Stompie began clashing with Verryn’s housekeeper, Xoliswa Falati. Verryn arrived home one evening to find Stompie cowering in terror after Falati had questioned him and then beaten him after he got into a fight with her eight-year-old son, Mzamo. Falati accused Stompie of being a police informer, presumably because he had been staying with whites, although the Chaskalson family had strong anti-apartheid credentials. Verryn was furious and told Falati to leave the boy alone.
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Soon after Stompie was delivered to her house, according to a range of witnesses,16 Winnie launched her assault on him, first punching him before asking for a sjambok. She called Stompie “a little shit” and began whipping him and the others on their backs until the sjambok broke in two. Other Football Club members were also punching the boys, all the time singing ANC anthems so that neighbours would not hear their cries and wailing. All the youths denied sexual relations with Paul Verryn.
Richardson began hitting Stompie on his knees and feet with a Coca-Cola bottle. Each time a boy fell to the floor he was kicked until he rose. The more they begged for mercy, the more the assaults intensified. Eventually Stompie fell unconscious. Someone poured water over him and Morgan told Winnie that things had gone too far. She took no notice and began whipping Stompie yet again, telling him and the others, “You are not fit to be alive.” She stopped, put her hands beneath Stompie’s armpits and ordered Cebekhulu to take hold of his legs and help her lift him high above their heads. From there Stompie was thrown down onto the concrete floor. This was repeated several times, with Richardson taking over from Cebekhulu. Each time Stompie was dropped, sometimes on his head, Winnie and her Football Club are alleged to have shouted, “Breakdown!”
As the sun went down there was blood on the floor and walls of the back cabin where the kidnapped youths were interrogated. All began confessing that they had slept with Paul Verryn in order to prevent further punishment. Stompie’s face was swollen and the top of his skull was soft and bruised, as though broken, and there was blood coming out from both nostrils and both ears. Some say Stompie sustained permanent brain damage.17
Accounts of how long the assaults lasted vary between 45 and 50 minutes. Richardson told Stompie and the others to wash and gave them blankets to make beds on the floor of one of the outside rooms. Richardson lectured them on the rules of the house: they were not to try to escape, they were to be obedient and, as a reward for good behaviour, they might be sent out of South Africa to train as ANC freedom fighters.
Cebekhulu, in testimony to the TRC and in a written statement given beforehand to Archbishop Tutu and his commissioners, said he woke on the morning of Friday, 30 December – a day when Mrs Mandela would later argue she was “somewhere else”, 360 kilometres away – and wandered into the back courtyard, where he found Stompie and the other kidnapped youths sitting around. Richardson ordered them to clean the courtyard and the room in which they had slept, with specific instructions to get rid of their own remaining bloodstains.
Stompie’s head was swollen and bruised and his wounds were still bloodied. He indicated to Cebekhulu with hand movements that he could not see and that he was thirsty. When Cebekhulu fetched water, Stompie could not lift the cup. As Cebekhulu began to raise the cup to Stompie’s lips, he claimed, Winnie Mandela stormed from the house and shouted that he was not to be given food or drink.
She then ordered Cebekhulu to come with her to see her personal doctor, Abu-Baker Asvat, to inform him of the rape by Paul Verryn.
Chapter 5
Mrs Mandela’s physician pays a visit
Give a child love, laughter and peace.
Nelson Mandela
Dr Abu-Baker Asvat was a radical, politically committed South African of Indian descent with a medical practice in Soweto, who had first met Winnie Mandela in the late 1970s. He was very popular in Soweto. The gregarious son of a Muslim shopkeeper, he was fiery when confronting injustice. Outside surgery hours, he and his wife, Zhora, drove into squatter camps towing a caravan packed with medical supplies to treat the poorest of the poor who had no access to medical care, charging no fees for their drugs or time.
Asvat was known in Soweto both as “the people’s doctor” and also as Hurley, because as a young man his favourite soccer player was Charlie Hurley, a famous centre half for the northern England club of Sunderland, where fans revered him as “The King”. Dr Asvat, well over 1.9 metres tall, was renowned for his personal warmth and his sharp and bawdy sense of humour, especially when shouting taunts in Gujarati across cricket fields. He was mischievous, sometimes phoning close friends at crack of dawn and growling in fluent Afrikaans: “This is John Vorster Square [the notorious Johannesburg police headquarters]. You must report to us immediately.”
During the 1976 Soweto Uprising by black schoolchildren against apartheid rule, Asvat organised the transport of wounded and dying students to his surgery for treatment in complete disregard for his own safety. He was sometimes taking care of more than a hundred patients a day during the revolt, never refusing to see those who could not afford to pay. On one occasion his surgery was flooded with so many children wounded in battles with the police that he resorted to teaching patients in his waiting room how to remove buckshot from the backs and scalps of screaming victims. Like all prominent anti-apartheid activists, Asvat endured police harassment for years. In January 1978 he filed an affidavit after a Special Branch major beat him severely and threatened his life while under detention in a Soweto police station.
After Winnie was exiled to Brandfort, Dr Asvat used to visit her there between 1977 and 1985. His mobile clinic became so successful in Brandfort’s Phathakahle that he in effect became the township’s doctor, building a small cabin behind Mrs Mandela’s house as an examination cubicle and waiting room. On each trip he left behind medical supplies and maize meal for Winnie to administer and distribute.
Asvat’s radicalism had several roots. His father, a prosperous shopkeeper in Vrededorp, an Indian inner suburb of Johannesburg, urged his sons to do something more interesting with their lives than selling rice, lentils and detergents. Get a profession, he urged them in the days when most vocations in South Africa other than medicine, the law and teaching were closed to non-whites.
Abu-Baker’s elder brother, Ebrahim, opted for medicine and left to study in Pakistan. His younger brother followed. Abu-Baker entered the Department of Medical Studies at the University of Rajshahi in former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, before transferring to Karachi University, whose medical degrees were recognised in South Africa – unlike Rajshahi’s. He returned home deeply radicalised. His anger intensified when in 1973 his parents were forcibly removed from their doublestorey, colonial Victorian house with delicate ironwork and wide verandahs in Vrededorp to a new Indian township location, Lenasia, more than thirty kilometres out of Johannesburg. “We got peanuts for our property, and then the government broke it down,” Ebrahim Asvat told me in one of many interviews I conducted with him.1
Coronation Hospital in Coronationville in Johannesburg, and Natalspruit Hospital, in the township of Katlehong, where Abu-Baker first worked after his return from Pakistan, served coloured and black communities respectively. But all the senior staff were white: their salary structures were higher and their leave entitlements were better than those for Indians and coloureds, whose own salaries were in turn better than those of blacks. The whites’ tea and rest rooms were separate and their conditions were superior to those for non-white personnel. Abu-Baker fought constantly with the hospital authorities about these discriminatory practices. He was disciplined several times and was eventually reported to the provincial authorities and sacked.
Abu-Baker bought Ebrahim’s private practice in Soweto. He hired as his surgery nurse and receptionist Mrs Albertina Sisulu, wife of Walter Sisulu. Albertina was a courageous and disciplined woman; she was patient and unpretentious. While Winnie Mandela was far more glamorous and openly confrontational, Albertina had a calmness and composure which drew people towards her for support and solace in