Magnificent Winnie Mandela

Press, 30 March 1983, Page 13

Magnificent Winnie Mandela

An unusual little ceremony took place under a willow tree outside Mrs Winnie Mandela’s matchbox house in the remote country dorp of Brandfort, in the Orange Free State, recently. Mrs Helen Suzman, South Africa’s leading civil rights parliamentarian, flew there from Cape Town to give a bedspread to Mrs Mandela — and I flew from Johannesburg to report the presentation. International television and news agencies were on hand to record our arrival and interview us, for incredibly this seemingly mundane event was making world headlines involving all three of us. It was another example of the extraordinary talent the South African authorities have for making the worst of a bad job, for compounding their own initial acts of crassness into a publicity disaster. As when they banned Donald Woods to stop him protesting about the death of his friend Steve Biko in detention. In his case, the initial crassness was their long harassment of Mrs Mandela, particularly during her six years of banishment in this onehorse town in a hostile environment of white racialism. The intention of the security police was to send her into obscurity. Instead they have turned her into an international celebrity. The presentation of the bedspread epitomised this. It was a gift from 26 leading American senators and congressmen, who were disgusted by news of a security police raid on Mrs Mandela’s house while Mrs Suzman was visiting her last January.

During that raid, the police took away Mrs Mandela’s bedspread, which was in the African National congress colours of green, yellow and black. So the senators and congressmen sent her another in an old Pennsylvania Dutch design, which is supposed to keep evil spirits away. They autographed it, and Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, who organised the gesture, issued a statement explaining that it was intended “to express support for Mrs Mandela in her determined fight for freedom and dignity.” As for the interest in my own presence at the presentation, that stemmed from an act of crassness against myself only the previous day, when up to nine security policemen spent six hours pawing their way through my private papers and furnishings in my home and office, going like termites through desk drawers and bathroom cupboards and through my four-year-old toddler’s bedroom. This act of gross intimidation, as I regard it, was connected with Mrs Mandela too. I have written several reports about her over the past year, about her life in Brandfort and her extraordinary resilience and buoyancy, and it seems the authorities do not like the

impact these have made. One, written for the “Observer” 15 months ago, has resulted in more than £5OOO being contributed by readers to help Mrs Mandela travel to Cape Town to visit her husband in prison there. The justification this posse of hard-faced men — and one woman — gave me for ransacking my premises was that I had quoted Mrs Mandela in some of these reports, and quoting a banned person, which Mrs Mandela is, is forbidden under the security laws. But there is something strange here. For years, other foreign correspondents in South Africa have assumed this does not apply to newspapers published abroad and have regularly quoted banned people. And why now? Why this sudden heavy-handed reaction nearly a year after my alleged “crimes” were committed? Most of my colleagues in the foreign press corps believe it may not have been unconnected with the presentation of that bedspread. I wrote the report of the raid which led to the congressmen making their gesture of support. I arranged over the telephone with Mrs Suzman to accompany her to Brandfort for the handing-over and, this being a country where newspapermen take it for granted that their telephones are tapped, my colleagues concluded that the raid on me the day before was intended to dissuade me from going. That is why they wanted to see whether I would be there and whether the little ceremony would go ahead as planned. So it came about that what would have been a relatively minor story was magnified tenfold in the global attention it received. The first time t ever saw Mrs Mandela was on the steps of the Pretoria Supreme Court on December 6, 1964. Her husband Nelson, leader of the banned African National Congress, had just been sentenced to life plus five years imprisonment. That is a hell of a sentence, particularly when you know the South African Government’s policy is not to grant any remission of sentence to political prisoners. Life means life. The five years was for a charge additional to the main one. I fully expected to see a shaken Mrs Mandela emerge from the

courthouse with the buzzing crowd. But no. She appeared on the steps wearing a magnificent full-length red-ochre robe of her Tembu tribe with a matching “doek” wrapped around her head, and she flashed a smile that dazzled. The effect was regal and almost triumphant, performed in the heart of the Afrikaner capital in her moment of anguish, and the crowds of Africans, thronging church Square with Paul Kruger’s statue in the middle, loved it. They cheered, perhaps the only time black people have ever summoned the courage to cheer in that place. I did not see Mrs Mandela again for 17 years, but the memory of that moment remained for its display of sheer buoyancy of spirit. I began moving into desk-bound executive jobs on my newspaper, eventually becoming editor of the “Rand Daily Mail,” while Mrs Mandela was subjected to a series of severely restrictive banning orders. One knew what was happening to her, of course. The stories of security police harassment kept coming in. And the pictures. Again and again these showed that irrepressible smile. Winnie Mandela has always been a great beauty and, like Sophia Loren, her looks have endured well into her forties. She also has a great sense of dress and of occasion and these things add to the impact of her vivid personality. So when the proprietors of the “Rand Daily Mail” decided they had had enough of me as editor, and I found myself working as a foreign correspondent for the “Observer” and the “Washington Post,” Winnie Mandela seemed a natural

