The Shope family is ANC aristocracy. So what is it like to leave the party — and launch a breakaway? Lyndall Shope-Mafole tells Mandy Rossouw
It is a slightly annoyed Lyndall Shope-Mafole who sits down to catch her breath in the lobby of the President Hotel in BloemÂfontein after the first day of the Congress of the People’s (Cope) inaugural conference.
”We didn’t start on time,” she says with a sigh. ”That was always the thing that OR [Tambo] taught us. He was obsessive about timekeeping. It was the only thing that did not go right today; everything else was perfect.”
It is shortly before midnight and Shope-Mafole had just returned from the University of the Free State campus in Bloemfontein where the conference is being held.
Picture taken for an
international campaign in
Norway to save the
Sharpeville
six from being hanged
She’s tired but happy. ”You know when you’re so tired you can’t stand up but it is a joyful tiredness?” she asks.
She checks her cellphone. Her mother Gertrude has been trying to get hold of her all day to hear how things went at the conference, but it is too late to call one’s 83-year-old mother.
A bottle of Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon is ordered — of which she will drink just one glass — in celebration of a successful start to the conference.
But she is celebrating much more than that. This year Shope-Mafole did something she never dreamed she would do: she left home.
The Shope family was part of the aristocracy in the ANC — Gertrude was the chief Ârepresentative of the ANC in Lusaka and her father Mark was the representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions at the World Federation of Trade Unions in Prague.
Home was wherever her parents were needed, so Lyndall spent her childhood in Czechoslovakia, Zambia, Tanzania and Cuba. When she got married to Tebogo Mafole in the Seventies, they spent the first years of their marriage in Cairo (where their first son, Kgotso, was born) and later New York, where he was the ANC representative to the United Nations and she was the ANC youth representative. They later had another son, Sandile. Mafole died in 1998 after their return to South Africa.
She remembers those heady days when they lived in world cities but had to survive on the bare minimum because the ANC did not pay salaries.
”You had to fundraise for the party. And then you had to pay your expenses out of it, but you never took enough because you know you fundraise for the struggle, not for your stomach.”
With the struggle over and apartheid defeated, Shope-Mafole became the director general in the department of communications and started her road up the ANC ladder. She was elected to the highest decision-making body, the national executive committee (NEC), at the ANC’s 52nd conference in Polokwane last year.
It was in NEC meetings that she started feeling uncomfortable about the ANC’s new leadership and the utterances made by senior ANC members and the youth league president, Julius Malema. She started feeling the ANC was not doing what was in the best interest of South Africa any more. Then the leadership decided to strip former president Thabo Mbeki of his position. That is when Shope-Mafole started packing her bags.
”It took me three weeks to draft that letter,” she says, referring to the resignation letter she sent to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe, following the NEC decision.
She did not discuss her plan to leave the ANC with anyone, not even her mother. ”I did not want to put anyone in an awkward position. When I told my mother about my decision, I was just telling her, not asking for her input.”
It took a long time for Gertrude Shope to accept her daughter’s decision, but now that Cope is up and running and former senior ANC people such as Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa are involved, she is more at ease, says Shope-Mafole. ”She is not worried anymore that it is just me who’s being wayward. She understands better now.”
After Shope-Mafole sent the letter to Luthuli House, she faxed a copy to Mbeki’s wife, Zanele. ”Shortly after that he [Mbeki] called me. He said it was obvious that I was in a lot of pain but congratulated me for doing what I thought was right. It meant a lot to me, because if you can just get one or two people who you respect that say they support you, it means a lot.”
Although Shope-Mafole has severed all formal ties with the ANC, she still has a cupboard with ANC paraphernalia, T-shirts and caps in her house in Centurion. ”It reminds me of all the conferences and the big events. It is part of my heritage, my roots. I will not throw it away. It will mean something to my grandchildren.”
The way the ANC has been stumbling from blunder to blunder in the past few weeks, with various court cases against Cope, has not been an easy sight for her. ”It hurts. It is like coming out of a bad relationship: you know you have to go but it is not like you stop caring.”
On Sunday during a closed session of the Cope conference Shope-Mafole could not hold back the tears. ”There was such excitement and unity of purpose in that hall today, it reminded me of the ANC in exile. When the Sisulus came to visit once in Zambia after Walter Sisulu was released, you felt convinced that you would be going home soon and South Africa would be free.
”That was the feeling I had today, about that ANC. There was hope and people were so happy. That is the ANC that I will miss.”