Jonny Steinberg
Jonny Steinberg, Author of ‘Winnie and Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage’ in Discussion with Judge Dennis Davis
Jonny Steinberg - Author of ‘Winnie and Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage’ - in Discussion with Judge Dennis Davis
Good evening, good afternoon to everybody. It’s a pleasure to introduce Jonny Steinberg. I think it’s no stretch of imagination, no question about it, he is our, that is South Africa’s, best writer in relation to a whole range of nonfiction. And so brilliant an author is he that it’s culled my heart sometimes to divide between the fiction and the nonfiction because these books have a fluency and an eloquence, which is staggering. Many of you may have read some of them, “Midlands,” “The Number, "A Man of Good Hope.” In fact, in relation to, “The Number,” it’s very much on my mind at the moment because having been asked by the premier of the Western Cape to chair a commission into gangs, I’ve recommending to all of my team that they read, “The Number,” to start with. But of course, the book that we have to discuss this evening is this absolutely magisterial text, “Winnie & Nelson.” This is the book. I would sincerely hope, if you haven’t got it, that you should rush out and get it afterwards. And I’m quite sure after our conversation with Jonny, you will definitely do that. Just one final caveat, as a lawyer, I can’t possibly cover everything of this extraordinary book in one hour, so I’m going to, as it were, try to pick out some themes that seem to be particularly intriguing. And of course, you’re very welcome to ask questions on the chat line. Let me start. Jonny, it’s interesting, the first paragraph you say, “The story that they were to tell about their courtship, the story, both of them were to tell, Nelson and Winnie alike, over and over again, told so often they appear to have forgotten that it was not entirely true, went like this.” And then you document it. Is there a sense in which the whole of their relationship was sort of, had its own independent narrative, which was wrenched from the actual facts?
Thanks, Dennis, and Dennis, thank you for doing this. It’s a real pleasure to be talking to you. And it’s a privilege
No, no, likewise.
to be in this forum, so hello to everybody. Yes, I mean, you’ve hit the nail on the head. From the very beginning, their marriage had two lives. And one was a private relationship between two lovers and then parents, but the other was a public display. And I think from the very beginning, they understood the massive public potential that they had as an icon, as a celebrity marriage. Maybe not consciously at first, but intuitively, from the beginning, understood that their marriage could carry huge, huge symbolic weights that have two glamorous, beautiful, celebrity-like Black people seen together, carried massive political import. They absolutely understood that from the starts and they developed a myth about themselves from the start.
Could I just ask that in relation? Winnie was incredibly young when she married Nelson. I think 21, or whatever the case may be. Did she have that political nous right at the beginning?
You know, it’s hard to pin that down, but there’s a really strong sense that from her late teens, she absolutely understood that she was an incredibly powerful person. She understood that her gender blocked her from going where she wanted to go. It had quite a lot to do with her childhood. She came from a very prestigious Transkei family, quite a rough childhood in a way. Her family was monstrously ambitious and had 11 children, and were pretty clear that there’d be winners and losers among the children. And she absolutely knew that she had to be seen by her father in order not to drown and get lost, you know, to be the one who was chosen. And, you know, at the end, she was incredibly strong and chosen over some of her brothers. So, I think from early, on she had ambition wired into her, and she did not think the fact that she was a girl, and then a woman, should get in her way. And in that way, she was absolutely extraordinary from the beginning.
But just out of interest, whilst I’m on that, her father didn’t want her to marry Nelson.
He did not. Her father ended up-
Was he like a good Yiddish father who said, “He’s not a good enough for my daughter, or was there something else there?
Well, part of it was that he was twice her age and had three children, but more important to Winnie’s father is that he was becoming a big deal in the Transkei administration. He was becoming an ally of the Apartheid state. And she absolutely knew that bringing Nelson Mandela, of all people home, was crushing to her father. And I think that’s partly why she was attracted to Nelson. She had this incredibly fierce fighting relationship with everybody, including with her father. So, you know, her father chose her among his children. And she went along, but then she fought him back, and fought him back by bringing home Nelson Mandela. And she was like that with everybody. She was fierce, she read power, she fought, you know, from the smallest personal relationships to the big ones.
So, just talking about Nelson Mandela for the moment, I mean, in the early part of the book where you describe him as somebody who had his suits tailored by the tailor who all the wealthy people went to, and he drove his fancy Oldsmobile. He seemed very much a man about town rather than this great heroic leader that we were going to have in South Africa. Or was that quite apparent early on that he was going to be the man to be the central figure in the South African historical tapestry over the half century, or more?
You know, in the 1940s and ‘50s, it was only apparent to one person, his mentor, Walter Sisulu, but most other people thought that he was much too frivolous to be a leader. He was far too glamorous. He was far too attentive to whether cameras were on him. He overdressed. His car was too fancy. He behaved a bit more like a sports star than a serious political figure. And it was only later in the late '50s, even perhaps early '60s, that people began to see a gravitas in him in a sense that he really was a powerful leader, but the realisation came late to a lot of people.
What was it about him that Sisulu 'cause you documented in the book, and I’m trying to just tease this out, what was it about that when Sisulu first met him, he knew he was the man?
