Winnie and Nelson

“The humiliation, the anonymity…of Johannesburg was more of a shock probably than Mandela’s ever been able to describe,” his authorized biographer once reflected.[8]

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These racial knife cuts were to become quotidian at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman. They could strike at any moment, as quick as a flash. Once, Nelson was dictating a memo to a white secretary when a client walked in. Embarrassed to be seen taking instruction from a black man, she pushed some money into Nelson’s hand and ordered him to go out and buy her a bottle of shampoo.

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These experiences were wounding—he remembered them all until well into old age—but hovering above them was the benign and protective spirit of Walter Sisulu. For Gaur Radebe, the cheeky native who drank from the wrong cup, was a friend and a comrade of Walter’s, and when Sisulu sent Nelson to work for Lazar Sidelsky, he was, unbeknown to Nelson, delivering him into Radebe’s care.

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It is hard to exaggerate the influence Radebe wielded over Nelson for the next two years. In his relations with whites, Radebe was more than self-assured; he was positively provocative. Once, when Nelson returned from yet another errand on behalf of Sidelsky, Radebe reminded his white boss that Nelson was a royal. “You sit there like a Lord whilst my chief runs around doing errands for you,” he said. “The situation should be reversed and one day it will, and we will dump all of you into the sea.”[3]

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Radebe was also the first to begin instructing Nelson in the tools of analytical thought. Nelson went home in the evenings with books Radebe had suggested he read; lunch breaks became the occasion for impromptu tutorials. This autodidact, his formal schooling scant, made the Fort Hare boy his pupil. “I had taken two courses in modern history at Fort Hare,” Nelson recalled, “but…Gaur Radebe…learned not just the facts, he was able to get behind the facts and explain to you the causes for a particular viewpoint.”[4] That it was a black man who introduced Nelson to critical thought is important. In years to come, Nelson met white and Indian communists, and their analytical prowess impressed him deeply. But it is doubtful that in 1941 and 1942 he had the psychological facility to learn from people who were not black, for their knowledge would have been poisoned by the racial hierarchy through which it was transmitted.

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Until now, Nelson had been employed at the firm as a clerk. If he was to qualify as a lawyer, the firm would have to change his status to that of candidate attorney, for this practical apprenticeship was a compulsory component of one’s training. Nelson had not even considered whether his boss, Lazar Sidelsky, would change his status thus until Gaur Radebe raised the matter in the most dramatic fashion. “My boy,” Nelson recalled Radebe saying, “as long as I am here these chaps will never article you. I am interested in you being articled because it means a great deal for the future of our struggle in this country—I am going to leave. I do not know what is going to happen to me.”[5] Radebe was nominally employed at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman as a messenger and an interpreter. But in reality he was the firm’s conduit to its black clientele. He had surmised that his continued employment at the firm would make the second black man, Nelson, redundant. He gave up his job so that Nelson could stay. It is a remarkable moment; were it not for the fact that Walter Sisulu confirmed its veracity, one might question Nelson’s memory. Nelson had done no more than flirt with political activism by the beginning of 1943. That Radebe was surrendering his livelihood because Nelson’s legal career…

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“The house was identical to hundreds of others built on postage-stamp sized plots on dirt roads,” Nelson writes in his autobiography. “It had the same standard tin roof, the same cement floor, a narrow kitchen and a bucket toilet at the back…The bedroom was so small that a double bed took up almost the entire floor space.” He went on to say something that has been quoted countless times: “It was the opposite of grand but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.”[12] This is among the more unfortunate of Nelson’s recollections. It was Evelyn who secured their residence at 8115 Orlando West because of her position as a city-council nurse. The house was clearly marked with a large sign: “Nurse” in English, “Mooki” in Sesotho, signaling that the woman who lived there provided a public service.[13] The lease was in Nelson’s name only because of the patriarchal mores of the time.

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In 1948, tragedy struck the young family. Evelyn had given birth to a second child the previous year, a girl. They had called her Makaziwe. She was nine months old when she died. Nelson was to say that she had been sickly from birth. Evelyn remembered that she contracted meningitis without warning and quickly died. More than two decades later, in a letter from prison, Nelson wrote for the first time of her death. “I managed to see her during the critical moments when she was struggling desperately to hold within her body the last sparks of life which were flickering away,” he wrote. “I have never known whether I was fortunate to witness that grievous scene. It haunted me for many days thereafter and still provokes painful memories right up to the present day.”[15]

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There is no record of how Evelyn dealt with the death of her daughter, nor of the consequences of the tragedy for her and Nelson’s marriage. Evelyn was to give birth two years later to a son, Makgatho. The name the couple chose was significant. Sefako Mapogo Makgatho was an early leader of the ANC legendary for the campaigns of civil disobedience he led. In naming their son after him, the couple was choosing a Pedi, rather than a Xhosa, name, which was highly unusual and thus a bold statement of Nelson’s growing commitment to African nationalism.[16] Indeed, one can only imagine that they named the child thus at Nelson’s insistence; it was very much an expression of his preoccupations.

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There is no record of Nosekeni’s feelings about her daughter-in-law. But it appears that she placed much store in Evelyn’s presence in Nelson’s life. When the marriage began falling apart, Nosekeni would do her utmost to keep it together, and once she understood that she had failed, she packed up, distraught, and returned to the Transkei. Indeed, the breakup would inflict wounds on many people and they would take forever to heal.

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Nelson wrote exams for his final year three times, in 1947, 1948, and 1949. At first, he failed all six subjects; on his second attempt, he failed four. Finally, in 1949, he passed three subjects—Law of Mortgage and Pledge, Conflict of Laws, and Civil Procedure; he had failed Jurisprudence, Delict, and Law of Evidence. He applied for permission to break the two-supplementary-exams rule and sit for the three courses he had failed. In his application he explained that he was deep in debt and was unable to pay the following year’s fees; if the university did not allow him to sit the three supplementary exams, he would never get the degree. He also pointed out that he lived in Orlando, where there was no electricity and he was forced to study by the light of a paraffin lamp. Orlando, he added, was a long commute from Johannesburg: “I…returned home after 8 p.m. tired and hungry and unfit to concentrate on my studies.”[7]

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That this is noteworthy enough to recall nearly half a century later tells us so much of what Nelson experienced. And it is even more illuminating to compare Nelson’s recollections of First with First’s memories of Nelson. He was “good-looking, very proud, very dignified, very prickly, rather sensitive, perhaps even arrogant,” she recalled shortly before she was assassinated by agents of the South African government. “But, of course,” she added, “he was exposed to all the humiliations.”[11] One can imagine Nelson hiding behind his height, his grace, and his looks, haughty and distant, even to Ruth First, the rare white person who put him at ease. Day in and day out for seven years he walked those corridors and sat in those classrooms; it must have been exhausting.

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Nearly half a century later, when Nelson was president of South Africa, he hosted a lunch to which Browde was invited. It was a large affair; several hundred people attended. At some point, Nelson scanned the crowd, caught Browde’s eye, called him over, and asked him to arrange a reunion of their law class. “And, Jules,” Nelson added. “Do you remember, when I came into the class…and sat down, the man next to me got up and went and sat on the other side of the table?” Browde remembered the incident clearly. The man’s name, he told Nelson, was Ballie de Klerk. “Please see that you ask him to come,” Nelson said. “Why?” Browde asked. Because, Nelson replied, he wanted to remind De Klerk of what he had done those many decades ago. “I don’t mind whether he says he remembers or he doesn’t remember. Because I want to take his hand,” and at this point he took Browde’s hands, and he held them in his. “And I want to say, ‘I remember. But I forgive you. Now let’s see what we can do together for the good of this country.’ ”[12] Nelson never got to take the hand of Jan Adriaan Enslin “Ballie” de Klerk, for De Klerk was dead. Some might take this story as an example of Nelson’s remarkable generosity. But its deepest meaning is surely more complex than that. Half a century later, Nelson had not only forgotten nothing; he felt compelled to seek out the one who had offended him and to rub his face in the memory. Forgiveness seldom wears its deepest motivation on its sleeve. It is hardly a sign that the anger preceding it has vanished: rather, it has been reworked into another state. What remains is the very core of anger: the desire, no matter how gentle and civilized it has become, to avenge. There is one-upmanship in the offer to forgive, a soft triumph, a gentle torturing of the other into a position of compliance.[13] Nelson remembered everything and his anger was still live. And he knew this. He knew this absolutely and he said it with clarity. “Wits made me what I am today,” he told the audience at the reunion the late Ballie de Klerk did not attend. “I am what I am both as a result of people who respected me and helped me, and those who did not respect me and treated me badly.”[14]

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Two weeks later, rioting erupted at a workers’ hostel on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and five days after that violence broke out in the town of Kimberley in the Northern Cape.[6] A day later, on November 9, the most disturbing incident of all occurred. In the poverty-stricken township of Duncan Village on the outskirts of East London, the police broke up a large, open-air meeting the ANC Youth League had called. The crowd stoned the police, the police shot into the crowd, and in the mayhem that followed, buildings throughout the township associated with whites—the Catholic mission, administrative offices, a trading store—were burned to the ground. How many people died that day is unknown: the official count was nine; unofficial police records show that as many as two hundred might have been killed, most of them by police bullets. It is extraordinary that the incident was for so long largely forgotten, for it is most likely the most lethal massacre of black civilians by white officials in South African history. Not all those killed were black, however. Among the dead was an Irish nun and medical doctor, Sister Aidan Quinlan, who had established a clinic in Duncan Village three years earlier. She was on a customary Sunday drive when she heard of the disturbances and returned immediately to the township, probably to tend to the wounded. As she made her way to her clinic, a mob surrounded her car, turned it on its side, and set it alight. At what point in the attack she died is unclear, but she was dragged into the street, and chunks of flesh were hacked from her corpse. By the time the crowd was done with her, her arms had been removed from the elbows down and her legs were missing from her hips.[7] White South Africa responded with revulsion and fear, and in the midst of the moral panic the government took a series of measures that ended the Defiance Campaign. In December, a statutory amendment was passed making deliberate lawbreaking punishable by flogging and by prison sentences of up to three years. In the wake of the new law, none but the bravest or the craziest would defy. And this was just one of a series of harsh measures the government took. Also in December, Nelson, along with fifty-one other ANC leaders, was banned from attending any meeting, from holding office in the ANC, from talking to more than one person at a time, and from leaving Johannesburg without permission.[8] Barring two brief periods of remission, he would remain under a host of successive restrictions until he disappeared underground in 1961.

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Sisulu’s trip abroad was life changing. He took in Jerusalem, which, for a man steeped all his life in biblical narrative, was meaningful beyond words; he witnessed formal equality among black and white people on the streets of London; above all, he was exposed to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. He came away believing them to be among the most impressive people he had met. And what they said about the prospect of violent revolution was positively alarming. “Revolution is a very serious affair,” they advised him. “Don’t play with it. Don’t take chances unless you are really ready for it.” By the time he returned home, Sisulu felt the heaviest burden on his shoulders; turning to violence, he understood, might destroy the movement against apartheid, not just now, but for generations.[12] Sisulu, Nelson, and others would inaugurate an armed struggle eight years later. Whether the decision was indeed their greatest strategic blunder, delaying freedom by decades, is impossible ever to know.

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In the early 1950s, Nelson took up boxing; in no time, it became something of an obsession. Given how frantic his life had become, it is remarkable not just that he carved out the time for it—he spent ninety minutes in the boxing gym four evenings a week, and on most mornings began his day with a predawn run—but that he kept at it, religiously, seldom missing a day’s training, for a decade. What did it mean to Nelson to box? The outstanding feature of boxing in mid-century black South Africa was its wholesome and egalitarian dignity. Wholesome because it could be contrasted to the brash honor of a gangster, and the township gangs of those times loomed large in people’s minds, their violence dominating the newspaper headlines every day. And egalitarian because the dignity it conferred was available to everyone.[12] Nelson understood this and he delighted in it. “In the ring,” he remarked much later, “rank, age, colour and wealth are irrelevant. When you are circling your opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his colour or social status.”[13]

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As his law career flourished and his activism deepened, Nelson Mandela’s marriage fell apart. It did so with drama and with pain, wounding many bystanders—his mother, his children, the Mases, the Sisulus. The life Evelyn must have imagined when she married Nelson may seem conventional to us now; together they were to build a professional household, he a prospective lawyer, she a nurse. It is difficult to exaggerate the sense of distinction the idea exuded in Orlando in 1944. “It was almost like their home had an aura around it,” a woman who grew up on their street in the late 1940s and early 1950s recalled. “Many adults in the neighborhood one got to know well because they were around, on the streets, visiting our home. Nelson and Evelyn: one did not see much of them; they left early and returned late. They were working.”[1] From Evelyn’s vantage point, Nelson tore this household down as they were building it. It is not just that he was consumed by his political commitments; it is that he chose these commitments over two of the fundamental roles he ought to have played in their home. The first was paterfamilias. Nelson supported the family financially when he began to earn a good living. And there are many witnesses to the affection he showed his children. But by the early 1950s his presence in their lives was sporadic. As an elderly man he would recall overhearing his five-year-old son, Thembi, ask Evelyn, “Where does Daddy live now?”[2] And politics stole Evelyn’s husband in another way, too: as a monogamous romantic partner. For it is not just that Nelson had lovers; his affairs were with political activists, and for Evelyn this was painful beyond forbearance. Politics had taken all of her husband: the father of her children and the lover in her bed. Talk about Nelson’s affairs among Johannesburg’s black elite assailed Evelyn’s honor. Peter Mda’s son, Zakes, recalls how his mother and her friends spoke of Nelson in the mid-1950s. Referring to him as Nel or Nelly, they giggled. “Nelly” was “a ladies’ man,” they said. Zakes, a prepubescent child, hadn’t a clue what a ladies’ man was, but given the excitement Mandela instilled in his mother and her friends, he aspired to be one, too.[3] References to Nelson’s reputation as a playboy entered formal politics, too. At an ill-tempered meeting of the Transvaal ANC in 1953, for instance, Nelson accused a group of Africanists of conspiring against him. Among them was Ellen Molapo, a famously beautiful widow. In the face of Nelson’s charge, she stood up to speak. “How can I be against Mr. Mandela,” she asked, “when he left his hat in my house?” The conference broke down in thunderous laughter, leaving Nelson not just embarrassed but disarmed.[4] Evelyn was tortured by Nelson’s affairs. Once, in 1953, when Nelson was giving a female colleague a lift to work, Evelyn protested in the street in front of the car, eventually forcing Nelson’s passenger to get out and find another way to town. She also…

Ref. 49B4-Q

In February 1955, the acrimony between them took the nastiest turn. In Nelson’s account, a former police detective he knew, a man named Edward Majola, came to him with news that shocked him to his core. For some time now, Evelyn had accused Nelson of having an affair with the ANC Women’s League leader, Lilian Ngoyi. Now Ngoyi was about to embark upon an overseas tour. She planned to leave the country without a passport, for she was a prominent activist and if the authorities caught wind of her trip, they would stop her. Evelyn, Majola informed Nelson, had told him of Ngoyi’s plan and urged him to report her to the police; had he done so, Ngoyi might well have gone to jail. Evelyn also gave Majola £6 to pay a diviner for a substance to sneak into Nelson’s food that would rekindle his love for her. When Nelson heard what Evelyn had done, he left the marital bed and set up makeshift sleeping quarters in the dining room. And he resolved not to eat food that she had prepared.[6] The situation was ghastly; at war with each other, they shared their tiny house, day in and day out, their children an audience to their mutual rage. They were to live like this for more than a year, until March 1956, when Evelyn finally left; she moved first into the nurses’ quarters at the hospital, then to her brother Sam’s house in Orlando East, leaving the children, for now, to be cared for by Nelson’s mother, who had come to Johannesburg to try to mend the marriage. What happened between them during this unbearable period, Nelson sleeping in the dining room, Evelyn in their bed, is in dispute. When she filed for divorce, Evelyn claimed that Nelson had beaten her on several occasions. The most serious assault, she said, came in February 1956. He had tried to throw her out of the house. When she refused to leave, he hit her with his fists and throttled her until she choked. She ran to a neighbor, clad only in her nightdress. Doggedly, she returned to the marital home and remained there another month, until Nelson finally threatened to kill her with an ax unless she left.[7] In his replying claim, Nelson denied all the acts of violence Evelyn had described save for two. In July 1955, he said, she had taken money from his suit pocket, money that a client had paid him that day and belonged to his law firm. When he snatched it back from her, she attacked him with her fists; he hit her in the face and she fell to the floor. Then there was the incident in February 1956 when Evelyn claimed that Nelson had tried to strangle her. During a quarrel, she had reached for a stove poker, he said, and made to attack him. He was carrying a baby in his arms—he must have been referring to Makaziwe, who was less than two years old. Holding the baby with one hand, he grabbed Evelyn by the throat with the other, dragged her away from the stove to the bedroom, put the baby down on the bed, then pushed Evelyn out of the house. Evelyn laid a charge of assault with the police; to ward off his…

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For Nelson’s family, his war with Evelyn was a catastrophe. “It was as if the ground beneath us was breaking and we were falling,” Nelson’s sister Leabie said of that time. Nelson’s mother packed her bags and returned to the Transkei, unwilling to bear further witness to the destruction of her son’s marriage.[10] As for the three children, they witnessed at close quarters their parents at war. In the wake of the separation, the two older children, Thembi and Makgatho, lived sometimes with Evelyn, sometimes with Nelson, until Winnie moved in with Nelson in June 1958; after that, neither boy lived with his father again. The boys took sides in their parents’ feud, Makgatho his father’s, Thembi his mother’s.[11] The atmosphere in the Mandela home, it seems, did not create a space for neutrality. Thembi’s fury with his father lasted until the end of his short life; as a young man, he refused to visit Nelson in prison. Yet the relationship between son and father was thicker than simple estrangement. A peer of Thembi’s, who attended high school with him in Swaziland in the early 1960s, recalls a young man who was very tall and obsessed with boxing. By then, Nelson’s name had reached every corner of black South Africa; that he boxed was legendary; pictures of him sparring were famous. In taking to the ring, Thembi could not but step into his father’s orbit, emulating him, fighting him.[12] In 1992, when Nelson’s ghostwriter asked him about the children from his first marriage, he spoke immediately of Thembi. He took the boy with him to the boxing gym on most days, relations between them fraught and laden, his son hating him, loving him, straining to better him. Sometimes, Nelson recalled, Thembi was assigned to lead a group exercise session. He would strut around, wearing his authority heavily, and he would pick on Nelson. “Mr. Mandela,” he would bark. “We have no time to waste!”[13]

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his autobiography, Nelson honed a compact tale about his marriage to Evelyn. They were young when they fell in love; neither knew yet who each would become. He evolved into a political being while she became a devout Jehovah’s Witness. They grew incompatible as they matured. That is surely true, as far as it goes, but there is so much more to be said. Divorce proceedings do not bring out one’s best colors. In response to Evelyn’s contention that she had married a violent man, Nelson wrote that his wife was delusional: her jealousy had conjured phantom lovers; her rage had triggered irrational violence; and she was in the grip of primitive superstition, to boot. He was appealing to the prejudices the magistrate might hold about women’s erratic emotions and about black people’s spiritual worlds. Evelyn was hardly deluded; she took the deepest offense to what she knew to be true. The best that can be said is that Evelyn and Nelson held incompatible values; she regarded monogamy as sacrosanct, while he, as one of his biographers has suggested, was surprised by her puritanical zeal.[14] It should be said, though, that if Evelyn did indeed conspire to have Ngoyi arrested, the implications for Nelson were nightmarish. It is hard to imagine a marriage going more awry. From Nelson’s perspective, their relationship was well and truly broken. That Evelyn persisted in trying to mend it into the late 1950s must have astounded him. As for the violence, we have no basis on which to judge who between them was the more faithful witness to what happened in their home. What we can say is that the Nelson Mandela the world came to know, famous for subordinating his emotional life to his political goals, had yet to be forged. There was a wildness in his home and in his heart, a spiraling of events and of feelings out of his control.

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They met again just once, in 1973; after more than a decade of successive banning orders were finally lifted, Ngoyi was free, at last, to visit Nelson in prison. She traveled to Cape Town, took the ferry to Robben Island, and spent the better part of a day being funneled through the prison’s bureaucracy. Finally, moments after she had been led to a room filled with guards, Nelson appeared suddenly on the other side of a glass pane. She could see him only from the shoulders up. “Ah! Lily, my dearest!” he exclaimed. “I felt we should kiss each other,” she wrote to a comrade afterward, “but there [was] the glass between us.”[23] And then Nelson said the most generous thing. When he and his comrades were released—and they would be released, he said, freedom would come—Ngoyi should be the one to take them home.[24] She never saw him again; she died in March 1980, aged sixty-eight, just shy of a decade before his release. The last eighteen years of her life had been harsh. Confined by her banning orders to her house in Soweto, she had struggled to earn a living. At times, the scramble to survive became desperate: briefly, she resorted to selling alcohol to make ends meet. In later years, she became a supplicant to Amnesty International, whose New York office sent her a modest monthly allowance. She felt the indignity of it deeply. “You know if you have noticed birds,” she wrote to her benefactor in New York, “the young ones open their mouths while their mothers are gone out seeking food. The same applies to me.”[25] It is unlikely that Nelson ever spoke to anybody about his romantic relationship with Ngoyi. But speak about her he did. A close confidante of his in the early 1990s, who was also his head of staff, and spent a good sixteen hours a day at his side, reports that he talked of her frequently, with great admiration, almost in a stream of consciousness, for, on any given day, something would happen to remind him of her.[26]

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family had no patriarch and prized her autonomy. But it is hard to hold back the suspicion that for Nelson, Ngoyi was not enough. It is not just that she was barely educated; she carried her unworldliness heavily. She did not attend the parties at the First-Slovo house; she was not comfortable there.[29] And when she went abroad in 1955, she asked the superintendent of a Berlin hospital if the staff were so respectful to her because they thought she was educated.[30] One can hardly imagine Winnie in a similar state of self-doubt. “Lilian was not as emancipated as either Nelson or Winnie,” a comrade who knew all three of them commented decades later. “Nelson and Winnie didn’t carry their burdens on their backs. They delighted in all sorts of people. Lilian…did not have that confidence.”[31]

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She had trained as a schoolteacher, but had given it up by the time she met Nelson. When the apartheid government introduced its infamous Bantu Education Act in 1953, which created a separate and inferior education system for black students, she had put down her chalk and refused to teach. She spent the days at home, listless and bored. In the evenings, she attended ANC meetings where, among many others, she met Nelson Mandela. He was a flirt: a “Casanova,” is the word she used many years later, ever so charming and unashamedly on the hunt.

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She simply did not believe what Tambo was saying. And she said so. He could not stop her, she told him; she was going home. “I cannot allow you to do that,” she recalled him saying. “They will catch you.” He quite literally restrained her as she battled to free herself from his grasp… She did not lay eyes on her children for another ten years. When they finally joined her, the older boy was sixteen, the younger one twelve. “You always think of them as being the age when you left,” she told an interviewer many years later. “When I met the twelve-year-old after ten years it wasn’t too bad; I could still cuddle him. He hadn’t shot up as one would have expected. But my other boy was a tall sixteen-year-old. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know how to behave towards this boy. It broke my heart. And neither of them knew how to behave towards me.”[32]

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breakfast and returned late at night and went to bed.”[33] She was among the first to return home when the ANC was unbanned in 1990, representing the organization in its first encounter with the apartheid government in Cape Town. In the group photographs taken that day, she cuts a striking figure. A pudgy black man on her left, a balding white man on her right, she is tall and erect and ever so alive. Not long after her return, Nelson phoned her. “How is the boy?” she recalled him asking. Noting that he chose not to call his son by his name, she realized in a flash how Mompati had settled in Nelson’s mind. He was racked with remorse about the children he had sired in wedlock, but this child he had placed in another, much more distant category: biologically his, to be sure, but that was all. Ruth Mompati lost both her children in quick succession in the early 1990s. Her younger son took his own life. The older, Mompati, died with little warning after suffering an aneurysm. She phoned Nelson hours after his death. “The boy has passed away” are the words she remembered choosing. There was a long silence. “Is there anything you need?” Nelson finally asked. She began to weep, she recalled, and put down the phone.[34]

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History has been as unkind to men like Phillips and Jones as it has been to black men like Xuma. A century after they began their work, their paternalism grates. “I have seen a white man deal with a motor car,” Phillips cites approvingly the comments of a black man he encountered at a township meeting. “He does not kick it. He looks at it carefully, methodically. He sees what’s wrong. Then he fixes it. I ask,” the man says, now addressing Phillips directly, “that you treat us blacks like that motor car.”[9] The Reverend Ray Phillips was nonetheless an extraordinary man whose influence over Winnie and her peers the condescension of hindsight threatens to obscure. His sheer energy was something to behold; the number of institutions he founded, raised money for, and managed was staggering.

