Mandela — pride and fall

Press, 1 March 1989, Page 21

Mandela — pride and fall

WINNIE MANDELA has paid the price of believing the tens of thousands who told her she was “The Mother of the Nation.” When she was once revered, she is now spurned. After a month of increasingly public controversy, South African antiapartheid organisations have cut her dead. Their members have been told to have no dealings with her and civil rights lawyers have been urged not to act for her. •

To their dismay, those who toppled her have found that even her fall from grace has eclipsed one of the anti-apartheid movement’s few recent triumphs. A three-week hunger strike by 300 political detainees — demanding they be charged or freed — has borne its first fruit.

Seven leading members of the banned United Democratic Front were released, some after 32 months in prison without trial. Several hundred more are due out in the coming weeks after negotiations between their lawyers and Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok.

These are significant achievments — and so is the principle conceded by Vlok of negotiating with extra-parliamentary leaders.

The immediate catalyst for the “Mandela crisis” was the abduc? tion of four youths on December 30 from a church-run refuge near the Mandela home in Soweto. One of them, Stompie Moeketsi, was later found dead, his throat slit and body battered. Mrs Mandela and her personal bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club, were linked to the killing in a statement from the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front. A doctor who. examined the kidnapped youth in the Mandela home was murdered soon afterwards. As the crisis reached its climax, a member of Mrs Mandela’s football team was beaten and stabbed to death in Soweto.

Police say they are investigating two murders possibly related to the Moeketsi killing. Civil rights lawyers, with greater access to the players in the brutal drama, believe the number is six or seven.

The crisis is the culmination of three years of mounting tension between Mrs Mandela and what Murphy Morobe, publicity secretary of the banned U.D.F., called “various sections of the oppressed people and the mass democratic movement as a whole.” «

The tension dates from Mrs Mandela’s return to Soweto in late 1985 in defiance of a government order banishing her eight years earlier to the tiny rural village of Brandfort. She brought with her impeccable revolutionary credentials. She was banned through most of the 1960 s and 1970 s and was one of the few local personalities to acknowledge her allegiance to the African National Congress during the organisation’s lean years in the decade f after the

destruction of its underground networks in 1963.

She spent almost three years behind bars for repeated breaches of her banning order or as a detainee held without trial. Her longest stretch, 17 months, was spent in solitary confine-

ment. The “young lions” who in 1985 were attempting — at the behest of the increasingly influential A.N.C.H. to render South Africa ungovernable, flocked to her to pay homage to what one described as "the A.N.C. flag in person.” 1:

She, in turn, empathised with their rash impatience and for-

gave them their excesses, publicly condoning “necklacing” at a time when the A.N.C. and local political organisations were feverishly working to stamp out the rash of political killings by

burning. It was the first time she bumped heads with other sections of the anti-apartheid movement. The second came with the construction of a $1.2 million mansion “fit for our president” in the middle of the ghettopoverty of Soweto 4 It remains

empty at Nelson Mandela’s insistence.

This was followed by the destruction of the original Mandela home by outraged pupils seeking rengence for the attempted rape of two schoolgirls by members of Mandela United.

A fortnight later came the abortive attempt to sell international rights to the family name to American businessman Robert Brown — averted only by her husband’s intervention. Mrs Mandela’s behaviour out of the limelight was causing

more serious tensions, however. In black townships, where police and the legal system are regarded with deep suspicion and the local authorities have little power or credibility, resident political figures must do more to retain their standing then hold out promises of a brighter, less hostile future.

They must shoulder the burdens of making the present more bearable for their neighbours and the supplicants who arrive daily on their doorsteps. They are the only available authority figures and are called on to mediate in domestic disputes, advise on big decisions and, often, to act as intermediaries in dealing with authority, as informal J.P.s for Soweto.

The changing style of black politics was fed by the growing importance of the trade union movement, where traditions of charismatic, authoritarian leadership had little support. Mrs Mandela never made the transition to the new, doorstep politics.

She was a veteran of the lonely political 19605, a media mega-star, and “she was treated like a queen and began to act like one,” said an activist. The brooding presence of the football team ensured her instructions were carried out. It took its cue from Mrs Mandela and acted as royal courtiers, demanding the fearful respect of much of Soweto. In the name of Mandela and dressed in tracksuits in the black, green and gold colours of the A.N.C., members forced their favours on often reluctant young women. On several occasions they forced their way into street committee meetings, demanding to be heard and obeyed.

When news of the December 30 abduction of Stompie and others flashed through Soweto, the full weight of the country’s battered opposition — solidly backed by the A.N.C. leadership in Lusaka and, reportedly, by Mandela himself — came down on Mrs Mandela. The team disbanded and Mrs Mandela has been pushed out into the cold. “Parliament censured the queen,” says a leading figure of the anti-apartheid movement. “And when the objected, it locked her in the palace.” Her fate was finally sealed when a statement on behalf of the “Mass Democratic Movement” roundly condemned her. Read by the U.D.F.'s Murphy Morobe, with Elijah Barayi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, at his side, there was little doubting its authority. But it is not yet clear that any court action will follow. The three youths abducted with Stompie Moeketsi have vanished — in hiding “for their own safety,” say friends. And no matter what their opinion of her, few others are likely to testify against the former Mother of the Nation on behalf of the apartheid Government.

Copyright London Observer

DAVID NIDDRIE reports from Johannesburg on how South Africa’s black megastar is having trouble coming to terms with common politics: