At the hospital bedside of ailing Nelson Mandela, the former South
African president, two women take turns to hold his hand and speak
softly to him.
His wife Graca, who sleeps at the hospital to be near him, has formed
an extraordinary bond with Mandela’s ex-wife, the colourful and
often-controversial Winnie.
They spend hours together talking about ‘our husband’ and their hopes
that he will recover. Winnie describes Graca as her younger sister.
Mandela, 94, the world’s best-loved revolutionary and father of the
South African nation, is entering his fourth week in hospital.
He spent 27 years in prison for his political beliefs, and has
suffered chronic lung problems due to contracting tuberculosis while
incarcerated on Robben Island.
In a moving interview, and close to tears, 76-year-old Winnie talked
to The Mail on Sunday about the true state of Mandela’s health and how
his large extended family is struggling to cope.
She told of tender moments at his bedside recently when he was struggling to talk.
She could not hear what he was saying through his oxygen mask. ‘I called a doctor and he listened up close,’ she said.
‘He told me my husband wanted me to sit down. He was so weak but he
still cares so much, he is still so concerned for others, and of course
he is still telling me what to do.’
Winnie, with a big smile, clearly enjoyed the notion that her
ex-husband was the only person likely to try to order her around. Her
lifelong reputation has been of a strong-willed, fearlessly outspoken
woman.
Seated next to Zindzi, the younger of her two daughters with Mandela,
in the pretty garden of Winnie’s home in Soweto, Johannesburg, she said
she was learning to face the reality of Mandela’s plight.
“Of course I am also reliving our long life together,” she said. “I
cannot escape it. We were married for more than 30 years and I still
love him. I’m the mother of his children.”
She said she wanted to reassure people who were sending messages from
all over the world that the family was not discussing switching off
Mandela’s life-support.
“We are at the hospital every day. We want to give him moral support. The most painful thing is to see him struggling.
“He is breathing through an oxygen mask and there are drips for nutrition and sedation.
“Most of the time he is comfortable and still very much with us. He often opens his eyes and can squeeze my hand.”
She said she was shocked when she found out about how the ambulance
taking Mandela to hospital had broken down but said: ‘At least he is in a
safe place now and that is in the past.’
Winnie explained that in the tradition of the Xhosa – Mandela’s tribe
– it was forbidden to speak of an elder’s death in advance, adding:
“But realistically in this case we have to.”
Dressed in black with leopard trim and a gold waistcoat, Winnie
dabbed her eyes as she talked. She has a natural charisma and a forceful
clarity of speech – a characteristic that the apartheid-era authorities
found hard to ignore.
In 1969, leaving her small daughters behind, she spent 18 months in
prison, mostly in solitary confinement, under the Suppression of
Terrorism Act.
Afterwards she was banished hundreds of miles from her home to
Brandfort, an Afrikaans stronghold in the Orange Free State where she
was harassed constantly by the secret police.
Then, in 1988, she was accused of the kidnap and murder of a teenage
boy after he was killed by her private army of supporters – dubbed
Mandela United because they wore football shirts.
In 1991 she was convicted of being an accessory to murder and
sentenced to six years – reduced to a fine on appeal. And in 2003 she
was given a six-month suspended sentence for fraud and theft.
Today she rejects the accusations, and says she ‘doesn’t give a damn’
about them. Winnie is proud of her work in recruiting youths to the ANC
revolution and would do it all again.
“All of the accusations against me were done to tarnish the ANC and the Mandela name,” she said.
She is clearly no longer hurt, just angry at past sufferings. But
that is nothing compared to the reality of her ex-husband’s illness.
“Words cannot describe our pain and hurt when people talk or write of him as if he had already passed on,” she said.
“He has actually shown improvement in the past few days. His doctors are amazing and we are very happy with them.
“There is no intention whatsoever of discussing intervention by the family. What is happening is God’s wish.”
Zindzi, 53, who joined her parents’ activism against apartheid from
the age of 12, said she had a personal touching moment with her father
last week.
“I was holding his hand and stroking his shoulder and telling him
interesting things happening in the country. I told him about President
Obama’s visit and his eyes opened and he looked happy. Then I told him
about our plans for his 95th birthday on July 18.”
She said when the end came, it would be President Jacob Zuma who would make an announcement.
