Winnie Mandela (49 page)

‘At that moment, I lost my temper completely and slammed the phone down. How dare a
meid
(yes, to my shame, many of us still thought in those terms in the years before 1990) phone me at three o’clock in the morning?’

A little later, wrote Joubert, his telephone rang again. Still angry, he picked up the receiver and heard the same woman, in an extremely calm voice, ask: ‘Are you Herman?’

Startled, he said yes, and the caller said she was Winnie Mandela, and she wanted to help him.

‘Why would you want to help me? I don’t need your help. Leave me alone,’ Joubert answered.

Unperturbed, Winnie asked him why he was so lonely. ‘Tell me. What is going on? Do you have children?’

What he told her was too personal to share with his readers, Joubert wrote, but, he said, ‘for the first time in months, someone showed genuine concern, and listened to what I had to say’.

Towards the end of the conversation, Winnie said she wanted to give him some good advice. ‘Go and make yourself a sandwich, get something into your tummy. Then drink a glass of warm milk, and go back to bed. Remember, you need to look after yourself. You are not alone in this world. There are people who care about you. We care.’

She made him promise that he would warm up some milk, and suggested he take an aspirin as well, wished him good night and gently replaced the receiver.

Joubert followed her advice, and for the first time in months, he got a good
night’s sleep. ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘as though the angels themselves were watching over me.’

After that night, his situation began to improve, and he never called Winnie again, though he sometimes wondered if he should. The lesson he learned from ‘Mrs Mandela’, he said, was that very often there was a simple and practical solution to problems that seemed insurmountable.

He ended his account by wishing Winnie well with the problems she faced, and by paraphrasing the closing line from one of dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s plays: It’s not only the bad things you do that rebound. Any good you do comes back as well.

Both Winnie and Addy Moolman were granted leave to appeal against their convictions and sentences, and at the time of writing, Winnie’s case was scheduled to come before the Appeal Court at the end of September 2003 – around the time of her sixty-ninth birthday. While the judges in Bloemfontein can base their decision only on legal grounds rather than merit, and while senior citizenship is no deterrent to imprisonment in South Africa, there have been indications that the state would not be crushed if, indeed, Winnie was to serve no jail time. Following her conviction, prosecutor Jan Ferreira consulted the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, before recommending an appropriate sentence. According to NDPP spokesman Sipho Ngwema, Ngcuka made it clear that he did not believe Winnie should go to prison, and a suspended sentence was proposed. But in the end, it was the magistrate’s prerogative to decide on a sentence he believed the crime warranted.

In July, Ngcuka confirmed publicly that, in his opinion, Winnie did not deserve to go to prison, adding that a ‘caring’ society did not send its grandmothers to jail. Furthermore, this particular granny had already ‘suffered more than most’, he said.

In a country that prides itself on the independence of its judiciary, Ngcuka’s comments were quite extraordinary, particularly since they coincided with a demand by South Africa’s 241 high court judges for more, rather than less, autonomy. Any action favouring Winnie that might be perceived as an attempt by government to interfere with the judicial process would almost certainly evoke a storm of criticism from the media and the legal fraternity – but 2004 is an election year, and the ANC is certainly aware that she still commands significant support among certain sectors of the voting population.

Immediately after her conviction, President Mbeki made it plain that the government would not interfere with the legal process, but, ultimately, he could be Winnie’s only hope of staying out of jail, should he choose to offer her a presidential pardon. But Mbeki finds himself in an invidious position in this regard. He has publicly humiliated her in the past, and she has accused his government of colluding to have her imprisoned. It is an open secret that they
dislike – if not despise – one another, and any move by Mbeki to circumvent an adverse decision by the Appeal Court would inevitably be seen as an election ploy.

On the other hand, should he do nothing and allow the law to take its course, the ANC could pay the price at the polls.

There is another factor that Mbeki would have to weigh, namely whether Winnie would even accept a presidential pardon if one were offered. On 20 May, Daniel Silke, an independent political analyst, wrote in the
Argus
that Winnie’s battles with the ANC were essentially over the authoritarian tendencies within the party, and Mbeki’s leadership. She has gone to prison before rather than compromise her principles, and the first decade of democracy has not broken the chains of poverty that tether the majority of South Africa’s black population to lives of misery and want. For Winnie, political freedom is meaningless unless it goes hand in hand with economic upliftment, and she believes that the government’s policies are perpetuating rather than relieving the lot of the downtrodden. Furthermore, her relationship with Mbeki is so damaged, and she is so stubborn, that she is quite capable of rejecting a pardon.

In the immediate aftermath of her trial, Winnie resigned as a member of parliament and vacated her seat on the ANC’s national executive committee. She also relinquished her post as president of the Women’s League. In May, the rift between Winnie and the ANC leadership was accentuated by the death of struggle stalwart Walter Sisulu, one of Nelson’s closest friends.

At his state funeral on 18 May, the chief mourners represented those with whom Sisulu had shared the front line during the struggle: his widow Albertina, Nelson Mandela, Epainette Mbeki (widow of Govan and mother of Thabo), Oliver Tambo’s widow Adelaide. Notably absent was Winnie, who had sacrificed and contributed as much as any of them, if not more.

But there have been signs that at least some of the ANC leaders are ready to welcome Winnie back into the fold, and she has been seen at various functions and events at their invitation. No longer a threat to those in power, she might well find herself being courted avidly in the run-up to the 2004 elections – provided she is not sent to jail.

