A sharp interrogation of the Mandelas and their self-made myths
WINNIE & NELSON: PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE
by Jonny Steinberg 576pp, HarperCollins, £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £14.99
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“I hope to be with you long after you have reached menopause, when all the gloss you have now will be gone, and your body, your lovely face included, will be all wrinkles, skin as tough as that of a rhinoceros.” So wrote Nelson Mandela in 1970 to his second wife, Winnie, from his Robben Island cell. Six years into a life sentence, and knowing that Winnie had already shared their marital home with at least one lover, the then-ANC activist comforted himself with a fantasy of domestic bliss. “I shall nurse and look after you in every way,” promised the playboy husband who’d barely been present during their brief time together.
“What did she make of such sweetness?” wonders Jonny Steinberg in his excellent new biography of the couple. Winnie’s letters to Nelson from this time are still sealed, so we cannot yet know how she replied. But Steinberg suspects she was probably “struck by the unnerving doubleness her husband displayed”, for they had lived as revolutionaries, and a future reunion looked unlikely.
Then again, both Mandelas were highly skilled in the art of self-mythologising, spinning stories in the service of their personal and political interests and often losing tabs on the truth in the process. Steinberg, a South African-born Oxford academic, admits that unpicking aspects of Winnie’s “extravagantly fictionalised” youth leaves him feeling like “a sleuth”.
His book pivots around how this charismatic couple, initially united in their political fight for racial equality, came to take opposing positions on how to deal with Africa’s white colonists. Nelson gradually gravitated towards forgiveness; Winnie absolutely refused to forgive and forget. A couples’ therapist might note that they had backed each other into this extreme and unrealistic division of emotions. Maybe they both paid too much attention to Winnie’s father, who said in his speech at their wedding that if his daughter was intent on hitching herself to “a wizard”, she would need to become “a witch”.
Interviewed at Yale University in 2019, Steinberg said he had started to write solely about Nelson Mandela, but quickly realised how much of the late South African president’s life and politics had been shaped by his marriage to Winnie, whom Steinberg calls “enormously controversial, but also extraordinary”. Nonetheless, he goes much easier on her than many other commentators. Emma Gilbey, author of 1993 biography
Told in jail of her affairs, he planned divorce, but later settled for political rather than sexual fidelity
The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela,
tracked the violence that came to be associated with her back to her youth, describing how she got the edge in childhood fights by “taking a tin and driving a nail through the bottom of it”, then slugging her sister in the mouth with the weapon so ferociously that the latter needed stitches. By contrast, Steinberg makes more of how
Winnie became her father’s helpmate after her mother died when she was just 10, raising her younger siblings and helping with their farmland while still acing her academic studies.
Both Nelson and Winnie came from successful social-climbing families, and both experienced their fair share of humiliation as they fought to make their way in the world. But both were physically attractive, with a personal magnetism that drew others to them. Nelson had what Steinberg describes as “grace”; Winnie had a sizzling allure. When they met in 1957, his marriage to his first wife was failing and he had started playing away. At 38, he was one of only 60 black lawyers in the country and the most prominent anti-apartheid campaigner. The couple only had a few years together, conceiving two daughters, before Nelson was incarcerated for 27 years.
Steinberg is at pains to stress how hard the apartheid government made Winnie’s life too. It restricted her movements so that she lost her job as a social worker, threatened to have her children excluded from school, and regularly imprisoned her. It also made sure that her jailed husband knew of her affairs – he responded, initially, by planning divorce but later came to settle for political rather than sexual fidelity. By 1985, Winnie was openly inciting violence, declaring that “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country” – a reference to how township residents burned suspected collaborators alive with tyres and petrol. Four years later, she was linked to the murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, of whose kidnapping she was convicted.
When Nelson was released from prison in 1990, he thus had to make a choice: stick with the woman whose photograph had brightened his cell for almost three decades, or cut her loose. He chose to walk to freedom holding her hand, and even gave her a post in his first government. He soon fired her, and then divorced her in 1996, marrying Graça Machel in 1998, yet as he lost his mind to dementia, it was Winnie he called for, and Winnie who held his hand as he died. Steinberg suspects that the couple’s myths will only endure – but his thorough interrogation of their story should help readers reconcile themselves with the messier truth.