Beautiful and brave but destroyed by her arrogance - the Winnie Mandela I knew

Winnie Mandela was beautiful and brave, but was intoxicated, and ultimately destroyed, by the arrogance of her self-importance and the exercise of her power.

By the time I first met her, in the late Eighties, Winnie’s influence in the black townships was already eroding, though she retained much of the physical beauty that Nelson and a dizzying succession of paramours, had once seen in her.

We met clandestinely, in Soweto, where children were that day boycotting school, as they had done periodically for several years. During our interview, I recounted how youngsters, worrying about ever getting a decent qualification and therefore a job, had told me that they wanted to return to school, yet feared that if they defied the boycott they could be victimised as traitors or even necklaced with a burning tyre.

It was Winnie who had infamously declared in a televised rally that “with our necklaces and our lighted matches we will liberate this country”.

Her eyes burned with anger as she declared: “They just told you they wanted to go back to school because you’re a white man. No white man can know the truth here. Whites know nothing about us.”

To her surprise, I ended the interview and walked out.

While her high-handedness and arrogance increased – she would sometimes keep foreign VIPs waiting for days – they were merely mild symptoms of a greater malady. A reign of terror in the townships, spearheaded by the Mandela United “football club”, was already tearing at the liberation struggle’s loyalties. The ANC party heavyweights formed a Winnie Mandela Crisis Committee to try to restrain her. They failed.

Eventually Winnie was convicted for the kidnapping of a small boy called Stompie, who was then killed, but a court suspended her six-year jail sentence. After he had split from her in 1991 Nelson Mandela told me: “I blame myself for Winnie becoming what she now is. After all, I was away from her for 27 years.”

In the company of Winnie’s former driver, I myself spent a harrowing day searching for dead bodies at a mineshaft. John Morgan, a terminally ill man who had little apparent reason to lie on this score. He told me he had driven there in Winnie's van, with several bodies and one still-living person, who were then vertically disposed of. The shaft was far too deep for any human remains to be visible. Families of missing people continue to claim their loved ones died at Winnie’s behest, but proof has been hard to come by.

Winnie’s reputation within black South Africa was also damaged at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the powerful testimony of a tearfully contrite murderer, Katiza Cebekhulu. He insisted that Ms Mandela herself gave him a 9mm revolver, wrapped in a parcel covered by a cloth, and told him to kill the popular and sincere anti-apartheid activist Dr Abu Baker Asvat, who, it is claimed, had previously examined the dying Stompie and simply knew too much.

Years earlier, while in state-imposed banishment to a rural location near Brandfort, Winnie had assiduously built up her nurturing image, launching community improvement programmes and taking a homeless man and a child into her care. All the while, and when back in Soweto, she was preventing Nelson’s first set of children, let alone his first wife, getting equal support from the large overseas grants and cash that flowed in.

Other funding, including some from multinational companies, led to the construction of the 15-room mansion on a Soweto hillside dubbed “Winnie’s Palace” by the populace. Nelson lived there only briefly. (I spent three long mornings inside the palace living-rooms waiting in vain for a television interview with her. All we could film inside were a plethora of “We Love Winnie” T-shirts that lay in boxes in the hallway.)

Corruption and misuse of foreign finance was to emerge as one of Winnie’s Achilles heels. By then bizarrely appointed deputy minister of culture, Winnie chartered a plane to send her minions on a failed diamond-buying mission to the Angolan premier, but declined to pay the R100,000 (£6,000) air charter bill. The purchases were intended to further swell the coffers of her thinly-disguised front company, Co-ordinated Anti-Poverty Programmes. As an MP, she registered her outside financial interests beyond her parliamentary salary as “nil” and stated she had never received gifts of more than R350 (£21).

Her influence among the shanties of many black townships nevertheless remained considerable. Nor was her star totally eclipsed in high political circles.

She shamelessly exploited her ex-husband's iconic status. Even as more grim details were emerging from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings, under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she danced with and hugged supporters and reporters as she inaugurated a “museum” at her long-abandoned tiny Soweto home, although it actually never belonged to her, having first been assigned to Nelson and his first wife.

Not long before, she had even more tastelessly cashed in on the place’s notoriety by selling souvenir soil from its previously bloodied garden at R50 (£3) a bottle. The proceeds, said an accompanying pamphlet, would go to “the realisation of the broken children’s sacrifice”.

It was in this house, continued the pamphlet, that she had raised her children and “many others” and had “led the resistance struggle that would ultimately liberate a nation”.

Ironically, until her death led to a stream of gushing tributes by government ministers and "struggle" stalwarts, there had been an increasing consensus in South Africa’s political leadership that Winnie Mandela was not the Nation’s Mother but rather the Nation’s Mugger. Her legacy is certainly a murky one.