasks for her. He saw Stompie and said his face “was like a pumpkin and his hands so swollen that he could not lift a cup of coffee”. By the early morning of 1 January 1989, when Morgan again reported routinely for work, Stompie Moeketsi was dead, he told Barkhuizen. Mrs Mandela ordered him to remove the body and dump it. He refused to do so.5 Barkhuizen said she went over Morgan’s story with him time and again before the Sunday Times went to print on 12 April 1992 with its reporter’s sensational scoop.

Morgan, who was arrested and detained in connection with the kidnap of Moeketsi, told Barkhuizen he was visited by Winnie in Diepkloof Prison, where he was held between February and September 1989. He said she gave him “a couple of rand” and told him to keep his mouth shut. After Morgan was released on bail, Winnie hosted a big party at her house at which a sheep was killed and barbecued. “Throughout the day she kept telling me to say at the trial that she was in Brandfort on December 29,” Morgan told Barkhuizen. “She said she would see me right later. She never threatened me, but I knew what happened to other boys who had crossed her. I was afraid of what would happen to me if I didn’t lie.”

When Morgan was eventually sentenced to a year in jail for assault, he asked Mrs Mandela to provide funds for his appeal. But she refused and directed him to Dali Mpofu, Mrs Mandela’s youthful lover and a junior lawyer on her defence team. “He [Mpofu] said my case was not important and refused to give me money,” said Morgan.

Morgan then received a letter from his lawyer, Kathy Satchwell, saying that since she had also been unable to raise money for his appeal from the London-based International Defence and Aid Fund, she could no longer give him legal representation. “Winnie used me and dumped me,” said Morgan.

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Barkhuizen left Morgan in a hotel in Pretoria on 10 April 1992 and returned to the Sunday Times office in Johannesburg to write her scoop about Winnie Mandela’s alibi for the front page. She got to her desk at about 2 pm, wrote the story on her computer and sent it to the news editor’s computer at about 4 pm. “At about 5 pm I was still sitting in my office when a friend in Soweto who knew Winnie telephoned and said: ‘What have you done? Winnie and [her daughter] Zindzi are going ballistic. They have a computer printout of a story you have written: they are absolutely enraged, ranting about its contents to anyone in earshot. Don’t go home: you are not safe.’

“I was deeply shaken. Having sat right through Winnie’s trial, I had heard testimony of how ruthless she could be.”

Given the strict security surrounding the story, Barkhuizen was astounded that it had somehow reached Mrs Mandela before it had been published. Barkhuizen was “freaked out” by the fact that her contact, 20 kilometres away from Dawn’s office, knew about the top-secret story when not even most of her colleagues knew about it.

How this happened puzzled Barkhuizen for years, but, as events unfolded and as she pieced together bits of information, she came to believe that a senior colleague, whom she knew had worked for the military before turning to journalism, had sent the article to the apartheid security establishment, who quickly sent it on to Mrs Mandela. (The colleague has since died.) The security authorities, notably the powerful National Intelligence Service, were deeply nervous that jailing Mrs Mandela could derail the peace negotiations which had begun secretly with Nelson Mandela in May 1988.

On learning that Mrs Mandela had the story, the Sunday Times management became alarmed about Barkhuizen’s safety and sent her to a secure location. “It happened so hurriedly that I went without my toothbrush or a change of clothes and underwear,” she said. At the same time, managers placed armed guards at the house Barkhuizen shared with her brother.

The next day, the Saturday before Barkhuizen’s Sunday Times article was to be published, she learned that an emergency meeting of the ANC’s top leaders had been called in Johannesburg to discuss the impending article. “I had driven to the office from where I had been holed up by the management, and in the late afternoon received a confidential phone call from a very senior ANC official,” said Barkhuizen.6 “I got the impression from this call that our story was the final straw for Nelson Mandela in his relationship with Winnie.”

Behind the scenes Nelson’s close friend Walter Sisulu and Cyril Ramaphosa – then the ANC secretary-general and from February 2018 the President of South Africa – had been advising Mr Mandela that both he and the movement were being so badly damaged by revelations about his wife’s Football Club and rumours about her affairs that he needed to take a public stance about the collapse of his marriage and distance himself from Winnie.

“I learned,” said Barkhuizen, “that the official announcement of a separation would be made on the Monday, the day after my story would appear in the Sunday Times. Nelson Mandela, I was told, would say he was leaving his wife after 34 years of marriage.” Barkhuizen’s informant was right. The following day, Mandela called a press conference and announced that he was separating from his wife.

I was a South Africa-based foreign correspondent at that time and I watched, at the ANC’s Johannesburg headquarters, as Mandela spoke softly and with dignity, but under clear strain, telling the throng of reporters that his love for Winnie remained undiminished. He added, however, that he and Winnie had agreed to part “in view of the tensions that have arisen owing to differences between ourselves on a number of issues in recent months”. Mandela, aged 73 at the time, was flanked by his lifelong friends in the fight against white minority rule – the staunch Walter Sisulu, imprisoned alongside Mandela for almost three decades, and the visibly ailing Oliver Tambo, who had led the ANC in exile from Lusaka and London before returning home in December 1990.

