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Why Nelson Mandela Never Forgave Winnie, his Ex-Wife ‘She was Cheating On Him because of Several Lovers She Had’
Nelson Mandela passed away Thursday night. John Carlin in his new book ‘Knowing Mandela,’ reveals why he never forgave the former wife who has visited his bedside.
Winnie
Winnie’s home, funded by foreign benefactors, was a two-floor, three-bedroom house with a garden and a small swimming pool. The height of extravagance by black standards, it would have more or less met the aspirations of the average white, middle-class South African.
Zindzi, Winnie’s slim and attractive second daughter, was 29 but looked younger in a yellow T-shirt and denim dungarees. It was 9.30 a.m. and she was in the kitchen frying eggs. She invited me in and started chatting as if we were old friends. The truth was that I had not scheduled an interview with Winnie. I had just dropped in to try my luck. But Zindzi saw nothing wrong in me giving it a shot.
Mum, she said, was still upstairs and would probably be a while. As I hovered about waiting (and, as it turned out, waiting, and waiting friends of Zindzi wandered in for coffee and a chat. Completing the South African middle-class picture, a small, wizened maid in blue overalls padded inscrutably around.
Finally, Winnie made her entrance, Taller than I had expected, very much the grande dame, she displayed neither surprise nor irritation at my presence in her home. When I said I would like to interview her, she responded with a sigh, a knowing smile and a glance at her watch. I said all I would need was half an hour. She thought a moment, shrugged her shoulders and said: “OK. But you will have to give me a little time.” She still had to put the finishing touches to her morning toilette.
The picture presented to me by mother, daughter, friends and cleaning lady was of a domesticity so stable and relaxed that, had I not been better informed, I would never have imagined the depths of trauma that lucked beneath.
Winnie had been continually persecuted by agents of the apartheid state during the 1970s and 1980s; she had borne the anguish of hearing her two small daughters screaming as the police broke into her home and carted her off to jail; she had spent more than a year in solitary confinement. Trusting that her confused and stricken children would be cared for by friends; she had been banished and placed under house arrest far away. But she was back, her circumstances altered dramatically for the better now that Mandela’s release was imminent.
One hour after her first entrance, she majestically reappeared, Cleopatra still needed her morning coffee, and motioned me to wait in her study while she withdrew into the kitchen. I had five minutes to take in the surroundings.
On a bookshelf there was a row of framed family portraits, a Christmas card and a birthday card. Only a month had passed since Christmas, but nearly four since Winnie had turned 53. I could not resist taking a closer look.
I opened the Christmas card, which was enormous, and immediately recognised Nelson Mandela’s large, spidery handwriting. “Darling, I love you. Madiba,” It said. Madiba was the tribal name by which he liked to be known to those close to him. On the birthday card he had written the same words.
If I had not known better I might have imagined the cards had been sent by an infatuated teenager. Once we began our interview. Winnie took on just such a role, playing the tremulous bride-to-be, convincing me she was in a state of nervous excitement at the prospect of rekindling her life’s great love.
Close up she had, like her husband, the charisma of the vastly self-confident, and there was a coquettish, eye-fluttering sensuality about her. It was not hard to imagine how the young woman who met Mandela one rainy evening in 1957 had struck him, as he would later confess, like a thunderbolt.
The Mandela the world saw wore a mask that disguised his private feelings, presenting himself as a fearless hero, immune to ordinary human weakness. His effectiveness as a leader hung, he believed, on keeping that public mask from cracking. Winnie offered the greatest test to his resolve. During the following years the mask cracked only twice. She was the cause both times.
The first was in May 1991. She had just been convicted at Johannesburg’s Rand Supreme Court of assault and accessory to kidnapping a 14-year-old black boy called Stomple Moeketsi, whom her driver had subsequently murdered. Winnie had been led to believe, falsely as it turned out, that the boy had been working as a spy for the apartheid state.
