‘POLITICALLY and morally accountable for gross violations of human rights’: the author of this statement is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); and its subject is Winnie Madikizela Mandela (WMM) who died on 2 April and was buried on 14 April 2018. Yet South Africans have been bombarded by broadcast words and images about the ‘mother of the nation’ and a ‘struggle icon’. As routinely happens with the deaths of prominent figures from politics, sport or entertainment the nation has been awash with tributes and comment from every possible angle and individual in what may be described as a repetitive hagiographic orgy. In the process history is heavily massaged (if not partially rewritten) and the national conscience heavily compromised.
This is especially irritating when it comes to contributions from overseas. Shortly after WMM’s death, Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch wrote a particularly disgraceful piece putting on display her dismal ignorance of South African history. The demise of apartheid, she wrote, was entirely the achievement of ‘radicals’ like WMM: ‘Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.’ This drivel comes from the keyboard of a British barrister and an Oxford University graduate (though, thankfully, not in history). Hirsch’s version cynically writes out of the anti-apartheid struggle many thousands of patriotic South Africans.
South Africa was liberated by many strands of political action and thought over many years. Township protest with which WMM was particularly associated was an important factor, but so too were trade and financial sanctions, the long struggles of trade unions from various ideological backgrounds, the churches, a robust human rights movement, the personal efforts of many individuals and, ultimately, doubt about apartheid from within the National Party itself. South Africa’s liberation was evolutionary not revolutionary, hinging on a negotiated settlement that established a democratic state based on liberal principles. It can be argued that this has failed to deliver a freedom dividend to the mass of the country’s people, a consequence in part of the racketeers, corrupt tenderpreneurs and gangsters (including a recent president) in all ranks of the ANC. Mistakes, betrayals and unnecessary compromises have been made, but none of them invalidates the negotiated settlement that eventually marginalised the violent of both sides as a political force.
It is safe to assume that Hirsch has not bothered to read the 27 pages of volume two of the TRC Report that record its special investigation into the activities of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) in Soweto in the late 1980s. It is a story of depravity even by South Africa’s violent standards. The MUFC, a collection of low-life thuggish com-tsotsis – WMM’s enforcers, bodyguards and drivers – was responsible for abduction, assault, torture, mutilation and attempted and multiple murder – at least eighteen killings. The addition of battery acid to open wounds is enough to give an indication of the cruelty involved. The TRC found that WMM was the patron of this vigilante group, which operated from and on her properties in Orlando West and Diepkloof (the understandably enraged community burned down her first house) and used her vehicle to impose a reign of terror.
There is plentiful evidence from credible witnesses that WMM ordered abductions and was personally involved in interrogation and beatings designed to extract confessions from supposed informers. There is also evidence that WMM’s daughter, Zindzi Mandela-Hlongwane, was mixed up in this saga of abuse and cover up. It is worth remembering that physical abuse to extract information and intimidate was routine in police cells across South Africa. In 1991 WMM was convicted of kidnapping and as accessory to assault; and sentenced to six years in prison. The assault charge was dismissed on appeal and the sentence reduced to two years suspended, plus a R15 000 fine. This was widely regarded as a political outcome in a situation of fear about instability. The trial judge had called WMM an outright liar.
Yet Hirsch sets great store by the fact that WMM denied involvement in the most notorious MUFC killing; that of 14-year-old Mokhetsi Stompie Seepei, hacked to death by MUFC coach Jerry Richardson in 1988 after abduction from the Methodist manse with three other youths (the minister, Paul Verryn, was smeared as a child abuser). Subpoenaed, during the TRC hearings she adopted an attitude of indifferent contempt over nine days in spite of a mountain of evidence from 43 witnesses implicating her, simply denied everything, and labelled allegations ridiculous and ludicrous. One of her lies had been that Seepei was not dead, but living in a Botswana refugee camp. There is also circumstantial evidence that she was implicated in the murder on 27 January 1989 of Abubaker Asvat, the doctor who ran the clinic where Albertina Sisulu also worked and had examined Seepei. And the removal of MUFC member Katiza Cebekhulu to long-term detention in Zambia during WMM’s trial is yet another mystery. Answers to many unresolved questions have gone to the grave with her.
It is conveniently forgotten that the Orlando West community was outraged by the reign of terror unleashed on it by the MUFC. The ANC in exile and the internal Mass Democratic Movement (United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) were aghast at the actions and words of WMM, pointed out that she worked outside democratic structures, disowned her, and set up the (ineffectual) Mandela Crisis Committee to address the situation. Notoriously she had waved around a box of matches, implicitly endorsing necklacing. The MCC, together with community and religious leaders, she simply scorned.
Former security branch policeman Paul Erasmus, who testified to the TRC, now claims after WMM’s death that every member of the MUFC was a police informer. Whether or not he is correct will probably never be known, but this version is an interesting addition to the theory that Seepei was killed because he was about to expose Richardson. Whatever the nuances of the situation, WMM was herself an effective agent of the apartheid state in a low-level conflict against the people of Soweto; in other words, just another warlord/lady.
Something happened to WMM in the mid-1980s just as she moved back to Soweto for good; possibly full realisation that the Mandela name and the current volatile political situation gave her virtual carte blanche. Her robust attitude to the apartheid state was turned against her own local community, an episode buried by the current climate of mass adulation. One possibility is that the brutal treatment she had received over many years resulted in post-traumatic stress that imagined enemies close to home and created a need for obedient thugs. At the time there was a suggestion that she had fallen under the influence of various American groups strong on loud-mouthed rhetoric. There is no doubt that she suffered appallingly for fifteen years from 1969 to 1985 with a total of seven, non-consecutive years in prison and another eight banished to Brandfort. R.W. (Bill) Johnson has recently written a well-argued and researched piece that points out that WMM led a complex and troubled life from childhood that can only have been exacerbated by state abuse.
In the current climate of strict political correctness the most challenging comment about her is that she was a controversial figure. The solitary confinement she suffered amounted to psychological torture, yet it was endured by many. And many other women, Albertina Sisulu among them, and their children endured the family deprivation of long-term political imprisonment. WMM chose a path of violent rhetoric and abuse and yet she is the icon and the supposed mother of the nation. In his contribution, Johnson wisely points that liberation movements attract people for many reasons, not all of them the making of heroes.
What does this idolisation say about South Africa? In a recent published interview WMM described Nelson Mandela as soft; and Desmond Tutu as a cretin directing a religious circus. Soft, after 27 years in prison and faced with the need to fire his wife from government and divorce her for her criminality and infidelity? And Tutu a cretin; the man who risked his life to face down enraged crowds and rescue potential necklace victims? Brandishing matchboxes and inciting murder is an easy option by comparison.
Adulation for WMM incorrectly sets the national moral compass. Violence was perpetrated by both sides of the anti-apartheid struggle, but WMM’s contribution was sheer incitement and it occurred without mandate and outside any disciplined structures. Do mothers run torture centres from their own backyards and then have the victims murdered on the basis of mere allegation? Events of the last fortnight have shown a disturbing disrespect for the legacy of Nelson Mandela that illustrates an increasingly ugly side of the national condition.
And why does South Africa need a ‘mother’? Its citizens live in a nominal democracy with a sophisticated constitution. But their reactions to the deaths of prominent figures suggest a troubling lack of confidence and uncertainty in their ability to face the future. And in this particular case a wave of wild rhetoric about the past has been unleashed that feeds into growing instability around a populist Zuma backlash supported by rising neo-fascist groups like Black First Land First.
South Africa should select its heroic icons more carefully.