THE TRIAL OF WINNIE MANDELA

Paul Trewhela

A Change in Perceptions

The prosaic spirit of the 1990s has torn the veil from the most glamourized
iconography of the 1980s. In the trial of Winnie Mandela, the recent past of
the African National Congress is displayed in a manner to writefinisto many
of the heroic myths of the period when her husband and his colleagues defied
the apartheid regime in the Rivonia Trial, 27 years earlier.
Then, the mystique of revolutionary violence was exalted as the antidote to
the all-saturating violence of the state. Now, the balance-sheet of the past
three decades of nationalist politics is drawn up, and payment must be made.
This was recognized outside the courtroom before being recognized in it.
The law imitated life. As the once putative First Lady of a future South Africa,
Winnie Mandela was repudiated by members of her own organization before
she was convicted by the white judiciary. In finding her guilty of the kidnap-
ping of four black youths and as accessory to their assault, the verdict of the
court followed an implied act of censure by a major section of the ANC
membership, which decided a week earlier by 400 votes to 196 against electing
Mrs Mandela to the presidency of the ANC Women's League. This election
result, an index to ANC affairs in the second year after its unbanning, was not
merely a prophylactic against political contamination. It followed the open
denunciation of Mrs Mandela by the most influential members and sup-
porters of the ANC within the country in February 1989, a year before its
unbanning. Within the ANC inside South Africa during this period, two souls
contended in a single breast, that of Nelson Mandela — in isolation on
Robben Island — confronted by the fury of his wife.
As she strode out of court following her conviction, an image flashed across
the world of an old man held hostage by a younger wife, more sinned against
than sinning. The contrast in faces: she, manic, exultant, wilfully impervious
to her own humiliation; he, drawn, ashen, grieving almost, a bitter taste in the
mouth after the decades of honourable endurance. That famous noble head,
turned grey, his name soiled, an aging Antony married to a vulgar Cleopatra.
Was it for this so much was dared, and sacrificed?
How little this portrait of a marriage was purely personal was given point
by the threat of Chris Hani, chief of staff of the ANC military wing, Umkhonto
we Sizwe (MK), that there would be mass protest action if she were convicted,
in contrast to her husband's insistence, shortly after sentence had been
passed, that the matter be left to the courts. In the event, it was the sober
realism of her husband and not the giant-killing rhetoric of Hani or of Peter
Mokaba, leader of the ANC Youth League, that was closest to the opinions
of the people of Soweto. Their reserved response to Mrs Mandela's convic-
tion, their implied acknowledgement that she was indeed guilty of serious
34 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

abuses, speak of a profound longing for some kind of civic peace after so
many years of appalling tension. This emphasizes in its own way that the
period of revolt is well and truly over, and that the ascent of the period of
negotiations corresponds to a profound decline in the curve of general social
rebellion. It heralds the wish for a period of order, characterized by a strong
state clothed in the toga of constitutionalism. The rhetoric of the clenched
fist employed by Mrs Mandela outside the court after her conviction and
sentence, like the rhetoric of combat fatigues and hammer and sickle
headgear sported by her co-accused, Mrs Xoliswa Falati, marks the ag-
grieved reaction of the doomed stratum of township lumpenism in a period
of serious upward social mobility (for some). It suggests the bad grace of the
drunk evicted from a dinner party. Just as she misread the limits to her own
immunity to prosecution by the state, so Mrs Mandela misread the very
widespread desire among blacks for an end to criminality as the normal
condition of life in the townships.
Drum magazine in South Africa has published an account of the criminal
associations of Jerry Richardson, head of Mrs Mandela's team of killers, the
Mandela United Football Club (October 1990). Formed by her in Soweto at
the end of 1986, the football club, which never played a single match,
conducted itself in full view of everyone as a kind of brigandage feeding off
the society. Mrs Mandela was its pirate chief. It is precisely this convergence
of criminality and politics that her trial established as a fact of recent South
African history, against the grain of decades of effort to remove political
struggle from such accusations by the state.
The iconic exceptionalism of the ANC, a sacred isle in a corrupt world, is
gone. Mrs Mandela's house, the house to which Nelson Mandela returned
after his 27 years' incarceration, the house from which the 14-year-old 'boy
general' Stompie Moeketsie Seipei was dragged off to be murdered only one
year earlier, was at the vortex of a psychopathic fusion of political terror, a
social vigilante movement and ordinary township gangsterism. Protected by
the international aura of the Mandela name and the cunning of the South
African state — which calculatingly left events to run their course — the
famous residence at 8115 Orlando West in Soweto served simultaneously
(among other purposes) as a safe house for returned MK guerrillas, a
weapons dump, a barracks for the Mandela football squad, a prison for
recalcitrants, a punishment yard in which innumerable beatings were ad-
ministered and a transit camp from which the executioner set forth.