It’s hard to say, but I think part of the key is that Sisulu also came from a high-blood Transkei family and had an intuitive sense of what it meant to be a royal. And Nelson Mandela, in a strange way, was more royal than royal. You know, his father died when he was 11, 12 years old. And he was made, unexpectedly made a ward of the paramount of the Thembu, and was thrust into this aristocratic world having not grown up in it, and in a way, really had to act the role, had to act the aristocratic royal role in order to survive there. And so, everything about being a Transkei Royal was exaggerated with him. And I think that Sisulu just saw this young man, tall, 6'2” broad shoulders, walking in with his exaggerated pride, and just had this sort of, came from the world where he could read what that might mean to masses of people.
Extraordinary level of insight. Just on Sisulu, very underrated in a way, in our history. I mean, he seems to be, when you read your book. Obviously there was enormous closeness between him and Mandela throughout, but he seemed to be somebody who was really very, very important in all sorts of ways. If you’re an historian, you know that, but just in the public domain seemed to have got less importance than perhaps he deserved.
Well, he’s really one of those people whose intelligence and wisdom is quite inexplicable. I mean, he was barely educated. He had seven, or eight years of schooling. He never read very comfortably. And yet he had this incredible independence, wisdom, insight, intelligence, and most important of all, no ego. You know, he knew that he wasn’t Nelson Mandela. He was short and squat and didn’t look good in front of a camera and didn’t want to be in front of a camera, but he wanted to put Nelson in front of one. And so, he had all the qualities of a quiet, effective, attentive kingmaker.
So just, now just dealing with Nelson and Winnie, as you rightly say, they spent just about two-odd years together before they were parted for all sorts of reasons. It appears from your book that both of them, as it were, were not exactly shy about having other relationships. I mean, I find that really astonishing, particularly interesting that, I mean, you’ve got, in various parts of the book, really kind of searing accounts of this. The account that struck me was the one, I think, with Samson in relation to… Well, I wonder whether you’d just sort of tell us all about that?
Well, you know, in the story that Winnie and Nelson told for the public about their marriage, it’s a very conventional story. You know, she’s 20 years old, he’s in his late 30s, she’s unknown and beautiful, he’s powerful, famous, and he sweeps her her feet. She’s the young, naive, beautiful woman attracted to a powerful man, he’s attracted to her beauty, and it’s an old story. But the real story is that she’s much more powerful, and wily, and interesting than that. When she meets Nelson Mandela, she is already engaged to another man, a man called Barney Sampson, also young, also beautiful, fashionable, and she plays them off against each other for two years. She’s seeing them both, she’s promising both of them that she will marry them. You know, she literally… She stays at a hostel for girls, Nelson parks his car at one end of the street, Samson at the other, and she darts between the two cars. You know, she’s in a very, very sexist mid-century world, and she quickly learns that her sexuality, her seductiveness, her beauty is, is one of the few things at her disposal that can really make her powerful. You know, she really gathers what she can use. And as a woman, as a young, young woman at that time, that’s really all she had. And the fact that she, at such a young age, could use it so effectively, is quite remarkable.
But he was a philanderer himself. There’s a wonderful story that you tell, I’m going sort of forward in order to go back, where they’re at Rivonia and he prepares a meal for her. And you document the fact that she thinks he’s never cooked in her life, in his life before. He’s obviously been taught this by some lover of his. So, were they both suspicious of each other in that sense?
Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting counterfactual to wonder what would’ve happened to their marriage if he had not gone to jail. And I suspect-
Yes.
it wouldn’t have lasted. You know, they were both prone to sleeping with others, to betraying one another. That’s how they were in the world. You know, his first marriage ended, in part, because of him sleeping with several other women and the humiliation of his wife when he did that. The fact that the whole world knew that, I mean, it was a running joke in the ANC, and later, PAC circles that Nelson Mandela was, you know, the great philanderer. And it humiliated his first wife. You know, and one of the most interesting things about Nelson Mandela is that, you know, in the '50s, he was not a nice man. You know, he treated his wife badly. You know, he loved his children, but he was never there for them. He was the sort of person who lived this high-octane life in the present. He was always moving, he was always out. I think he found domestic life very boring and had to live this dangerous, frenetic, constantly active life, you know, seldom seeing the people he was meant to be caring for. And it’s really extraordinary to watch him reflect on this when he’s in prison. You know, prison really, really hurt him. To be so alive, to live so in the present, and to be locked away, it’s harsher on somebody like him than on most people. And when he is older and he looks back with such remorse at who he was, that’s when I really begin to feel for him. You know, not just that he wasn’t a very nice person in the '50s, but what that did for him later.
And just, so just talking about his, in that early period, Mandela’s always heralded, in the general kind of narrative, as somebody who amazingly transcended all these racist hurdles that had been placed in his, obstacles that had been placed in his way. Early on, you talk about two instances, which I know he kind of mentioned at various times. One was of course, when he was working for Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman and this question of the new cups that were brought, basically separate for Black people. The second is a disgraceful behaviour that he received at the hands of Bobby Harlow at Wits. So early on, I mean, you’re welcome to explicate on that, but it seemed to me that he, I mean, he really was subjected to, as much as he was this extraordinary man about town in the imperious way, he was subjected to those egregious forms of racism that the vast majority of Black people suffered right through.
