Читать книгу Truth, Lies and Alibis - Fred Bridgland - Страница 9

A sexual honeytrap

Many people have become uneasy that Mrs Mandela is taking her role as “First Lady” too heavily.

Nomavenda Mathiane

John Morgan’s sensational revelation to Dawn Barkhuizen that he had lied at Winnie Mandela’s trial to save her from prison was not the only evidence that the Brandfort alibi was a fiction.

The origin of the tragic Stompie–Winnie saga can be traced to the arrival in Soweto some time in 1988 of a young boy named Katiza Cebekhulu. He had fled from Mpumalanga, a township on the very edge of Durban in what was then Natal. The area was torn by a terrible war between supporters of the ANC and followers of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party that earned the township the nickname of Little Beirut. Cebekhulu, barely educated and functionally illiterate, had been detained in Mpumalanga for seven months on a charge, along with other members of a gang, of murdering an ANC warlord named Bhekumuzi Nqobo, who was axed in the forehead and bludgeoned to death with baseball bats. Released because of insufficient evidence, Cebekhulu, fearing revenge, moved to Johannesburg, where Mrs Mandela recruited him into her Football Club.

Soon after he had settled in at her Diepkloof Extension home, he said, Mrs Mandela gave him an extraordinary task. He said she had dreamed up a plot to ruin the Reverend Paul Verryn by luring him into a sexual honeytrap: she had chosen Cebekhulu, then aged 16, as the bait.

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Paul Verryn, radical and popular, lived in the small manse next to his big Orlando West church. He was the only white Methodist minister in Soweto at the time – and later, when he became the regional bishop, he continued to live in Soweto for many years.

Verryn, red-haired, bespectacled and stocky, preached fearlessly against apartheid and police brutality. He conducted funerals of blacks and whites who had died at the hands of the police and covert government death squads. I watched in awe as he preached at an illegal multi-faith funeral at St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg in May 1989 for David Webster, a popular Witwatersrand University anthropology lecturer and ANC activist, who had been assassinated that month by a Military Intelligence hit squad. Thousands of people of every colour defied a government ban on the singing of haunting ANC war anthems and the parading of ANC colours as MK fighters carried Webster’s coffin into the cathedral on their shoulders. Verryn put himself at risk of becoming another target of the government’s licensed killers.

Verryn’s Soweto flock totalled about three thousand souls and he was helped by nearly eighty black lay preachers in an era when it took moral commitment and guts for a white person to identify with the voteless black majority. No one doubted Verryn’s commitment to the liberation struggle. Nor did Winnie.

Verryn gave shelter in his manse to scores of youths who were on the run from police because of their anti-government activities. The minister hid others in a farmhouse in the Magaliesberg mountains, to the north of Johannesburg, from where they were smuggled out of the country to join the ANC army in exile. At the time anti-apartheid organisations, such as the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, reported white South African Defence Force soldiers picking children off the streets at random. “The children were beaten with fists and rifle butts, whipped with sjamboks and subjected to electric shock treatment,” said one prominent lawyer.1

People in the wider world beyond Soweto thought of Winnie Mandela as the guardian angel of the people. She often referred youths from Community House, her social work centre, to Verryn, but gradually she came to regard his manse as an opposing power base rather than as a place of refuge for young apartheid opponents. It was a time when race relations were deeply troubled and she seems to have questioned the true motives of an unmarried white man who had chosen to live in a black township.

For years, as the tragic and indomitable wife of the great imprisoned leader Nelson Mandela, Winnie had brought in massive sums of money from foreign organisations and individuals who saw her as the supreme symbol of opposition to apartheid.2 Admirers and sympathisers overseas would put money into envelopes marked “Winnie Mandela” and post them to her.3 But, unknown to outsiders and the international world beyond South Africa, her popularity in Soweto was dwindling because so many families in the community had experienced or witnessed the Football Club’s increasingly violent behaviour.

The gruesome story of the teenage Makanda brothers, Peter and Philip, illustrates the fear Winnie and the Football Club inspired. They were woken one night in May 1987 by a banging on the door of their uncle’s house in Soweto. When their uncle opened the door, three gun-toting men, disguised by stockings over their heads, stormed in. The brothers were forced at gunpoint into a car and made to lie on the floor.

The driver, later identified as John Umuthi Morgan, drove to Mrs Mandela’s tiny “matchbox” house in Orlando West, in which she and Nelson had established their home after their marriage. The Makandas were manhandled into a backyard shack where they saw a third youth who was tied to a chair and bleeding from inflicted wounds. Winnie Mandela entered, gestured towards the youth – who has never been named or found – and told the Makanda brothers: “If you don’t want to be hurt like this boy, you must tell the truth.” She then left and an assault was launched by Football Club members on the brothers. They were accused of being “sell-outs” whose actions had caused deaths among “comrades”.

