The Long Walk to Freedom (86 page)

THE OPPRESSION of my wife did not let up. In 1972, security policemen kicked down the door of 8115 Orlando West. Bricks were hurled through the window. Gunshots were fired at the front door. In 1974, Winnie was charged with violating her banning orders, which restricted her from having any visitors apart from her children and her doctor. She was then working at a lawyer’s office, and a friend brought Zeni and Zindzi to see her during her lunch hour. For this, Winnie was charged and then sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. She was put in Kroonstad Prison, in the Orange Free State, but her experience there was not as horrendous as her previous stay in Pretoria. Winnie wrote to me that she felt liberated in prison this time, and it served to reaffirm her commitment to the struggle. The authorities permitted Zindzi and Zeni to visit her on Sundays.

When Winnie was released in 1975, we managed, through letters and communications with our lawyers, to work out a plan for me to see Zindzi. Prison regulations stated that no child between the ages of two and sixteen may visit a prisoner. When I went to Robben Island, all my children were in this legal limbo of age restrictions. The reasoning behind the rule is not pernicious: the lawmakers presumed that a prison visit would negatively affect the sensitive psyches of children. But the effect on prisoners was perhaps equally damaging. It is a source of deep sorrow not to be able to see one’s children.

In 1975, Zindzi turned fifteen. The plan was for her mother to alter Zindzi’s birth documents to show that the girl was turning sixteen, not fifteen, and therefore able to see me. Birth records are not kept in a very uniform or organized way for Africans, and Winnie found that it was not hard to modify her documents to show that Zindzi was born a year earlier. She applied for a permit, and it was approved.

A few weeks before Zindzi’s scheduled visit in December, I had a previously arranged visit with Winnie’s mother. When I was seated across from her in the visiting area, I said to her, “Well, Ma, I’m very excited because I’m going to see Zindzi.” My mother-in-law, who was a former teacher, regarded me with some surprise and then said in a rather peevish way, “No, Zindzi cannot come and see you because she is not yet sixteen.”

I realized immediately that no one had told her about our gambit. There was a warder behind each of us, and I decided I would simply gloss over what she had said, and mumbled, “Ah, well, Ma, it is nothing.”

But my mother-in-law is a stubborn woman and she did not let it pass. “Well, Mkonyanisi” — an affectionate term for son-in-law in Xhosa, which is what she always called me — “you have made a serious error because Zindzi is only fifteen.”

I widened my eyes in a gesture of alarm and she must have gotten the message because she did not mention Zindzi again.

I had not seen Zindzi since she was three years old. She was a daughter who knew her father from old photographs rather than memory. I put on a fresh shirt that morning, and took more trouble than usual with my appearance: it is my own vanity, but I did not want to look like an old man for my youngest daughter.

I had not seen Winnie for over a year, and I was gratified to find that she looked well. But I was delighted to behold what a beautiful woman my youngest daughter had become and how closely she resembled her equally beautiful mother.

Zindzi was shy and hesitant at first. I am sure it was not easy for her finally to see a father she had never really known, a father who could love her only from a distance, who seemed to belong not to her but to the people. Somewhere deep inside her she must have harbored resentment and anger for a father who was absent during her childhood and adolescence. I could see right away that she was a strong and fiery young woman like her own mother had been when she was Zindzi’s age.

I knew she would be feeling uncomfortable, and I did my best to lighten the atmosphere. When she arrived I said to her, “Have you met my guard of honor?,” gesturing to the warders who followed me everywhere. I asked her questions about her life, her schooling, and her friends, and then tried to take her back to the old days that she barely remembered. I told her how I often recalled Sunday mornings at home when I dandled her on my knee while Mum was in the kitchen making a roast. I recollected small incidents and adventures in Orlando when she was a baby, and how she had rarely cried even when she was small. Through the glass, I could see her holding back her tears as I talked.

The one tragic note of the visit was when I learned from Winnie that Bram Fischer had died of cancer shortly after being let out of prison. Bram’s death affected me deeply. Although the government left no fingerprints on Bram’s body, it was the state’s relentless harassment of him that brought on the final illness that took him too soon. They hounded him even after death — the state confiscated his ashes after his cremation.

Bram was a purist, and after the Rivonia Trial, he decided he could best serve the struggle by going underground and living the life of an outlaw. It burdened him that the men whom he was representing in court were going to prison while he lived freely. During the trial, I advised Bram not to take this route, stressing that he served the struggle best in the courtroom, where people could see this Afrikaner son of a judge president fighting for the rights of the powerless. But he could not let others suffer while he remained free. Like the general who fights side by side with his troops at the front, Bram did not want to ask others to make a sacrifice that he was unwilling to make himself.

Bram went underground while out on bail and was captured in 1965, and sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to commit sabotage. I had tried to write him in prison, but regulations forbade prisoners from corresponding with each other. After he had been diagnosed with cancer, a newspaper campaign calling for his release on humanitarian grounds had influenced the government. It was just a few weeks after the authorities released him, still under house arrest, to his brother’s house in Bloemfontein that he died.

In many ways, Bram Fischer, the grandson of the prime minister of the Orange River Colony, had made the greatest sacrifice of all. No matter what I suffered in my pursuit of freedom, I always took strength from the fact that I was fighting with and for my own people. Bram was a free man who fought against his own people to ensure the freedom of others.

A month after this visit I received word from Winnie that her most recent request for a visit had been turned down by the authorities on the absurd grounds that I did not wish to see her. I immediately made an appointment with Lieutenant Prins, who was then head of prison, to lodge a protest.

Prins was not what one would call a sophisticated man. When I went in to see him I explained the situation evenly and without animosity. But I said the situation as it stood was unacceptable and my wife must be permitted to visit.

Prins did not appear to be listening, and when I had finished he said, “Ag, Mandela, your wife is only seeking publicity.” I told him that I resented his remark, and before I had even finished, he uttered something so offensive and uncomplimentary about my wife that I immediately lost my temper.

I rose from my chair and started to move around the desk toward the lieutenant. Prins began to retreat, but I soon checked myself. Instead of assaulting him with my fists, as I felt like doing, I pummeled him with words. I am not a man who approves of oaths or curses, but that day I violated my own principle. I finished by telling him that he was a contemptible man without honor, and that if he ever repeated those same words I would not hold myself back as I had that day.

When I had finished, I turned and stormed out of his office. As I was leaving, I saw Kathy and Eddie Daniels outside but I did not even greet them as I walked back to my cell. Even though I had silenced Prins, he had caused me to violate my self-control and I consider that a defeat at the hands of my opponent.

After breakfast the following morning, two warders entered my cell and said I was wanted at the Head Office. When I reached the office, I was surrounded by a half-dozen armed warders. Off to one side was Lieutenant Prins and in the center of this circle was a warrant officer who was the prison prosecutor. The atmosphere was tense.

“Well, Mandela,” the prosecutor said, “I hear you had yourself a nice time yesterday, but today will not be so pleasant. I am charging you for having insulted and threatened the head of prison. It is a grave charge.” He then handed me the summons.

“Do you have anything to say?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “You can speak with my attorney.” I then asked to be taken back to my cell. Prins did not say a word.

I knew immediately what I would do: prepare a countersuit charging everyone from the lieutenant all the way up to the minister of justice with misconduct. I would indict the prison system as a whole as a racist institution that sought to perpetuate white supremacy. I would make the case a cause célèbre, and make them regret they had ever charged me in the first place.