Good Morning, Mr. Mandela: A Memoir, by Zelda la Grange
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Good Morning, Mr. Mandela: A Memoir, by Zelda la Grange
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“An important reminder of the lessons Madiba taught us all.” —President Bill Clinton There are numerous books about Nelson Mandela, but Good Morning, Mr. Mandela is the first by a trusted member of his inner circle. In addition to offering a rare close portrait, Zelda la Grange pays tribute to Madiba as she knew him—a teacher who gave her the most valuable lessons of her life. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, La Grange, a white Afrikaner, feared the imprisoned Nelson Mandela as “a terrorist.” Yet she would become one of his most devoted associates for almost two decades. Inspiring and deeply felt, this book honors a great man’s lasting gift.
Good Morning, Mr. Mandela: A Memoir, by Zelda la Grange - Amazon Sales Rank: #403733 in Books
- Brand: La Grange, Zelda
- Published on: 2015-06-16
- Released on: 2015-06-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.41" h x .83" w x 5.44" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Good Morning, Mr. Mandela: A Memoir, by Zelda la Grange Review “In Good Morning, Mr. Mandela, Zelda la Grange recounts her remarkable life at the right hand of the man we both knew and loved. It's a tribute to both of them—to Madiba's eye for talent and his capacity for trust and to Zelda's courage to take on a great challenge and her capacity for growth. This story proves the power of making politics personal and is an important reminder of the lessons Madiba taught us all.”—President Bill Clinton“Leadership is the rarest resource in this world, the ability to inspire the best and the brightest to serve the public good. Nelson Mandela did this at the government level with his official cabinet, but he also did it with his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of trusted advisers. Zelda’s view of his extraordinary impact is uniquely personal. Her leadership is also of the highest order: service.” —Bono, lead singer of U2 and cofounder of ONE “President Nelson Mandela’s choice of the young Afrikaner typist Zelda la Grange as his most trusted aide embodied his commitment to reconciliation in South Africa. She repaid his trust with loyalty and integrity. I have the highest regard for her.”—Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu “Zelda la Grange has a singular perspective on Nelson Mandela, having served as his longtime personal aide, confidante and close friend. She is a dear friend to both of us and a touchstone to all of us who loved Madiba. Her story of their journey together demonstrates how a man who transformed an entire nation also had the power to transform the life of one extraordinary woman.”—Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary, actor, producer of Invictus
About the Author ZELDA LA GRANGE left the South African government to work for the Nelson Mandela Foundation in 2002. She lives in Pretoria, South Africa.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Author’s Note
In June 2013 the son of the ANC stalwart Oliver Tambo, Dali Tambo, conducted an interview with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Mugabe said: Nelson Mandela is too much of a saint. He has been too good to white people at the expense of blacks in his own country. Some agreed while others protested. To some extent I think the man had a point. It could well have been perceived that way. And yet, in a conversation with Richard Stengel, quoted in Conversations With Myself, Madiba himself said a long time ago, ‘People will feel I see too much good in people. So it’s a criticism I have to put up with and I’ve tried to adjust to, because whether it is so or not, it is something which I think is profitable. It’s a good thing to assume, to act on the basis that . . . others are men of integrity and honour . . . because you tend to attract integrity and honour if that is how you regard those with whom you work.’
Somehow in the Mugabe interview I felt responsible for this perception that he has been too good to white people. Indeed he has been too good to me, but I want to believe that he felt proud of how he changed this insignificant life. He often said that if you change one person for the better, you have done your duty. He has not only changed my life but millions of others. He has done way beyond what is expected of a single human being and perhaps for that he deserves to be hailed as a saint after all.
In another conversation with Richard Stengel, Madiba said, ‘Your duty is to work with human beings as human beings, not because you think they are angels. And, therefore, once you know that this man has got this virtue and he has got this weakness you work with them and you accommodate that weakness and you try and help him to overcome that weakness. I don’t want to be frightened by the fact that a person has made certain mistakes and he has got human frailties. I can’t allow myself to be influenced by that. And that is why many people criticize me.’
I try not to think ‘Why me?’, to understand why Nelson Mandela chose me. If I do, I think of these quotes above. In the nineteen years we spent together he learned my weaknesses, he learned my strengths, and he invested in my strengths to make me the person I am today.
I served him for almost twenty years and was his PA until he left us on 5 December 2013. In 2009 I decided to start writing this book to pay tribute to him. I mostly wanted to record my experiences in the hope that others would be changed and influenced by my story too. My book is therefore a tribute to Khulu, as I knew him.
This is not his story. This is my story, and I am content with it. But the reader may be disappointed if they expect me to wash too much dirty laundry in public. I would not disrespect the trust Nelson Mandela had invested in me. That is the biggest honour he could have bestowed on me – to trust me – and I intend to cherish that for the rest of my life. What I decided to write about and what I decided to omit as far as he is concerned is based on that trust. It is therefore not a tell-all book.
It is also not a book of great political insights or a thematic dissection of his life. It’s a simple story of my experiences with him. One of the most important lessons I have learned from this great man over the years, reaffirmed by his wife Graça Machel to me later in life, is that you only have one person to account to and that is yourself. You have to go to bed at night with your own thoughts and conscience, and after writing this book I need to feel the comfort of a pillow of a clear conscience. I need to make him proud because as much as it feels that our lives were overshadowed by negativity and turmoil over the last couple of years, there is a beautiful story to be told, and I need to admit that I am part of that story and that it is my duty to tell that story. Above all, I need to know in my heart that if he had to read this book he would be happy with what I told and he would agree with the detail, and spending sixteen of the last nineteen years with him, day in, day out, I know what he would be comfortable with in the public domain and what he would not, and that is what is mine to protect.
The book is therefore a collection of anecdotes, sometimes at my own expense, of a road well travelled. No regrets and only lessons to be learned. I am an emotional billionaire, and if nothing extraordinary happens to me for the rest of my life I will still be content with my memories until the day I die. I have had a rich life. Most people will not experience what I have been witness to, and my story is therefore one of change, of slow metamorphoses of the mind and a belief system to where I am today. The reader has to decide if there is any part he or she can identify with or lessons they can learn from my story. It is not for me to decide.
It would also be incorrect to assume that I was the only one, or a special one, around Madiba. I played a particular role in his life, mostly concerned with his public life. But there are many others, household staff, office staff, security and medical personnel, who played equally important roles in his life and who he was totally dependent upon. Some of them are included in my story but I simply couldn’t pay tribute to each and every one of them.
I have tried my best without exception and that is the best I have to give. I hope to contribute to Nelson Mandela’s legacy in a small way by sharing the privileges and experiences I have had to anyone open to receiving them. If I change one life by touching another with my story, I have done my duty.
* * *
I remain grateful and indebted for ever . . .
Prologue: Zeldina
It was early 2000s. I was in my thirties. I stood outside our office door in Johannesburg, as usual, awaiting the arrival of Nelson Mandela to receive him, escort him into his office and brief him on events for the day. Whenever his car appeared around the corner, my face lit up, no matter how much pressure I was under. The smile that painted my face was one loaded with love and admiration, like one would have when you see your dearest grandparents. His car came to a standstill and the bodyguards emerged. We greeted and briefly exchanged pleasantries before they opened the heavily armed car door for Madiba to step out of the car. Madiba is Nelson Mandela’s clan name in South Africa. It is also the term with which people endearingly refer to him. Some call him Tata, which means ‘Father’, but most people refer to him and address him as Madiba. I called him Khulu, an abbreviated version of Tata um’khulu which means ‘Grandfather’.
While getting out of the car, our eyes met. I exclaimed, ‘Good morning Khulu.’ He called me Zeldina. He was handed his walking stick to support himself to get out of the car. The stick was made from ivory, a gift from his good friend Douw Steyn. He didn’t care much for material things but his walking stick was one of the few items he valued and protected with his life.
‘Good morning Zeldina,’ he said as he emerged from the car. His face lit up with his usual smile although I detected some reserve. Once the bodyguards had him steady on his feet, they handed him to me. He would support himself on his walking stick and hold onto my arm with his left hand.
‘How are you this morning Khulu?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine Zeldina,’ he said but he didn’t continue as he usually did, asking after my well-being. That was another sign that something bothered him. As we walked into his office I thought of giving him a few moments to gather his thoughts before I started overloading him with information about the day. Once his office door was closed he opened up:
‘You know Zeldina, I had a dream last night.’
I responded with a ‘Yes?’
‘I dreamt that you left me, that you deserted me . . .’ he said.
I was dumbstruck. Me? Zelda la Grange? Abandoning Nelson Mandela? How could he ever conceive me doing something like that? At the time I had been in his service for almost ten years. What would cause him to feel that I would abandon him? To the contrary, because of my early childhood I was the one who feared abandonment. I had to set his mind at ease. I put my left hand on his left hand which was holding onto my right arm and said, ‘Khulu, I would never ever do something like that and you should please never think about that ever again. I can give you my assurance that I will never abandon you.’ And then added on a lighter note, ‘In any event I think you are going to abandon me or chase me away before I can abandon you.’
He looked at me, laughed half heartedly, lifted his eyebrows and then responded: ‘I will never do that.’
That was the warmth of our relationship. We needed affirmation from each other. We looked after each other. I have grown to love this man who was once my people’s enemy. He resembled fear in our eyes. Growing up in apartheid South Africa as a white Afrikaner, we had spent our lives oppressing the same people that Nelson Mandela represented. He was the voice of the oppressed and the liberation struggle. Less than fifteen years after his release from prison, here I was trying to explain and defend my commitment to the man we once despised.
Apartheid was the system introduced by the white government in South Africa in the 1940s. It advocated for white supremacy and black oppression and was a clear set of legislation providing for the separation and segregation of white and black in South Africa. The laws of apartheid were upheld in churches and schools, on beaches and in restaurants, and any areas where the white minority could feel intimidated by the presence of black people.
Yet I walked next to Nelson Mandela for most of my adult professional life – each of us holding onto the other. I was a young Afrikaner girl whose views and mindset were changed by the greatest statesman of our time. Yet to me, he was more than my moral conscience. I had learned to care for him, because he cared for me. He shaped and changed my thinking because for him to employ a white Afrikaans-speaking young woman as his Personal Assistant was not only unprecedented, it was unheard of.
PART ONE
‘If it isn’t good, let it die’
1970–1994
1
Childhood
On 29 October 1970 in Boksburg to the east of Johannesburg, South Africa, I was born and not left to die but to make it good, like most babies that are brought into this world.
On the same day, Nelson Mandela was already beginning his ninth year in prison. In prison since 1962, and then convicted for treason after the Rivonia Trial in 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He and other political prisoners were incarcerated on Robben Island, a desolate island off the coast of Cape Town, for opposing apartheid.
At the time my father worked at a construction company and my mother was a teacher. They were very poor. My only sibling, my brother Anton, was three years old when I was born. Because our parents were white, we were born to legal privilege. That was the way it was in South Africa in 1970. Even though my parents’ families shared the same holiday destination every December, my parents only met in Boksburg once my mother was studying to become a teacher and my father was working in the postal service.
My grandfather’s family originated from French Huguenots who fled the south of France during the 1680s to escape the persecution of Protestants by the Catholic authorities. The La Grange family originated from a small town called Cabrières in the region of Avignon; a place I discovered and visited twice in the decades after my birth as a result of working for Nelson Mandela.
My father was one of two siblings. Their parents lived in Mosselbay, a coastal town along the picturesque Garden Route in the Cape Province. My grandmother’s sister was the first qualified female pharmacist in South Africa and up to this day the Scholtz family own and run a reputable pharmacy in the town of Willowmore in the Eastern Cape. She was therefore quite an impressive woman and someone we automatically looked up to as a result of her unique achievement.
I was also very fond of my dad’s father. His name was Anthony Michael but we just called him ‘Oupa Mike’ (Grandpa Mike). He used to visit us a few times a year and then stay with us for a few weeks. He smoked a pipe and the smell of smoke irritated us. He would sit on one particular chair and constantly wipe his hand on the arm rest. His skin was old and cracked and the tobacco from stuffing his pipe stuck in those cracks. When he left our home the armrest was black, much to my mother’s irritation, but nobody ever said he couldn’t smoke in the house.
My mother was the eldest of three siblings from the Strydom family. The only famous family with that surname was that of J. G. Strijdom (also sometimes spelt Strydom), the sixth Prime Minister of South Africa who served between 1954 and 1958. He was succeeded by the ‘Father of Apartheid’, H. F. Verwoerd. When I learned as a child about a Strijdom being Prime Minister, I convinced myself that we were somehow related even though no real connection exists.
My mother’s father died in a motorcycle accident when my mother was only twelve years of age. I often asked my mother whether she recalled the night they received the news about her father’s death. She has mostly avoided talking about it, but has said that she recalled been woken up by someone knocking on their front door and then hearing my grandmother crying hysterically.
My grandmother had few options about the upbringing of her children. She had a clerical job at the South African Railways and it was financially impossible for her to raise three small children by herself.
She decided to send my mother, being the eldest, to an orphanage. The children’s home was in Cape Town, which is why my mother still detests the city. For her, it stinks of abandonment.
Ma only saw her siblings and my grandmother once a year during the December holidays. Both the La Grange and Strydom families camped in the same area close to Mosselbay, called Hartenbos, during the December holidays, but they never knew about the other’s existence.
My mother’s childhood memories are limited to suffering, neglect, sadness. The world was suffering the consequences of the Second World War, slowly recovering from the economic recession, and my mother, even as an Afrikaans child in the 1940s in South Africa, felt those consequences through poverty. I greatly admire her for not holding a grudge against my grandmother, whatever the circumstances.
Grandma Tilly, my mother’s mother, was part of our everyday life, even though she had given up my mother as a child. She lived close to us and I would often visit her on my way from primary school, as she conveniently lived halfway between our house and the school. Before she moved closer to us, Grandma Tilly lived opposite the Union Buildings. Sitting on the hill overlooking the city of Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, the Union Buildings were built by Herbert Baker and were the seat of the apartheid government. Imposing, monumental and beautiful – for my family, it was like living across from the White House.
On Sundays the La Granges and the Strydoms, my uncle’s family, would all visit my gran in her apartment for lunch and then go for a walk on the manicured lawns of the Union Buildings. The Union Buildings represented ultimate authority and we walked up the steps with great respect. My cousins, brother and I would play on the grounds, rolling down the sloping lawn, laughing all the time. We were happy children growing up in apartheid South Africa.
Ours was a typical privileged white family, benefiting from apartheid through good education, access to basic services and a sense of entitlement to the land and its resources. Apartheid was our regime’s political solution to enforce segregation and the separation of races, classes and cultures.
