Winnie Mandela (40 page)

Mandela had earlier requested a meeting with Coetsee, but had received no reply from him. Now Coetsee decided to visit him in hospital. Winnie – whose friendship with and influence on Piet de Waal had initially been responsible for a shift in Coetsee’s thinking about Mandela – cemented the change on that fateful flight. Coetsee arrived at the hospital unannounced to visit Mandela, inquired about his health and the surgery, but did not talk politics. Mandela took advantage of the visit to raise the question of Winnie’s situation. He asked Coetsee to allow her to remain in Johannesburg, and Coetsee said he would look into the matter but could make no promises.

After the visit, however, Coetsee summoned Winnie to his official residence and told her she could return to Johannesburg, provided she did not cause any problems. It was Winnie’s turn to make no promises, and soon after arriving home, she flouted the terms of her banning order and addressed a funeral at Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, for twelve people – including a baby – who had been killed when the police opened fire on them.

A few days before Christmas, Winnie was notified that the Minister of Law and Order, Louis le Grange, had relaxed her banning order. She need not return to Brandfort, and would no longer be required to report to the police every day. She could attend social events, but was still prohibited from attending political meetings or making political speeches. It sounded marvellous – but there was the inevitable sting in the tail. She could go anywhere in South Africa, except into the magisterial districts of Johannesburg and Roodepoort. Quite simply, that meant that Winnie could go nowhere near Soweto. She could not go home.

She defied the restriction, and returned to house No. 8115 in Orlando West. The police arrived, negotiated with her to leave, and she agreed, but returned at the first opportunity. The police returned, dragged her out of the house, arrested her and detained her overnight. There was an international outcry, and when Winnie appeared in court on 23 December, she was released on bail. She went to Cape Town to spend Christmas with Mandela, but as soon as she returned to Johannesburg she was arrested again. When she appeared in court in January 1986, the case was postponed. In March, Le Grange announced that the case had been postponed indefinitely.

After more than eight years in exile, Winnie Mandela went home to Soweto.

 

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FTER WORLD WAR II
, and especially following the Vietnam War, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became a buzzword. The psychological, psychiatric and medical fraternities, military and security services, employers, educators, parents and spouses the world over became sensitised to the causes and symptoms of the syndrome, initially identified in soldiers returning from combat zones, but gradually extended to include civilian victims as well as survivors of serious car accidents, natural disasters, assaults, hijackings, domestic violence, sexual abuse and torture.

Towards the end of the 1990s, clinicians and researchers found that the accepted diagnosis of PTSD did not cover the severe and far-reaching psychological effects of protracted, repeated trauma over periods of months or years. They determined that continuing trauma causes a multitude of serious and complex symptoms, including changes in emotional behaviour, often manifested by delayed and lasting mental illness. Long-term effects suggest a close association between escalating levels of trauma and psychosocial dysfunction. The risk of mental illness is four times greater in people who have been exposed to more than three traumatic experiences, and reactions related to post-traumatic stress often persist for substantial periods of time – and can be latent for up to ten or more years after the trauma itself. To distinguish the typical symptoms of continuing trauma and persistent victimisation from those of common trauma, researchers defined it as ‘complex PTSD'.

A disturbing finding of the research was that people who have suffered trauma, victimisation or violence and suffer from post-traumatic stress are, ironically, at high risk of becoming perpetrators of violence, including torture and rape – and even murder or massacres. Experts believe that for some people, the pain of being a victim becomes unbearable, and they attempt to ‘shift' their own pain onto someone else. And thus they become perpetrators, and create other victims.

The extent to which violence disturbs the intricate and fragile balance of society is alarming. Even people who don't experience violence at first hand are affected. The more one empathises with a victim, the more one becomes a co-victim, even
suffering the same symptoms of helplessness, anxiety and despair. In situations where an entire society is victimised and traumatised, virtually every member of the community becomes a potential perpetrator of violence.

