Winnie Mandela (15 page)

When Winnie and the baby went home, both her mother-in-law and Walter Sisulu’s mother were waiting to offer her traditional counsel on how to care for the infant. Winnie was horrified when Nelson’s mother informed her they had arranged for an
inyanga
[tribal healer] to give the baby a traditional herbal bath, and she refused to take part in what she considered an unsanitary and outdated custom. She also stubbornly refused to drink the herbal tea the elderly women had prepared for her, but she acceded to custom when it came to naming the baby. It was the prerogative of a Tembu chief to name all babies born into the Madiba clan and the Mandela family, and Chief Ndingi named the little girl Zenani, which meant ‘what have you brought to the world’. The Madikizela family prophetically named her Nomadabi Nosizwe [battlefield of the nation], and Winnie shortened her name to Zeni. She was a beautiful and happy child, and her devoted parents showered her with love.

As soon as she could, Winnie again began helping Nelson with his work for the ANC. He, in turn, took great pains to explain his political philosophy to her. The expected outcome of the Treason Trial left little room for optimism, and he seemed anxious to share as much as he could with Winnie in whatever time they had left together. At a practical level, he realised that Winnie needed to learn to drive, and offered to teach her himself. Inevitably, as when any husband tries to teach his wife to drive, the lessons led to marital strife and often ended in shouting matches, until Nelson admitted defeat and asked his friend Joe Matthews to instruct Winnie instead.

As for any other young woman, marriage and motherhood demanded compromises from Winnie, but she was determined to remain true to herself. Much as she loved and admired her Madiba, as she called him, she would not hide in his shadow, or become known as nothing more than just his wife. So, when Zenani was five months old, Winnie left her in her grandmother’s care, and went back to work.

A
NY DESIRE OR
intention that Nelson and Winnie Mandela might have had to lead a normal life would have been thwarted by government policies that provided compelling grounds for them to continue their political crusade.

In 1959, parliament passed the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, creating eight ethnic homelands called Bantustans. The legislation formed the basis of the state’s
groot apartheid
[grand apartheid]. Blacks were outraged by the obvious injustice of a policy that set aside 13 per cent of the land in South Africa for more than 70 per cent of its people. Although roughly two-thirds of black South Africans lived in so-called white areas, the new law determined that they could only claim citizenship of their traditional homelands. The aim was clearly to drive blacks out of, or as far away as possible from, areas inhabited by whites, and to fragment them into separate tribes in order to divide them and prevent them from functioning as one cohesive group.

The policy of divide and rule dated back to 1950, when the Population Registration Act classified people according to race. ‘White’ was a single category, but people of mixed blood were subdivided into groups such as Cape Coloured, Malay and Griqua, while in addition to Chinese and Indian there was a separate category for ‘other Asian’. By breaking down the identity of blacks along tribal lines, the government’s intention was clearly to present the whites as the single biggest ethnic group, since, taken as a whole, the blacks were unquestionably in the majority and posed the most serious political threat.

A slew of supporting legislation followed the 1950 law, including the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Group Areas Act, the Native Labour Act and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act. The Extension of University Education Act was unashamedly discriminatory, as it barred ‘non-whites’ from universities that had until then been open to all. At every level of society, the government was putting into effect measures to honour promises that would prevent blacks and other non-whites from being integrated into the wider community. However, the Bantustan system did not lead to true self-government or independence in the homelands, nor was it ever intended to do so, since the Bantustan ‘governments’
were hand-picked by and financially dependent on the South African authorities. Verwoerd promised that the Bantustans would engender so much goodwill among blacks that, unlike white urban areas, they would never be used as the springboards for rebellion. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The escalating strife in Africa did not go unnoticed internationally. The United Nations declared 1960 ‘Africa Year’, in support and celebration of the principle of independence after the continent’s long exposure to colonialism. In order to strengthen the protest against apartheid, Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC, called for an international boycott of South African products.

The 1960s would hold numerous hardships for the Mandela family, both personally and politically, but as the decade began, Winnie had no inkling that the international spotlight would fall as much on her as on Nelson. In cities across South Africa, there was growing interaction between the white intelligentsia and educated blacks, Indians and coloureds. The National Party could not allow a multiracial society to take root, as this would seriously challenge its policy of segregation, and those who practised free association were labelled communists.

Nelson and Winnie had become close friends with Paul and Adelaide Joseph. Paul was a senior member of the Indian Congress, had been active in the Defiance Campaign and was one of the defendants in the Treason Trial. Adelaide and Winnie were both members of the Women’s Federation, and had attended a course in public speaking arranged by Hilda Bernstein and Helen Joseph, a white woman of British descent who was to become one of Winnie’s closest friends. But Winnie didn’t feel the need for formal instruction on how to get her message across, and suggested that she, and other activists, should simply speak from the heart when expressing their views on the injustices they opposed. She was right. When she made her first public speech after joining the Women’s Federation, she made such an impact that her audience composed a song in her honour there and then. Her candid, shoot-from-the-hip delivery became one of her trademarks, and her public addresses reflected an innate insight and natural empathy that could not be learned.

Nelson’s professional life was under tremendous strain, and by the end of 1960 his law practice had all but ceased to exist. More and more of their friends went into exile, and their vibrant social network was in tatters. Winnie bravely soldiered on, meeting the many challenges of being a young mother, wife and working woman, supporting her husband morally, politically and financially. She was often alone. Mandela regularly spent the night in Pretoria after consultations with his legal team, and when he did come home, Winnie had to share him with the ANC. Many a meal was interrupted by telephone calls, and he often had to meet with other ANC leaders or arrange bail for members.

