491 Days

Prisoner Number 1323/69

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780821444924
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

On a freezing winter's night, a few hours before dawn on May 12, 1969, South African security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, activist and wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and arrested her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten.

Rounded up in a group of other antiapartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. She had no idea where they were taking her or what would happen to her children. For Winnie Mandela, this was the start of 491 days of detention and two trials.

Forty-one years after Winnie Mandela's release on September 14, 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of one of the defense attorneys from the 1969–70 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes she had written while in detention, most of the time in solitary confinement. Their reappearance brought back to Winnie vivid and horrifying memories and uncovered for the rest of us a unique and personal slice of South Africa's history.

491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 shares with the world Winnie Mandela's moving and compelling journal along with some of the letters written between several affected parties at the time, including Winnie and Nelson Mandela, himself then a prisoner on Robben Island for nearly seven years.

Readers will gain insight into the brutality she experienced and her depths of despair, as well as her resilience and defiance under extreme pressure. This young wife and mother emerged after 491 days in detention unbowed and determined to continue the struggle for freedom.

Part One

Journal

Chapter 1

Arrest

On a freezing-cold winter’s morning some hours before dawn, on Monday 12 May 1969, security police arrived at the Soweto home of Winnie Mandela and detained her in the presence of her two young daughters.

At the time, she was banned and restricted to Orlando township and unable to leave or even to visit her husband, Nelson Mandela, who was in the fifth year of his life sentence.²

Mrs Mandela and at least 40 others were rounded up and detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, which was passed in 1967 and designed for the security police to hold people and to interrogate them for as long as they chose. One of those detained, Caleb Mayekiso, died just days after his arrest.

She was driven to Pretoria Central Prison and held incommunicado, not knowing what would happen to her children Zenani and Zindzi, aged ten and nine, who had been left in the small hours on their own. She was not allowed to bring her medication for an existing heart condition.

Her first interrogation started on 26 May and lasted for five days and five nights. On the second day she began having dizzy spells and palpitations. A day later, the blackouts began.

One of her sisters, Iris Madikizela, brought a case against the minister to stop her and her fellow accused from being assaulted.

Mrs Mandela and 21 others appeared five months later in the Old Synagogue in Pretoria, the same makeshift court where her husband was sentenced to five years in prison on 7 November 1962.

The trial, known as ‘The Trial of the 22’ or the ‘State vs Samson Ndou and 21 others’, started on 1 December 1969. All pleaded not guilty to charges under the Suppression of Communism Act. These charges included:

Establishing groups or committees within the banned African National Congress; taking or administering the oath of the ANC; recruiting members for the ANC; arranging, attending or addressing meetings of the ANC; inspecting trains to find sabotage targets; devising means for obtaining explosives; discussing, distributing or possessing publications by the ANC in exile; preparing, discussing, distributing or possessing ANC literature; propagating the Communist doctrine; discussing the establishment of contact with guerrilla fighters; arranging a funeral under the auspices of the ANC; encouraging people to listen to radio broadcasts of the ANC in Tanzania; discussing sending people outside the country; informally discussing and issuing instructions related to the affairs of the organisation.

After a range of witnesses testified and after Shanti Naidoo and Nondwe Mankahla were sentenced to two months for refusing to testify against her, the court adjourned to February 1970, when all 22 accused were acquitted but immediately re-detained by police.

Six months later they reappeared in court to face similar charges – this time under the Terrorism Act. Three of the accused turned state witness and MK operative Benjamin Ramotse was added to the list of accused. Mrs Mandela wrote in her journal of Mr Ramotse: ‘I have never been involved with him in any of my political activities nor am I aware of his activities.’

On 14 September 1970, Mrs Mandela and all the accused except Mr Ramotse were acquitted.

Judge Gerrit Viljoen accepted that the alleged acts were so similar to the first that the prosecution was ‘oppressive, vexatious and an abuse of the process of the court’.

As soon as she was able to, Mrs Mandela kept a secret journal, which she shared with her advocate David Soggot and did not see it again until 2011 when his widow Greta Soggot brought it to her office in parliament.

On the 10th of May I had been referred by my doctor to the specialist Dr Berman [who gave me a prescription] which I took to the chemist in West Street. I did not get all the tablets at the chemist, I was told to get the rest on a Monday as the 10th was a Saturday. I just had enough tablets for the weekend.

When Maj Viktor³ of the Johannesburg Security Branch told me that I would have to accompany him as he was detaining me under the Terr[orism] Act I wrote down the name of the chemist and the prescription No., and requested Peter Magubane who knew the chemist to fetch the rest of the tablets with a message that the tablets should be given to my attorney.

THE ARREST

12 MAY 1969

On the night of the Security Branch raid and my arrest I was reading the biography of Trotsky which I fetched the previous night from Mrs Betty Miya’s house together with some documents.

On Friday the 9th of May 1969 I sent my 10yr old daughter to Mrs Miya to find out if I could visit her. She understood this to mean, ‘is the coast clear,’ she said I should not come, but that I could visit her the following day. It is not possible that I was followed to her house. I had used Mrs Miya’s place for the past ten years. I sometimes sent Olive⁴ with a paper bag parcel to give to Mrs Miya and I always put clothes on top if there were documents underneath. Mrs Miya was a child welfare foster mother; this was arranged by me to assist her with some income as she was unemployed and sickly. I gave her clothes for the children in her care from time to time.

