The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,112

meeting, and this simple act of waiting gave a regal touch to Mrs. Mandela when she appeared, quite modest, soft in body, in a grey trouser suit, with her famous wig and with pearls around her neck and wrists. It was hard not to be affected by her, seeing her close, a woman whom one had seen in countless photographs, and in varying moods, a woman to some extent bypassed now by the great events that had come to South Africa.

She was still full of political passion, still close to the fears she felt in the bad times.

“You have no idea what the name Mandela meant. It meant imprisonment and interrogation. This was a period where people vanished or were killed by the security forces for being members of the ANC. The greatest danger was that the leadership would perish in prison, and that people would get disheartened and lose faith. So I exposed myself, and did it quite deliberately. I had by then lost all fear. When you undergo every possible humiliation or torture there is nothing left. You lose all fear. One night they just came and threw all my things in a van, and I was banished to a desolate place for nine years.”

She used the banishment and the remoteness to recruit people and to send them out of the country for training.

It was in Soweto in 1976 that the revolution became critical. “This is where it began, and I still live here. I cannot dream of leaving my people and going to live in a grand suburb.”

She was referring obliquely to the larger-than-life statue of Mandela that had been put up in a rich Johannesburg square. She thought it was a “foolish” statue; and the day I went to see it two white children were playing on the chunky feet.

She said, “You must remember that the Mandela who went in”—went in: went to jail—“was a revolutionary, and the Mandela who came out was preaching peace and compromise. In fact, the statue should have been here in Soweto, where it all began and where he lived. The way to dilute a person is to commercialise him, and they have. The man who went to prison would not have allowed this commercialisation or being a brand name for a Foundation. My grandchildren are deeply hurt by all this commercialisation, and it is an albatross round their necks.”

The greater hurt was the “compromised” freedom that had come to South Africa. “I feel that we were short-changed. It was a freedom based on compromises and concessions, and that is what Mandela accepted. Black economic empowerment is a joke. It was a white confidence measure made up by local white capitalists. They took malleable blacks and made them partners. But those who had struggled and had given blood were left with nothing. They are still in shacks: no electricity, no sanitation, and no chance of an education.”

When she spoke Mandela’s name she didn’t use the first name, Nelson; and she had two distinct ways of enunciating the name Mandela. Mandela the revolutionary was pronounced in one way; the later Mandela was pronounced in another way.

She said, “I felt very bad when he went to get the Nobel Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Why did he go with the oppressor in tow? De Klerk had done nothing to release Mandela. Time dictated that it was necessary to release him, and there was always the promise of great violence to come if things had carried on as before.”

We talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was meant to heal the racial divisions in the country, but Winnie Mandela (and others) were scornful. She thought it was especially hard for black people, who had suffered so much, to appear before that Commission and condemn themselves for resisting.

She said, “It should be an individual process and not forced on a society. I think it is a terrible insult to women and men who sacrificed their lives for removing apartheid. They had to go and account for their actions. Not many people know what it was like living under that regime day in and day out. What they forget is that for over four decades black people had lived as non-people. The abnormality of racism had become a normal reality for them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not a realistic idea. It opened up wounds that could not heal. You learned about atrocities and the method and means of your loved one’s death.