A South African Gothic

Attention in the trial was focussed on the abduction to Mrs Mandela's house
of four youths from a church manse on 29 December 1988 by her team of
enforcers, the Football Club. On New Year's Day, one of the four — the
teenager, Seipei — is taken out of Mrs Mandela's house, battered and left
dead in a field, his throat slit.
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 35

Some time after the abduction, a Soweto doctor is consulted by Mrs

Mandela and Mrs Falati, previously housekeeper at the manse. Mrs Falati
says she fetched a young man from the manse on Mrs Mandela's instructions
on the same day that the four victims in the case were abducted. (Weekly Mail,
15 February 1991) The priest at the manse is Rev Paul Verryn, whom Mrs
Mandela and Mrs Falati accuse of homosexual abuses with homeless black
youths sleeping in overcrowded conditions at the manse. The young man is
Katiza Cebukulu, who later gives damning evidence to the press about the
football club and who is charged alongside Mrs Mandela and Mrs Falati.
On 27 January 1989, Dr Abubaker Asvat — 'Hurley5 to his friends, the
'People's Doctor', secretary for health in a political organization rival to the
ANC, the Azanian People's Organization (Azapo) — is shot dead in his
surgery. T\vo men are later found guilty of Asvat's murder and sentenced to
death, maintaining throughout that their motive was robbery. Yet a strange
coincidence: the doctor's appointment book for the day of his death as well
as for the day preceding it show meetings with Jerry Richardson, the head of
the Football Team. (Weekly Mail, 15 February 1991) A year later, Richardson
is himself arrested, tried and condemned to death for Seipei's murder.
Before the abduction, followed by the murder of Dr Asvat, two murder
trials with important implications take place in the Supreme Court in Johan-
nesburg in 1988 and 1989. TJiough she is never summoned as a witness, Mrs
Mandela is mentioned by name in both trials in testimony agreed between
prosecution and defence. This states that her house was used for hiding a
murder weapon, that the killers set off on their deadly assignation from, and
returned to, her house in her car, that her daughter Zinzi was involved in
exchanging the murder weapon and that the killers then continued to operate
from the house as members of the football club. No charge is ever brought
against Mrs Mandela or her daughter because of these allegations, and they
are not made public at the time, either in the South African or international
press — even though the facts are well known to journalists. This at a time
when Mrs Mandela is a world media star, on a scale to relegate Evita Per on
to a mere footnote in the annals. The trial results in the imposition of the
death sentence on a trained ANC guerrilla returned from abroad, Oupa
Seheri. Leading a charmed life, Mrs Mandela is not called in for questioning.
In the second of the two murder trials, the j oint statement between defence
and prosecution reads that 'a decision was made by Mrs Winnie Mandela
and the football club to kill' two former members of the club, Sibusiso Chili
and Lerothodi Ikaneng (quoted by John Carlin, 'Blood Soccer', New
Republic, 18 February 1991). The court finds that Maxwell Madondo, a
member of the club, had been 'mandated' together with another member of
the club to murder Chili and Ikaneng, but that the gods had thrown the dice
otherwise, and the 'mandated' murderer was himself murdered by Chili, his
intended victim. Mrs Mandela is not called, even as a witness.
Madondo was killed on 13 February 1989. Two days later, the police identify
the body of the murdered Stompie Seipei. On 16 February 1989, Mrs
Mandela's closest political associates in the Mass Democratic Movement —
 36 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

'the most senior trade union and political leaders loyal to the ANC (accord-
ing to Carlin) — publicly dissociate themselves from her.Murphison Morobe,
a former activist of the 1976 Soweto school students movement from his time
at Morris Isaacson High School alongside the student leader Tsietsi
Mashinini, states at a press conference:

We have now reached the state where we have no option but to speak
publicly on what is a very sensitive and painful matter. In recent years
Mrs Mandela's actions have led her into conflict with various sections
of the oppressed people...In particular we are outraged by the reign of
terror that the [Mandela United Football] team has been associated
with. Not only is Mrs Mandela associated with the team, in fact the team
is her own creation. We are outraged at Mrs Mandela's complicity in
the recent abductions and assault on Stompie. The Mass Democratic
Movement hereby distances itself from Mrs Mandela and her actions.
(Carlin, New Republic, and Carlin, BBC Radio 4,27 November 1990)

Morobe, general secretary of the United Democratic Front, makes his

statement denouncing Mrs Mandela alongside Archie Gumede (co-presi-
dent of UDF) and Elijah Barayi (a long-time ANC stalwart, president of
Cosatu). As Carlin observes in the New Republic, Morobe's phrase 'recent
years' suggests a long history of terror in Soweto emanating from the Mandela
household; but this cryptic pointer is never elaborated.

Breaking the Silence

Time passes. Richardson, the 'coach' of Mrs Mandela's Football Club — a

club whose metier in leather lies more in sjamboks than in footballs — is
convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Seipei. Her husband is
released to world acclaim. No awkward questions are asked by the world's
journalists and statesmen as she and her husband circle the globe in one
glittering reception after another. For the Mandelas it is Hollywood all the
way; for Richardson, death row.
Meanwhile, Morobe wisely distances himself by taking up a scholarship for
study at Princeton University in the US. As one of the most important political
leaders of the period when the ANC was gaining popular sanction through
the UDF to return as apartheid's avenging angel, he removes himself from
the scene of battle at the moment of triumph. To remain in South Africa while
Mrs Mandela is in full cry is not politic.
At last a journalist dares to publish the suppressed testimony of the courts.
On 21 September 1990, an account by John Carlin of the Supreme Court
trials in 1988 and 1989 (involving statements about events in Mrs Mandela's
house) appears in the Independent in Britain. This act of honest reportage
follows the example of the Weekly Mail in Johannesburg, in the early weeks
of 1989, in printing thefirstreport of the kidnapping of the four youths to Mrs
Mandela's house. Carlin later reveals that he and his assistant, Mandla
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 37

Themba — presenter of a programme on BBC Radio 4 on the chaotic

conditions among 'the youth' in South Africa — is the recipients of a series
of menaces from Mrs Mandela, most recently on the steps of the Supreme
Court in the middle of her trial. 'He's an SB', Carlin reports Mrs Mandela as
saying about Themba, whom she had summoned to approach her retinue.
{Independent, 13 April 1991) To be accused in South Africa of being 'an SB'
— a Special Branch policeman — is equivalent to a death sentence.
Two months after Carlin's initial scoop, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a
programme by him in which a founder member of the football club, Lerothodi
Ikaneng, describes how Mrs Mandela 'often participated' in beatings ad-
ministered by her personal punishment battalion. Ikaneng describes how as
a member of the football club, living in her house, he witnessed the murder
of a friend carried out by the chairman of the Mandela FC disciplinary
committee, Sizwe Sithole. How Ikaneng was then himself brought to Mrs
Mandela and her daughter, Zinzi, (Sithole's lover before his death in police
custody); how he was accused by them of being a police spy; how he was
punched by Winnie Mandela and ordered by her to be taken to her house at
Diepkloof Extension; how, afraid of being killed, he escaped his captors, and
fled the area. Six weeks later he returns to Soweto, having run out of money,
is seen by Stompie's murderer, Jerry Richardson (still coach to the Mandela
team), is taken to a field, stabbed in the neck with a blade from a garden
shears, and left for dead. Richardson continues living at Mrs Mandela's
house, where he is eventually arrested before the eyes of the television
cameras.
A week before Mrs Mandela is convicted, at a crucial point in her trial, a
second attempt is made on the life of Ikaneng. He is shot and seriously injured
outside his home in Soweto on 6 May by three men whom he later identifies
as Matthew, Theo and 'Marlboro'. A second eye-witness, who says she had
been beaten by two of the men while four months pregnant in 1988, identifies
the three by the same names. A third witness states that Matthew was carrying
a large rifle. All three assailants are identified as former members of the
Football Club. According to the witnesses, who know them well, at the time
of the assault they are part of the guards outside the new Mandela residence
in Orlando West, known as 'the Parliament', which sits in glowing lights like
a jewelled crown on the top of a low hill overlooking Soweto. They sleep in
the smaller Mandela home, also in Orlando West, from where Stompie was
taken to his death and where Mrs Mandela's co-accused, Mrs Falati — like
her, convicted of abduction — continues to live. It is this house which at the
time of the second attempt on the life of Ikaneng is at the focus of the court
case then proceeding, before the eyes of the world, in the Supreme Court in
Johannesburg.
The second murder attempt on Ikaneng suggests that members of the
football team continue to function during her trial as a bodyguard for her and
Nelson Mandela himself. Ikaneng ascribes it to revenge for his evidence
against Richardson. (Carlin, Independent, 8 May) This does not prevent the
ANC from issuing a statement six days later, after the conviction of Mrs
38 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

Mandela, stating that it had decided following the release of Nelson Mandela
in February last year that all members of the club should be removed and
barred from premisses associated with the Mandela family. {Times, 14 May)
Nelson Mandela was indeed involved in the affair of the kidnappings, but
in a manner different to his wife. Following the murder of Seipei, the three
survivors of the kidnapping from the manse were Gabriel Pelo Mekgwe (then
aged 20), Thabiso Mono (also 20) and Kenneth Kgase (then 29). All three,
still confined to Mrs Mandela's house, had been forced by their captor,
Richardson, to hold Ikaneng while he cut his throat. Nelson Mandela's
intervention in the lives of these young men emerges with some interesting
implications. According to a report, news of the kidnappings and assault

first became public on 4 January 1989, when Mr Kgase escaped from

the Mandela house...
Mr Kgase went first to the Johannesburg Central Methodist Church
and [Rev Paul] Verryn [the white priest alleged by Mrs Mandela to have
been responsible for homosexual child abuse of young black boys at the
manse]. A full investigation was launched by members of the Soweto
crisis committee. Committee members visited Mrs Mandela and
demanded the release of the other victims.
When she refused to comply, they threatened writs of habeas corpus.
But it was not until Mr Mandela was told of the incidents during a prison
visit by his lawyer, Mr Ismail Ayob, that Mrs Mandela allowed Mr Mono
and Mr Mekgwe to be released. {Daily Telegraph, London, 14 May)