When Peter Makanda denied the accusations, he was beaten and then hung by the neck with a rope from a rafter. The rope broke and he fell to the floor, still alive. A plastic bag was then pulled over his head, which was dipped repeatedly into a bucket of water. The brothers were told they would be shot if they did not admit to being “sell-outs”. They refused to confess. “Let’s stoep [carve] them,” said one of the assailants.

Philip was seized and tied to a chair with his hands behind his back. A knife was produced and a big “M” for Mandela was sliced into his chest. “Viva ANC” was carved thickly along the length of one of his thighs before car-battery acid was smeared into the wounds so that the slogans were etched permanently into the flesh. Then it was Peter’s turn. He was held down while “Viva ANC” was carved across his back.

The brothers were beaten further before being ordered to rest. Surreally, Winnie Mandela later entered the shack with tea and cakes for her Football Club’s mutilated victims before a lookout warned that a police car was patrolling the area and that it was no longer safe to keep the youths in the shack. They were bundled into a van and driven to John Morgan’s house, where they were locked in his garage.

The Makandas worked out how to open the garage door from the inside and escaped. They went directly to a police station and made statements about how they had been beaten and abused. Morgan and two other Football Club members were charged with kidnap and assault, and the case came to court the following year. A lawyer involved in the case saw the brothers as the trial began and observed that their wounds were still vivid.

Peter and Philip Makanda were asked to pick out their assailants at an identity parade without the safeguard of a two-way mirror. They were seated in front of the line-up and asked to point to anyone they recognised while being watched and listened to by the potential suspects. They appear to have been too frightened to be effective witnesses. Their testimonies contained so many contradictions that the magistrate concluded it would be impossible to obtain a conviction. But while dismissing the case, he said: “The experience must have been so frightening that their powers of observation were affected and their minds were more on how to get through the ordeal alive.”

Winnie Mandela was never questioned, charged or listed as a witness in connection with the assault on the Makandas. “Lack of police action against Winnie made her extremely suspect in the eyes of Soweto residents,” wrote one of her biographers. “But it also made her appear invincible.”4

One month before the Makanda brothers were assaulted, a plucky Sowetan woman journalist had become the first black writer to suggest that all was not well between Mrs Mandela and the Soweto citizenry. “Many people have become uneasy that Mrs Mandela is taking her role as ‘First Lady’ too heavily,” wrote Nomavenda Mathiane. “They want to know: is she still an ordinary mortal at heart?”

Mathiane, who had been trying unsuccessfully to obtain an interview with Mrs Mandela, was summoned at short notice to accompany Football Club members to Zondi, a Soweto suburb, where Winnie was scheduled to preside at a “people’s trial”. Few people, said Mathiane, understood how Winnie had so quickly, barely a year after her return from banishment in Brandfort, acquired the power to act as prosecutor and judge in extra-judicial, kangaroo court trials. Equally, few people were bold enough to question Mrs Mandela’s authority. A 19-year-old girl named Ntsiki protested at the Zondi “trial” that an elderly male relative who had paid for her to come from a rural area to live in Soweto had reprimanded her unreasonably for the way she drifted freely in and out of his house. The old man addressed the “judge”, Mrs Mandela, in a soft voice as “madam” before testifying: “I find this very hurtful that I have lived with you, Ntsiki, for so many years and treated you like my own child and when, today, we have a difference, you call a gang for me.”

Mrs Mandela was assisted by her “assessors”, every one of them members of her Football Club. She asked: What did Ntsiki want done? Ntsiki replied that she no longer wanted to live in her relative’s house. “Judge” Winnie ordered her “boys” to remove Ntsiki’s belongings to the Football Club minibus. Amid the watching crowd, as the minibus left, Mathiane heard a woman say: “Where will this all end?”5

Mathiane later questioned how Mrs Mandela had achieved the reverential label “Mother of the Nation”. “The fact is that this title is a mystery,” Mathiane argued. “Many black people have never known where it came from. The title was made popular in the eyes of the outside world, which shows that if a small group of people set out with a determination to create a lie, they can succeed.”6

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Mrs Mandela seemed at some point to become jealous of Verryn and the success of his community projects: he was attracting more and more finance, particularly from Europe, mainly through the South African Council of Churches, that had previously come her way. Football Club members like John Morgan and Katiza Cebekhulu speculated that she was outraged that a white person like Verryn could live in a black township and be accepted and well liked amid the racial turmoil.

