Winnie Mandela (48 page)

In accordance with the habits of a lifetime, Winnie was invariably to be found where there was suffering or injustice, regardless of time or distance. Women’s issues remained a priority, and as president of the Women’s League she visited farm workers employed under appalling conditions in Limpopo Province, attended the funeral of Edith Erens, a young girl who had been murdered in Johannesburg, and on 9 August – National Women’s Day – led a dramatised event to commemorate the historic anti-pass march on the Union Buildings in 1956. Far from waning, Winnie’s star continued to glitter over the political landscape, as a member of parliament, head of the women’s movement and member of the ANC’s national executive and national working committee. But controversy was never far from hand, and with little love lost between Winnie and Mbeki, it could be only a matter of time before their differences spilled over into the public domain.

In January 2001, the
Sunday Times
acquired and published a letter she had written to Deputy President Jacob Zuma in 1999, asking him to intervene after President Mbeki attacked her from the podium at an ANC meeting in Durban and accused her of gossiping about his private life. She told Zuma that she had been hurt and shocked by the president’s barbs, and yet again the media trumpeted the end of Winnie’s political career.

Considering that she had charged in the letter that the ANC was plagued by
intrigue, infighting and backstabbing, that the party leaders were systematically persecuting her and that she had been ‘grievously maligned’ by Mbeki, predictions that she had finally gone too far were not without foundation. But yet again, Winnie confounded the critics. A few weeks after the letter was leaked to the media, she was honoured with other famous Sowetans as a Soweto legend.

But as the year progressed, it became clear that Winnie’s travails were far from over. Her financial affairs came increasingly under the spotlight, and by mid-1992 she was enmeshed in various probes into alleged irregularities and misconduct.

The government had announced in 1998 that it was considering taking action against Winnie to recover R170 000 for the unauthorised use of an official vehicle that had been damaged, and another R100 000 for an unauthorised trip she had made to Ghana. At about the same time, Absa Bank obtained a judgment against her for defaulting on a R500 000 loan she had taken, using the Diepkloof house as security. In May 2001, the
Sunday Times reported
that Winnie was at the centre of a R1-million scandal involving the ANC Women’s League. She went to court to seek an injunction against publication of the report, but acting judge Geoff Budlender – who had taken Kenneth Kgase’s statement after he escaped from Winnie’s home in 1989 – ruled that the article was not defamatory. The newspaper revealed that the police were investigating loans made by the beleagured Saambou Bank to non-existent employees of the Women’s League, on the basis of recommendations sent to the bank on Women’s League letterheads. One of the loans had evidently been made to Winnie’s daughter Zindzi.

Shortly after the report was published, Winnie was admitted to hospital suffering from high blood pressure, and, in her absence, police raided her home, ostensibly in search of documents related to the loan investigation. But the alleged fraud was knocked off the front pages by an extraordinary encounter, captured on camera by television news crews, during a Youth Day rally at Orlando Stadium on 16 June to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soweto student uprising.

Winnie arrived an hour late, and as she stepped from her car, the crowd began chanting her name. Mbeki, the guest of honour, was not amused by the outpouring of support, which disrupted a speech by the chairman of the National Youth Commission, Jabu Mbalula. The president was visibly infuriated by what happened next.

Making her way to her seat on the stage, Winnie stopped behind Mbeki’s chair and bent down to greet him with a kiss. The usually urbane Mbeki roughly pushed her aside, knocking off her baseball cap in the process, then snapped angrily at her. Home affairs minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi left his seat on the stage, picked up Winnie’s cap and placed it gently back on her head.

That night, and for days afterwards, television viewers throughout the world froze as the scene was replayed over and over. If there had been any lingering doubts
that relations between Winnie and Mbeki were strained, this unsavoury public demonstration made it quite clear that all was not well with South Africa’s head of state and his predecessor’s former wife. The media fuelled the fire by reporting that a senior police officer believed Winnie had grounds to lay a charge of assault against the president, or possibly a case for
crimen injuria
, since her dignity had been impaired by an incident in full view of a large crowd of spectators and the international media. Women’s rights campaigners and organisations accused Mbeki of doing immense harm to their work and the progress they had taken years to make by undermining the message that physical domination of women was not acceptable.

But the sympathy and support Winnie enjoyed was a temporary reprieve. It seemed there were fires to be put out wherever she turned. She was in hot water with the South African Revenue Service about her income tax, and First National Bank confiscated about R1 million from her because she had failed to repay a loan. Winnie filed an urgent high court application to prevent the bank from attaching funds in investment accounts belonging to her and her company, the Heroes Acre Foundation. The application was dismissed, and the bank threatened further legal action to recover an additional R100 000 which she owed. In September, the media reported that Winnie allegedly owed more than R50 000 to the Johannesburg municipality for electricity, and had to make arrangements for payment through her attorney. In October, she was arrested by the specialised commercial crime unit on charges of fraud and theft relating to the Women’s League loans.

Meanwhile, parliament’s ethics committee had launched an investigation into Winnie’s failure to declare all her business interests. As accusations of impropriety mounted, Winnie’s fate and future became one of the hottest topics in South Africa.

In December, the murder of another former president’s ex-wife, Marike de Klerk, briefly moved Winnie off the front pages. Though poles apart in their lifestyles and political convictions, the two women had shared a unique bond, having supported their husbands to the pinnacle of public life, then losing them to divorce and marriage to other women. Unfortunate scheduling saw a memorial service for Marike coincide with the state funeral for erstwhile defence minister Joe Modise, and Winnie chose to attend the De Klerk service in what could have been perceived as a snub to the ANC. As if to underline her apparent chagrin, she told the media that Marike de Klerk’s murder was an indictment against crimeridden South Africa, and perhaps God’s way of awakening the country to the reality of daily life.

In February 2002, Winnie lost her two-year legal battle over occupancy of the house in Orlando West, and was ordered to vacate the premises. Within a week, another judgment against her was granted, this time for repossession of her luxury Mercedes Benz, for which the instalments were in arrears. Her lawyers seemed to
be in court almost every week, and it was hard to imagine that any silver lining lurked behind the gathering dark clouds. In June, personal tragedy struck with the death of her friend and political ally, Peter Mokaba. The ANC said the firebrand youth leader had died of acute pneumonia linked to a respiratory problem, but there was widespread speculation that he had died of AIDS. Mokaba had survived rumours of being a police informer and controversy as the chief proponent of the inflammatory youth rally war cry,
Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer –
officially declared hate speech in mid-2003 – before taking his seat in parliament and on the ANC’s national executive. Winnie, who had been one of his most loyal supporters, was sidelined at his funeral and prevented from speaking, apparently on the orders of Mbeki.

By the middle of 2002, Winnie’s life was no longer merely punctuated with accusations of misconduct and financial infractions, but had become a seemingly endless battle against them. In July, the other accused in the fraudulent loan case, Addy Moolman, went on trial. Witnesses testified that they had signed blank application forms and had never been employed by the ANC Women’s League, although their loan applications stated that they were. Other information on the forms also turned out to be false. The police established that only five of the seventy beneficiaries of the loans had, in fact, worked for the Women’s League. A forensic expert confirmed that the signature on letters supporting the loan applications was, indeed, that of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The charges of theft against her arose from the fact that applicants were obliged to take out and pay the premiums on non-existent funeral policies.

In November, on the eve of the Diepkloof house being auctioned to cover the R1 million she owed Absa, Winnie’s lawyers managed to come to an agreement with the bank, and her home was saved. A month later, despite the litany of charges and accusations levelled at her, Winnie was again among the nominees for election to the ANC’s national executive.