This is confirmed by another report, which states that 'Nelson's intervention

was eventually successful' in securing the release of the two kidnapped youths,
following Seipei's murder and Kgase's escape. {Observer, 19 May) Mandela's
intervention from prison — which might even have saved the lives of the two
youths, one of whom later gave evidence against his wife — corresponds to
the consistently humane example presented by him during his decades in
prison, a matter attested by fellow-prisoners not members of the ANC.
In a statement delivered at a crowded press conference on the first
anniversary of his release from prison, within days of the start of his wife's
trial, he declared 'no hesitation whatsoever in asserting her
irmocence\{Guardian, 9 February) His prison intervention however would
indicate that Mr Mandela knew more of the truth concerning his wife's
conduct than he would later concede. The inter-relation between husband
and wife in this strangely matched couple remains one of many conundrums
in this dark night of the soul in southern Africa.

Two Women

A week before Mrs Mandela is convicted, Sibusiso Chili leaves prison after
completing a sentence of one year for the killing of Maxwell Madondo, one
of the team who had been 'mandated' by the football club to kill him.
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 39

Chili is the son of Mrs Dudu Chili, an office-bearer in the Federation of

Transvaal Women (Fedtraw). In 1988 Mrs Chili was a close ally of Mrs
Albertina Sisulu, one of the presidents of the UDF and wife of Nelson
Mandela's most senior prison colleague on Robben Island, Walter Sisulu,
former secretary-general of the ANC. While Mrs Sisulu's movements were
restricted by banning orders, Mrs Chili had acted as her deputy in finding
shelter for young men and boys wanting to leave the murderous circle of the
Mandela football club. Older than Winnie Mandela and an honoured figure
in Soweto, with a much longer history of political commitment, Mrs Sisulu
worked as a nurse in the surgery of the murdered Dr Asvat. While Mrs Sisulu
has not commented either to the press or in court on her own relation to the
events in Mrs Mandela's house, Mrs Chili states that:

Some of the children who had startedfleeingfrom Mrs Mandela's place

would flee to Mrs Sisulu's place. Mrs Sisulu, as a restricted somebody,
according to the South African law, would not be in a position to move
around and help these boys. She would call upon me and say, 'Dudu,
please, can you get some places where we can keep these children
temporarily until we remove them from Soweto for their safety?'
Those were precautions which we took to help the children who were
terrified, who were very scared, staying at Winnie Mandela's. And of
course, they would relate to us what was happening there. (Carlin, BBC
Radio 4)

ANC politics in Soweto over this period revolves around Mrs Mandela and
Mrs Sisulu, these two women of formidably different temperament, each the
wife of one of the imprisoned leaders on Robben Island. In the election for
presidency of the ANC Women's League at the time of Winnie Mandela's
trial, it is primarily the caucus of support for Mrs Sisulu that bars the way to
Mrs Mandela. Mrs Sisulu conspicuously fails to give evidence for Mrs
Mandela in her trial, or even to appear in the visitors' gallery in court.
On 22 February 1989, nine days after the killing of Madondo, Mrs Chili is
arrested and charged with complicity, though she is later set free before the
start of her son's trial. That evening, while she is under arrest in the police
cells, her 13-year-old niece, Finkie Msomi, is killed in a firebomb and
shooting attack on Mrs Chili's house carried out by Winnie's boys'. Charles
Zwane, one of the Mandela FC, is later sentenced to death for this crime,
having been charged with 11 murders and 22 attempted killings. Zwane had
previously received a suspended sentence as an accessory to murder in the
Seheri murder case of 1988. The motive for the attack on Mrs Chili's house
is revenge for the death of Madondo, and a generalized hatred for the role
of the family in opposing the whim of the great lady. At this point there was
near civil war among supporters of the ANC in Soweto, and Mrs Sisulu must
herself have been in danger.
Sibusiso Chili is put on trial in 1990 for Madondo's death alongside
Cebukulu, one of Madondo's colleagues in the botched attempt on Sibusiso's
life. After their trial, in which the judge gives token sentences, Cebukulu is
40 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

interviewed. (Carlin, BBC Radio 4) He tells of a meeting in Winnie Mandela's

office in Orlando township on 13 February 1989, the day of Madondo's death,
attended by himself, Richardson, Zinzi Mandela and others at which Mrs
Mandela 'mandated* the gang to 'get rid' of Chili and Ikaneng. Mr Justice
Solomon, the judge, declares he believes Cebukulu's evidence.
Cebukulu is one of the seven people charged alongside Mrs Mandela in
February this year. On the opening day of the trial it emerges that four of the
accused have skipped their bail and gone into hiding. Cebukulu is one of the
missing accused. The following Sunday, pictures appear in the press of
Cebukulu standing in the crowd outside the Johannesburg Supreme Court,
watching the opening of his own trial. The farce is repeated in the second
week of the trial. No effort is made to arrest Cebukulu, and he does not
reappear in the dock. The trial proceeds in the manner oielrealismo magical
in the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with the accused looking on at his
own trial from the outside, cocking a snoot at the massive police presence.
The insouciance of this former hit-man would be funny if the circumstances
were not as grim.

