Winnie Mandela Under Siege, to Testify Publicly

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The Mother of the Nation, as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was known during the anti-apartheid struggle, has been recast as the mother of calamity as South Africans scrutinize the dark side of their country’s extolled rebirth.

Public hearings into the criminal activities of the Mandela United Football Club, a notorious gang of renegade youths led by Madikizela-Mandela during the tumultuous 1980s, continue this week after five days of questioning in a Johannesburg community center.

The biggest sensation of the extraordinary forum is expected midweek: the sworn testimony of Madikizela-Mandela, who insisted on an open session after being summoned behind closed doors by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government body trying to get to the bottom of several thousand apartheid-era crimes.

“We are all incidental actors to the main act here,” said Mafison Murphy Morobe, one of two dozen witnesses who appeared before the commission last week. “The main subject is Mrs. Mandela.”

Stern-faced and tight-lipped, the former wife of President Nelson Mandela has sat through a barrage of allegations about her past, ranging from murder and torture to infidelity and petty jealousy.

One witness claimed that he watched in horror as Madikizela-Mandela stabbed to death a 14-year-old boy; another witness said she was beaten, while three months pregnant, by “Mama” Mandela for stealing the affections of a young lover. In a written submission, the so-called coach of the erstwhile soccer team--now serving a life sentence for murder--said Madikizela-Mandela instructed him to kill.

But unlike the repeated humiliations she endured during the 27 years her then-husband was behind bars, this time Madikizela-Mandela’s accusers are not the plotting agents of a racist apartheid regime. For the most part, the tales of her undoing are coming from within the ranks of the African National Congress--the same people who stood by her during the darkest days of apartheid, when she gained an international reputation as the brave defender of the oppressed.

“As I sit here, I am deeply conflicted,” said Azhar Cachalia, an anti-apartheid activist and longtime friend who is now a high-ranking government official. “There is a part of me which wants to, in a sense, go over and hug you and say, ‘Let’s walk away from all of this, because it is a bit of a bad nightmare.’ But there is another part which says we can’t go forward unless there is some level of accountability.”

Sobbing relatives have begged Madikizela-Mandela for answers about dead and missing victims of the soccer team’s thuggery; admitted accomplices have denounced her as a demagogue.

A prominent Soweto minister, wrongly accused by her of sexually abusing young black activists, offered a hand of reconciliation across the muggy auditorium.

But through it all, often scowling from behind rhinestone-studded spectacles, Madikizela-Mandela was visibly moved just once, her eyes welling with tears when the confessed killer of nine people--a young associate of her former bodyguards--recounted the terror of being tortured by apartheid-era police.

“Tears at last,” a skeptical Johannesburg newspaper proclaimed. “Or were they the real thing?”

Few of the disclosures about Madikizela-Mandela are new. In 1991, she was convicted of kidnapping in the 1988 abduction and killing of 14-year-old activist Stompie Seipei.

South African Police Commissioner John George Fivaz confirmed Friday that she had also been investigated in connection with three other cases--a murder and two disappearances.

But the allegations are coming during an unprecedented public gathering that has brought shackled convicts and smartly dressed government officials to the same wooden platform splashed in the sweltering Klieg lights of television cameras from across the world.

Although some witnesses have waffled and others have chosen their words delicately, their common pursuit has been difficult to disguise: public exoneration for themselves and public rebuke for Madikizela-Mandela.

“My hands are not dripping with the blood of African children,” said Xoliswa Falati, a former Mandela neighbor who was convicted in the assault and kidnapping of Seipei but who now says she lied to protect Madikizela-Mandela. “I have never compromised my comrades. I never even compromised my leaders. I went to prison for her. She was so much ungrateful.”

Yet as truth commission investigators try to reconstruct Madikizela-Mandela’s activities in the late 1980s, it has become plain that responsibility for the alleged criminal happenings does not fall solely at the doorstep of her Soweto home.

Prominent anti-apartheid activists, including several who now hold top positions in the ANC and the South African government, have squirmed when asked why they did so little to rein in the wife of Nelson Mandela when the country was rife with rumors of her criminal doings.

Witness after witness came up short of an explanation.

“It is difficult seven or eight years later to actually appreciate the conditions under which people worked at that time,” said Frank Chikane, special advisor to South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki. “We did whatever we could do at that stage to save lives, to avoid further lives being lost. There were difficulties in doing that.”

Cachalia, who helped draft a statement in 1989 after the murder of Seipei that distanced the mainstream democratic movement from Madikizela-Mandela, said activists feared that a split with the charismatic leader would be exploited by the apartheid regime “on the eve of our liberation.”

Moreover, he said, Madikizela-Mandela has always been a formidable foe.

“Mrs. Mandela is a powerful person and a powerful figure,” he said. “Before you mess with a powerful person, you must be clear of your facts.”