by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
And then she met him at some do, and was introduced as the painter.
She told me that her first impression of him was that he was very, very sexy. In fact, he came on to her as a man, and she confessed that if he had merely crooked his little finger at her, she would have followed him anywhere and let him have his way with her.
An old biddy, a friend of my father, a racist, confessed that if there was one black man who could put his shoes under her bed, it was Nelson Mandela.
When Mandela was young, he liked to swan around in suits and long silk scarves.
Mandela was a ladies man.
He met the queen of England once, after not having seen her awhile, and wrapped her up in a bear hug, and said “Ah, Elizabeth! You are as beautiful as ever. How do you manage to keep so young?” and while all the courtiers were beside themselves with embarrassment at god-knows-how-many protocols of etiquette were being trounced, she blushed, giggled and said helplessly: “Nelson!”
It was with this same charm — a sense of mischief, warm humor, and unfailing grace and politesse — that Mandela wooed his jailers and the politicians with whom he negotiated his freedom while he was still in prison.
Here is what happened, since no one is telling the story now, and it's not often told anyhow.
You may recall that on June 16th, 1976 the black youth of Soweto marched against a Department of Education edict that said half their subjects would be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor.
On that day in 1976, I was working on the top floor of the tallest building in Johannesburg, and we saw the smoke rising from Soweto. In the chaos, the authorities didn't clamp down on black newspapers with their usual alacrity, so we read enough to realize it was a major police riot that started because the trigger-happy white cops had opened fire on kids marching peacefully — and not a case of black people going Neanderthal apeshit as the official media told us. (In America, Fox News is pretty much EXACTLY like the official media of apartheid. Growing up in a fascist country makes it fairly easy to spot those tendencies elsewhere. The first time I heard Ronald Reagan speak, my racist-fascist detector went on automatic red alert, and that was before Reagan called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. The biggest difference between President Reagan and any South African apartheid President is that Reagan had more hair.)
On June 16th, somewhere between 600 to 3,000 school kids were shot dead by South Africa's Security Police. The country was stunned. Protests broke out everywhere. The time had come for change. We all waited for President John Vorster, an old pal of my Dad's, to come up with some big announcement about some compromise, some lessening of the weight of the state on black necks. But when Vorster spoke, this is what he said:
“This is a storm in a teacup.”
That's when I decided to get the hell out of Hell. (Today I feel a little flicker of the same perplexed fury about Obama's coddling of Goldman Sachs, Big Oil, Big Pharma and the like.)
Vorster shrugged off the greatest event in the history of South Africa, but there was a massive metamorphosis in the psyches of the black kids. Unlike most of their parents, they refused to succumb humbly to oppression. They did not fear the Man. They did not fear the guns of the Security Police. They were too young to make any compromises with life. Or death. They walked right up to the armored vehicles of the oppressors, Molotov cocktails in hand. It was a revolt of the fearless Twenty-Somethings and the Teens and the Tweens and the Toddlers. The never-ending intifada of South Africa's black youth had begun.
Meanwhile, as the revolt of the youth continued, and incarcerated youngsters joined Mandela on Robben Island at “Mandela University,” Winnie Mandela was being persecuted by the authorities in Soweto, and stirring so much shit, the government banned her in 1977 to the little town of Brandfort in the Free State.
This was before Winnie did things so bad, the people of the neighborhood tried to burn her house down. This was before her involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Stompie Moeketsi by her bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club. Stompie was an activist; detained without trial at the age of 12, he'd been South Africa's youngest political prisoner. The man who slit Stompie's throat, Jerry Richardson, said Winnie ordered him to kidnap Stompie and three other boys. The boys were accused of being police informers, and beaten. In 1991 Winnie was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault, and sentenced to six years in jail; on appeal it was reduced to a fine and a two-year suspended sentence. In her appearance at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with Stompie's mother present, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a friend of the Mandela family, appealed to Winnie to speak the truth, but she remained defiant and called her accusers all sorts of names. No doubt being persecuted all her adult life had been traumatic, but it's clear this exemplary symbol of defiance went rotten, and that her moral compass spun right off true north; she has never shown the slightest remorse, because she obviously doesn't feel the need to. The defiance that sustained her against the apartheid authorities, now makes her refuse to admit to any culpability in a brutal murder.
In 1994 Nelson Mandela was granted a divorce from Winnie. He had wanted a quiet divorce, but she made a big fuss, so he was forced to reveal their dirty washing. He told the court that he'd been “the loneliest man” after he came out of jail, because she never entered his bedroom while he was awake. She was having an affair with a younger colleague, Dali Mpofu. Mandela said that having a marriage in name only was “embarrassing” and that Winnie “takes opportunities at public functions to show affection for him,” which he found distasteful.
OK, let's get back to the good old bad old days, when Winnie was a worldwide symbol of defiance against apartheid.