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is easy to mistake where Winnie stood in regard to Phillips’s project. She was young and beautiful and discovering the power of her sexuality. In time to come, she made a mockery of Helping Hand’s attempts to keep her chaste. During her last months at the institution, she spent her evenings with Nelson in his office ostensibly “to study.” And when Nelson went out, she invited her other lover, Barney Sampson, to share his office with her. The street outside Helping Hand became her playground. With Nelson’s Oldsmobile parked at one end of Hans Street and Sampson’s blue van at the other, she flitted between her lovers under Mrs. Bruce’s nose. But that is

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As Winnie grew older, the antinomies inside her grew more numerous. The new roles did not displace the old; they lived together within her, side by side. In relation to the Reverend Ray Phillips, she stood in two quite different places. On the one hand, she was a black woman who chose her lovers freely, both before and after she married. She was the great undoer of Phillips’s project, a glorious rival to his vision of what a modern woman should be. And yet she also became more Phillips than Phillips himself. This role was less apparent when she was young. But she imbibed it, and it nestled inside her. In time to come, she became a ferocious enforcer of conservative sexual mores among young black South Africans, even while she herself flouted sexual norms. She did this enforcing in the name of an ascendant African nationalism, Phillips in all probability long banished from her mind. He was there nonetheless, modified almost beyond recognition.

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appears that Winnie herself required the intensity; she nurtured it with persistence and with vigor. There would be many equivalents to the twice-weekly phone calls to Barbara. She wanted not just to enter a person’s internal world but to occupy it. Born into a large brood, she knew all about what it took to wedge herself into another’s thoughts. Indeed, perhaps the greatest talent she took into the world was the capacity not just to understand the person sitting next to her but to become what that person wanted. In Barbara Harmel’s case, it was a parent; for others, we shall see, it was somebody to whom to confess; for others, still, a lover. Her propensity to take this talent for intimacy everywhere, across the lines of race, class, and gender, was notable. Often, it was white men who noticed her power, for Winnie flirted across racial boundaries with an ease that struck them. Ben Turok, for instance, who stood trial for treason alongside Nelson, recalls that for all that black and white activists socialized together, “the racial differences were substantial.” There were many, he was to observe, “who did not make the adjustment easily.” Not so with Winnie; not even remotely. On the day they met, Turok told Winnie that upon finishing high school, he and a group of friends had backpacked their way through the Mpondoland, at one point passing close to her home. At every subsequent party, Winnie called Turok “my Mpondo boyfriend” and asked him to dance. There was a self-command in her teasing, and a provocation in her flirting, that stayed with him for decades.[10] Other white men were similarly struck. Leon Levy, who also stood trial for treason with Nelson, recalled regularly arranging to meet Winnie on a busy street in the inner city. At each of these encounters, Winnie flung her arms around him, her embrace extravagant and tactile. He would consciously stop himself from recoiling; a white man and a black woman embracing thus on a busy street was more than provocative; he feared that passersby would lynch them. Levy recalled something else about Winnie. At a gathering in the suburbs, while he and Winnie were dancing, she put her lips to his ear: these parties were preparations for the state balls they would host one day, she whispered. It struck him that this young woman, barely in her twenties, had given much consideration to the prospect of exercising power.[11]

Ref. 97A7-C

The argument Kotane and others put forward was simple: launching an armed struggle would not only drain energy and personnel from mass politics; it would give the apartheid state license to crush all opposition.[7] The bracing advice Walter Sisulu had received when he visited China eight years earlier was echoing in his ears. We cannot know which way history would have turned had Nelson and his allies lost the argument.[8] But we do know that their detractors’ prognosis was right. In the wake of the turn to violence, the ANC was all but wiped off the face of South Africa, its leadership dispersed between prison and exile.[9] Marooned in the wasteland that remained were the wives of the struggle: Albertina Sisulu, Winnie Mandela, and others. Barely in contact with those in exile and in prison, some attempted, each after her own fashion, to build an underground organization. Nelson was party to what might have been one of the most fateful strategic errors in his country’s history. Among the consequences were a life in prison and the evolution of a marriage too astonishing for anyone to have made up…

Ref. 7FBA-D

across the room. From the following morning on, Kodesh woke with Nelson and joined him at exercise. It seemed the path of least resistance. At first, he lasted just fifteen minutes; by the time the two men parted, he was keeping up with Nelson for the full two hours.[10] Nelson enjoyed his time underground. Some who visited him clandestinely in Kodesh’s flat found themselves in the company of an ebullient, charming, flirtatious man. “He was, quite simply, full of beans,” one of them recalled.[11]

Ref. 63AC-E

Among the sources of his good spirits, it seems, was the experience of an unusual new source of danger. He was not just underground; he was notoriously so, the mysterious existence of the Black Pimpernel reported in the newspapers every day. And his efforts to conceal himself were lackluster. He did not confine himself to Kodesh’s flat; from time to time he would drive to meetings in the most unconvincing disguise: a cap, blue overalls, a thick beard, a pair of rimless sunglasses—he was meant to pass for a chauffeur. In truth, people recognized him all the time; they recognized him and they kept his secret, and from this he derived much pleasure.

Ref. 9CEB-F

One imagines Nelson and Winnie sitting alone together at Liliesleaf farm, Winnie smoldering, Nelson’s discomfort growing. The irony could not be greater. Three years later, on Robben Island, Nelson would discover that Brian Somana had been Winnie’s lover while tasked to watch out for her and the kids. There is comedy in this scene at Liliesleaf, but it is deeply serious, too. Their courtship had been frenetic, dizzying; it had pressed the boundaries of the acceptable. Each knew very well the other’s sexualized relation to the world. Now, three years after marrying, they had been more apart than together, and the question of infidelity was a constant disturbance.

Ref. BE0E-G

Having fought bitterly to launch an armed struggle, Nelson had to learn how to actually conduct it. He had trained as a lawyer, after all, and was an experienced political organizer, but about violence he knew nothing at all. Now, at Wolfie Kodesh’s apartment, then at Liliesleaf, he read: on the insurgency in Malaya, on the resistance to the French in Indochina, on the war in the Philippines. On Kodesh’s bookshelf he saw Carl von Clausewitz’s On War; he devoured it.[1] He found Menachem Begin’s account of Haganah, the paramilitary organization founded in the last years of British Palestine. He read the account by Blas Roca, secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, of the Cuban Revolution.[2] He read these books as a lawyer might: meticulously. When the police finally discovered Liliesleaf, they found sixty-five pages of notes, in Nelson’s handwriting, on Mao’s Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War, and also a thick précis of Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare.[3] Nelson was not so much reading as studying.

Ref. 1C6F-H

Most guerrilla movements begin amateurishly, and this one was no exception. Only two of the conspirators had any military expertise: one, Jack Hodgson, had been in a unit that operated behind German lines in North Africa in 1941, a distant memory now. Another, Arthur Goldreich, had served in the Jewish Palmach in its fight against the British in Palestine.[5] Leaning heavily on these men’s rusty knowledge, the would-be guerrillas did the best they could. At times they fumbled. On a weekday afternoon in mid-December, a car came to a standstill in Johannesburg’s downtown traffic, black smoke belching from the windows. A crowd gathered and two traffic officers approached. One of the bystanders, a prominent journalist, recognized the driver as Ben Turok, a well-known activist. He sped off. It was a scorching summer day. On the floor of the car, a plastic jar filled with the acid to be used in a bomb had overheated.[6]

Ref. AF19-I

In many ways, the armed struggle came to define the ANC, both for better and for worse. The notion of an armed popular insurrection became an article of religious faith for many of its leaders, constricting their tactics, narrowing their vision. And yet the idea of Umkhonto we Sizwe performed decisive symbolic work; when they revolted in the 1980s, South Africa’s youth aligned en masse with the ANC, envisaging that its exiled army would come back to topple the regime…

Ref. DFAD-J

In Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, he watched a phalanx of troops march through the city before the gaze of their emperor, Haile Selassie. His head understood that Selassie was a dictator. But his gut was considerably more powerful. “I was 44 years old,” he recalled, “and this was the first time for me to see black armies commanded by black generals.”[8]

Ref. 82EA-K

At the tail end of the procession a military band was playing, and its leader caught Nelson’s eye. Most of the marchers were pale-skinned Arabs. This one was built like a god and “was as black as the night.”[9] Supremely confident in his magnificent body, he twirled a mace through his hands. As he marched past, a collective giddiness took hold of the small South African delegation: they rose from their seats and cheered. Feeling a little self-conscious, Nelson glanced around to discover that the people around the South Africans were laughing; they had become an audience to his and his comrades’ exuberant racial pride.[10] This moment sits awkwardly with Nelson’s legacy. He is hardly associated with the celebration of black martial power. That violence might free the oppressed from psychological diminishment is an idea we connect to the likes of Frantz Fanon. Yet the force of this feeling burst spontaneously from Nelson’s being. Watching a virile black soldier, he imagined the collapse of the apartheid regime. “I felt sure,” he wrote of this moment, “that once our units, operating from friendly territory, put foot on our soil, they would grow in numbers and striking power so rapidly that Verwoerd would be plagued by all the problems that once tormented Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo Diem, De Gaulle, Batista and the British.”[11]

Ref. 780F-L

Since 1956, two friendly neighboring countries, Tunisia and Morocco, had harbored the Algerian revolutionary army. These territories in theory constituted crucial rear bases from which to support the war. Now, from his hosts, Nelson learned that the fortification the French had built, the Morice Line—an enormous barrier of minefields, electric fences, and artillery—had effectively sealed the Algerian border. Guerrilla units that did cross into Algeria sustained stunning casualties. The FLN was in fact largely cut off from its home country. The prospects of a military victory, Nelson was told, were zero. Guerrilla warfare was useful, Nelson’s hosts said, only insofar as it pressured the enemy to negotiate. As important, if not more so, was the political mobilization of people at home and the forging of alliances abroad. “International public opinion,” he was told, “is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters.”[13]

Ref. F9EF-M

Back home, Nelson’s comrades at Liliesleaf were drawing up plans for guerrilla war. For the remainder of his life, he was impeccably polite about these plans. They were “an honest attempt…to create an army,” he said.[14] But he clearly understood, as he learned Algeria’s lessons, the folly of what his comrades had planned.

Ref. 96F8-N

Winnie took one look at him. “Is it Nelson?” she asked.[27] A quarter of a century later, a retired CIA agent told The New York Times that his agency had let the South African government know where to find Nelson Mandela.[28] Nelson himself always remained skeptical of this story. Indeed, he would come to blame his capture on his wife.

Ref. DBE5-O

“I can never forget,” Kodesh recalled. “When he came up—and he’s this tall, big, athletic man—he had…a kaross, like a skin, across [his shoulders], beads round his neck, beads round his arms, and he was half naked… “[T]here was a complete hush. Even the policemen, I honestly think they went pale, to see this huge man standing there in his national costume.”[1] Winnie had slipped him the outfit half an hour earlier. She had borrowed it from a Thembu family, the Festiles, who used it on ceremonial occasions and whom Nelson had known since his earliest days in Johannesburg.[2] He did not so much as glance at the gallery; he fixed his stare upon the magistrate, who returned his gaze with palpable unease, “like a mongoose staring at a snake,” Kodesh thought.[3] Winnie’s costume was barely less dramatic than Nelson’s. An outlandishly tall black wrap around her head, her body in raw white cotton, beadwork on her wrists, a bead tie around her neck: she was not just beautiful but towering. All about her in the black section of the gallery were dozens of women, also in ceremonial Thembu dress. The accused, his wife, and their supporters in the gallery, together symbolizing black South Africa, were showing “contempt for the court,” as Nelson would put it.[4]

Ref. E821-P

the front line of the marchers was Winnie Mandela. Those who had seen her in the courtroom must have raised an eyebrow for she had changed clothes; dressed in a tailored business suit and a fur toque, she headed toward the cordon of police officers blocking the street ahead.[5] This confrontation of the state’s armed forces with beauty and style was perfectly choreographed. She would use it time and again, its force never fading.

Ref. 8D67-Q

aspirations of the African people” were on trial. He turned to face the magistrate square on and spoke to him personally. “I want to make it perfectly clear,” he said, “that the remarks I am about to make are not addressed to Your Worship in his personal capacity, nor are they intended to reflect upon the integrity of the court. I hold Your Worship in high esteem.” Then he requested that the magistrate recuse himself. “Why is it,” Nelson asked, “that in this courtroom I am facing a white magistrate, confronted by a white prosecutor, escorted by white orderlies? Can anyone honestly and seriously suggest that in this type of atmosphere the scales of justice are evenly balanced? Why is it that no African in the history of this country has ever had the honour of being tried by his kith and kin?” He did not, Nelson said, consider himself “legally or morally bound to obey laws made by a parliament in which I have no representation.”[8]

Ref. 1215-R

close of the trial, he pleaded in mitigation. He spoke for an hour, first about life before imperial conquest. “The country was our own,” he said, “in name and right…We set up and operated our own government. We controlled our own arms and we organised our own trade and commerce.” He was, he said, a prisoner of conscience. “I was made, by the law, a criminal not because of what I had done, but because of what I stood for, because of what I thought…[T]here comes a time,” he said, when a man “can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him.” The magistrate called a recess, returned ten minutes later, and sentenced Nelson to five years in prison. As the court rose, Nelson turned to the gallery, raised a clenched fist, and shouted, “Amandla!”—“Power!”—three times. The crowd returned his salute and began singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” as he was led away.[9] . .

Ref. C7AC-S

strategy he adopted in the courtroom, Nelson wrote in his autobiography, occurred to him two months earlier, when he had appeared in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court for remand. It struck him, he said, that although he was “a handcuffed outlaw,” the magistrate and attorneys all greeted him with deference. Once the proceedings began, their deference gave way to something even more striking: embarrassment. “I had something of a revelation,” he would write. “These men were not only uncomfortable because I was a colleague brought low, but because I was an ordinary man being punished for his beliefs. In a…

Ref. BB90-T

to him in a flash, that he worked it out all alone—none of this is true. He had in fact snatched Robert Sobukwe’s court performance from two years earlier, all of it, and made it his own: the refusal to apply for bail or to be represented by a barrister; the declaration that he did not consider himself bound to obey the laws of a parliament in which he was not represented. He had hardly bothered to modify Sobukwe’s words. “Because I had no hand in making the law,” Sobukwe and his co-accused had said, “I have no moral obligation to obey it.” “We are not afraid of the consequences of our actions,” Sobukwe had declared, “and it is not our intention to plead for mercy.” Even Nelson’s gracious insistence that he had nothing personal against the magistrate was…

Ref. DAEC-U

Winnie was to wait for Nelson’s return before an admiring audience. Her story would be one of temptation: of men to cuckold their country’s most famous son; of Winnie to betray her heroic man. The prospect of transgression formed the very frame of the tale. And yet, if this is how Winnie’s story was framed in the press, it was hardly how she understood herself. Indeed, her conception of her role at this time was remarkable, perhaps even shocking, and it would go largely undetected for years. “Most people do not realise,” she wrote to Nelson in prison in December 1962, “that your physical presence would have meant nothing to me if the ideals for which you have dedicated your life have not been realised…In these hectic and violent years I have grown to love you more than I ever did before…Nothing can be as valuable as being part & parcel of the formation of the history of a country.”[5] What she expresses here is so liquid, so surprising: we need to cite her in another context to understand what she is saying. Several years later, in a diary she kept in jail, she recounted a tense conversation with a brigadier Aucamp, the head of the prison in which she was being held. “Why do you think I talk to you and not to any one of those [other detainees?],” she quoted him asking. “[I]t is because I acknowledge the fact that your people regard you as their leader in your husband’s absence.”[6] One finds oneself going back and reading the lines again; it is improbable that Brigadier Aucamp, or anyone else, for that matter, understood Winnie as the leader of black South Africa, certainly not in 1969. It was Winnie who understood herself thus. The remarks she put in Aucamp’s mouth shed the starkest light on what she told Nelson in that letter in December 1962. The marriage she conjured was a mythical, royal union: as Nelson’s wife she was the leader of a nation.

Ref. 50BB-V

and the maximum sentence was the same: it was death. It is doubtful that Nelson thought he’d hang. He certainly did not behave like a man who believed he might die. Before the Rivonia charges, he had enrolled for a law degree by correspondence at the University of London so that he might complete the course of study he had failed at Wits. Now, during the trial, he also began to study Afrikaans. That, perhaps, is the crispest reflection of his state of mind. Assuming that his enemy might lock him away indefinitely, he acquired fluency in its language, preparing, it seems, for a long engagement.

Ref. 0FB1-W

battery of distinguished lawyers lined up to defend the Rivonia defendants. To their discomfort, they discovered that their clients’ primary aim was not to avoid execution but to explain their objectives. They were not going to contest evidence that was true, only that which slandered them. Nor did they plan to answer questions that might expose their comrades to arrest. In following this course, their lawyers explained, they might be signing their death warrants.[3] Nelson and his comrades were brave, to be sure. But circumstances had not given them much choice. To be seen to be saving themselves now would shatter their credibility. Sobukwe’s and Nelson’s previous trials had conjured a spirit of principled sacrifice from which there was no retreat.

Ref. EB55-X

He spoke for more than five hours. Among the most striking moments in his speech was his explanation of the turn to violence. He enumerated the myriad ways in which lawful protest had been closed down. “We were placed in a position,” he said, “in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government.”

Ref. 76A3-Y

It was among the most compelling statements of leadership he ever made. It was also the first clear expression of the mature Mandela’s abiding sense of the world. He had experimented a great deal: with insurrection, with revolution, with guerrilla warfare. Now he was clear that the struggle against apartheid should not tear to pieces the society that would survive it. This imperative informed much of what he did over the following three decades. He had written his speech in his

Ref. E262-Z

by its final sentence. “I have fought against white domination,” Nelson had written, “and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Nelson was daring the judge to sentence him to death, two of his lawyers, Bram Fischer and George Bizos, complained. They begged him to take the last sentence out. He refused. Eventually, they reached a compromise and added three words.[7] “But if needs be,” he said in court, “it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” It was late afternoon. He had been speaking since lunchtime. He sat down to a prolonged silence. The trial went on for another two months. During all of that time, Nelson recalled, the judge, a man named Quartus de Wet, did not once look him in the eye.[8] . .

Ref. 783C-A

On the morning the sentence was passed, June 12, 1964, a large crowd gathered outside the court, eager to hear whether eight of the men inside were to die. They waited for hours, until 12:15 p.m., when a woman emerged from the building. It was Winnie Mandela. She raised her fist and shouted, “Amandla!” From mouth to mouth, a single word was whispered: “life”; the men had been sentenced to life imprisonment, not to death. The crowd, most of whom were women, burst into song and began to move, as one, toward Church Square. White bystanders watched. Some sneered. A group of children ran sorties into the marching women, trying to trip them. From a window above, somebody threw a bucket of water. They marched on, making a circuit of the Palace of Justice.[14] A few minutes later, the British broadcaster Robin Day interviewed Winnie Mandela. “I am slightly relieved,” she told him. “It could have been far worse than this. In fact, my people and I expected death sentences for all the accused.” The interview was broadcast on the BBC that night. Her voice was clean and young; her huge eyes beamed an angelic clarity. The image was so incongruous with what she had said that most people probably missed it. “My people and I expected…” She was speaking as the embodiment of a nation.

Ref. 99F9-B

Two weekends after sentencing, a gathering assembled in a house opposite the Mandela residence in Orlando West. More than a hundred people came; they arrived on the Saturday night and partied into the following afternoon. The occasion was Nelson and Winnie’s sixth wedding anniversary, but neither husband nor wife was there. Nelson was on Robben Island serving the fifteenth and sixteenth days of a life sentence. Winnie, whose banning order did not permit her to attend social gatherings, was at home. The party, one of the guests declared, had been arranged to uphold a principle.[15] The absence of the couple was somehow fitting, for the marriage was now a national institution quite apart from the two people who had wed. Nobody saw this more clearly than Winnie Mandela. A month earlier, while the Rivonia trial slouched toward its conclusion, she had invited her lover to live in the home she and Nelson had shared. The ensuing scandal spread like contagion through activist households in Johannesburg, jumped the ocean to exile circles in London, then found its way to the prison cells of Robben Island.

Ref. DF53-C

It is hard to exaggerate the effects of this new campaign of torture on South Africa’s activists and on their relations with one another. “In a sense, up to about 1960/1,” Joe Slovo was to say, “the underground struggle was fought on a gentlemanly terrain. There was still the rule of law. You had a fair trial in their courts. Nobody was kept in isolation. Up to 1963, I know of no incident of any political prisoner being tortured.”[2] The results of the new regime were immediate. Information, some of it reliable, some of it made up to get the torture to stop, spilled from the mouths of detainees. But the seepage of information was hardly the only consequence; the damage to people’s moral lives was harder to measure. Torture trades in betrayal; no matter that one is hardly in control of one’s perfidy, the moral legacy of what one has said lives on for years. Of the memoirs written by those who were tortured at this time, precious few do not conceal or simply avoid the matter of what one said that harmed others. Just now, as this author writes these lines, an accusation sits in his email in-box, leveled from one old man to another, concerning who betrayed whom more than half a century ago. During the 1960s, the activists subjected to the new regime of detention without trial and bodily torture would tally in the hundreds. In the wake of mass uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s, the number would climb into the thousands, then into the tens of thousands. By the time apartheid ended, some seventy-eight thousand people would have been detained without trial. How many of them were beaten, electrocuted, and sleep deprived, how many dunked in water until their lungs were flooded, how many broke and betrayed comrades, friends, and loved ones, cannot be counted.[3]

Ref. B54F-D

Somana was the young man Nelson had tapped to mind his family while he was on the run. It was he who had smuggled Winnie and the children to see Nelson at Liliesleaf farm. When he was arrested, Somana had been visiting Liliesleaf for the better part of two years. He was also, by this time, Winnie Mandela’s lover. The scandal of it had been reverberating through Johannesburg’s activist ranks throughout the first half of 1963. It was not just that Winnie’s husband was on trial for his life. It was the sheer visibility of the affair. In addition to his work at New Age, Somana had a business that marketed a brand of sweets, the wrappers adorned with an image of Mickey Mouse. Now, as he and Winnie increasingly spent their time together, Winnie’s car was adorned on its side by a picture of Mickey, for Somana was using her car to run his business.[5] If Winnie Mandela alone were not distinctive enough, if an eccentrically painted car did not itself draw stares, the daily sight of the two of them encased in a Disney cartoon screamed for attention. Their relationship might have remained no more than the subject of fierce gossip, but for an incident that occurred in the spring of 1963. In early October, two Cape Town activists, Fikile Bam and Marcus Solomon, fled to Johannesburg.