Winnie and Mandela walked together down the steps of the grand court building. Once again the actress, she swaggered to the street, right fist raised in triumph. It was not clear what she could possibly have been celebrating, except perhaps the perplexing straight off to jail and would remain free pending an appeal.
Mandela had a different grasp of the situation. His face was grey, his eyes were downcast.
The second and last time was nearly a year later. The setting was an evening press conference hastily summoned at the drab headquarters of the ANC. He shuffled into the room, sat down at a table and read from a piece of paper, beginning by paying tribute to his wife.
“During the two decades I spent on Robben Island she was an indispensable pillar of support and comfort… My love for her remains undiminished.” There was a general intake of breath. Then he continued: “We have mutually agreed that a separation would be the best for each of us… I part from my wife with no recriminations. I embrace her with all the love and affection I have nursed for her inside and outside prison from the moment I first met her.”
He rose to his feet. “Ladies and gentlemen. I hope you ‘ll appreciate the pain I have gone through and I now end this interview.”
He exited the room, head-bowed, amid total silence.
Mandela’s love for Winnie had been, like many great loves, a kind of madness, all the more so in his case as it was founded more on a fantasy that he had kept alive for 27 years in prison than on the brief time they had actually spent together. The demands of his political life before he was imprisoned were such that they had next to no experience of married life, as Winnie herself would confess to me that morning.
“I have never lived with Mandela,” she said. “I have never known what it was to have a close family where you sat around the table with husband and children. I have no such dear memories. When I gave birth to my children he was never there, even though he was not in jail at the time.”
It seemed that Winnie, who was 22 to his 38 when they met, had cast a spell on him. Or maybe he cast a spell on himself, needing to reconstruct those fleeting memories of her into a fantasy of tranquility where he sought refuge from the loneliness of prison life.
His letters to her from Robben Island revealed romantic, sensual side to his nature that no one but Winnie then knew. He recalled “the electric current” that “flushed” through his blood as he looked at her photograph and imagined their caresses.
The truth was that Winnie had had several lovers during Mandela’s long absence. In the months before his release, she had been having an affair with Dali Mpofu, a lawyer 30 years her junior and a member of her defence team. She carried on with the affair after Mandela left prison. ANC members close to Mandela knew that was going on, as they did about her frequent bouts of drunkenness. I tried asking them why they did not talk to Mandela about her waywardness, but I was always met by frosty stares. Winnie became a taboo subject within the ANC during the two years after Mandela left prison. Confronting him with the truth was a step too far for the freedom fighters of the ANC.
His impeccably courteous public persona acted as a coat of armour protecting the sorrowing man within. But there came a point when Mandela could deceive himself, or the public, no longer. Details of the affair with Mpofu were made luridly public in a newspaper report two weeks before the separation announcement.
The article was a devastating, irrefutable expose of Winnie’s affair. It was based on a letter she had written to Mpofu that revealed he had recently had a child with a woman whom she referred to as “a white hag.” Winnie accused Mpofu of “running around f***** at the slightest emotional excuse … Before I am through with you, you are going to learn a bit of honesty and sincerity and know what betrayal of one’s love means to a woman … Remember always how much you have hurt and humiliated me … I keep telling you the situation is deteriorating at home, you are not bothered because you are satisfying yourself every night with a woman. I won’t be your bloody fool, Dali.”
In private, Mandela had already endured quite enough conjugal torture. I learnt of one especially hurtful episode from a friend of Mandela some years later. Not long after the end of her trial, Winnie was due to fly to America on ANC-related business. She wanted to take Mpofu with her, and Mandela said she should not, Winnie agreed not to, but went with him anyway. Mandela phoned her at her hotel room in New York, and Mpofu answered the phone.
On the face of it, Mandela was a man more sinned against than sinning, but he did not see it that way. It was his belief that the original sin was to have put his political cause before his family.
