Dr MUFAMADI, your pants are on fire, but here’s a bucket. When I was a child my mother taught me a valuable lesson about the endless bounds of women’s empathy.
She said: “Lebogang, a mother is apt to stop praying for a miracle on receiving news that her child’s school bus is in an accident and three have perished. She is bound to ask ‘if not mine, then whose’?”
Absurd as it may sound, I was surprised to learn while reading for a degree in philosophy at UCT, that this was gender theory.
My mother was giving me a lesson in what feminists call “The ethics of care”. And so I understood well what Stompie Seipei’s mother was trying to teach the nation about her private relationship with Mama Winnie. I noted that she did not speak of innocence nor guilt, only of empathy and solidarity.
When I contrast her ways with those of Dr Sydney Mufamadi, I can’t but think Maya Angelou was right: “We must always be intolerant of ignorance, but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, are more educated and more intelligent than college professors. We must always listen carefully to what country people called mother-wit; in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.”
Dr Mufamadi could not help himself. I felt we were listening to Squealer, the master of propaganda, in Animal Farm. It was remarkable - “comrades, fools, and countrymen; we would be only too happy to let you think and speak for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
His followers were no better.
Unfortunately, we have rushed in too quickly in denouncing Pascale Lamche’s film. It is more accurate than we think. She owes no one an apology, and is being bullied just as Mama Winnie was at the TRC. I don’t think it is deliberate; Dr Mufamadi seems ill-advised and flustered by public pressure.
Firstly, Dr Mufamadi is not Piet van der Merwe, the stapler-manager at the post office in Poffader. He is a powerful man with a PhD, a former cabinet minister, who has ample public space to voice his version.
He has no overriding right of reply, at least not in a feature documentary. He will soon join the ranks of church mice in the poverty stakes, if he takes this to court.
It is also a bit disingenuous. He was, after all, a witness at the TRC.
The same allegations were put to him under cross-examination, they are not new. Worse still, he is on record under oath, saying “my instruction to the National Commission of the SAPS is that, should there be a request for any investigation to be re-opened, and that includes this one specifically, the investigation must be reopened”.
He even told the commission one of Dr Asvat’s murderers knows how to contact him from prison. Again, these things were put to him and the investigating officers.
Much of what is in the film has already been flogged to death, not least by ANC members in good standing such as Thabo Masebe, Thandi Modise and Hlengiwe Mkhize, who was one of the TRC commissioners. The only difference is the film provides Mama Winnie with a voice, it allows her to tell her side of the story.
If Dr Mufamadi and friends want South Africans to retell the story, we could easily write them a book.
The film is only espousing another version, one that is reasonably, possibly true but has been suppressed for years. After decades of vile, invasive and voyeuristic exposition of her private life, Mama Winnie deserves a fair hearing. Perhaps it would be helpful if we restated the chilling findings in another form.
When one reads Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog, one would be forgiven for thinking Mama Winnie is a convicted murderer, Mama Sisulu a liar and Dr Mufamadi, St Sydney who gave the damning testimony.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela gestures to supporters at the 54th National Conference of the ruling ANC at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg.
There is also the strange submission at the TRC, specific to Mama Winnie, where it is requested that a finding is made that people like her must be disqualified from holding public office in future. All this a few weeks before she was due to stand for deputy president. Were there other conspiracies against her?
Former intelligence DDG Barry Gilder, in his memoirs Songs and Secrets, reminds us that in 1998 Madiba had to fire the chief of the SANDF for a fake intelligence report accusing her, General Nyanda, and others of plotting to overthrow him.
This Madiba confirms in his book with Mandla Langa, Dare Not Linger. Are there alternative reasons to believe Mama Winnie was treated differently at the TRC?
Yes. Archbishop Tutu writes in No Future Without Forgiveness, “We held a special hearing into the activities of Mrs Mandela’s bodyguards. It lasted nine days, longer than any other commission hearing focusing on a single political leader.”
I should not have to tell you about Dr Neil Barnard’s memoirs revealing the taped conversations between Mama and Madiba.
It is clear that they were both being manipulated. In the chapter “A woman like Winnie”, he writes: “General Willie Willems, who was later promoted to Commissioner of Correctional Services, came up with an excellent suggestion: that Winnie be allowed to move in with her husband that would keep her out of the limelight and away from many temptations and give us a measure of control over her.”
Mandela listened to the suggestion with a twinkle in his eye; Winnie refused point blank. He also writes about an important exchange between Mama and Madiba:
“Mandela told Winnie about his meeting with De Klerk and (she) warned that he was not all that he appeared to be. Mandela disagreed with her and said he thought De Klerk was an honourable man.”
What is my point? As illustrated in the film, she speaks for herself: “I told him, Tata, you don’t know these people” The rest, as they say, is history. So, Dr Mufamadi must stop being a crybaby. It is not about him. Mama Winnie taught about empathy and the generosity of the human spirit.
Easily, as it is written in the poem I Vow to thee my Country, hers was the service of love: the love that asks no questions; the love that stands the test and lays upon the altar the dearest and the best.
Hers was the love that never faltered; the love that paid the price; the love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice. And yes tomorrow is another country, most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know. We may not count her armies, she may not have become our president, but her fortress was a faithful heart and her pride was suffering. And so, soul by soul and silently, her shining bounds increase; her ways were ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
So chill Dr Mufamadi, Juju always plays to the gallery, there are no signals coming your way!
* Lebogang Hoveka is the author of “They Think and Speak for Themselves - Memoirs and Letters to the Children of the ANC”.