But at Mrs Mandela’s subsequent trial in 1991, Morgan told Barkhuizen, he reversed his story and lied on Mrs Mandela’s orders and in concert with others, to a Supreme Court judge by placing her in Brandfort on those crucial dates at the end of December 1988. Judge Michael Stegmann accepted Winnie Mandela’s alibi.
Morgan told Barkhuizen it was true that he had participated in the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi from the manse of Verryn, whose church was in the Soweto suburb of Orlando West and who was accused by Mrs Mandela of homosexually violating Stompie and other young black activists when they sought shelter in the manse while on the run from the apartheid police. Jerry Vusi Richardson, Mrs Mandela’s right-hand man and the Football Club’s so-called chief coach – in fact its chief enforcer – had told Morgan to drive her minibus to the manse to snatch Moeketsi. “Mummy said you must go,” Richardson ordered him. “Mummy” was the term Richardson used to address Mrs Mandela and he insisted that all members of the Football Club also did so. Morgan said that as he left with the kidnap party, Mrs Mandela was sitting in her living room watching a soap opera on television.
Chapter 2
Nomzamo Winifred Mandela
Apartheid was structured in many ways to humiliate, degrade, incapacitate and destroy the possibilities of black South Africans.
Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela was at the time of Stompie Moeketsi’s death one of the most famous women in the world, up there alongside Mother Teresa and as widely photographed as Princess Diana. Tall and strikingly beautiful at 51, Winnie Mandela was revered and honoured at home and abroad as the Mother of the Nation, the wife of an authentic political hero, and the subject of countless hagiographic newspaper, magazine and book profiles that portrayed her as a living martyr to the black liberation cause in the fight against the evil of apartheid.1 Her husband, Nelson, was at that time more mythical than real: he was serving a life sentence imposed at the 1963–4 Rivonia Trial for his part as leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in organising armed resistance to white minority rule. While few people outside Robben Island knew what he looked like, news photos of Winnie and international news reports about her were commonplace. She brought to the outside world a flavour of Nelson’s thoughts and of his state of mind.
Winnie had suffered harsh reprisals for the beliefs of her husband, with whom she had lived for only a short time in broken spells of marriage before he was detained and sentenced to life imprisonment. She once lamented: “I think I am the most unmarried married woman.”2
After Nelson’s arrest in 1962, his wife became the public and international face of the internal struggle to end apartheid. She was subjected by the police and the authorities to a series of legal banning orders which prevented her from living, working and socialising like any ordinary person. She was prohibited from publishing statements or addressing more than one person at a time; she was subjected to house arrest and terrorised by constant police harassment and arbitrary detention.
In May 1969 the security police burst into her home and arrested her. As she was dragged off, her daughters, then aged ten and nine, clung to her skirt, begging the police to leave their mother alone. Winnie was then imprisoned without charge for seventeen months under the 1967 Terrorism Act, a draconian piece of apartheid legislation which allowed police to detain individuals indefinitely for questioning without access to a lawyer. “Terrorism” was broadly defined and, because there was no requirement under the Act to release information about those being held, many people just went “missing”. One estimate put at eighty the number of people who died while being held under the Terrorism Act.3 For most of her imprisonment, Winnie Mandela was held in solitary confinement. For one continuous period of 160 days she was not allowed a bath or a shower. Her sanitary bucket was emptied once a day, but was never properly cleaned. Her plate of food at mealtimes was placed on top of the foul-smelling bucket.4 She was interrogated by one of the most notorious apartheid-era security policemen, Major Theunis Swanepoel. “Solitary confinement,” she later wrote, “was designed to kill you so slowly that you were long dead before you died … You had no soul anymore, and a body without a soul is a corpse anyway.”5 One of her biographers wrote that Winnie considered suicide.6
All charges against Mrs Mandela were dropped in February 1970 after she had spent 17 months behind bars.
She was detained again in August 1976 for five months under another harsh apartheid law, the Internal Security Act, which criminalised any organised black political opposition. Imprisonment under the Act required no proof to be offered or charges to be made: it needed only an autocratic declaration by the Minister of Justice, with no appeal permitted. She was released in December 1976, following which the security police strengthened their surveillance of Winnie and served her with an extended banning order before devising for her a new kind of punishment. They decided she had to be removed far from the centre of black resistance in Soweto. “Only if she were to be far from Johannesburg – not in prison, where she had a record of rallying other prisoners and encouraging defiance, but isolated in some remote spot – could she be neutralised,” wrote one biographer.7
Twenty police raided Winnie Mandela’s small “matchbox” house in Orlando West at four o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 16 May 1977. As police poured through her home, emptying cupboards and wardrobes and carrying furniture outside, she thought she was being redetained under the Internal Security Act. But at the local police station, where she was surrounded by heavily armed guards, the commander, Colonel Jan Visser, told her that this time she was neither being charged nor detained. Instead she was being banished to Brandfort, 360 kilometres south-west of Johannesburg in the Orange Free State – on the direct instructions, said Visser, of Jimmy Kruger, the hard-line (even by apartheid standards) Minister of Justice.8 Kruger was determined to crush her. Mrs Mandela was told she would have no legal recourse against the order. She was terrified that she would disappear without trace, as had others before her who had been removed to remote places without any means of communication.
During her nine years of exile in Brandfort, Winnie was not allowed a telephone. Only towards the end of her banishment was she allowed to visit her husband regularly in jail on Robben Island. Friends, colleagues and journalists visited her only with difficulty.
The banishment order was roughly the equivalent of being removed to the Soviet Union’s Gulag. Brandfort was in 1977 a small and dreary white Afrikaner dorp, a rural town in the middle of nowhere with one main shopping street and one old-fashioned hotel reserved for whites only. Winnie was put in a tiny house, number 802, in Phathakahle, Brandfort’s segregated black township, which had a population of five thousand living in chronic poverty with a high rate of infant mortality. Situated as it was on the highveld, seasonal temperatures were extreme – freezing cold nights in winter and baking hot days in summer. The house had an earth floor and an outside pit latrine; there was no piped water or electricity.9
Mary Benson, a renowned anti-apartheid author and activist, wrote of Brandfort: “It was the most alien environment the state could have chosen: politically and culturally the essence of Afrikanerdom; indeed it was here that Hendrik Verwoerd (the architect of Apartheid) had spent formative years as his father hawked Bibles and religious tracts for the Dutch Reformed Church.” Another author described Brandfort as “a one-street hick town populated by 2,000 ultra-conservative whites”.10
Winnie’s forcible removal was meant to render her a “non-person”; it was intended that, for all practical purposes, she cease to exist. But the effect was the opposite. The Brandfort years instead focused international attention on her as a symbol of the white minority’s oppression of the black majority. She became widely regarded as a heroic one-woman resistance army at a time when Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of