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A humorous version of giving street directions in South Africa is “turn left onto Nelson Mandela Boulevard, right on Mandela Drive, straight past the statue of Nelson”. The many biographies of Nelson Mandela reinforce this deification. By contrast, when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died, she was both lionised and demonised.
Deep in the South African psyche is the notion of the Mother (Umama) and Father (Tata) of the nation. We might wonder, what couple has been internalised? What violence has been inscribed into the body and the body politic? To weave a marriage across seismic political change is formidable. The Mandelas' inevitable divorce was met with compassionate respect by a people who know how hardship affects the human psyche.
Jonny Steinberg has produced a searing “portrait of a marriage” that bears close reading by couple psychotherapists. He combines impeccable research with analytic reverie.
Steinberg gained unexpected access to the Coetsee Collection, an archive collected by the last apartheid Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee. It contains intimate conversations recorded by spies, and an exchange of letters between Winnie and Nelson across almost three decades of separation. This love story shows how Nelson survived the interminable twenty-seven years of imprisonment by idealising Winnie, whilst she was drawn inexorably into violence.
Nelson was born in 1918, Winnie in 1936. His father was a Thembu chief in the Eastern Cape, but he grew up in the poverty of a mud hut, tending cattle, until the age of twelve when his polygamous father died. His mother, the fourth wife, then placed him under the Thembu regent's guardianship, which ensured an elite Methodist missionary education for Nelson, and paved the way later for his study of law at Fort Hare.
Winnie's father was also polygamous, taking Gertrude as his second wife. Winnie, their fifth child, suffered the loss of her mother when she was nine. By then Gertrude had given birth to eleven children; two of whom had