Yeah so, and the fact that he came from aristocratic stock, that he was a proud man that the Black people around him when he was growing up had enormous gravitas and dignity, and were treated with the utmost respect, meant that he, when he arrived in Johannesburg in his early 20s and understood for the first time in his life what it meant to be Black in a white world, he was shocked, deeply offended, and horrified. And there’s no question that that’s what turned him to politics so vociferously. It was a sense of very, very deep offence. But in a way it also, I think, animated his upward mobility. You know, he very quickly became a lawyer. And being a Black lawyer protected him from racism in many ways. You know, partly the suit he wore, but the fact that he could drive a car and was not exposed to public transport where day-to-day racism happens. You know, the fact that he was one of literally a handful of Black South Africans who earned a living independently and didn’t have to work for white people. I think if you look at his upward trajectory and, you know, becoming a lawyer as fast as he can, joining the top of the city elite as fast as he can, a lot of it was animated by trying to escape that racism that he experienced in his early years in Johannesburg.
But that racism clearly was there, I mean, the feeling was there throughout. He might have-
It absolutely was. So, a quick story about that, which I think shows it very, very vividly.
Yes, yes.
I think it was in 1946 that he walked into a classroom at Wits Law School.
That’s what I wanted to ask you, yes, please. Yeah
He was the only Black person in his year. So, he walks in, the only Black person, everyone looks up, he sits down in a chair, and the student sitting next to him gets up and goes to sit at the other end of the room. Watching this, is a student called Jules Brody, who, you know, Mandela and he remained friends the rest of their lives.
His famous council, yeah.
Fast forward 50 years, Mandela is president of South Africa. It’s 1996, he’s at a big function, he sees Jules Brody, calls him over and says, “Jules, I want you to organise the reunion of our law class.” And then he says, remember, this is 50 years later and he is now president, “Do you remember that man who got up when I sat down?”
Yeah, Manie De Klerk.
“I do remember.” And Mandela said, “Invite him. I want to talk to him.” And it’s an amazing story because it shows, not only that he remembered all those years, but he had to exact vengeance. I mean, De Klerk was dead, so Mandela never got his vengeance. It was going to be a quiet vengeance. It was going to say, “I remember, and I forgive you,” but it just kind of shows what lies under forgiveness. He really was going to get him back. He was going to humiliate him. And the fact that he still needed to humiliate him 50 years later just shows the depths and the visceralness with which he felt racism all his life.
Which you document absolutely eloquently. Can I, because as I said, so much to talk about. I’m intrigued that as the '50s roll on, and Mandela does find himself at the sharp end of the law, there’s that sort of, kind of contest as it were, perhaps that’s the best word, between him and Subokwe. And you document this, it’s interesting that somehow he kind of almost felt deeply worried, or anxious about the fact that Sobukwe was really the hero, to some considerable extent, that he was more radical than Mandela. I mean, why was that? What was going on there?
Well, there was, you know, a huge question hanging over Black South Africa, which really never went away, which is do you work with white and Indian people, or do you go alone? And in 1959, the Africanists split off from the ANC on precisely this question and formed the PAC. And the next thing that happened is that the PAC seemed to be winning over the ANC largely through the figure of Sobukwe. You know, the Sharpeville massacre happened because of a PAC protest. And when it happened and the PAC leadership was locked up, they did something extraordinary and powerful. You know, they arrived in court and they refused to defend themselves. They said, “This is not our court. It’s not a fair court. Do what you like. We’re not going to do anything. We won’t be represented by lawyers. We’ll take whatever punishment you give.” And that was not a display of violence, it was a display of martyrdom. And Mandela immediately understood that it was probably the most powerful display a Black South African leader had ever accomplished. And he really knew that he would have to emulate it if he wanted to beat Sobukwe. And that’s really the moment where he… I think, you know, before that he thought that being a guerilla being a Fidel Castro-like figure, showing that a Black man can fight and be violent was what would win people over. In that moment, watching Sobukwe, he understood that what win Black people over was not somebody who was violent, but somebody who could martyr himself. And it was a formative moment in his life. I think that’s when he really understood that spending the rest of his life in prison might be the most powerful thing that he could do. He really went to out to out-martyr Sobukwe, and did.
Yeah, I mean, so essentially moving, he goes to prison, I mean, firstly. I suppose there’s one thing I just wanted to ask about the prison question was that, with suggestions, the book as well, I suspect given Winnie’s philandering, that some of the information that essentially the police got with regard to Nelson’s arrest, came from her indirectly, or at least not deliberately, but did come from her.
Well, it turns out that even before Nelson was sentenced to life in prison, she was sleeping with a man who turned out to be a police informer.
Yes.
It’s a pretty bizarre story because when she found out that he was a police informer, she refused to leave him. She was an immensely complicated person, especially in love. But many years later, in the late 1980s, you know, Nelson suddenly, from out of the blue, turned on Winnie and said, “You know, I was caught because you was sleeping with an agent.” It’s a quite hard one to interpret. I’m not sure that it’s entirely true. I think that Nelson was caught because he was very, very careless.
Yes.
I think that was ammunition he was storing up against her for many years, it was one of the many, many complicated things that happened in a difficult marriage. And I don’t take that at face value that accusation that it was her fault. I think it had more to do with what was happening in their marriage in the late 1980s than what may have happened in the early '60s.
But she was very careless. I mean, you document this man, Samanya, Samana, or whatever his name was, was a police agent.
Yeah.
And she was warned about him.