Ref. D5B9-E

A delegation from the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), of which Winnie was a founding member, went immediately to appeal to her to break off with Somana. So too did Soweto’s most respected businesswoman, Constance Ntshona; she arrived unannounced at Winnie’s house and demanded that Winnie never see Somana again.[9] There is no direct record of Winnie’s response. But something of its spirit is captured in a remark made more than two decades later by Hilda Bernstein, a prominent Johannesburg activist at that time. “We tried to persuade her to break off this relationship,” Bernstein recalled. “I mean that was a terrible time there. She had that same sort of obstinacy and arrogance that she later exposed, a refusal to listen to what people around her were saying.”[10] Winnie’s car kept appearing on Soweto’s streets as it had before, Somana in the driver’s seat, Winnie next to him, Mickey Mouse in his customary place on the door. Soon, the couple grew bolder. Throughout 1963, Somana had lived a few blocks from the Mandelas with his wife and two small children. Now, in early May 1964—a little over a month before Nelson was found guilty and sentenced—Somana moved in with Winnie. It would emerge at his divorce hearing two years later that his wife, Miriam, had presented him with an ultimatum: he should either end his romance with Winnie Mandela, or he should leave home. And so he left home and went to live at 8115 Orlando West.[11] In early May 1964 it was widely believed that Nelson would be sentenced to death the following month. Winnie had invited into his bed a man increasingly believed to have betrayed the Rivonia defendants. She was taking extraordinary risks. She was indeed on the cusp of personal catastrophe, for the fury she had provoked might have swept her into oblivion. There is evidence that she knew this, that she felt disaster coming.

Ref. 13FE-F

Some time before she left South Africa in late 1964, Barbara Harmel had lunch with Winnie in her office at the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society. They had gone downstairs together to buy their meal from a grocery store. Now, alone in the elevator as they made their way back to the office, it dawned on Harmel that Winnie was in a state of extreme distress. “They keep talking about me,” she recalled Winnie saying. “They keep talking and talking and talking. One day Nelson will know the truth about me.” Harmel regretted that she did not take the opportunity to discover what was in Winnie’s heart. Still hungry for her maternal love, she recoiled from the unwelcome vulnerability this formidable woman was displaying.[12]

Ref. F25A-G

Now, in the letter that preceded Winnie’s arrival, FEDSAW members in Johannesburg warned Cape Town comrades “that we must do nothing for Winnie, that Winnie was a sell-out,” as one of the recipients of the letter recalled. The Cape Town women ignored the letter; indeed, they were incensed by it, considering it irresponsible gossip, and went ahead with Winnie’s planned program. And Winnie, of course, performed brilliantly in her clandestine encounters with township activists. “She had wonderful meetings…in ten or fifteen streets in Langa, and the same thing in Nyanga.”[13] That is how it would go with Winnie for years to come. She would scandalize some within her movement; others would rush to her defense. Their motives were varied: some shielded her because her marriage was a political asset that required protection, others because they saw in the wrath of her detractors a misogyny they knew all too well. When Barbara Harmel arrived in London in 1964, South African exile circles were dizzy with gossip about Winnie. And what she recalled above all was the outspoken voice of Rica Hodgson, a senior comrade in exile. “Do you expect her to be celibate her whole life?” Harmel remembered Hodgson demanding. “Rica was so angry,” she recalled. “This was the swinging ’60s, but I was struck to hear a left-wing adult talk this way.”[14]

Ref. 109A-H

Why did Winnie drive herself to the brink of excommunication? It would be wrong to imagine that she was acting with coolness or calculation. We know from her subsequent career that she required to be frenetically present in the inner world of another. She required the boundarylessness, perhaps even the instability. Most likely she did not feel alive unless connected in this way. She probably felt the demands that she leave Somana an existential assault; she battened down and fought. As speculative as these thoughts may be, they are crucial to understanding her trajectory not just in private life but, more especially, in politics. For she maintained this ceaseless agitation in both spheres: in her personal life, a succession of astonishingly unstable love triangles; in politics, something harder to pin down—a relationship to the masses of black South Africans demanding a state of constant activity and a vision of apartheid ending in insurrection.

Ref. C06D-I

In years to come, Winnie and Magubane drew very close; the sacrifices Magubane made for Winnie and her children—he courted banning orders, imprisonment, torture, and much more—speak to extraordinary devotion. And it appears from the account of a man who attended those evening gatherings that Magubane and Winnie were already drawing close then, much to the ire of Brian Somana.[16] Precisely what happened on New Year’s Eve is impossible to reconstruct, but Somana drew a gun, his intention apparently to threaten Magubane; the gun was discharged and Sefton Vuthela was shot in the finger. The following day, police took Somana into custody and charged him with attempted murder.[17] This was not the first episode of high drama to take place at Winnie’s house. A week earlier, in the early hours of December 24, Somana’s wife, Miriam, had arrived with her brother-in-law and a police detective. They had pounded on Winnie’s door, demanding that Somana come out. Sometime after 4:00 a.m., following three hours of door thumping and shouting, the lights came on and Winnie emerged from the house, followed a short while later by Somana.[18] Matters escalated again three and a half weeks after the shooting incident at Winnie’s house. In the early hours of January 24, Peter Magubane’s car, which was in the garage at the Mandela house, was set alight. A neighbor later testified that he saw Somana’s brother, Oscar, fleeing the scene. When the police went to the Somana residence shortly after the fire broke out, they found Oscar lying on the couch in the living room; under the blanket that covered him he was fully dressed: he had not even taken off his shoes.[19]

Ref. 0E67-J

So much about Winnie’s intervention prefigures her later trajectory. For the longest time, she had clung fiercely to Brian Somana in the face of a storm. Now she branded him a living embodiment of evil. This Manichaean view of human beings, indeed, of the same human being, at one time all good, at another diabolical, followed her in the decades ahead. Another aspect of Winnie’s conduct would echo into the future. She was discovering early something both she and Nelson learned well, along with many others who have exercised power: that even blatant lying might pay off, for time and circumstance have a formidable capacity to remake what passes for truth. So it was in the case of Brian Somana. In the authorized biography of Nelson penned by Fatima Meer, a close friend of the family whose loyalty to Winnie was unwavering, the Somanas are cast as pawns in a “sinister plan…hatched…to destroy the Mandelas by destroying Winnie’s reputation… “Brian was a plant,” Meer writes, an “instrument used by the police…Mrs. Somana started divorce proceedings and cited Winnie as a co-respondent. But once this reached the press, the divorce proceedings were dropped… “A woman is vulnerable,” Meer concludes. “A beautiful young woman, deprived of her husband, is a hundred-fold more vulnerable.”[24] At the time, though, few believed what Winnie had said in her affidavit. In the press, the question increasingly arose whether Nelson knew, and, if he did, what he might do. In July 1965, the liberal Rand Daily Mail carried a story explicitly about this issue. “Unnamed friends of Nelson Mandela,” the story went, “say that he does not know about the Somana case and is still very much in love with his wife.”[25] It made for an uncomfortable spectacle: a conversation taking place in a national newspaper behind the back of a cuckolded man. The Rand Daily Mail was wrong, though; Nelson did know. Skip

Ref. 494D-K

Their cellblock was called B Section, or, informally, the leadership section, for it had been decided to isolate the leaders of political organizations from the rest of Robben Island’s inmates; the majority of prisoners were held in large communal cells some distance away. Whether it had been a mistake to house the liberation movement’s upper ranks together, permitting them to talk, to learn, and to plan, was a question that reverberated through apartheid’s security establishment for years.

Ref. D5C5-L

What happened between these men as they worked and lived together? And what passed between them and their keepers? These are the hardest of questions, for there is no source one might trust. Nelson himself recorded his ethical duty to conceal the island’s life. “Frankness…is dangerous and must be avoided,” he wrote.[10] Even those who are candid cannot be fully trusted; the most self-reflective among them know not to believe what they recall. “I remember prison as a good experience,” Mac Maharaj told an interviewer many years after his release. “I think I have unconsciously learned to [distill] from that experience all the good aspects.” In the course of the interview he recalled “two years of ennui, of…a state of self-pity which I wouldn’t want to reveal.”[11]

Ref. 1F4F-M

The dominant feature of Nelson’s life now was solitude. For fifteen hours a day every prisoner on B Section was alone with himself. What happened with Nelson during these hours? The only reading material he was permitted at first were his law books; he had been given special dispensation to keep studying for his LLB by correspondence at University College London. From 4:00 p.m., when he was locked in his cell, until 8:00 p.m., when he was ordered to sleep, he busied himself with his studies. The remainder of the night was idle time; if he was caught studying after 8:00 p.m., he was punished. But nor was he permitted a darkened room; the overhead lightbulb burned all night. He was not allowed a timepiece; one imagines that he guessed from the birdsong when dawn was near.

Ref. 45A3-N

Please do not pay from your account.”[14] But by the late 1960s, as the restrictions on his communications eased, his letters became both more numerous and considerably more revealing. Notwithstanding that his enemy was reading them, he began truly to live through his correspondence: he ached for the beehives and the honeycombs of Qunu; he pined for Johannesburg’s nightlife; more than anything else, he rekindled his romance with his wife. His memories, we shall see, were so nostalgic, at times so utterly fantastical, we cannot but worry that he was drifting too far from the world as it was.

Ref. CC0C-O

arson trial, the spectacular divorce proceedings. Nelson’s response was dramatic and brutal. He told Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada that he was to divorce his wife.[16] Then he sought out the two Yu Chi Chan members and asked them for a meeting. With great formality he apologized to them on behalf of his organization. “He thought, in the first place, of the political damage that such an incident might have caused,” Neville Alexander recalled, “and we were quite taken aback. Because we would never even have dreamt of associating that kind of thing with the political movement from which the person came…We said, ‘Look, we are fully behind you. We understand the situation, and if there is anything that we can do…’ ”[17] Why was Nelson’s initial response so decisive, so apparently final? His innermost feelings about Winnie’s sex life were complicated, no doubt, but that he wished to divorce her for having a lover is implausible. He never expected her to be celibate, he always insisted; his place was not to know too much. “One must not be inquisitive,” he said. “It is sufficient that this is a woman who is loyal to me, who supports and who comes to visit me, who writes to me; that’s sufficient.”[18]

Ref. D93F-P

In years to come, a strangeness pervaded Nelson’s communication with Winnie; a letter suffused with romance suddenly turned to politics, and yet the same charged, erotic spirit remained. It is jarring to read, as if two circuits have crossed. In Nelson’s mind, it appears, two commitments had mingled, political substituting for sexual fidelity. Winnie’s violation of this pact was as intense and as personal as a lover’s betrayal. But it is not quite as simple as this—how could it be in matters so close to the heart? Years later, Nelson read the sensational memoir of Canada’s First Lady Margaret Trudeau in which she described, among other salacious episodes, her affair with Ted Kennedy. Nelson wrote to Winnie expressing his distaste. Its intimacy, he said, bordered on the improper. “I am not in a position to judge to what extent the…book has damaged the political career of Premier Trudeau,” he wrote. “A happy family life is an important pillar to any public man.”[19] He appeared to forget, when he wrote these lines, the salaciousness of the Somana affair. For all his flirting and preening, Nelson was a traditional bourgeois man. To command the public sphere, men must be patriarchs, their houses seen to be in order. He understood that Winnie might have lovers, but for her affairs to be reported in the newspapers was beyond the pale. Perhaps this is what offended him most deeply: not her infidelity, not even her political betrayal, but his public humiliation.

Ref. 4D0E-Q

It is from Ahmed Kathrada that we know that Nelson resolved to divorce Winnie; he told several people a quarter of a century later when he was released from prison. What Kathrada does not say is why Nelson changed his mind. Probably he did not know. He was a decade Nelson’s junior and was regarded as a nephew or a little brother. Walter Sisulu is the one who might have altered Nelson’s course. We cannot know what passed between them. We can only guess that it was from this man—who had taken young Nelson under…

Ref. 9048-R

Winnie came to see Nelson in July 1965 while the scandal was on fire.[20] By the time he wrote his autobiography, he had erased the encounter from his mind. “In July 1966…I had my second visit from my wife,” he writes. “It was almost exactly two years after the first visit.”[21] It is hardly surprising. On the other side of the glass was the woman he had almost divorced. Behind her stood a phalanx of prying white men listening closely to every word they spoke. It could only have been the most…

Ref. C83B-S

because he himself had been powerfully seduced. At the very beginning of his imprisonment, in August 1962, Nelson was held in the hospital section of the Fort with four other prisoners. One of them was Moosa Dinath. Nelson had known him vaguely in the 1950s; he was a successful businessman, famous for being the first Indian to float a public company, and had been peripherally involved in antiapartheid politics.[2] He was also a serial con artist and a crook; indeed, he was serving time not for political activity but for fraud. That a prisoner convicted of a nonpolitical offense had been placed with Nelson ought to have aroused his suspicion. Instead, he was enchanted. “He was a very intelligent fellow,” Nelson recalled. “Very confident. Tall, light and handsome, you know…very handsome…Impressive.” And striking, too, for a man like Nelson, so attuned to matters of masculine honor, was the open contempt Dinath displayed to his captors; he even talked down to the head of the prison, a Colonel Minnaar, much to Nelson’s delight. “He just despised these fellows,” Nelson reflected with admiration.

Ref. D6E4-T

with Cabinet Ministers, in those days already.”[3] There is something astonishing in the sheer familiarity, indeed, in the timelessness, of the seduction. Here was Nelson, nationalist leader, son of the soil, locked in a cell with a true child of Mercury, cunning, tricky, ever so eloquent, able to deal with anyone, from any world.[4] There are echoes here of the reverence Nelson felt when he encountered Walter Sisulu, a man who had mastered Johannesburg with what seemed a mysterious power. As his time with Dinath went on, extraordinary things began to happen. Late one night, the head of the prison walked into the hospital section with a famous barrister in tow. Dinath slipped out with them and did not reappear until morning.[5] Some time later, when Winnie visited Nelson, she was called into Colonel Minnaar’s office. Looking furtive and anxious, he peered out of the window and closed the door. Winnie feared for a moment that he wished to seduce her. Instead, Dinath walked in and Minnaar left the two of them alone. To her astonishment, Dinath told her that for a sum of 10,000 rand Minnaar could collude in Nelson’s escape. She reported the plan to Nelson’s comrades, who greeted the news with understandable suspicion. Before they could decide what to do, Dinath advised Winnie to walk away. It was a rotten deal, he said; Minnaar wanted the whole payment up front; there was nothing to bind him to his side of the agreement.[6] Months later, Dinath was unexpectedly released from prison, years before he had served his sentence. In the meantime, he had encouraged Nelson to kindle a friendship between Winnie and his common-law wife, Maud Katzenellenbogen. The two women saw each other constantly over the following seven years, their relationship heavily lubricated by material things. Winnie was a woman in need, and Maud provided a steady flow of money, groceries, and finally, when nobody else would employ her, a job. More than that, the Somana affair had left Winnie isolated. The Sisulu home was just blocks away from 8115 Orlando West. And yet Albertina avoided Winnie like the plague. So did Lilian Ngoyi.[7] In 1965, Oliver Tambo himself set a trap to ascertain whether Winnie was a spy; he sent her a message that two senior ANC men had stolen into the country and wished to meet her at an address in Soweto. The venue was watched to see if the police would swoop; the results were inconclusive and Tambo’s suspicions remained.[8] In familiar circles, among people she ought to be able to trust, Winnie felt threatened, persecuted, ill at ease. A stranger who lavished her with attention was a safer bet.

Ref. 5DD9-U

Maud Katzenellenbogen and Moosa Dinath were of a criminal type one encounters in hard-boiled fiction: inveterate chancers, dishonest to the marrow of their bones, they were liable to sell the shirt off your back. In the late 1940s, Maud bought a quantity of gold for £5,000 from a mine worker who had smuggled it from his place of work. When the deal went wrong, she kidnapped his wife and daughter.[9] As for Moosa, he had been convicted over the course of his life for fraud and theft, for writing fake checks, for holding a false passport. Arcane connections with powerful people often got him off.[10] The probable route to their collaboration with the security police was appropriately smutty. Maud’s sister, Phyllis Peake, owned a high-end brothel in downtown Johannesburg. To weaken her competition, she periodically paid police detectives to sleep with and then arrest women employed by her rivals. One of these detectives was a certain…

Ref. CD64-V

Johannesburg without the requisite permit.[28] As for Winnie’s sister Nonyaniso, who had been living with her since the early days of her marriage, the police hounded her relentlessly. Many years later, she recounted to this author how the police beat her when they came around to find that Winnie was not at home.[29] In 1969, she was thrown in prison, tortured, and blackmailed into testifying against her sister.[30] State agents were no less energetic in their quest to prevent Winnie’s children from going to school. Shortly after she enrolled Zenani in a Roman Catholic nursery school, the nuns sent Winnie a letter saying that her daughter had to go; the security police, Winnie surmised, had paid them a threatening visit. Next, she placed her girls under false names at a Colored (mixed-race) school in central Johannesburg. When the police got wind of that, the girls were forced to leave.[31] Resigned to defeat, Winnie had her daughters shipped off to Swaziland to attend a private boarding school. This was in 1966; Zenani was seven years old; Zindzi was not yet six. A wealthy British benefactor, Lady Elinor Birley, whom Winnie had befriended in Johannesburg, paid the girls’ school fees.[32] She and her husband, Robert Birley, were among several people who saw the Mandela family through these straitened years. Another was David Astor, a wealthy heir and the editor of the London Observer. Nelson had met him on his London visit in 1962; Astor would extend his largesse to the Mandelas over the following thirty years.[33] . .

Ref. A54C-W

Nelson knew early that Winnie and Magubane were lovers; that is the recollection of Mac Maharaj, who remembers the warders telling Nelson with glee that Winnie had aborted Magubane’s child. Nelson never discussed matters this personal with anyone on Robben Island, except, perhaps, with Walter Sisulu. But it appears that he understood Magubane to be a ballast in Winnie’s life; when Magubane came to visit him on Robben Island, Maharaj recalls, Nelson welcomed him warmly.[36]

Ref. D5E9-X

Winnie as for his political commitment. Many years later, in the 1990s, long after their lives had taken different paths, his loyalty to her remained resolute. “Without Winnie,” he told Nelson’s authorized biographer, “Nelson wouldn’t have been what he is. When newspapers could not write about him, she could have his problems publicised. Without her, the ANC would have been forgotten. She was the only person who stood by the ANC and said, ‘I dare you to stop me.’ She was prepared to die for it.”[37] This is as powerful testimony to Winnie’s career as anyone has offered. Over the course of his adult life, Peter Magubane gave Winnie Mandela more than his love; he bore witness to her spirit and her work.

Ref. A8F9-Y

In September 1967, during his fourth year on Robben Island, Nelson’s mother came to see him; they had laid eyes on each other just once since the end of the Rivonia trial in June 1964. When time came for them to say goodbye, the warders watching on beheld a wrenching scene. Nelson offered his mother his cheek, pressing it against the glass barrier between them, his eyes shut tight. And Nosekeni, as one warder remembers it, put out “her old, bony hand” and stroked her son’s face through the glass. On the path back from the visitors’ block to the prison, Nelson’s emotions were laid bare in his gait. “It was the first time I had seen this tall, proud man, bowed,” the warder who accompanied him wrote.[1] Nelson remembered his thoughts in this moment vividly. “I was able to look at her as she walked away towards the boat that would take her to the mainland,” he told a correspondent. “Somehow the idea crossed my mind that I would never again set eyes on her.”[2] A year later, Nosekeni was dead. “It was afternoon [when Nelson was informed],” Mac Maharaj remembered. “When someone is called to the office, he comes back with news. But Nelson walks straight to his cell without saying a word. Walter follows him, sits with him, comes out after a long time, says, ‘Chaps, this is what happened: don’t crowd him, go to him one by one, but give him space.’ We take turns to go to see him. He acknowledges our condolences briefly; we leave.

Ref. 2C03-Z

“For a few days I spent moments in my cell which I never want to remember,” he told one correspondent.[4] While losing his mother at any time would have been hard, “behind bars this news can be a shattering disaster.” And in his case, he continues, it very nearly was.[5] One gets the sense that he looked down an abyss when Nosekeni died, that it took some wherewithal to steady himself and find safe ground. What did her death mean to him? The answer perhaps lies in the identities of the people with whom he chose to bare his soul. He was refused permission to attend the funeral; instead, he was permitted to write thank-you notes to those who were there. And he used this dispensation to open himself to a sphere beyond his political world. The fragment just cited is to a man named Knowledge Guzana, not a comrade Nelson knew from politics, but a Transkei notable he met at university. In his letter he addresses Guzana not by his Christian name but by his clan name, Dambisa. Among the first to receive a letter from Nelson after Nosekeni’s death was Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima, by now a resolute political enemy. It was with Matanzima that he shared the image of his mother walking toward the boat that would carry her away for the last time.

Ref. D055-A

To be thrown by the death of a parent is a widely shared experience. To take stock, in its wake, of whence one comes, is common too. When Nosekeni died, Nelson, it appears, took refuge in the world in which she had loved him, a world in which he was a Thembu royal. How complex his mourning for his mother must have been and how tinged with regret. “I had hoped to be able to look after her in her last days on earth and to bury her when she died,” he wrote to his oldest daughter.[7] Wrapped in his filial grief, it seems, was his mourning of the place from which he was severed and in which he was, profoundly and fundamentally, a black man and an African.

Ref. 0EEC-B

a lowly driver. His eldest child was lost to him, it seems, and he must have entertained the unwelcome thought that Thembi was lost to himself. We cannot know whether Thembi’s failure as a student arose from the drama of his parents’ divorce. But Nelson certainly convinced himself that his absence as a father was to blame. “I sincerely believe,” he wrote, “that if I were home…he would not have succumbed to abandoning school at a critical age in his life.”[9] And when he discovered a little later that his younger son, Makgatho, had abandoned plans to study at university, he could not contain his rage. “Have you neither pride nor conscience, strong will & independence?” he asked. “Look out: take stock of your position before it is too late!” Sitting in his prison cell, he imagined the downward trajectory of the Mandelas he had spawned. They would be “condemned forever to the degrading status of being subservient to, & the object of exploitation by other human beings.”[10] He took solace in the fact that his eldest daughter, Makaziwe, was doing well at school. But while he wrote with love, his expectations of her were uncomfortably naked, the fatherhood performed so stiffly the starch falls from the page. “The language and style were good and the writing clear,” he said of the last letter he received from her. And he imagined aloud that she would “become a doctor or scientist and use your knowledge, training and skill to help your people who are poor and miserable and who have no opportunity to develop.”[11] It is hard to say how a thirteen-year-old might respond to these lines; it is unlikely that even the most remote of her schoolteachers would talk to her in this way.