Instituted by the Afrikaner leaders in the late 1950s, the then State President, Hendrik Verwoerd, called it ‘policy’. ‘Our policy is one of good neighbourliness’, implying that the Afrikaner cared for all racial groups in South Africa. But the reality was that apartheid was a way of ensuring that Afrikaners benefited from the economy, opportunities and wealth of the country’s natural resources, at the expense of others.
By the mid 1970s the apartheid government had created a racist state based on decisions taken in the Union Buildings. Black and white people were separated, not allowed to marry, befriend, have sex together or to live in the same cities. These were the so-called Group Areas Act provisions in South Africa, an attempt to prevent people from freely moving around and living lives within the same boundaries. Black people couldn’t ride in the same buses or swim in the same sea as whites. Due to its apartheid policies, South Africa was suspended from participating in the business of the United Nations in 1974, and followed by a resolution passed in 1977 a mandatory arms embargo was imposed against us. However, the United States, Britain and France opposed the expulsion of South Africa from the UN despite several resolutions calling for it.
Even though my country was an international pariah, we kept on playing and laughing at the seat of government. This was because my people were protected. Protected from men like Nelson Mandela. It was people like him – black and determined to overthrow the government, challenging white superiority – who we feared.
Neither of my parents were politicians or worked for the government. But we supported the regime. We were, I suppose, racists. We epitomized the typical Afrikaner middle-class family at the time: law-abiding citizens, cheerleaders for whatever the church and government dictated. Our respect for authority and the ties to the Dutch Reformed Church superseded common sense. Like any other Afrikaans family, we attended church services on Sunday morning without fail and participated in all related activities to exhibit our model citizenry.
So apartheid was in our home. We lived by segregation. It was all acceptable and unquestionable, not only because the Nationalist Party government in power dictated it but also because our church endorsed it.
Black people were anyone who wasn’t white. Coloured and Indian people were black in our eyes too. ‘Coloured people’, now referred to as ‘brown’ people, originated from different groups, just like the Afrikaners, but some of their forefathers were Qash-skinned. Therefore they were regarded as ‘black’ in South Africa.
The white Afrikaner has a mixed genealogy that includes Dutch, French, German and British blood. Although unthinkable at the time, it has emerged in modern history and studies that almost all white Afrikaner people have DNA that can be traced to black and brown ancestry in South Africa – facts not all white Afrikaners easily accept.
At the time of apartheid you didn’t even contemplate anything but simply did it. I knew that all black people were required to carry a pass book and they had to show their pass books randomly to police that stopped them. I didn’t know that they were only allowed to move in areas that their passes allowed them to move in, and if they didn’t have a pass for a specific area they would be arrested for transgression of the pass act and thrown into jail, before being deported to their own area. If you had a pass for Johannesburg, you couldn’t move in Pretoria – two cities barely thirty miles apart. It was the government’s way of controlling black people’s movements.
According to our church, we were right. We did the ‘right’ thing. And yes it was right, as in direction to the right. The utmost conservatism.
Like most white families we had a black live-in domestic worker. Her name was Jogabeth. Reminiscing about those days one cannot help but come to the realization that most white children of my age were brought up by black people. They were not only domestic workers but surrogate mothers. As a child Jogabeth was part of our family to a certain extent, and within limits – apartheid limits. She stayed in a back room. She had a toilet but no bath or shower. She had a separate cup and cutlery and was not allowed to use ‘ours’. I cannot recall that my parents ever told her she was not allowed to use anything of ours but she knew and we knew. It was unspoken. Yet, Jogabeth was my lifeline.
Touching a black person was taboo. Apart from the fact that white people were considered superior to black people, we were brought up to believe that they were not as clean as we were, they apparently smelled different and the texture of their hair was different to ours. You would never dream of touching a black person’s hair or face. It was just unthinkable. Yet Jogabeth carried me on her back when I was a toddler. Although I never would have touched her hair, her hands, arms and her bosom comforted me whenever I needed it. Because she brought us children up, in our eyes she wasn’t as black as other blacks. She posed no threat to us and she served us and therefore she was more acceptable to us than other black people.
I remember on many occasions being bullied by my brother and how Jogabeth had to comfort me after losing the battle. She was my safe house and I knew that, as long as I was in her care, I was protected from my big brother’s bullying. And then during such times, I found comfort in her arms, close to her chest.
* * *
When I was twelve years old and my father was employed by the South African Breweries, eventually working his way up to become logistics manager, political unrest against apartheid played a role in my life for the first time. The head offices of the SAB were situated in the Poyntons Building in Church Street, Pretoria. On Friday, 20 May 1983 my dad was scheduled to fly to Cape Town to attend to business there. Just before 4 p.m. a bomb blast shook the entire city of Pretoria in its core. The story broke on the news immediately and it was reported that the car bomb exploded right in front of the Poyntons Building.
When news was received my mother called my dad’s office, but there was no response. She called the airport to check whether he was on the flight at around 6 p.m. but the airport authorities refused to release information on passengers, as they always do. We couldn’t find anyone that could confirm whether my dad was still in the building at the time of the explosion, whether he had safely left by the time of the explosion or whether he possibly walked past or drove out of the parking garage at the time of the explosion. He often attended business luncheons at restaurants in the surrounding areas of his head office and we feared for the worst. It was only at about 9 p.m. that night, when he arrived at his hotel in Cape Town, that he called to inform us that he was safe. It was the longest five hours of my life. We were relieved that he was unharmed. I didn’t ask why resistance to apartheid would be so strong, or take such violent forms. The violence only served to strengthen my belief in apartheid, the inherent difference between black and white.
Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the opposition African National Congress’s military wing, accepted responsibility for the bomb in which 19 people were killed – 8 black people and 11 white people – and more than 217 were injured. The Church Street bomb exploded at the height of rush hour. The two men involved in planning and executing the bombing were also killed, as the bomb was detonated by accident too soon.
Umkhonto we Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’, was established in 1961 after Nelson Mandela and other founding members of MK decided that violence in South Africa was becoming the only way to respond to the violence exercised by the apartheid government. Since the government resorted to violent means in fighting the ANC and keeping black people oppressed under apartheid laws, MK was the ANC’s response to such violence. In Nelson Mandela’s speech during the closing moments of the Rivonia Trial in 1964, when he was charged with acts of terrorism and after which he and others were sentenced to life imprisonment, he noted about MK: ‘It would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.’
Having gone to Ethiopia and Morocco in 1962 to receive military training and to secure support for MK, Mr Mandela was prepared to resort to violence. However, I am not sure whether he knew while he was imprisoned what ANC cadres were doing outside and whether those imprisoned were consulted about such acts of violence. In 1983 Oliver Tambo was President of the ANC; Nelson Mandela was already sixty-five years of age, spending his twentieth year imprisoned, and communication was difficult with prisoners. I subsequently asked him whether he was aware of the Church Street bombing and he said that they had been briefed after the incident.
The ANC knew it needed to force the hand of the racist regime. To do that they would have to turn to violence. The government was not prepared to abolish apartheid or improve the living conditions of black people and they would rather fight the black force with violence. The ANC’s response was violence. They did that by targeting strategic installations, crucial to the state. The Poytons Building was strategic because the South African Air Force Headquarters was situated in the same building.
I was generally oblivious to what was happening in the country, the poverty of blacks and the violence, but I knew that we lived in separate cocoons and that we were fighting one another in a bitter battle because we were not able to co-exist. It was pressed upon us instinctively, because of the way we lived, that when approached by a black person, you turned and walked the other way. You didn’t make conversation and you feared them. They were not our friends. I was quite happy with my life as it was and knew that we were locking doors and windows from an early age out of fear that black people might attack us at night. It never crossed my mind that we could be harmed by white people too. It was always ‘black’ people. I didn’t ask why they might attack us, or who they were, or what their lives were like. I only knew that they were dangerous.
