The house on the hill. That’s what Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home in Johannesburg is, not far from 8115 Vilakazi Street where she and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela started their married life together.
That home is now a museum, a vestige of their anti-apartheid days, and a mandatory tick mark for tourists. Winnie moved to her present home on the hill after Mandela’s release in 1990.
It’s a red-brick structure with imposing walls and brawny security guards at the gate.
Inside the home, in three levels, we pass a living room choc-a-block with Mandela photos, portraits and paintings. They are everywhere, on the walls, tables, floors, and are probably gifts, from diplomats and presidents. There’s more. Entire showcases filled with chinaware, crystals and collectibles. Rugs cover every conceivable floor and tables groan under the weight of glossy books and glass vases. There is Indian art too: a large Nataraja statue welcomes visitors at the door.
We step into “the Angola room”. Zindzi appears in a black skirt and polka-dot top, her hair coiffured. She says this room is filled with gifts to Mandela from the Angolan president following his release from prison. More rugs here too. The highlight of this room is a wooden dining table with – now rickety – red velvet chairs.
“It’s like a museum,” Winnie says when we meet her later.
The room overlooks an expansive garden, with a fountain and benches. Zindzi says every plant and tree here has been planted by ‘Mama’.
“She is so creative, she spends time in the garden every day.”
These days, Winnie is recovering from a surgical procedure. We wait a while before she materialises on the staircase, in a traditional Xhosa dress and African beaded jewelry. This is the ceremonial mourning attire stipulated by custom and the family’s elders, worn for a year in honor of Mandela’s passing.
Winnie is still quite a head-turner at 78, and has a graceful gait.
This is a woman who has led an extraordinary life, a courageous and controversial life, as a revolutionary in South Africa’s liberation movement leading up to Mandela’s release from prison after 27 years and the country’s freedom in 1994. She continues to be popular among her supporters as ‘Mother of the Nation’, and has been the subject of books, films and two operas.
Winnie smiles genially, her eyes look tired, but she is ready to roll.
She is emotional when she starts speaking about the late South African president.
His final moments, when he breathed his last, keep coming back to her.
“It has been a very difficult year. There will never be a sense of closure,” she begins.
“There will never be another funeral like that. That was heavy. I wouldn’t like to see anything like that again, the image of my children walking past their father’s body with millions of other people. Death is such a personal thing, so private, they were not allowed to even have him in his death. They had to in fact share him more with the rest of the world…I cannot wipe out the image of Zindzi and Zenani walking past that coffin at the Union Buildings. It is something I wake up and see in the dead of night on those days when it is difficult to live with the past.”
She sighs loudly.
Winnie’s eyes well up as she speaks, slowly, recounting those final moments by Mandela’s side. Her daughters were in London at the time attending the royal premiere of Anant Singh’s Mandela biopic, Long Walk To Freedom. It was during the film’s screening that news about his death came.
“The circumstances surrounding that particular day were very difficult. I got a call from Zindzi, who alerted me she had heard her father was critical. I rushed [to the hospital] and when I arrived…the doctors let me sit next to his head. He was breathing with difficulty. But his face looked very calm. I sat there for three-and-a-half hours. I was just going downstairs at one point, and the doctors called me back and said ‘Mama, you can stand close to him’. I knew what they meant. He was breathing hard and pulled three deep breaths. The last one was very long, he had this smile on his face and he still moved his lips. And he was gone!”
And when it happened, the words “till death do us part” came to Winnie’s mind, she says, as she harked back to that day in June 1958 when she married Mandela.
“And that’s exactly what happened, I happened to be there. I just felt this excruciating pain. I didn’t know how they [her daughters] were going to be told. In fact, from that day, I have kept trying to imagine how they must have felt on that flight back…My eldest step-daughter [who was there] was wonderful in trying to bring order and comfort. I never dreamt I would witness [his final moment]. But for some reason, God decided I should be there…It was particularly rewarding that I managed to hold him when he pulled his last breath. It brought back all the memories of our struggle and what one had gone through politically, and a certain chapter was just closed.”
For Zindzi, that moment meant losing the father she had missed all her life, the 27 years that he was imprisoned by the white government in South Africa.