On the night of the raid I put some of the documents in the stove with the book I was reading. The one copy of the Loabile⁵ speech was brought by Sikosana⁶ during that same week. He had taken it to No 1⁷ earlier and I told him to return it so that I could destroy it.

When the police kicked the door open I had just taken it out of the kitchen units, I put it in the pocket of my gown. They started raiding the bedroom for almost two hours. I have a set of suitcases in which my husband’s clothes, my new clothes and my children’s clothes are kept besides the wardrobes. Major⁸ went through the contents of each suitcase, he removed all my photographs, my husband’s military attire which was sent back to me by the police after the Rivonia Trial. I protested and told this major that the police gave the attire back, he said that may well be and that was before his time – he was taking it.

As I packed the contents back into my husband’s suitcase I managed to put the Loabile speech into the pocket of one of his folded jackets which I put back into the suitcase. I put the case back on top of the wardrobe with the assistance of the police.

This is the speech said to have been found with Maud.⁹ It could have been found by a person who went through each garment looking for something. I cannot understand all this business about the removal of my clothes by Maud herself from my bedroom with the aid of a librarian from the Rand Daily Mail. Nor do I understand why the police who in any case had the speech naturally from Sikosana who kept it for a while before he brought it to me from No 1, should want to use Maud whom they have protected for so long.

I appreciate No 22’s¹⁰ desire to assist me by keeping my husband’s clothes and mine in a safe place but my sister-in-law who is so adamant that no one have them, should in fact have kept them herself. She says she was very annoyed because none of the members of my family came near my house after my arrest for a whole month, but they went to Mr Carlson.¹¹ The fact that nobody paid rent, electricity and there was no one to look after Olive and the house was not important. She made all the arrangements for my children to return to school.

2. Nelson Mandela and seven of his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964. He had already been in custody for 22 months, having been arrested on 5 August 1962 and sentenced to five years on 7 November 1962.

3. Johannes Viktor.

4. Her niece, Olive Nomfundo Mandela.

5. Lameck Loabile, an activist. The accused had arranged his funeral and an ANC flag, which they were charged for.

6. Joseph Sikosana turned out to be a police informer.

7. Accused No. 1, Samson Ndou.

8. Major Viktor of the security police.

9. Maud Katzenellenbogen, a friend who Winnie Mandela later mistrusted as an informer.

10. Peter Magubane.

11. Attorney Joel Carlson.

Chapter 2

Detention

The first thing you do when you get into a cell is to do a calendar, the very first day because you lose track of days when you are in solitary confinement because the light was on for 24 hours and it was the brightest light – they never switched it off. You didn’t know when it was sunset or daybreak; they never switched off the lights and in my case I was held in the death cell with three doors. — WINNIE MADIKIZELA-MANDELA 2012

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DETAINEE

In the dim grim dark walls with the electric light burning day and night, the difference between day and night or daybreak and dawn is hard to tell when you can’t sleep and all you do is to doze off now and again whenever the mind decides to stop over functioning for a while.

The cell measures 15' x 5'¹² or is it? I’ve walked miles and miles in this cell, round and round, backwards and forwards in a desperate attempt to kill the empty long lonely minutes, hours, weeks, months which drag by at a snail’s pace gnawing at the inner cores of my soul, corroding it, scarring it, battering it about, tearing it to pieces in the second bout round number two¹³ of the Terrorism Act boxing match between the 22 and the Security Branch.

The trouble with this match is that it has a biased referee; it may go on for years. The referee wants my side to lose, and he goes out of his way to break my side. No rules and regulations have to be observed by his side whilst my boxers are forced at gunpoint to observe rules and regulations. The match has already had a bad start for someone; history will decide who of these two teams had this bad start. All I know is that both sides are determined to win the main match at whatever cost.

The first bell rings at 6am means it is time to get up, make my ‘bed’ and clean my cell. To make up my bed takes about five minutes for I have just two sisal mats, four blankets, the bitterly cold cement floor as my bed. I roll up the two mats, leaving about one foot of the mat underneath sticking out so that I can put my cold feet on this when I sit on the folded mats on top of which I put the neatly folded blanket to make my chair higher and a little more comfortable.

Both the blankets and the mats tell many tales each time I fold them up. Perhaps the mat underneath has the worst story to tell for about a quarter of this mat is full of blood, may be the blood all over this mat on top is the same but how did it come to appear to have been sprinkled all over the top mat? I wonder if it’s the same blood which seems to have been scrubbed hurriedly off the wall, beneath the window and right at the corner which I have chosen for my bed. Whoever scrubbed it used a lot of [V]im, the hands must have been shaking badly or trembling for some reason, it’s very untidily scrubbed.

I am next to the assault chamber. As long as I live I shall never forget the nightmares I have suffered as a result of the daily prisoners’ piercing screams as the brutal corporal punishment is inflicted on them. As the cane lashes at them, sometimes a hose pipe, you feel it tearing at your own flesh mercilessly. It’s hard to imagine women inflicting so much punishment. I have shed tears time without number quite unconsciously and often forget even to wipe them off. These hysterical screams pierce through my heart and injure my dignity so much. The hero of these assaults is barely 23 years old, very often the screaming voice appealing for mercy is that of a mother twice her age but of course she is white, a matron [at] that, this qualifies her for everything. The prisoner is at her mercy, life and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One Journal
• Part Two Letters
• Epilogue
• Twenty Years in the Life of Winnie Mandela
• Sixteen Months in the Life of Winnie Mandela: 12 May 1969 to 14 September 1970
• Acknowledgements