Winnie Mandela at that time seemed near-invincible, like Napoleon Bonaparte at the height of his powers, walking with her head in the clouds with a personality cult growing and enlarging around her. But her critics in the liberation movement worried that the Mother of the Nation had become a violent, unpredictable despot, without personal insight or humility, totally unaccountable to her community in Soweto or to the ANC itself.

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In late 1988 Mrs Mandela ordered Cebekhulu to meet Paul Verryn and gain admission to his Soweto manse as a homeless boy on the run from the warfare of Natal. She said he was to report back to her the moment Verryn made any sexual advances towards him.7

Rumours said Verryn had made such advances to some of the boys in the manse. The gossip was begun by Maxwell Rabolou, a teenager who in 1987 was expelled by Verryn from the manse because he repeatedly stayed out overnight without telling the minister where he was. It was one of Verryn’s strict house rules that youths in the manse keep him informed of their whereabouts and report each evening because black activists were being detained or disappearing all the time in the struggle against the white government. Masses of young people, some of them mere children, were on the run, hiding from the police, and it was vital to act quickly if it was known that someone had been detained by the security forces: it could often be a matter of life or death.

Rabolou went to Mrs Mandela after Verryn threw him out. She said Rabolou complained to her of sexual advances by Verryn and that he was too frightened to return to the manse.8

Rabolou stayed with the Football Club in Mrs Mandela’s back rooms for a while before disappearing into the township and then returning to the Verryn manse in early 1988. It is unclear what kind of game Rabolou was playing, but he met Verryn and pleaded successfully to be allowed to live in the manse again. According to close friends of the minister, however, Rabolou continued to irritate Verryn by disappearing for days at a time without giving notice. “On one occasion,” said one of those friends, “he came back to Paul’s and said he had been beaten at Winnie’s house.” Verryn eventually became so exasperated by Rabolou’s disappearances that he ordered him once more to leave. “I will make you pay for this,” Rabolou warned Verryn as he left.9

By September 1988 Rabolou was again living in one of the cabins behind Mrs Mandela’s house, and he complained to her yet again about sexual innuendos by Verryn. Winnie raised the matter with the secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, the Reverend Frank Chikane, who telephoned Verryn to tell him about the allegation. Verryn immediately informed Bishop Peter Storey, head of the Methodist Church in the Johannesburg area. Storey investigated and concluded that the accusations were groundless.10 However, Storey suggested that Verryn put his bedroom out of bounds to youths in the manse. Verryn rejected the guidance as impractical. His bedroom would have to continue to be used because of the sheer numbers of youths seeking shelter, as they would otherwise be crammed into the lounge and two tiny bedrooms. Verryn sometimes had as many as forty people staying with him.

One close woman friend of Verryn described Winnie’s obsession with Paul as weird. Was it really the homosexual thing? Was it because he was white? Was it most likely her envy of a rival operation in areas where she had gained credibility and power? Azhar Cachalia, a leading ANC supporter and senior official of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the leading anti-apartheid organisation in the country at the time, said publicly that it was clear to him that Winnie Mandela was involved in a conspiracy to frame Verryn.11

Whatever the truth, she seemed to believe that Verryn was challenging her constituency with strong backing from one of the most influential church organisations in the country, the South African Council of Churches. Furthermore, she could not have failed to notice that Paul’s operation went unscathed when the house in which she had lived with Nelson was burned down.12 This attack occurred on 28 July 1988 by pupils from Soweto’s Daliwonga High School on Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house, where she and Nelson and their daughters lived before he was imprisoned.

The tiny house in Orlando West had been set ablaze and destroyed, along with most of Winnie’s letters from her husband, many of her photographs and the slice of cake from their 1958 wedding which she had saved for thirty years in anticipation that he might one day walk to freedom. Albertina Sisulu, the wife of Nelson’s close friend Walter Sisulu, went to see the damage and found many scorched and uncashed cheques from overseas donors strewn amid the wreckage.

The dispute between Mrs Mandela and the pupils had begun in 1987 when some members of the Mandela United Football Club arrived at a soccer field where a match involving Daliwonga High School was in progress. The Football Club heavy-handedly ordered Daliwonga from the pitch, which Winnie’s “team” wanted for a kick-about. A fight broke out and was then settled when the Football Club produced guns and forced the schoolboys to flee. The Daliwonga players and their friends launched a revenge attack: they stoned Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house, causing a lot of damage, and kidnapped two Football Club members whom they took to their school and assaulted until teachers intervened. Then in July 1988 a girl close to the Football Club was gang-raped by Daliwonga High youths. The girl told the Football Club what had happened. The alleged Daliwonga rapists were identified, captured by the Football Club and taken to Mrs Mandela’s new Diep-kloof Extension house, where they were tried, found guilty and beaten up before being released. A Daliwonga schoolgirl was raped as part of the retribution.