In the months before he died, aged 95, she had been a constant by his bedside, as he was in and out of hospital.
“All those health scares he had…you were mentally prepared, but not emotionally prepared to let go of somebody you have missed your entire life. The few years you have been given with him, you just wished to prolong and extend. Every moment counted. He had become so repetitive in the latter years, because of the ageing process, but we had learnt that even if he was telling a story for the 20th time, to enjoy as if we were hearing it for the first time,” says Zindzi.
Soon after his release from prison, on 11 February 1990 – when Winnie famously walked with him, hand in hand, clenched fist in the air – Mandela had returned to 8115, the house on Vilakazi Street. In his book, Long Walk To Freedom, he retells that moment: “For me, No. 8115 was the centrepoint of my world, the place marked with an X in my mental geography.”
“The house was too cramped,” says Zindzi, “so Mama moved to this house in Soweto thereafter.”
Winnie and Mandela were married
38 years.
“Were we? asks Winnie. The number escapes her now.
And then says: “We were never together. I was the most unmarried married woman.”
Freedom fighters don’t have personal lives. The years Mandela was imprisoned were most “difficult” as Winnie continued the defiance struggle. In 1969, she was jailed for almost 18 months, thrown into solitary confinement. How did the family cope?
Winnie passes on the question to Zindzi: “I think you should answer that.”
“I was 18 months old when my dad went to prison. I was a grown woman with three children when he came back. In between, I never always had my mother home, because she was often incarcerated herself,” says Zindzi.
At this point, her eyes well up.
“It wasn’t easy because the system was unbelievably brutal and harsh even to children… because one had to find oneself in adult spaces, making adult decisions and choices whilst still a child.”
When she was five, and her sister Zenani, six, they went to boarding school in Swaziland, because they couldn’t go to school anywhere in South Africa – the security forces said no.
“The moment we got to a school, the security police would get there, harass the principal, and we would be thrown out. We were literally on a tour of schools. At some stage we had to play colored, we straightened our hair, we changed our identities, and [still] they caught up with us. It reached a stage where my mother was now stuck at home with two children who couldn’t go to school…they wanted to break her, and break my father…they wanted to say, ‘even your children will have no normalcy in their childhood’,” says Zindzi.
They were shunted from school to school, spending various stages of their childhood living in other homes. When they returned home from boarding school, the authorities would take their mother away.
“On the day that school closes, we would come back to the house, and find mother has been locked up that same morning. This became a pattern, where, as children, we would come home and not even know where the key was…Somebody [would] take us and dump us with aunts. But then I was given an extended family, because of the choices my parents made, and choices, that mind you, if I were to do all over again, I wouldn’t change anything.”
Zindzi says she is grateful for those years, as they taught her to be self-reliant and determined.
“I have learnt to respect the strength of an African woman because of the example set by my mother…She taught us a strong work ethic. I started working at the age of 13.”
Winnie finds it hard to describe her own experience of those years, especially the indignity of her time in prison, and then her exile in Brandfort, in South Africa’s Free State. In her book, 491 Days, published by Pan Macmillan, she shares her despair
and resilience.
“It’s not possible to attribute precisely how one coped. It was particularly painful in the sense that it actually dawned on me that our freedom was so priceless…I didn’t know where my children were, and they were so young. I hate to revisit that chapter. I decided to bury it for years in my subconscious mind so I could deal with the pain differently, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to carry on the task bestowed on me by fate. You had to make a decision then whether you were going to give in to the enemy or fight till the last drop of your blood. I am so grateful my children have turned out the way they are,” says Winnie.
Did she feel anger?
“I don’t think I would be here if I had that continued feeling. As angry as I was during the 491 days, you sort of learn to live with that kind of political background, if you are ultimately rewarded by the liberation of your country.”
We near the end of the interview and as the cameras are put away and the mood lightens, she turns to me and asks: “What is the Mandela legacy actually?”
“It is a political legacy,” she goes on.
“We need to remind future generations that the Mandela legacy is not what you can make out of his name. It’s not about creating entities that are going to give capital. Our legacy is political, it was never about material gain…it’s not about the statues in the country, it’s not about egos. I never wanted to be associated with such things, which is why I am [living] in Soweto. My days will come to an end here with the people I threw stones with.”