By the mid-1980s, South Africa's black population had suffered three decades of gradually escalating government-sponsored victimisation and violence at the hands of the police, and, after 1976, the military. Townships had been turned into war zones, where security forces committed acts of brutality with impunity and total disregard for human life or acceptable norms of behaviour. New laws gave them sweeping powers and they were not held accountable for their actions. In the larger townships, displaced and orphaned children roamed the streets, and delinquency and behavioural problems were at an all-time high. The ANC in exile contributed to the mayhem with the call – from the safety of other countries – for black South Africans to render the country ungovernable. For criminal elements, it was a licence to commit crime unchecked. For young blacks, many severely disturbed by years of fear and violence, it offered justification to vent their anger and need for revenge on virtually anyone. The smallest incident could provoke a brutal attack, even cost a life.

Complex PTSD is a common result of organised violence, including the politically motivated victimisation of large numbers of people or entire sections of a population. There were tens of thousands of troops and police in the townships. The Defence Force had ostensibly been deployed to curb the unrest, but there was widespread evidence of excessive security force violence, often aimed at the youth. The effects of the intensifying brutality on the black youth were far-reaching. Township children grew up in war zones, their childhoods essentially no different to those of children in Beirut or Bosnia. They witnessed violence against their families, and large numbers saw their parents and other relatives arrested and imprisoned for years at a time, even killed. What made the situation in South Africa worse was that children as young as twelve or less were imprisoned. Gangs of aimless youths started copying the terrifying tactics of the security forces, beating and abducting people, interrogating and sometimes killing them: the unbridled and angry barbarism of the victim turned perpetrator.

Young, uprooted blacks saw themselves as soldiers of the liberation struggle, and by the mid-1980s, thousands of them had formed groups and gangs, many acting as vigilantes in their neighbourhoods. The police took full advantage of the situation, playing them off against each other through informers who infiltrated the gangs, provoking suspicion, betrayal and fierce reprisals. More than a decade later, during hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), numerous black South Africans testified to the demise of normal life in their communities and the deep suffering this had caused.

As so often happens during war, women were brutalised by both the enemy
and their own comrades, and they were far more willing than men to publicly record their suffering, especially emotional and psychological distress. The TRC heard chilling evidence of the depravity that surfaced during the 1970s and 1980s, and how it influenced black communities. The testimony of Sheila Masote, daughter of former PAC president Zeph Mathopeng, was a painful precis of the devastating consequences of apartheid.

Sheila came from a privileged background. The Mathopengs lived in Orlando West, the Soweto suburb that was home to the black elite, including the Mandelas, the Sisulus and the Motlanas. Her parents were both teachers, cultured and intellectual individuals. Her father was the first chairman of the Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival. But her supportive family and healthy society were systematically eroded by apartheid. As a result of her father's political activities, both her parents lost their teaching jobs and were imprisoned, her father frequently. Hundreds of relatives, friends and acquaintances were either jailed or fled the country. Denied the right to earn their living as teachers, her parents became impoverished, and her mother, traumatised, lonely and frustrated, started beating her.

Sheila married a classical musician, the only black in Africa with a licentiate in violin tuition, but, as the political mayhem grew, both he and Sheila were detained. One of her brothers went into exile, the other became an abusive alcoholic.

At the TRC, Sheila Masote exposed her deepest anguish to the world when she testified that she had abused her son, as she herself had been abused by her mother. She whipped him so badly that neighbours had to intervene. When he was six, he tried to hang himself.

The Masotes were but one example of the anguish and confusion that infiltrated the lives of millions of ordinary black South Africans.

During the latter half of the 1980s, certain elements of the security forces embarked on a campaign of unmitigated torture and murder against so-called enemies of the apartheid state, their heinous crimes cloaked in ‘top secret' classifications or covered up by burning or blowing up the bodies of victims with explosives. Detainees were drugged, poisoned or shot, their remains dumped in unmarked graves or thrown into the sea. Those who survived the brutal interrogations and lengthy incarcerations returned to their communities bearing permanent emotional scars and psychological lacerations.

During prolonged periods of isolation, many detainees contemplate suicide. Ruth First tried to kill herself while she was in solitary confinement. Winnie Mandela considered it.

