South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission appeared to be administering the last rites to the political career of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela this week as a procession of witnesses savaged her with accounts of crimes she allegedly committed in the name of the liberation struggle.
For the first time, the woman who has made something of an art out of survival in the face of overwhelming scandal began to look beaten as former acolytes, friends, comrades and others in the anti-apartheid community tore at her with the gusto of hounds which have cornered a fox.
Hundreds of people crowded into the Johannesburg Institute of Social Science on the outskirts of the city for the hearings into allegations against President Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife.
But notable for their absence were the crowds of fans who used to roar their support for her in the days when she was worshipped as the champion of the anti- apartheid cause.
Instead, her legal team looked helpless to defend her as witnesses attacked her alibi in the murder of Stompie Seipei — the killing which first shattered the myth of the “Mother of the Nation” — and, even more damaging, began to build a picture of a woman seemingly corrupted by power to the point of depravity. The rot set in for Madikizela-Mandela early on the first day of the hearings with the story of an alleged crime which ranks comparatively low in the ranks of atrocity — a common assault.
Maggie Phumzile Dlamini took the stand to recount how she had allegedly been beaten up by Madikizela-Mandela personally, as well as by members of her notorious Mandela United Football Club. Dlamini said the incident happened after she had fallen pregnant by one of Madikizela-Mandela’s drivers, “Shakes”.
She said that shortly after she and Shakes had fallen in love, he “told me that Winnie had come to him in the middle of the night and got under the blanket with him”. He had warned her that if Madikizela-Mandela found out about their relationship she could be in trouble. She was three-months pregnant when Madikizela-Mandela came and fetched her from her home in a minibus and questioned her about the relationship.
Dlamini said she denied there was one, but Madikizela- Mandela told her not to tell lies and began hitting her. “She slapped me in the face and hit me with her fists all over my body and in my stomach.” Some days later she was taken to Madikizela-Mandela’s house in Soweto and accused of lying again. This time Madikizela-Mandela set members of the football club on to her. They beat her badly — hitting her with their fists and kicking her in the stomach — over a five- hour period.
Weeping, Dlamini told the commission she was convinced that her child Tsepo, who was born a month prematurely, had suffered mental injuries from the assaults. Dlamini was followed on the witness stand by Soweto businessman Nichodemus Sono and widow Nomsa Shabalala, who accused Madikizela-Mandela of being behind the disappearance of their two sons.
They told the commission that the two youths vanished after two African National Congress guerrillas had been killed in a shoot-out with the police in Soweto. Sono, a huge man in a dark suit, recounted how he used to help ANC guerrillas, providing them with safe houses and transport. He said that after the shoot-out in which the guerrillas were killed – one of them his cousin — his son, Lolo, was accused of betraying them.
Madikizela-Mandela and members of the football club came around to his house with Lolo in the back of a minibus. The boy, who had been badly beaten, tried to speak to him, but was told by Madikizela-Mandela to “shut up”. He had pleaded with Madikizela-Mandela to let him go, insisting that Lolo was a loyal supporter of the ANC. She refused, saying he was a “spy” and she was taking him away to be dealt with by “the movement”.
Asked by Madikizela-Mandela’s counsel why she would have brought his son around to his house in the first place, Nichodemus Sono said he could only imagine that the boy had told them they could find something at his house in the hope that his father would intervene and save him.
The story of Stompie Seipei’s death was the centrepiece of the testimony by John Morgan, Madikizela-Mandela’s former driver. Morgan told the truth commission that he had driven members of the football club to the Methodist manse, on Madikizela-Mandela’s personal instructions, to collect Seipei and three other youths. He had been present when the youths were taken into a room “next to the jacuzzi” at the back of Madikizela-Mandela’s house and attacked in her presence.
Morgan said Madikizela-Mandela had led the assault, delivering the first blow to Seipei. Members of the football club had then joined in, throwing the boys into the air and letting them “bounce” on the floor. The next day Seipei’s face was “as round as a football. I tried to feed him coffee and some bread as he was not in a position to help himself.” Morgan said that on the third day the teenager was “in a critical condition”.
A Sowetan doctor, Dr Abu Baker Asvat, was brought to the house to treat the boy. “Asvat refused and said the boy should be sent to hospital.” Madikizela-Mandela has been accused of subsequently having killed Asvat.
On the fourth day, Madikizela-Mandela told Morgan to “take the dog and go and dump it”. Seipei was later found in the veld with his throat slit.
Morgan confirmed that the football club had a disciplinary committee which would hand out punishments. “They would undress the young men and squeeze their scrotum and she [Madikizela-Mandela] would peep and go away,” he said.
Madikizela-Mandela appeared to recover her spirits on the second day of the hearings when the steady build-up of the case against her seemed to falter, first with a shaky performance by one of the four youths abducted on her orders.
Pelo Mekgwe was badly discredited when it emerged that he had made a series of conflicting statements over the years, including contradictions in his statement to the truth commission itself.
Looking glamorous in gold necklaces and an elegant silk suit, Madikizela-Mandela smiled her derision at Mekgwe’s faltering testimony.
Later she was making screwball motions to her head, signalling to her former friend, now her most bitter enemy, Xoliswa Falati, that she was a lunatic.
“My hands are not dripping with the blood of the African children,” raged Falati, accusing Madikizela-Mandela not only of individual murders, but of having orchestrated the commuter massacres on South Africa’s trains which nearly wrecked the transition to majority rule in 1994.
Falati drew roars of laughter from the public gallery and had truth commission chair Desmond Tutu threaten her with contempt proceedings several times as she repeatedly let her indignation with Madikizela-Mandela boil over. Falati was followed by Katiza Cebekhulu, who was spirited out of South Africa to prevent his testifying against Madikizela-Mandela in her 1991 trial and has taken refuge in Britain, in the care of the former Tory MP, Baroness Emma Nicholson.
Cebekhulu, who was sworn in as a witness together with Nicholson, told the inquiry that he had seen Madikizela-Mandela murder Seipei. But, in cross-examination, a number of contradictions were pointed out between Cebekhulu’s testimony and statements attributed to him in a recently published book on the “Winnie scandal”, Katiza’s Journey.
One of the commissioners, Yasmin Sooka, drew applause from the public gallery and Madikizela-Mandela when she observed that the book was filled with inaccuracies. But day three of the hearings saw Madikizela-Mandela’s defence being ripped to pieces by testimony from two bishops of the Methodist church.
The demolition began when Bishop Paul Verryn — the Methodist minister whom Madikizela-Mandela originally blamed for her woes, accusing him of sodomising black children in his care — took the witness stand to recall events surrounding the abduction of the four youths which led to Stompie’s death.
Verryn began to weep as he told the commission: “The thing that has been most difficult for me is that, having heard the allegations [that Stompie was a spy], I … I … did not remove him from the mission and get him to a place where he could be safe. I think if I had acted another way he could be alive today.”
Addressing Madikizela-Mandela directly, Verryn said: “My feelings about you have taken me in many directions, as you can imagine. I long for reconciliation. I have been profoundly, profoundly affected by some of the things that you have said about me, that have hurt me and cut me to the quick.” He had battled to find the understanding to forgive her. “I struggle to find a way in which we can be reconciled for the sake of this nation and for the people I believe God loves so deeply.”
Tutu invited Madikizela-Mandela to reply to Verryn, but her lawyer, advocate Ismail Semenya, SC, declined on her behalf saying she would want to do it in private. Verryn was followed by Bishop Peter Storey who had been directly involved in efforts to secure the release of the four kidnapped youths.
Storey presented the commission with a devastatingly detailed account of the kidnapping, based on his contemporary diary entries and notes. He described how Madikizela-Mandela had allegedly lied abut the whereabouts of the youths, the circumstances in which they had been held and detailed efforts by a variety of community and political leaders – including the then president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, from exile in Zambia — to secure their release.
He also recalled a succession of statements by Madikizela-Mandela accusing Verryn of sodomising children and the church of having organised the murder of Asvat to cover up the homosexual scandal.
On Thursday, the commission heard members of the Winnie Mandela Crisis Committee — Sydney Mufamadi, Aubrey Mokoena, Frank Chikane and Sister Bernadette Ncube — squirming as they tried to explain why they failed to take more drastic action when the seriousness of the situation at Madikizela- Mandela’s house became apparent. The crisis committee was established by the Mass Democratic Movement to investigate the abduction of the youths.
Hanief Vally, for the commission, pointed out that according to Storey’s notes he had wanted to go for a court interdict to protect the youths kidnapped by Madikizela- Mandela, but members of the crisis committee, in particular Mokoena, had opposed such action on the grounds that they had “no mandate”.
Vally pointed out that by this stage the football club was known to be engaged in criminal activity: Madikizela-Mandela’s home had been burned down to revenge the rape of a local schoolgirl; Seipei was missing, feared dead; they had firm evidence that others were being held against their will and were displaying injuries.
Mokoena protested that Storey’s diaries could not be relied on. Mufamadi said the boys claimed they had been injured falling out of trees and it was conceivable that they, members of the crisis committee, could have been charged with kidnapping themselves if they had tried to take them away forcibly.