Free for the first time in more than forty years of any formal political obligations, Winnie returned to her first and abiding love, welfare work, and was finally able to devote more time to her family. Those close to her say she has seldom seemed so well and so happy. But she is not yet ready to retire completely from public life and service to others. In the middle of August, she accepted an appointment to the jury of the South Asian Court of Women, sitting in Bangladesh. The court addresses the problems of violence against women, human trafficking in women and the issue of HIV-AIDS, and is convened by the Asian Women’s Human Rights Council in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s life has come full circle, and while her political career has been marked by as many troughs as peaks, she has more than fulfilled her father’s expectations as a caring and committed social worker and advocate of her people. For Winnie, providing food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless, consoling the bereaved and arranging funerals, helping one child tend a parent dying of AIDS and rescuing another from an abusive home, are all in a day’s work – except on Sundays, when she goes to church.

In a radio interview broadcast by SAfm on 11 February 2003, Winnie said her community involvement was not an extension of her role as a politician, but a result of the fact that she still saw herself primarily as a social worker and a mother.

‘It would be very sad if whatever I do is defined in terms of my ideological beliefs. I am a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, and I am all those before I am a member of the ANC. It is not the other way around,’ she said. ‘My family is my life. I don’t think I could have been who I am had I not defined myself in terms of being a parent, and whatever is around me is for my family, my children. My daughters are like sisters to me. I have been with them through the most difficult of times. And at the worst times they are my friends, they are my sisters, they are my everything. And then of course I have an army of grandchildren and I now have great-grandchildren. I am blessed in that sense. There is nothing better than that in life, to live for your family.’

During the 1980s, Winnie told journalist Hennie Serfontein that she had never revealed to anyone what really happened to her during her thirteen months of solitary confinement from May 1969, and did not think she ever would. ‘It was clear to see she still suffered a deep-seated distress from that experience,’ Serfontein said. ‘Knowing what the security police were like in those days, one can only guess at the scenario, imagine what might have happened when they were in control and a black woman was alone and isolated and totally at their mercy.’
¹

While the Truth Commission hearings were taking place in 1998, Deborah Matshoba, who had once been in prison with Winnie, said: ‘When I look around, I marvel at how we battle to be normal – and no one knows how shattered we are inside …’
²
Marinus Wiechers, political analyst and former professor of constitutional law at the University of South Africa, said that for years Winnie always added the same postscript when she sent him a Christmas card: Pray for me.
³

As she moves into the final phase of her momentous life, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela could ask for no more than the prayers of the nation she has served – perhaps not always wisely, but indubitably well.

‘I am the product of the masses of my country
and the product of my enemy.’

– Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

I
N WRITING THIS BOOK
I have had to draw from a small volume of published works about, or touching on, the life of Winnie Mandela. In the interests of uninterrupted reading I have kept the material as clear as possible of references and notes. The primary sources of information are listed in the bibliography, and I gratefully acknowledge the following specific references:

Prologue

1
. Noël Mostert,
Frontiers
, p. 604

Introduction

1
. EA Ritter,
Shaka Zulu
, p. 351

2
. Fatima Meer,
Higher Than Hope
, p. 81

3
. Noël Mostert,
Frontiers
, p. 268

Chapter 1

1
. Fatima Meer,
Higher Than Hope
, p. 85

2
. Fatima Meer,
Higher Than Hope
, p. 89

3
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, pp. 29, 30

Chapter 2

1
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 32

Chapter 5

1
. Nancy Harrison,
Winnie Mandela: Mother of a Nation
, p. 63

Chapter 10

1
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 75

Chapter 11

1
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 75

2
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 91

3
. Emma Gilbey,
The Lady
, p. 79

Chapter 15

1
. Nancy Harrison,
Winnie Mandela: Mother of a Nation
, p. 162

2
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, pp. xviii, xix

3
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 153

Chapter 17

1
. Winnie Mandela,
Part of My Soul Went with Him
, p. 59

2
. Conversation with the author, September 2002

Chapter 19

1
. Conversation with the author, July 2003

2
. Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
Special Report on Gender Hearings

3
. Conversation with the author, July 2002

Akhmatova, Anna.
Poems
. New York and London: WW Norton & Co, 1983.

Benson, Mary. ‘The Struggle in South Africa Has United All Races’.
Notes and Documents
, No. 7/84, August 1984.

Bezdrob, Anné Mariè du Preez.
In Spring the Dead Come Closer and Closer – War Memoir of a Peacekeeper
. (Unpublished).

Breytenbach, Breyten.
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
. Johannesburg: Taurus, 1984.

Buchanan-Gould, Vera.
Not Without Honour: The Life and Writings of Olive Schreiner
. Cape Town: Standard Press, 1949.

Callaghan, Karen. ‘Movement Psychotherapy with Adult Survivors of Political Torture and Organised Violence’,
The Arts in Psychotherapy
, 20: 1993. pp. 411–21.

Cameron, Trewhella.
Nuwe Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika in Woord en Beeld
. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1986.

Cataldi, Anna.
Letters from Sarajevo
. Longmead: Element Books Ltd, 1994.

De Kock, Eugene.
A Long Night’s Damage
(as told to Jeremy Gordin). Johannesburg: Centra, 1998.

Frederikse, Julie.
None But Ourselves
. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982.

Gilbey, Emma.
The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela
. London: Vintage, 1994.

Goldenberg, Myrna. ‘Testimony, Narrative, and Nightmare. The Experiences of Jewish Women in the Holocaust’, in Maurice Sacks (ed.),
Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture
. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.