Whatever the truth, she seemed to believe that Verryn was challenging her constituency with strong backing from one of the most influential church organisations in the country, the South African Council of Churches. Furthermore, she could not have failed to notice that Paul’s operation went unscathed when the house in which she had lived with Nelson was burned down.12 This attack occurred on 28 July 1988 by pupils from Soweto’s Daliwonga High School on Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house, where she and Nelson and their daughters lived before he was imprisoned.
The tiny house in Orlando West had been set ablaze and destroyed, along with most of Winnie’s letters from her husband, many of her photographs and the slice of cake from their 1958 wedding which she had saved for thirty years in anticipation that he might one day walk to freedom. Albertina Sisulu, the wife of Nelson’s close friend Walter Sisulu, went to see the damage and found many scorched and uncashed cheques from overseas donors strewn amid the wreckage.
The dispute between Mrs Mandela and the pupils had begun in 1987 when some members of the Mandela United Football Club arrived at a soccer field where a match involving Daliwonga High School was in progress. The Football Club heavy-handedly ordered Daliwonga from the pitch, which Winnie’s “team” wanted for a kick-about. A fight broke out and was then settled when the Football Club produced guns and forced the schoolboys to flee. The Daliwonga players and their friends launched a revenge attack: they stoned Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house, causing a lot of damage, and kidnapped two Football Club members whom they took to their school and assaulted until teachers intervened. Then in July 1988 a girl close to the Football Club was gang-raped by Daliwonga High youths. The girl told the Football Club what had happened. The alleged Daliwonga rapists were identified, captured by the Football Club and taken to Mrs Mandela’s new Diep-kloof Extension house, where they were tried, found guilty and beaten up before being released. A Daliwonga schoolgirl was raped as part of the retribution.
Daliwonga plotted counter-revenge. A mob of teenage schoolboys climbed the wall surrounding Mrs Mandela’s “matchbox” house on 28 July 1988 in broad daylight and set it ablaze. Neither Winnie nor any Football Club members were there at the time. But none of the neighbours tried to prevent the attack: as the fire intensified they did nothing to put out the blaze. Fire engines, ambulances and police arrived, but they too did nothing, joining other Sowetans who watched indifferently as Mrs Mandela’s house was totally destroyed.
The torching of the house was barely reported at the time, although many journalists knew the facts. Rian Malan, award-winning author of My Traitor’s Heart, reckoned white reporters and editors did not want to be branded racists; black reporters, on the other hand, were paralysed by fear. “If you lived in Soweto, there are some things you dared not say for fear of being labelled a sell-out. Sell-outs did not live long,” wrote Malan. “One of the township’s most prominent black journalists chuckled bleakly when I asked why the full story of the arson attack on Winnie Mandela’s home hadn’t yet been written. ‘You write it,’ he said. ‘You’re white, you might get away with it.’”
****
Verryn reluctantly accepted Katiza Cebekhulu into his overcrowded manse. According to evidence submitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Cebekhulu was briefed by Mrs Mandela on how to report if Verryn made any sexual advance towards him: he was to inform a woman called Xoliswa Falati, Verryn’s housekeeper and a friend of Winnie. Mrs Mandela added that if Verryn made no approach, Cebekhulu should regardless choose a moment to tell Falati that such a sexual advance had been made. From then onwards Mrs Mandela said she would take over.
Cebekhulu stated that he accepted the mission readily. He was just 16. A refugee in his own country, he was living in Winnie’s house and being fed and clothed better than at any other time in his life. Most of her Football Club members were, like him, broken and deprived in some way: she was glamorous and made them feel important and cared for. It was also the dream of many prominent people to be around her and to visit her, including Senator Ted Kennedy, who described her as a fighter for democracy, US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and innumerable international journalists, many of whom wrote about her uncritically. Cebekhulu loved and respected her and was prepared to do anything in order to impress her.
Stompie Seipei Moeketsi was among the youths in the manse who were on the run from the apartheid police and who hoped to go into exile and become soldiers with Umkhonto we Sizwe. The boys in the manse slept more than one person per bed, but also on sofas and armchairs and under tables. Cebekhulu testified before the TRC years later that Paul Verryn made no sexual advance towards him.13 But, in line with Mrs Mandela’s briefing, he decided on the morning of Thursday, 29 December 1988, after Verryn had left on church business for Potchefstroom, 122 kilometres away, to cry rape. He told Xoliswa Falati that Verryn had raped him while he was sharing a bed with the church minister.
Falati immediately left the manse to tell Winnie what had happened and that other boys, including Stompie Moeketsi, had been molested. Falati added that she believed Stompie might be a police informer.
Winnie sent her raiding party, led by Jerry Richardson, to the manse to kidnap some of the boys whom Falati said had been molested. As John Morgan drove the raiding party and the kidnapped boys back to Winnie’s Diepkloof Extension house, they all sang ANC freedom songs, including, under duress, the four who had been snatched. On reaching the house, the youths were hustled into an outside cabin where, according to Morgan and the accounts of at least five others, Mrs Mandela arrived and accused Stompie and the three other “rescued” youths of allowing Verryn to sodomise them. They all denied this.14 She then focused on Stompie.
****
Stompie Seipei Moeketsi was small for his 14 years, but he had cult status among black South Africans for his leadership of resistance by children against the apartheid police in the small town of Parys, 160 kilometres to the south-west of Johannesburg. Tough and charming, he had mobilised an army of child activists, reputedly fifteen-hundred-strong, aged between 8 and 14, in Tumahole, Parys’s black township. The wider Parys area was a stronghold of diehard white right-wingers whose Nazi-style vigilantes staged raids on Tumahole, ignored by the police, to intimidate and control the strongly pro-ANC black population. Exaggerated stories abounded of how Stompie, when aged only 12, acted as a general of his army and beat back the whites while organising school strikes and consumer boycotts. His legend was enhanced by tales of his jazzy way with words, which led to invitations for him to speak at such places as the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The Moeketsi part of Stompie’s name came from his father, who died when Stompie was an infant. His mother, Joyce Seipei, was an uneducated, unmarried, very poor woman who lived in a corrugated-iron shack without running water or electricity on the edge of Tumahole. Stompie’s stepfather earned a meagre wage as a gardener, and his grandfather, grandmother, younger sister and an uncle all shared the shack.
At the height of his war with the white vigilantes, Stompie said: “Children are better than adults because they are not afraid. Adults run away when the police come.” Although he had quit school when he was only 12, Stompie was intelligent. He played chess, said he wanted to be a scientist and was often quoted as saying: “I don’t mind dying for the cause.” One South African journalist noted: “Stompie epitomised so much of the tragedy that goes with being black and underprivileged. He was a child without a childhood.”15
Stompie had twice been detained for short periods and beaten up by the police. After his second detention spell, he ran away to Johannesburg where at first he slept in railway station waiting rooms. He was later given shelter by a young human rights lawyer, Matthew Chaskalson, the son of Arthur Chaskalson, a member of the legal team that had represented Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial. In November 1988 Chaskalson, who lived in the tree-lined whites-only northern suburbs of Johannesburg, left town on an extended holiday. He asked his friend Paul Verryn if he would let Stompie stay temporarily at the minister’s manse until he returned.
Stompie