Sometimes they would see one another only for a brief period in the morning, when he dashed into the house to take a bath and change his clothes before joining his co-accused in the Treason Trial. Winnie later said she couldn’t recall a time when they had a truly normal family life. As Nelson had warned her before they got married, the struggle always came first, but this did not prevent him from being a loving husband and father, even though his wife and children always had to share him with the nation.

At times, though, he could be infuriating, such as when he returned from court with a group of people and blithely told Winnie he had invited them to taste her wonderful cooking – at a time of the month when there might be only a single chop left in the fridge! He had no sense of the practical demands of domestic life and never even had a bank account, but Winnie never resented his commitment to the struggle, and in between all her other duties, found time to further her own involvement.

She greatly admired Lillian Ngoyi, prominent in the ANC and another accused in the Treason Trial, and learned much from other prominent ANC women such as Albertina Sisulu, Florence Matomela, Frances Baard, Kate Molale and Ruth Mompati. She also developed good relationships with Hilda Bernstein – the only member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) to serve on the Johannesburg City Council for three years during the 1940s – and Ruth First, an academic, editor of several radical newspapers and author of several books. She and her husband Joe Slovo, an advocate, played leading roles in the liberation struggle. Ruth was killed by a letter bomb in Mozambique in August 1982.

But more than any other woman, it was Helen Joseph who influenced Winnie, despite the thirty-year difference in their ages. Winnie regarded Helen as a mother figure, and was grateful for the advice and support the older woman offered. Helen had become politically active during World War II, and had founded a number of civil rights organisations that made her a target of the police Special Branch. She and Lillian Ngoyi were the only two women accused in the Treason Trial.

By 1959, serious tensions within the ANC reached crisis proportions. As president of the Youth League, Nelson knew that some of the members were becoming increasingly disgruntled, challenging the ANC’s moderate policies, which they condemned as ineffective. A major bone of contention was a proposed alliance with the CPSA and white liberals, and Mandela spent many a night reasoning with the dissidents until the early hours of the morning in a bid to close an ever-widening rift.

When he was released in February 1990 after more than twenty-seven years in prison, it was generally accepted that Mandela had developed his reconciliatory vision during the long years behind bars. In fact, as early as 1959, when he fell into bed too exhausted and exasperated to sleep, he would tell Winnie that the
dissidents seemed incapable of grasping that black racism in retaliation for white racism would never result in a country that was free and fair for all, but would tear South Africa apart. For him, the challenge was always to find a way for people of all races to live together in harmony. He worried about opportunists who saw the struggle as a vehicle for adventure, and didn’t understand the tremendous patience, effort and hard work that were needed to normalise an entire society.

In November 1958, a militant group with strong Africanist leanings broke away from the ANC, and in April 1959 formed the Pan Africanist Congress. Their leader, Robert Sobukwe, was a university lecturer, and a strong and charismatic leader. He saw the PAC as the ANC’s rival for black support, but the organisation never managed to muster enough of a popular following to take the lead in the liberation struggle.

The restrictive pass laws continued to evoke opposition, and the ANC planned to launch a national protest on 31 March 1960. The Mandela home in Orlando West became the campaign headquarters, and Winnie threw her full weight into the preparations. Then the PAC announced that it, too, would organise anti-pass protests, but ten days earlier, on 21 March.

Winnie didn’t go to work that day, staying home so that she could monitor radio reports of the PAC campaign. But except for news that Robert Sobukwe had been arrested, there was no reference to the PAC campaign, which had drawn fairly large support in Cape Town but little response anywhere else. That afternoon, one of Winnie’s colleagues in the Women’s League, Beatrice, burst into the house and told Winnie hysterically that the police were shooting people in Sharpeville. Beatrice lived in Vereeniging, ninety kilometres south of Johannesburg, and Winnie realised at once that she would not have driven that distance unless something was seriously awry. But Beatrice was so distraught that it took a while for her to tell Winnie what had happened.

That morning, Beatrice had heard that people were gathering in Sharpeville, the black township a few kilometres outside Vereeniging, and had decided to see for herself what was going on. By the time she arrived, some 5 000 people had congregated outside the police station, but, Beatrice said, they were doing nothing except mill around and talk, and someone told her they were waiting for an announcement about the pass laws. At noon, said Beatrice, a large contingent of police arrived in armoured cars, and from time to time helicopters swooped low over the crowd, which paid little attention to this activity. Suddenly, Beatrice heard gunfire, and within seconds people were screaming in terror and running in all directions, while shots rang out and dead and wounded people fell to the ground. Beatrice rushed to her car and drove to Soweto as fast as she could.

News of the massacre spread like wildfire through Soweto, but details only emerged in the days that followed: sixty-nine people dead, including ten children
and eight women, most of them shot in the back, and another 176 wounded. In the wake of the Sharpeville shootings, riots broke out in the Cape Town townships of Langa and Nyanga. In Langa, where thousands of blacks took to the streets, the police killed fourteen people and wounded dozens more. Condemnation from both inside and outside South Africa was swift. The police had shot and killed blacks before, but not on this scale. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution by nine votes to none (with Britain and France abstaining) that condemned the South African government for its actions, and called for the introduction of measures that would promote racial harmony and equality.

The ANC leaders anticipated that the government would use the crisis as an excuse to clamp down on black political activity, and decided to send a senior representative abroad to ensure that the organisation’s voice would still be heard. Their choice fell on Oliver Tambo, and six days after Sharpeville he left in haste for Botswana, from where he would make his way to London via Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana.

The ANC’s reading of the situation proved correct. The government declared a state of emergency, banned a host of political organisations, including the ANC and PAC, and rounded up 2 000 activists. Among them were Nelson Mandela and Chief Albert Luthuli, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while he was in prison.