 

The Soweto to which she returned in 1986 was a changed and dangerous place, but, as always, Winnie's primary concern was for those who needed help. Evidence of the ravages of a decade of violence was everywhere, and as soon as she could,
Winnie set up an informal welfare office, aimed specifically at the troubled youth. She gave shelter under her own roof to many of the homeless teenagers and young adults who roamed the township streets, fed them, clothed them and sent them back to school, paying their tuition fees herself. House No. 8115 became a refuge for children on the run from the police, and for those with nowhere else to go. Towards the end of the year, Winnie became involved in the resolution of internal conflict in the Orlando West branch of the Soweto Youth Congress (SOYCO), and subsequently a number of the youths she had come to know in the process moved into the outbuildings at her home. There was already a Sisulu Football Club, and boys and young men living with Winnie formed the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC). The girls called themselves the Mandela Sisters. Winnie provided accommodation, food and education for them, and helped them when they needed money. They had come from all over the country, and many of the boys were Zulus from the rural areas of Natal.

Winnie never went into the outside rooms where the young people lived, and they, in turn, did not frequent the main house, where Zindzi and her children were also living. There was only one unbreakable rule: all the young people living on Winnie's property had to sign a book showing when they were at home, or not. Youths were often picked up by the police and disappeared without a trace, and the register made it possible to see if anyone did not come home, so that enquiries could be made.

Winnie was busy. She went to her welfare office every day and spent long hours dealing with the many social problems that beset the community. She attended funerals, comforted bereaved families, organised help for the needy and the elderly, and enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand for part-time studies in social anthropology and politics.

Rumours begun while she was in Brandfort, that she had lost perspective on her role in the struggle, and specifically as Mandela's representative, followed Winnie to Soweto, where they were fuelled by some of her own actions. She seemed more defiant than ever, often wearing a khaki military-style outfit, and making statements that evoked strong criticism. In his biography of Mandela, Anthony Sampson observes that Winnie ‘appeared to sail into dangerous storms like a ship in full sail, towering over both her acolytes and her adversaries'. In April, at Munsieville near Johannesburg, Winnie made a highly inflammatory statement that evoked widespread reaction: ‘Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.'

The media outcry was unmitigated. Winnie was called irresponsible and accused of inciting violence against whites. The ANC refused to publicly condemn either Winnie's words or the abhorrent practice of ‘necklacing', which her statement appeared to endorse. At a summit of non-aligned nations in Harare, Oliver Tambo
said whereas the ANC was not happy about necklacing, the organisation would not condemn people who had been driven to such extremes by the situation in South Africa. Privately, however, he contacted Dr Motlana and told him to gag Winnie.

Like Tambo, Mandela was shocked that Winnie seemed to support necklacing, but he, too, refrained from public condemnation. Winnie's reaction was that she had been quoted out of context, and that her intention had not been to approve necklacing, but to illustrate what measures people had been driven to by apartheid.

However controversial her public utterances, Winnie had a clear understanding of, and insight into, the political situation. Anthony Sampson writes that she showed ‘clear-sighted judgment' about the unfolding crisis. During her banishment to Brandfort, the United Democratic Front had been formed to create a surrogate ANC pressure group by bringing various political interest groups together under a single umbrella. Gossip and her critics alleged that Winnie did not support the new movement, but she went on record as saying the UDF embodied the South Africa of the future, a broad-based organisation that embraced both the workers and the intelligentsia, with room even for those who supported different ideologies. She favoured the ANC's vision of a multiracial South Africa in which wealth was shared, but not as a democracy. Winnie advocated a socialist state as the only way to solve the problems of poverty and starvation, and remedy the disparity between population groups, with equality for all and universal franchise. Notwithstanding her relationship with Helen Suzman, she was unequivocally critical of the Progressive Federal Party's preoccupation with white minority rights, accusing the PFP of being supportive of the government. She was equally scathing in her condemnation of what she called the politics of exclusivity advocated by the Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO), which was the other extreme.