The plaasjapie typist who called her boss ‘Nelson’
Ruth Mompati tells Pearlie Joubert of the ‘tall, handsome’ lawyer she worked for
SHE was a plaasjapie from North West and he was a big-city lawyer. But Ruth Mompati, a 25-year-old typist from Ganyesa (population 19 000), near Vryburg, nevertheless called him “Nelson”.
“He was tall and handsome, and all the girls loved him,” said Mompati, 86, who held Madiba’s hand on Thursday just before he died.
“He squeezed back, and today I’m poorer and we all feel a bit lost because he is no longer here.”
Mompati was in bed in Vryburg when Graça Machel called on Thursday morning to say that she should come to see her old boss, comrade and friend.
Mompati was Nelson Mandela’s secretary, typist and receptionist when she worked for Oliver Tambo and Mandela at their Johannesburg law firm in 1953.
She met Mandela soon after arriving in Johannesburg as a newly married young woman and moved into a house in Orlando West, next door to Walter and Albertina Sisulu. Mandela lived around the corner.
“It was the end of 1952 and Bantu education was just introduced and there was no way that I was going to teach children the Bantu education syllabus. A lot of black teachers left the profession then,” she said.
Mompati took shorthand and typing classes and the following year she was interviewed for a job by Mandela.
“I’m sure I could type,” she said of the days when it was not common for black people to type because there were no secretarial schools for them. “We had to learn privately or at private colleges.”
Nevertheless, Mandela wanted to make sure she could type.
Not only did she know her way around the keyboard, she also fell in at a political level. She joined the ANC, of which Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu were already members and who attended meetings secretly because they had had banning orders served on them.
“I was very much in awe of Nelson and of Tambo. By this stage, politics was my life,” she said.
“I remember that Nelson asked me about politics. It was important for them that I was an ANC member because our clients were all people who were harassed by the government.”
Mompati remembers that she often had to fight her way through a throng queuing outside the door of the office. No one was turned away, even though only about a third could pay.
“I loved my job. Most of the cases that came to us were pass-lawrelated. Wives and families came to us and told Mandela and Tambo that they were looking for missing relatives. Mandela always had time for everybody.
“What always struck me about him was how he never discriminated against anyone. He didn’t only help people who were well dressed. He treated everybody the same. He was extraordinary like that.
“I saw how easily people loved him and how easy he made it for people to talk to him. We were blessed to have him. He was a man of great understanding for others. He really did bring out the best in people.
“He was truly on the side of the oppressed people. He really liked helping those who were discriminated against.”
Mompati remembers the specific case of a young man charged with rape. The police had caught
People liked him. It was never possible to know whether he was drawn to people or if they were drawn to him
him in bed with a white woman at a hotel where both worked.
“Mandela told us they were in love. That case really caught my attention because it was the epitome of what apartheid was about.”
The man was prosecuted under the Immorality Act, which forbade miscegenation, but the woman refused to testify. In the end, the state could not prove its case.
“‘Love won,’ Mandela told us. This was Mandela’s case. I remember this case very well,” said Mompati.
She left the law firm in 1961, having become part of the ANC underground.
“I think it was about 1962 when Sisulu spoke to me about going into exile to receive military training at the Lenin School, in Moscow.”
She left her small sons with her mother.
While she was gone, Mandela and the entire top structure of the ANC were arrested.
As an MK operative, she was told by Tambo not to return to South Africa.
“I cried about my children and my country,” she said.
She was able to return to South Africa only in 1990 with the exiled leadership of the ANC.
She was part of the ANC’s Groote Schuur delegation, which opened talks with the National Party in 1990, and in 1994 she became a member of parliament.
From 1996 to 2000, she was South Africa’s ambassador to Switzerland, and on her return became mayor of Vryburg.
“Nelson was a very striking man when I met him. People liked him. It was never possible to know whether he was drawn to people or if they were drawn to him,” she said.
“Even as a young man Nelson was tall and stately and absolutely lovely. I don’t know if he was that handsome. It was something else. He was magnetic. The problem is … a person like him was just simply lovely. Really. He was.
“If I had met Nelson earlier, I would have considered taking him all for myself.
“It’s a pity that Nelson left us now. We are splitting apart again. We were so blessed to have him, and now we have nobody.”