Despite everything, Mandela believed when he left prison that he would find a way to reconcile political and family life. Some years after his separation from Winnie, I interviewed his close friend Amina Cashalia, who had known him since before he met Winnie.” His one great wish,” she told me, “was that he would come out of prison, and have a family life again with his wife and the children. Because he’s a great family man and I think he really wanted that more than anything else and he couldn’t have it.”
His fallout with Winnie only deepened the catastrophe, contaminating his relationships with other family members, among them his daughter Zindzi. She was a far more complicated character than I had imagined when I chatted with her cheerfully in her mother’s kitchen over fried eggs. At that very moment, in late January 1990, her current lover, the father of her third child, was in a prison cell. Five days later he hanged himself.
Zindzi was very much her mother’s daughter, inheriting her capacity to dissemble as well as her strength of personality. The unhappiness and sheer chaos that she would endure in her own private life, a mirror of her mother’s, found expression in a succession of tense episodes with her father after he was set free.
One of them took place before friends and family on the day of her marriage to the father of her fourth child, six months after her parents’ separation. It was a glittering occasion at Johannesburg’s swankiest hotel, with Zindzi radiant in a magnificent pearl and sequin bridal dress. It seemed to be a joyous celebration; in truth, it provided further evidence of the Mandela family’s dysfunctions.
One of the guests seated near the top table was Helen Suzman, the white liberal politician and good friend of Mandela. She told me that he went through the ceremonial motions with all the propriety one would have expected. He joined in the cutting of the wedding cake and played his part when the time came to give his speech, declaring, “She’s not mine now,” as fathers are supposed to do. He did not, however, mention Winnie in the speech. When he sat down, he looked silent and cheerless.
Maybe he had had time to reflect in the intervening six months on the depth of Winnie’s betrayal. For more details had emerged of her love affairs and of the crimes of the gang of young men “Winnie’s boys,” as they were known in Soweto – who played the role of both bodyguards and courtly retinue. They had killed at least three young black men, beaten up Winnie’s perceived enemies and raped ;young girls.
Whether Mandela chose to realise it at the time, he was the reason that Winnie never ended up going to jail. Some years later, the minister of justice and the chief of national intelligence admitted to me that they had conveyed a message to the relevant members of the judiciary to show Winnie leniency.
Mandela’s mental and emotional wellbeing were essential to the success of the negotiations between the government and the ANC; for him to bow out of the process could have had catastrophic consequences for the country as a whole. Jailing Winnie would be too grave a risk.
Bizarrely, one of the guests at Zindzi’s wedding, prominently positioned near the top table, was the “white hag” Winnie had derided in her letter to Mpofu, and she was sitting next to a man I know to be another former lover of Winnie’s.
It also would have been difficult for Mandela to miss the menacing glances Winnie cast towards the “hag” although I hope he missed the moment when Winnie brushed past her and hissed at her former lover: “Go on! Take her ! Take her!”
When the band struck up and the newly married couple got up to dance, Mandela, who had been standing up, turned his back on Winnie and returned stiffly to the top table. Grim-faced for the rest of the night, he treated Winnie as if she did not exist. At one point, Suzman passed him a note. “Smile, Nelson,” it said.
In October 1994, five months after Mandela had become president, I spoke to a friend of his, one of the few people in whom he confided the details of his marital difficulties. The friend leant over to me and said: “It’s amazing. He has forgiven all his political enemies, but he cannot forgive her.”
During their divorce proceedings a year and a half later, he made his feelings towards Winnie public at the Rand Supreme Court, where he had accompanied and supported Winnie during her trial in 1991.
As his lawyer would tell me later, he was arbitrarily generous about sharing his estate, giving Winnie what was more than fair. But he made his feelings bluntly known in the divorce hearing. Standing a few feet away from her, he addressed the judge, saying: “Can I put it simply, my lord? If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile with the defendant. I would not … I am determined to get rid of this marriage.”