She was astonishingly careless. You know, I think she was really, she was one of those human beings who can’t really be alive until she’s in a deeply intense, borderless relationship, boundaryless relationship with another human being. And she didn’t only had lovers. She had the most incredibly intense love affairs, you know, absolutely consuming. And at every moment in her political career, she would go into politics with a lover at her side. You know, I think that solitude was impossible for her, and intensity was necessary for her. It’s part of what makes her fascinating to me, but it is also what made her very dangerous and ill-disciplined. And, you know, the number of times that she nearly destroyed herself politically because of this, but then came bouncing back just because of her sheer charisma, is extraordinary. Her political career was an absolute rollercoaster. It was unbelievably violent, ebb and flow, ebb and flow, going to the brink of distraction and coming back. I think it was exhausting being her.
But it’s interesting because, you know, in the book you intertwine, obviously you have to because all this long period he’s in prison, but in some way she’s the more interesting character. I mean, because of how you describe her, all of these conflict, and I want to get to some of that, if I may. One of the things that struck me, which is particularly interesting, and you pull this out as a theme consistently. There were two aspects I want to talk about. One was, you talk about a diary she kept in jail where she recounted a conversation with a Brigadier Aucamp, and she reports him say, “Why do you think I talk to you and not to any other of those other detainees?” she quoted him saying, “It’s because I acknowledge the fact that your people regard you as their leader in your husband’s absence.” Of course you say, “The remarks she put into Aucamp’s mouth shed the starkest light on what she told Nelson in that letter in 62. The marriage she conjured was a mythical royal union. As Nelson’s wife, she was now the leader of the nation.” So, she saw herself, once he was in prison, that she wasn’t just the mother of the nation, but actually the leader of the nation.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you say she was more interesting than Nelson. She was probably more interesting than anybody because she was-
Yes.
she was so strange, so sui generis. So, I don’t think anybody else in the world understood, but she understood, when she was 21 years old and married the famous Nelson Mandela, that she was becoming a political leader as a result. She had the strangely otherworldly aristocratic sense of politics. She never thought that accountability to an organisation meant anything, that getting a mandate meant anything. She believed that the ground that she stood on was revolutionary ground because she was Winnie Mandela, married to Nelson Mandela. It’s a strangely, almost bizarrely futile sense of the world and she carried it with her to old age, but it also sustained her. You know, it is what made her an incredibly famous and powerful person against all the odds.
The second aspect I wanted to ask you in relation to this, is fascinating, so much as this, that at some particular point in her life, she was interrogated by that awful man, “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel. And she was quoted as saying, as you put in the book, “It was through Swanepoel that I discovered the type of hate I’d never encountered before in my life. He taught me how to hate him. By the end of my interrogation, I knew that if my own father and brother walked in and was on the other side, if I had a gun, I would fire.” To what extent was those experiences and Brandfort, which I’m about to come to, which essentially shaped her, and which makes it almost unfair to judge her without that context?
Well, it’s complicated. You know, I think that those events shaped her because of who she already was. You know, her relationship with her lovers was frighteningly boundaryless, but so was her relationship with her interrogator. You know, she’s the worst sort of person to undergo interrogation because she can’t put up boundaries between her and her interrogator. Their subjectivities have to mingle. She can’t help it. And so, this man interrogates her for five days in 1969 and 15 years later, really a long time later, in an interview, she suddenly says, “This man inhabited me and I became him. His hatred became my hatred.” And then the next thing she says is the most disturbing of all. She says, “Because of that, you know, because our hatred, mingled, Apartheid has to go violently, through an insurrection. There’s no other way.” And so, she’s conflating what’s happening in her head with what’s happening to an entire nation, and she doesn’t understand that she’s doing that. For me, that’s the most disturbing moment in her career.
But when she’s basically sent to Brandfort, and I know there was a mention of this last night in Frances Jowells’ excellent lecture on when her mother, Helen Suzman had visited, I mean, that was a shocking, I mean, that was a brutal thing to take somebody like Winnie and plunk her in Brandfort of all places. And yet even there, you document there was a sort of resistance when she marched into a shop to get fancy clothes, or whatever the case may be, or it was furniture, I can’t remember. But I mean, so you couldn’t suppress her in that sense, but psychologically it had a huge damage on her, from what you document.
I mean, paradoxically, I think Brandfort was the site of her greatest brilliance and even her political genius, and at the very same time, the site of her personal despair and deterioration. You know, the moment that they, you know, they came to get her a dawn, they threw her and possessions in the back of a truck, they dumped her in Brandfort, she absolutely understood that this was going to be immediate sensation. She knew that this was theatre, and like nobody in the world, she could play it. And the International Press came from around the world to see this beautiful woman in her banishment. And she was absolutely brilliant the way she played it. You know, it was a time when the ANC was ebbing. They’d had nothing to do with the 1976 uprisings. They were barely getting into the news. She put the ANC back into the news. You know, when the Press came to see her, she said such simple, powerful things. She said, kept repeating her husband’s name, you know, “This country will not be free until Mandela is president.” And at the same time, the isolation was absolutely destroying her. You know, she finally acquired a lover in Brandfort and it almost seemed certain that the police killed him. You know, they really, really went after her in the cruellest, cruellest ways. And so, the extraordinary thing about Brandfort is, she knew that it was destroying her and she refused to give it up. You know, they came to her and said, “You can live anywhere in the country except here. Go,” and she refused. She stays, you know, despite her misery and unhappiness. She knew that the theatre was too powerful to give up. So, it’s a real moment of self-sacrifice. It’s quite a moment.