Evidently seeking to soften the impact on Winnie, Nelson denied that his action was prompted by the new allegations against her in Dawn Barkhuizen’s Sunday Times report. Recounting the great pressures he and Winnie had endured from 1961, when he was forced to go underground after they had been married for less than three years, Mandela said: “During the two decades I spent on Robben Island she was an indispensable pillar of support and comfort to myself personally … My love for her remains undiminished. Circumstances beyond our control, however, dictated that it should be otherwise. I part from my wife with no recriminations.”

Mandela declined to take questions, but as he stood wearily to leave, he paused and said to us: “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will appreciate the pain I have gone through and I now end this press conference.” He walked out with his head bowed.

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Although Winnie Mandela did not attend the press conference, the man who stood next to me at the back of the densely packed room was Dali Mpofu, who was rumoured to be at the heart of Nelson’s decision to end his marriage.7

City Press newspaper reported subsequently that Nelson had been physically attacked by Winnie several times between 1990 and 1992 before he decided to leave her. A “family member” told the newspaper Winnie had assaulted him more than once after he moved in with her following his release from prison. “A bodyguard stepped in on one occasion and drew a firearm, saying he would not allow Mr Mandela to be humiliated,” City Press quoted the family member as saying. After one such attack a “well-known cleric”, believed to have been Archbishop Tutu, was called to mediate, but he was thrown out by Winnie, who told him to go back to his church.8

A little later Nelson would admit that for a long time he had avoided facing some of the sad truths about Winnie. “Perhaps I was blinded to certain things because of the pain I felt for not being able to fulfill my role as a husband to my wife and a father to my children,” he wrote in his autobiography. “She [Winnie] married a man who soon left her. That man became a myth, and then that myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all.”9

And in perhaps the most anguished revelation of his life, Mandela, when his divorce proceedings began in March 1996, disclosed that following his release from prison in 1990 his wife had not once entered their bedroom “while I was still awake”. “I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her,” he said. “If the entire universe persuaded me to reconcile I would not.”

Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, spoke shortly before her death in 2014 of the pain Mandela experienced from the degeneration of his marriage. In an article in the New Yorker magazine,10 Gordimer described how Mandela asked to see her in 1990 just a few days after he was released from life imprisonment. She thought, “with a writer’s vanity”, that he wanted to talk about her novel Burger’s Daughter, on the theme of the family life of revolutionaries’ children, a smuggled version of which he had read in prison on Robben Island. “We were alone in Johannesburg,” Gordimer wrote. “It was not about my book that he spoke but about his discovering, on the first day of his freedom, that Winnie Mandela had a lover. This devastation was not made public until their divorce, six years later. I have never before told of it.”

George Bizos, Nelson’s close friend and legal ally, said in his 2009 memoir Odyssey to Freedom that Winnie visited her husband frequently when in December 1988 he was moved to a three-bedroom house in the grounds of Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl. “But [she] refused to spend the night with him,” wrote Bizos.11 Nelson spent his final eighteen months of “imprisonment” in the Victor Verster house where he had a swimming pool and personal cook as he began negotiations with the National Party government and received streams of personal and political visitors.

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Looking back, Barkhuizen felt that Nelson’s decision to admit publicly that he had separated from Winnie validated her Sunday Times story. “It was an implicit admission by Mr Mandela of the truth of what Morgan had told me and which he [Morgan] repeated later on national television,” said Barkhuizen. “For me it was a difficult story to do. I felt tremendously conflicted and agonised about the story. I knew that consequences would follow. I was a lot more naive than I am now, but in hindsight it was probably a good thing that it all came out when and how it did.”

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In the wake of Barkhuizen’s story, a succession of people began arriving at the Sunday Times offices, or telephoning, to give her more accounts of the alleged misdeeds of Winnie and the Football Club. “One middle-aged and well-educated Soweto woman claimed that Mrs Mandela and Football Club members arrived at her house and shot her son in the kitchen,” the reporter recounted.

Unnervingly, Barkhuizen arrived at work one day to find that all her notebooks in which she’d recorded her interviews with Morgan and others about Mrs Mandela and the Football Club had somehow been removed from her locked office. She never recovered them. The notes included the account by the Soweto woman of the alleged shooting of her son, and Barkhuizen is convinced that her now-deceased military-connected senior colleague, whom she believes caused her Morgan story to end up with Winnie Mandela before it was published, may also have had a hand in the destruction of her notes.

Some months later Barkhuizen left to manage the Sunday Times office in Port Elizabeth. She has since been absent from Johannesburg for a quarter of a century. “I was relieved to get out,” she said. “I wanted to get away. It was all too harsh and extreme. I was only 32 and wanted a life, and although I was a good hard-news reporter, I wasn’t a political heavy.”12