Ref. 5180-C

There was nothing stiff, though, in his letters to Winnie. She had sent him a pile of family photographs, among them two portraits of herself, one “big,” he wrote, the other “small.” The small one caused great excitement among his comrades. “Is that not her younger sister?” they were asking. “Madiba has been too long in jail, he does not know his sister-in-law.” But it is the bigger picture, Nelson wrote, that had garnered his attention. It “depicts all I know of you, the devastating beauty & charm which 10 stormy years of marriage have not chilled.” He displayed it for years to come on the makeshift bookshelf he was permitted to place in his cell. She sits in profile, her chin resting on her folded hands, her expression at once pensive and intense, as if her thoughts are far away. He had clearly been staring at it for some time when he wrote to her. “I suspect that you intended the picture to convey a special message that no words could ever express. Rest assured I have caught it.”[12]

Ref. E5F5-D

Mac Maharaj, for instance, was captured in 1964, in his head the names of every single member of the South African Communist Party active in the country. He was desperate to divulge nothing. Swanepoel made a grand entrance, Maharaj recalled. “That was his style. He would walk into the room in the middle of an interrogation and the torture would stop. There would be a great sense of drama around his entry, and, usually, if you had not met him before, he would walk up to you, look you in your face, and ask: ‘Do you know who I am? I am Swanepoel. Do you know now who I am? Do you know what to expect from me?’ ” Swanepoel had clearly given some thought to the encounter before he came into the room. Knowing that Maharaj had one good eye, he lit a match to it. Fearing that it would burn into its socket and that he would go blind, Maharaj panicked; he only just held back from talking, he recalled. The following day, Swanepoel tried something else. Maharaj was taken to his office and told to strip naked and to put his penis on the desk. “Then [Swanepoel] took a policeman’s baton and started to stroke it, without ever taking his eyes off me, and then he raised the baton and brought it whacking down on my penis.” When Maharaj’s agony began to subside, Swanepoel stood him up and ordered him to put his penis on the desk again. “But this time, he did not hit it immediately. He picked up his baton, raised it, and waited for the expectation of pain to capture me before he hit.” Day upon day, the ritual went on. Maharaj was taken to Swanepoel’s office and ordered to put his penis on the desk. On some days, Swanepoel left Maharaj’s body unscathed; he just stood there, the baton hovering in the air over the exposed penis all afternoon. Maharaj understood that were he to break, it was the expectation of pain, not the pain itself, that would do it. And then, all of a sudden one day, Swanepoel did something new. He picked a badly beaten Maharaj off the floor, stood him against the wall, pressed the tip of a sword to his throat, and demanded that he talk. Trying desperately to conquer his fear, Maharaj had an epiphany: “It suddenly dawned on me that he had handed me a gift. The gift was there in that sharp point on my throat. All I had to do was dive on it, and I would be dead.” Swanepoel, who was staring Maharaj intently in the eye, read his thoughts in a flash. “He panicked and withdrew the sword and walked out.” As the meaning of this exchange began to settle, Maharaj understood that he had won. He and Swanepoel now both knew that it was Maharaj who held the trump in the bloody game they played: he could stop himself from talking by dying. Swanepoel stood back after that; he never again played a prominent role in Maharaj’s torture. And Maharaj would have it confirmed that Swanepoel had taken in precisely what had happened. “He told other detainees that he respected me.”[16] That is Maharaj’s recollection, at any rate. The story is worth telling in part because it…

Ref. 7C11-E

The Swanepoel Winnie remembered is unlike the one presented by Maharaj. She did not recall a tactical man aiming to outwit her. She remembered his raw hatred. And she described absorbing that hatred and making it her own. The significance of her memory of Swanepoel to her political career cannot be overstated. But it is only a partial guide to what happened between them. Swanepoel was cruel to Winnie. When she fell ill as a result of her prolonged sleeplessness, her heart beating irregularly, her limbs swollen and blue, he not only persisted with the grueling interrogation; he appeared to egg on her death. His aim, it seems, was to diminish her to the point of nothingness, to have her imagine herself as a corpse. The only useful thing she could leave behind, he and several of his colleagues suggested, was the information she might share before she expired.[18] This is what Winnie recalled five months after her interrogation. It is most instructive and revealing. Swanepoel surely calculated that Winnie’s life was not actually in danger. Her death under interrogation would have been catastrophic for the government and a fate thus avoided. But her own fear that she was dying appears to have garnered his interest. His response was not just to pretend to egg on her death but to paint for her an image of her extinction. This was a shrewd course of action. A lazier observer of Winnie would see a formidably strong person, full of confidence in her self-worth and brave in the face of death. A deeper intelligence sees in the theatrical aspects of her conduct a mortifying fear of nonbeing. Getting Maharaj to imagine his own corpse was precisely the wrong thing to do, for it showed him a path to victory. Getting Winnie to imagine herself dead was probably right.

Ref. 50EE-F

But a cruel face is not all Swanepoel showed her. There was a period during her interrogation, it seems, when he was beguiling. All she need do, he said, was make a statement over the radio to the black people of South Africa. There was every hope for improvement within the existing framework of law, she should tell them. They should abandon their illegal struggles. Whites and blacks ought to cooperate, she should say. Swanepoel described in exquisite detail the future she would acquire in exchange. Nelson would be removed from B Section immediately and placed in a comfortable cottage. He would be allowed to read and write all he wanted and to receive unrestricted visits from his wife. Later, he would be released and settled in the Transkei, where Winnie, Zenani, and Zindzi could join him and live a serene country life. Eventually, Nelson would be permitted to resume practicing as an attorney.[20] There is no evidence that Winnie even considered this offer. Swanepoel probably never imagined that she would take it. He had in fact dangled a quite different bait, tailor-made to evade Winnie’s detection. When her interrogation was over, Mendel Levin, the lawyer Maud had offered to Winnie’s co-defendants, and whom Moosa Dinath had come to Robben Island to persuade Nelson to hire, was permitted to see Winnie. Conspicuously, Joel Carlson’s requests to see her or any of his other clients were denied. Winnie told Levin that she was ill, perhaps even dying. And Levin made a great show of demanding from the authorities that his client be examined by a doctor. The authorities, of course, immediately obliged.[21] Something else happened between Winnie and Mendel Levin. From her prison cell she wrote a letter to IDAF in London saying that Joel Carlson was not to be trusted and that money should be raised for Levin to represent the defendants. When Carlson asked her some time later why she had written the letter, she told him she had been sick and that Levin had helped her.[22] She had been caught in a trap. A familiar good-cop, bad-cop relay had been assembled with the twist that the good cop was disguised as her lawyer. It was an intelligent trap, for it was designed specifically for its victim. Her interrogation had targeted her immense fear of death, revealed by her hypochondria. As for Levin’s role, it was shaped by the knowledge, helpfully imparted by Maud Katzenellenbogen, that Winnie was suspicious of Carlson. Swanepoel had done to Winnie precisely what Maharaj had dreamed of doing to Swanepoel: she had done his bidding not because he held a gun to her head but because he had placed his desire in her heart.

Ref. CD2F-G

In this regard, Swanepoel’s victory over Winnie was always going to be Pyrrhic. Mary Benson had long ago reported to Oliver Tambo what Moosa and Maud were up to. And Carlson had submitted a dossier to IDAF documenting their criminal history.[23] They were in fact so obviously suspect they might as well have had bells around their feet. Only Nelson and Winnie Mandela were deaf to the ringing, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story. Winnie did, in fact, in the nick of time, come to realize what was going on. In November 1969, just before the case finally came to trial, she wrote Levin an enigmatic letter which showed that the wool had been pulled from her eyes. “You will agree with me as a legal man,” she told him, “that it is extremely difficult for a person behind bars in solitary confinement to understand people’s motives.”[24] When Levin asked her to persuade the other defendants to have him represent them, she agreed to see them in his presence one at a time. In English, she told them to accept Levin as their attorney. But she made sure to throw in a word of Xhosa beseeching them not to go near him.[25] Only she and Peter Magubane had given Levin power of attorney. They switched to Carlson on the day the trial began; all twenty-two were represented in court by a young but distinguished trio of barristers: David Soggot, George Bizos, and Arthur Chaskalson. As for Maud, she disappeared from Winnie’s life as abruptly as she had arrived.

Ref. 4B08-H

Months later, Nelson shared with a correspondent what had happened with him when he received the news. “Suddenly my heart seemed to have stopped beating & the warm blood that had freely flowed through my veins for the last 52 years froze into ice. For some time I could neither think nor talk & my strength appeared to be draining out.”[5] When he did not emerge from his cell for dinner, several of his comrades looked in. Unable to make human contact, he simply ignored them. And so Walter Sisulu was called to attend to his dear friend. In silence, Nelson handed him Levin’s telegram. Once Sisulu had read it, he sat down next to Nelson and held his hand. They were together like that for some time, exchanging not a single word.[6] That same evening Nelson wrote to Winnie, his heightened emotions bringing forth a series of crystalline images. He recalled a meeting with Thembi in July 1962, when he was in hiding and on the run. “He was then a lusty lad of 17 that I could never associate with death.” “He wore one of my trousers which was a shade too big & long for him…As you know he had a lot of clothing, was particular about his dress & had no reason whatsoever for using my clothes. I was deeply touched for the emotional factors underlying his action were too obvious. “[Thembi] had come to bid me farewell on his way to boarding school,” Nelson continued. They had chatted for some time, an enjoyable chat, he recalled: “I was indeed a bit sad when we ultimately parted. I could neither accompany him to a bus stop nor see him off at a station, for an outlaw, such as I was at the time, must be ready to give up even important parental duties. So it was that my son no! my friend, stepped out alone to fend for himself in a world where I could only meet him secretly and once in a while…I emptied my pockets and transferred to him all the copper and silver that a wretched fugitive could afford.”[7] A young man going off alone into life, his useless father scrounging his empty pockets: it is almost self-pitying and it is intolerably sad. His mother and son dead in quick succession, his wife in jail, the fate of his daughters unknown. “If calamities had the weight of physical objects,” he wrote to Winnie a year later, “we should long have been crushed down, or else…hunch-backed, unsteady on our feet.”[8] But he was not crushed, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that he survived because of the Winnie he installed in his inner world. His letters to her now began to fill with an exquisite intensity, their meanings increasingly complex. In November he heard that she was to stand trial, and he geared his letters to prepare her. “The proceedings are likely to be the bitterest experience of your entire life to date…I write to warn you in time of what lies ahead.” Until now, he had addressed her in his letters as “My Darling.” This time, he chose another greeting. “Dade Wethu,” he called her. “Sister” in Xhosa. “The salutation to this letter will not surprise you,”…

Ref. AC41-I

white people acted in the world now. “When I came to [university]…in 1966,” Biko commented, “there was some kind of anomaly…where whites were in fact the main participants in our oppression and at the same time the main participants in the opposition to that oppression.”[7] To be black and join in antiapartheid politics was to watch white people salve their consciences, Biko observed, all the more to enjoy their privilege when they got good jobs and settled down. Biko has become the retrospective symbol of the movement in part because he was martyred; the police killed him while he was in their custody, his head smashed to a pulp, in September 1977. But he was also an astonishing human being, his voice larger and more powerful than the words that gave it form. If he had an animating idea during the last year of his life, it was that shedding the fear of death freed one to act. “You are either alive and proud,” he told an interviewer shortly before he was killed, “or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway.”[8] All the introspective work Black Consciousness urged was preparation for going forth into a violent world. It may be tempting to think of Black Consciousness as a new incarnation of the spirit of the PAC, which, similarly, refused to work with whites. But that would not be right. For one, the Black Consciousness Movement defined as black anyone whom the apartheid government did not classify as white, including Coloreds and Indians. Being black was a political condition brought on by white supremacy, not a biological inheritance. The PAC, in contrast, associated blackness with indigeneity and was hostile to working with Indians. In South Africa’s fraught entanglement with questions of race, Black Consciousness was both an innovation and a breakthrough. Besides, Black Consciousness activists claimed both the ANC and the PAC as part of their heritage and sought to replace neither. They believed that they were working in a parenthetic moment, their labor one of spiritual regrouping.[9] Black Consciousness began in universities and in Christian seminaries, but as its adherents graduated, they acquired positions as schoolteachers, journalists, and clergymen, taking with them their ideas. A lodestar of the Black Consciousness Movement, Abram Onkgopotse Tiro, taught in Soweto’s Morris Isaacson High School in the early 1970s. He fled into exile in late 1973 and was assassinated in a parcel bomb explosion in Botswana the following year, bringing the taste of martyrdom to the students who had known him. Among the handful of teenagers who went from school to school on June 14, 1976, spreading word of the coming march, some had sat in Tiro’s class and taken in his ideas.

Ref. EEC5-J

Just before 11:00 a.m., a convoy of police trucks approached the crowd on Vilakazi Street, coming to a halt about a hundred yards away. Several dozen police officers, their rifles loaded with live ammunition, poured from the vehicles and assembled in formation across the road. Thousands of students had amassed outside the school by then, and thousands more were winding their way there. The students, loud with song until now, drew still; for a long moment, the two sides stared each other down. Then the students began singing again, and in response a police officer let loose a dog that went charging into the crowd. It was mobbed and killed, and with this first drawing of blood—not human but canine blood—the police opened fire and a slaughter began.[10] The first to die was Hastings Ndlovu, a fifteen-year-old boy. The second was Zolile Hector Pieterson; a photograph of him in the arms of another boy, Mbuyisa Makhubu, while his sister, Antoinette, cried out in anguish, would become the most widely reproduced symbol of the brutality of apartheid.[11] When news reached the thousands still making their way to Vilakazi Street that police had opened fire, they turned to rage; en masse it was decided “to go and meet the police head-on,” a student leader in that crowd recalled. The driver of a municipality van turned a corner just then to find himself facing the crowd. “It was a white man,” the same student leader recalled. “Mostly the girls were in the forefront. I have never seen so many stones in my life raining on a target. In no time the [van] had no windows. And the student girls themselves actually fought among each other to get hold of the white man who was inside the car. They dragged him out. They pelted him with stones, with bottles, with their shoes as they were screaming. There was a young boy who was also looking for a way through to the white man. Finally, when they made space for him he produced a knife and stabbed a number of times in the chest of the white man.”[12] A teenager in the crowd spotted the dead man’s car keys on the ground next to his corpse. “I picked them up,” he recalled later. “The key ring was attached to a yellow tag. I will never forget that…He was a white man, but he had been crushed like he was nothing. The section of the crowd that had watched him die went mad. We went looking for vehicles to hijack. We wanted to use them as battering rams to smash down the storefronts of bottle stores.”[13] In the hours that followed, the youth took possession of the township. They burned down administrative buildings, attacked beer halls and liquor stores, and stoned delivery vehicles. Among the police officers sent to quell them was Theuns Swanepoel, the man who, seven years earlier, had led the interrogation of Winnie Mandela. Giving testimony the following year to a commission of inquiry into the violence, he would boast that he personally killed five people that afternoon.[14]

Ref. 7F86-K

In the following weeks and months, the insurrection spread, first to other townships on the Witwatersrand, then to Pretoria, to East London, to Cape Town, and to more than a hundred smaller towns. It had no centralized leadership, which is in part why it was so hard to stop; it would simmer and explode in relays for more than a year before it was finally quelled. By then, many hundreds of youths had died, the exact number unknowable, for the authorities suppressed much information. Thousands were detained and tortured, a great many of them put on trial and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Thousands more went into exile to look for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the army Nelson Mandela had founded fifteen years earlier; they wanted to train as soldiers and return to their townships armed. South Africa would not be the same again. The exiled ANC, which in the early 1970s had grown weak and dispirited, was brought suddenly to life as thousands of youths came to join it. The armed struggle was finally yielding fruit, for the existence of an exiled army that might come back and defeat apartheid was the centerpiece in the story of the future taking shape. Robben Island, too, would be utterly transformed by the uprisings as young veterans of these street battles poured into the prison. Nelson and his generation, who were growing old with one another for company, would be confronted with a surfeit of youth. But the most profound change was on the streets of South Africa’s townships. Biko was among those who understood that what had been spawned was a new attitude to death. “[The students] were not prepared to be calmed down even at the point of a gun,” he remarked in an interview in early 1977. “And hence, what happened, happened. Some people were killed. These riots just continued and continued. Because at no stage were the young students…prepared to be scared.”[15] The changes in fact went deeper than that. In July 1977, a distinguished anthropologist, Harriet Ngubane, visited Soweto for the first time since the uprisings. She immediately put pen to paper, for what she had witnessed was nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of death. The chief mourners at funerals had always been the family of the deceased. Now they…

Ref. E9A3-L

ahead. On the third day of this ritual, police swarmed the van and arrested the two adults for breaking their banning orders. It was an especially cynical maneuver, for what Winnie and Peter were contriving to share was not a political conspiracy but the love and care of two girls.[14] The trial proceedings dragged on for more than two years. Finally, in October 1974, both were sentenced to six months in jail. A friend of Winnie’s in the gallery that day witnessed thirteen-year-old Zindzi break down and weep. As an assortment of strangers looked on, Winnie went to her daughter not to comfort her but to give her a dressing-down. There are Security Branch operatives watching us, she admonished; do not ever give them the satisfaction of seeing your pain.[15]

Ref. BF3D-M

Then Winnie was called to the stage. “It is necessary from the outset to say that we are gathered here as fellow blacks,” she began, “in a black atmosphere in a black community…This is why we are gathered here, not just to discuss common problems, but also to rediscover ourselves, our dignity and to instil in ourselves self-reliance and self-respect…[O]nly black people have a right to speak for blacks,” she continued, “and white for white.” It was as blunt an expression of the soul of Black Consciousness as ever was made, and quite provocative from the wife of a scion of the ANC. She would seldom speak like that again. She took her audience back into history, pausing in the 1950s to claim, again, controversially for one associated with the ANC, that black people, to their shame, had never produced “a single organisation that can claim to be truly national.” She condemned the black informers of the 1960s; they had betrayed their people because they “felt acute guilt for their failure in contributing to their cause.” This swipe at informers could only have unnerved her audience. Middle-aged, quiescent, afraid, they were uncertain how to act in these times. Now she was saying that those without clarity of purpose would end up working for the other side. And in her next breath she did indeed turn directly on her audience. “Events in our own locality have reduced us parents to shame,” she declared. “It is an absolute disgrace that our children fight battles for us…There couldn’t be a worse insult to our nationhood…How did each one of you feel when your child returned from school and said nothing to you while you saw his or her photograph in the press as having gone on strike without taking you into his confidence? You will agree with me that our young generation will spit over our graves, our generation of cowards.”[22] A week later, the children revolted while their parents looked on. Their spirit had been captured to perfection by a woman twice their age. Her capacity to read, and then to exude, the feelings around her was unmatched.

Ref. 4C5B-N

Once the uprisings began, Winnie spoke forthrightly, often provocatively, but she also tempered her actions. Shocked by the spiral of young deaths, she carved out a sober role. The Black Parents’ Association was formed, its origin the town hall meeting at which Winnie had spoken so boldly, its role to give assistance to the students; Winnie was its only female member. On August 4, as the revolt entered its seventh week, some twenty thousand people gathered outside a train station on the periphery of Soweto, their intention to march on Johannesburg. By now, the revolt’s leaders understood that they could tear Soweto to pieces and the apartheid regime would remain largely unscathed; they had resolved to take the revolt to white South Africa. That morning, a police commander pleaded with Winnie and her fellow Black Parents Association member Dr. Nthato Motlana to urge the students to turn back. She did. With a bullhorn borrowed from the police, she stood on the back of a pickup truck and told the thousands who had gathered to turn on their heels and save their own lives.[23] A man who was a teenager in the crowd that day later remembered his mixed emotions. Seeing Winnie in the flesh had excited him. But his enthusiasm turned to dismay when she urged the students to disperse. “To us this was giving in,” he recalled. “We didn’t want to accept what she was saying, but she was our leader, so we began to turn back, and as we did so, the police started opening fire.”[24] Three people were killed that day. Absent Winnie’s intervention, the death toll might have been in the hundreds.

Ref. D856-O

But something else was going on. By now, breathless stories of Winnie’s time in jail in 1969–70 were swirling through Security Branch ranks. It was said that when the head of the Security Branch, Hendrik van den Bergh, interrogated her, she came up close to him and straightened his tie; he was so thrown, the story went, that the questioning broke down.[28] As for Swanepoel, it was said that she slowly unbuttoned her shirt in his presence, eventually exposing most of her breast; he had left the room in embarrassment. There was clearly an erotic, perhaps sadistic, element to the Security Branch’s relationship with her, the punishment they heaped upon her no doubt driven in part by desire. The role they conjured her playing in the uprising—an older woman coaxing boys into acts of violence—seems pretty heated, pretty charged. In retrospect, there is something spooky about the police’s fabrications. A full decade later, a version of the Winnie they had invented took form in the real world. The football team of young men she’d establish in Soweto was horribly violent, and she was indeed their charismatic leader.

Ref. 8FDE-P

among the modern youth.”[1] He did not know quite how lavishly his wish would come true. News of the 1976 uprisings came to Robben Island months after they began when a single prisoner was transferred from an up-country jail. So unlikely was the tale he told that Nelson and his comrades did not believe him.[2] By early 1977, their world had been shaken to its core. Hundreds upon hundreds of the revolt’s children came pouring in. Some were seasoned, university-educated Black Consciousness leaders. Most were younger, their ideas less formed; they had come straight from the fury of the insurrection. What happened when they arrived has seldom been told as narrative; a sense of shame has forced the telling into fragments. The older prisoners seized upon the young and demanded their allegiance. It was as if scraps of meat had been cast into the cells of ravenous men. One new prisoner would remember his first hours on the island as a harrowing dream. A warder led him down a corridor, the cells on each side packed with older men; they pressed themselves against the bars, “crazy looking…excited.” “Which organisation are you affiliated to?” they demanded, their hunger to claim him raw. Not just their urgency but the question itself unnerved him: he had never imagined that he might have to choose.[3] When newcomers left their cells for breakfast in the mornings, older men brushed against them and stuffed notes in their pockets. “The ANC’s mother is Helen Suzman [a liberal member of parliament],” read one note, “their father is Joe Slovo, their headquarters is in Moscow. Join the PAC.”[4] As for ANC notes, they beckoned youngsters to join in exchange for more food. Testimony from this time is couched in language that deflects. But one can glimpse the shock nonetheless. Many newcomers “collapsed,” one of them recalled. “They had to go to hospital” as a result of the “mental pressure” of recruitment.[5] “You are new,” another commented. “Coming into that environment…it shocks you…It tended to undermine your integrity as an individual.”[6]

Ref. 6EEA-Q

Among the few Robben Island prisoners to speak frankly about what happened when the youngsters came was the psychologist Saths Cooper. Being jailed is “horrific,” “dehumanising,” he wrote. While it brings out the best in a few, “narcissistic and exploitative behaviour” is more common. When all is said and done, he wrote, “there is little difference between common law and political prisoners generally. Where the former are…

Ref. 9FBF-R

Nelson gradually acquired “a quiet authority over the younger inmates,” the story goes.[12] Indeed, “the body of prisoners…united…with Mandela as their leader.”[13] He won this influence, it is said, because he demonstrated the virtues of standing down. Once the island had calmed, prisoners could talk and exchange and make something new. Herein lies the magic of the place, the story goes. The authorities had made a terrible mistake. They corralled together on one island every current in black politics. The Rivonia defendants; the Young Turks of 1976; the Africanists; the ideologues of Black Consciousness; the Trotskyists of the Non-European Unity Movement. Their enemy had built them a forum in which they could listen and talk to one another. “The prisoners of Robben Island began to build a polity,” one historian wrote, “and even a nascent parliament.”[14] Robben Islanders made the future itself, and as they were released, so they seeded it in the world at large. It is important to tell a more plausible story lest Nelson himself disappear on the wings of this dream. The recruitment battle ended because the ANC had won. By the final months of 1980, the PAC and the BCM had settled as stable minorities; everyone else was in the ANC. But the contest among older men to capture the young did not die. It became calmer, to be sure; it lost its cravenness. But in its more subdued form it was transferred into the ranks of the ANC. There was no shortage of

Ref. 595D-S

As for Nelson’s group, it was constant throughout the years: Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Laloo Chiba, and, until his departure in 1976, Mac Maharaj. Nobody who lived on B Section could mistake the clannishness of Nelson’s group. It was “physically separate, secretive, highly organised,” according to James April, who arrived on B Section in 1971.[18] The most ambitious of its projects was the writing of Nelson’s autobiography. It kept them busy for several months in 1975 and then again the following year. Nelson wrote late at night and in the mornings gave his work to Maharaj; he transcribed Nelson’s words into a tiny script and passed it on to Sisulu and Kathrada; they made notes and suggestions; Maharaj himself often altered the text in response. When he was released in 1976, Maharaj smuggled a clean copy of the manuscript to London; Kathrada buried the original draft, in Nelson’s hand, in several tins in the prison garden.[19] Mbeki apparently knew of the project and gave it his nominal consent, but only because he judged that nothing would come of it.[20] The very idea must have offended him deeply. Not only did it elevate one comrade over others, violating a principle of collective leadership; not only did it elevate Nelson, a man whose leadership Mbeki did not accept. Exalting Nelson in this way revealed a vision of apartheid’s end of which Mbeki deeply disapproved: a pact forged between famous men.