He did not shirk from describing before the court the disappointment and misery of married life after he returned from prison. Winnie, he explained, did not share his bed once in the two years after their reunion. “I was the loneliest man,” he said.
The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough wrote about the “terrible notions of duty” that boost the public figure but can stunt the private man. It is impossible to avoid concluding that Mandela was far less at ease in private than in public life. In the harsh world of South African politics he had his bearing; in the family sphere he often seemed baffled and lost.
Happily for his country, one did not drain energy from the other. Thanks to a kind of self-imposed apartheid of the mind, personal anguish and the political drive inhabited separate compartments and ran along parallel lines.
As out of control as she could be in her personal affairs, she possessed a lucid political intelligence and a mature understanding of where her husband’s priorities lay, even if she was deluded in attributing some of his qualities to herself.
“When you lead the kind of life we lead, if you are involved in a revolutionary situation, you cease to think in terms of self,” she said. “The question of personal feelings and reactions dues not even arise, because you are in a position where you think solely in terms of the nation, the people who have come first all your life.”
CREDITS: Courtesy of Sunday Times; Extracted from Knowing Mandela by John Carlin
Posted by
Mwaka
December 20, 2013 at 3:17 am
I thought that he should have forgiven her. She was a young woman in her prime when he went to jail, and surely, she could not sit there and wait for a man serving a life sentence.
test@e
December 20, 2013 at 8:25 am
HE forgave by making sure that they stay separate ways
wa kwamwanjawanthu
December 20, 2013 at 6:43 am
Mwaka in that case she shouldn’t have continued the affair after he came back
ayoba
December 20, 2013 at 7:44 am
Makes sad reading,I hope Mandela found sanctuary in his last marriage.
Shard
December 20, 2013 at 7:57 am
Wow…it has made a good reading. I would love to read the whole book.
*no comment for this article though.
mj
December 20, 2013 at 8:06 am
Chalemoneka bwino chi Winnie!
Jonathan Mphande
December 20, 2013 at 8:11 am
I will never understand women. Always with demonic intent and agenda’s.
Mailon
December 20, 2013 at 8:45 am
Jonathan that is a bit unfair.Afterall it is men [some of them married and therefore betraying innocent women at home] that most of them betray us with.You should say “you shall never understand human nature”
Malawian Kasai
December 20, 2013 at 6:14 pm
Very right. Men and women are just the same. They can be devils or angels
MMD Cadre
December 20, 2013 at 9:54 am
For starters, Winnie was in her prime (in her early twenties) when Mandela went to prison and secondly, she hardly knew the man she married before he was thrown in jail. If you listened to her interview last week, you will appreciate her sentiments. We cannot blame any of them.
PF
December 20, 2013 at 8:18 am
Women are impossible to understand. Very demonic indeed.
UbuTutu Fontini
December 20, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Amen
Shibobo
December 20, 2013 at 9:00 am
If you heard the story right,Mandela was hardly available for his family because of the political struggles.Meaning that Winnie had a scanty memory. Of the fond moments they had with his husband.
This meant that when Mandela was given a life sentence,it was as if he was dead and this young woman needed to feed the children and survive.
It was also natural that she got involved in affairs as an attractive woman.How long was she going to turn away persistent men,who ofcourse reminded. Her that her husband was in prison for life and that it was foolish of her to deny reality.
I for one would not entirely condemn her behaviour and her actions.
I believe,she also wanted to be real to Mandela by continuing with her affair to show him that what she felt for him had changed and reality was to be embraced.
ryan
December 20, 2013 at 9:21 am
well to me it is not justify to cheat even thou the situation become like that..you must understand mandela do what he do because of his ppl and for the country.if it was not for him south affrica would not be what it is today.but for his wife at that time i know it lonely for a woman with 2 child to care for..and how hard it will be…there are plenty woman who husband leave or die but did not get married or have an affair they children doing well..so why can’t she do that??as her husband are not dead..and she continue her affair even after manedela was realeas…it is not right.
the future
December 20, 2013 at 9:39 am
its difficult to analyse the situation as its not clearly indicating when and how,
moojo
December 20, 2013 at 9:44 am
He forgave her,it does not mean when you forgive then you must stay together in marriage.It is extremely difficult to continue staying with a cheating wife even if you have forgiven her.
yongwe
December 20, 2013 at 9:46 am
Sad reading indeed…!! but I can call this sacrificing self for the betterment of many..!!!