An Imperial Triumph

Initially, the principle of imperial suzerainty is triumphally asserted by Mrs

Mandela and the ANC executive ('the sovereign can do no wrong'). Despite
the burning of Mrs Mandela's house in Diepkloof Extension by outraged
Soweto school students in July 1988 (following beatings by members of the
football club, in connection with a rape), despite the murder of Stompie,
despite the statements agreed between prosecution and defence in the
murder trials of 1988 and 1989, despite dissociation from her 'reign of terror'
by the MDM, the leaders of the ANC at first stand by their royal consort. In
particular, Mrs Mandela is supported by the ANC secretary general, Alfred
Nzo, one of the top leaders returned from exile (and deeply discredited
among the exile rank and file). Within the ANC she rises, as Carlin reports,
'without trace'. At the time of her trial Mrs Mandela holds even more
portfolios than her husband. 'She is chairperson of her local ANC Soweto
branch; she is on the executive of the ANC's regional branch for the
Pretoria-Johannesburg area, the most populous in the country; she is interim
head of the Women's League of the ANC; and she is the ANC's head of social
welfare' — the beneficiary of a 'collective decision taken by the ANC, right
down to township branch level, to close ranks behind her'. (Independent, 4
February) Under conditions of an Angolan, or Mozambican, or even Zim-
babwean 'people's republic', she would have been as invulnerable as Madame
Ceaucsecu in the decades before the floor collapsed beneath her.
Seipei is in no position to give evidence. Nor is Dr Asvat. Of the other three
witnesses, one — Mekgwe — fails to give evidence after having been seen
leaving the church manse in Soweto from which he was kidnapped in 1988,
in the company of'three African National Congress men', one of the them 'a
senior ANC man'. (Guardian, 13 February) Mekgwe disappears. Of this,
more later. Concerning the other two witnesses, Kgase and Mono, the state
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 41

prosecutor declares: They are scared because their mate [Mekgwe] had been
kidnapped'. Kgase says: 'I very much fear for my life...I think my life is at
stake'. {Guardian, 14 February) For a period at the beginning of the trial it
appears as if it will collapse, due to absence of witnesses. It portends what
the US journal Newsweek suggestively describes as a 'Sicilian-style outcome
— acquittal by kidnapping'. (25 February)
The attorney-general of the Witwatersrand declares he will act with vigour
against any attempt to coerce witnesses. According to the Times, a 'psychosis
of fear' surrounds the proceedings, the central subject of the affair sitting
demurely in the dock alongside her three remaining co-accused, the other
four having vanished. (13 February) She is relaxed, confident, and jokes with
her defence team. Her husband, the expected future president of the country,
and the ANC top brass pack the visitors' gallery, while paramilitary squads
of uniformed ANC youth parade outside the courtroom door. Under threat
of imprisonment, the two remaining witnesses are eventually induced to talk.
The case comes to life.
As the trial runs its course, the perception of Mrs Mandela both within the
country and internationally undergoes a profound change. This trial provides
the occasion for a major learning experience about the reality of southern
African conditions, in which judgements are reassessed within the country
and across the world. The ANC leadership takes a decision 'to distance the
organization from the trial'. {Independent, 15 May) Top-level ANC and
SACP leaders no longer crowd the visitors' benches, as in thefirstdays of the
trial. Three weeks before the verdict, the paragon of national motherhood
has been redefined in the Guardian in Britain by its political columnist as a
'Medusa'. (Hugo Young, 25 April 1991) It is a view widely shared in Soweto,
if not expressed in such classical imagery. On the day when she is found guilty,
of the ANC leadership only her husband is present. The following day, when
she is sentenced (to six years in prison), even he is not there.

A Radical Confusion

The affair requires comment from a further point of vision. During the trial
itself, defence cross-examination makes it appear that the two main wit-
nesses, Kgase and Mono, rather than Mrs Mandela are the accused, and that
the crime of which they stand charged is...homosexuality. It is argued by the
defence that Mrs Mandela and her co-accused had rescued the youths for
their own good from alleged homosexual advances by Rev Verryn, the priest
in charge of the manse in which they had been living. The issue of
homosexuality becomes the 'ke/ to Mrs Mandela's defence. {Weekly Mail, 8
March) Posters held up by her supporters outside the courtroom read:
'Homosex is not in black culture'. {Weekly Mail, 15 March)
One need merely substitute the adjective Aryan' for 'black' to appreciate
the ideological climate in which the defence of Mrs Mandela is organized. A
serious effort is made to convert a trial for kidnapping and assault into a trial
of alleged homosexuality of prosecution witnesses, the victims of that kidnap-
 42 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, My 1991