On Sundays we solemnly prayed in church for the men defending our borders. It was the right thing to do because everybody else did it. Well, all the other whites in my community. I didn’t know which border but I knew they were fighting black people. My knowledge was limited to whites protecting the border from infiltration by more black people. How strange that then one didn’t ask the question, which black people? Were we protecting our borders from infiltration by more black people or were we protecting our borders from other military forces in the region infiltrating South Africa to support the ANC? You were told just this: we are fighting black communist people. I was brought up to believe that all black people were communists and atheists. Yet on Sundays black people gathered in small groups in open spaces, holding church services. I disregarded seeing that and cannot remember that the contradiction to what I was brought up to believe ever bothered me. As a child it is easy to follow when you grow up in an environment that is safe. Perhaps if I had been oppressed, didn’t have access to a decent school, a proper house, electricity and water, I would have asked different questions, and my brain would have developed into being more inquisitive about injustice at an early age. In any case it didn’t.
Today I also realize that the community you are brought up in chooses to live in a particular way. The people around you, grown-up adult people, decide what is socially acceptable and what is not. You live that life not realizing that there is a life beyond: issues, policies, world events and tendencies that influence your world. When you live in comfort you don’t ask questions, and there was no need for me to question what was happening beyond the walls of our house. No person is born a racist. You become a racist by influences around you. And I had become a racist by the time I was thirteen years old. By that calculation I should never have become Nelson Mandela’s longest-serving assistant. But I did.
2
Change
Perhaps something in my childhood suited me to Nelson Mandela.
When I was growing up, my mother often had severe spells of depression where she would simply cry for days or stay in bed and be depressed. We were never neglected but I do remember her sadness. One felt disempowered to do anything about it, not understanding what it was.
My mother is to this day one of the most decent, softly spoken, ladylike people I know. She has never sworn or used foul language in my presence. She has never spoken in a degrading manner to or about anyone, not even people that made her angry or people that harmed her in any way. She has calmness about her and reserves her extreme emotions for her inner self. I also never recall her being overly happy or excited about anything and she is moderate by nature. Her time spent in the orphanage while she was growing up obviously taught her to hide her emotions. It altered her. I recognized that burying of one’s self in my years with Nelson Mandela later in life. He too had to suppress his emotions to survive prison.
My dad often got frustrated with Mom’s depression and they would end up arguing about it and fighting because my mom would be so passive. My dad is a social person, the more the merrier, while my mother likes her own space and not socializing too much. I inherited that anti-social tendency from my mother. None of us realized just how troubled my mom really was.
One Friday afternoon, after playing at a friend’s house, I returned home to an empty house. When I opened the kitchen door I heard mom’s car in the garage. I didn’t open the door to the garage but merely slipped into the house, lounging around. After a while, I heard that the car was still in the garage, idling, but I didn’t hear her opening the garage door to leave. I decided to go and look what was happening. When I opened the door between the house and the garage I vividly remember my mother resting her head against the window of the car, the car idling; she seemed asleep. I rushed to the car door and tried to open it. It was locked. I then noticed a pipe from the window and traced it to the car’s exhaust. Only then did reality hit home. She was trying to commit suicide. I screamed and cried all at once and tried to force the door open.
I was twelve years of age and had little strength to make an impact. I slammed against the window but she didn’t react and the rest of the events I cannot remember. I know that I called my grandmother and my gran arrived quickly because she lived around the corner. I don’t know how my mom got out of the car to her bedroom, I don’t know at what time Anton, my brother, came home or when the doctor arrived or my mom’s best friend came. I don’t remember if and who called my dad, who was travelling on business again. I don’t remember where he was and I don’t remember how they got hold of him – cellphones were not yet invented at the time. I do remember that this was the last day I smelled anything in my life. And that smell was gas. Doctors say that from the shock my body’s ability to smell was shut off, a psychosomatic reaction to trauma.
My mom was admitted to a clinic for people suffering from depression, and stabilized. I was left constantly wondering why she would decide to leave me, just as she had been by her mom; wasn’t I good enough? Did she love me enough to live? Was it me and my brother’s endless fighting as siblings that drove her to do that? I was never angry at my mother, perhaps rather sad, and I felt abandoned.
Those events in the gas-filled garage in 1982 determined my relationships for ever. I am constantly terrified I will be abandoned. Left alone. So I overcompensate. I sacrifice myself to please people, hoping and trying to avoid a situation in which I find myself abandoned. And with the fear of abandonment comes the constant need for affirmation. It is not an ideal recipe for relationships of a romantic kind but it is ideal when you dedicate your life to your job and the world’s most iconic statesman. In a strange twist, Nelson Mandela needed someone to devote themselves to him. To help him. He needed someone who was always there. Available to support him and to be depended upon. We complemented each other in a slightly co-dependent way. My need to please fitted with his need for absolute loyalty.
* * *
But this was still to come. In 1988 I turned eighteen and completed school. The news was dominated by reports of killings of either policemen or ‘cadres’, as liberation fighters were referred to. Not a month passed without a bomb blast somewhere in the country. It became such a common occurrence that one later doesn’t pay attention to numbers. There was death everywhere. South Africa was on the brink of a civil war. Violence erupted more often than not, and for the middle-class white Afrikaans people perhaps going to war against black people seemed like the only solution.
For me, though, life continued as before. My father had asked me: ‘What do you want to study?’ I had no idea, but since I was always engaged in cultural activities at school I opted to study acting. He gave me a definite ‘No’ and said that unless you are Sandra Prinsloo – one of South Africa’s most successful and admired actresses – you had no chance at succeeding in the performing arts. It was my life’s dream to become an actress. From childhood I remembered role-playing to be a secretary whenever I accompanied my dad to his office at weekends. My father convinced me, like most Afrikaner parents would have done at the time, to opt for a career in which job security took priority over following your passion, and I decided to enrol for a three-year National Diploma as Executive Secretary at the Technicon (now the Tshwane University of Technology) in Pretoria.
In September 1989, almost a year after my eighteenth birthday – the age at which South African citizens become legitimate voters – a general election was held. It excluded black people. No coloured, Indian or black people were allowed to vote under the apartheid laws. In South Africa’s last national race-based elections the National Party lost ground and only managed to secure 48 per cent of the vote. The National Party had ruled since 1948. Its policies were based on apartheid, segregation and the promotion of the Afrikaner. People who supported them were known as Nats. Being a stern conservative, even more conservative than the Nats, I voted for the Conservative Party in 1989.
The Nats were beginning to talk about reform: allowing black people to vote, bringing an end to the Group Areas Act and discrimination against people based on the colour of their skin. The Conservative Party opposed any change to apartheid laws and that year they became the official opposition, securing 31 per cent of the white vote. Though the total population at the time was estimated to be in the region of 30 million (there are no official figures available because black people were not counted as citizens), only about 3.1 million voters (all white) were registered, of which just over 1 million voted for the National Party’s reform policies.
Unbeknown to anyone, Nelson Mandela had had his first meeting with the then President, P. W. Botha, on 4 July 1989. Mr Botha was known to oppose black majority rule, yet his willingness to meet with Mr Mandela set the tone of concessions to be made. At this point Nelson Mandela was spending his twenty-sixth year in prison. He had become the figurehead of the oppressed in South Africa even though very few people really knew him apart from his cadres. He was becoming the symbol of freedom for the masses in South Africa, even though the pictures that appeared of him were from the 1960s or were sketches of what people imagined he looked like at the time. No one was allowed access to the prison to ever take photographs of the ageing Nelson Mandela.
