Ma Sisulu had been imprisoned several times for defiance of apartheid laws. She had been tortured, held in solitary confinement, banned and put under house arrest for ten years. Her three children had also been detained at various times. In late 1958 she and Winnie Mandela were imprisoned together for defying the notorious pass laws.2 It was the first time that Winnie, then only 24 years old and pregnant with her first child, Zenani, had been arrested. Winnie started to bleed on the stone floor of the cell in Johannesburg’s Old Fort Prison. Ma Sisulu, a trained midwife, took charge. She removed her own overcoat and covered Winnie to keep her warm while making her eat some food. The haemorrhaging slowed and eventually stopped and the threatened miscarriage was averted.3
The episode should have bonded the two women who had so much in common, but thereafter they grew apart, and their mutual disapproval became outright hostility. During Winnie’s internal exile in Brandfort, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in 1983 to take up the work of the banned ANC. Ma Sisulu helped found the movement and was appointed its co-president.
The honour paid Albertina seemed to infuriate Winnie. It appeared that she resolved on return from exile in Brandfort to have nothing to do with the UDF and to act as a free agent without seeking any mandate from the community. It also seemed to reinforce her resolve to form the Mandela United Football Club.
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Abu-Baker Asvat and Albertina Sisulu became very close. Together they visited squatter camps, where he was addressed as “father”. Albertina helped distribute old clothing and food parcels collected by the Asvat family to the aged, sick and destitute. Ma Sisulu admired the humanity and commitment of a man who at times provided shelter in his own Lenasia home for as many as twenty dirt-poor people at a time.
“My brother had real compassion for people,” Ebrahim Asvat told me. “He treated anyone, regardless of ideology. Once someone was referred to hospital he would visit them there regularly until they were discharged. If he was called out at midnight, he would always go and come back as late as three or four in the morning. Sometimes the police would detain him, or he would close the practice for a week or two and go into hiding. The security police constantly harassed him, making threatening phone calls or searching his home for documents, usually in the early hours of the morning. He persuaded our family to raise money to put black people through college.”
Despite Ma Sisulu’s aversion to the post-Brandfort Winnie Mandela, Abu-Baker maintained his close relationship with the younger woman. He remained Winnie’s personal physician, and she was so close to the doctor that on return from Brandfort she used to dine regularly with him and his family on Friday evenings in Lenasia, together with the Mandela daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, and, occasionally, Football Club members. Mrs Mandela almost always left the Asvat household with the gift of half a freshly slaughtered lamb.
Although Ma Sisulu loved Dr Asvat, she refused to attend the Friday night dinners because of Winnie’s presence there.
Zhora Asvat, too, was uncomfortable with Winnie, especially since she sometimes arrived drunk, which is completely taboo in traditional Muslim households. But in the face of her husband’s long-term commitment to the Mother of the Nation, Zhora was powerless to caution him effectively.
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Abu-Baker’s loyalty was so great that when on Friday, 30 December 1988, John Morgan drove Mrs Mandela, Xoliswa Falati and Katiza Cebekhulu to his surgery in the Soweto suburb of Rockville, Winnie was sure of a warm welcome.
While Morgan stayed outside in the minibus and Falati waited in the reception area with Ma Sisulu, Winnie and Cebekhulu entered the consulting room to be greeted by Asvat, who, according to Cebekhulu, laughed and asked: “What have I done to deserve a visit by big people like this?”
“We’ve come with a very big problem,” Winnie replied. “This young boy has been sodomised by Paul Verryn.”
The smile, Cebekhulu recalled, disappeared from the doctor’s face. Asvat knew Verryn well and regarded him as a friend. He said he did not believe what Mrs Mandela was telling him, but she demanded that Abu-Baker examine Cebekhulu and issue a signed medical report confirming homosexual rape the previous day.
Dr Asvat ushered Cebekhulu into an examination booth, and after asking him to describe the rape he took an anal smear with a cotton swab. He also took a blood sample, checked Cebekhulu’s heart and pulse, and measured his weight. Back in the consulting room, he asked Winnie why she had not brought the youth earlier. He told her the smear would not prove anything because Cebekhulu had since been to the toilet and bathed following the alleged sexual assault. He told Mrs Mandela to return in two weeks for the results of the lab tests on the samples. John Morgan drove Winnie back to her house without the medical report she had sought.
Ebrahim Asvat told me in several interviews that the routine medical visit card filled out that day by his brother showed that Winnie Mandela could not possibly have been 360 kilometres away in Brandfort between 29 and 31 December 1988. The medical card clearly showed the date of Winnie Mandela’s visit to the surgery with Cebekhulu to have been Friday, 30 December 1988. The date was to become of critical importance at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing into the activities of Mrs Mandela’s Football Club in November–December 1997, helping the commission establish that Mrs Mandela’s alibi was false. Details from the date-stamped medical card were duplicated in the meticulous double-entry logbook maintained by Ma Sisulu and her assistants. The date on the medical card and that in the logbook were the same: 30 December 1988.4
On the card Cebekhulu’s name was entered in handwriting and his address was given as Paul Verryn’s at the Methodist church in Orlando West, Soweto. Next to the stamped date there was additional writing, identified by Ebrahim Asvat as Abu-Baker’s, which made no reference to Mrs Mandela’s allegation that Cebekhulu had been raped by Verryn. Instead, Abu-Baker wrote only that Cebekhulu was mentally confused, tearful and hysterical and that he was suffering from insomnia. The doctor prescribed sleeping pills, paracetamol and multivitamin tablets.
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That same evening, following the visit to the surgery, Thabiso Mono said Stompie was subjected to another savage beating. Gybon Khubeka, one of the Football Club’s main “enforcers”, accused Stompie of being a police informer and asked him why he had sold out people who were fighting for liberation. Stompie could not answer because he was so badly injured, and Khubeka reacted by kicking him, just like a piece of rag, saying: “I’m not going to use my hands. If I use my hands, I can kill you.” The more frustrated Khubeka became with Stompie’s failure to answer, the more heavily he kicked him.
The next morning – Saturday, 31 December – Stompie’s condition was worse. A huge lump had risen on the side of his head. He was still unable to speak and every time he tried to eat he threw up and was forced by Football Club members to clean up his own vomit.
Mono described to me how he felt he was living through a nightmare as he watched Khubeka assault Stompie. “Gybon was a very big and tough guy. He kept saying Stompie was an informer and he couldn’t live with informers. He kept kicking Stompie against the wall. He kicked him very heavily. Stompie was in a terrible state afterwards. The whole of the following day [Saturday] he was vomiting and he couldn’t eat.”
Later, the state would prepare a case against Khubeka for the assault on Stompie. But before he was brought to trial, Khubeka fled the country to an unknown destination in East Africa.5
Chapter 6
Dr Asvat, overwhelmed by terror, tells his friend about Stompie’s terrible injuries
If you can do no good, at least do no harm.
Kurt Vonnegut
Winnie Mandela now became deeply alarmed by the extent of Stompie Moeketsi’s wounds. She telephoned Dr Asvat and begged him to come to check the small boy. On arrival he examined Stompie’s head, ears and chest. He checked the other boys too: their wounds were less serious. He rubbed some ointment into their injuries before turning to Winnie and asking: “Who beat the boy like this?” Mrs Mandela told him Stompie had climbed a tree and fallen from a branch. Dr