story to do early in my new career. By then, she had been banished to her matchbox house in Brandfort, number 802 in the forlorn little black “location” behind a kopje out of sight from the white dorp. Three minute rooms, no electricity, no running water, no bathroom. How on earth did a sophisticated woman of style and cosmopolitan outlook make out in such circumstances? I travelled to Brandfort to find out. It was the beginning of a reporter-subject relationship that was to yield much good copy and expand into a personal friendship that includes my whole family. She has swept up my toddler to her ample African bosom and enjoined my wife to take care of me and not let the nasties get me. That is the nature of the woman. As Mrs Suzman told reporters under the willow tree this month: “The thing about Winnie is that, despite all she has gone through, her concern is always for other people. Whenever she asks for anything, it is on behalf of someone else, never herself.” Bishop Desmond Tutu, the general secretary of the Council of Churches, once remarked sadly: “What a tragedy that someone like Winnie should be rotting away in Brandfort.” But he is wrong. She is not rotting. She is blossoming in her desert. That is what I have found so irresistibly appealing about her.

She moved into Brandfort and, through sheer force of personality, began smashing down its petty segregation practices, marching into the white side of the little supermarket and the liquor store and trying on clothes in the town’s only dress shop. The locals were nonplussed; they didn’t know what to do. Now they have grown grudgingly to respect her. She strides through their streets in her long gowns like a queen. She is their only celebrity. Piet De Waal, the town’s only lawyer, was appalled when Winnie’s Johannesburg lawyer reminded him that Law Society rules

obliged him to attend to her affairs. He hot-footed it to the police station to tell the security branch his visits to her would be strictly in the line of duty, and they should not think he had any personal affinity with her. But the personal affinity has grown. Today, the whole De Waal family regard Winnie as a close friend, although Piet still votes for the National Party and plays golf regularly with Kobie Koetee, the Minister of Justice who imposed the latest banning order on her. She corresponds with their teenaged daughter, now living in Cape Town, and often drops in at the De Waal home to chat to Piet’s wife, Adele. Her impact has been no less on the black “location”. She has organised a mobile clinic to tour the district, she runs a babycare centre, she has taught the miser-ably-paid workers who live there how to grow vegetables and how to demand better wages. She has even organised a couple of strikes. All this has provided the material for what I have written, and because it is such a human story of triumph over adversity and meanness, it evoked a remarkable response. Mrs Marjorie Ruck, a widow of Lyme Regis, sent £250 to enable Winnie to see Nelson in jail and that started the spontaneous travel fund. I accompanied her on the trip paid for by Mrs Ruck. One would have thought it would be a traumatic experience for a woman to spend a rare half-hour with her husband, knowing he is locked away for life, unable to touch him through the thick glass partition and having to talk through a telephone connection. If so, Mrs Mandela hid her emotions. She emerged from the visit with that dazzling smile, pronounced Nelson well and in good heart, and promptly suggested all manner of madcap adventures, if only we could shake off the security police car that was tailing us to ensure she did not deviate from the route laid down in the permit allowing her to leave Brandfort. She is, of course, a political person. And it is doubtful whether all the congressmen who signed the bedspread would share her Leftleaning views, which the South African Government regards as communist, but she has become a symbol of African resistance to apartheid, and that is what drew their response. For me she is also the symbol of all the African women of this country, who shoulder so much of the burden of oppression and poverty and who never complain but soldier on carrying huge loads on their heads, radiating warmth and love and holding their families and often whole communities together in the face of adversities that would crush anyone else. Because I have responded to what she is and been drawn into her orbit, I have now felt the whiplash of the official malevolence that surrounds her all the time. She has felt it nearly all her life, I for only a day, yet when we met this month her only concern was for me and my family. I felt ashamed.

Fighter for “freedom and dignity . . .

ALLISTER SPARKS, award-winning South Africa correspondent of the “Observer,” whose home was raided by security police this month, reports on the harassment that Winnie Mandela has turned against her tormentors.

Earned grudging respect of locals .