P. W. Botha abruptly resigned as President in August 1989, a month before the elections, after he felt that the then Minister of Education, F. W. de Klerk, had not consulted with him after a meeting he had with President Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia. Mr Botha felt undermined and resigned; Mr de Klerk was appointed Acting President for the month prior to the elections.
At this time, Nelson Mandela had been moved to Victor Verster Prison in the Paarl, close to Cape Town. He regularly met with President de Klerk and Mr de Klerk announced the release of the first long-serving political prisoners barely a month after becoming President. This was a landmark in South Africa’s history: change became inevitable. I knew nothing about the prisoners being released and I can hardly remember that I paid attention to the announcement. These prisoners included Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni, Raymond Mhlaba and Ahmed Kathrada among others, some of Nelson Mandela’s closest friends and colleagues. Who could have imagined that I would later adore some of these prisoners.
On 2 February 1990 President de Klerk announced the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela after being imprisoned for twenty-seven years. February in the north of Pretoria where my family lived is one of the hottest months in our summer. I was swimming in our pool when my father came outside and the fact that someone was watching me distracted my attention. I could see that he had something on his mind. ‘Yes Dad . . . ?’ I said. He just looked at me and after a few moments of silence he replied, ‘Now we are in trouble. The terrorist has been released.’ My response was: ‘Who’s that?’ and he replied: ‘Nelson Mandela.’ I had no idea who it was or what this meant to us. I could sense that he was worried but I continued swimming and left him to ponder about his announcement.
It was only much later after I had joined the Presidency that Mr Mandela told me that Mr de Klerk visited him a few days before the announcement of his release. He unceremoniously told Mr Mandela that he was free to go. Mr Mandela indicated that he couldn’t leave immediately and that he needed to afford his people time to allow them to prepare for his release. He asked for an extra few days to allow people on the outside to prepare. If someone told me ‘You are free to leave’ after twenty-seven years I would ignore courtesy and run out, yet Mr Mandela wanted to stay to allow his people time to prepare. I often asked him whether he wasn’t scared that the government could change its mind in those extra days. He looked at me, surprised that I would mistrust people in that way, laughed and then said ‘No.’
It was of course only much later that I could comprehend what actually happened in South Africa at that time. Little did I know that Nelson Mandela was already aged seventy-one when he was released. Little did I know that he lost his mother and his son during his incarceration and that he was not allowed to attend their respective funerals at the time. The fact that he was a human being, a person with emotions, didn’t cross my mind. All I knew was that we were in trouble, because my dad said so.
By 1992 the white National government called a referendum to decide on the future of apartheid. But, of course, whites only were allowed to vote in the referendum. The apartheid system that had been implemented in 1948 was withering. The white population was asked to express themselves in support or against the reform policies started by President de Klerk. Very few people shared the notion that reform would go further than they anticipated, but it was clear that apartheid was losing its few remaining supporters in the international community.
A total of 2.8 million whites voted in the referendum; 1.9 million were in favour of reform and an election in which non-white South Africans could vote; 875,000 of my compatriots voted against the abolishment of apartheid. I voted ‘NO’ too. And I was proud of it. This was my contribution, I thought, to ensuring that the country remained governable. There was always this white Afrikaans fear that if the country was run by blacks it would become ungovernable and that they would run the whites into the ocean, take revenge for what whites denied them of for centuries.
Really it was all over by 1990, when Mr Mandela was released. It marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of a country where ‘one man one vote’ would apply, irrespective of the colour of your skin. But it all kind of passed me by as I was enjoying the life of being a student – the partying and late night studying to catch up on work that fell behind as a result of such partying. I had no involvement or even thought about politics or where South Africa was heading, even though I knew that apartheid had ended and that black people were free to move as they please. At social gatherings we sometimes referred briefly to what was unfolding in South Africa but never with informed detail and all playing on each other’s white Afrikaner fears that, indeed, ‘we were in trouble’. That was the totality of my understanding of the political situation and I wasn’t bothered much.
I do recall driving to my uncle’s farm in Ellisras in the north over Easter in April 1993 when we heard the news on the radio that Communist Party leader and chief of staff of the military wing of the ANC, the charismatic Chris Hani, had been killed. For whites in South Africa the communists held the real threat to our safety, security and financial future. Somehow Nelson Mandela was also considered a communist. Because South Africa, or our white world, was dominated by religion and what the church dictated, it was unthinkable that the Communist Party would ever occupy a legitimate space in South Africa. We were a capitalist state in which the whites owned and controlled all the resources.
When I asked my parents later about Chris Hani, I was told that it was a big mistake by whoever initiated his killing because even though Hani was a communist, surely he was a better deal for the white people than the so-called terrorist Mandela. I was confused by my parents’ pronouncements because to me anything communist posed a serious threat, and even though Nelson Mandela had not been officially named a member of the Communist Party, surely Chris Hani was more dangerous, being the leader of that party? According to my parents, Chris Hani had exhibited some tolerance towards white people, probably because he hadn’t been imprisoned on Robben Island like Nelson Mandela, and therefore they obviously assumed that he didn’t have the hatred Mr Mandela supposedly had.
Little did we know, or care, that Mr Mandela had no bitterness. He had secretly been talking about negotiations with the government from prison, determined to bring about a peaceful transition. As Ahmed Kathrada, one of Madiba’s closest friends and a fellow prisoner, said, ‘Forgiveness is a choice.’ One inherently always expects the worst and we expected Nelson Mandela to live up to our expectations.
It was during these riveting and dangerous political times that I fell in love and got engaged. My aspirations were limited to getting married and having children, like most young Afrikaans women my age. I was only twenty-two years of age but it didn’t matter. I had also graduated and I started my first job at the Department of State Expenditure in 1992 as a secretary. A few months into the job I became bored and asked for a more challenging position. I was transferred to the Human Resources division within the same department as an administrative clerk, working in mid-town Pretoria.
Apartheid had ended but life continued unchanged. We didn’t feel the end of apartheid in our everyday lives. We still ‘lived’ apartheid even though politically changes started to emerge prior to the 1994 elections. Violence and unrest continued in far off communities, and we were continuously confronted with the pictures of dead people in rural areas. The violence was no longer only black against white but now also due to tensions between the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party. The IFP was the ANC’s biggest rival at the time.
Then my engagement ended. I was distraught and lost. What I usually do when relationships fail is that I throw myself into my work, completely and utterly, as a way of dealing with pain.
On 10 May 1994 South Africa’s first democratically elected black President was inaugurated. I was twenty-three years of age and putting in every extra hour of overtime to build my career in the Human Resources department of the Department of State Expenditure. Even though the day of his swearing in was a public holiday, I was on my way to work to put in extra time. There was hardly any traffic and people avoided the streets out of fear for the outbreak of violence following the inauguration of the ANC government, which was seen as the enemy to all white people, even those whites who voted in favour of reform and for apartheid to end. An ANC government in power meant that the majority of our leadership would change to black people, and that seriously challenged white supremacy. It was pay-back time and we expected black people to settle scores with us whites for centuries of oppression. Military vehicles were visible everywhere in the suburbs and police cars ready to respond on instructions. Still, this didn’t affect my life and I found myself safe in the comfort of my office during the inauguration. As long as the police, still from the previous regime, were visible in the streets, surely we were safe. I do recall driving home seeing black people along the street and people smiling, looking happy, cheering and dancing. My thoughts were simple: Yes, you can now do as you please but please don’t kill us tonight because we are white.
