FOR A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, SOUTH AFRICA UNDER apartheid was one of the last great stories. It had everything: violence, intransigence, English speakers and a surprise ending. Most of all, it had what we all yearn for in our confused world–moral certainty. Its color-coded cast was neatly sorted into villains and heroes, making the story easy to follow for a remote audience. But beneath the reader-friendly version, there lurked another South Africa, one complex and shaded gray, one best ignored, since it took too long to explain.
Winnie Mandela belonged to that other version. To begin with, the foreign press celebrated her. Indeed, together with the security police, we probably created her. In the frustrating 30-year absence of her enigmatic husband, Nelson Mandela, we seized upon Winnie as his corporeal presence, and elevated her to something she had never been within the rebel African National Congress. Her visits were virtually the only contact Nelson Mandela had with the outside world, and this access to the oracle of resistance bequeathed upon Winnie a Delphian magic. Robbed of the husband, we baptized his wife in the font of our publicity, christening her Mother of the Nation, Joan of Arc, The Black Evita. Winnie thrived on the celebrity. She was–and is–deeply charismatic, feisty, proud, photogenic: everything that a fearless fighter of injustice should be.
Slowly browning in my clippings book is a piece from early 1986, an almost reverential profile I wrote celebrating Winnie’s high-spirited defiance. Written just after she was released from house arrest, the 1986 story includes an account of a white sergeant who’d marched into her bedroom while she was changing. She threw him out, breaking his neck (not fatally). It took gall to do something like that in apartheid South Africa.
She was still at the height of her celebrity in 1987, when I met another heroic member of the antiapartheid cast, Stompie Moeketsie. At 13, he was the head of a 1,500-strong army of urchins who, armed only with garbage-can lids and stones, fought daily with South African policemen in Parys, a little town in the Free State province. Stompie (the nickname means ““Shorty’’) was their general, and had just emerged from a year in prison–South Africa’s youngest-ever political detainee. With adult activists and leaders either under arrest or terrorized into sullen inactivity, antiapartheid protest had all but ceased in Parys. But, cometh the hour, cometh the man, or in this case, the boy. Wearing a ragged T shirt and torn sneakers, Stompie explained why he had mobilized the children. ““We formed an army to protect the people,’’ he told me. ““Most of the time we find the older people doing noth- ing. During trouble, they run away. We are braver than them.''
That he might die young was something Stompie took for granted, but the manner of his death was totally surprising. When his broken corpse was found in a Soweto ditch a year later, he had not been killed by his enemies, but by his comrades in the struggle against apartheid. Stompie, it transpired, had been killed by a bodyguard of Winnie Mandela’s. Winnie was convicted of his kidnapping. For her crime, she received a fine.
Now, another bodyguard charged with the murder of Stompie alleges that the Mother of the Nation herself wielded the knife that ended Stompie’s short life. Other employees have said that Winnie participated in seven additional murders, including that of a Soweto doctor who had examined the injured Stompie and refused to collude in a cover-up.
Now divorced from Nelson, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela denies the allegations. And her support within South Africa remains significant: The ANC’s Women’s League is proposing her as a candidate for South Africa’s deputy presidency. It’s quite possible she will spring free of the charges and win the job. Winnie is the Houdini of South African politics; she has twisted herself out of impossible bonds before.
We who reported from South Africa at the time must take some share of the blame for the excesses of Winnie Mandela. I can still remember when Stompie disappeared. Alerted by his anxious mother, I toured his haunts in Soweto, and a picture began to emerge of his last days: he’d been picked up by Winnie’s bodyguards and beaten so severely that witnesses doubted he could have survived. This was an excruciatingly difficult story to report. Here, at the very height of apartheid, someone at the pinnacle of resistance was behaving like those who tormented black South Africa.
When I did reluctantly report that Stompie was last seen in the company of Winnie’s bodyguards, implicitly linking her to his fate, it was as if I had breached some unspoken law. There were dark mutterings from some members of the foreign press that I had provided ammunition to the forces of evil. In fact, muted by the constraints of political correctness, we had all been reporting less than we knew about Winnie, her bodyguards and their reign of terror in Soweto. She had been spinning out of control, as the ANC knew as well; she even was ignoring the chastising letters Nelson sent her from his cell. I wish now that we had been more vigilant.
As Winnie prepares to defend herself this week before the Truth Commission, I recall my last conversation with Stompie Moeketsie. Anticipating some sweeping political statement, I asked him what he wished for most. ““Anything at all?’’ he queried. I nodded. He thought seriously for a moment, then his eyes lit up. ““A bike,’’ he whispered, ““a mountain bike.’’ And for a brief moment of yearning, his lost childhood was restored to him.