ping and assault. The defence argument is characterized by a systematic

confusion of concepts: of child abuse relative to the right to freedom of sexual
orientation among adults, of the culpability of child abusers relative to that
of their victims, and of counselling rather than brutality as the appropriate
response towards the victims (and perpetrators) of sexual abuse of children.
The murder of Stompie Seipei, a matter of child abuse of the most extreme
kind, throws its shadow over the effort of the defence to represent Mrs
Mandela as motivated solely by repugnance at the abuse of young people.
This blurring and fudging of concepts relating to sexuality and violence, by
the accused, their counsel and their supporters, is an ominous indicator of
the tone of thought to be expected in a 'new South Africa'. A heavy dose of
sexist poison is spilled into public affairs during the trial, both within South
Africa and abroad, with damaging effect given the international importance
of its leading personality and her husband. The character of the defence, let
alone the events which form the focus to the charges, in all respects typical
of a period of deep reaction.
Under these circumstances, it was a brave act of the Weekly Mail — a liberal
journal normally sympathetic to the ANC — to open its columns to a critique
of the sexist brutalism of the defence case, just as it did in exposing the
apparent connivance of state and ANC in the disappearance and hijacking
of witnesses. The Weekly Mail, to its honour, was also the first to expose the
kidnappings in January 1989. It may later emerge that the decision of the
prosecution to proceed with the case at the critical moment in mid-February
owes much to the readiness of this journal to incur the wrath of Mrs Mandela,
rather than see a double standard ofjustice — one for the families and friends
of political leaders, another for the rest.
The most sensitive analysis of the character of Mrs Mandela's defence was
made by the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (Glow) in
an open letter to the national executive committee of the ANC, protesting at
its homophobic character. Glow described this as an attempt to capitalize on
'reactionary prejudices against homosexuals', and pointed out that the argu-
ment of the defence contravened the ANC's own draft Bill of Rights. It was
alarming that the NEC had 'failed to respond to the level of homophobia'
that had arisen both within and outside the court, the letter said. The ANC's
failure to respond raised 'doubts regarding its stated commitment to the
recognition of lesbian and gay rights'. A black gay activist, Simon Nkoli, who
had been defended by Mrs Mandela's senior counsel, George Bizos, in a
major political trial in 1987, charged with having conspired to overthrow the
state, now said of Bizos: 'It is very sad for me to see him using the gay issue
in this trial'. {Independent, 18 March 1991)
Whether or not sexual abuse of young people did in fact take place at the
manse could not be verified from the trial. Nor was it the issue. The character
of the defence case, funded from abroad by the International Defence and
Aid Fund (like the trial of Richardson) on the grounds that this was a political
and not a criminal trial, marks the end of an epoch in which the state, not the
accused, was overwhelmingly judged guilty in political trials by a majority
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 43

within South Africa and abroad. By the character of her defence, Mrs
Mandela affronted a basic principle underlying support for the ANC both
within South Africa and internationally. This was the principle of the critique
of prejudice. She proved unable to grasp the point made by the sociologist
Peter L. Berger, that the persecution of homosexuals

fulfils the same function of'bad faith' as racial prejudice or discrimina-

tion. In both cases, one's own shaky identity is guaranteed by the
counter-image of the despised group...The white man despises the
Negro and in that very act confirms his own identity as one entitled to
show contempt. In the same way, one comes to believe one's own
dubious virility as one spits upon the homosexual. (Berger (1975),
Invitation to Sociology. A Humanistic Perspective, Pelican, pl80)

The violent and deeply prejudiced nature of South African society was
given sharp focus by the trial. That the trial nevertheless proceeded to its
conclusion was a small augury of hope for the future.

The Oration at Bekkersdal

It was not only South Africa's homosexuals, however, who felt a cold wind at
the back of the neck. On 7 February, three days after the trial had begun and
was remanded, Winnie Mandela addressed a rally in the black township at
Bekkersdal, about 25 miles southeast of Johannesburg. In what the London
Times describes as a 'chilling threat' to whites, Mrs Mandela states: Any white
person who comes here to interfere with us or who comes to preach peace
— that person must not leave Bekkersdal alive. Their wives and mothers will
have to fetch them as corpses'. (8 February) As the Times correspondent
notes, this is the 'most vitriolic speech' by the First Lady since her classic call
in April 1986 that 'together, hand in hand, with our sticks of matches, with
our necklaces, we shall liberate this country5. (Carlin, BBC Radio 4)
Shortly after her Bekkersdal oration, Mrs Mandela delivers a passionate
implied justification of the occupation of Kuwait by the regime of Saddam
Hussein of Iraq. (Carlin, New Republic) Not out of character, Saddam's secret
police introduce the necklace to the streets of Iraq a month later as a means
of control over the revolt of their own citizens. {Observer, 24 March)
The significance of Mrs Mandela's threat at Bekkersdal is that, like so many
of her utterances, it is a blind intended to obscure the politics of the
organization of which she remains a leading member. The rally in Bekkersdal
is convened to call a truce after a weekend of slaughter in which a dozen
people are killed and scores left homeless: victims of political factioneering
between supporters of the ANC and those of the successor to the black
consciousness movement of the 1970s, Azapo.
Like the killing of Seipei, the deaths in Bekkersdal are not an unfortunate
act of god, and have a human history which requires investigation. The blood
rhetoric of Mrs Mandela relates here to the antagonism of the ANC towards
44 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