Prior to the elections some white people collected tinned food and perishables out of fear of civil war, violence and disruption. We expected black people to take over the country and now deprive us of basic services, that they would raid shops and create absolute chaos, sabotaging water and power supply to white suburbs. People stocked up and gathered bottled water, candles, tinned food and whatever would last them and be needed in an emergency. We expected revenge.
But that night nothing happened and we all woke up the next morning, went back to work and to our normal way of life, untouched by the previous day’s events and whoever was leading this country. Life continued in a strangely unaffected way. We still had our house, we were still alive and water still came from the tap. Nothing was there to indicate that soon the very foundations of my life, my ignorance, my beliefs, my values were to be shaken up and tested. Little did I know that I would emerge from that paranoid, white cocoon of fear and denial and that the man who would lead me out of that – gently holding my hand – would be Nelson Mandela.
PART TWO
Start of a New Dawn
1994–1999
3
Meeting Mr Mandela
Soon after the elections in 1994 the incoming government needed to recruit new people. My department was tasked to help with the huge project of making the former apartheid government more ‘representative’, in other words we had to hire more black people. It was the beginning of transformation. South Africa was to be governed for all. It would represent all its people.
Thousands and thousands of people applied. It took us weeks to come up with short-lists for posts advertised. It was clear that there was a great shortage of skilled people but that indeed people in South Africa were desperate for work. A lot of applications couldn’t be processed as a result of illiteracy, applicants having been denied a decent education during apartheid. I worked very hard to process these applications. There was no incentive to do so but my nature is such that if given a task I have to complete it in the shortest possible time. I am one of those people who like to clear things off their mental notes and I often work unnecessarily at a pace that is not required. I was looking for a new job, I wanted a new start, away from my broken engagement, but in the meantime I focused all my attention on processing applications.
Then a colleague told me about a typist’s job being advertised in an administrative department attached to the newly established President’s office. The position would mean being based six months of the year in Pretoria and six months in Cape Town. Whenever Parliament was in session, politicians, their families and support staff lived and worked from Cape Town as our Parliament is housed in Cape Town. Whenever Parliament went in recess, politicians and their families and staff would move back to Pretoria, the administrative capital. It is something I had always dreamt of doing and the fact that the job was on a lower rank than the one I currently occupied didn’t matter. What I also found attractive was that the position was advertised for the Minister without Portfolio and I thought that surely someone without a portfolio didn’t have a lot of work and it therefore couldn’t be too hard to work for him. Later of course I learned that ‘without portfolio’ simply meant that the minister could be tasked with ad hoc issues and therefore had no fixed portfolio or agenda to attend to.
I soon started discussions within my own department to inform my seniors that I would apply for the job, providing that I could be transferred on the same salary scale if I was successful in the application. They agreed.
The job interview was at the Union Buildings. Not only was I no longer rolling around on the lawn, but a black man was now the most powerful man in South Africa. And he was making sure people like me, conservative Afrikaans white folk, were included in this new government. People were friendly and relaxed and I noticed that there were still a lot of white faces around despite the new ANC government being in power.
During the interview, a black lady entered. She appeared cheerful and flamboyant. Dressed in a colourful satin outfit it was a picture I was not used to – that of a black lady dressed in such style and clearly in something that was more expensive than my mother’s most prized outfit. We were rudely interrupted by her during the interview but she exclaimed to my interviewers: ‘I need a typist and I don’t care if she’s black or white but I need her right now.’ I smiled and thought: I’m your person. I had no idea what her position was. She briefly exchanged a few words with my two interviewers and then left. My interviewers telephoned me hours after the interview to ask whether I would be interested in a typist position in the actual President’s office itself, and it was explained that it would involve working in his personal office. I only had Cape Town in mind, and since they assured me that the job would be on the same terms as the advertised post, I said I was interested.
They told me that the lady that had entered the interview before was the President’s private secretary. My understanding was that I was going to work for her, Mary Mxadana, and she looked fairly pleasant. While still working at the Department of State Expenditure I had been tasked to train two junior black officials who had joined our department after the transformation process kicked in. They appeared friendly and I ended up working well with them. Slowly but surely I was starting to see black people a little differently. I was no longer inherently scared of all black people. I was starting to converse with them in normal language, without thinking that they could only understand broken Afrikaans or English. Mary was friendly and she made me feel at ease even though I had my doubts.
I realized that I was going to work in an office that was closer to the political centre of the beliefs I still opposed but I thought it was just a job and I wouldn’t have much to do with real politics. I was willing to compromise and by then toyed with the idea that I actually liked the President of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Dr Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the opposition to the ANC. I liked him from seeing him on TV during the election campaign and I thought that since I had changed my mind about him, Nelson Mandela couldn’t be that bad either. I was willing to give it a try but was very realistic about the fact that if I didn’t like working there, nothing would stop me from leaving.
I can’t remember feeling anything except relief when I was called and offered the position. Two weeks after the interview I assumed duty in the President’s office as senior ministerial typist.
* * *
On 12 October 1994 I walked into the Union Buildings for the first time as an employee of President Mandela’s personal office. I had seen pictures of him but knew nothing about him apart from the fact that he spent a long time in prison on Robben Island and that my family regarded him a terrorist. I didn’t expect to have any interactions with him or ever see him.
I was well on time and received in reception by another staffer who took me through several glass doors and through security checks to reach what was known as the President’s suite. It constituted a few offices along a corridor. She showed me a desk and computer in what looked like a ‘pool’ office, even though the only other desk was hers. She was an administrator answering the President’s private office switchboard and assisting with ad hoc administration.
She explained that the President’s personal office consisted of only Mary, herself and Elize Wessels. Elize was from the de Klerk government and used to work for the former First Lady, Marike de Klerk.
I sensed there was a tense atmosphere between the ‘old’ or white staff and the ‘new’ or black staff and that people were still marking territory and claiming positions in the new government. It was also clear that the ‘old’ guard were there to slowly ease the new leadership into power, guiding and teaching them, willing or unwillingly.
It was only much later that Mary arrived at the office. She had a presence about her that could be felt even without noticing her at first. She carried authority and dressed colourfully, which added to her vibrant personality. She entered the office like a whirlwind and hugged me to welcome me to the office. She was extremely friendly and made me feel at ease. Not having worked for a black person before, I was reluctant to let my defences go too soon. There was a superficial trust between black and white people. We still didn’t know what to expect of one another. I was prepared to work for her but I held on to my political beliefs, thinking that my practical and financial situation had forced me to be in this office.
It is not necessarily a trait of all Afrikaners but generally speaking we have respect for people of authority or elderly people; whether we agree with their policies or not we were always courteous. If your principles did not allow you to respect a person you would simply ignore that person. I found I respected Mary. She told me about the liberation struggle. I started to be intrigued by the history of my own country. It felt like I had lived on another planet and I was completely unaware of anything she was telling me. Perhaps it was precisely that innocence and ignorance that made her feel at ease with me. She was very warm and friendly towards me and we shared a passion for music. She told me about her choir and brought me a CD to listen to. Her husband was the conductor of the choir and she was one of the founding members. They sang like angels.
