Mandela's granddaughter tells all
Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter reveals her drug habit and sex addiction in a new memoir
‘BY the time I was born, on 9 April 1980, my mother knew how to strip and assemble an AK-47 in exactly 38 seconds.”
It is with these words that Zindzi Mandela’s daughter, Zoleka, begins her biography, When Hope Whispers, a brutally honest book about her life.
She may be a member of one of South Africa’s most eminent families, but her book does not document politics — or seek to glamorise Zoleka’s life.
She was just 10 when her grandfather, Nelson Mandela, took his first few steps as a free man in 1990.
She details her personal struggle with drug and alcohol abuse and a sex addiction that once saw her have sex outside a car facing oncoming traffic along a busy highway.
In an interview on Thursday, Zoleka, the eldest of four children, admitted to feeling some anxiety about tomorrow’s release of When Hope Whispers because she expects it will shock some relatives.
But she has been to hell and back and this book is about her healing and her wish to inspire others with her story.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and at first rejected treatment.
“To our horror as a family, Zoleka, upon receiving her diagnosis and for three months after, said she did not want treatment,” says her grandmother, Winnie MadikizelaMandela, in a foreword to the book. “Together with the family I watched her dying each day. I knew each of us were praying silently for her to change her mind.”
Zoleka has had a change of heart and has since undergone a bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy. Her breasts have been partly reconstructed.
“I lost two children, I am clean and sober and I am dealing with my sex addiction,” she said this week.
In her book she tells of how, in 2010, just days before her daughter Zenani died in a car crash, she was recovering from a suicide attempt “after a druginduced psychotic episode”.
On June 1 she had just sampled a new bag of cocaine when an imaginary “man” told her to kill herself.
“He wanted me to burn myself to death.”
She set her room at her mother’s Atholl home alight. “My youngest brother, Zwelabo ... kicked open my burning bed- room door to find me on the floor . . .”
It was while Zoleka was recovering at the Brenthurst Clinic in Johannesburg on June 11 that her 13-year-old daughter, returning from a 2010 World Cup concert, died in a car crash.
The car was driven by Sizwe Mankazana, the 25-year-old son of her aunt Zenani’s longtime boyfriend. It is clear she thinks that Mankazana, who was found not guilty of culpable homicide, should have paid for his actions.
She adores her aunt Zenani, whom she calls Mama and with whom she went to live in Swaziland for three years.
Zoleka highlights snippets of lovely childhood memories in exile, but she also reveals: “From the time I was barely eight years old to the age of 14, I had been sexually abused by some of the adults in my life who should have been looking after me.”
She was also physically abused by an unnamed nanny in Swaziland who, she said, would “knock my head against [the tap] or use her knuckles on my skull” if she found the little girl getting herself a drink of water at night. “I wasn’t allowed any water in the evenings due to my bed-wetting.”
When her aunt and family packed up to move to the US, Zoleka, then five, was sent to live with her grandmother, then banished to Brandfort in the Free State. “Soon after I arrived in Brandfort, my mother left for Johannesburg, taking my brother with her.”
A year later they moved to the family’s Vilakazi Street home in Soweto, where they lived until 1989 when the house burned down. After that she grew up fast: she had her first boyfriend at age nine and lost her virginity at 15 in the back room of a
I lost two children, I am clean and sober and I am dealing with my sex addiction
bachelor flat in Johannesburg.
In the book, she suggests that she turned to men — one disturbing relationship after the other — because she needed to feel wanted.
It was through some of them that she would be exposed to a variety of drugs, including dagga, cocaine, ecstasy and magic mushrooms. Her drug habit would last about 10 years.
She managed to conceal her first pregnancy from a US boyfriend for eight months. She had been pregnant when she met him in a Johannesburg nightclub, but he lived in Botswana and they did not see each other often.
Her daughter Zenani was born in June 1997; a second child, Zwelami, in 2002; and another, Zenawe, in 2011. Zenawe died of organ failure soon after being born three months pre- maturely. She names their fathers in the book as “Casey”; a Zimbabwean Rastafarian named “Bryan”; and actor Sekoati Tsubane.
Speaking about the day her daughter died, Zoleka said: “The biggest part of me died that Tuesday June morning. I kept thinking God should have taken me instead.”
Two months later, she checked herself into a drug rehab facility for 42 days. It was in the following year that she gave birth to, and lost, Zenawe.
Tears well up in her eyes as she speaks of the loss of her children. “I don’t think I will ever get over losing my children. I feel guilty every day, thinking I could have been a better mother to Zenani and not have chosen alcohol and drugs over my children. I keep thinking if only I had been there.”
Zoleka struggles to have a real relationship with her own mother. She writes: “All my life, my mother and I struggled to find common ground. For years I blamed her for the physical and sexual abuse I was subjected to as a child. My feeling was that if she had been there for me, she could have prevented it and I could have been protected. I have come to realise that she probably did the best she could.”
During the interview she said: “She doesn’t know about this book and what I wrote, but that doesn’t mean I do not love her, because I do.
“This is my truth. Sure, it may come with criticism, but I had to tell it because it would be a great injustice if I didn’t use my story to help others.”