Winnie Mandela (34 page)
The short, bespectacled cabinet minister who had wagged a finger at Winnie at the Durban airport and cautioned her about her conduct had shown that, in 1977, he approved of her behaviour even less than he had two years before. Sending Winnie to the Free State, the most racist of the four provinces, was a far harsher step than the forced relocation of two million black South Africans who had been driven from their homes to the apartheid government’s Bantustans. At least those victims usually had some tribal or traditional connection to the places they were going, and in many cases they had family as support when they arrived. She and Zindzi would be alone in a place that was as alien as a foreign country, which, of course, was just what the government intended. Neither mother nor daughter could speak or understand the local language. Blacks in the Free State spoke Sotho or Tswana and some Afrikaans, whereas Winnie’s mother tongue was Xhosa, and she spoke fluent English, but no Afrikaans. The authorities had clearly calculated that the language barrier would make it impossible for her to communicate with any of her new neighbours, and thus influence them politically.
In almost twenty years of dealing with Winnie Mandela, the South African government and the security police had learned nothing about her.
It was a four-hour drive to Brandfort, which lies some 400 kilometres south-west of Johannesburg and 50 kilometres north of Bloemfontein, the Free State capital. The town was a shock – a drab and dusty rural hamlet with unimaginative houses, an old-fashioned two-storey hotel, small shops lining the main street and a pervading atmosphere of lethargy and inactivity. Winnie and Zindzi were taken to the police station and formally handed over to the Free State security police. She was tired, and asked where she could refresh herself. She and Zindzi were taken to the hotel, but, since they were ‘non-white’, they were not allowed to use the facilities, which were strictly reserved for whites only. They were shown to the laundry – a ramshackle outbuilding – instead. From there, they were accompanied to the township superintendent’s office to register Winnie as a new resident.
The forlorn township had no official name, but the black residents had baptised it
Phatakahle
, meaning ‘handle with care’. Winnie’s heart sank as she took in the desolation that was almost palpable. When the police stopped in front of what was to be her home, she had to fight back the tears. It was one half of a tiny, semi-detached square house with a flat roof. There was no fence, and not a sprig
of green. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but the beige Free State dust. Winnie’s little box was No. 802, an address that would become as well known as No. 8115 in Soweto. A gang of prisoners was moving a mound of earth from the interior – and Winnie reeled as one shock followed another. The only entrance was a narrow door that opened directly into the kitchen, and there were just two other rooms, neither of them big enough in which to swing the proverbial cat.
The toilet, a pit latrine, was in the backyard. There was no running water, electricity or water-borne sewage system. And worse, there were no floors. The bare earth outside merely extended into the house.
Winnie and Zindzi watched, numb and speechless, as their furniture and belongings were offloaded. When the prisoners tried to move the furniture inside, they discovered that the kitchen door was not wide enough. Despite themselves, Winnie and Zindzi started to giggle as they watched the efforts to squeeze the furniture through the door, turning it from side to side and upside down. But no matter how hard the men tried, they could not move a single piece of Winnie’s good and solid furniture into the house – not the lounge suite, dining table, refrigerator, stove or even the beds. They finally gave up, and the police loaded everything but the bundles of bedding back onto the trucks, and carted it off to the police station, where it was stored for the next year. Winnie’s refrigerator was plugged in at the police station so that she could make use of it, though it meant she had to walk there each time she needed something.
The first night in Brandfort was a harrowing end to a day of trauma and distress. There was one communal tap serving about eighty township houses, and Winnie and Zindzi had to queue with a long line of strangely uncommunicative residents to fetch water. During the previous week, the residents of Phatakahle had been informed by the Bantu Authority that a woman – a dangerous terrorist – would be moving there, and they were warned to avoid her at all cost. True to form, they did as they had been told, hence the fact that Winnie found them curt and aloof. Having had a proper bathroom and running water in Soweto, she didn’t even have a basin in which to wash, and there was no way to heat any water. She and Zindzi bought potato chips for supper, but they were too tired to eat, and huddled together on bundles of clothing and linen dumped on the dirt floor in an empty house. It took a long time before Winnie slept that night.
Early the next morning, she and Zindzi were awakened by voices from the adjoining half of the semi-detached house. In the light, Winnie saw that the dividing wall stopped well short of the ceiling, with the result that one could hear perfectly well what was going on in the house next door. As soon as she was dressed, Winnie walked to the police station and insisted that the gap be closed. She was told her neighbour was a security policeman assigned to watch her, but she made it clear that even if his orders were to monitor her every word and move,
she had no interest in his. Her neighbour on the other side was also a security policeman, but at least he lived in a separate house.
Winnie realised that for the time being, at least, she was stranded in the godforsaken town, and had to find a way of letting her family and friends know what had happened, but there was not a single telephone in the entire township. Fortunately, thanks to Ilona Kleinschmidt, the press soon learned that she had been whisked off to Brandfort, and reporters and photographers raced to the Free State to get the story.
After assessing the situation, Winnie decided she would have to make the best of her dilemma, redirect her bitterness into action, and turn the blow the authorities had dealt her into a challenge. She and Zindzi walked to the town to buy some basic provisions, blissfully unprepared for the caustic small-town racism they had not encountered in Johannesburg. At the first shop, they were told blacks were not allowed inside, but had to queue at a side window for service. Winnie pointedly ignored the rule and walked into the shop, straight past the flabbergasted attendant. Other blacks who watched her stride into the store, and expected to see her thrown out, were amazed when instead all the whites who had been in the shop walked out, outraged by Winnie’s audacity. In the face of her imperious conduct, and totally intimidated by the presence of journalists, the shop assistant meekly served her. Suddenly, Brandfort had a celebrity, albeit a ‘dangerous terrorist’. While the authorities had taken the precaution of alerting the black community to Winnie’s arrival, white residents had been told nothing, probably because the police assumed they did not need to be cautioned against associating with her. The mayor arrived and said although he had not been given prior notice, Winnie was welcome in the town. The deputy mayor remarked, prophetically, that she had put their small town on the map.
Winnie descended on Brandfort like a thundering tidal wave, assaulting racial prejudice, narrow-mindedness, intolerance, bigotry and injustice with her usual unhesitating boldness. The police had the dividing wall in her house built up to the ceiling and provided her with a small coal stove to replace her electric one, which could not fit through the door. Trudging to the police station whenever she needed something from the refrigerator was inconvenient, but she decided to live with it for the time being. The authorities in Brandfort had never encountered any black person daring enough to make demands, and Winnie was convinced they had given in to her requests more out of surprise than a desire to be helpful.
The next obstacle was the black community. Winnie knew instinctively that the police were behind their unsociable behaviour, and decided not to force the issue. She understood that the police had thought the language barrier would isolate her from the local residents, and she made it a priority to learn their languages so that she could first communicate with them, and then convince them to do
something about their servile existence. After years of watching her every move, intercepting her letters and telephone calls, brutal interrogation and more than a year of solitary confinement, the security police had still not fathomed the depth of Winnie’s courage, her strength of character and will, her determination and extraordinary tenacity. They clearly did not understand that her spirit was far from broken, and that she would confront every obstacle they put in her way. If they did recognise her strength, they apparently believed that exile in Brandfort would cower her and force her to admit defeat.
To Winnie’s joy her employer, Helmut Hirsch, forwarded her salary for May, even though she had worked for only half the month and had not given notice. With the money, Winnie bought two single beds, narrow enough to fit through the kitchen door, and paraffin lamps to replace the candles she had used since her arrival. Slowly her spirit was lifting, and she was preparing for battle.
Within days, Winnie was receiving visitors who came from all over the country. Whites were not allowed to enter black townships without permits, but despite this, many of her friends – and a large number of people she hadn’t known before – travelled vast distances to see her, bringing food and other gifts. She was deeply touched that people she had never heard of would go to such lengths to show their support.
Among her first visitors was Ilona Kleinschmidt, who came all the way from Johannesburg. She was shocked at the conditions in which Winnie was expected to live, and when she returned home she contacted various other friends and spread the word of Winnie’s predicament. Another early visitor was Bunty Biggs, who made the trip from Pietermaritzburg in Natal with food for Winnie and Zindzi. The steady stream of visitors gave Winnie new heart.
Over the years, friends had helped and supported her in different ways. Ray Carter, a devout Christian she had met through Helen Joseph, had called her every night while she was in Johannesburg, and they prayed together on the telephone. Winnie, knowing her telephone was tapped, told Ray it didn’t matter who was listening, the prayers could only help them. With no telephone in Brandfort, she and Ray could not maintain this ritual, but they agreed to pray for each other every night at the same time. In a letter to Ray, Winnie said she would always regard her as an angel, sent by God to sustain her spiritually while she was in Brandfort.
When she ventured out into her new neighbourhood, Winnie was appalled. As a social worker, she had dealt with abject poverty in Soweto and in the Transkei, but there was a depth of impoverishment and hopelessness in Phatakahle that she had never seen before. There were 725 houses in the township, all similar to hers, and the total population was 5 000. Winnie discovered that there was a high rate of infant mortality as a result of malnutrition, and a disturbing level of alcohol abuse. Phatakahle was a sad, desolate place. The government had exiled Winnie to
Brandfort to destroy her very spirit, but, ironically, far from being crestfallen, she had a liberating influence on Phatakahle’s residents. Her professional training and caring heart allowed her to devise plans to help the destitute blacks and infuse them with hope and inspiration. She firmly resolved to prove to the authorities that she would continue to work for her people, and serve them wherever she was.
Winnie’s presence turned the sleepy hollow of Brandfort upside down. Following her early victory over where she could shop, a sprinkling of other blacks nervously followed suit, and when they were not thrown out, as had previously been the case, a steady trickle stopped queuing at the serving hatches and shopped inside. A prohibition that had been in place for years without question, died a quiet death, but white residents were bitterly unhappy at this turn of events. When Winnie or other blacks entered the shops, white customers promptly left. Winnie was not beyond exploiting the situation, and when this happened she took her time, browsing and looking over the merchandise for as long as she liked, while the irate whites fumed outside. In newspaper interviews they attacked the government’s decision to place Winnie in their midst, and demanded that she be moved elsewhere. They said that she was rude, resorted to outbursts and temper tantrums if they tried to put her in her place, and was corrupting black residents and giving them dangerous ideas. The government knew that wherever they sent Winnie, the reaction would be the same, so she stayed.
Even complaints by the former minister of justice and state president, Blackie Swart (in Afrikaans the word ‘swart’ means black), had no effect. He owned a farm in the district and insisted on being accompanied by an armed guard when he visited Brandfort, in case he was confronted by the dangerous terrorist. This provoked ironic smiles among even the town’s staunchest Afrikaner residents. Swart was one of a handful of non-executive state presidents appointed over a period of less than two decades after South Africa became a republic. His successor, Dr Nico Diederichs, was a former minister of finance, whose tenure as state president was plagued by rumours that he had hoarded millions – plundered from South African taxpayers – in secret Swiss bank accounts. The last office bearer before the post was abolished was former prime minister BJ Vorster, who was forced to resign in disgrace when he was implicated in the infamous Information Scandal amid more rumours of millions being spirited out of the country and allegedly stashed in Paraguay.
The black population of Phatakahle had expected Winnie to retreat into docile servility like the rest of them, especially after the briefing they had received from the Bantu Authority officials, and the way she had been dumped on them by the police. They were astonished at the impact she made on the town within weeks. For the first time in their lives, they saw a black person with the temerity to interact
with whites as an equal – even to argue with them. It was all the more astonishing that she got away with it. In no time, wherever Winnie and Zindzi went, they were followed by curious onlookers, who watched and learned. Blacks in Brandfort had always had to buy clothes without first trying them on, and could not return purchases if they were the wrong size. Winnie’s growing entourage was astonished when she insisted on trying on a dress in a well-known fashion chain store. The shop assistant refused, and a furious argument erupted. Winnie refused to budge, the assistant called the police, and the altercation turned to farce.