WINNIE AND NELSON: Portrait of a Marriage, by Jonny Steinberg
The South African leader and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela died in 2013, suffering from dementia. We can only guess at the memories that whirled around his mind as he passed from one world to the next, but we know that at some point in his final hours he began calling for his ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Six decades after their relationship began, Jonny Steinberg writes in “Winnie and Nelson,” here she was beside him again. The book, a literary double biography, opens with an epigraph from the playwright August Wilson: “I just wanted to see your face to know that the world was still there.”
Nelson first glimpsed Winnie in 1957, when she was waiting at a bus stop in Johannesburg. He was a 38-year-old attorney, nearly twice Winnie’s age, and married with three children. She was a social worker and engaged to a part-time office worker who would attempt to take his own life months later when Winnie told him she was going to marry Nelson instead.
The news didn’t sit well with Winnie’s father either. Columbus Madikizela made no secret of his disdain for his future son-in-law. “Why is she marrying that old man?” he asked. “Especially one who will live the rest of his life running away from the police and sleeping in the bush.”
Nelson was not yet a fugitive when he and Winnie met, but he was already a major political figure. In 1952, he had led a program of civil disobedience launched by the African National Congress and its allies. Throughout Nelson’s courtship of Winnie, he was standing trial on charges of treason.
Winnie was soon caught up in resistance work and their marriage became synonymous with South Africa’s struggle against oppression. In 1958, four months after their wedding, she was arrested at a peaceful protest while pregnant with their first child. “They were throwing themselves into the maelstrom of history,” Steinberg observes, “and nobody in a maelstrom is in control of their journey.”
Johannesburg, where their lives collided, had undergone rapid change. The demand for labor, particularly during World War II, drove hundreds of thousands of Black South Africans, dispossessed of their ancestral lands by white colonists, from the countryside into urban centers. By 1946, Black people began to outnumber white people in cities. The white population’s response was apartheid.
Still, Winnie and Nelson’s courtship coincided with a moment of immense optimism about the collapse of white rule in Africa. Wherever one looked, anticolonial movements were seizing the future. As Steinberg points out, Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Ghana in March 1957, just days before Winnie and Nelson’s first date.
That apartheid would lay waste to innumerable lives and endure for another four decades was not something they could have predicted. In March 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, police officers fired more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd of protesters, killing dozens of them. Three weeks later, the A.N.C. was outlawed in South Africa.
Nelson went into hiding and, by 1962, he and other A.N.C. leaders had drafted a plan of violent resistance known as “Operation Mayibuye.” Confiscated pages from the plan would condemn Nelson to life in prison. Even standing in shackles aboard the ferry that took him to his cell on Robben Island, he clung to the belief that the regime’s collapse was imminent.
What happened to Winnie and Nelson during these decades apart makes up the greater part of Steinberg’s story. Nelson’s life has been mined exhaustively by biographers and historians, but Steinberg, who has written several books about people at the edges of South African society, brings a new depth to Nelson’s relationship with Winnie. Steinberg is aided in this task by a collection of some 15,000 pages of transcripts and notes that were only recently made available to scholars.
These materials represent many hours of government eavesdropping on conversations Nelson had with his visitors, Winnie included, during his long incarceration. Nelson’s relationship with his youngest daughter, Zindzi, unravels before us, and we watch as he and his wife grow ever more estranged.
With Nelson in prison, Winnie became one of the most visible faces of the resistance, marching sometimes in “a tailored business suit and a fur toque.” Regularly detained and harassed by the police, she was eventually subject to house arrest and prohibited from speaking to the media.
Beginning in 1969, Winnie was held for some 400 days in solitary confinement and tortured by a police interrogator named Theuns Swanepoel. “He had lodged himself in her being,” Steinberg writes, “an intimate and unwelcome companion who simply refused to leave.”
In 1976, Swanepoel ordered the police to open fire on protesting schoolchildren in the township of Soweto. In 1986, Winnie formed the infamous “Mandela United Football Club,” a group of young men who pursued a campaign of fear and violence in Soweto, kidnapping and beating suspected informants on her behalf. Winnie confided to a documentary filmmaker that she’d learned how to hate from Swanepoel. “The war between them,” Steinberg writes, “was to the death.”
By the 1980s, although he would not publicly promise peace without conditions, Nelson had long begun to consider the limits of violence. On a tour through African states in the early 1960s to learn about guerrilla warfare, Nelson met with members of the National Liberation Front in Algeria. “International public opinion,” his hosts explained, “is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters.”
Nelson was released in 1990, in the midst of the negotiations that would end apartheid. Two years later, he and Winnie separated. Inevitably, Winnie and Nelson have become stand-ins for opposing political traditions, each pointing to a different way forward in the country and on the continent. Steinberg forces us, with extraordinary pathos at times, to reckon with the humanity of his subjects and not the myths we have constructed around them.
The tale of Nelson’s long prison years is often told as a fable of Christlike forbearance in the face of political evil. Steinberg’s crucial insight here is that Nelson understood his own life to have been a tragedy. “I regret those years that I have wasted,” he said.
“Winnie and Nelson” arrives at a moment of widespread disillusion, especially among the young, about South Africa’s negotiated settlement and the halo over Nelson’s head. As the Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe writes, Mandela’s victory “did not erase apartheid from the social and mental landscape.” The country ranks as the most unequal society on the planet, and some see in Winnie’s anger something more truthful, Steinberg writes, than what they find in Nelson’s “avuncular good cheer.”
Steinberg suggests that a sense of disenchantment overcame Nelson too. He’d paid for his time in prison with everything that mattered but “chose to conceal his suffering, his bitterness and his anger,” Steinberg writes, “because he felt that this was the mask his country’s future required him to wear.” Thus, when he was on his deathbed, in the grips of dementia, and no longer in need of masks, his mind flashed back to the early moment of hope, when the white man’s world was on the verge of collapse, and the new one seemed so close at hand.
Bongani Kona is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in the department of history at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and is the editor of “Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying.”
WINNIE AND NELSON: Portrait of a Marriage | By Jonny Steinberg | Illustrated | 550 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $35