Journalist & author John Carlin, in his
new book “Knowing Mandela: A
Personal Portrait” has talked about
the relationship between the late
Madiba and his ex-wife Winnie
Mandela, and why the late icon
never forgave her.
Read an excerpt from the book
below.
TWO weeks before Nelson Mandela’s
release from prison in February 1990
I went to see his wife, Winnie, at her
home in Diepkloof Extension, the
posh neighbourhood of Soweto
where the handful of black people
who had contrived to make a little
money resided. It was known as
Baverly Hills to Soweto’s other
presidents.
Winnie’s home, funded by foreign
benefactors, was a two-floor, three-
bedroom house with a garden and a
small swimming pool. The height of
extravagance by black standards, it
would have more or less met the
aspirations of the average white,
middle-class South African.
Zindzi, Winnie’s slim and attractive
second daughter, was 29 but looked
younger in a yellow T-shirt and
denim dungarees. It was 9.30 a.m.
and she was in the kitchen frying
eggs. She invited me in and started
chatting as if we were old friends.
The truth was that I had not
scheduled an interview with Winnie.
I had just dropped in to try my luck.
But Zindzi saw nothing wrong in me
giving it a shot.
Mum, she said, was still upstairs and
would probably be a while. As I
hovered about waiting (and, as it
turned out, waiting, and waiting
friends of Zindzi wandered in for
coffee and a chat. Completing the
South African middle-class picture, a
small, wizened maid in blue overalls
padded inscrutably around.
Finally, Winnie made her entrance,
Taller than I had expected, very
much the grande dame, she
displayed neither surprise nor
irritation at my presence in her
home. When I said I would like to
interview her, she responded with a
sigh, a knowing smile and a glance at
her watch. I said all I would need was
half an hour.
She thought a moment,
shrugged her shoulders and said:
“OK.
But you will have to give me a
little time.” She still had to put the
finishing touches to her morning
toilette.
The picture presented to me by
mother, daughter, friends and
cleaning lady was of a domesticity so
stable and relaxed that, had I not
been better informed, I would never
have imagined the depths of trauma
that lucked beneath.
Winnie had been continually
persecuted by agents of the
apartheid state during the 1970s and
1980s; she had borne the anguish of
hearing her two small daughters
screaming as the police broke into
her home and carted her off to jail;
she had spent more than a year in
solitary confinement. Trusting that
her confused and stricken children
would be cared for by friends; she
had been banished and placed under
house arrest far away. But she was
back, her circumstances altered
dramatically for the better now that
Mandela’s release was imminent.
One hour after her first entrance, she
majestically reappeared, Cleopatra
still needed her morning coffee, and
motioned me to wait in her study
while she withdrew into the kitchen.
I had five minutes to take in the
surroundings.
On a bookshelf there was a row of
framed family portraits, a Christmas
card and a birthday card. Only a
month had passed since Christmas,
but nearly four since Winnie had
turned 53. I could not resist taking a
closer look.
I opened the Christmas card, which
was enormous, and immediately
recognised Nelson Mandela’s large,
spidery handwriting. “Darling, I love
you. Madiba,” It said.
Madiba was the
tribal name by which he liked to be
known to those close to him. On the
birthday card he had written the
same words.
If I had not known better I might
have imagined the cards had been
sent by an infatuated teenager.
Once
we began our interview. Winnie
took on just such a role, playing the
tremulous bride-to-be, convincing
me she was in a state of nervous
excitement at the prospect of
rekindling her life’s great love.
Close up she had, like her husband,
the charisma of the vastly self-
confident, and there was a
coquettish, eye-fluttering sensuality
about her. It was not hard to imagine
how the young woman who met
Mandela one rainy evening in 1957
had struck him, as he would later
confess, like a thunderbolt.
The Mandela the world saw wore a
mask that disguised his private
feelings, presenting himself as a
fearless hero, immune to ordinary
human weakness. His effectiveness
as a leader hung, he believed, on
keeping that public mask from
cracking. Winnie offered the greatest
test to his resolve. During the
following years the mask cracked
only twice. She was the cause both
times.
The first was in May 1991. She had
just been convicted at
Johannesburg’s Rand Supreme Court
of assault and accessory to
kidnapping a 14-year-old black boy
called Stomple Moeketsi, whom her
driver had subsequently murdered.
Winnie had been led to believe,
falsely as it turned out, that the boy
had been working as a spy for the
apartheid state.
Winnie and Mandela walked
together down the steps of the
grand court building. Once again the
actress, she swaggered to the street,
right fist raised in triumph. It was not
clear what she could possibly have
been celebrating, except perhaps
the perplexing straight off to jail and
would remain free pending an
appeal.
