Angella Johnson
SHE was banned earlier this year from visiting British prisons amid accusations that she had nearly provoked a riot. In South Africa she is accused of obstructing attempts by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to interview a former member of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s notorious football team about the murder of “Stompie” Seipei, and the disappearance of four other youths in a separate incident.
Emma Nicholson, the former British Conservative MP who defected to the Liberal Democratic Party in 1995, seems to thrive on getting people’s backs up – usually when she is busy championing the cause of the underdog.
It was while challenging the Tory government’s policy of detaining asylum- seekers that this once grande dame of the Tory party was declared persona non grata at any penal establishment. It was alleged that during a visit to a detention centre she caused detainees to become “very noisy and angry” after she asked women if they had been raped.
Her latest cause clbre is Katiza Cebekhulu, believed to have evidence concerning allegations of Madikizela- Mandela’s involvement in the disappearance of four youths in Soweto and the death of Seipei.
Nicholson says Cebekhulu does not want to return to South Africa because he fears for his life. She guards him jealously and will not reveal his whereabouts: he is believed to be in Britain or Zambia (where she first met him).
A recent visit to London by the truth commission’s investigation head, Dumisa Ntsebeza, failed to find Cebekhulu. Without his testimony, the commission is pessimistic that it will ever get to the bottom of the youths’ disappearance.
Nicholson calls herself Cebe-khulu’s “self- styled champion” and argues that as she holds “full and legal power of attorney” for him, she is able to testify on his behalf. “I offered interview time with myself to the TRC last month … but they were unable to take it up,” she says.
It is not the first time that Nicholson has taken a refugee under her wing. A liberal feminist with a broad range of interests, she adopted an Iraqi boy called Amar after discovering him at a London hospital with burns over 45% of his body.
So just who is this do-gooder? Born 55 years ago into British aristocracy, her mother was the daughter of a Scottish earl, her father a Tory MP and baronet, with a history of Tory fidelity stretching back generations. Three uncles, 10 cousins, her grandfather and three great-grandfathers were all in Parliament.
The Tory party was her inheritance. When she defected, she was vilified and ridiculed by her old colleagues, dismissed as menopausal and hysterical, and described as a woman spurned and vengeful.
There are jokes alluding to the fact that she didn’t marry until the age of 45, the implication being: who would have this harridan? Critics also claim her defection came from disappointment that she had not risen very high in the party’s ranks.
It was so different back in 1983 when she was made a vice chair of the party. But Nicholson made herself unpopular. The party’s then chair, Norman Tebbit, has said that he remembers endless pressure from her for bigger offices, grander furniture, new curtains, more staff. When he had had enough of her tantrums and empire-building, she left with no political credit.
Even in a party full of hunger for office, Nicholson’s ambition glowed. One senior politician is reported to have said of her: “Poor Emma; if only there was a Pulitzer Prize for ambition, she’d win it every year.”
Many people tolerated her brashness out of sympathy for the way she had overcome the handicap of deafness. Nicholson lost much of her hearing in her teens through illness, ending a promising musical career.
But the goodwill appears to have dissipated, even as she gears up to speak for the underprivileged and needy. It seems an irresistible duty in her. And, of course, it will keep her name in the headlines.