Over the next two weeks I was orientated more about the operations around the President. He was nowhere to be seen or heard and I started assuming that I would possibly see him at a distance ‘one day’, but I did meet a number of people, from Parks Mankahlana, whom I was told spoke on the President’s behalf, to Tony Trew, whom I was told helped write all the President’s speeches, to the head of our office, referred to as the Director General of the Presidency, Professor Jakes Gerwel. It took me some time to figure out who did what and to remember names.
My main task was to type for Mary and to update the President’s programme regularly. She soon taught me how to distribute the programme to the President’s security and I was told to ensure that I sent it to both the white and the black commanders of his security team simultaneously. The South African Police Service was going through a transformation process like all government departments and amalgamating the ANC’s old military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and Apla from Azapo, another of the old liberation struggle parties, into the old white-dominated police force. Not everything made sense immediately and I would have to send the same fax twice to the same number but mark it for different people’s attention. It was clearly a cosmetic merger in the police force and the two sides were very much operating independently, still trying to establish trust. But I’m a person who lives by the book. If instructions are issued, I follow them to the letter, and I did so without questioning or arguing about practicalities.
About two weeks into my time at the Presidency the President was scheduled to be in the office for the first time. By this time Mary had told me a little about the President, what type of person he was and that he was kind but disciplined. Afrikaners grow up with a sense of respect for any authority and before having met him, I had respect for him, purely because he was the President of the country. He hadn’t done anything publicly to prove the contrary and I therefore had no reason to disrespect him.
From my early arrival at the office that morning I could sense an unusual tension within the building but at the same time a kind of excitement. The police guarding our private office were alert and their uniforms neatly pressed, and soon a team of men in dark suits arrived presenting themselves as the advance team of the President’s bodyguards. It was then time for the President to arrive and I closed the door leading to my office so as not to disturb anything that might be happening in the corridors. From passing footsteps and ructions I gathered that the President had arrived and he went past my office down the corridor into his office. Guests arrived to see him and were taken to his office without delay. They were all punctual and everything flowed with military precision. I sat quietly in my chair, awaiting instructions from anyone. I had noticed that the bodyguards were all armed and I was tense and cautious not to make any sudden move that could be misinterpreted. It was my first encounter with armed people in close proximity, and it made me nervous.
A few hours later Mary asked me to type something and bring it to her office once I was ready. So I did. I was looking at the piece of paper in front of me when I nearly bumped into President Nelson Mandela as he was exiting Mary’s office into the corridor surrounded by bodyguards. He extended his hand first to shake mine; I was confused and not sure whether it was proper for me to greet him. I said, ‘Good morning, Mr Mandela.’ One doesn’t really know what to do at that point except cry. Which I did. It was all too much. I was sobbing. He then spoke to me but I didn’t understand him and was completely in shock. I had to say ‘Excuse me Mr President’ for him to repeat what he had just said to me, and after gathering my thoughts or guts – I’m not sure which – I realized that he addressed me in Afrikaans. My home language.
He was visibly old and appeared kind. I focused on the wrinkles on his face and his warm, sincere smile. He spoke with a caring voice and in a kind manner and asked me my name. I was ready to pull back my hand after shaking his but he held on. I could feel the texture of his hand on mine and I started perspiring. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to hold this black man’s hand. I wanted him to let go but he didn’t and he asked where I came from and where I worked. I wasn’t sure whether to answer in Afrikaans or English and cannot remember which I chose, but we conversed in a mixture of Afrikaans and English. I was completely overtaken by emotion and couldn’t continue. I then had a feeling of guilt that swept over me. I felt guilty that this kindly spoken man with gentle eyes and generosity of spirit spoke to me in my own language after ‘my people’ had sent him to jail for so many years. I instantly regretted voting ‘No’ in the referendum. How do you correct all of that prejudice in five minutes? Suddenly, I wanted to apologize. I hadn’t given any thought to what twenty-seven years of imprisonment would be like, but I knew I was not even twenty-seven years of age. I was a mere twenty-three, about to turn twenty-four and I couldn’t comprehend an entire lifetime in prison.
Mr Mandela noticed that I was unable to continue our conversation and still held onto my hand as he put his left hand on my shoulder and tapped it while he said, ‘It’s OK, calm down, I think you are overreacting.’ I was firstly not used to someone being so direct to me to tell me that I’m overreacting and, secondly, I was embarrassed that it was a President telling me this. I calmed down and he was obviously in a hurry so we parted. His last words were ‘I am happy to meet you and hope to see you again.’ As we parted I thought: Ye, right. How can I be important to a President? After all, it’s my people that put him through all that suffering.
I was in shock for the entire day and went home, telling my parents that I met the President today, and what a nice man he appeared to be. He spoke to me in Afrikaans. My parents didn’t ask any questions and continued doing whatever they were busy with at the time, unaffected by my announcement. Probably used to me exaggerating a bit, I got the impression that they thought I was lying. I went to sleep puzzled by our encounter, not knowing where my thoughts or feelings were about this gentleman, perceived by my family and community to be a terrorist.
The next day I interrogated Mary about the fact that the President was so fluent in Afrikaans. She explained that he had learned Afrikaans in prison and he did so purposefully to communicate with his warders. It only struck me later that he obviously also charmed the apartheid leaders with his Afrikaans whenever he met them during negotiations. It is quite an amusing experience when events override what your brain expects. The last thing any Afrikaner would expect from Nelson Mandela was that he spoke to you in Afrikaans. It all became clear when he told me much later that, ‘When you speak to a man you speak to his head but when you speak to him in his language you speak to his heart.’ And that is exactly what he did. I came to understand that by learning the language of the warders he could almost seduce them. Afrikaans, being the language of the oppressor, was a much-hated language at the time and synonymous with the apartheid regime. I later also learned that Afrikaans was imposed as the main language for black education in 1974. This resulted in the Soweto uprising in 1976 in which about 20,000 black students took part, and although official figures estimated that the uprising resulted in 176 deaths it is widely believed that up to 700 students died during the protest. Black people were not accounted for in South Africa in those years and therefore official figures and estimates never correlated as there was no existing official register.
* * *
In the weeks that followed I saw the President at a distance on a few occasions as he passed in and out of the office. I concentrated on my typing and supporting Mary and never bothered to be around or be seen when he was in the office. Instead, I befriended the bodyguards, black and white. Some of them were very caring about me and inquisitive about my background. I was never sure whether they were checking on me or not, asking questions out of pure interest or whether it was as part of their job to establish any threat I may pose to the President.
Every time the President passed my office, I ensured that my door was closed so as to avoid having another emotional interaction with him. I literally hid away when I heard him approaching and only saw his back as he was passing the office. I was happy with his presence in the office though, as it brought about some excitement and a list of interesting visitors. I was more intrigued by him than by the visitors and hardly took notice of them, apart from knowing that some of them had names I recognized from the media or magazines.
I do recall the newly crowned Miss South Africa visiting, Basetsana Makgalamela. I had some practice before she arrived in pronouncing her surname and managed by the time she arrived. She met with the President and we were called by Mary after the meeting to meet Miss South Africa.
Mary announced one afternoon that the President wished to see all his personal staff for lunch at his official residence the next day. Soon after his inauguration he renamed the Presidential house Mahlamba Ndlopfu, meaning ‘start of a new dawn’. I thought that was quite appropriate. I was extremely nervous and definitely not ready to eat with any President. I had no idea what cutlery to use first, and one of my colleagues told me to simply watch her and follow her example, which put me at ease. I had also asked my mother the night before what to do about a selection of cutlery and she grabbed her Emsie Schoeman book – a South African lady who was considered the authority on etiquette – and I got a crash-course in table manners.
