George Bizos, Nelson’s close friend and legal ally, said in his 2009 memoir Odyssey to Freedom that Winnie visited her husband frequently when in December 1988 he was moved to a three-bedroom house in the grounds of Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl. “But [she] refused to spend the night with him,” wrote Bizos.11 Nelson spent his final eighteen months of “imprisonment” in the Victor Verster house where he had a swimming pool and personal cook as he began negotiations with the National Party government and received streams of personal and political visitors.
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Looking back, Barkhuizen felt that Nelson’s decision to admit publicly that he had separated from Winnie validated her Sunday Times story. “It was an implicit admission by Mr Mandela of the truth of what Morgan had told me and which he [Morgan] repeated later on national television,” said Barkhuizen. “For me it was a difficult story to do. I felt tremendously conflicted and agonised about the story. I knew that consequences would follow. I was a lot more naive than I am now, but in hindsight it was probably a good thing that it all came out when and how it did.”
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In the wake of Barkhuizen’s story, a succession of people began arriving at the Sunday Times offices, or telephoning, to give her more accounts of the alleged misdeeds of Winnie and the Football Club. “One middle-aged and well-educated Soweto woman claimed that Mrs Mandela and Football Club members arrived at her house and shot her son in the kitchen,” the reporter recounted.
Unnervingly, Barkhuizen arrived at work one day to find that all her notebooks in which she’d recorded her interviews with Morgan and others about Mrs Mandela and the Football Club had somehow been removed from her locked office. She never recovered them. The notes included the account by the Soweto woman of the alleged shooting of her son, and Barkhuizen is convinced that her now-deceased military-connected senior colleague, whom she believes caused her Morgan story to end up with Winnie Mandela before it was published, may also have had a hand in the destruction of her notes.
Some months later Barkhuizen left to manage the Sunday Times office in Port Elizabeth. She has since been absent from Johannesburg for a quarter of a century. “I was relieved to get out,” she said. “I wanted to get away. It was all too harsh and extreme. I was only 32 and wanted a life, and although I was a good hard-news reporter, I wasn’t a political heavy.”12
Chapter 4
A sexual honeytrap
Many people have become uneasy that Mrs Mandela is taking her role as “First Lady” too heavily.
Nomavenda Mathiane
John Morgan’s sensational revelation to Dawn Barkhuizen that he had lied at Winnie Mandela’s trial to save her from prison was not the only evidence that the Brandfort alibi was a fiction.
The origin of the tragic Stompie–Winnie saga can be traced to the arrival in Soweto some time in 1988 of a young boy named Katiza Cebekhulu. He had fled from Mpumalanga, a township on the very edge of Durban in what was then Natal. The area was torn by a terrible war between supporters of the ANC and followers of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party that earned the township the nickname of Little Beirut. Cebekhulu, barely educated and functionally illiterate, had been detained in Mpumalanga for seven months on a charge, along with other members of a gang, of murdering an ANC warlord named Bhekumuzi Nqobo, who was axed in the forehead and bludgeoned to death with baseball bats. Released because of insufficient evidence, Cebekhulu, fearing revenge, moved to Johannesburg, where Mrs Mandela recruited him into her Football Club.
Soon after he had settled in at her Diepkloof Extension home, he said, Mrs Mandela gave him an extraordinary task. He said she had dreamed up a plot to ruin the Reverend Paul Verryn by luring him into a sexual honeytrap: she had chosen Cebekhulu, then aged 16, as the bait.
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Paul Verryn, radical and popular, lived in the small manse next to his big Orlando West church. He was the only white Methodist minister in Soweto at the time – and later, when he became the regional bishop, he continued to live in Soweto for many years.
Verryn, red-haired, bespectacled and stocky, preached fearlessly against apartheid and police brutality. He conducted funerals of blacks and whites who had died at the hands of the police and covert government death squads. I watched in awe as he preached at an illegal multi-faith funeral at St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg in May 1989 for David Webster, a popular Witwatersrand University anthropology lecturer and ANC activist, who had been assassinated that month by a Military Intelligence hit squad. Thousands of people of every colour defied a government ban on the singing of haunting ANC war anthems and the parading of ANC colours as MK fighters carried Webster’s coffin into the cathedral on their shoulders. Verryn put himself at risk of becoming another target of the government’s licensed killers.
Verryn’s Soweto flock totalled about three thousand souls and he was helped by nearly eighty black lay preachers in an era when it took moral commitment and guts for a white person to identify with the voteless black majority. No one doubted Verryn’s commitment to the liberation struggle. Nor did Winnie.
Verryn gave shelter in his manse to scores of youths who were on the run from police because of their anti-government activities. The minister hid others in a farmhouse in the Magaliesberg mountains, to the north of Johannesburg, from where they were smuggled out of the country to join the ANC army in exile. At the time anti-apartheid organisations, such as the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, reported white South African Defence Force soldiers picking children off the streets at random. “The children were beaten with fists and rifle butts, whipped with sjamboks and subjected to electric shock treatment,” said one prominent lawyer.1
People in the wider world beyond Soweto thought of Winnie Mandela as the guardian angel of the people. She often referred youths from Community House, her social work centre, to Verryn, but gradually she came to regard his manse as an opposing power base rather than as a place of refuge for young apartheid opponents. It was a time when race relations were deeply troubled and she seems to have questioned the true motives of an unmarried white man who had chosen to live in a black township.
For years, as the tragic and indomitable wife of the great imprisoned leader Nelson Mandela, Winnie had brought in massive sums of money from foreign organisations and individuals who saw her as the supreme symbol of opposition to apartheid.2 Admirers and sympathisers overseas would put money into envelopes marked “Winnie Mandela” and post them to her.3 But, unknown to outsiders and the international world beyond South Africa, her popularity in Soweto was dwindling because so many families in the community had experienced or witnessed the Football Club’s increasingly violent behaviour.
The gruesome story of the teenage Makanda brothers, Peter and Philip, illustrates the fear Winnie and the Football Club inspired. They were woken one night in May 1987 by a banging on the door of their uncle’s house in Soweto. When their uncle opened the door, three gun-toting men, disguised by stockings over their heads, stormed in. The brothers were forced at gunpoint into a car and made to lie on the floor.
The driver, later identified as John Umuthi Morgan, drove to Mrs Mandela’s tiny “matchbox” house in Orlando West, in which she and Nelson had established their home after their marriage. The Makandas were manhandled into a backyard shack where they saw a third youth who was tied to a chair and bleeding from inflicted wounds. Winnie Mandela entered, gestured towards the youth – who has never been named or found – and