“In the meantime I am sitting here in hospital with my dad and he is
alive and breathing and well. If people love him so much they should
avoid rumours about his death.
“There is a bizarre excitement about all these rumours on Twitter and
other sites. It removes all the humanity around him and it hurts us.”
Winnie criticised Zuma for recently taking a delegation into
Mandela’s home, surrounding him as he sat motionless in an armchair,
staring into nothingness, clearly unaware of anything around him.
A grinning Zuma afterwards said he was happy to see Mandela looking
so well. “You see he is up and about and in good spirits,” he said
outside the house.
Winnie described the intrusion as ‘the most insensitive thing anyone could have done’.
“He was obviously so unwell. Less than a month later he was in
hospital. They compromised his dignity and the family’s dignity. It was
terrible to see an old man in that state. We are after all human beings
with emotions.”
Zindzi said it was some times overwhelming to cope with her father’s
health crisis and she felt afraid about his inevitable death. ‘I know
he’s fighting,’ she said. ‘He was born a boxer, and he’s still fighting
today.
“It is so hurtful and insensitive when we hear that people are
gathering for his death and funeral, and even worshippers are praying
for us to have the strength to let him go.
“We will not be letting him go – we will be letting God and nature
take their course. We are not going to switch off anything or intervene
to stop any treatment.
“This is a 94-year-old man who we love, a father and a husband. He is the one choosing to hang around.”
She said that ‘both of my mothers’ – Winnie and Graca – were always
there and both part of the Mandela extended family, and that it helped
them to see crowds outside the Pretoria hospital where Mandela is being
treated.
‘I was so touched to see a small child giving a policeman a cup of coffee one cold evening,’ she said.
“That was a small act of compassion and kindness that would have been typical of my father.”
Zindzi and her mother talked of turbulent times when they turned to Mandela’s humour to get through.
She remembers his favourite joke about getting to Heaven. ‘He said he
would open a branch of the African National Congress there, but first
he would take his belongings in paper bags up to the Pearly Gates and
ask if Oliver was inside.
That’s Oliver Tambo, his friend and fellow activist. They would tell
him Oliver was busy, so he would ask to see Luthuli, another great
father of the ANC. He would also be busy.
“But then my father would see Adolf Hitler scrubbing the floors. He
said, “You’ll know that you’ve gone to Heaven if you are in a place
where dictators are humbled.” ’
Zindzi, who has her father’s famous smile, suffered a difficult
childhood without him, and experienced her mother being arrested by the
security squads.
In one 2am raid on their home in Vilakazi Street in Soweto, at the
heart of the struggle against the former racist government, Zindzi held
on to her mother’s skirt as police dragged her away.
After that, with her mother imprisoned on trumped-up charges, she was sent to boarding school.
Aged 12, she wrote to the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, demanding better security for her mother.
And aged 25, Zindzi stood up at a packed football stadium to read her father’s message from prison.
It was 1985 and he had refused a cruelly manipulated offer to release
him if he renounced violent action against the apartheid state.
Zindzi spoke in a clear declamatory tone as she read his words: “I
cherish my own freedom dearly but I care even more for your freedom. Too
many have died since I went to prison, too many have suffered . Only
free men can negotiate.
“Prisoners cannot enter into contracts . I cannot and will not give
any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your
freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.”
Zindzi had to summon extraordinary reserves of courage to appear like
that in public. Her father was in prison and her mother was confined to
her home between 6am and 6pm and forbidden to speak out.
During our interview, Winnie revealed how, that day, she had put on a
hat and slippers, wrapped herself in a blanket and mingled with the
crowds to proudly hear her daughter read her husband’s brave words.
Today Zindzi says it was a
bittersweet moment for her.
She was desperate to have her father home.
She was only four months old when he was first arrested, and only
four years old when she stood outside a Johannesburg courtroom with her
mother while he was sentenced to life imprisonment. She didn’t meet him
on Robben Island until she was 15.
“It was such an important moment, finally seeing the man beyond the
myth,” she said. “I finally understood at that moment what charm and
humour he had, trying to make me feel better despite the surroundings
and the three prison warders.
“He told me to imagine us all at home, when I once sat on his lap in front of the fire while we had Sunday lunch as a family.
“I embraced the fact that I really did have a father and he really was here.”
When Mandela was released in 1990 the family still found it hard to
live a normal life. By then Zindzi had three children by three different
fathers, but Mandela still believed she should be part of his household
and under his control.