Arriving at Mahlamba Ndlopfu we were escorted to a sitting room. The President was still in a meeting but our arrival was announced to him. He ended his meeting and joined us in the lounge. He greeted us each by shaking hands and in a relaxing way conversing with us as a group, walking us to the dining room. By now I managed to control myself and I didn’t cry. It was a kind gesture from his side to invite his staff to lunch, and looking at my colleagues it crossed my mind that the seven of us at that point were almost representative of all races in South Africa: Mary Mxadana, his private secretary, was black; Morris Chabalala, one of the assistant private secretaries, also black; Elize Wessels, the other assistant private secretary, white; Alan Pillay, the administrative officer, Indian; Lenois Coetzee, the receptionist, white; Olga Tsoko, the other receptionist, black; and then me, the most junior in age and rank, white.
I was told that shortly after his inauguration the President called all the staff from the old Presidency, people who had served the previous regime, to a meeting, allaying their fears of being fired or made redundant without discussion or them having a choice in the matter. He asked people to stay and help build the new government of national unity but also gave them the option of leaving if they wished to move on. Staff greatly appreciated the President giving them a choice. The President’s office was now a mixture of black and white people representing the ‘Rainbow nation’ he often referred to in speeches.
I’d noticed, too, that in Tuynhuys, the President’s office in Cape Town situated next to Parliament, the pictures of the old Presidents and Prime Ministers continued to hang on the walls. Again I’d found it strange that he wouldn’t erase the past, seeing as how these people had spearheaded the oppression of his people and imprisoned him. But I was told that President Mandela insisted that those not be removed. That they were part of South Africa’s history, no matter how unpleasant the memories were.
At the lunch, a round table was set and I quickly chose a chair far from his to avoid any uncomfortable conversation or difficult questions from him, and I didn’t want to take a chair of someone that wanted to sit next to him. It was 1 p.m. and instead of lunch, one of the housekeepers entered the room with a small FM black box-type radio. It looked like an antique and something that was not seen often being used any longer. It was time for the news and the radio was switched on and put on the window shelf. While the news was being read on radio we all looked at one another uncomfortably. The President listened with concentration, clearly taking seriously what was being read. I vaguely recall mention about South Africa acting as a peace-keeping force in Africa, the Achille Lauro sinking off the coast of Somalia and Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere announcing their separation. I was trying to concentrate on the news but my thoughts wandered about the President, what he felt and thought at that time and, most importantly, how he felt about the three white Afrikaners at his lunch table.
Following the news lunch was served. To the contrary of what I expected, lunch was simple. It consisted of a starter, main course, dessert and coffee. The food was home-cooked, without fanciness, and you knew exactly what you were eating. The President had a glass of wine and even though we were all offered wine I settled for water. During lunch he started to tell us some stories about his years in prison and I had to press my fingernails into the palm of my hand to prevent me from crying again. By the time dessert was served I couldn’t control myself any longer and my eyes were filled with tears. I felt so sorry for him. He told us about his precious tomato garden in prison and how he cherished his crop. He also explained how they worked in the limestone quarry, and how the reflection of the white rock damaged his eyes, and with his exceptional ability of story-telling he transported our imaginations to South Africa’s Alcatraz and his prison cell on Robben Island. I tried to comprehend season upon season in a prison cell, cold cement floors, sharing a bathroom with other inmates, never having privacy, eating at specific times and limited tasteless food for twenty-seven years. It was still too much to comprehend. What struck me was that while he was telling these stories he didn’t appear to be sad. To me it sounded like tragedy, yet he recited the stories in a colourful way as opposed to my grim imagination.
Lunch was soon over and back at the office we shared our experience with each other and I was free to express my sympathy. Clearly the President didn’t want sympathy. It was something he considered to have been part of history and not to determine the rest of his life. I soon found a quote that expressed it so well: ‘It’s not important in life what happens to you, but how you handle what happens to you.’
I read later that he had written that it was easier to change others than to change himself, and to this day I often wonder about the struggle within himself as far as it concerned forgiveness and reconciliation, trying to imagine to what extent one has to really work with oneself to change your thinking and your beliefs: to take that decision to forgive, as Ahmed Kathrada told me. But as Madiba said, by deciding to forgive you do not only free the oppressed but you also free the oppressor.
* * *
Later that year, a prominent and progressive South African, Dr Johan Heyns, was assassinated and the President called all the generals in charge of the security forces in South Africa to a meeting in his office. Dr Heyns was one of the senior leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. The church was prominent during the apartheid era, justifying it through religion and Dr Heyns was one of the few Afrikaner leaders who criticized apartheid at a time when it was not fashionable to do so. Now it was suspected that a third force was at play, trying to destabilize the country and create tension between black and white at a time when South Africa was still vulnerable. As someone who had walked the Damascus road and showed eagerness to work with the new government, it was believed that Dr Heyns was assassinated by white Afrikaner extremists, the same kind of conservative people I once religiously supported. The conservative Afrikaners did not welcome such gestures of reform. I had slowly started to think about my own beliefs and although I was still a little confused, I had softened up and realized at least that resisting change was neither logical nor justifiable.
As the generals marched past my office to the President’s office I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride when I saw them in their uniforms. We Afrikaners are proud people, especially of our generals and people who hold such positions – inherently so, but also because we trust them unconditionally and without prejudice. I felt proud of their presence even though there was tension in the office.
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Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Cringeworthy narration is an absolute disgrace By Donn Edwards Warning! Adjoa Andoh's reading of this book is absolutely dreadful. She should have read it in her normal voice, not in a phoney "Afrikaans" accent, which is not only inaccurate but inconsistent and unconvincing. And while she's about it, how about learning how to pronounce names correctly, instead of butchering them the way she did. She doesn't even pronounce the author's name correctly, let alone Nelson Mandela's name. And her rendition of names such as Beeld, Vergelegen, Strydom and so on is nothing short of disgraceful.Having said that, if you have to listen to the audiobook and are willing to put up with the author being insulted for 14 hours, the story is fascinating. Rather get the print book or the Kindle edition. The audio book is a fiasco.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Great reading for a Mandela's admirer By Amazon Customer If you admire Mandela, the man and the hero, this book will show you how he was able to change any person with his charm, intelligence and wisdom. This is not a history book or a Biography. For me, it is more like a love story... A love story of someone who was tought to see in Nelson Mandela only a black man, terrorist and part of a revolutionary group. But sudenly, this man himself convinced her of another reality and showed her that every single person deserves respect and by doing so, he opened her eyes to a new realiy, a new South Africa and made her fall for him. He became her grandfather and she devoted her entire life, proffesional or personal, to protect him, to give him always 110%.They say behind a great man there is always a woman... Mandela had two: aMrs Graça Machel and Zelda La Grange. Thank you Zelda for taking so much care of Madiba so that the world had the chance to enjoy him as we did.Hamba Kahle Madiba!!!!Miguel Jaramillo@migueljaramillo
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Well written book, easyto read, full of details ... By Rosa Arechederra Well written book,easyto read, full of details and again ,Mandela is portraited as a humble ,extraordinary man that fought and succeed in abolishing the apartheid regime instaured by the fear of the small white population.The lesson here is Zelda herself as being a proof that a Rainbow of races are possible to coexist .Herself being one of the many at that time being in favour of the apartheid ,however and through her years as a secretary to Mandela, lived herself the ideals and goals of achiving a new order of coexistence and wellness for all south africans, no matter their colour of their skin.
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Good Morning, Mr. Mandela: A Memoir, by Zelda la Grange
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