And I’m fascinated by that you mentioned the lover, Chris Hutton, who was a white man. And from what I get from, it’s a very moving account, as so many of other aspects of this book about their relationship, which makes it so complicated. Because on one hand, as we move on to the end… You know, I wanted to ask you about the fact that, you know, the EFF take her as the central image of their struggle, and yet, she was more complex than that. I mean, she clearly seemed to love this man, and he was a white Afrikaner.
You know, she’s so beguiling ‘cause, you know, we haven’t got to what she did in the late 1980s in Soweto, but she-
I’m about to get there, yes.
she wielded horrible violence, and she could be almost inhumanly cruel. And yet, she also could love with the most extraordinary intensity. And I lost count the number of people who I interviewed who deeply loved her because of her intensity, because of her immense power 'cause of her boundarylessness, her power to feel what was going on with other people. It was a real talent. And while writing the book, to hold in my head both that and her immense cruelty was really one of the big tasks.
I want to get back to that. Before I do that, if I could turn to him again, for two reasons. One is, you describe how in '83 of course, there was a massive Nelson Mandela birthday. And because my knowledge of music only extends as far as Shostakovich, I didn’t realise who Jerry Dammers was until I read your book. But it’s interesting that he made this song about Mandela, “Free Nelson Mandela,” and then there’s this entire international campaign. Was it at that point that the ANC externally realised that a man who’d languished in prison for almost 20 years and probably was unknown to all sorts of people, suddenly became a centre of the struggle, could become?
Well, a very small handful of people consciously decided to make Nelson Mandela the great icon of the struggle in the lead-up to his 60th birthday in 1978.
Right.
And the key person there was the president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo.
Oliver Tambo.
If he had taken that campaign to his national executive and asked them to discuss it, they would’ve said, no. It was against the grain. It was against everything the ANC stood for, to make a great personality of one person. You know, very few people but Tambo actually trusted Mandela then. He’d been away for so long. There were rumours about what he was up to in prison. And Tambo and a couple of others, ingeniously invented this campaign. You know, celebrate this man’s 60th birthday. He is the future leader of the country. And it took off. It became wilder and bigger than even its authors imagined. And amazingly, it straddled the Cold War. You know, this was a time when the ANC was getting its military support from the Soviet Union. You know, when Thatcher was coming to power and Reagan was coming to power, you know, deep anti-communist, and yet the figure of Nelson Mandela ended up hovering above politics, in a way. It was impossible not to be for him. It was a brilliant campaign to use in that way.
But just out of interest, in relation, what I found interesting is clearly he went through really hard times during the time in Robben Island. It seems that Sisulu was quite central in holding him up at various points, psychologically, I mean.
Yeah, I think he had a terrible time on Robben Island. You know, he lived so fiercely in the present in the 1950s and early 1960s, and to be robbed of all that, to be not just in this prison, but in this horribly factionalized prison where there were people who loathed him, you know, living right next to him. He wasn’t sure what would happen to his future. I think he became a deeply, deeply sad person in prison and understood his life as a tragedy, as the years went on. You know, and Sisulu probably kept his sanity. Sisulu was the one person, you know, beside him every day who could really see who he had been before he went to prison. You know, Sisulu had groomed him. He’d introduced Mandela to his first wife. He’d watched him bring up his children, watched his second marriage take form. There was a sense in which, when Mandela looked at Sisulu, he could actually see a mirror of the person that he really was outside of prison. I think that Sisulu, in profound ways, really did hold him together in prison.
But what I also was interested in at the same time, is that at some point in prison where you document what he was reading. Apart from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky he was also reading Afrikaner, history of the Afrikaners.
Well, he was reading the history of Afrikaners and he was reading, one after the other, biographies of powerful white men.
Yes.
Afrikaans leaders, but also Kennedy and Churchill. And really he was training himself. I mean, he-
That’s what I meant to ask, yeah.
he understood from the early '60s that there would be no military takeover in South Africa, that violent revolution would fail, that the Apartheid state was much too strong, that you would have to negotiate with these people. He understood that very, very early. And part of what kept him sane in prison was the very idea of negotiated settlements and him being at the forefront of it. And for many years, in his head, he was living with the white men that he was going to be in combat with, you know, verbally in negotiations. And he was doing that through, you know, voracious reading. He was practising . He was living the future role that he was going to play through reading these biographies.
And can I ask you on that? He starts talking to the government in circumstances where to quite a considerable extent, I assume, that the ANC doesn’t know this to start with?
Well, for a little while, they don’t know, but he gets the message out to Tambo as soon as he possibly can. And he and Tambo trust one another implicitly despite having been separated for many years. And Tambo trusts him. I think that’s been a little overplayed, you know, in the heroic Mandela narrative, you know, the extent to which he went out on his own. You know, he kept organisational discipline. He kept people informed wherever he could. But he did understand his own role, heroically. He did think that he was in a unique position to bring the government and the ANC together, and was very, very keen to be that broker.
And how was that responded to by the exiles who seemed to always have this idea that the movement is more important than any individual, not withstanding the use of him?
