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Nelson & Winnie: inside the Mandelas' marriage
00:40:21
Jonny Steinberg chronicles the powerful yet tragic relationship between two of the key figures in the fight against apartheid
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- [00:01]
Wendy
This is Wendy from Science Versus. This month our friends at Ford are.
- [00:05]
Johnny Steinberg
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Wendy
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- [00:31]
Wendy
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- [01:38]
Johnny Steinberg
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Nelson and Winnie Mandela were one of the most famous couples of the 20th century. Their relationship became a powerful symbol of the freedom struggle in apartheid South Africa, but it was also dogged by infidelity, violence, Nelson's long imprisonment, and the oppressive weight of the regime they fought against. In Johnny Steinberg's recent book, Winnie and Nelson Portrait of a Marriage, the South African writer chronicles a tragic love story that was both personal and and deeply political. The book has recently been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and Rob Attar caught up with Johnny. To find out more, could we begin.
- [02:29]
Rob Attar
With the genesis of the book? Because I understand that you initially intended to write a life of just Nelson Mandela. How did it then morph into this dual biography?
- [02:37]
Wendy
Yes, I initially intended the biography of Nelson Mandela, and the reason is that I thought that once he had died, it became possible to write about him in a Totally different way that to write about him as a human being with a dark side, with faults, while he was alive would have almost automatically been an attack on him and not his projects. But once he died, a new chapter had opened and it was possible to write about him in a much more raw and honest manner. And I began researching with that in mind. And one of the first archives I came across was a recently released set of letters that he wrote to Winnie while he was in prison. And it daunted me with quite a shock that his relationship to her was growing more and more complicated the longer he was in prison. His whole identity became wrapped up in hers. The idea that they were in love and remained in love just became fundamental to who he was, to his sanity, to his survival. And so I realized the book on the marriage was considerably more interesting than a book simply on him. Yeah, his humanity came to me in quite surprising ways. I didn't expect that.
- [03:39]
Rob Attar
How then did you go about researching their lives? And was it more difficult perhaps to find out some of the details about Winnie Mandela than it was about Nelson Mandela?
- [03:47]
Wendy
I mean, there is a much, much bigger archive on him than on her. You know, I came across a very awkward but rich archive late in the research. During the last 10 years of Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, the Minister of Justice at the time, Koepi Kutseer, ordered his officials to record every word spoken between Nelson Mandela and his visitors. And that included all the visits from Winnie and essentially their relationship, their marriage, was conducted in these visits. They had very few other means of communicating with each other. A couple of years into the project, I discovered that the transcripts of these meetings existed and that I could access them. It's an odd archive to come across. It is a front row seat to a very, very private set of conversations in very difficult circumstances. These people are trying to hold their marriage together, bring up their children. They're doing so in front of a microphone. They know that the microphone's there, but they can't really help being enormously self revelatory just because of the business at hand between the two of them. And you really get to see Winnie in action. You get to see her as a wife, as a mother. Those conversations between them are full of all the cruelties, manipulations, horrible things that spouses do to each other, especially when the marriage is under pressure. And so that, above all, showed me a great deal of Winnie. I mean, there were other moments that were very revealing. She was an incredibly volatile person. And interviewing people who knew her in the 50s and the 60s was enormously valuable as well.
- [05:13]
Rob Attar
The archive that you talk about there and you write a note about it, actually, end of the book. Did you have any qualms on an ethical basis about using those sources?
- [05:21]
Wendy
Yeah, of course I did. You know, I guess I wondered for a moment whether I should use them at all. But it really was only for a moment because they're public, they are going to be used in the future. I'm writing a book about the marriage. Not to use them would be odd. And then I thought, do I censor? Are there things that happen between them that should not be known about? In the end, I decided not to. In the end, I decided that what rides in my use of this material is how empathetic I am. Essentially not what I write about, but how I write, whether I leave their dignity intact, their humanity intact. And that was the art of using this archive.
- [05:53]
Rob Attar
Your book really begins with the initial meeting and courtship of Nelson and Winnie. And the way you describe it, mythology has grown up around the early time they spent together. So I wonder if you could explain what this mythology is and what the reality actually is.
