From scoundrel to Nelson’s carpenter
With the arrival of what would have been Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday, we searched far and wide for a related tale in Knysna, and true to form we found one. Stefan Goosen spoke to Colin Fitzgerald who spent over a decade as Madiba’s carpenter.
It’s pouring outside and 71-year-old Colin Fitzgerald is pacing around the living room of his compact cottage in Knysna Heights on a mid-Saturday-morning, staring back into the past as a young man on the Jersey Channel Islands, fired from his first job… back to when he was a budding weightlifter and surfer… back to when he became Madiba’s carpenter and confidant.
Upon shaking the calloused hand of the man who will soon be heading the training section at Knysna’s Timber Village, the initial impression is one of an old-school type, but as I get to know him that view quickly changes. He has stood up for the downtrodden since he can remember.
He regales me with tale after tale of memories of Madiba. It is clear their relationship has left a deep impression on him, and how he misses the man he calls his friend and father.
“I couldn’t find fault in him. He was the best man I ever met. He became not only my spiritual father but like a real father… I adored Madiba,” says Colin, his voice laced with sadness.
Colin was born on 27 September 1946 as one of four illegitimate children, and ended up in a children’s home at a very early age. He never met his father.
From the age of about four Colin was “shopped out” from the home to what was called professional childminders until, at age six, a woman he would call mother took him in. He would live with Mrs Powers until he was 27.
By the time he left school, around 16, he had become a champion weightlifter – “without a brain”, he quips. He went straight into a carpentry apprenticeship.
“I’ve always rubbed people up the wrong way. After my first job, I struggled through a few more, using them to learn and to teach myself the trade,” he says.
In 1977 he came to South Africa, where getting jobs on major sites was easy for him. What was hard, though, was to see how most employers at that time were treating their workforce. Many times, Colin says, he would get himself into trouble by speaking out on the miserable wages they earned, and their substandard working conditions, making himself rather unpopular with his “Afrikaner employers”, he recalls.
The political climate in SA at the time was something Colin never got used to. His fellow weightlifters back home were all black men, and the first girlfriend he had in the UK was a “stunning” girl of Jamaican and Malay descent. In retrospect, says Colin, these experiences were all a lead-up to his time with Madiba. “It was fate that I got to him,” he says.
In SA, Colin would build up a name for himself doing carpentry work for large 5-star hotels, moguls and mining magnates all over the country – jobs that would eventually lead him to the great Madiba.
In October 1997, a date he recalls with reverence, Colin says he was pulled in as a specialist carpenter to work on Nelson Mandela’s Houghton home.
“For the next 16 years I would be his in-house carpenter, designer, general ‘Mr Fix-It’, unofficial house manager, woodwork and building consultant.”
Being a white man working for an African in those early “rainbow nation” years was something most white privileged men would not accept for years to come. For Colin it was nothing strange at all. “The entire Mandela family knew where my heart was,” he says.
Asked for some anecdotes, Colin becomes surprisingly reticent – until he explains how he has been called “crazy” for stories he has told in the past.
What he does divulge is that Madiba was one of the funniest men he ever met. “If you didn’t laugh in the first minute of meeting the man there was definitely something wrong with you. He made himself the butt of most of his jokes. He told us the story of going into a bookshop and the cashier asked him if he could afford the book, and Madiba quipped that he hoped his salary as the president of the country would be enough.”
Colin remembers spending four birthdays with Madiba. “While the whole country was celebrating his birthday in their own way, my wife and I would be having lunch with him,” he recalls fondly.
When Mandela passed away, and even though he loved the man with all his existence, Colin says he was relieved. “I hated seeing him on life support – he wouldn’t have wanted that. I knew him well enough to know that,” he says. The mourning that followed was for that of a loved one. “I lost my father. I lost the person both I and my wife Clare loved.”
Thank-you notes and cards from Madiba addressed to both Colin and his wife Clare, who passed away three years ago, can be found all over his little cottage.
With nothing left for him in Johannesburg, after having lost two people he loved so much, Colin came to settle in Knysna. “Incidentally, Madiba loved this area. He stayed in the Knoetzie Castle a long time ago,” adds Colin.
Citing Madiba as his inspiration, Colin ends our interview thus: “At this moment, the country is going through a turbulent time. Many people are only focusing on the negative, and that is working against the country. We must try to dispel this negativity and get rid of it. Then the future can be nothing but positive.”