There was enormous suspicion. There was enormous rumour that he had sold out. You know, in Robben Island, Robben Island was just a cesspit of rumour. Every day there was a rumour that Mandela had sold out, that Sisulu had sold out, this one and that one had sold out. It was the most opaque place where stories circulated. But I know the amusing thing about Mandela’s secret role is just how, how he was much less central than he really believed himself to be. I mean, he had this idea, and he tried to get De Klerk to go along with this idea that the only way that the government and the ANC could trust each other, the only way they could move out of this prisoner’s dilemma of not being the one to move first, was to literally move together. That on the very same hour of the same day the government would unbound ANC and the ANC would give up the armed struggle. And he wanted to orchestrate this. He wanted to secretly fly to Lusaka, walk into an ANC NEC meeting, and announce this plan, you know, he would have the key to the future in his pocket. There’s really something quite moving about that, that in these terrible, terrible years in prison, what was keeping him alive, what was keeping him animated, was this almost superman sense that he had of himself and the role that he was going to play. You know, he was going to be it, he was going to deliver South Africa from Apartheid. And, you know, there’s obviously some self-aggrandizement in that, but I think it’s just incredibly moving. That’s what was waking him up in the morning in these very difficult circumstances.
Now, meanwhile, in between, Winnie was now back from Brandfort, and as you indicated already, she got up to terrible things. And I just want to talk a little bit about the Mandela Football Club because it’s a shocker in many ways. How does one deal with all of this when one evaluates her? And how did you, if I could really put you on the spot here, in a way, how did you manage all? Because you document, you know, how Stompie was killed, you document the violence, which was intendent on the activities of this so-called football club? It’s so hard to then try to hold on to some rational assessment of Winnie.
So, I felt it was the most difficult part of the book, for me. And I felt that my-
Perhaps, I wonder whether you could just describe briefly, if people haven’t read the book, precisely what we’re talking about. Otherwise they may not understand.
So, you know, Winnie is in exile in Brandfort. South Africa explodes into insurrection in 1984, 1985. Soweto becomes one of the epicentres of the insurrection in '85. Winnie has to be in the centre of it, and she very bravely defies her banning order and goes back to live in Soweto, and really rolls up her sleeves and decides that she’s going to be at the centre of the insurrection. At this point, she understands, she firmly believes that Apartheid will only go if it goes violently. You know, in her house, she assembles a group of young men and calls them a football team. And for a while they do play football, but she understands them as an incipient armed force, and she begins to arm them. But this is an insurrection. And if you don’t have strict, strict discipline, and control, and sobriety in an insurrection, you’re going to very quickly lose control. And that’s what happens. And the football team, largely under her command, firstly, begins a terrible reign of violence, but secondly, turns on itself. It becomes a very paranoid organisation that can’t trust itself. And many people are killed at the football team’s hands, and most of them are killed because they’re suspected of being informers. It becomes a cesspit of terrible, terrible paranoia, and she’s at the centre of it. It’s really quite horrible. And I felt that my task was, number one, not to flinch, but to describe everything that she did, and everything that happened around her, but at the same time, not to lose sympathy with her, and not to… I thought that simply judging her, or being moralistic would be cheap and easy. I wanted to tell the truth about her, but at the same time, just keep the whole trajectory of who she was, and who she had been, and what an extraordinary person she’d been. I think that you can hold onto that and her terrible cruelty at the same time. You need to see everything together. I don’t think that one can displace the other.
But I mean, when you’re documenting this, number one, there’s the cruelty of this boy being tortured and killed. There is the accusations, which are more than credible, that she was responsible for the death of Dr. Asvat because, as I understand from the book, he knew what had happened in relation to Stompie. There is the incredible blaming, homophobic defence which blames Paul Verryn, the Methodist priest. I mean, it’s kind of hard to look, you know? In a way, as I read this, I mean you’ve done this very, very dexterously because you’ve set up, quite properly, the fact of the awful situation she was in and her extraordinary life, and then you come to this. And I don’t know. Just, I mean, your job, I suppose, is to document it, and I’ve got to choose, as the reader. I assume that’s what should happen here?
And for me, what makes it a really, really interesting story is that Nelson Mandela is-
I’m about to get there, yes. Now tell me about him because you posed that. You say, “How involved is Nelson Mandela in this particular issue?” So, won’t you just answer that and then tell how responsible, well, how involved was he? How much did he know and how much did he? He seemed to have defended her rather extraordinarily, looking for money and putting pressure on people, and so on and so forth.
It’s very complicated. You know, he was sitting in prison. He was getting messages about Winnie losing control, about the violence in her household. He had to interpret what this meant. And really interesting, his first response was one of deep paranoia. It was that the Apartheid state had framed his wife-
Wife.
which is amazing 'cause at this point he’s dealing with them personally. He’s developing good, solid, healthy relationships with his enemy by talking to them. And at the very same time, he thinks that they’re destroying his wife. What he’s going through is incredibly complicated. And when he comes out of prison, you know, the strange, the amazing thing about Nelson Mandela is that the more famous he became, and by late '80s, he was perhaps the most famous person in the world, the more famous he became the less his fame and the myth of him meant to him. The more he understood himself as somebody who had been ruined, whose children had lost their way, whose wife had lost her way, you know, he understood himself, in a strange way, as a simple family man who had lost his family. And when he came out of prison, he wanted more than anything else to have his wife back. You know, from his memory of the '50s, she was his life. And a part of him understood that their relationship was gone, their marriage had hollowed out and was over. But I don’t think he could fully comprehend that because I don’t think there was enough of a human being left in him if he didn’t have Winnie. I think the stakes were really that high. He was also very new to wielding a great deal of power. And in his first year out of prison, he really abused that power to try and mend his marriage, and to save his wife. And so he, you know, he accepted money secretly from Coca-Cola of all people, to secretly fund her trial. He abused his authority to create a new ANC branch for her to lead. He strong-armed her into, he strong-armed the ANC into electing her to executive office in the province. He was indirectly responsible for witnesses and co-defendants disappearing at the beginning of her trial. It was a terrible moment where he lost his bearings, but for reasons which one so deeply understands. He was a, he was, in a way, a torn and broken human being for a while. It took him a while to find his feet again and to understand what his newfound power was for and what it wasn’t for. And I don’t think that ruins his reputation. I just think it shows his humanity in all its complexity.