Azapo, which has a strong following in Bekkersdai. The tone and content of
her threat, and the political reality underlying the slaughter, reach back
beyond her words of April 1986 — captured by the sound camera — to the
period in 1985 when supporters of the ANC began a pogrom to wipe Azapo
from the map of political life.
A murderous campaign was launched against Azapo in 1985, after it had
dared to humiliate the UDF through its strident campaign against the visit of
Senator Edward Kennedy in January of that year. The cycle of township
violence of this period requires its own detailed investigation. In his acclaimed
book, My Traitor's Heart, the South African journalist Rian Malan has
described in chilling detail the murder-hunt against Azapo members in
Soweto by supporters of the UDF in Soweto in 1985. He quotes George
Wauchope, an Azapo leader and former close colleague of Steve Biko, as
stating that Morobe, Albertina Sisulu and Patrick Terror' Lekota, the leaders
of the UDF, 'didn't see anything...they never ever acknowledged that there
was this internecine warfare. They never ever tried to stop it'. (My Traitor's
Heart, Vintage, 1991, p 324)
Lethal violence against anyone with different opinions enters into the body
politic at this time like the Aids virus, eruptingfiveyears later in the massacres
launched by massed Inkatha members on the people of the townships. To be
a township resident, or to be a Zulu speaker in the wrong place at the wrong
time, or even erroneously to be thought to be a Zulu speaker, then becomes
a fatal error. If the carnage of Inkatha is the vengeance of the despoliated
countryside on the township, then the violence centred within the ANC and
its supporters is the vengeance of the despoliated township on itself. Despite
declarations of harmony at Bekkersdai at the rally on 7 February, in a joint
platform appearance by speakers from the ANC, Azapo, the Pan Africanist
Congress and Inkatha, South Africa is experiencing a pogrom tending
towards low intensity civil war, in which the sources have not been clarified
and in which the ANC has signally failed to lead the way to civil peace. It was
the place of Mrs Mandela, even at this late stage, to be an exponent of the
rhetoric of violent militancy.

The Selling of a Celebrity.

The day before her speech at Bekkersdai, Mrs Mandela implied outside the
courtroom — standing beside her husband — that she was being persecuted
by the press. As the international media star runs out of hype, she turns on
her former sources of publicity. Her husband declares: 'My wife is subject to
trial by mass media, before her trial in the court', (recorded by Carlin, BBC
Radio 4)
Yet another media romance of the 1980s now wears out. Not long before,
Mrs Mandela was the beneficiary of one of the most spectacular campaigns
of hype in modern times. But those whom the media creates, it also frequently
destroys. As I write', observes Rian Malan on the first day of her trial, 'the
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 45

skies above Johannesburg are dark withflyingreporters, coming in to cover

the trial of Winnie Mandela, and it seems that a journahstic feeding-frenzy
is in the offing...' {Guardian, 4 February)

All this is in stark contrast with the abject deference accorded to Winnie
Mandela in her 'Mother of the Nation' heyday. Her deification began
in 1985, when she returned to Soweto in open defiance of a government
banning order and resumed a leading role in the freedom struggle. The
world press — the US press in particular — was entranced. Here was
a genuine heroine, headstrong, fearlessly outspoken, and enormously
telegenic to boot.
Mrs Mandela was the subject of 22New York Times stories in 1986, and
made 70 appearances on network television. Scores of flattering
magazine profiles, and at least three books, were written. She was
showered with movie offers and honorary degrees, even nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize. She became one of the most celebrated women
on the planet.

But now the enthusiasm of the international radical chic is becoming jaded.
There is aflyin the unguent. A little worm of doubt creeps into the minds of
true believers, some of whom might even previously have wished that some-
one would 'preach peace' in the townships. It is now Mrs Mandela who most
prominently illustrates the ugly face of'national liberation'. Witness to this is
the description of the 'imperious and enigmatic' Mrs Mandela in the London
Times: she appears to be 'stalking South Africa's political stage like some
latter-day Lady MacBeth'. (11 February) The Guardian, previously the most
pro-ANC of the major daily newspapers in Britain, with a well-tested
mechanism for blocking stories critical of the ANC, now declares itself
'appalled by the evidence of intimidation of witnesses' in the Mandela case.
The reputation of the ANC itself is at stake because of this 'single, flawed
individual'. Her case is a 'disaster for the ANC which, together with Nelson
Mandela needs to distance itself 'very fast, very openly, from this deeply
disturbing affair'. (14 February) This editorial, in a newspaper which gave
minimal coverage to revelations about the Swapo and ANC prison camps in
Angola, marks the turning on its axis of late 20th century liberalism in relation
to the ANC.
By April this year it appears that, for the moment, the career of Mrs
Mandela has been held in check not only by the disaffection of the world's
media but by the women of the ANC. At itsfirstcongress inside South Africa
for 30 years, the ANC Women's League on 27 April rejects Winnie Mandela
as its president in favour of Gertrude Shope — a national executive commit-
tee member from the exile, who had acted with humanity to stop executions,
torture and humiliation of ANC members held prisoner in Angola after the
mutiny in Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1984 (see Searchlight South Africa, No 5, p
53). Mrs Shope's victory, and Mrs Mandela's defeat, had according to the
Times been 'engineered' by Albertina Sisulu, who stepped aside as candidate
in order to let Mrs Shope win. Most significantly, Mrs Shope appears to have
46 Searchlight South Africa, Vol 2, No 3, July 1991