Ref. 7CC6-T

And so, when the youngsters were recruited into the ANC, they joined a divided group. While many respected and deferred to Nelson, they were in the main drawn to men hostile to his views. Chief among them was Harry Gwala, a “veteran Stalinist,” in Nelson’s authorized biographer’s view, who delighted the youth with his venom. “We crammed daily into his tiny cell analysing all the conflicts in the world,” one of them later recalled. “He didn’t hesitate to take a swipe at anybody,” remembered another. “He would go for Madiba.”[21] And when the ANC wrote a syllabus of instruction, compulsory for all its members on the island, it was Mbeki’s influence that prevailed; for a course titled “A History of Human Society,” the only authors were Marx, Engels, and Lenin.[22]

Ref. 4CD5-U

when he says that he escaped. Where did he go? One place to which he persistently returned was the company of white statesmen. He read biographies of Lincoln, Washington, Disraeli; he read Churchill’s war diaries and emerging works on John F. Kennedy. By the time he was released in 1990, there was scarcely a head of state on the planet who did not wish to shake his hand. And yet, until his final years in prison, he had not met a single diplomat in the flesh;[24] it was in his head that he had conversed with them, over and over again. Even the fiction he read was an extension of his taste for high politics. While he expressed dutiful admiration for Dostoevsky, this inward-turned moralist left him depressed. It was Tolstoy’s War and Peace that fired him; he read it in three days flat.[25] His strongest taste was for Afrikaans statesmen. He read biographies of Jan Smuts and of the Boer War leader Koos de la Rey. He wrote to South Africa’s justice minister requesting a copy of Piet Meiring’s Ons eerste ses premiers: ’n persoonlike tergublik (Our first six prime ministers: A personal recollection).[26] He was especially consumed with those Afrikaans statesmen whose biographies mapped his own imagined career: men who were once outlaws and died national heroes. He devoured the first biography of John Vorster, South Africa’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978, who had been interned during World War II for his membership in a fascist militia. Christiaan de Wet was another favorite: leader of an armed rebellion during World War I, he was given a state funeral when he died and a place in the nationalist canon. We must all imagine ourselves in the future: to cease doing so is to become a walking corpse. The point is the company Nelson was keeping. He was with his enemies, matching their souls against his. It must have been a cold place. His companions were men who had humiliated him, men about whom he felt ambivalent at best; he summoned them into his inner world so that one day he might master them…

Ref. 82AD-V

There are other places to which Nelson tried less successfully to flee. In a letter to an old comrade, Yusuf Dadoo, penned in 1975, he counted the friends who had died. “Such losses make one feel alone,” he wrote, for it seemed that his own past was dying one person at a time. “I’ve nothing to prod the memory,” he complained, just a few photos and the letters he receives from outside. There were 199 of them, he said, accumulated over thirteen years. Does Dadoo understand that he lives for Saturdays, when the mail arrives? If Oliver and Adelaide Tambo knew, they would surely have acknowledged his letters.

Ref. 7A2C-W

He was anxious. Some photographs, a pile of letters, a map: these were pitifully inadequate tools. There are limits to what imagination can achieve when the substance of one’s life is gone.

Ref. 2D7E-X

While they had done little to make it comfortable, the police had wired her new home with bugs. A retired policeman lived in the house next door, his job to change the tapes that ran day and night. Another officer was posted permanently across the road to police the terms of Winnie’s banning order: nobody was permitted to enter her house save for its full-time residents, her doctor, and her lawyer; out on the street, Winnie could be in the presence of no more than one adult at a time. There was no phone in the house, no means of communicating with the outside world. Nor, as she discovered the next morning, could she make herself understood to her neighbors. Their native tongue was Setswana, their lingua franca Afrikaans. Winnie spoke neither. She would live here for eight years.

Ref. D952-Y

Of all that her foes ever did to her, this was not just the cruelest; it was also the most ill-advised. In fact, just as he was about to sign the order banishing Winnie to Brandfort, a senior official beseeched the justice minister, Jimmy Kruger, to think again. “Her banning to Brandfort might easily make her a martyr,” the official warned. “We would be vulnerable for years to extremely distasteful and difficult-to-handle propaganda.” Might it not be wiser, the official continued, to confine her to her house in Soweto for twenty-four hours a day, save to shop for essentials and to visit the doctor? The state could even give her a monthly stipend equal to the salary she would have to forgo.[2] The warning proved to be prescient. Not for the first time, an effort to destroy Winnie Mandela would escalate her fame.

Ref. DB8B-Z

1977, banishment was not uncommon. Many political prisoners released during the 1960s were sent to hamlets far from their homes.[3] Robert Sobukwe himself, the PAC’s leader, was confined to Kimberley after his release in 1969, where he lived out his days. The purpose of banishment was blunt and simple: it was to sever activists from the organizations they had built and to destroy their spirits.[4] But Winnie’s talent did not lie in establishing organizations, let alone in running them. Her talent lay in theater, and she could not have been offered a more formidable stage.

Ref. 9D76-A

Winnie herself was deluged with mail. Her lawyer often arrived from Johannesburg with box loads in his trunk: letters of encouragement, words of advice, invitations to give lectures, to take up titular positions at charities and municipal councils, cash checks. She hadn’t the wherewithal to deal with them. They piled up alongside her furniture in the police garage in town. She grasped in a flash the significance of what was happening. She could not be quoted in South Africa, her words all the more tantalizing when broadcast abroad. Over and over again, she said the same thing. There will be majority rule in South Africa. The president will be Mandela. “We are fighting for a country which can only be led by him. He is the only hope for this country if the white man wants to save himself from the inevitable bloodbath.”[17] She did not call him “my husband” or “Nelson” or “Nelson Mandela.” Always, simply, Mandela, the repetition of the name so important. All traces of Black Consciousness had vanished. “Our founding document is the Freedom Charter,” she told a British television channel. “It is our country’s future constitution.” What her tongue conjured was so simple, so entirely pared down. South Africa’s rightful government is in exile. Its leader is in jail. That is all. In banishing her, the government had accomplished what Oliver Tambo had struggled in vain to do: the names ANC and Mandela were, finally, all over the news.

Ref. 0383-B

Tambo, Reddy, Terry: together these men were creating the First Couple of a future South Africa. Their success bore enormous risks. They had strung this couple together with images and words. The actual Nelson and Winnie Mandela remained backstage. Someday, the myth and its shadow would meet. What might happen then? Winnie was playing her banishment as well as anyone might hope. But her performances were pro forma; she had not faced an exacting test. And Tambo’s misgivings about her ran deep; he must have wondered, if only in the privacy of his own thoughts, what it was he had made. As for Nelson, he was forty-one years old when Tambo last laid eyes on him. Now he was on the cusp of old age. There was no saying for certain what he had become.

Ref. 301B-C

“At one time there was a certain farmer who…was married to a rich [man’s] daughter,” Nelson wrote to Winnie in December 1977. The couple was prosperous and in love, he continued, and had a child they both cherished. Then the man was called away to lead warriors to war and was captured by his enemy. Bitter that he had left her, his wife took up with a former lover. Provocatively, she wrote to tell her husband that her old flame wished to marry her. “What she was doing was to make sure that the husband still loved her,” Nelson wrote. A proud man, he decided instead to call her bluff. “Marry him,” he replied. “It was hardly two years when news came that the husband was coming back and he was regarded as the true leader in the community,” Nelson wrote. The wife now wanted to reunite with him, but the milk had been spilled. To make matters worse, her child, angry that her mother had not waited, went to live with her returning father. The woman and her new husband descended into poverty and lived unhappily for the rest of their lives. “Shame was on her,” Nelson concluded.[1]

Ref. 933F-D

Not long after Hattingh’s death, Zindzi confided in the family doctor in Johannesburg that Winnie was drinking heavily. It was not just that she drank every night, Zindzi reported, it was that she did not stop until she was drunk. The doctor, who was considerably younger than Winnie, having met her in Black Consciousness circles in the early 1970s, raised the matter with her cautiously. Decades later, he vividly recalled her cold reply. “Zindzi must be hallucinating,” she snapped. “I do not drink.”[12]

Ref. 6181-E

The most remarkable fact about the suffering of Winnie Mandela is this: she might have left Brandfort at any moment; she chose not to. In July 1980, she was visited in her house by the national head of the Security Branch, Johann Coetzee.[13] Neither of them appears to have left a record of the encounter. Did she invite him to sit at her cramped kitchen table? One imagines that she forced him to conduct his business standing. He had come to resolve an escalating problem. The most esteemed of Brandfort’s white citizens were lobbying fiercely to have Winnie removed. They had in fact sent the justice minister, Alwyn Schlebusch, an ultimatum: if he failed to send her elsewhere, the municipal government would act unilaterally and simply throw her out.

Ref. 4E75-F

From the earliest times, Winnie appears to have possessed her daughters with furious jealousy. “I once wrote to [Winnie] during the early seventies what I considered to be a romantic letter from a man who adored and worshipped his beloved wife,” Nelson recalled in correspondence with a friend. “In the course of that letter I remarked that Zeni and Zindzi had grown beautifully and that I found it a real pleasure to chat with them. My beloved wife was furious and, when I reached the last line of her letter, I felt…very fortunate to be so far from her physically. Otherwise I would have lost my jugular vein. It was as if I had committed treason. She reminded me: ‘I, not you, brought up these children whom you now prefer to me!’ I was simply stunned.”[29] By the time of her banishment, the jealousy Winnie felt toward her daughters appears to have shifted exclusively to Zindzi. The traces are scant, but no less powerful for that. Sixteen years old when she went to Brandfort with her mother, Zindzi had fallen in love some time earlier with a twenty-year-old man called Oupa Seakamela. Their relationship was very serious indeed. As early as July 1977, Nelson was writing to Zindzi and Oupa jointly. He was hungry to know more about Oupa, he wrote, but it seems Winnie had refused to speak of him. “Zindzi once promised that Mum would tell me all about Oupa,” he wrote, “but as you both know, she has always been hard pressed by pressure of work & other problems & up to now she has not been able to give me a full sketch. Perhaps,” he hinted heavily, “Zindzi will now have to do it.”[30]

Ref. 16D6-G

“Sometimes I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself,” Nelson wrote to Winnie in January 1979. “Touching your hand or hugging you as you moved up & down the house, enjoying your delicious dishes, the unforgettable hrs in the bedroom, make life taste like honey.” As so often in his letters, he suddenly turned to an uncomfortable subject: On 2/12 Zindzi hinted that she & you planned to be here on her birthday. I looked forward to that day as I would be seeing both of you [together] for the first time. But on the morning of that dy I prayed that you might not come. Unconsciously, during the previous dy & night I worked a little harder than I realised. I thought the eyes might betray me again, much to your concern as when Zindzi visited me on 21/10. I was, therefore, much relieved when you did not turn up.[1] He writes obscurely, in part to shelter from prying eyes, and, perhaps, too, because he is embarrassed. Subsequent gossip among prison warders who witnessed the incident makes its nature clearer: the previous October, Zindzi had come to see him, and he had mistaken her for his wife. Zindzi, one assumes, reported what had happened to her mother. Winnie’s reaction, probably in a letter, is inaccessible. But it must have been severe. For Nelson now woke to discover that he was dreading seeing her. One wonders whether it was a moment of revelation for Winnie. She had long understood that Nelson’s view of her was frozen in time. “I often wonder,” she had written to him back in 1970, “if your memory of me isn’t…of a trembling little girl [standing] next to you in a shabby little back veld church.”

Ref. 1851-H

There were other moments. Once, Brand looked on as a warder told Nelson not to bother waiting for letters from Winnie; the authorities, the warder said, had discovered that she had yet another new boyfriend, this one a member of the Security Branch. “Sir,” Brand recalled Nelson answering quietly. “I am inside here, powerless. She is a flesh-and-blood human being living in the outside world. I can’t be jealous about what she is doing, or tell her what she can and cannot do.”[3] Brand admired Nelson for his self-control. But behind it, he sensed deep anguish. His senior colleagues were torturing Nelson, he understood, even if his poise concealed his pain.[4] But what struck Brand most forcefully was a spectacle that recurred on B Section like clockwork for half an hour each morning and again at dusk: the figure of Nelson, alone, tending his garden. The plot ran against the southern boundary of B Section’s courtyard, fifteen meters long and two and a half meters wide. While Nelson had planted wildflowers along the border, Brand noticed, his real interest was in growing food: tomatoes, carrots, onions, spinach, a peach sapling.[5] Robben Island is a cruel host for a gardener. Flat and almost treeless, the Cape’s southeaster whips across it with fury. Nelson had learned to grow vegetables in the fecund hills of the Transkei, where everyone’s fingers are green. Here, Brand noticed at once, he was struggling. And it happened that the youngster had some wisdom to impart. Having grown up on a farm outside the coastal hamlet of Stanford, he knew a thing or two about gardening in a southeaster. On one of his biweekly visits to the mainland, Brand bought some netting. The following Monday morning, he stood respectfully at the edge of Nelson’s garden and offered help. That evening, the two were crouched together, discussing how best to protect the most tender of Nelson’s plants from the weather. By the time Winnie stole her granddaughter onto the island, Nelson and Brand had become something of a fixture: the elderly African and the young Afrikaner, standing in the twilight before a narrow strip of land, conferring in the politest tones about pigeon droppings and rainwater…

Ref. CCAD-I

Now, as Brand walked back into the visitors’ center, where Winnie was waiting for the ferry, she took 200 rand from her handbag, $360 in today’s values, and tried to place it in his hand. “Please, sir,” he remembered her asking, “let my husband see the baby for a few seconds.” He declined once more. Instead, he asked Winnie if he could hold the child. He had never held an African baby in his arms, he told her awkwardly in explanation. Then he asked her to follow him back to the interview room, for she and Nelson had forgotten to confer about seeking a permit for her to visit at Christmas. He locked her in the booth, went around to Nelson’s side, where the microphones were now turned off and the window looking onto his visitor was closed. He handed Nelson the child. To his astonishment, Nelson’s eyes were soon wet with tears. He dropped his head, kissed the baby on the cheek, and then handed her back to Brand. Winnie was not two feet away from this scene and had no idea what had transpired.[6] Two decades passed before Nelson talked of the incident to Brand; during the remainder of his time as a prisoner, neither man mentioned it.[7] What had passed between them was very complex indeed. A distinguished man in late middle age had to beg a fresh-faced boy to hold and kiss his own flesh and blood: the scene arose from the deep centuries of racial humiliation. And yet, that is hardly the end of what the encounter might mean. They were enclosed in a room, the door locked, the microphones off, the hatch to the window shut. In this secrecy, Brand had made an offering upon which he wagered his career. In that resides an ancient kernel of friendship—making oneself vulnerable to another, offering him one’s trust.

Ref. 91E8-J

Of all the cruelties Robben Islanders suffered, this violent uprooting offended most. However cramped and unchosen, the space one inhabits has become one’s own. The photograph of one’s wife at eye level next to one’s desk; the line of law books on the shelf to one’s left; the old Oxford Atlas, always in reach so that the mind can wander at will: to the extent that one has acquired some mastery over one’s world, it is a mastery ingrained in that space. More than that, one has been thrown into a life with companions one did not choose; learning to tolerate them, learning to be tolerated by them, has been hard, hard work. “You have lived with these people so many years,” Nelson’s fellow B Section inmate Laloo Chiba commented about his own abrupt departure, “and you are not given the courtesy of saying farewell.”[2]

Ref. DBFD-K

It was quite different from Robben Island. They had flushing toilets and hot-water showers; there was linen on the beds: these were comforts Nelson had not known in twenty years. There were also freedoms unheard of before: the prisoners had an FM radio and could listen to stations that broadcast from South Africa; they could read uncensored copies of local newspapers as well as Time and The Guardian Weekly from abroad. They had never before in their careers as prisoners been quite this close to the outside world.[4] But this life brought new difficulties, too. Nelson had spent most of each day on Robben Island alone. Now, from the moment he woke to the moment he slept, there were the voices of others, the eyes of others, the tics and the habits of aging men. He began immediately to look for refuge. The cell opened onto the building’s rooftop, a walled area fifteen feet wide and seventy feet long. Taking in the space and the sunlight, Nelson wrote to the head of the prison requesting material for a garden. Fifteen forty-four-gallon drums were duly delivered; they were cut in half lengthways to produce thirty giant pots. Soil, vegetable seeds, and a set of basic implements were brought from prison grounds. Within months of his arrival, Nelson was working on his plants for several hours each day.[5] His gardening was scrupulous, systematic. He read as widely as he could about technique, made a careful record of his own evolving practice, and was fastidious about tallying his yield. It was soon extensive. He grew onions, eggplants, cabbage, cauliflower, beans, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, broccoli, beetroot, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries. At its height, his garden boasted almost nine hundred individual plants. On Sundays, he harvested, offering some of his yield to warders and sending the rest to the prison kitchen.[6]

Ref. BDD2-L

Once, Nelson looked up from his work and pointed his trowel at Sisulu. “Do you see this man here?” he asked, addressing himself to a warder who was gardening with them. “He is why I am here. He took me into politics when I was a mere boy. Then he found me a wife. Then he took me deeper into politics. My punishment is that I am forced to grow old with him here.” Sisulu, the warder recalled, chortled quietly without looking up from his work.[7] . .

Ref. CAFF-M

conditions of their lives rendering them prematurely old. Their aging was nowhere clearer than in their relation to Christo Brand. He had been transferred to Pollsmoor shortly before they arrived; now he was one among the select warders assigned to their cell. It was something of a refuge for him. Pollsmoor was a wild prison, the relationship between warders and the infamous “Number” gangs one of heart-stopping violence.[9] To be locked up all day with a group of placid, genteel men was something of a blessing. Soon, Brand was playing table tennis with them, his torso naked, his warder’s jacket and shirt draped over a chair. As time wore on, his connection with them grew increasingly complex. He was, on the one hand, an agent of their enemy: he spied on them through the one-way glass that looked into their cell; on occasion he was instructed to wear a bug. But he became, too, a dedicated factotum to increasingly fussy men. Each of the prisoners could spend up to 25 rand a month at the prison tuckshop. Since they were not permitted to enter the prison at large, Brand did their buying for them. Soon, he offered them much more: he would leave the prison grounds on his motorbike and head for a large supermarket; combing the aisles, he would record the prices of dozens of items. His prisoners pored over the lists he had made, each with pencil in hand, calculating what he could afford to buy. Brand then returned to the supermarket with each man’s order in his pocket: Sisulu and Kathrada usually asked for coffee, Nelson for muesli rusks, Sensodyne toothpaste, and an Oral-B toothbrush. Brand walked the aisles clutching five baskets, one for each prisoner; he paid for their purchases separately, making sure that nobody spent over his monthly limit.

Ref. 0F0D-N

One morning in the winter of 1984, Nelson and Brand made their way to the reception area for a regular visit from Winnie. When they got to the visiting booths, they were shooed on and led to a small room. Minutes later, Winnie walked in and threw her arms around Nelson. He had been given no notice, no time to compose himself: for the first time in twenty-two years, he was touching his wife. The way Brand recalled it, Nelson briefly lost his bearings. He was nervous, jittery, hugging her, kissing her, hugging her again. They sat down, holding hands, looked at each other, and giggled. Nelson customarily brought a notebook and pencil to his encounters with Winnie. He was forever asking her to send messages, to see to family matters, and made lists of his requests. Now he did not know what to do with his hands. He put the notebook down so that he was free to touch his wife. Then he picked it up again awkwardly and paged through it. He was like a fumbling teenage boy finally alone with his girl.[13]

Ref. 1908-O

In September 1978, while Nelson was serving his seventeenth year in prison, Winnie her second year of banishment, a storm erupted at the summit of South African power. In the midst of a funding scandal and a brewing palace coup, Prime Minister John Vorster, who had ruled since 1966, resigned. His place was taken by a man who had served in his cabinet throughout his long term of office: P. W. Botha. What had happened was much more than the substitution of one leader for another. A quite different sensibility, a different canon of concepts and ideas—one that had been evolving out of sight, behind the doors of training academies, offices, and boardrooms—now came out into the world. South Africa’s new prime minister had contempt for the man he replaced. Vorster was inert and visionless, in Botha’s view, and the civil service he had built was chaotic and amateurish. He wished to regear the organs of state to do something new. Botha had been minister of defense for the past twelve years and came to office saturated in this experience. The military, he believed, was among a handful of public institutions in South Africa capable of executing complex tasks. He set about centralizing power and placed the military at the heart of his regime. A previously moribund committee, the State Security Council, consisting largely of cabinet ministers in security portfolios, was revived. It was given its own extensive implementing apparatus, the National Security Management System, with line functions extending into regions throughout the country.[1] What Botha built was a shadow executive branch attached to a shadow bureaucracy. So armed, he set to work. Botha’s strategic thinking had also grown from his exposure to the South African Defence Force. For some while now, the country’s military academies had been preoccupied with the lessons of France’s war in Algeria. The writings of the French general André Beaufre had acquired something of a biblical status among the strategists in apartheid’s army. To be conversant with his work was a benchmark of intellectual competence. To read him in the original French was to be a high priest.[2] At the core of Beaufre’s doctrine of counterinsurgency was the idea that the war was won or lost not militarily but psychologically. One’s real enemy, the doctrine proposed, was in fact quite small in number; one’s primary task was to isolate him by winning the allegiance of the general population. And since one controlled the state apparatus, the balance of forces was tilted heavily in the government’s favor; one had both the hard power to crush the enemy’s spirit and the soft power to give his potential constituency a measure of well-being. Following Beaufre, the thinkers around Botha spoke of a “total strategy,” total because the operational theater now spilled over from the battlefield into all spheres of life: the media, the classroom, the workplace, the built environment, the structures of political representation.[3]

Ref. A68E-P

is striking how large Algeria loomed in imaginations on either side of South Africa’s great political divide. From Algerian freedom fighters in Morocco, Nelson Mandela had learned back in 1962 the most significant lesson of his political career: that the apartheid government could not be defeated outright and would have to be negotiated out of power. From Algeria, Botha believed he had learned the opposite lesson: that through an adroit combination of warfare and reform, the ANC could be slayed.

Ref. C381-Q

Indians, was presented to the world. Everyone save the country’s black majority would vote in national elections. It was a beguiling concoction. On the one hand, the reforms were substantial. Black workers at the heart of the industrial economy now had the right to strike. Swaths of people long considered visitors in white South Africa were now permanent residents. Botha had, without question, given black people tangible power. And yet the script of the drama had been written alone; there was not a single black co-author. And the all-white authorship showed: the highest elected position open to a black politician in Botha’s new order was that of mayor in a racially segregated local government. Indeed, Botha’s intense need to dominate shaped his project. Never mind sharing power with unfamiliar faces: he did not even trust his own cabinet to make executive decisions nor his own civil service to implement them. To centralize power so tightly while dispersing it: paradoxes like these do not lend credibility to the story one tells. “We Afrikaners are trying to find the secret to sharing power without losing control,” a business leader close to Botha said, his bluffness exposing the anxiety at the heart of the project.[4] With hindsight we know that Botha failed. A decade after he came to power, his successor unbanned the ANC and released Nelson Mandela, beginning a nation’s short journey to majority rule. But exactly how Botha failed is not obvious, not even in hindsight. Accurately describing the character of the forces he unwittingly unleashed is so important, for these forces shaped the subsequent careers of Winnie and Nelson Mandela.

Ref. 91EA-R

Botha would have done well to heed the words of another Frenchman, one whose thinking was both deeper and more expansive than that of a military strategist like Beaufre. “The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it,” Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote in his account of the French Revolution, “and experience shows that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it sets about reform.”[5] It is not just that reform raises expectations. Something more interesting than that is at play. When a ruler institutes reforms, he by that very act provides his enemy with a platform to contest them, a legal platform. To reform is to give your enemy a legitimate place in your own order and to risk him destroying it from within. In the case of which Tocqueville wrote, Louis XVI called an ancient forum, the Estates General, which had not sat in centuries, to ratify dramatic changes to the tax regime. It was a forum he called, unearthed from the depths of his own constitutional order, and its activities set in train what became the French Revolution.

