Winnie Mandela yesterday vehemently denounced Wednesday’s “ignominious” attack on her outside the Cape Town Supreme Court as the work of “hooligan elements obviously orchestrated by the system”.
Mandela says the incident was part of the state’s propaganda campaign against the, “authentic leaders” of South Africa’s majority. She accuses the SABC of wildly exaggerating the number of people involved in the attack.
“I heard them say there was a mob of about 500. There were no more than 30,” she said at a press conference at her Soweto home yesterday.
“The people who participated in that incident were the same hooligan element we find among our own communities here, the people who are vigilantes, who take advantage of democratic, peaceful demonstrations and make it appear we have black-on-black violence. That is the element used by the state.
“I feel I want to explain that to the country,” she said. “These are the government’s usual measures — we are not surprised.”
Mandela said her attendance at the trial of Lindi Mangaliso of Guguletu, recently convicted of the murder of her husband Victor, should not be seen as unusual.
“The accused is the daughter of Mr Qunta, who is a veteran of the African National Congress in the Cape,” she said. “Her mother is still an activist. We do not disown our family.”
Newspaper reports suggested that the crowd was angry that a political figure like Mandela was supporting a woman accused of murdering her husband. “You are a public figure and now you associate with a murderess,” bystanders allegedly shouted.
As she left court with members of Mangaliso’s family, Mandela was pelted with eggs, sand, and cooldrink cans. Mandela alleges that as a result of the attack, several witnesses who were to have appeared in mitigation of the accused have withdrawn, fearing similar treatment.
“This was perhaps the reason for the state deciding to orchestrate the whole thing,” she said. She alleged that she saw two journalists “with her own eyes” directing crowds and “actually positioning them in such a way that they could take photographs of the incident”.
The head of the Release Mandela Committee, Aubrey Mokoena, said “the attack is obviously highly outrageous. We have had telephone calls from activists in Cape Town saying this can only be the system; people who are so outraged that they are on the point of getting into buses and rushing to Cape Town and going for these miserable creatures who engineered this scandalous attack on the Mother of the Nation.”
The state had failed with propaganda attempts like the “Bureau song”, according to Mokoena and was trying to present the world with a picture of South African blacks “at each other’s throats”.