- [06:09]
Wendy
Well, they were very unusual people inasmuch as they. They were both very good looking, they were both very flashy. They both paid a great deal of attention to presentation. Their courtship was a little scandalous. He was 30 years old, she was 20. He was married and had three children. The way they went after each other was electric and very sexual. And the moment they got together, the black media was interested in them. Interested in what they looked like as a glamorous, very good looking couple. And they really, against the political culture around them, understood that this presentation was deeply political. That to be a highly modern, beautiful young black couple in front of a camera emitted meaning. And it was political meaning. And they understood fairly early on that their marriage itself was a political vehicle and an incredibly powerful one that people would write about the two of them together. And that the two of them together could come to symbolize much more than a marriage. It could come to symbolize a struggle. It symbolize what black people were and what their aspirations were in very unusual and counterintuitive ways. And so I think partly why they were so attracted to each other, partly why there was so much electricity between them, was their mutual understanding that their marriage could become a myth. And by myth, I don't mean a fiction. I mean something exemplary, something that tells a general lesson, something that all black people can identify with. They probably didn't understand that consciously at the beginning, but they understood it Intuitively, right from the start, as the years went on and he went to prison and she stayed outside, the story of their marriage became more and more dramatic, more romantic in a way, more sentimental. And within time, not just them, but the people around them understood that this was a gift, really, to the struggle against apartheid, to elevate this marriage, to put it in the shop window, to freight it with all sorts of meanings. And at the end, it worked spectacularly. And the story the marriage told was a beautifully, powerfully, effectively simple one. It's that this couple has been torn asunder. They have not seen each other in years, and the day they get back together again is the day that their people are freed. And so this marriage did come to symbolize a freedom struggle in very powerful ways.
- [08:13]
Rob Attar
And as we'll come on to discuss the actual reality of what was going on when Nelson Mandela was in prison. It was very different from this. But I wonder if we could talk just a little bit about the short time where they were married together before Nelson ended up having to go to prison for such a long time. Was this a happy marriage at that time, when they were able to live, in a way, as a normal couple?
- [08:34]
Wendy
It was such a short time. They married in 1958, and Nelson Mandetta went underground in 1960. So they were really together for a little over two years. Was it a happy time? It's really hard to know because those two years are embodied in two very different memories for him. His memory of those two years is extraordinarily romantic and largely fictitious, you know, unaware himself. He had painted an extraordinarily idyllic marriage, and he rarely did that in order to keep his sanity. What she remembers is a very, very busy man running a law practice, running a political struggle, barely at home. Which is closer to the reality, I think. Nelson Madeira in the 1950s was a frenetic person. He lived off nervous energy. He lived off danger. He was bored by domestic life. Those two years together were two of the craziest years of his life. He was banned at the time. He was running from the police half the time. He was working perhaps 18, 20 hours a day. And so her memories of the marriage are probably more accurate than his.
- [09:35]
Rob Attar
You've already talked a little bit about how Winnie and the memory of Winnie sustained Nelson Mandela during his 27 years of imprisonment. How far were they actually able to interact with each other, to meet, to speak during those years?
- [09:49]
Wendy
At the beginning, hardly at all at the beginning. She was allowed to write to him every six months, and he to her, every six months, the letters had to be 500 words or less. They were closely read by a censor. Anything the censor didn't like was blocked out. I mean, as years went on, their contact expanded. He was arrived to write longer letters there. At the beginning, they could see each other once a year, but in a room full of guards. As the years went on, they could see each other more frequently. But they had these very, very narrow and watched channels of communication between them. And the stakes were very, very high. You know, Nelson Mandela knew from early on that he had married a young and beautiful woman, that she was going to have another life. He found out fairly early that she'd fallen in love with somebody else and then had succession of lovers. He understood that that would happen, but it was inevitable. But it did hurt him. And I guess he lodged a campaign over these years to keep her interested in him. And they come out in these extraordinary letters that he wrote to her. You know, the only ammunition he has, the only material he has to keep her interested in is the memory of their courtship. And he keeps writing over and over again about their courtship. And each time he writes about it, it is more electric, more exciting, more dangerous, more scandalous. He absolutely needs her to remember how things were between them and in his own mind how things were between them. Get outsized and fantastical. And all of this is an attempt to keep her. And the sadness, it's a very sad story, is that he isn't keeping her. It's not just that she has moved on and is in love with others. She has also drifted from him politically during this time. You know, as he gets older in prison, he believes more and more firmly that if his country goes to war, the war will never end and that apartheid can only end peacefully, that the alternative is unthinkable. She goes in precisely the opposite direction. Thief thinks that unless apartheid ends violently, apocalyptically, you know, literally with tens of thousands of black civilians armed and fighting, it will not end at all. By the 1980s, there's a fundamental difference between them on the basic questions of how to fight apartheid. And so here is a marriage which they can barely communicate with one another. Their enemy is listening in their communications. And the stakes romantically between a husband and a wife and politically between two leaders could not possibly be higher or more difficult.
- [12:06]
Rob Attar
Do you think the outside world beyond South Africa was aware of the political differences that were growing between Nelson and Willie Mandela at this time?
- [12:14]
Wendy
Well, the outside world knew that South Africa's liberation movement was torn between whether to End apartheid peacefully or violently. They were not aware of the starkness of the difference in the marriage itself until after the end, until after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. So, yeah, that fault line in the liberation movement was clear to all that. It was in the middle of the most famous marriage, and the struggle was not apparent except to the people around them.
- [12:39]
Rob Attar
How much do you attribute that fault line to the different treatments that Nelson and Winnie Mandela experienced from the apartheid regime at this point? Clearly, Nelson's been in prison 27 years, but Winnie Mandela suffered greatly also under the apartheid regime while she was both imprisoned and free. Does that perhaps explain their different approaches?
- [12:58]
Wendy
Well, Winnie would have loved the question that you just asked, and she had a very hurtful answer to that. Essentially, she said that when Nelson Mandela was locked in prison, he was locked away from the experiences of black South Africans. She was treated well. He was fed well. His enemy came to court him and was very nice to him, where she said, she, in contrast, bore the brunt of what black South Africans suffered. She was arrested and put in solitary confinement. She was tortured. She was banished. The apartheid regime treated her with extraordinary cruelty. And she said, the difference between us is I embody black experience and understand it where you really. And she didn't quite say it this starkly, but you are now nominally a black person. You are divorced from black experience, and that is why you were able to negotiate a peaceful transition where I, as the embodiment of the suffering and the anger, cannot possibly do that. And so she was a masterful storyteller. And the story that she told about their marriage evolved and became a very powerful political weapon for her. I think it's unfair. I think Nelson Mandela suffered almost beyond my powers of description to convey he was a man so full of life, so full of the present. He enjoyed danger. He enjoyed good food. He had many extramarital lovers. When he was married to his first wife, he was somebody who rarely lived. And to lock somebody up like that for 27 years is a terrible act of cruelty. He suffered enormously in prison. And I think that his really fervent belief that there shouldn't be war, that apartheid must end peacefully, comes from elsewhere. It doesn't come from being treated well. It comes from a sense that life is tragic and tender and fragile and needs to be treated with care. And I'm not sure that you can find a particular moment in his biography and say, this is where that sensibility came from. I think it's a little more opaque and difficult to pin down than that.
- [14:48]
Rob Attar
As you said earlier there, William Mandela was treated appallingly on many occasions by the apartheid regiment. However, she herself then did inflict a number of cruelties on other people, particularly during the 1980s. How far was Nelson Mandela aware of this and how far do you think he believed that Winnie could have been capable of some of these acts?
- [15:07]
Wendy
Well, just to fill in the story, you know, in 1977, the apartheid government banished Winnie Mandela to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere where she didn't speak the local language. And they thought that they'd dealt with her and gotten rid of her and was the exactly the opposite. She understood that the international press would be very interested in the story and they did indeed converge on her place of banishment. And she performed the most extraordinary performance of her life in the small town of Brantford. She was incredibly beautiful. The words that she spoke to the international press were very simple. She said, I am a member of the anc. It was illegal to do that at the time. My husband is Nelson Mandela and this country will not be free until he is president. Very simple language, but really putting a banned movement back on the map and a banned leader back on the map. Very powerful stuff. Eight years after she was banished, insurrections broke out across South Africa, including in Nelson and Winnie's home, Soweto. And she wanted to be there. And she defied her banning order and went home and moved into to the old house that she and Nelson lived in and began assembling an army of young men around her. And I think that her intentions were pretty straightforward and political. She believed that apartheid should end violently and she wanted to arm the young men around her. And that's what she did. It went horribly, horribly off the rails. They within no time, it really turned into a neighborhood gang. Much of their violence turned against poor, pretty, defenseless black people around them rather than a white state. And in 1988, her young men kidnapped five boys and young men tortured them terribly. And one died, a 14 year old boy died in her care. Nelson Mandela was told of all of this and did not believe it. I'm not sure if he ever believed it, but he certainly didn't at the time. You know, I think that one has to understand that by this point in his life there's this amazing duality in Nelson Mandela. He is by now a mythical figure. He is probably the most famous human being on the planet. He understands that he has great political power, but he never for a moment conflates that political success with who he is personally. And by now he Understands that personally his life is a tragedy. He has not been with his wife or children for nearly 30 years now. His children's lives are gone very badly. They're all adults now. None of them are particularly functional. He's racked with guilt. He feels it's his fault. He knows that he's going to come out of jail pretty soon. And he struggles to make any sense of meaning about the future without rekindling his relationship with his wife. He believes that there must be a process of personal repair. He must bring his children back in, he must reestablish a proper relationship with his wife. That the future is essentially nonsensical to him unless he can do these things. And in the middle of this he's told that he's. That, you know, a 14 year old boy has been tortured to death in his wife's care. And it's a moment of paranoia for him. He believes that his enemy has made up the story and that they're trying to attack him through his wife. He has enormous raging anger. He wants to defend her. He wants to, if necessary, break the law to defend her. You know, a myth about Nelson Mandela is that he was a reconciled person. His reconciliation was tactical. It was out of a need to make peace. You know, he felt that as a leader his responsibility was to make peace. But inside he was raging with anger. And one of the objects of that anger were the people he believed had ruined his wife and were making up tales about his wife. And when he went out of prison, he went to pretty disturbing lengths to defend her. She was up on kidnapping charges. And literally the evening before her trial, some state witnesses and co accused disappeared. They had been taken by ANC personnel and transported across the border. He didn't personally order that, but the people that he left in charge of the situation did. Yes, there is this duality. He comes out of prison a very powerful, very influential and very sane political leader. But as a private person, he is raging and he is prepared to do some scandalous stuff to try and reconstitute his family.
- [19:04]
Rob Attar
And actually, as a little aside, I wonder if you could tell us about your own memories of Nelson Mandela's release. Because you were living in South Africa at the time. What did it feel like? What was the experience, what was the emotions on that day?
- [19:15]
Wendy
It's very, very hard to describe. It's one of the most intense, electric experiences of my life. I was 19 years old. I'd been at university for two years. I was in the Atiya Parset student movement. And you Know by then had been to many rallies, had been in many marches. I was. I had a lot of experience with crowds. The crowd that assembled in a Soweto football stadium two days after Mandela was released was unlike anything I'd experienced before. The moment that man set foot in the stadium, it was as if we were transported somewhere magical. This was 150,000 people going absolutely insane, transported somewhere else. It was an experience of collective energy, of collective electricity that I don't think I'll ever experience again. And I guess the explanation is that this man had come to symbolize the struggle for freedom. He was one person, and yet he was all people. And his release from prison was pretty close, as you can get, to a mystical experience while being secular. Everything was embodied in him. The moment, the meaning of the moment was embodied in him. And there he was in the flesh. It was a very strange moment, and yet it lasted for a few minutes, and then the noise died down. And once again, we were in South Africa, in Soweto, within a radius of a kilometer or two kilometers, many thousands of people had died violently in the last few years. We were transported back to reality, to a very difficult country, facing a hard task, a hard transition ahead of it.
- [20:43]
Rob Attar
And on a personal level, Nelson Mandela faced a hard task trying to rekindle his marriage, which, as you detail in the book, failed fairly soon afterwards. Was there any chance at all that they could have made it work, or had they grown far too far apart over his years of imprisonment?
- [20:58]
Wendy
Well, that's a. It's a counterfactual. It's hard to say, but I doubt it. I think that it was hollowed out by then. It was over by then. And it took Nelson Mandela two years to discover that, you know, at a personal level, he was rarely reeling and disoriented when he came out of prison, which is strange to think of. He was so famous and so powerful and politically so competent, but personally, it took a long time to build foundations again and to realize that the marriage was over and that there was life after the marriage. One of the people I spoke to him was his chief of staff at that time, Barbara Masakela, who was with him perhaps 16 hours a day from 1990 to 1995. And she described him as, during that period, the saddest human being she had ever met. There was a moment in particular where they were in Tanzania, you know, driving in the presidential retinue. They drove into a village. Everybody in the village crowded around this car. They were all shouting, nelson Mandela. And Nelson Mandela, for Her. It was a very joyous moment. And she turned to him and she said she found this face in a rictus of sadness. And he just emanated a terrible, terrible hollowness. And so that was one of the moments she realized that she'd never been in the presence of somebody sadder. She also said that she watched him preparing to become the public Percival Nelson Mandela, and literally watched him put on the mask and changed from a sad, angry person to the public Nelson Mandela, who was a vacuola, who was joyous, who beamed a benign spirit. And she was amazed that he just had the capacity to put this face on and to put this performance on and such a disciplined performance. Because he absolutely understood that that's what his country required at the time. It was in a very dangerous moment. The transition could slip into civil war at any moment. And he understood that what he presented to the world was very, very important. You know, he'd always been a master of performance. In the 1960s, he was the slick black lawyer wearing very, very fine clothes, driving a fancy car, and understood that that symbolized aspiration. In the early 60s, he managed to change his presentation around completely and become like an African Fidel Castro, an underground guerrilla fighter. At the Rivoli trial, he managed to play the martyr very effectively. This was his last performance, and perhaps his most sophisticated and difficult one. And such an ineffable performance. It's not what he said. It's the spirit he exuded. And it was a spirit of gentleness. It was a spirit of saying we can actually cross the threshold together into a new world. And the fact that what he was feeling inside was the opposite. Inside he was a black man and a patriarch whose life had been ruined by apartheid. That's how he understood things. But he felt that if he projected that onto the stage, he would lead his people to war, and that would be irresponsible.
- [23:32]
Rob Attar
How do you think he found the kind of emotional strength to sustain this performance, considering that his marriage, which he'd invested great hopes in, broke down so quickly?
- [23:41]
Wendy
I think that he had a strength which came from being a deeply political being. You know, right from the 1950s, it was understood in his political culture and his activist circles that one does not show one's vulnerability to one's enemy. One doesn't show one's pain to one's enemy. That that is a political defeat. And that really, one has an obligation to hide what is going on inside and to present something different. That is the heart of one's political responsibility to do that. And he and the people around him had trained himself like that over the years. You know, the difference between him and many people around him was his talents at performance. Not his capacity to bury what he was feeling, but the quality of the performance itself, its agility and its sophistication. But the culture that bred in Raman island was interesting. It was very factional. You know, the ANC leaders fought with one another very, very bitterly. But where they were united was in not showing any vulnerability to their waters and not showing their divisions to their waters and keeping them secret. They were very skilled at compartmentalizing, at keeping the private private.
- [24:39]
Rob Attar
Following the. The breakdown of Winnie and Nelson's marriage and their subsequent divorce, what kind of relationship did the two have for the remaining two decades of Nelson's life?
- [24:49]
Wendy
He and Winnie finally divorced in 1996, having separated in 1992. And shortly thereafter, he remarried Gracie Michelle, the wife of the first leader of independent Mozambique, Zamora Michelle. When he married Michelle, he and Winnie were estranged. And one of the things Michelle did when she married Mandela was looked at his relationship with his family and how sad and torn it was, and began a project to bring his family around him again and said to him, you know, Winnie is the mother of your children. She is part of your family. You need to reconcile. And in the last 12, 13 years of his life, she was very much there. And in fact, when he was dying again, it was Gracie Michel's doing to decide that Winnie should be alone with him when he died. And, you know, the moment that he. His spirit was extinguished, the moment he was no longer there, she was alone in the room with him, which I think was fitting. I mean, as Michelle said, her relationship with him was autumnal. Winnie and Nelson were, for the bulk of their adult lives, the primary love of each other's life. And a death is a consummation, so it was appropriate that she be there.
- [25:53]
Rob Attar
And then coming on to Winnie, how far was she able to rebuild her political career after the scandals and the legal proceedings and everything in the 1990s?
