When the screams of the victims became too loud, Xholisa Falati was ordered to sing rousing African revolutionary songs at the top of her voice. ‘If you did not follow Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s orders,’ Falati said simply, ‘you would die.’
So Falati would sing, her voice ringing out across the dark streets of Soweto, to mask the cries of young black activists who were being tortured under interrogation inside the house of the woman then revered as the Mother of the Nation.
Falati told me her story in 1997. She was about to face her former best friend across a courtroom in Johannesburg as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela appeared before a hearing of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where she would answer questions for the first time about her alleged involvement in the murder or disappearance of 17 people.
Rather than expose Winnie’s role in the murder of Stompie Seipei, a 14-year-old boy assaulted at the house in 1988, Falati had gone to prison. But that day, as I went with Falati to a mineshaft outside Johannesburg where Madikizela-Mandela’s victims were allegedly dumped, she was no longer willing to remain silent to save her powerful friend.
‘Winnie Mandela’s hands are dripping with the blood of the people of South Africa,’ Falati said. ‘She is brutal, she is selfish, she has no conscience. She is like Idi Amin.’
The mineshaft was more than a mile deep, and grass grew around it since the supplies of gold had been exhausted more than a decade earlier. Falati said Madikizela-Mandela’s henchmen would take the bodies from the torture session there after she had delivered her verdict on whether they should live or die. Some were accused of being spies for the white apartheid police; others had simply lost her confidence.
The evidence of other witnesses at the inquiry was equally damning. As a group of Madikizela-Mandela’s burly henchmen in dark glasses growled threats at the back of the court, they charged that Winnie personally whipped black activists, put plastic bags over their heads and ordered her henchmen to ‘take the dogs away’ as she swigged from a brandy bottle.
Last week, after a charmed life that saw her travel in the public mind from the adoring wife of Nelson Mandela to a terrifying presence against her own people, Winnie was finally sentenced to five years in jail for her part in a complicated fraud.
Like Al Capone, she fell foul of her quest for money. But many – not least her countless victims – believe she should be serving life imprisonment for torturing the black oppressed she purported to champion.
Until Judge Peet Johnson delivered his verdict in Pretoria, saying that the accused had not shown ‘one hint’ of remorse, Winnie had proved a remarkable survivor, even after she was branded an ‘unblushing liar’ and was given a fine for her role in Seipei’s death in 1991. At the time, she was convicted of kidnapping, but not of murder – she supplied an alibi saying that she had not been in Soweto on the night he died.
Despite Madikizela-Mandela’s conviction, the scars will not fade for many. After she had fiercely denounced the allegations of murder and torture six years ago in that stifling Johannesburg civic court, I drove out to Soweto, where the bulk of black South Africans continued to live in abject poverty.
Nico Sono, a taxi driver and former ANC activist involved in gun-running, was a man with sad eyes who lived in a small shack a mile or so from where Winnie’s family lived in an opulent building with a swimming pool. Lolo, his eldest son, was abducted by members of the notorious Mandela United football club, a group of thugs who were devoted to Winnie and had been linked to a series of murders in black townships during the apartheid era.
‘Winnie Mandela appeared outside my home in a vehicle with Lolo,’ Sono told me. ‘Lolo was bleeding and badly bruised. She accused him of being a police informer, just because he had been taken in for questioning. I begged, I pleaded, for Lolo’s life. She said the movement would decide what to do with him and that he was a dog. They drove off. I have never seen my son again.’
Cradling a picture of Lolo, Sono’s wife Carolyn fought back tears. ‘It has been terrible,’ she said. ‘We know that Lolo was killed. We just want his bones back so that we can bury him. I will ask her [Winnie Mandela] the same thing until the day I die: give us the bones of our son.’
I listened for days as people queued up to give evidence to the commission about Winnie’s involvement in township atrocities. This included testimony that her alibi in the Seipei murder was bogus.
Katiza Cebekhulu, a former member of Mandela United, stated that he saw Winnie stab Seipei twice in the neck. Cebekhulu also claimed that he was tortured after discovering a photograph of Winnie and lawyer Dali Mpofu, then Winnie’s boyfriend, making love while Nelson Mandela was still in prison.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as ever, remained defiant after the verdict against her on Friday, punching a fist into the air after emerging from court and saying she would appeal against the sentence. Even if that fails, she will be allowed out of prison in less than a year, serving the remainder of her sentence doing community service.
She will undoubtedly take the secrets of what went on in her Soweto home to the grave. And in Nico and Carolyn Sono’s house there will never be singing again. Not while the bones of their boy, and untold numbers of other sons, are still missing – denied a proper African burial so that they can enter the world of their ancestors. – Guardian Unlimited Â