Revealed: Why Nelson Mandela never
forgave ex-wife, Winnie
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Nelson Mandela was laid to rest on 15th
Dec 2013. John Carlin in his new book
‘Knowing Mandela,’ reveals why he never
forgave the former wife who has featured
through out the 10 day mourning period
and even in the official programme.
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.”