- [26:02]
Wendy
So when Mandela divorced her in 96, it seemed as if her career was over. You know, his position was unassailable. He had cast her out not just as a wife, but as a political ally. A year later, in 1997, she faced a hearing at the Truth Commission for what she had done in Soweto, and her star rarely waned. It seemed like it may be over for her beginning, I would say, five or so years before Nelson Mandela's death in 2008, nine, 10, you know, a great deal of disenchantment with South Africa, particularly among its middle class. Black youth, began to set in. Unemployment remained very high. Inequality was as high as ever. A great deal of corruption set into the ruling party, to the anc. And as disillusionment grew, young people began asking questions about him, about the person who authored this new settlement and whether it was good enough settlement and when he was one of the very first people to understand what was going on, to understand the disenchantment, and became one of its leaders and became a leader by retelling the story of her marriage. You know, essentially saying the narrative I conveyed earlier that Nelson Mandela compromised too much because he'd lost touch with black experience, was she was the embodiment of black experience. And she became the figurehead of a new populist movement that broke away from the ANC called the Economic Freedom Fighters. And by the time she died in 2018, she had really become sanctified in the new populist movement. She became the singular embodiment of a more radical transition that didn't happen, of an alternative that didn't happen. And with that went with a great deal of mythologization of what did happen, a lot of conspiracy theory. Was she really as violent as everybody said in the late 1980s? Was there in fact not some sort of secret alliance between the old regime and the moderate and new regime to bury her? Was she simply too dangerous and had to be made into a witch? And so in South African left, a very different sense of factually, what happened during the transition to democracy has emerged with her at the center of it as the beacon of what might have been as a woman who was put down because what she wanted was too radical. And that's essentially where the populist left is now, in South Africa. And if you had to do a poll among young, black, educated South Africans, who do they prefer? Winnie One else. And I haven't seen such a poll, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Winnie.
- [28:18]
Rob Attar
That's really interesting because I think a lot of people listening certainly in Britain would probably still think that Nelson Mandela is seen as a hero of South Africa. But what you're saying actually is that his reputation is now much more complicated over there.
- [28:30]
Wendy
I mean, these are huge generalizations. But I'd say that among elderly and some middle aged South Africans, you know, he's probably still an exalted figure. But South Africa is enormously, enormously disenchanted with the democratic order and with the anc. And for Very good reason. We've had years of horrific corruption, of the decaying of institutions, of the smashing of institutions, of organized crime, seizing the state in Mandela's movement. And I guess it's natural that people say was the problem right there at the beginning. Was it in the nature of the settlement that he bargained with the white elite? I think that's wrong. I think that the ANC won, absolutely triumphed in 1994 when FW Tukurkan banned ANC and released Mandela. I don't think that he had democracy in mind as an alternative. The initial constitutional proposals that he put forward were all sorts of minority vetoes. Not even a single president rotating chair between different parties. And he felt that he could win this. He felt that if he dragged out the transition long enough, the ANC would lose its luster. He would develop right wing black allies and win an election. And in the end, the ANC won hands down. There was proportional representation. The only concession to minorities was a fairly mild property rights regiment, a constitution that baked in socioeconomic rights. If you look at what Mandela won on paper, it was formidable and extensive. And to the extent that it's gone wrong, it's because of the politics that came after him, not what he did. So I think that his declining reputation among young black South Africans is unfair, but perhaps inevitable, certainly not surprising.
- [30:03]
Rob Attar
And then In a way, D'Winnie and Nelson Mandela symbolize some of the divides that are going on in South Africa today.
- [30:09]
Wendy
Yeah, they absolutely do. In the last election this year, the ANC, for the very first time, after 30 years, democracy dropped below 50% and in fact got 40%. And for the first time had a governing coalition. The choice of coalition partners facing them was stark. On the one side, there were two populist breakaways from the ANC called Nkuntu Siswe Party and the Economic Freedom Fighters. They could go that way and govern from, you know, the extreme populist left. And their other alternative as a coalition partner was the Democratic Alliance, a formerly white party from the apartheid era, which hands down represents South Africa's racial minorities. 80% of white people vote for them, nearly 90% of Indian people, a great deal of colored people. And the ANC tacked to the center and went for the da. There's absolutely no question that if Winnie was alive, she would have gone the other way to the populist left. So very, very strangely, you know, in this historic election of 2024, when the ANC has to choose which direction to go in, the marriage is right there in the middle Nelson Mandela tracks to the center when he tracks to populism. That fault line between them is as alive as it's ever been.