She moved into the family home where Winnie lives today – a
two-storey house popularly known as ‘Parliament’ in Orlando West,
Soweto. The front room has a huge circular table where intense political
debate took place in the years immediately following his release.
Elsewhere in the house there is the evidence of normal family life:
rooms cluttered with family photographs and historical mementoes and
paintings
Winnie lives there with her daughter and son-in-law and their children.
Zindzi recalls her father, in the aftermath of his release, as a
possessive man who loved her young children but who treated her ‘as if I
was still in pigtails and bobby socks’.
He tried to impose a curfew if she went out, and wanted her to have a chaperone.
When Zindzi’s son Bambatha was five months old, Mandela, a doting
grandfather, persuaded her to stop breastfeeding him so that he could
have the baby sleep with him and Winnie in their bed.
Zindzi said: ‘He wanted to make up his bottle and feed him and change him. He wanted a second chance to be a real dad.’
Bambatha was a confident little two-year-old when he answered his
grandfather’s phone one day and found himself talking to George Bush
Snr, then President of the United States.
Bush had recently collapsed on a visit to Japan and Bambatha told
him: ‘You must look after yourself better and drink lots of water.’
An amused Bush later sent him a postcard from the White House thanking him for his concern.
But, Winnie explained, life for the Mandela family was far from
normal. ‘His release had been the greatest moment of my life. I equated
it with freedom for everyone.
“Until then I hadn’t been able to speak out in my own country. Now I
was trying to heal myself with a normal husband and father around the
dining table.
“But it wasn’t to be. He was busy morning till night. It was a circus
and impossible to have a normal life. We separated in 1991. We were
both emotionally brutalised.”
For Winnie there was an unexpected development. Now she could stand for election to parliament and take up a career of her own.
She became a passionate campaigner for the poor, heading the ANC
Women’s League and amassing a following of millions as she fought for
housing and jobs.
Today she is a member of the powerful National Executive Committee of the ANC, still fighting the cause for her people.
She said Mandela would be disappointed if he knew of South Africa’s
lack of progress in dealing with poverty, and that white people were
still in control of most wealth.
“As president he did what he could,” she said. “He did more than
enough. But he was already in his 70s when he became president.”
Winnie said she feared that South Africa was facing a bleak future with massive unemployment among the youth.
“This is not what he fought for,” she said. “Our Freedom Charter
declares the land belongs to all of us but our land reform programmes
have failed and every day now you read of corruption.
“Mandela had no magic wand, but better policies. In many ways the ANC
is splintered today and needs to go back to the drawing board.”
When her parents sepa
rated in 1992, Zindzi was
devastated. She had spent many hours talking to her father about her
childhood because he wanted so much to fill in the gaps of his lost
prison years.
During those years she had had many difficulties of her own. ‘I went
through a period of anger, bitterness and depression especially at
defining moments in my life when I thought my father should have been
part of it,’ she said.
Winnie said Zindzi had been a naughty, difficult child. At the age of
six she angrily demanded to know why her father was in prison.
“I tried to tell her that many daddies were in prison to fight for
freedom for all of us. It was hard to explain why a man would be in
prison if he wasn’t bad.
“And Zindzi said I was lying. Her friends next door had their daddy at home, so it wasn’t true that all daddies were in prison.
“She suffered badly during those prison years, as I did. I was the
most unmarried married woman. My husband was away from me for 27 years.
“But still no one knows me better than him. It is extremely painful to see him now, but I know it is God’s wish.”
She said the family could not have managed the idea of his death
without the world’s sympathy pouring in daily through messages, prayers,
letters and the crowds outside the hospital and his home in
Johannesburg.
Zindzi said her father still had no real concept of the impact he
made on people. He would be amazed to know of people gathering in their
thousands to pray and sing for him.
“When he was first released from prison I went with him on a tour of America,” she recalled.
“There was a woman who collapsed weeping in the street and had to be
helped to her feet. Daddy and I drove back, very quietly, and had lunch.
“He said he could not understand why that lady was so emotional – it
upset him. He had no idea how people were affected by what he had done
in his life.”
source: the nation
My vigil for Nelson, the man I still love, by Winnie
Posted by Oluseyi Olaniyi
Posted on Tuesday, July 02, 2013
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