I take that. I just want to, if I can just reverse the time sequence for a moment in terms of that. Because of course, he moves off the island, and then, at a particular point when he’s, I think, at Victor Verster Prison, and he’s got his little house, big house, she comes to visit him. And of course you discover later that in fact the security police had taped all these conversations. And you’ve, the story, which is quite interesting, as I understand, the Minister of Justice at the time, Kobie Coetsee, actually effectively stole the tapes. Is that right? And how did they come back into, as it were, the public domain?
So, Kobie Coetsee either taped, or got prison guards to write down summaries of every conversation Mandela had with every visitor, from the early 1980s until his release. When Coetsee left office in '94, he took, you know, these, in the end, about 15,000 pages of transcripts with him, put them in his garage in Bloemfontein, dropped dead unexpectedly. You know, they remained in his garage until his wife died in, I think, 2010. And at that point, his will said that they must go to an archive at the University of the Orange Free State-
Aah.
Bloemfontein. And slowly, many years later, it gradually, the information seeped out that these documents were there in a public archive, and you could just go and see them.
So, what I wanted to ask you, was in relation to that. You know, I’m not going to, it’s actually proper to use them as an historian, but I suppose one of the wrenching exchanges, which is why I wanted to talk about it, was the argument he had about his daughter, Zindzi, the despair. It seemed to me that what you document there is a man, as you say, is broken by the fact that he’s not been able to be the father he should have been. And he’s kind of blaming her for the fact that Zindzi has behaved in this cavalier way, not getting her education, and so, and so forth. I mean, it seemed to me unbelievably poignant. And I wanted to ask whether at that time, during those conversations, did it suddenly dawn on him the kind of woman that Winnie had become?
It’s so hard to say. I mean, in a way, yes. So, just a brief background, you know, about the early '80s, probably the most important thing in Mandela’s life was that his children be saved, that they get a decent education and live decent lives. And he is watching Zindzi drift, you know, to someplace horrible and is absolutely determined to put it straight, despite the fact that he’s a prisoner. And, you know, very sadly, he does it in such crude ways. He literally tries to take control of her life and forces her to become a student at the University of Cape Town, and rustles up people who come to see him for money. Desperately wants his child to have an education. Little does he know that what Winnie is doing, is secretly taking Zindzi out of university and into her house, training her to use a gun, making her a soldier. And when he realises that Winnie has done that, he absolutely cracks. It’s very strange that Winnie and Nelson wanted to embody South Africa in it’s struggle for freedom. And at that moment, you know, what they really do embody is South Africa’s disintegration, its biggest dysfunctionality, it’s biggest pain. You know, the insurrection has white-answered its way into his family, taken his daughter, taken his wife. You know, I think there’s a flash where he just understands that. And amazingly, you know, the microphone’s on at this stage. You can read the transcripts of this happening. It’s very moving to read.
It’s interesting that you say, just on that, this kind of gives a text of just the eloquence of this book, in dealing with Zindzi, “Perhaps he grasps in that moment just how helpless he was in rescuing his wife and daughter from what had already befallen them in saving his people from a horror already wrought.” It’s incredibly sad. And I suppose I wanted to end, because we are running out of time, you describe him as a very sad man at the end of his life, and that with people who really knew him, there was a real pathos and a sadness, very different from the kind of avuncular uncle that he portrayed to the public at large. I just wonder, perhaps if you want to explicate on that a little.
Well, the person I spoke to who knew him best in the early '90s, was his Chief of Staff, Barbara Masekela who was literally with him 16, 18 hours a day and who he grew very close to. And she would describe, A, she described him as the saddest human being she’d ever met. She said there were times where you can just feel the sadness emanate from him. And it was almost unbearable to be in the presence of such intense sadness. But then, she’d also say she’d watch him put on his public face, and it was literally putting on a new face. And then he’d walk out into the public and he’d be somebody completely different. And that was really, it was his genius, his strength, his discipline, his public service that he, you know, he calculated that that’s what his country needed. That if he really showed his sadness and above all, if he really showed his anger as the leader of his people, he would lead them into war. And he very self-consciously decided that he needed to show, he needed to emanate, he needed to beam something benign, that’s what would prevent his country going to civil war. I think he really put on a mask, he put on an act as a public duty. And, you know, somebody like Masekela could actually see that mask come on and the man he was when it came off.
But that’s even sadder than would otherwise be the case, that sort of dialectic between the public face and the private. It’s something-
It’s massively sad. It’s also massively admirable.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, a man who can put his pain away and do his duty, is hugely, hugely admirable.
Two final questions since we’re almost out of time. One which I found really intriguing, was that despite marrying Graca Machel, and despite all of the tensions that he clearly had with Winnie, it turns out that she was with him when he died and was there for quite some time, that they were together, almost like the circle had been completed. So they, in some way, they really did love each other very profoundly.
