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‘Winnie & Nelson’
by Jonny Steinberg
Winnie & Nelson is a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Drawing on never-before-seen material, Steinberg reveals the fractures and stubborn bonds at the heart of a volatile and groundbreaking union, a very modern political marriage that played out on the world stage.
An extract from Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage
The story they were to tell about their courtship – the story both of them were to tell, Nelson and Winnie alike, over and over again, told so often they appear to have forgotten that it was not entirely true – went like this.
It was a weekday afternoon in the summer of 1956–57. Nelson was giving his friend, the medical student Diliza Mji, a ride from Orlando West to central Johannesburg, when he saw, waiting at a bus stop outside Baragwanath Hospital, a beautiful girl, indeed, one so beautiful that he considered turning his car around and going back.
He does not describe her. In the thousands of pages of letters and memoirs Nelson wrote, there are almost no physical descriptions of women, only of men. One is left to imagine that he was struck by the huge mournful eyes, so out of place on her youthful face; by the high, sculptured cheeks; and, incongruous with the mournfulness, by a regal authority, quite formidable, even at a glance. She was very young, barely out of her teens, he might well have surmised, and indeed, on the day he clapped eyes on her, she was not yet twenty-one years old.[1]
Nelson, famously, drove a two-tone Oldsmobile, the paintwork pastel green, the hubcaps walled and brilliant white. Everyone in Orlando West knew the Oldsmobile, and everyone in Orlando West knew of the man behind the wheel. When he drove through his neighbourhood on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon, a time when people were out on the streets, they gathered and waved and shouted his name.
And when he drove through central Johannesburg to his law firm, Mandela and Tambo, the heads of the drivers in the cars on Fox Street, almost all of them white, turned. For although most white people still did not know the name Nelson Mandela, or, if they had heard the name, could not put it to a face, the sight of a black man in so extravagant a vehicle signalled that something was up.
And Nelson himself was as much a spectacle as his car. Six feet two, with the body of an athlete, at thirty-eight years old still youthful and strong, he wore double-breasted suits, made bespoke by the most sought-after, and the most expensive, tailor in Johannesburg, Alfred Kahn, whose clients included many of the city’s white mining magnates.[2]
And if the sight of him was arresting, the idea of him was no less so. It was not just that he was a lawyer, indeed, one of only sixty or so black lawyers in all of South Africa, placing him in the top echelons of the black elite; it was not just that he was famously theatrical in court, his aura of command a lesson to white judges and lawyers that he was their equal: five years earlier, he had become the poster child of the Defiance Campaign, a nationwide action of civil disobedience in which more than 8,000 people, among them the most esteemed black men and women in the land, went to prison for defying segregationist laws. Just then, in late 1956 and early 1957, he and 155 others were standing trial for treason, a trial covered faithfully in the black press day after day, month after month, and about which black South Africans were speaking incessantly at their kitchen tables.
And if Nelson’s public performances were growing increasingly famous, his private exploits were becoming less and less private. Among Nelson’s colleagues and friends it was no secret that he liked women and that they often liked him back. ‘I can’t help it if the ladies take note of me,’ he told a biographer. ‘I’m not going to protest.’[3] His marriage – to Evelyn Mase, with whom he had three children – was in ruins, and rumours about his love life were much discussed among his comrades, his legal colleagues and his friends.
And so if there was any man in South Africa, hitting forty and married, who might turn his car around because he had glimpsed waiting at a bus stop a magnificent woman almost half his age, it was Nelson Mandela.