Even Jesus said you can divorce on adulterous grounds..because he knew you can not just forgive..! so Madiba was in the right..!sad though!
MMD Cadre
December 20, 2013 at 9:48 am
Thanks for this write up now I understand why Comrade Grace Machel came in to fill in the void. I pity the Madiba, he was such a lonely man.
mulamu
December 20, 2013 at 9:49 am
@He forgave her,it does not mean when you forgive then you must stay together in marriage.It is extremely difficult to continue staying with a cheating wife even if you have forgiven her.let the dead rest in peace.
13 21 11 1 14 1
December 20, 2013 at 10:07 am
Kind a difficult both ways!
Davido
December 20, 2013 at 10:20 am
That’s how life is. You can not have it both ways (nothing like the best of both worlds). 27 years was way too long for Mandela to except finding his family intact
lukwesa
December 20, 2013 at 10:29 am
He forgave her. he understood leaving a beautiful lady for years without him. gather information before you say certain things. She had lovers including her lawyer.
Have facts
Truth will set you free
December 20, 2013 at 10:41 am
Winnie had many lovers not just one, yes the Dali Mpofu situation was the most public, but she was basically a slut. And another thing is he did not only leave her because she was a slut, he had to leave her because she was busy advocating violence and perpetuated the black on black killings of the early 90′s whilst Mandela was himself the ultimate symbol of reconciliation, be it black and black or black and white. Winnie was basically bad for the cause with her militant stance and criminal activites were taking everything Mandela fought for backwards. She put him in a corner were he basically had no choice but to leave her for the greater good. This does not mean though that he never forgave her.
Turning point
January 13, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Mandela the womaniser and wife beater who did not only work with his comrades( Ruth Mompati, Lilian Ngoyi) But also bedded them. Do some research, the only difference between Winnie and Nelson’s behavior was that Mandela was discreet.An alleged adulterer alos has illegitimate children.
pig
December 20, 2013 at 11:20 am
Pls connect me to any of her grandchildren, in case one wud be of her type. Mutototo is now working in me!
Patience
December 20, 2013 at 11:41 am
Men of nowadays will leave you at home, go out, cheat and come back home to you. She might have tried to resist the urge to, but maybe she had those elements as such mentioned here and cud not control herself.
And if it is true that he was never there even before goin to jail, he might have seen no point in hanging on and waiting for what she never had. Love means too much to a woman, there is no way she can throw away what meant a lot to her. If she just threw it away, ninshi abafyashi tabaleumfwafye.
Otherwise, I would live strong on such love.
Trixy
December 20, 2013 at 12:01 pm
What can I say? Winnie was young and beautiful when Mandela went to prison. Infact they were married for only two years before he went there. Whilst in prison she did not know if the husband will ever come out. Putting myself in her situation, I think she was bound to error. But what I condemn the most is the fact that she continued misbehaving even after he came out of prison; which I find a bit strange. She should have tried to rekindled her love for her husband, but to keep misbehaving two years after he came out of prison? What did that mean? Mandela had no choice but help her move on instead of holding on to nothing left to hold on to. Poor Madiba…some people are just destined to suffer….he spent more than half of his life fighting. Fighting as a freedom fighter, fighting in family matters and fighting on his death bed. One would have thought getting out of prison would give him a bit of happiness to no avail. Am happy Gracia came and filled the void. May his soul rest in peace.