Yeah, and the most touching thing about that story is, it’s thanks to Graca Machel that Winnie was there when Nelson died.
Yes.
Because, you know, she understood that her relationship with Nelson was, and that Winnie had been the mainstay of his life. And when, you know, when he was dying, understood that Winnie must be there, must be among the chief mourners. Because the person’s death must be the summation of their life, and not to have Winnie front and centre would be wrong. So, extraordinary wisdom on Graca’s part to make that happen.
And then my final question, Jonny, is a more general one. There’s been a lot written about Winnie and Nelson. And I discover almost every day that there were people who knew Nelson extremely well, who’d written books about him and talk about him in ways that, you know, I can only smile. But you were dealing, let’s leave her aside, because in a sense, she was the more controversial character. In his case, he’s this iconic figure. You write a book, which unquestionably reflects that, but it also reflects, in a sense, the warts and all. Was that difficult to write, in a sense, when you’re dealing with an icon like that? I mean, I think it’s a brave book, but I don’t know whether you felt that you had to take a deep breath when you wrote it, or whether in fact that wasn’t a major problem.
No, I think, I think it would’ve been a brave book, in fact, it would’ve been a reckless book if it was written while he was alive, if it was written while he was at the centre of the South African Project because it then would’ve been an attack on him, and it would’ve been an attack on the South African Project, and it would’ve been used by a quite destructive political forces. But after he died, it’s a different story. After he died, I think it’s possible both to be absolutely honest about who he was and keep the myth of him. I don’t think there’s a contradiction between the two. I think, on the contrary, I think it makes him more admirable, it makes him more human to tell the warts-and-all-story about him. It doesn’t bring him down. In a way it holds him up. You know, he is fading among young people. His reputation is fading. I think that to tell the real complex story about who he was, really keeps him alive in many ways.
And that’s my last question, is that there’s, in the book, there’s a sort of sub-theme about generational questions that she, in a sense, became a hero for a younger generation. And as you’ve intimated now, he almost represents an older generation, sort of my generation, of Black and white who saw him as absolutely central. But that fades as younger people see that the failure of South Africa to live up to the constitutional promises means people move more into her level of militancy. Has she then become, ironically, a more powerful figure in the development of politics going forward than he is?
I’m not sure about that. I mean, she has become a much loved and admired figure among young, militant people, but I also think that there’s a deeper scepticism about her, even among young people. I think that there’s such a scepticism, perhaps even a cynicism about politics in general among young South Africans. And I don’t think that she escapes that. You know, I don’t think it’s a simple case of him going down and she going up. There’s a complicated way in which they both get a little sullied together.
Q&A and Comments:
Right so, we are out of time. I’m just going to try to read some of the questions. Some of them, as I read them, I see, I see you dealt with. Somebody asked about the relationship between Winnie and Helen Suzman. I just dunno if you’ve got any comment about that.
You know, Helen Suzman was remarkable at seeking out people who were politically victimised and giving them succour, giving them support. And she was amazing with Winnie. I think that she also, she just admired Winnie’s extraordinary strength. I mean, I’m not sure what she made of Winnie in the late 1980s, and what happened with her, but Suzman was one of many, many admirers of Winnie. I mean, I’ve really lost count of the number of people who encountered Winnie and rallied behind her. She had that magnetism, that charisma.
Interesting as well, somebody asking about the devotion that Helen Joseph had for Winnie not withstanding everything we’ve spoken about.
Their relationship was a little more complex.
Right.
You know, I think that publicly they supported each other a great deal. I think that privately their relationship was very complex, and not altogether good.
Q - And then, there’s a question. “What relationship did Mandela have with Chief Buthelezi?”
A - That’s a really, really good question, and I wish we had more time.
- Yeah.
A - You know, Mandela was, in many ways, an old chief who believed that the future should be decided by great men getting together. And he was a great advocate of bringing Buthelezi on board and cutting a deal with him. And I think exactly what sort of deal he cut with him in the 1990s remains not entirely explored. You know, how involved Mandela was in the formation of Ingonyama Trust, which gave the Zulu Royal Family enormous power is, we haven’t got to the bottom of that yet.
Q - And then, one final question. “What happened to the daughters?”
A - Well, Zindzi very tragically died young, while I was writing the book, very young, at the age of 59. You know, I think that her life was unbelievably difficult. I think that being the child of those two people and, you know, living under the extraordinary state repression took its toll, and that she had an enormous difficult life. Zenani was more removed. You know, she left the scene as a teenager and went first to Swaziland, and then to America. I think that she was much more sheltered from the rough of what was going on in South Africa, but Zindzi since he faced it full-on from an early age.
Jonny, thank you very much. I just want to, in concluding, say this is unquestionably, I noticed that the sharp on John Coetzee, our Nobel Prize winner, we still claim him as a South African, “Unlikely to superseded in a long time.” I think that’s absolutely correct. This is a definitive book if you really want to read about Winnie and Nelson. It’s just magnificently researched. It is so beautifully written. I’m in your envy, just how good this is. And I just want to thank you. It’s a national treasure and everybody should read it. And thanks again for being so generous with your time in sharing this.
That’s really generous and kind of you. Thanks so much.
Pleasure. And I hope everybody does go and buy the book, who hasn’t and reads it. Goodnight to everybody, and thank you so much.
Bye everybody, thank you.
Bye.