But 2003 would be a watershed year for this apparently indestructible woman. After being bombarded for months by the media with salacious details of the case, few were surprised when a Pretoria magistrate found Winnie guilty as charged on forty-three counts of fraud and twenty-five counts of theft. On 25 April she was sentenced to five years in prison, with one year suspended, but seasoned regional court magistrate Peet Johnson ruled that she would serve an effective eight months of the sentence in prison, followed by community service. As so often in the past, public opinion on the outcome of the case was deeply divided, with whites generally favouring a spell in prison, and blacks vehemently opposed.

Adding to the controversy was the fact that the magistrate found no evidence that Winnie had personally benefited from the fraudulent loan scheme. In fact, he underlined the fact that she had acted like a modern-day Robin Hood to help
the poor. Winnie has made no secret of her disdain for legislation based on the indifferent principles of a free-market economy that allow little grace for those who lack assets. Not for the first time, she had taken the law into her own hands to help those marginalised by endemic poverty. Her enormous debts, too, had been run up on behalf of the legions of needy who rely on her for assistance.

Those who have never understood the workings of Winnie’s mind or heart gasped when court proceedings revealed that she needed R72 000 a month to meet her household expenses – including more than R10 000 for groceries, R6 000 for telephone calls, R5 000 for electricity, and a mortgage bond payment of R12 000. What her detractors fail (or refuse) to take into account is that Winnie’s home, wherever she has made it, has always served as a haven for the homeless, the hungry and the hopeless. Throughout her life, black people have turned to her for help, and she has never, as far as is known, turned away anyone in genuine need. The massive bills for food and utilities are run up on behalf of those who knock on her door at all hours and in all seasons. Those who condemn her are incapable of grasping the African concept of
ubuntu
, the spirit of fellowship which she lives each day to the full. Her perceived inability to set boundaries, to turn away the drifters and the destitute, is not a weakness, but a duty. Among the urban masses, Winnie is regarded as a chief, and in times of need, chiefs are expected to provide for their people. It has ever been so in Africa, and centuries of Westernisation have done little to erode this culture of caring and compassion. Thus Winnie, during the apartheid years, often exposed herself to real danger by hiding MK fighters in the townships and tending to the wounded herself until they had recovered.

But for her, compassion is colour blind. Despite the fact that her demonisers have been predominantly white – the vast majority of them never even having met her – her innate kindness and generosity of spirit have extended to many from that population group.

When she was appointed Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture, Fanie Janse van Rensburg was a junior public servant in the department. Winnie learned that his parents had both been murdered and that he was deeply distressed and obsessed with anger towards the murderer. She took him under her wing, encouraged him to talk about his fears and feelings, counselled him and, in time, arranged a face-to-face meeting for him with the black man who had been imprisoned for the crime. She also had Fanie transferred to the ministry, and he became one of her most loyal supporters.

A similar example was Afrikaans journalist Herman Joubert’s intensely personal encounter with Winnie, which is all the more remarkable because, although he was a total stranger, she helped him through one of the darkest nights of his life.

On 7 March 1995, Joubert wrote in the newspaper
Beeld
about his 3 am encounter
with Winnie. It had happened, he said, many years before Nelson was released from prison and long before the Stompie Seipei case hit the headlines. Joubert was living in a flat in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, and one night he was overcome by ineffable loneliness. By 1 am he was still wide awake. His children were ‘far, far away’, his marriage was in tatters and he was ‘on the edge of the precipice’.

As befits any ‘good’ journalist, he wrote, he had a beer and began paging through his contact book. There was no one he could call. Finally, he came to a page on which there was a telephone number, but no name. He had no idea who it belonged to, or how long ago he had written it there. ‘To hell with it,’ he thought, ‘tonight I’m phoning a number with no name.’

A young woman answered politely and said cryptically: ‘She’s not here, she’ll call you back later. It sounds as though you need help.’ Joubert left his name and number, threw himself down on his bed and fell into a fitful sleep filled with grotesque nightmares.

‘Around 3 am that morning, the phone rang,’ wrote Joubert. ‘I had forgotten all about my daring call, and I was damn annoyed when I picked up the phone. A voice said: “Hello, did you call earlier?”