What might have been?

In the early 1970s, when Winnie Mandela was banned, few people outside South Africa had heard of her. Those who followed the country’s politics assiduously would have remembered her as the wife of the Rivonia trialist who once made a famous speech; and if they were watching the South African scene especially closely, they would have recalled Winnie’s own detention and trial in 1969 and 1970. 

But beyond these aficionados, few people knew of Winnie Mandela. Even her more famous husband, Nelson, had slipped from people’s minds; during the first half of the 1970s, his name was mentioned just once in the New York Times.

By June 1977, Winnie Mandela was famous all over the world. Journalists boarded flights for South Africa to meet her. Reporters were winning major awards for describing her life. In the great global newspapers, stories on what she wore and did and said appeared every week, at times every day. Heads of state were jotting down her name as an item for discussion in bilateral talks.

There is a hitherto untold story about why Winnie Mandela became so well-known so fast. The evidence is contained in a couple of documents in the South African National Archives. Two men, each in their own separate way, were out to curtail Winnie’s political career. One was Thabo Mbeki, a rising star in the exiled ANC. The other was Jimmy Kruger, apartheid South Africa’s minister of justice. Their respective missions backfired; between them, they made Winnie famous.

In March 1975, the ANC sent Thabo Mbeki to Swaziland to establish an underground presence in South Africa. Three months later, he and his comrade Albert Dhlomo wrote their first in situ report to the executive of their organisation. Among many other matters, they reported that Winnie Mandela, who was then confined to her Orlando West house by a banning order, had made contact.

At dawn on May 16 1977, police swooped on Winnie’s house, loaded her, her daughter Zindzi, her clothes and her furniture onto a truck, and dumped her in Brandfort. Within weeks, she was one of the most famous human beings in the world

“We are advising everybody to cut off all links with her,” they wrote. They were stringing her along, giving her “the impression that she is in fact not being cut off”. But this was just a holding operation “for what we feared is beginning to happen, i.e. that she is now insistently asking us for directives. We are of course dilly-dallying in as much as, if we did, that would then serve as justification for her going around claiming to be directly in touch with the executive.”

Why was Mbeki determined to cut off Winnie Mandela? In part it was because the police watched her so closely. An underground operative who made contact with her was thus in grave danger. She was too well known to play an active role in the underground Mbeki envisaged building.

But his concerns appear to have gone deeper than that. 

At the end of September 1975, the banning order that had been slapped on Winnie five years earlier expired. Renewing it would have been a formality, accomplished at the stroke of a pen. But minister of police, prisons & justice Jimmy Kruger did not renew Winnie’s banning order. He simply let it expire. From out of the blue, she was free to travel, and meet people, and, most crucially, to address crowds.

When he took this decision, Kruger was following advice. The security police were running an informer who managed to speak to Thabo Mbeki in Swaziland. Mbeki, the informer reported, believed that Winnie was talking to the security police; indeed, Mbeki was feeding her false information to see how the police would respond.

What an informer tells their handler is often untrue. But in this case, it is strongly credible. Uncertainty about Winnie went back some time. In 1968, Oliver Tambo, Mbeki’s mentor, confided to the struggle stalwart and future Mandela biographer Mary Benson that he mistrusted Winnie. Indeed, he had set a trap for her to test whether she passed on information to the security police. (Benson’s memo recounting this meeting with Tambo is in Anthony Sampson’s papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.)

In any event, the security police took their informer’s intelligence seriously and fed what he had said about Mbeki to Jimmy Kruger’s advisers. They, in turn, persuaded Kruger to let Winnie’s banning order lapse. If she was causing such trouble in her movement, they reasoned, why not let her loose?

Nine months later, on June 16 1976, Soweto’s schoolchildren rose in rebellion. Had Winnie still been banned, she would have played no role. As it was, she became a leading figure during the insurrection. She was militant and unforgiving, to be sure, but her judgment was often sober. Once, she stood on the back of a pickup truck and with a borrowed police megaphone urged thousands of people to abandon a march into the heart of white Johannesburg. She likely saved many lives that day.

It was because Winnie had figured so prominently in the uprisings that the next misjudgement was made. In early 1977, Jimmy Kruger resolved to ban Winnie to Brandfort, a hamlet in the Free State hinterland where she knew not a soul and spoke not a word of the language. 

At dawn on May 16 1977, police swooped on Winnie’s house, loaded her, her daughter Zindzi, her clothes and her furniture onto a truck, and dumped her in Brandfort. Within weeks, she was one of the most famous human beings in the world. Her plight was relayed in an endless string of stories in print and on broadcast news. US vice-president Walter Mondale immediately raised the matter of her welfare with prime minister BJ Vorster. She was a colossal embarrassment for the South African government.

It was a coup for the ANC. Its star had been waning. It had played no role in the uprisings of the previous year. All of a sudden, one of its own was on front pages across the globe. And Winnie played her part to perfection. The language she used was simple and honed. Over and again, she said the same thing. There will be majority rule in South Africa. The president will be the ANC’s Nelson Mandela. “We are fighting for a country which can only be led by him.”

What might have happened to Winnie Mandela had Mbeki not broadcast his misgivings about her? Her banning order would have been renewed in the spring of 1975; she would have played no part in the Soweto uprisings; she would not have been banished to Brandfort. That much can be reasonably surmised. But what would have become of her instead?

Counterfactuals are very hard. She was a formidable woman. Her husband was soon to become legendary, irrespective of the role she played in amplifying his name, and she would have become famous as his wife.  Her world renown would have been delayed, it would have been slighter, her story far less effective; but she would undoubtedly have found a place on the global stage.

But that is hardly the end of the story. What might have happened to her personally had she not been banished to Brandfort? She was there for seven nightmarish years. Her letters to friends written at that time exude a spirit of despair that is heartbreaking. Several people I have interviewed who knew her then speak of her exuding a sorrow so deep they came away in tears. She began drinking heavily there. She violently attacked a small child there. She did not cope well at all there.

Winnie Mandela was an immensely complicated person; putting down everything that happened next in her life to the pain inflicted by Brandfort is implausible. But what transpired when she returned to insurrectionary Soweto in August 1985 was ghastly and painful beyond words, and it is impossible to disconnect it from her harrowing time in Brandfort.

It is unnerving to think that little contingencies can so profoundly change a life. A young ANC leader speaking too loosely; a justice minister making a poor decision. From these momentary judgments came such hardship and tragedy and such soaring political success.

Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg (HarperCollins) is a mammoth work of research and a telling tale of truth. Here is an edited extract ...

It is always a shock to see what three decades have done to a person. The strapping, rambunctious man in the photographs — a man about to throw an arm around you and grin in your face — had long vanished when Nelson Mandela stepped back into the world. 

Within days, that face had donned an extraordinary assortment of masks: the wooden patriarch, the charming host, the delighted old man. That mouth would grimace as if it had not smiled in 70 years before opening into a Buddha-like glow.

The more recognisable the face became, the deeper the spirit beneath it seemed to hide.

This opacity was perhaps inevitable in a man who had ascended into myth. On his first full day out of prison he arrived in Johannesburg, which had long ago been his home, and what he brought came more from the realm of magic than from the mundane world.

Much of Soweto simply did not turn up for work. Nor did people stay at home. They converged on the streets in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate on an epic scale. This author, 19 years old, was in that endless crowd, unconcerned that he had lost his bearings and knew not where he was, for everywhere on this unworldly day was home.

Hours before Mandela’s plane touched down, and a full day before he was scheduled to speak, rumours swirled that he had arrived at Orlando Stadium and was about to address the crowds. Around the township, people dropped what they were doing and ran. By midafternoon, some 50,000 had gathered outside the stadium gates, Mandela still a thousand miles away.

He spoke at Soccer City the following afternoon, just six miles from his home. In an arena designed to seat 80,000, almost double that number filled the stands: people jammed the aisles, squeezed two to a seat; people climbed the stadium walls. Not a single uniformed official of the state was there, the vast crowd’s only shepherd a group of marshals assembled in haste. It did not seem remotely unsafe. That lives may be lost on a day like this, even by accident, seemed incongruous.

You could barely make him out as he walked into the stadium, a flash of silver hair way down on the pitch below; a few beats passed before the crowd clocked that it was him. And then a whistling arose. Within moments it had quickened into a deafening, alien, scarcely human sound, both shrill and unfathomably deep. It chopped up human movement, as if we were under a strobe. So electrically intense, so eerily out of body, it seemed to radiate from that single man below.

I had been to a hundred rallies over the previous couple of years, had absorbed the spirit of a hundred crowds. Nothing had come close to what happened in that moment — the suspension of time, the sheer density of energy, the sense that we were someplace outside our lives.

As the whistling died, the spirit left, quickly, unexpectedly, and everyone seemed suddenly alone. So much blood had spilled in the vicinity of this very stadium, month upon month, year upon year. The moment that collective feeling ebbed, one wondered whether it had existed at all.

********

Nelson had been told of Winnie’s lover during his final months in prison; he had written to her demanding that she get “that boy” out of the house. His name was Dali Mpofu, a prominent student activist and a trainee lawyer. He was also two generations younger than Nelson; his time on this earth coincided, almost exactly, with Nelson’s time in prison.

Mpofu and Winnie had apparently drawn close in the early months of 1989, precisely when Johannes Mabotha had vanished into the clutches of the police. The timing is no surprise. All her adult life Winnie had skirted solitude, her relation to another at a necessary fever pitch. And, as in so many of her previous relationships, this one involved another; Mpofu’s lover, the Wits University academic Teresa Oakley-Smith, was pregnant with Mpofu’s child. The upset that followed was another recurring feature of Winnie’s life.

Nelson knew that Winnie and Mpofu were still together shortly after he was released. When she arrived at Victor Verster those many hours late, her lover was in tow; he was among the group standing behind Nelson that evening on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. 

Winnie had sent her husband the starkest message: she was no Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return.

*******

Upon arriving in Johannesburg, Nelson and Winnie had planned to go directly to Soweto, a grand homecoming for the township’s most famous son. But by late morning, the crowd at their house had swelled to thousands and concerns were raised about whether it was safe.

An alternative was hastily arranged: a family near the private airport where their flight would land was asked to vacate their house. Nelson, Winnie, Zindzi and two grandchildren would sleep there the night.

By evening, the house was teeming with people: Nelson, Winnie, Zindzi and her children; Walter and Albertina Sisulu; various members of the reception committee that had been assembled to manage Nelson’s release.

The mood in the modest living room was tense. Among the members of the reception committee present that evening were Azhar Cachalia, Murphy Morobe, Sydney Mufamadi — men Winnie now regarded as mortal enemies. Nelson, some of those in that room recalled, was grimly silent.

Walter came to sit next to Nelson, and the two old men held hands. The spectacle of their intimacy imprinted itself in the memory of one of those present that evening: here was a deep, old friendship, of unabashed brotherly love, in a room filling with ill will.

Winnie kept demanding to go home. She did not want to sleep in the suburbs, she said; she wanted, at very least, to change her clothes. But from Soweto the messages kept coming that the crowd was still swelling, their homecoming unsafe.

Eventually, Winnie upped and left, and Zindzi and her children followed her. Nelson now worked with members of the reception committee on the speech he would give the following day. And then, one by one, they left, and the Sisulus, too, returned to Soweto, leaving Nelson to spend the night alone.