Mandela had a different grasp of the
situation. His face was grey, his eyes
were downcast.
The second and last time was nearly
a year later. The setting was an
evening press conference hastily
summoned at the drab headquarters
of the ANC. He shuffled into the room,
sat down at a table and read from a
piece of paper, beginning by paying
tribute to his wife.
“During the two decades I spent on
Robben Island she was an
indispensable pillar of support and
comfort… My love for her remains
undiminished.” There was a general
intake of breath. Then he continued:
“We have mutually agreed that a
separation would be the best for
each of us… I part from my wife with
no recriminations. I embrace her
with all the love and affection I have
nursed for her inside and outside
prison from the moment I first met
her.”
He rose to his feet. “Ladies and
gentlemen. I hope you ‘ll appreciate
the pain I have gone through and I
now end this interview.”
He exited the room, head-bowed,
amid total silence.
Mandela’s love for Winnie had been,
like many great loves, a kind of
madness, all the more so in his case
as it was founded more on a fantasy
that he had kept alive for 27 years in
prison than on the brief time they
had actually spent together. The
demands of his political life before
he was imprisoned were such that
they had next to no experience of
married life, as Winnie herself would
confess to me that morning.
“I have never lived with Mandela,”
she said. “I have never known what
it was to have a close family where
you sat around the table with
husband and children. I have no such
dear memories. When I gave birth to
my children he was never there,
even though he was not in jail at the
time.”
It seemed that Winnie, who was 22
to his 38 when they met, had cast a
spell on him. Or maybe he cast a
spell on himself, needing to
reconstruct those fleeting memories
of her into a fantasy of tranquility
where he sought refuge from the
loneliness of prison life.
His letters to her from Robben Island
revealed romantic, sensual side to
his nature that no one but Winnie
then knew. He recalled “the electric
current” that “flushed” through his
blood as he looked at her
photograph and imagined their
caresses.
The truth was that Winnie had had
several lovers during Mandela’s long
absence.
In the months before his
release, she had been having an
affair with Dali Mpofu, a lawyer 30
years her junior and a member of her
defence team. She carried on with
the affair after Mandela left prison.
ANC members close to Mandela knew
that was going on, as they did about
her frequent bouts of drunkenness. I
tried asking them why they did not
talk to Mandela about her
waywardness, but I was always met
by frosty stares. Winnie became a
taboo subject within the ANC during
the two years after Mandela left
prison. Confronting him with the
truth was a step too far for the
freedom fighters of the ANC.
His impeccably courteous public
persona acted as a coat of armour
protecting the sorrowing man
within. But there came a point when
Mandela could deceive himself, or
the public, no longer. Details of the
affair with Mpofu were made luridly
public in a newspaper report two
weeks before the separation
announcement.
The article was a devastating,
irrefutable expose of Winnie’s affair.
It was based on a letter she had
written to Mpofu that revealed he
had recently had a child with a
woman whom she referred to as “a
white hag.” Winnie accused Mpofu of
“running around f***** at the
slightest emotional excuse … Before
I am through with you, you are going
to learn a bit of honesty and sincerity
and know what betrayal of one’s
love means to a woman …
Remember always how much you
have hurt and humiliated me … I
keep telling you the situation is
deteriorating at home, you are not
bothered because you are satisfying
yourself every night with a woman. I
won’t be your bloody fool, Dali.”
In private, Mandela had already
endured quite enough conjugal
torture. I learnt of one especially
hurtful episode from a friend of
Mandela some years later. Not long
after the end of her trial, Winnie was
due to fly to America on ANC-related
business. She wanted to take Mpofu
with her, and Mandela said she
should not, Winnie agreed not to,
but went with him anyway. Mandela
phoned her at her hotel room in
New York, and Mpofu answered the
phone.
On the face of it, Mandela was a man
more sinned against than sinning,
but he did not see it that way. It was
his belief that the original sin was to
have put his political cause before
his family.
Despite everything, Mandela
believed when he left prison that he
would find a way to reconcile
political and family life. Some years
after his separation from Winnie, I
interviewed his close friend Amina
Cashalia, who had known him since
before he met Winnie.” His one great
wish,” she told me, “was that he
would come out of prison, and have
a family life again with his wife and
the children. Because he’s a great
family man and I think he really
wanted that more than anything
else and he couldn’t have it.”
His fallout with Winnie only
deepened the catastrophe,
contaminating his relationships with
other family members, among them
his daughter Zindzi. She was a far
more complicated character than I
had imagined when I chatted with
her cheerfully in her mother’s
kitchen over fried eggs. At that very
moment, in late January 1990, her
current lover, the father of her third
child, was in a prison cell. Five days
later he hanged himself.
Zindzi was very much her mother’s
daughter, inheriting her capacity to
dissemble as well as her strength of
personality. The unhappiness and
sheer chaos that she would endure
in her own private life, a mirror of
her mother’s, found expression in a
succession of tense episodes with
her father after he was set free.
One of them took place before
friends and family on the day of her
marriage to the father of her fourth
child, six months after her parents’
separation.
It was a glittering
occasion at Johannesburg’s
swankiest hotel, with Zindzi radiant
in a magnificent pearl and sequin
bridal dress. It seemed to be a
joyous celebration; in truth, it
provided further evidence of the
Mandela family’s dysfunctions.
One of the guests seated near the
top table was Helen Suzman, the
white liberal politician and good
friend of Mandela. She told me that
he went through the ceremonial
motions with all the propriety one
would have expected. He joined in
the cutting of the wedding cake and
played his part when the time came
to give his speech, declaring, “She’s
not mine now,” as fathers are
supposed to do. He did not, however,
mention Winnie in the speech. When
he sat down, he looked silent and
cheerless.
Maybe he had had time to reflect in
the intervening six months on the
depth of Winnie’s betrayal. For more
details had emerged of her love
affairs and of the crimes of the gang
of young men “Winnie’s boys,” as
they were known in Soweto – who
played the role of both bodyguards
and courtly retinue. They had killed
at least three young black men,
beaten up Winnie’s perceived
enemies and raped ;young girls.
Whether Mandela chose to realise it
at the time, he was the reason that
Winnie never ended up going to jail.
Some years later, the minister of
justice and the chief of national
intelligence admitted to me that
they had conveyed a message to the
relevant members of the judiciary to
show Winnie leniency.
Mandela’s mental and emotional
wellbeing were essential to the
success of the negotiations between
the government and the ANC; for him
to bow out of the process could have
had catastrophic consequences for
the country as a whole. Jailing
Winnie would be too grave a risk.
Bizarrely, one of the guests at
Zindzi’s wedding, prominently
positioned near the top table, was
the “white hag” Winnie had derided
in her letter to Mpofu, and she was
sitting next to a man I know to be
another former lover of Winnie’s.
It also would have been difficult for
Mandela to miss the menacing
glances Winnie cast towards the
“hag” although I hope he missed the
moment when Winnie brushed past
her and hissed at her former lover:
“Go on! Take her ! Take her!”
When the band struck up and the
newly married couple got up to
dance, Mandela, who had been
standing up, turned his back on
Winnie and returned stiffly to the
top table. Grim-faced for the rest of
the night, he treated Winnie as if she
did not exist. At one point, Suzman
passed him a note. “Smile, Nelson,”
it said.
In October 1994, five months after
Mandela had become president, I
spoke to a friend of his, one of the
few people in whom he confided the
details of his marital difficulties. The
friend leant over to me and said: “It’s
amazing. He has forgiven all his
political enemies, but he cannot
forgive her.”
During their divorce proceedings a
year and a half later, he made his
feelings towards Winnie public at
the Rand Supreme Court, where he
had accompanied and supported
Winnie during her trial in 1991.
As his lawyer would tell me later, he
was arbitrarily generous about
sharing his estate, giving Winnie
what was more than fair. But he
made his feelings bluntly known in
the divorce hearing. Standing a few
feet away from her, he addressed
the judge, saying: “Can I put it
simply, my lord? If the entire
universe tried to persuade me to
reconcile with the defendant. I
would not … I am determined to get
rid of this marriage.”
He did not shirk from describing
before the court the disappointment
and misery of married life after he
returned from prison. Winnie, he
explained, did not share his bed
once in the two years after their
reunion. “I was the loneliest man,”
he said.
The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh
Clough wrote about the “terrible
notions of duty” that boost the
public figure but can stunt the
private man. It is impossible to avoid
concluding that Mandela was far less
at ease in private than in public life.
In the harsh world of South African
politics he had his bearing; in the
family sphere he often seemed
baffled and lost.
Happily for his country, one did not
drain energy from the other. Thanks
to a kind of self-imposed apartheid
of the mind, personal anguish and
the political drive inhabited
separate compartments and ran
along parallel lines.
As out of control as she could be in
her personal affairs, she possessed a
lucid political intelligence and a
mature understanding of where her
husband’s priorities lay, even if she
was deluded in attributing some of
his qualities to herself.
“When you lead the kind of life we
lead, if you are involved in a
revolutionary situation, you cease to
think in terms of self,” she said. “The
question of personal feelings and
reactions dues not even arise,
because you are in a position where
you think solely in terms of the
nation, the people who have come
first all your life.”
Your views are most welcome...
EXAMPLES OF NOISES IN MARRIAGE:
1. Resentment
2. Nagging
3. Hostility etc