- [31:19]
Rob Attar
Okay, Jonny, I think I've asked you all the main things I wanted to put to you. Is there anything else really important you think we should have discussed that I didn't mention?
- [31:26]
Wendy
Yeah. I think that the one narrative arc that we've left out entirely is Winnie under apartheid. You know, with all that happened with Winnie later in life, I think that it would be a tragedy. Forget her almost superhuman courage during the apartheid years. In the early 1960s, she found herself a single mother of two young children and with a state that was determined to destroy her and which had the capacity to. They banned her, that she couldn't work and earn a living. Whenever she put her children in school, they sent security pleasure rounds to take them out of school. They were, quite bluntly trying to destroy her. What she did in response is that she attempted very, very bravely to build an underground resistance movement in her neighborhood in Soweto, which she did with success for a while. They caught up with her in the late 1960s, arrested her, threw her in prison, and in a very, very grueling five days, interrogated her night and day, and then left her in solitary confinement for 18 months. They were very, very brutal to her. She came out of prison in the early 1970s, and I guess the woman who emerged from this horrible experience of social confinement and torture was a very complicated person. She was, on the one hand, as defiant as ever, as steely willed as ever. On the other hand, very, very damaged inside. The role she played in the 1970s was heroic. You know, I went through the story of her being banished to Brantford, and instead of allowing that to crash her, used it as a platform to gain a global reputation and to give her husband and his movement a global reputation. But what was happening inside her during this time was quite different. She was tortured by a security policeman called Tianus Swanepoel. Many years after her torture, 15 years, she was giving an interview to a Canadian TV journalist. And suddenly she's talking about Tianus Swanepoel. And what she says about her and him is very disturbing. She said that I am Swane Poole's child. He made me. I was so proximate to him, so close to him, that I felt his hatred for me. And I imbibed it and I threw it back at him. By the time he was done with me, I understood that the fight between us was a fight to the death. One of us could survive. We couldn't both survive. And she tells that story and then takes a leap. And I'm not even sure that she is aware of making the leap. She says, therefore, apartheid must end violently, that one side cannot be left standing. Therefore, the task now is to arm as many young black men as possible and to fight. And so a kind of a slippage happens in her between her own personal story and her country story, and there's no daylight between them. The two are the same in her mind. And so when she goes back to Soweto in the middle of the uprisings in 1985, it's with this understanding, it's that there must be an explosion. And where the personal ends and the public begins has become blurred for her. Her personal tussle with her tortures and her people's tussle with the apartheid state have become one, and it's an apocalyptic struggle. And I think that's an important story to tell for a number of reasons. One is that it shows that she was, in fact, a deeply principled person, that she believed from the bottom of her heart that apartheid must end violently, and that she would be prepared to destroy her own life to make that happen. But it also explains where things went off the rails. She did believe in unguarded, unbounded violence. And that is what the group of young men around her delivered. And it was a form of craziness and involved a lot of blood and a lot of death. It's a complex story. It's not about her corruption, it's not about personal gain. It's about her principle, but a very scary set of principles. And it does embody a side to the South African struggle, which is frightening. Insurrections are very liquid, volatile, dangerous moments. And South Africa had an extended insurrection that went on for a couple of years in which the amount of violence and the amount of death was absolutely staggering, from which it's arguable the country never recovered. So in a way, Winnie Mandela embodies something very difficult. But it is a central South African experience that she embodies. And that's possibly why her memory is impossible to kill. It's why she keeps coming back. She carries residues of history with her that are fundamental to what the country is.
- [35:33]
Johnny Steinberg
That was Johnny Steinberg. His book, Winnie and Nelson Portrait of a Marriage, is out now, and it's nominated for the Wolfson History Prize. The winner of that prize will be announced on 2nd December, and you can find out more about it at wolfsonhistoryprize.orguk to listen to interviews we've done with other shortlisted authors over the past few months, then check out the episode description of this podcast where you'll find links to them. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.