Candy
December 20, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Waiting for 27 years is too much to ask of any woman. If the tables were turned and she was the one in prison would he have waited? I guess they became strangers to each other.
chileshe
December 20, 2013 at 12:27 pm
This is a very complex pastoral-marital issue that requires a lot of time, information, personal experiences of those involved like Mandela and Winnie,etc,to analyse and discern.There are so many factors to really take into consideration before u make a prudent and rational judgement of the issue at hand.
G CHANDA
December 20, 2013 at 4:08 pm
yes i agree wt sibobo can u imagine life in imprison n later 27 yrs. u fools stop condeming. she did her best.keep it up.
PF
December 20, 2013 at 4:39 pm
She went to his bed side.If she is after the house I can see her collapsing in court.
Katampa
December 20, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Has she been 4given?
Katampa
December 20, 2013 at 6:28 pm
Has she sort 4givenss from Madiba b4 he died? Pantu nabakota bamayo.”Life”
Katampa
December 20, 2013 at 6:29 pm
Has she sort 4givenss from Madiba b4 he died? Pantu nabakota bamayo.”Life”.Only God knows.
Wantanshi
December 20, 2013 at 7:31 pm
Do you recall where the article says she and Mandela agreed not to take Mpofu along to New York. When mandela called her at the hotel, Mpofu answered the phone! You probably have an idea what a congenital adulterer she was! All this rationalisation that she was beautiful and young and couldn’t keep men at bay is just so much hogwash. She is a cheater! That’s it! She couldn’t even allow him at least one night of love after his prison term ended! Being the man that Mandela was he could have forgiven her if she had at least opened her legs just once. 27 years of lusting for your wife and she couldn’t yield!?
Ukwa
December 21, 2013 at 7:52 am
Men u suprise me! How many men can wait for a wife for 27 yrs? My sister went for peace Keeping for one year she came and found the husband had impregnanted our cousin. Winnie was left when she was only 23 yrs old!!!!!!!!!
ELISHA
December 21, 2013 at 10:01 am
Mandela was really a fighter. All the icebergs thrown at him melted at bay, like retarded kids throwing ice cubes at the sun. RIP selfless son of Africa, for you ran a good race and fought a brilliant fight. The world will live to remember you for as long as it exists. Winnie was just a mere character in a life of a great HERO. She was just there to confirm a strong fighter Mandela was, just like Judas Eschariot was there to complete the story of our savior JESUS CHRIST.
Kembwe Nyambe
December 24, 2013 at 5:15 pm
It would have better if Mandela forgave Winner even after divorcing her.
wife
December 27, 2013 at 3:04 pm
At ubuchende bwa mwaume ta butoba eng’anda,but bwa mwana kashi, whe….re!!!! we are all humanbeing,why always women to blame. such a beautiful lady u can still admire her even at her age now. wow!!!
Tasila bwalya
January 6, 2014 at 9:49 am
It’s just heartbreaking to learn that Mandela never knew any happiness after the 27 long years in prison. As a married woman the first thing that i want after even a shot time away from home is to be with my husband. Am not one to judge or condemn Winnie though i feel she should have stopped her affairs after the old man was released. May Madiba’s gentle soul rest in peace.
Bambazonke
January 13, 2014 at 7:43 pm
Betrayal at the most but may be she thought Madiba would not return given the tenacity grip on power boers had in SA,however unforgivable tendencies were started by Winnie by denying Mandela marital rights to sex for 2yrs thats absurd and…… for a woman
abakali
January 20, 2014 at 6:08 pm
What a thrilling reading. i will buy the whole book. the writer is very good at capturing events.
it is hard to imagine that winnie and mandela were super human. it is only wise to realise that humans are prone to err.
mandela preached forgiveness, but could not forgive his wife. i desire to understand why?
because it is the only event that crushed him as a human being, betrayal. apertheid did not betray him, but love. never mess around with the power of love between a man and a woman