In the Brandfort ghetto, there was no phone, so Winnie would brazenly march to a pay phone in the white town and use it. Soon she was charged with breaking her banning orders. By law she needed an attorney to represent her in court, and it so happened that the only attorney in town who could do that, an Afrikaner, used to be the college roommate of a guy who had gone to the big city and become the Minister of Justice or something. So the attorney called his friend and asked if he'd get into trouble representing this well-known shit-stirrer Winnie Mandela, who had already organized the local ghetto into a hotbed of uppityness. His friend said it's totally OK, so this Afrikaner attorney met with Winnie as her attorney. She would come to his house to discuss her case and while there, she became bosom buddies with his Afrikaner wife, trading recipes and knitting tips and jokes. So he calls his pal in the big city and says, listen, maybe you guys should talk to Nelson Mandela, these people are reasonable people we can make a deal with, and besides, Winnie Mandela is great to hang out with.
So a little later it happens that Mandela is sent from jail to a hospital because of some ailment, and the friend of Winnie's attorney and some other Afrikaner Cabinet members say, hey, it would have been beneath our dignity to visit Mandela in jail, but now we can go and see him in the hospital. So they arrive there and a smiling Mandela gets up from his hospital bed and graciously introduces them to the staff of the hospital, seeing as he had everyone eating out of his hand within minutes of arriving, and the Afrikaner big wigs walk out of their session with Mandela basically liquified: they're stepping on air, their pants charmed right off their thick Boer legs, their closed Afrikaner minds now spinning wildly from the Mandela reality distortion field. Soon they're taking him on secret trips out of jail, and then they release him and unban the ANC. That's essentially how South Africa's black and white holocausts were expiated, and democracy came to South Africa without a massive bloodbath, all through the charm and forgiving spirit of one of the greatest men who ever lived.
My brother, who lived through the whole thing, and lost four friends to Security Police bullets, told me he saw Mandela only once look like he was about to lose his temper. It was when, during the negotiations, the white President De Klerk insisted that the ANC renounce violence and give up their arms. Barely containing his anger, Mandela pointed out that De Klerk's people, who had murdered black people for decades, were hardly in a position to tell anyone else to renounce violence. De Klerk shut the fuck up about renouncing violence after that.
So that's my Mandela story. Here's a poem I wrote about him.
MANDELA
so this is why I've been
in New York all this time
to stand at the UN
and vote for a man
Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela
his life cut by twenty-seven and a half years
yet he said, I'm not bitter
I'm not bitter?
up here in the north
we sure could learn from his south
here the smaller the brain
the bigger the mouth
you liked New York, Nelson
but I have to warn you
we poopscoop our dogshit
and giftwrap our bullshit
we're all prisoners in a dark sitcom
some talk revolution
but the closest they get
is to call Doctor King
an Uncle Tom
praise-sing Rolihlahla
Nelson Mandela
your mother Nosekeni
your eldest son Thembi
they too went underground
prison-bound
unable to go their funeral
where did you go?
the last walk to hell
a deep descent
but you came back
your back unbent
you knew a nation
marched from Lagos to London
Beijing to Boston
Moscow to Cuba
Makgatho, Maziwe
Zenani and Zindziwe
how proud for them yeah
that you were their tata
my father was proud
when you went to jail
he, a ten-foot crackpipe
I couldn't inhale
his idea of father
came straight from hell
he touched me only
to beat the shit out of me
and when he finished
he beat the shit as well
all those years I made up
two fathers for me
the one I could smell
whiskey-fart near
the other one gone
island-bound, gagged
Nelson, he ain't here
I liked having one father who was missing
he made up for the one
who was too much there
but far from my fatherland
on the isle of Manhattan
where the hype high-fives
to maroela-tree size
you get to spot self-deception
it wears a funny green hat
check it out
the cold smile of fact
Nelson, I can never dig my tata
the way I love you
but marooned in my whiteness
how long? very long
in my self-imposed exile
I know one thing that's true
the father who is my father
is my father
and the father who is not
is not
is you
amandla! – power
awethu! – is ours
the price of freedom has been paid
in blood, in pain, in tears, in rage
hey, dad, I count the scars
you wrote on me
I price the resentment
I kept forever on simmer
I total up the rage
I ate each New York night for dinner
but now today
as I make my cross
with Rolihlahla I say
sweet freedom at last
I'm not bitter
Mandela once described himself, after he had been president of South Africa, as “an unemployed pensioner with a criminal record.” He also said that resentment is like taking poison and thinking it will kill your enemies.
Will there ever be a great man again, like Churchill, FDR, Gandhi, MLK, or Mandela? Great men happen because of great challenges. So yes, there will be great men again, because of three great challenges facing the human race: the oppression of women (if Malala goes into politics, she could be a great woman); the growing worldwide inequality between the rich and everyone else; and the man-made destruction of our planet's ecosystem. These problems may throw up great men again, as well as great women.
Let's hope they do, because we can't seem to achieve great things without them.