In 1953 Winnie came up to Johannesburg to become a social worker, living at the Helping Hand hostel in Jeppe Street and studying at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, above the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. She went around with two other attractive young students, Marcia Pumla Finca and Harriet Khongisa, together with Ellen Kuzwayo, an older student who later became a writer, who tried to protect them from predatory men.38 Winnie was a bright student, and two years later she became the first black social worker at Baragwanath Hospital. She was sociable, spirited, fascinated by clothes and by shoes (which she did not wear until she went to secondary school). ‘I had to become a smart city girl, acquire glamour,’ she explained much later, ‘before I could begin to be processed into a personality.’39
In Johannesburg Winnie went to a few meetings of the Trotskyist Unity Movement, to which her brother belonged, but stayed aloof from politics. One day when she visited a law-court with a friend she saw the towering figure of Mandela coming in to conduct a case, as the crowd whispered his name. Soon afterwards she was introduced to him at a delicatessen by Adelaide Tsukudu, a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital who was soon to marry Oliver Tambo. ‘I didn’t play Cupid,’ Adelaide insists, ‘and Winnie didn’t break up the marriage; it was already crumbling.’40 Mandela was obviously fascinated by Winnie, and kept looking at her. The next day he invited her to lunch, on the pretext of asking her to help raise money for the Treason Trial Defence Fund. His friend Joe Matthews picked her up, and they lunched at Azad’s Indian restaurant.41
Mandela spent as much time as possible with Winnie, between the Drill Hall and his law office: ‘I was both courting her and politicising her,’ he remembered.42 He was able to wrest her away from a rival, who turned out to be none other than his opponent and nephew Kaiser Matanzima, and he introduced her to his political friends, including Indians and whites. In the midst of the treason ordeals, they were not sure what to make of this innocent-looking twenty-two-year-old, with her lively talk, her fascination with clothes and her big, soulful eyes, who seemed to belong to a quite different world. ‘She was very glamorous but terribly shy,’ said Paul Joseph’s wife Adelaide. ‘She was very innocent and naïve,’ remembered Yusuf Cachalia’s wife Amina. Mandela took Winnie to Rusty Bernstein’s house on Sundays, where she would sit in the Bernsteins’ daughter’s bedroom reading fashion magazines. ‘She was right outside the political circle,’ said Bernstein, ‘but Nelson didn’t worry about that.’43 Winnie embraced Mandela’s political friends as her own: she stayed with Ismail and Fatima Meer in Durban, idolised Lilian Ngoyi, regarded Helen Joseph as a mother, and saw Tambo as a father-figure.44 She was awed by Mandela’s air of authority as a hereditary chief ‘who would not listen to a woman … The way he walks, the way he carries himself he is in fact paramount chief.’
Mandela never formally proposed, but Winnie found herself swept into matrimony. Her family worried about the risks. ‘My father was totally against the marriage,’ she says now. ‘My sisters literally cried, and they begged me not to marry such an older man.’ They warned her that Mandela would end up in prison, and that she would be ‘just an instrument’ to keep the house going and to visit him.45
But they were in love. Mandela had now divorced Evelyn, and in June 1958 he and Winnie were married, a year after they had met. Mandela was allowed a six-day relief from his bans to travel down to the Transkei for the wedding celebrations, first at the ancestral home of the Madikizelas, then at Bizana town hall, accompanied by friends including Ruth Mompati and the white communist Michael Harmel. In his speech Winnie’s father warned her that Mandela was already married to the struggle, and that if she wanted to be happy with her in-laws she must do what they did: ‘If your man is a wizard, you must become a witch.’46 Mandela would lovingly call her a witch in his letters.
Mandela returned to the constraints of the Treason Trial, and his beautiful young wife provided an exotic contrast to the sombre tedium and commitment of the courtroom. His dramatic appearances with Winnie, both with wide smiles, seemed to belong to showbiz rather than to politics, and his image acquired a new dimension: not just the lawyer and revolutionary, but the lover with the adoring partner. They were visibly fascinated with each other, with a sense of drama which was heightened, as in a wartime romance, by the obstacles and dangers they faced. Through his long years in jail Mandela would relish the times they could snatch together, and would recall their former life: ‘Do you remember the wonderful dish you used to prepare for supper? The spaghetti and simple mince from some humble township butchery! As I entered the house from the gym in the evening that flavour would hit me full flush in the tongue.’47
But his marriage to a passionate girl, with her own demands, and with all the complications of three alienated stepchildren, did not provide the kind of stable home base which many of his political friends took for granted. Walter Sisulu still had Albertina as his ‘backbone’, subsidising his own meagre pay and sharing all his political commitment: ‘I could rely on her, and there was no complaining … she had mastered the situation in an amazing way, and that gave me wonderful courage.’48 Mandela’s life with Winnie was more exciting, but more distracting, less predictable; while she was soon aware of how much politics dominated his life: ‘He did not even pretend that I would have some special claim to his time,’ she remembered. ‘There never was any kind of life I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life where you sit with your husband. You just couldn’t tear Nelson from the people: the struggle, the nation came first.’49
Winnie very soon developed her own political ambition and instinct. ‘I discovered only too soon how quickly I would lose my identity because of his overpowering personality – you just fizzled into being his appendage, with no name and no individuality except Mandela’s … I vowed that none of this should apply to me.’50 Her older friend Ellen Kuzwayo observed that she was drifting away from routine social work.51 She began to attend meetings where her white friends Helen Joseph and Hilda Bernstein taught black women about public speaking; but she soon burst out: ‘I don’t think we need to be taught how to speak. From our suffering we can just tell people how we feel.’ She began to find her own voice, with an expressiveness and empathy which amazed her teachers. And she began campaigning with a powerful populist instinct, bypassing the more conventional speeches of the ANC leaders. ‘She wasn’t bothered about being in the limelight,’ said her Indian friend Adelaide Joseph. ‘She wanted to be there with ordinary people.’52
Winnie was soon drawn into the women’s struggle, which had been gathering momentum in the wake of the Defiance Campaign. It showed its strength when the government determined to make women carry the hated pass-books which controlled Africans’ movements, which until then had applied only to men. The ANC formed the Federation of South African Women, affiliated to its Women’s League, which by August 1956 organised a march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister, Hans Strijdom. The marchers arrived singing their militant anthem: ‘Strijdom you have tampered with women. You have struck a rock.’53