Ref. CE53-S

And so here was a legal entity, its books audited, its taxes paid, its support for a banned movement barely concealed. Botha had resurrected a version of his enemy inside his country’s borders, with a license to organize and to speak. The commanders of his security apparatus were acutely aware of the irony. Years later, Johan van der Merwe, apartheid South Africa’s last commissioner of police, still expressed his frustration: the intention of the UDF’s leaders, he recalled, was quite clearly to destroy the existing order, and yet they were breaking no law.[8]

Ref. 2830-T

Something else happened in response to Botha’s reforms, something more dramatic, more frightening, and, quite literally, more incendiary than the launch of an organization. The new version of black local government Botha introduced was self-funding; to raise revenue, it had to hike rents and service charges among the residents who fell within its jurisdictions. The early 1980s was a time of economic recession in South Africa, as it was through much of the world. The unemployment rate was higher than ever before in the country’s history.[9] It was not a good time to tell people to pay for a new form of government whose legitimacy was dubious already.[10]

Ref. 5BF3-U

On September 3, 1984, in Sharpeville, site of the famous 1960 massacre, residents rose in revolt against rent increases. “All day long,” one commentator wrote, “angry mobs roamed the streets, burning businesses, government buildings, and cars; throwing stones; battling with police.”[11] In the early afternoon, when the last of the township’s public buildings was on fire, the mob turned its anger on the houses of municipal councillors. Those unlucky enough to be at home were dragged into the street and slaughtered.[12] They were not the only ones to die that day. Several of the rioters, some of them children, were shot dead by police. By the end of the week, the fallen numbered forty, among them the deputy mayors of Sharpeville and neighboring Evaton.[13] Within days, the revolt had spread to neighboring townships; within months, to the coastal cities of East London and Port Elizabeth, and…

Ref. DD0F-V

A second striking feature of the revolt was its youthfulness; high school students across the country boycotted classes and poured onto the streets, where they were joined by older youths from the ranks of the unemployed. And they were not just young: they were overwhelmingly male. The teenagers who took to the streets on June 16, 1976, in their blazers and school shoes were equally divided between the sexes. Now those on the front lines were largely boys and young men.[15] The spirit of the revolt was starkly Manichaean; the world was divided between the uprising and its enemy, and everybody was told to choose sides. This found expression not just in the killing of municipal councillors and the destruction of government property but in other forms, too. Early in the troubles calls went out for the residents of black townships to boycott white-owned businesses. Youths surrounded train stations and taxi terminuses and searched…

Ref. B76D-W

And yet, while the talk sounded bold, the voice was that of a spectator “shouting from the sidelines,” as an astute commentator put it.[18] The ANC was quite incapable of leading an insurrection. In the midst of losing its capacity to work from Mozambique and Lesotho—the result of an accord signed that same year between South Africa and Mozambique—its operational lines into South Africa were severely damaged. The situation throughout 1985 was awfully mercurial; it took hard and rigorous minds to think clearly. A genuine insurrection was under way. Should the flames of the uprising be fanned in the hope that the apartheid regime itself catches fire and explodes? On the other hand, an ensemble of formidable organizations had recently evolved: the trade union movement, the UDF. Their power lay in their legality. Should the lines between insurrection and legal campaigning vanish, it is these precious organizations that might go up in flames. How to name the struggle against apartheid: Was it a revolution? Or was its mainstay a peaceful movement for fundamental change? These questions divided people in the UDF at home and in the ANC abroad. They agitated old wounds on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor. And they also, for the first time in their long union, revealed to Winnie and Nelson Mandela whom, exactly, each had married.

Ref. F4EB-X

That Winnie Mandela might watch a revolution at a distance was always unlikely. Never mind that she was banished to a corner of the Free State: from its earliest stirrings, in 1980, a full three years before the formation of the UDF, she had done her utmost not just to get involved but to lead. And she had done so, as had now long been her way, through a consuming relationship with a lover. “[You will find a] rather strange-looking fellow called Matthews Malefane who lives with Winnie as a general factotum—body guard (what have you?),” the liberal parliamentarian Helen Suzman wrote to a colleague as she coached him in preparation for visiting Brandfort. “Don’t be put off by his appearance—he’s a Rastafarian.”[1]

Ref. 53B5-Y

The very sight of Malefane wagged tongues. “I don’t think anyone in our little rural town had seen a man with dreadlocks before,” the son of Winnie’s Brandfort lawyer recalled. “And here was this incredibly handsome man with his hair dancing around his shoulders. People stared.”[2] It was Zindzi who introduced Malefane to Winnie on one of her permitted visits to Soweto. He was just embarking upon adult life, an aspiring fine artist. But now—as with Zindzi and her education, as with Peter Magubane and his career as a photographer, as with Brian Somana and his young family—Malefane took position as a

Ref. A573-Z

There was a daftness to what Winnie was doing—trawling strange youths from the streets of dusty towns to sit at her feet and learn. But there was, too, extraordinary self-belief: the idea that a two-person show, Malefane and she, could assemble a national network of young men, any young men; that the sheer force of her presence might instill in them the deepest loyalty. This was not crazy at all; it presaged what was famously to come.

Ref. A03A-A

Once, driving through the western Free State, a clergyman who knew Winnie well spotted Malefane walking along the verge of a provincial road. He was far from Brandfort, a good ten miles out, and so the minister pulled over and offered him a ride. Malefane was in a dreadful state; he muttered over and over again that he must leave Winnie at once, without delay, that he could not stand being with her in that house another moment. He had nothing with him, no bag, not even a toothbrush. The clergyman took him for a long drive and, once his passenger had calmed down, drove into Brandfort’s black township and dropped him off at Winnie’s home.[11] There can be little question about the depths of her anguish at this time, witnessed, above all, in the amount of alcohol she had begun to consume. Brandfort was a small town, Winnie a famous figure; the town’s mayor, Jurie Erwee, was also the owner of its liquor store, and he dined out on the sheer quantity of spirits Winnie’s household acquired.[12]

Ref. 5759-B

In her sobriety, too, Winnie revealed her despair. So many who spent an afternoon or an evening with her commented not just on the intensity of her sadness but on how she shared it, projecting it with great force to those in her company. Among them was a senior Methodist cleric, John Scholtz, who ministered to Winnie for several years. On Christmas Day in 1982, he recalled, Winnie traveled to Cape Town to see Nelson in Pollsmoor Prison. She was not permitted to stay in Cape Town the night and was required to be back in Brandfort by 8:00 p.m. And so she flew to Cape Town in the morning, saw Nelson, and then boarded a late afternoon flight to Bloemfontein. Scholtz and his wife met her at the airport and drove her to Brandfort. As they made their way into the night, he recalled, a feeling of utter wretchedness pervaded the car; Winnie barely spoke the entire journey, but he could feel her sorrow, as if it were inside him too. By the time they reached Brandfort, her melancholy had infected him.

Ref. B3A8-C

In January 1985, after a long period of turmoil, Malefane left Winnie and took up with a woman in Soweto. On an evening a few days after his arrival in town, he and his new love were having dinner with friends when Winnie made an astonishing entrance. “She just flew across the room and shouted, ‘You’re coming back with me or you know what will happen,’ ” he recalled seven years later. The others in the room had not yet taken in her fury; the famous Winnie Mandela had arrived from out of the blue, and people rose to greet and hug her. She brushed them aside. Malefane, who knew all too well what was happening, made for a telephone to call an uncle who lived nearby. “She tore the phone off the wall,” he recalled, “threw it to the ground and began hitting me.” Malefane managed to usher Winnie outside and found to his horror two young men waiting there, young men he had known well in Brandfort, one carrying a crowbar, the other an ax. “Kill the dog!” he remembered Winnie shouting to them. They moved toward him, halfheartedly, an apologetic look in their eyes. One of them

Ref. 980F-D

This was not the first act of violence Malefane had witnessed in Winnie. In the winter of 1983, two nine-year-old Brandfort boys had been playing outside her house. Her grandchild, who was staying with her at the time, accused the two boys of stealing her tricycle. Winnie stormed out of her house, took the leather belt off her waist, wrapped it around her fist, and struck one of the two boys, Andrew Pogisho, her belt buckle opening a deep gash in his forehead. To Malefane’s shock, she kept hitting the boy with her buckle, despite the sight of a great deal of blood. He threw himself on her, and the two of them fought each other with their fists in the dust.[17] Pogisho’s mother laid a charge of assault with the police, and Winnie stood trial later that year. The boy himself gave testimony in a closed hearing. Winnie contested his evidence, and neither Malefane nor the half a dozen or so neighbors who had witnessed the incident were called. She was acquitted. In her own testimony, she said that the people of Brandfort’s forlorn township had been so defeated by apartheid that they had lost the capacity to parent. “It was in sympathy with the mother’s inability to bring up children in a normal situation that I acted,” she said.[18]

Ref. CEF4-E

It is difficult to write about a woman in this way, for one risks tramping worn and familiar paths: the woman crazed by jealousy; the woman driven murderous by her proximity to power. From Jezebel to the life-ruining femmes fatales of film noir, the stories into which violent women fall are old and deep and hard to avoid. It behooves us to strain against these tales and to hold close what an unfamiliar figure Winnie was. Most arresting is the sheer number of norms she transgressed through the years. When her husband was on trial for his life, she took a married man who had a young family into her bed. When her public image was at its most sexualized, an object of shameless male desire, she imagined herself the leader of her people. When she was forty-four, she seduced a boy her daughters’ age and shared her life with him. When he left her, she ordered men with crowbars to break his bones. She flouted every rule of comportment expected of a woman in her position. And she did so with an aristocratic absence of reserve, rendering her the most singular, the most astonishing woman.

Ref. 6B0B-F

Her most remarkable feature of all was her relation to her country. A couple of months after the national uprisings began in 1984, a documentary filmmaker, Peter Davis, conducted a long interview with Winnie. Without prompting, she began speaking of Theuns Swanepoel, the man who had tortured her. She had clearly been living with him, close to the surface of her consciousness, all this time. What she said about him was bracing and unexpected. She had been made by Swanepoel, she told Davis. For she had, in the most troubling way, grown very close to him, close enough to feel his…

Ref. 2A8E-G

As this grim new spectacle was reported, it was given a name—“necklacing”—and with its christening, the practice spread. Over the next five years, 406 people died this way.[28] South Africa’s public broadcaster, tightly controlled by the government, went out of its way to film such killings and show them to the nation. The most spectacular of these broadcasts ran on the evening of July 20, 1985. A government agent, posing as a member of MK, had given a group of youths a batch of hand grenades rigged to detonate in their hands. Eight young men had blown themselves up. At their funeral, a young woman was picked out by the crowd and accused of being the traitor’s girlfriend. She was kicked and stoned for some time before a tire was thrown around her neck and set alight. As she burned to death, the crowd circled her and sang.[29] Now, nine months later, in three successive speeches delivered at gatherings around Johannesburg, Winnie spoke for the first time of necklacing. Our enemy, she said, is far more heavily armed than we are. “We have no guns. We only have stones, boxes of matches and petrol.” “Together, hand in hand,” she said a few hours later, “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”[30]

Ref. 989C-H

And she was a middle-aged woman of stature; this, perhaps more than anything, shaped what her words meant. “When we heard [what she had said] we were very excited, excited to have the endorsement of a senior leader,” recalled Mondli Makhanya, now one of South Africa’s most respected newspaper editors, then a youth on the barricades.[32] It was not just that she was a senior leader: the encouragement had issued from the lips of a mother—a mother of her own biological children, to be sure, but also of all the black children of a nation. She was identifying with the violence of her offspring, and the sheer uncanniness of this carried immense power. It shot a frisson of excitement into the world. And yet her words were also met with revulsion, both in South Africa and across the world. And its depth stemmed, too, from her age and her gender. For a middle-aged woman to appear to celebrate the burning of live human flesh drew from the depths of myth a figure long hated, she herself rounded upon and burned: the figure of an unnatural woman. At its bimonthly meeting held in mid-May, the State Security Council, by now the highest decision-making body on matters of security in the country, discussed what to do. It would be simple to issue Winnie a new banning order, the council resolved, but “at present and especially because of her indiscriminate remarks, it is tactically not desirable.”[33] Her enemy was happy for her to keep talking.

Ref. 950D-I

More than most human beings ever do, Nelson Mandela had changed. Throughout his last decade of freedom, he had lived—headily, inexhaustibly—in the present: the intensity of a life in politics, the adrenaline induced by the danger, the whole business eroticized by a series of sexual liaisons. He had tended so little to things that might last, leaving behind a wrecked marriage, an estranged son, a mother without means; even his second marriage was a fragile thing, assembled with the thrill of transgression. In prison, the present wasted away. Only the past and the future remained, both largely foreign to him until now. Once he found them, he worked on them ceaselessly, year upon year, threading who he had been to who he’d become once his endless confinement was over. And as his imaginings changed him, he became a strikingly ordinary man: the nourishment he found in kinship, the prospect of growing old with his wife, his craving for accomplishment in his children. His longings became so commonplace, so familiar.

Ref. 731F-J

During his time in prison, Nelson Mandela enlisted his fame into the service of his descendants’ education. He did this without reserve or shame. The sheer consistency, the sheer tenacity with which he hit up his influential visitors to raise scholarship funds is astonishing to behold. The American lawyer Samuel Dash, the British politician Nicholas Bethell, the South African parliamentarian Helen Suzman, the leading South African Quaker H. W. van der Merwe, the businessman Tony Bloom: anyone with means, with influence, with access to people who might open doors, was enlisted in the project to educate the Mandelas. When his granddaughter Nandi was admitted as a student to the University of Cape Town but hadn’t the money to pay the fees, he coached her on what to do. “Go to Prof. Van der Merwe,” he advised when she came to see him, “and ask him to make an appointment for you at the German Embassy…When you see the Ambassador, insist on a private audience. Tell him that your father was my son and that he died in an accident. Tell him you were brought up by your mother…and she can’t afford University fees. Tell him your grandfather is Nelson Mandela…Tell him I want not only the scholarship, but also money for your board and lodging, money for books and pocket money.”[4] One can hear the machinery at work in his mind. When he was younger, he had chosen politics over family. As a result, he had become a man without income, without assets, a man who could not provide. That his choices might leave the Mandelas who survived him non-people was intolerable. He was righting a wrong before it was too late, playing his proper part, at the last opportunity, in the cycle of life.

Ref. F1DB-K

Nelson’s son, Makgatho, was cause for much anguish. He had to all intents and purposes cut ties with Nelson; he last visited his father in 1983. And what Nelson knew of his life was very painful indeed. He was an alcoholic, his life ruinously unstable. Through a series of proxies and benefactors, Nelson had taken over the care of Makgatho’s child, Mandla. He was in fact taking nothing less than an obsessive interest in the boy’s welfare, forever asking after him, forever demanding to see him, watching vigilantly over his education. It is hard to resist the thought that in Mandla’s dislocations, his fate decided by the benevolence of others, Nelson saw his own childhood.[5]

Ref. 7D29-L

Christo Brand was by now something of an executive secretary to his prisoner—buying his food, posting his mail, going on endless errands throughout the city on his behalf—and found himself deeply embroiled in the quest to educate Zindzi Mandela. After she arrived in early 1985, Brand was sent, sometimes weekly, at times daily, to see that she was settled in her accommodation, that her studies were going well, that she was getting her meals. Many years later, Zindzi joked that Brand was an honorary Mandela, so ensconced in family matters had he become.[8] And if this were not enough, Nelson received dispensation for his friend H. W. van der Merwe to pay him special visits, over and above his regular allotment, for the express purpose of reporting on Zindzi’s academic progress.[9] There was something overbearing in Nelson’s relation to Zindzi. One evening, Brand recalled, he was sent to her student residence to give her a message from her father. When he returned with the news that he could not find her, Nelson descended into a state of agitation that took Brand aback.[10]

Ref. A932-M

Countless young men used the veneer of politics to rob and steal. In 1986, Soweto business operators complained of youths approaching them for money to sponsor the funeral of a fallen comrade, a thinly veiled demand to empty the cash register or face the consequences.[5] Car drivers returning to Soweto were stopped at the edge of the township to have their vehicles requisitioned, ostensibly for the struggle.[6] Youths invaded classrooms on the guise that they were enforcing a school boycott, their intent to molest the schoolgirls they chased into the street.[7] A world this violent soon grows mercurial, the line between real and imaginary danger hard to pin down. In early 1988, rumors coursed through Soweto that children were being abducted en masse. At the height of the panic, parents began arriving at schools in the middle of the morning to fetch their sons and daughters. It was said that the culprits were prowling Soweto with the letter H painted on the sides of their cars. Word began to spread that they were undertakers using the corpses of children for some ill-defined purpose. On a Friday night in February, five Soweto undertakers were assassinated in their homes.[8]

Ref. 8D0E-N

The leaders of the UDF at home and of the ANC in exile were acutely aware of this wildness. But the question of how to discipline the revolution produced an array of conflicting answers.

Ref. 49C6-O

Nelson Mandela was very much of this view. Criminal elements were now involved, he counseled Winnie shortly after her return to Soweto, and innocent people were getting hurt. He spoke about Germans being shot dead by their own during World War II and about the violence that had erupted during the Defiance Campaign. “We must be careful what we instruct our people because we are in a delicate situation.”[10]

Ref. 6B2A-P

At first, it appeared to some that Winnie’s intent was to tame the wildness, for the body she formed a year after her return to Soweto—the Mandela United Football Club—was a response to a dreadful event: the murder of a twenty-nine-year-old woman called Masabata Loate. A veteran of the 1976 uprisings, Loate was completing a five-year prison sentence for treason when the uprisings began. Shocked by the violence to which she returned after her release, she spoke out against some of the more brutal practices of her neighborhood’s youths, counseling them against stoning the cars of innocents and against beating shoppers returning from town. On a Friday night in October 1986, a group of twenty or so Orlando West youths turned on her and chased her to her grandmother’s house. They caught her just before she reached safety and killed her in the most gruesome fashion, stabbing her all over her torso and head and breaking her limbs with an ax.[12]

Ref. 8CAC-Q

The scene that confronted her was unusual and a little ominous. Unlike almost any other Soweto home, one could not simply walk through Winnie’s front gate; a group of youths stood in the street, blocking one’s way. Winnie was summoned and came outside; Chili asked her why members of the team wanted to kill her son. “Dudu,” she later recalled Winnie saying, “if he’s not in the football club, obviously the other boys will think he’s a sell-out.” Chili went home in something of a daze, not quite sure whether she had properly absorbed the meaning of Winnie’s words. “That really scared me,” she remembered years later, “because in those times when somebody is labelled a sell-out it means he must die.”[18] Quite how much was at stake for those young men who refused the football team’s approach soon became apparent. On May 26, 1987, two brothers, Peter and Phillip Makhanda, were taken forcibly from their home, driven to Winnie’s place, and put in an outhouse on the property. They were severely beaten. One of them, Peter, was hung by the neck from the roof until the rafters broke and he fell to the ground. A plastic bag was pulled over his face and his head dunked in a bucket of water, an imitation of one of the apartheid security police’s most familiar methods of torture. Then the carving began. The boys were placed on chairs and their hands tied behind their backs. Using a penknife, a member of the football team cut the letter M—for Mandela—into their chests and “Viva ANC” down the lengths of their thighs. The wounds were then doused with battery acid. Nowhere in the boys’ statements do they describe the pain; suffice it to say that they were made to watch their flesh burn. A police car was heard cruising outside in the middle of the night, and the Makhanda brothers were bundled away and taken to the house of Winnie’s driver, John Morgan. They were locked in a garage, from which they escaped and ran immediately to Meadowlands police station, where they wrote lengthy statements about what had happened. Three men stood trial for the assault—John Morgan, Absolom Madonsela, and Isaac Mokgoro. Winnie was neither questioned by the police nor called as a witness. The accused were acquitted on the grounds that the Makhanda brothers had offered conflicting evidence. That their testimony was poor is hardly surprising. The football team had been paraded before them, with no one-way mirror to protect them, while they were asked to point out their would-be killers, men still very much at large. Astonishingly, the magistrate appeared to concede that they had been kidnapped and tortured by residents of Winnie’s house in the very same breath as saying that nobody could be held responsible. “The experience must have been so frightening that their powers of observation were affected and their minds were more on how to get through the ordeal alive,” he wrote in his judgment.[19] A small group of politically active parents quietly rebelled. Dudu Chili, along with several…

Ref. 2396-R

In his search for the Škorpion, Seheri terrorized the members of the Mokhaula household. To show the seriousness of his intent, he shot a young man called Mlando Ngubeni in the hip; Ngubeni crawled away into an adjoining bedroom, where he bled to death. Seheri eventually found his gun and executed Mokhaula on his way out, a grim punishment for having won a fistfight started by another man.[29] Seheri was arrested the following day. Under torture, he began to speak. On January 27, Winnie’s house was raided; Buthelezi and several other members of the football club were arrested and taken away… The shooting spree at Xola Mokhaula’s house, the subsequent police raid on Winnie’s place, the arrest of S’thembiso Buthelezi and other members of the household—this series of incidents slowly unraveled the world Winnie had made. Each member of the club detained in the raids was interrogated, tortured, made to speak. What did they say? And what deals had they made? Many of them returned to Winnie’s house in the following months, and the question of who might be spying ate that house up from the inside.