Daliwonga plotted counter-revenge. A mob of teenage schoolboys climbed the wall surrounding Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house on 28 July 1988 in broad daylight and set it ablaze. Neither Winnie nor any Football Club members were there at the time. But none of the neighbours tried to prevent the attack: as the fire intensified they did nothing to put out the blaze. Fire engines, ambulances and police arrived, but they too did nothing, joining other Sowetans who watched indifferently as Mrs Mandela’s house was totally destroyed.

The torching of the house was barely reported at the time, although many journalists knew the facts. Rian Malan, award-winning author of My Traitor’s Heart, reckoned white reporters and editors did not want to be branded racists; black reporters, on the other hand, were paralysed by fear. “If you lived in Soweto, there are some things you dared not say for fear of being labelled a sell-out. Sell-outs did not live long,” wrote Malan. “One of the township’s most prominent black journalists chuckled bleakly when I asked why the full story of the arson attack on Winnie Mandela’s home hadn’t yet been written. ‘You write it,’ he said. ‘You’re white, you might get away with it.’”

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Verryn reluctantly accepted Katiza Cebekhulu into his overcrowded manse. According to evidence submitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Cebekhulu was briefed by Mrs Mandela on how to report if Verryn made any sexual advance towards him: he was to inform a woman called Xoliswa Falati, Verryn’s housekeeper and a friend of Winnie. Mrs Mandela added that if Verryn made no approach, Cebekhulu should regardless choose a moment to tell Falati that such a sexual advance had been made. From then onwards Mrs Mandela said she would take over.

Cebekhulu stated that he accepted the mission readily. He was just 16. A refugee in his own country, he was living in Winnie’s house and being fed and clothed better than at any other time in his life. Most of her Football Club members were, like him, broken and deprived in some way: she was glamorous and made them feel important and cared for. It was also the dream of many prominent people to be around her and to visit her, including Senator Ted Kennedy, who described her as a fighter for democracy, US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and innumerable international journalists, many of whom wrote about her uncritically. Cebekhulu loved and respected her and was prepared to do anything in order to impress her.

Stompie Seipei Moeketsi was among the youths in the manse who were on the run from the apartheid police and who hoped to go into exile and become soldiers with Umkhonto we Sizwe. The boys in the manse slept more than one person per bed, but also on sofas and armchairs and under tables. Cebekhulu testified before the TRC years later that Paul Verryn made no sexual advance towards him.13 But, in line with Mrs Mandela’s briefing, he decided on the morning of Thursday, 29 December 1988, after Verryn had left on church business for Potchefstroom, 122 kilometres away, to cry rape. He told Xoliswa Falati that Verryn had raped him while he was sharing a bed with the church minister.

Falati immediately left the manse to tell Winnie what had happened and that other boys, including Stompie Moeketsi, had been molested. Falati added that she believed Stompie might be a police informer.

Winnie sent her raiding party, led by Jerry Richardson, to the manse to kidnap some of the boys whom Falati said had been molested. As John Morgan drove the raiding party and the kidnapped boys back to Winnie’s Diepkloof Extension house, they all sang ANC freedom songs, including, under duress, the four who had been snatched. On reaching the house, the youths were hustled into an outside cabin where, according to Morgan and the accounts of at least five others, Mrs Mandela arrived and accused Stompie and the three other “rescued” youths of allowing Verryn to sodomise them. They all denied this.14 She then focused on Stompie.

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Stompie Seipei Moeketsi was small for his 14 years, but he had cult status among black South Africans for his leadership of resistance by children against the apartheid police in the small town of Parys, 160 kilometres to the south-west of Johannesburg. Tough and charming, he had mobilised an army of child activists, reputedly fifteen-hundred-strong, aged between 8 and 14, in Tumahole, Parys’s black township. The wider Parys area was a stronghold of diehard white right-wingers whose Nazi-style vigilantes staged raids on Tumahole, ignored by the police, to intimidate and control the strongly pro-ANC black population. Exaggerated stories abounded of how Stompie, when aged only 12, acted as a general of his army and beat back the whites while organising school strikes and consumer boycotts. His legend was enhanced by tales of his jazzy way with words, which led to invitations for him to speak at such places as the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The Moeketsi part of Stompie’s name came from his father, who died when Stompie was an infant. His mother, Joyce Seipei, was an uneducated, unmarried, very poor woman who lived in a corrugated-iron shack without running water or electricity on the edge of Tumahole. Stompie’s stepfather earned a meagre wage as a gardener, and his grandfather, grandmother, younger sister and an uncle all shared the shack.

