ZINDZI took her nephew to Brandfort in her Volkswagen Beetle to meet Winnie Mandela, his grandfather’s second wife.
When they arrived in the early evening, Mandla was surprised to see a very excited woman running out of her house to greet him.
“Where’s my grandson?” she called out. “Where is this child? Bring him out of the car.”
Mandla was astonished to learn that this woman calling herself his grandmother was “Mum Winnie”. He was confused, too. “I was meeting her for the first time, introducing herself as my grandmother. I was very puzzled, because growing up, I knew my grandmothers to be Anna Mosehla, my mother’s mother, and also Evelyn, on the paternal side, my father’s mother. It was a very strange moment for me. She kept me up almost the whole evening and we must have gone to sleep about midnight. She was telling me different stories of who she is.”
During the journey to visit his grandfather, Mandla flew on an aircraft for the first time in his life. The flight was difficult – there was a lot of turbulence and he remembers his ears being blocked for much of the trip. When he arrived in Cape Town, he recalls the cultural shock of seeing two people of a different race waiting for him and Winnie at the airport. They were Dullah and Farida Omar.
The Omars took Mandla and Winnie to see Mandela at Pollsmoor, and Mandla is still deeply grateful to the couple for introducing him to his famous grandparent.
“If you ask Aunt Farida, particularly, who introduced the young Mandla to the old man, they’ll say it was us. Farida still cries every time I tell her that if there are people to thank for introducing me to this global icon, to this founding father of our young democracy, it was absolutely Dullah and Farida Omar.”
The nervous 9-year-old sat with Winnie in the prison’s waiting room, where he marvelled at the size and security of the building.
“Every window has got bars. Every door has got bars.” As the full realisation of where he was hit him, Mandla retreated into himself. Everything he had ever learnt about prison had emphasised that it was a place that housed the worst people in society. He started to question the character of the man he was visiting, and found himself becoming angry, too, at this person who had “shamed our family”.
He suddenly heard the deep, booming voice of a man walking down the corridor. It was Mandela, who was making polite conversation with the guards, inquiring after their health and their families. This already indicated what kind of person Mandela was, but Mandla, as a child who had learnt very little about his grandfather, could not see this.
When Mandela finally entered the waiting room, Mandla was awed.
“A giant came into the room. My grandfather was built of a bigger stature than myself. He was six foot five at his peak, taller than I am now.” Winnie jumped up and ran to hug her husband, crying and thrilled to see him. But Mandla sat still and said nothing. Eventually, Mandela looked at him and said: “Oh, you must be my grandson.” On hearing this greeting, Mandla felt his bitterness increase.
Conversation between grandfather and grandson was stilted throughout the visit, the boy limiting his answers to Mandela’s questions to a mere “yes” or “no”.
Mandla refers to the visit as the longest 45 minutes of his life, and he was immensely relieved when it was time to go home. When he arrived back in Soweto, his father, Makgatho, asked him jokingly: “So did you find out who Mandela is?” But Mandla was too hurt and embarrassed by the experience to find the situation funny.
Mandela, however, seemed to sense what was going on in his grandson’s mind. He realised that Mandla needed to be schooled in South African history and politics, so he arranged for his comrade and political activist Helen Joseph to teach his grandson about the situation in the country.
In a coded letter, which went past the censors, he asked Helen to help Mandla with his English, which he feared was “very backward”.
Helen invited Mandla to Norwood. It was the first time he had been in such close proximity to a white person, never mind in the home of one. Helen handed Mandela’s letter over to Mandla and asked him to read it, which he did easily enough. When he was done, she said to him: “Well, even the apartheid regime couldn’t understand the letter. Your grandfather says you came to visit him and you were totally clueless as to who he is and the Struggle he’s committed to.”
She then told Mandla all about it. “And it became the irony that a white woman would educate me about who my grandfather was,” Mandla muses. “These are some of the experiences I will always treasure (about) having a man like Mandela as my grandfather.”
More lessons followed. It seemed that Mandela had set out to do for Mandla what Jongintaba had done for him: grooming and educating him so he could become a powerful leader of the Thembu tribe.
In 1988, when Mandla was 13, he received one of these lessons from Oliver Tambo, who taught him about the power of appearance and the importance of looking groomed and professional at all times. Tambo was still living in London when Mandela’s grandson paid him a brief visit while on his way to France to accept the Sakharov Prize on his grandfather’s behalf. Mandela was receiving this award for his contribution to fighting for human rights and freedom of thought.
When Tambo met Mandla, the ANC president took one look at the boy, dressed in a T-shirt, denim jacket and jeans, and set off with him to Harrods, where he bought Mandla a new suit. Tambo had said to him: ‘You see, you are here to represent your grandfather. You must look as he did. He was a very, very clean, sharp individual.”
Through such experiences, Mandla grew to appreciate who Mandela really was and what he stood for. Mandla was no longer the clueless boy at Pollsmoor.
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