Ref. FBDB-S

A month after they arrested S’thembiso Buthelezi and other members of the household, the police raided again. This time they found a Škorpion machine gun pistol in a suitcase under Zindzi’s bed. They promptly arrested her. It was now that a tale finally had to be told to Nelson Mandela, for his daughter’s arrest was all over the news. He had thought that she was living in Cape Town, a diligent student at UCT. Winnie hastily assembled a story for her husband’s consumption, only one part of which was true: S’thembiso Buthelezi, she told Nelson, correctly, was Zindzi’s lover. But she hid from Nelson that Buthelezi was a founding member of the football club. In the story she told, he was a student at UCT; Zindzi had met him in class; they had fallen in love; she had brought him up to Johannesburg to visit. It so happened that the police raided while they were there; they planted a weapon under Zindzi’s bed. “It was a Škorpion,” she added. “Some weird machine gun.”[1]

Ref. 9680-T

Nelson must have smelled a rat. For when Zindzi and Winnie next came to see him, the first words to issue from his mouth were not about the gun or the arrest or what had happened at the Soweto house. Instead, he asked Zindzi whether she was back at university after the year-end vacation. “Not yet,” she replied. “When do they open?” “They opened last week.” In response to the dismay that must have shown on Nelson’s face, Winnie intervened. “She’s not back at university because she’s upset about Buthelezi’s arrest.” “How does that stop you from going to school?” Nelson snapped. “Tata [Dad],” Zindzi replied. “I have problems with my conscience.” “Well how does it help at all not to continue with your studies?” Nelson asked. “This is the type of life your family undergoes. You must go back immediately. I cannot understand the reason for your not attending. You support S’thembiso. You love him. That is enough. You must go back immediately unless you can show me that there is something absolutely essential which requires you to stay away.” “She has a guilty feeling because of the attitude of his brothers and sisters,” Winnie explained. “They felt that his relationship [with Zindzi] would lead to this sort of trouble…Now they are saying I told you so.” “They will not stop saying so even if Zindzi does not go [back to university],” Nelson replied…

Ref. 8928-U

Less than a month later, Winnie told Nelson flatly that Zindzi was no longer a student at UCT; their daughter was living with her in Soweto and had registered to study at Wits. The way she told the story, neither she nor Zindzi had had much say in the matter. The decision had been made by George Bizos, Nelson’s old friend and lawyer. “It is because the police keep saying they are awaiting word from the attorney-general as to whether to charge her or not,” Winnie explained. “And so George thought it was better to transfer her to Wits and let her study there so they don’t disrupt her studies in Cape Town.” As she must have anticipated, Nelson exploded. “Why was I not consulted?” he shouted. “Why did she lie to me?” But she didn’t lie, Winnie replied. When she last visited Nelson, George had yet to make the decision. The conversation became knotted in a dispute about precise dates, precise facts, when exactly Zindzi knew she was leaving for Johannesburg, whether this was before she last saw Nelson. It was a pointless conversation, and Nelson’s exasperation finally got the better of him. “I know how to deal with you people!” he threatened. “You keep saying I can’t deal with family matters,” Winnie replied. “So I went to George.”[3] . . How much about his wife and daughter’s life did Nelson Mandela surmise? Each letter he wrote or received was read by his enemy, each conversation with a visitor recorded and transcribed. He knew this. And he ensured that everyone who visited or corresponded with him knew it, too. And so even for those who might want to tell him what was happening in his home, there was little opportunity. And if he himself had entertained dark thoughts, or had just fleetingly wondered, or had woken in the night with the sense that something was terribly wrong, he would have neither given voice to these feelings nor committed them to paper. There was only one forum in which he might talk and listen privately: in privileged consultations with his lawyers. And he had, for now, given these up. For by 1987 he was talking secretly, if fitfully, to senior government officials, and as proof of his bona fides, proof that these talks really were secret, he had resolved that his enemy would hear every word he said.[4] “It is a matter of national interest that I not have an unsupervised visit,” he told Winnie enigmatically.[5] . . In August 1987, Winnie…

Ref. 60DA-V

the three figures in these encounters, it is Zindzi who stands out. She has told her father that she has given up her studies to become a guerrilla fighter, an act of strength and resolve if ever there was one. But in the face of his wrath, she is a frightened child. The dissonance draws attention. The appearance Zindzi offers the world is deceptive. She is beautiful and charismatic; she writes lucid poetry and speaks to large audiences with poise. But behind this facade she appears to be a person without force of her own. Eight years have passed since she accompanied her mother to Brandfort. Since then, every attempt to strike out and live her own life has failed. Plans to study in the U.K. and in Johannesburg fell apart. Plans to marry her lover and live with him in Johannesburg were aborted; her lover had to come and live in her mother’s house instead. She abandoned her studies at UCT to become absorbed once more into her mother’s world, her mother’s politics, her mother’s vision of how apartheid should end. And now, in the face of her father’s will—which he expresses with the tyranny of a biblical patriarch—she breaks down and weeps. She is twenty-six, but her formidable parents have kept her a child. They are at war over her; she is both the subject of this war and its impotent witness. And in the battle between the older Mandelas it is Winnie who wins; it is hard to miss how decisively she has shaped the outcome of the encounter. “I wish,” she has said, “that there was a way to make children look forward to visits here with…

Ref. A7D3-W

told Jana to relay a message to Zindzi. “I have had enough. You are going to have a lot of things destroyed for which we have fought all our lives…I am not requesting Zindzi, I am instructing her, to come down to UCT and to stay at campus. If she doesn’t do so it is her own decision, but then she must leave the house. I will have nothing to do with her again if she doesn’t do that.” He has warned that he will wash his hands of his daughter. But what of his wife? Did he believe her when she said that she could only stand by helplessly while these wayward forces recruited Zindzi into their ranks? “I think that Zindzi cannot [bear] entire responsibility,” Jana says at one point. “No, no. I understand,” Nelson interrupts. “It is because we are discussing her. There are other people involved. You can rest assured that in almost all my visits I have been trying to correct that, but somehow I am helpless. I get promises, and then the same thing continues.” He omits Winnie’s name because the conversation is being recorded, but he is of course referring to her; he thus understands that despite her protestations she has encouraged her daughter to join a renegade armed band. “I can assure you that other people have tried as well,” Jana says.[7] They both know that she is referring to Oliver Tambo’s futile attempts to rein in Winnie Mandela. And so Nelson understands that Winnie was complicit in Zindzi’s abandonment of her studies at UCT and that she encouraged Zindzi to join a wayward force in MK. But did he understand that Winnie herself was the wayward force? It is hard to say.

Ref. 0A56-X

spewed. The warder on duty paraphrased this part of the conversation, and we cannot know the precise words Nelson used. They appear to have been desperately furious. “I’ve been here 25 years now,” the warder has him shout. “[I have experienced] humiliation after humiliation. You cannot know what [is going on in your house]. You cannot know. What you started will not be tolerated by any man!” Winnie appeared to change the subject. “Before visiting time is over, I must tell you this,” she said, the direct transcript of their conversation now back in place. Nelson’s sister Leabie has spoken of a child, a girl, who claims to be Nelson’s daughter. “I have forgotten her name.” An argument has erupted over who should pay for her education. “They say she is your child,” Winnie repeated. “Leabie says so.” “What is the surname?” Nelson asked. “I have forgotten the girl’s name. And the mother’s name also. But they said you would know her.” “How old is she?” “Apparently Zindzi’s age,” Winnie replied, no doubt pointedly. “You can tell Leabie I know nothing of the sort,” Nelson snapped. “I suggest that she comes here.” “I don’t want any of your suggestions.” “How do I convey your message to her?” “That is your problem,” Nelson replied. “Is that your message about the child?” “Yes.” “She has done nothing wrong.” “I know,” he conceded. “Your attitude is wrong.” “I don’t want to hear more about it. If you’re going to talk, talk about something else, not that subject.”[8] Winnie was so much better than Nelson at this, her timing exquisite. Not a couple of minutes earlier, he was accusing her of terrible things. At the click of her fingers, he had become a callous man, leaving in want the child his philandering had spawned.

Ref. BBD3-Y

It was now that Nelson resolved to tell his closest comrades what he was doing. They were deeply wary, not least his dearest and most trusted friend, Walter Sisulu. “I could see he was uncomfortable,” Nelson recalled, “and at best, lukewarm.”[3] As for Oliver Tambo, he smuggled a letter to Nelson to raise his concern. “What, he wanted to know, was I discussing with the government,” Nelson remembered. “Oliver could not have believed that I was selling out, but he might have thought that I was making an error of judgment. In fact, the tenor of his note suggested that.”[4] Tambo’s and Sisulu’s suspicions soon dimmed. But the suspicions of many others did not. Once news that he and his enemy were speaking was abroad, rumors that Nelson had cracked and was being used periodically swirled. At moments, these fears reached hysterical pitch, like in April 1989, when Nelson’s old foe Govan Mbeki, now free, sent a call to activists across South Africa to cut ties with Nelson.[5] And in July of the same year, when news reached the ANC in exile that Nelson had met with P. W. Botha, the fever rose again; among the stories going around senior ANC circles was that Nelson had been drugged and taken to see Botha by force.[6] Nelson could not have heard all these rumors, but he felt their pressures acutely. In the early months of 1988, Christo Brand noted the signs of stress in his charge. “He was so very on edge at that time,” Brand recalled. “He had no sense of humour at all.” At times, his behavior was so out of character, Brand felt he was in the presence of a stranger. Once, when Nelson woke to discover that the morning newspaper was nowhere to be found, he summoned the night-duty warder and spewed rage. “I thought for a moment that Mandela was going to hit him,” Brand wrote.[7] The pressure under which Nelson was putting himself was deliberate. “Both sides regarded discussions as a sign of weakness and betrayal,” he wrote. “Neither would come to the table unless the other made significant concessions…Someone from our side needed to take the first step.”[8] Nelson understood he had given his enemy the wherewithal to destroy him. For he knew, as two shrewd commentators have put it, that the government might “accept his invitation, but with the ulterior motive of trapping him, discrediting him among his people and decapitating the ANC leadership at a crucial moment.”[9] And his enemy knew that he knew this. “He was prepared to place his political life in the hands of the dominant Afrikaner ‘establishment’ that controlled his life,” a National Intelligence Service memo from the time observes. “If the Government and the team had wanted to maliciously exploit the talks with [him], this could have led to his destruction.”[10] This was the most creative act of his political career. The ANC and the South African government were facing a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Both wanted a negotiated end to apartheid. But neither trusted the other. Nelson offered his enemy the…

Ref. 6833-Z

Two months before his release, the government’s National Intelligence Service wrote a secret assessment of Nelson Mandela. It is among the most trenchant analyses of his character and his politics there is. That it was his enemy who saw him so clearly is of the greatest irony. The document—almost certainly penned by the NIS head, Niël Barnard, and his deputy, Mike Louw—describes Nelson Mandela as a man of some vanity. In prison, he became “one of the world’s most famous martyrs and he has an urgent need to live up to this fame by sacrificing his freedom to a role of great statesmanship in the few years that may still be bestowed upon him.” He needs “to perpetuate his name.” But he will not compromise on his principles in this quest. He can be trusted to keep his word, they write, “but that he could be ‘bought’ to betray his loyalty to his organization and his deep-rooted political philosophy is not possible.” Indeed, they argue, he thinks that history is on his organization’s side, that it will triumph by virtue of its principles. “He believes…that if the government can first be provoked to ‘engagement,’ the moral power and logic of the ANC’s cause will win the day.” That the authors of the report have come to admire Nelson shines through. “One is struck by his spiritual power,” they write, “the lack of bitterness, his natural courtesy, as well as his personal integrity. He will conceal truths and even present skewed ones to substantiate his argument, but lies and dishonesty are not in his nature.” Above all, they believe that a peaceful way out of apartheid is unlikely without him. They urge their principal to make haste. “His health is good, but his ankles are visibly swollen due to moderate heart failure which is not unexpected at his age. Furthermore, he realizes that his own camp as well as the Government is entering a period of political acceleration and that, if he cannot play his card soon, his personal political role could be severely damaged.”[12] Hurry, they implore. There is not much time.

Ref. 9417-A

In reaching out to his enemy, Nelson Mandela believed that he might save his country. He would save it from further bloodshed, from the further hardening of hearts, from wounds that do not heal long after the war has been won. Whether he knew quite how much damage had already been done is unclear. He certainly had little inkling of…

Ref. 873A-B

Winnie built her household in a world full of young men’s violence, and she harnessed that violence; hers was, in an obvious sense, a household of its time. And yet her home was also singular, for she scrambled what was expected of mothers,…

Ref. A290-C

is hard to exaggerate the machismo that characterized youth culture in Soweto at that time. To an astonishing degree, sexual violence against young women and girls was an anodyne fact of life. “The community seemed to treat rape as if it were just some minor inconvenience,” recalled the radio personality Redi Tlhabi in her memoir of growing up in Orlando East in the 1980s and 1990s. “It was not uncommon for a young woman to be walking down the street and for someone, even another woman, to point to her and snigger, ‘…

Ref. DB49-D

The rawest recruits to this culture of machismo resided under Winnie’s roof. And while they lived in her house, some committed acts of violence as cruel as any they had witnessed on the streets. But in the house itself, the relationship between the sexes was like nothing they would have seen elsewhere. Both Winnie and Zindzi took lovers from the young men who lived on their property. But these men did not exercise power over the women with whom they slept, not on the surface at any rate. On the contrary, to be chosen by them was to have a portion of their power bestowed upon one.

Ref. 9F8B-E

for Winnie, her choosing a lover among the members of her household speaks so illuminatingly to the state of her being at this strange, difficult time. Nearly a decade later, a woman who shared a lover with Winnie in the late 1980s gave testimony at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Her name is Evodia Nkadimeng. Hers is a most complex tale, and it is well to tell it one step at a time.

Ref. E67D-F

His suspicion was precisely correct. It was revealed in time that Mabotha was indeed an askari; his police commander was Eugene de Kock, a man who would become notorious as the head of a secret assassination squad housed at a farm called Vlakplaas.[4] Among other activities, members of the squad scoured railway stations, taxi ranks, and shebeens for the faces of MK soldiers they had known in exile; when they found a person they recognized, they hunted him down and slayed him. Sehlapelo told Nkadimeng that her life was in danger. He advised her to keep seeing Mabotha until the opportunity arose to kill him. It was her life versus his, Sehlapelo advised.[5]

Ref. F14D-G

She did not believe him. It was only when he brought other people who lived with Winnie to Evodia’s house—the football coach, Jerry Richardson, and two others, Xoliswa Falati and Katiza Cebekhulu—that she understood that he truly did live in the home of the struggle’s most famous woman. This troubled her deeply. For if Sehlapelo’s suspicions were right—and she was increasingly certain that they were—Winnie Mandela had a spy in her home. “You know, Evodia,” she recalled Mabotha telling her, “in Mrs. Mandela’s house, I am a trusted person.” “How did they come to trust you?” Nkadimeng asked. “You cannot believe it, I know that Mrs. Mandela has got white hair.” “How did you come to know that?” “No, Mrs. Mandela allows me to touch her here,” he replied, placing his hand behind his ear. “You know,” he continued, “there’s nobody allowed to use her bathroom except myself.”[6] There is wide-eyed wonder here: a grown man is ventriloquizing a small boy, a boy who has been permitted to sleep with his mother. Cautiously, Nkadimeng raised her suspicions about Mabotha with the other three members of the Mandela household. She found them surprisingly receptive to what she was saying. Indeed, they seemed positively excited. Mrs. Mandela had drawn much too close to Mabotha, they told her; she was in love with him and he had, as a result, grown far too powerful. They urged her to come back with them to Soweto to tell Winnie personally of what she knew.

Ref. C4F6-H

Something stranger still was happening. Mabotha came and went. For every moment he was there, he did not leave Winnie’s side. “They moved through the house hand in hand,” Nkadimeng recalled. “When she goes to the kitchen, he goes. When she is watching TV, he is sitting next to her, still holding her hand. Wherever she moved, he moved with her.” Soon, members of the household began making meaningful eye contact with Nkadimeng. “It was clear that Mama’s relationship with Mabotha was upsetting everybody,” she recalled. “We just used our eyes to communicate our dissatisfaction.” Eventually, Zindzi began confiding in Nkadimeng. “Evodia,” she remembered Zindzi saying, “something strange is happening in this house. That man is confusing my mother. He does not even allow me to have privacy with her. I feel I no longer belong in this house. I in fact tried to attack him with an empty bottle the other day; my mother stopped me.” A few days after that conversation, Nkadimeng was arrested. “Do you know why Mrs. Mandela hates you so?” she recalled her interrogator, Warrant Officer Jan Augustyn, asking her during an interminable interrogation. “Not because you said Mabotha was a spy, but because you said you slept with him.”[8]

Ref. B1FB-I

Another, somewhat quirky, piece of evidence was presented to the TRC. The Soweto security police, who were bugging Winnie’s bedroom, listened in while she and Mabotha made love. Once, Mabotha fell from the bed and crashed to the floor. Winnie, fearing that he was injured, became enormously gentle. “She told him how sorry she was that he may have hurt himself,” the policeman who read the transcript of the conversation testified.[9] He giggled as he gave his testimony and was upbraided by the lawyer cross-examining him. Beyond the prurience and the titillation, his nervous laughter was perhaps a response to the incongruity: this famously hard woman was also very tender and apparently in love.

Ref. 4DC7-J

Siboniso Tshabalala. On a Sunday evening in mid-November, Lolo’s father, Nicodemus Sono, who had known Winnie since the uprisings of 1976, returned home to find a member of Winnie’s household waiting at his front gate. He led Sono down the road to where Winnie’s van was parked and invited him to step inside. Winnie was there, as were several members of the football team. And so was his son, Lolo, who had been so disfigured that his father barely recognized him. “His face…was actually pulped,” Sono testified, “as if someone had…crushed him against the wall.” When he saw his father, Lolo tried to speak, but Winnie shut him up. She told Sono that she had come to show him his son the spy. Sono tried to reason with her. Lolo could not have betrayed the guerrillas, he said. He had in fact done so much to assist them over the months, at great risk. One of them was a beloved relative, a man Lolo deeply admired. As he spoke, he detected in Winnie a hardening—“she suddenly changed and…looked at me the other way,” is how he put it—and he immediately stopped reasoning and instead begged for his son’s life. “Leave Lolo with me because he has already been beaten,” he recalled pleading. “If it’s for punishment, I understand that he’s been punished; can’t you please leave him with me.” Sono had known Winnie for twelve years now. When she answered him, her tone was like nothing he had heard from her before. “She was really not speaking to me as I always knew her;…she raised up her voice; she was speaking very loud. ‘I cannot leave him with you! He is a spy!’ ” She told him she would send his son into exile where the ANC would decide what to do with him. The van took off, circled the block, and stopped outside Sono’s house. He glanced again at his son as he was preparing to leave. “He was in a terrible state,” Sono remembered. “He was shaking.” And he noticed for the first time that his son was wet. He must have passed out during his torture, Sono thought, and had a bucket of water thrown over his head. “I asked her may I please get a jersey for Lolo because by then I thought he’s feeling cold.” To this, Winnie agreed. Father and son were permitted to get out of the van and walk as far as the front gate, accompanied by “a hefty man with a gun on his hip.” Sono called for his wife to bring a jumper. She brought one and went immediately back into the house. Sono helped Lolo into the jumper and watched him climb back into the van. It drove off. For a long time, he believed that Winnie had done what she had said and that his son was somewhere in exile. The alternative was too ghastly to contemplate.[11] Lolo Sono’s corpse, riddled with stab wounds, was found and delivered to a government mortuary days after his father’s encounter with Winnie. Unable to identify the body, the authorities had given him a pauper’s burial. A quarter of a century passed before the remains were exhumed and identified as belonging to Lolo Sono.[12] On that same Sunday when Nicodemus Sono…

Ref. D9D8-K

July 1988, Winnie informed Nelson that their home at 8115 Orlando West had been burned to the ground. “It was a reaction to the concert,” she told him, referring to the seventieth birthday tribute that had just been broadcast across the world. “No doubt,” Nelson replied. “It was because we were front page news,” she continued. “It was clear that it was going to happen.”[3] For a man whose connection to his past had long felt tenuous, the news that his home had been destroyed was disorienting in the extreme. “We had lost invaluable family records, photographs, and keepsakes—even the slice of wedding cake Winnie had been saving for my release,” he wrote. “I had always thought that some day when I left prison I would be able to recapture the past when looking over those pictures and letters, and now they were gone.”[4] His house had in fact been burned by schoolboys. Members of Winnie’s football team had raped a girl from their school and this was their vengeance. As the flames engulfed the house, neighbors stood and watched, their ambivalence about the destruction of Winnie’s home expressed in their inaction.[5]

Ref. 7F1D-L

Two years earlier, Winnie had begun construction on a spacious new house in a plush section of Soweto known colloquially as Beverley Hills. Its grandeur had courted controversy. The money to fund the construction was gathered in a trust administered by the lawyer Raymond Tucker, the donors all anonymous.[6] One of those who had raised funds for the house was an American named Robert Brown; he had struck up a friendship with Winnie shortly after she returned to Soweto. He had already, by now, raised money for Zenani and her husband to study at Boston College. Brown’s association with the Mandela family caused trouble. By 1988, he had persuaded Winnie to sign over power of attorney to conduct business on behalf of the Mandelas abroad. Among the deals in the offing was the sale of the rights to a film on Winnie’s life to Bill Cosby, a development that caused consternation in ANC ranks abroad and among activists at home.

Ref. 613D-M

Within a week of Nelson’s move, the commissioner of prisons, Willie Willemse, had what he thought was a brain wave. Winnie should be invited to live with her husband in the cottage at Victor Verster Prison. What better way to prepare him for life as a free man? And what an opportunity for the couple: to have the time to rediscover each other before they stepped into the whirlwind outside.[14] Nelson warmed to the idea at once. But when he reported it to Winnie, she was incredulous. “Well, that did it for me,” she said many years later. “That’s when I realised I had lost him. I didn’t believe that he would actually expect me to go and live with him in prison…that I had been tortured to the extent that I would give in and go and surrender.”[15]

Ref. AFAB-N

they filed into the van, members of the football club began singing freedom songs, and their prisoners were told to join in. One of them, Kenny Kgase, asked where they were going. “Mommy wants to see you,” he was told. “Do you mean Mrs. Winnie Mandela?” he asked. “Yes, that is who I mean.” “Well, then, fine,” he replied. “Things are okay.” “No,” he was told. “Mommy is angry and things are not okay.” The youths were taken to the garage at the back of Winnie’s house. Seipei was repeatedly accused of being a spy; the other three were accused of having sex with the white man. Everyone was sitting on his own chair. Jerry Richardson looked around and ordered another to be brought for “Mommy.” Winnie came in and sat, and the captives were formally introduced to her. She asked Seipei why he had spied, asked the other three several times why they had allowed the white priest to fuck them up the ass. When Seipei protested that he was no spy, when the other three denied that they had had sex with Verryn, she stood up and slapped and punched them one by one.[3] “Umholi [the leader] has been in jail 26 years for your benefit, yet you are continuing your nonsense,” Kgase later recollected Winnie saying. “You are not fit to be alive.”[4] She appeared to be telling them that for a black man to have sex with a white man constituted political and racial betrayal. Indeed, they had betrayed Nelson Mandela personally. When she punched her captives, she was wearing on one of her fingers an ornate ring with a heavy stone. A woman who cared for the young men in the months to come remarked on the damage it had done to Kenny Kgase’s eye; it took six months to heal, she recalled.[5] The others in the room joined in the beating. Soon after they did, Winnie left the room. In her absence, the captives were slapped and punched and whipped. Several times, each was thrown high in the air and allowed to fall to the floor. All the while, Seipei was told that he had spied; the others that they had permitted Verryn to sodomize them. The three older captives began to understand that the beatings might stop if they told the story their torturers demanded; it was not long before they agreed that they had slept with Verryn. The assaults on them soon ceased. Each was badly injured. The following morning, they were ordered to mop their own blood and there was a lot to mop, they recalled. But none sustained permanent physical injuries.[6] It was a different story with Seipei. They continued to beat him that night and then resumed the next day. By the evening of December 30 his face was disfigured, his head misshapen. “There were a lot of things we did to [him],” Richardson recalled. “We kicked him like he was a ball. He was so badly tortured that at some stage I could see that he would ultimately die.”[7] It does not appear that the intent was to kill him. More likely is that he died because of dynamics that evolved between him and his captors in the hours after he was kidnapped. When the…

Ref. 45F5-O

Richardson described in graphic detail his version of the killing of Stompie Seipei, a version consistent with the forensic evidence subsequently gathered. Although it does not illuminate Winnie’s role, it is the most credible testimony we have of the last moments of Seipei’s life. Two days after the beatings began, on New Year’s Eve, Richardson testified, he went out to look for an appropriate place to bury a corpse. By evening, he had found a deserted spot near New Canada railway station, the same station outside which Winnie, twelve years earlier, had implored several thousand marching youths to turn around and save their own lives. The following morning, Richardson left the property with Seipei and a member of the football team. “I had to help Stompie along because he was very ill, very weak,” Richardson told the TRC. “We dragged Stompie along.” They took him to the spot opposite the railway line Richardson had chosen the previous evening. “This is the most painful part,” Richardson continued. “I don’t know whether I should proceed. I slaughtered him. I slaughtered him like a goat. We made him lay on his back and I put garden shears through his neck and they penetrated to the back of his neck and I made some cutting motion.”[12] . . It is not entirely certain that Winnie sent Falati and Cebekhulu to Verryn’s manse with the explicit instruction to bring back tales of abuse. What is certain is that when Falati did so report, Winnie took up the campaign with alacrity, assembling her team to punish the youths. Her own voice does not help us understand why she did that. She was not even in Soweto on the night the four were taken to her house, she said eighteen months later, an incredible claim. Thabiso Mono, Kenny Kgase, Pelo Mekgwe, Jerry Richardson, Katiza Cebekhulu, Xoliswa Falati, her driver, John Morgan: all testified to her role. It would have taken a conspiracy of improbable scale to assemble such a fiction. There is little question that she wished to destroy Paul Verryn. “It was as if there was a quite specific plan to eliminate me,” he told an interviewer several years later, “if not my physical person, certainly to eliminate any cause for me to carry on being. It was like killing somebody and then forcing them to carry on living their life.”[13] It is hard to reconjure now the sense Verryn’s presence in Orlando West must have conveyed. This quiet, uncharismatic man, white, bearded, dog collared, a cross around his neck, opening his home to those in flight and in need. It was too conspicuous—too attention stealing—a performance to take place on Winnie’s terrain. The story she told—of a white man perverting black children—is a story of evil conjured by the vast energy of rage. In October 1988, two months before the kidnappings, Verryn reported to his bishop rumors that he was abusing young men in his care.[14] The whispering must have reached Winnie’s ears. It must have set her imagination afire. Her abhorrence for the sex she alleged…

Ref. 98C9-P

Verryn’s house, in Winnie’s view, was a place of illicit sex and spying; that is why the youths were kidnapped and beaten. It is surely no coincidence that at this precise moment the entanglement of sex and spying was eating Winnie’s own house from within. Just a month earlier, Lolo Sono and Siboniso Tshabalala had been executed for allegedly giving away the hiding place of two guerrillas. Shortly after they died, Jerry Richardson was released from custody and went straight to Winnie’s place; upon his arrival, senior members of the household immediately accused him of informing. And well they should. For the police to release him without charge two weeks after he had been found to be hiding guerrillas is among the more extraordinary strands of the tale. He survived, by his own telling, because Winnie favored him and nobody she favored could possibly be a spy.[17]

Ref. 8C10-Q

There are other stories about that household—all of them involving betrayal and murder—that this narrative has not explored. On October 16, a little more than a month before the executions of Sono and Tshabalala, Sizwe Sithole, Zindzi’s lover, had shot dead a fellow member of the football club, Thole Dlamini. That murder had triggered consequences of its own. A member of the household, Lerothodi Ikaneng, had protested against Sizwe Sithole’s power to decide who should live and die. As a result, he himself was ordered killed and had fled Soweto.[19] Another murder associated with the club took place at this time. On December 18, eleven days before the kidnappings from the Methodist manse, a young woman called Kuki Zwane was killed. She was the lover of a member of the football team, and suspicion had arisen in the preceding weeks that she was a spy.[20] These spiraling tales of informing and killing may well account, in part, for why Winnie had the four youths taken from the manse and brought to her home. To have her household turn its attention on the dastardly place down the road was to deflect attention from itself. The beating of those young men and the killing of that boy were perhaps a matter of survival, the survival of the collective organism Winnie’s household had become.

Ref. 511F-R

And yet the attack on the manse and on four of its residents was also the undoing of the club. Lolo Sono, Siboniso Tshabalala, Thole Dlamini, Kuki Zwane: these were ordinary people without voice; their deaths brought no consequences. On December 29, Winnie attacked, for the first time, an institution with heft and with independence, an institution not bound to silence by the struggle’s code. She had attacked the body she had known longer than any other, the one that had stolen her mother’s attention when she was a small child. She had attacked the Methodist Church.

Ref. D487-S

As part of their initiation, they were to participate in a killing. Lerothodi Ikaneng, the football team member who had taken umbrage at the assassination of Thole Dlamini, had returned to Soweto after three months in hiding. He was duly caught. In a remote field, Mekgwe, Kgase, and Mono were forced to hold down his limbs while Jerry Richardson slit his neck with a pair of garden shears. He was left for dead.[1] On January 7, Kenny Kgase escaped from Winnie’s house. He made his way to the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, where he raised the alarm. The church contacted the Soweto crisis committee—the group of senior UDF leaders that had formed the previous July after the burning of Winnie and Nelson’s house.

Ref. 4CEC-T

That night, they and Kenny Kgase were brought to a church hall in Dobsonville, Soweto, where a group of 150 Sowetans had assembled. They told the meeting that they had been taken against their will to Winnie’s house, where she and the football team had beaten and whipped them. They took off their shirts and displayed their scars. They said that they had confessed to sex with Verryn under duress, but now that they were free they could testify that it was not true at all. Verryn himself was there, as were all the remaining members of his household. One after the other, they said that the minister had never made sexual advances on them nor, to their knowledge, on anyone else in his care. While they were speaking, Katiza Cebekhulu made a dramatic appearance. He described his own participation in the beatings and said he feared that Stompie Seipei was dead. Then Lerothodi Ikaneng rose to speak. For Kgase, Mekgwe, and Mono, it was as if a ghost had risen from the dead; they thought that Richardson had killed him. He unbandaged his throat to reveal the ear-to-ear wound the shears had made. It was still raw; the black stitches binding it protruded. Some in the audience called for those assembled to march on Winnie’s house and “deal with her.” They were talked down. It was decided instead that a delegation would visit her the following day. A motion was passed that the football team be forbidden to use the name Mandela. Eleven days later, the left-wing Weekly Mail ran a story on the Dobsonville meeting, breaking a long and painful silence. More than two years after its formation, the football club’s violence was reported in print.[2]

Ref. D6B0-U

In the time immediately before his death, family and close friends of Asvat’s later attested, he had not been himself. For years, he had driven back and forth at night between Soweto and his home in nearby Lenasia. Now, in January 1989, he began all of a sudden to ask friends to follow him home. On the night before he was killed, his tire went flat while he was on his way home. He drove on, too afraid to stop and change it; he feared that “they,” he told his wife mysteriously when he got home, had set him up to be attacked. On the morning of his death he made two failed attempts to see his lawyers and then arrived late for Friday prayers. He was so distracted, fellow worshippers attested, that he did not lay his right hand over his left, as Muslim men do when praying, but held them flat together, a conspicuous error that drew frowns of concern.[7] The two men convicted of murdering Asvat initially described the killing as the result of a botched robbery. But on the eve of their trial, one of them changed his story; his co-accused, he told the police, had been contracted by Winnie to kill Asvat. The investigating officers in the case chose to suppress this tale and to run instead with the accused men’s initial story, much to the discomfort of the prosecutor. “My gut feeling all along,” he told The Christian Science Monitor more than two years after the trial’s conclusion, “was that there was something very strange…[T]his was not an armed robbery or murder, but an assassination.” The police, he added, “had simply not explored this avenue.”[8]

Ref. F8F3-V

Winnie Mandela sent Johannes Mabotha to Botswana. His instruction was to contact South African media from the other side of the border. The body lying in the state mortuary, he was to tell them, could not possibly be Stompie Seipei’s; he had personally seen Seipei in a refugee camp in Botswana. It was not Winnie Mandela Seipei was fleeing, he was to add, but the security police.[10] Mabotha left Soweto, but he did not go to Botswana. How could he have? He was an MK soldier who had turned; going anywhere near his former comrades in exile would place him in grave danger. He phoned Winnie from a call box the day after he left. “I am so glad you phoned,” she said. “I phone from far.” “I did not sleep,” she said. “I rolled around and [then] walked around to [look for you].” “Where did you check?” he asked. “In the garage, [to see if] you are not there. “You are not far,” she continued. “It seems you are near. How is it going?” “I just wanted to phone.” “Please,” she said, “if you arrive at school [that is, to ANC personnel in Botswana], let them not ask so many questions. Register and come back.” “I will register and come back early,” he replied.[11] It appears that she privately doubted that he would ever go to Botswana. “I phone from far,” he said. “You are not far,” she replied. “You sound near.” She was, perhaps, in that strange but common state of knowing, but at the same time not knowing, that he had indeed betrayed the ANC, as Evodia Nkadimeng had been telling her, and would never go to Botswana. He called again four days later from the town of Groblersdal, less than two hundred miles north of Johannesburg. He had run out of money, he said. He needed more. She told him she would arrange to wire funds to the nearest post office. When he arrived to collect the transfer, he was ambushed by police; the Soweto Security Branch had been listening in on his and Winnie’s calls.[12]

Ref. AC0A-W

He received a visit the following day from the Reverend Anton Simons, the Methodist Church’s chaplain to Pollsmoor Prison. He recounted to Simons in full what he thought had happened. A child staying at the Methodist manse came to Winnie to say that sodomy was being committed there, he told Simons. She sent a car to fetch four more boys. They all said that they were sexually assaulted. That she took the kids was a very bad mistake, he continued. She should instead have gone to Bishop Peter Storey of the Methodist Church to report; he might have dealt with the matter internally. “The church must not think that I support Winnie in this conduct,” he said. “It was a grave mistake, and you must tell the leaders of the church that I ask for forgiveness.” Winnie was a woman who has been alone for twenty-six years, he said. She broke. She broke under the pressure of the apartheid regime. But he did not believe that the football team murdered the boy. Seipei was due to appear in a court case on February 27, he explained, and his co-accused killed him so that he would not speak. The police were exploiting Winnie’s mistake to divide people, he said.[3] A little over a week later, on February 26, Winnie and Zindzi came to see him. Jerry Richardson and another had just been charged for Seipei’s murder, and the national dailies had made it their front-page leads. He was certain, he assured his wife and daughter, that the body was not Seipei’s. The boy was clearly alive. And if he was dead, it was the police who killed him. They would not dare bring the matter to court.[4] . .

Ref. E7EF-X

Even then, the record is inadequate. It is not a verbatim transcript, but a warder’s point-form notes, written in Afrikaans; he has been listening to a conversation in one language and has summarized it in another. When one translates his notes back into English, the language that emerges is not Nelson’s at all. And so, we do not know the words a very careful man chose to use; nor do we witness the cadences of the conversation as it evolved. What we have instead is an apparent character assassination delivered in bullet notes. Nelson tells his guests that Winnie sleeps with one man today and another tomorrow, and that she has been doing so since he went underground. He was captured outside Howick in August 1962, he says, because Winnie had told her lover that he was going to Durban, and Fikile Bam was arrested because Winnie was sleeping with an informer. He lists a string of men she has slept with from the 1960s until the present. He says he has done his best to save the marriage, but that an embarrassing situation is approaching. She is living like a rich woman, but she is bankrupt; the ambassadors have been warned not to give her more money. As for Zindzi, he says that she should be taken away from Winnie because he cannot stand it any longer.[7] The manner in which the conversation was recorded shrouds its form and its spirit. Was it an outburst of fury? Or was it delivered like a lawyer constructing an argument? It would appear that in the wake of the Seipei crisis Nelson received a deluge of very grim information about the conduct of his wife; whoever whispered in his ear did not spare him. Like so many men before him on the brink of divorcing their wives, he lays the case out to the children, and he lays it on thick. The righteousness, the woundedness, the self-justification: this is a set piece performed in countless homes across the second half of the twentieth century. Shorn of its flesh, the marriage he describes is a skeleton of accusation. The eccentricity of the setting—a South African prison, the furniture stuffed with bugs, the most powerful men in the land hungrily listening in—should not distract from the formulaic character of the scene. Was Winnie responsible for his capture outside Howick? Was she already sleeping with Brian Somana in August 1962, and did she tell Somana that Nelson was going to Durban? Nelson’s captors might well have told him that, but why should he have believed them? Nelson himself later remarked that he had been awfully careless in Durban, that far too many people knew where he was.[8] That the thought had seeded long ago in his mind, and that it had never died, tells an interesting story. He had almost divorced Winnie in the early months of 1965 over Brian Somana. It appears that only the intervention of Walter Sisulu persuaded him to reverse course. In the interim, he had forgiven her in spades. With his pen, he had, over the following twenty years, crafted an exquisite portrait of his love, writing…

Ref. C825-Y

By December 1989, though, three months after Zenani and Muzi’s visit, Winnie and Nelson had yet again changed course. Winnie was coming regularly to see him. The discussions between them were calm and wide-ranging. They talked politics and family. They talked about friends. It appears that Winnie had mollified him as he reached the brink of divorcing her. She had written a letter of surrender, or at least of pacification; she was obeying his instructions, she wrote; she was cooperating with the UDF, with the crisis committee; she was ceding to his will.[9] Nelson had veered from feeling the duty to protect a broken woman to the desire to divorce a loathsome woman. Now he had again made peace with her. As for Winnie, she had swung from refusing to see him to mollifying him. Their marriage now vastly unstable, they knew that sometime soon, perhaps in a matter of months, they would live together again for the first time in twenty-seven years.

Ref. 66BC-Z

The wife of a prominent Soweto businessman, they both say, was a friend of Winnie Mandela’s. Sometime in 1989, she came to Winnie and Zindzi complaining that her husband was a serial adulterer. Mother and daughter promptly sent Sithole and others to raze one of his business premises to the ground. If Sithole did indeed die for that, the pathos is overwhelming. The incident had little to do with the liberation of black South Africans; it was one of those innumerable acts of private vengeance, most of them lost to history, born of the contagion of violence that besets unstable times. And if he took his life for fear of betraying Winnie and Zindzi, he undoubtedly died in vain. A case of treason against Winnie Mandela had just then been discarded lest talks with her husband derail. The authorities would not have troubled her for burning a man’s business to the ground… And yet the story is nonetheless meaningful. The arson to which Sithole confessed was not an isolated incident. In June 1988, another Soweto businessman, Joseph Laballo, successfully sought an urgent interdict against Winnie and his wife. Following matrimonial trouble, Laballo said in his affidavit, his wife had complained to Winnie, who in turn ordered her football team to remove him from his home. When he tried to return, Winnie, his wife, and members of the team had threatened to kill him. Among other things, the interdict prevented Winnie or his wife from entering his business premises or removing stock.[5]

Ref. E50D-A

taken the weavers’ lesson. As for her own marriage, Winnie had not exactly set fire to a building Nelson owned, but she had shown the greatest contempt for his assumption of patriarchal power. When he instructed his daughter to study in Cape Town, Winnie had surreptitiously helped Zindzi escape his wishes. When he had commanded Winnie to assist him in his quest for a peaceful end to apartheid, she had, behind his back, packed his home with weapons and done her utmost to make war.

Ref. 0EAB-B

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. “The hair has gone gray and the boxer’s shoulders are shells under the awkward jacket now,” The New York Times’s Robert McFadden wrote on the day of Nelson’s release. “The face [is] like parchment and the voice [is] strained.”[1]

Ref. E734-C

Winnie and Nelson were astonishingly scarred human beings. The nightmare Winnie inhabited can scarcely be held in one’s head. That everything one possesses—one’s husband, one’s lover, one’s public standing—is forever on the brink of theft. That one must constantly threaten others to keep oneself from drowning—the life Winnie lived at this time was ghastly beyond telling. The many stories of her episodes of narcotic escape are hardly surprising. Nelson’s scars were of such a different ilk. His pain was—for now at least—still and contained. At four o’clock on the morning after Nelson was freed, Trevor Manuel, one of the UDF leaders managing his release, was woken by his phone. It was Nelson. “Where are my weights?” he asked. “I need to exercise.”[11] The personal discipline that had held him together these many years would not pause, not even on this day. One cannot live just off discipline. It does not, alone, produce the meaning, the people, the narrative arc, that make for a human life.

Ref. F948-D

came from Nelson Mandela. IDAF, he said, must transfer the money it had received from Coca-Cola directly to the Mandela Family Trust. Once more, the phone call was unpleasant. Once more, IDAF’s trustees wrung their hands. In the end, they did as Nelson wished.[11] What Coca-Cola expected in return is hard to say. It was not a great deal of money—£53,000, in the end[12]—a cheap investment in the personal attention of a future head of state. Nelson Mandela was a year out of prison. He had corrupted the democratic processes of his organization; he had wounded a fund to which he, personally, owed an enormous debt; he had received covert money from a private corporation. He did not do any of this to augment his political power, nor to grow wealthy, nor, still, to line the pockets of his friends. His motivations were far more personal and harder to fathom than that.

Ref. 8E00-E

Among those closest to Nelson at this time was Barbara Masekela, his chief of staff. A well-known figure in the ANC in exile, she went on to serve as South Africa’s ambassador to France and the United States. But now, from 1990 to 1995, she was Nelson’s adviser and political confidante. They first worked together when Masekela co-managed that glorious visit to New York. On the last day of the trip, Nelson had asked her to join the group that ate with Winnie and him every night. “Why don’t you like me?” he had asked when she arrived. He was not five months out of prison and was flirting with great delight. “What do you mean?” she replied. “I like you.” “Every night,” he said, “everyone comes here to eat and talk. But not you.” “I am writing your speeches,” she replied. “I am preparing your day.” “I want you to work with me,” he said. “I want you to be my chief of staff.” The bond between them grew strong in the time to come. It was not long before some of Nelson’s closest friends gossiped that they were lovers. But it seems unlikely that this was so. “Naturally people thought we had a love affair,” Masekela told this author, “but that is not right. Our connection was very deep, close, trusting, professional, but also familial. He would arrive unannounced at my house with his

Ref. 8D89-F

to talk.”[13] “Madiba was an actor,” Masekela said, the moment we sat down to our first interview. “He was completely honest about it. We would catch him primping just before some delegation or person came to talk to him. You could actually see him becoming this Nelson Mandela, the great forgiver, the Thembu princeling. We would catch him doing it and he would laugh. He would not hide it. We were all women, you see. He would not do it in front of men.” All the senior figures in Nelson’s office at that time—Masekela, Jessie Duarte, and Frene Ginwala—were women. “It was not preconceived that it would be that way,” Masekela remarked. “It is just who I ended up hiring. Here we were, three women running the office of the president in this most patriarchal…

Ref. 4D76-G

who was he before he primped? Who was he offstage? “He was a deeply wounded man,” she said bluntly. “He was one of the saddest human beings I have known. From time to time, you felt it come out of him. It was sadness and anger mixed together: fierce anger. It must have taken masterful discipline not to show it. It would come without words, most often when we were in a crowd. He would stop…

Ref. 37EB-H

“We were in Tanzania,” she said, “in a village near the great Ngorongoro Crater. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It was vast and it was full of animals: hyenas, zebra, buck, moving through in great numbers. In a village nearby, the people had lined the street to greet him. They were simple, rural people. They just shouted, ‘Mandela! Mandela!’ It was really quite moving. He was fine, cheerful, his usual self. But as the convoy got to the village and we found ourselves among these people shouting, it came over him. This terrible sadness. It was palpable. You could see it in his face. “It is no coincidence that it happened to him among poor people,” she added. “People from the hinterland. He was sad for them and sad for himself.” From time to time, Masekela decided unilaterally to take him out of circulation. “I would hide him,” she recalled. “I would say, ‘Madiba, you need to take three days.’ I…

Ref. 431B-I

She wondered aloud whether twenty-seven years in prison would have damaged a quieter, less rambunctious soul as severely as it had damaged Nelson Mandela. “The thing about Madiba,” she said, “is that he loved life so much. Nobody will ever be able to measure the loss of that freedom, the loss of that love of laughter, of life itself. “And that,” she continued, “that is what his love of Winnie was all about. You see, he really felt, in his deepest heart,…

Ref. 6436-J

“Even during the darkest days, when what was happening between him and Winnie was truly terrible, the delight he would take in her was so striking. Once, Alfred Nzo and Thomas Nkobi, the secretary-general and treasurer of the ANC, came to him. Madiba, they said, she has gone too far; we must go as a delegation to see her: you, the sec-gen, the treasurer, to challenge her formally. Madiba said, ‘You go. I am not going.’ The moment they left his office, he started grinning from ear to ear. He was…

Ref. E3C4-K

Nelson’s friendship with Masekela must have provided great solace: that he felt sufficiently safe in her presence to offer that bottomless sadness; that he would stray far enough from his guard to allow the 1950s to come rushing back in. What he shared with her is indeed irretrievably sad. Here was a man reaching for the core of what made him human, and what he found was the ghost of a mid-century gentleman, flirting and playing and making love with the women who made him truly alive. “To spend twenty-seven years in the prime of one’s life [in prison] is a tragedy,” he said in an unguarded moment shortly after his release. “I regret those years that I have wasted.”[14] There is no self-deceit here; he absolutely knew what had happened to him.

Ref. B350-L

What did he think he was doing when he bulldozed a path for Winnie back into the ANC? What was he imagining when he ruined those who would not pay for her trial? It is unlikely that he was deluded in any straightforward way. He surely knew, at least to some degree, the extent of the damage—to him, to his wife, to the relation between them. It is improbable that he imagined that they would be happily married again. He was, perhaps, straining to retrieve something of value from the ruins of those awful years: battered, storm swept, unable any longer to provide shelter, those ruins had once been home.

Ref. 385A-M

The glimpses we have of their domestic life at this time are grim. They were both so busy; apart from anything else, there was scarcely time for the rhythms of a life together to form. Several years later, Zindzi described to a friend the scene on a rare occasion when the family ate together. From the room next door, the phone rang. “You should answer,” Nelson said coolly to Winnie. “It will be Dali.” The family labored on at their meal in silence.[15] As had always been the case with her lovers, Winnie was living much of her life with Dali by her side. She had appointed him her deputy in the Welfare Department of the ANC; they spent their days and their evenings together. He had, for now, suspended his law career, dedicating his working life exclusively to her. What Nelson offered Winnie now was a patriarch’s protection on the grandest scale: chiseling her a place into each tier of their organization, moving the earth to fund her trial. What she offered in return was a patriarch’s humiliation; she was cuckolding him in the open, without the slightest attempt at disguise.

Ref. 97AA-N

“She loses her husband young,” Masekela told this author. “She is at the height of her sexual powers. She is free. She can do what she wants. And then he comes back. She is a person in her own right now. But she still calls him Tata—father.” Masekela opened her arms, in her face a trace of distaste. “All these years later, I still struggle with that.”[16] “You know,” she remarked on another occasion, “something that irritated us [women in the office] about Madiba. There was a fruitery across the road. We would pool our money and one of us would go to buy fruit. He would take so long to get out his money. He would count the cents. We’d say, ‘We don’t have time, we will pay.’ ‘No, no,’ he’d protest. ‘This is good money!’ And he’d go on counting those coins. “That is the image that comes to my mind when I think of what Winnie faced in her marriage. Those jail years kept him away from social developments. He may have been briefed about social changes, but he could not keep track. He was in many ways an old gentleman from the past. So I see poor Winnie. She is meant to return to being the woman in love. She has had other experiences, has met other people. Now there has to be dinner on the table. Can you imagine?”[17]

Ref. D39A-O

How involved was Nelson Mandela in the assault on his wife’s trial? In 1997, in a horribly careless moment, the former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda said on camera that Oliver Tambo had asked him on behalf of Nelson Mandela to receive Katiza Cebekhulu.[7] In the ensuing scandal he backtracked a little. “I must clarify that I did not receive direct communication from Mr. Oliver Tambo on this matter,” he said. “It was [Zambian] government officials who informed me that they had received such a request from officials of Mr. Tambo.” He simply took it on faith, he said, that Mandela supported the action.[8] It is unlikely that Nelson was personally involved. He had, by now, delegated what a close colleague of his called “the political management of his wife” to Tokyo Sexwale and Chris Hani, a shrewd move on Nelson’s part, because Winnie admired both men very much. Sexwale conceded that members of the ANC’s Special Projects Department, which he himself ran, had used ANC resources to smuggle Mekgwe to Botswana. But he claimed that this had happened behind his back.[9]

Ref. 5EE9-P

What his wife’s trial had done to his mind was thus of cardinal importance. “His own mental and physical health are tied to the health of the ANC.”[18] Those whispering in Carlin’s ear were growing increasingly desperate. “We wondered whether we had created a monster,” an ANC leader recalled years later. “Inventing the figure of Nelson Mandela was among the most effective political strategies in modern history. Now it was on the brink of bringing the house down on our heads.”[19] What was going on with Nelson Mandela? Was his mental health indeed precarious, as some close to him increasingly believed? There is a broader landscape to consider as one answers these questions. Beyond the courtroom, beyond Winnie and Nelson’s house, South Africa’s transition had triggered terrible bloodletting. The violence out in the world and the fierce feelings in their marriage had entangled in unexpected ways.

Ref. 6D00-Q

When F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC, he did not intend giving up power. A long, grinding transition would wipe the sheen from Nelson and his movement, De Klerk calculated, rendering them fallible, ordinary, disappointing. If he could build an alliance with the right black allies, he might just defeat the ANC at the polls.[1] Nor did he envisage majority rule. The constitutional proposals the National Party released in 1990 sketched a bicameral parliament. While the lower chamber would be elected on a common roll, the Senate would be much more intricate; it would have 130 members, 10 each from ten newly constituted regions, and another 10 each representing Afrikaners, English speakers, and Asians, respectively. Legislation would require a two-thirds majority in this chamber to pass. As for the executive, South Africa would have not a new president but a rotating chairmanship shared by the major parties.[2] De Klerk got none of what he set out to achieve. A little over four years after he unbanned the ANC, it won a landslide victory in a system of proportional representation. South Africa’s new constitution made no reference to ethnic groups, just to individuals. Its greatest concession to the privileged was to enshrine the right to private property, but not unconditionally.

Ref. EC9D-R