At the height of his war with the white vigilantes, Stompie said: “Children are better than adults because they are not afraid. Adults run away when the police come.” Although he had quit school when he was only 12, Stompie was intelligent. He played chess, said he wanted to be a scientist and was often quoted as saying: “I don’t mind dying for the cause.” One South African journalist noted: “Stompie epitomised so much of the tragedy that goes with being black and underprivileged. He was a child without a childhood.”15

Stompie had twice been detained for short periods and beaten up by the police. After his second detention spell, he ran away to Johannesburg where at first he slept in railway station waiting rooms. He was later given shelter by a young human rights lawyer, Matthew Chaskalson, the son of Arthur Chaskalson, a member of the legal team that had represented Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial. In November 1988 Chaskalson, who lived in the tree-lined whites-only northern suburbs of Johannesburg, left town on an extended holiday. He asked his friend Paul Verryn if he would let Stompie stay temporarily at the minister’s manse until he returned.

Stompie had few clothes when he was delivered to Soweto, so Verryn gave him two T-shirts, one of them red- and blue-striped with a seaside scene on the front. Verryn confided to friends that he recognised Stompie’s leadership qualities, but also said he was arrogant and quarrelsome and reluctant to wash.

Stompie began clashing with Verryn’s housekeeper, Xoliswa Falati. Verryn arrived home one evening to find Stompie cowering in terror after Falati had questioned him and then beaten him after he got into a fight with her eight-year-old son, Mzamo. Falati accused Stompie of being a police informer, presumably because he had been staying with whites, although the Chaskalson family had strong anti-apartheid credentials. Verryn was furious and told Falati to leave the boy alone.

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Soon after Stompie was delivered to her house, according to a range of witnesses,16 Winnie launched her assault on him, first punching him before asking for a sjambok. She called Stompie “a little shit” and began whipping him and the others on their backs until the sjambok broke in two. Other Football Club members were also punching the boys, all the time singing ANC anthems so that neighbours would not hear their cries and wailing. All the youths denied sexual relations with Paul Verryn.

Richardson began hitting Stompie on his knees and feet with a Coca-Cola bottle. Each time a boy fell to the floor he was kicked until he rose. The more they begged for mercy, the more the assaults intensified. Eventually Stompie fell unconscious. Someone poured water over him and Morgan told Winnie that things had gone too far. She took no notice and began whipping Stompie yet again, telling him and the others, “You are not fit to be alive.” She stopped, put her hands beneath Stompie’s armpits and ordered Cebekhulu to take hold of his legs and help her lift him high above their heads. From there Stompie was thrown down onto the concrete floor. This was repeated several times, with Richardson taking over from Cebekhulu. Each time Stompie was dropped, sometimes on his head, Winnie and her Football Club are alleged to have shouted, “Breakdown!”

As the sun went down there was blood on the floor and walls of the back cabin where the kidnapped youths were interrogated. All began confessing that they had slept with Paul Verryn in order to prevent further punishment. Stompie’s face was swollen and the top of his skull was soft and bruised, as though broken, and there was blood coming out from both nostrils and both ears. Some say Stompie sustained permanent brain damage.17

Accounts of how long the assaults lasted vary between 45 and 50 minutes. Richardson told Stompie and the others to wash and gave them blankets to make beds on the floor of one of the outside rooms. Richardson lectured them on the rules of the house: they were not to try to escape, they were to be obedient and, as a reward for good behaviour, they might be sent out of South Africa to train as ANC freedom fighters.

Cebekhulu, in testimony to the TRC and in a written statement given beforehand to Archbishop Tutu and his commissioners, said he woke on the morning of Friday, 30 December – a day when Mrs Mandela would later argue she was “somewhere else”, 360 kilometres away – and wandered into the back courtyard, where he found Stompie and the other kidnapped youths sitting around. Richardson ordered them to clean the courtyard and the room in which they had slept, with specific instructions to get rid of their own remaining bloodstains.

Stompie’s head was swollen and bruised and his wounds were still bloodied. He indicated to Cebekhulu with hand movements that he could not see and that he was thirsty. When Cebekhulu fetched water, Stompie could not lift the cup. As Cebekhulu began to raise the cup to Stompie’s lips, he claimed, Winnie Mandela stormed from the house and shouted that he was not to be given food or drink.

She then ordered Cebekhulu to come with her to see her personal doctor, Abu-Baker Asvat, to inform him of the rape by Paul Verryn.