been 'strongly supported by women still in exile' (Times 29 April), who have
felt the methods of political authoritarianism from the ANC at first hand, on
their own persons.
As such, this was the first practical intervention of the exiles through
democratic means in the internal life of the ANC within the country. It
expressed the concerns of those members with deepest experience of
despotic forms of rule within the ANC, and the deepest hostility to them. It
indicates a possible consensus or coming together of that section of the ANC
which resisted the thuggery of the Mandela FC within the country and the
exiles who opposed the Stalinist regime of the security apparatus abroad.
Mrs Mandela's speech at Bekkersdal in February had been a Pie Jesu of
Third Worldist rhetoric. Addressing the crowd in both English and Xhosa,
she declared: 'Your spears should be pointed in the direction of Pretoria. Our
enemy is in Pretoria. We have never had enemies within ourselves. We are all
here because of our fight for freedom. The enemy come here to exploit our
differences'. (Times) Yet it is 'the Boers and the apartheid government' —
accused of having instigated the violence at Bekkersdal — with whom the
ANC is peacefully negotiating for a place in government. There are no spears
pointing in the direction of Pretoria, only briefcases, while a never-ending
catalogue of deaths in the townships belies Mrs Mandela's glib nationalistic
phrase about blacks in South Africa never having had 'enemies among
ourselves'.

The Nation of the Mother

Since 1985 — the incubatory period leading to the township slaughter of the
1990s — responsibility for legitimating violence as a primary means of
political control 'within ourselves' has lain first of all on the ANC and its
supporters, with its leading text in Winnie Mandela's homily on the liberatory
authority of necklaces and matches. This must be the subject of another
article, which investigates the conditions which nourished the use of execu-
tions against political opponents and caused the transfiguration of South
Africa's Saint Joan into a Medusa.
Mrs Mandela herself endured 27 years' loss of husband, following a first
few years of marriage when her husband was absorbed in mainly illegal
political work; 16 months' imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement; and
more than 17 years of banning orders, many of them served in banishment.
Her return to Soweto in 1985 (typically, in defiance of her banishment)
coincided with the most sustained period of near-insurrection in the
country's modern history, when all nerves were strained to breaking point. It
was the last years of the old order, when tens of thousands had decided that
one final, violent push would consign the regime of racial discrimination to
oblivion. Great sacrifice was called for, and great sacrifice was taken.
In the end, Mrs Mandela succumbed. In the endemic violence of South
African society, raised to fever-pitch in the mid-1980s, the complementary
 The Trial of Winnie Mandela 47

norms of white and black brutality became hers. She acquired the charac-
teristics of the regime she opposed, as of the gangster milieu in the purgatory
of the townships. She became truly South African.
Alongside so many horrors, three events from the same month as Mrs
Mandela's conviction give a pointer to South African political conditions in
the middle of 1991. One is the closure by the ANC of its prison camp at
Mbarara in southern Uganda and the release of its inmates, in all probability
in response to pressure from the British Foreign Office and the campaign of
the pressure group, Justice for Southern Africa. There will be a report on this
in the next issue.
Second is the shooting by the South African police of a former Umkhonto
activist Tumi Padi and his girlfriend Nokuzola as they lay in bed in Soweto on
19 May — slaughter in the old fashion, following the torture of Padi's father
(for information) at Protea police station in Soweto in February. {Inde-
pendent, 1 June)
And third: confirmation from a Zambian government official that Mekgwe,
the missing witness in the case of Winnie Mandela, was being detained by the
ANC in Zambia, after being moved there from Zimbabwe. Cebukulu,
Mandela's co-accused, who delighted in attending his own trial from the
outside, had earlier been reported in the Zambian press as being held in
Kamwalaremand centre at Lusaka, 'apparently under ANC authority.
(Guardian, 30 May) These two men, both scarred by their experiences in the
Mandela house, thus remain effectively prisoners of the ANC. The lesson
from the trial of Mrs Mandela is that in South Africa the rule is: Plus ga change,
plus c'est la meme chose, the more things change, the more they remain the
same.

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