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Winnie Mandela's prison memoirs

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About the book
On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on 12 May 1969, security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Mandela and detained her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten.

Rounded up in a group of other anti-apartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. She had no idea where they were taking her or what would happen to her children.

For Winnie Mandela this was the start of a 491-day period of detention and two trials.

Forty-one years after Winnie’s release on 14 September 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of David Soggot, one of Winnie Mandela’s advocates during the 1969–70 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes that she had written in detention.

Their arrival brought back vivid and horrifying memories and uncovered a unique and personal slice of South Africa’s history.

Read an exclusive extract - published with permission from Pan Macmillan South Africa - below. Please note that the letters and journal extracts featured below are published as Winnie originally wrote them. No edits or changes have been made.

"The first thing you do when you get into a cell is to do a calendar, the very first day because you lose track of days when you are in solitary confinement because the light was on for 24 hours and it was the brightest light – they never switched it off. You didn’t know when it was sunset or daybreak; they never switched off the lights and in my case I was held in the death cell with three doors." - Winnie Madikizela-Mandela 2012

A day in the life of a detainee

In the dim grim dark walls with the electric light burning day and night, the difference between day and night or daybreak and dawn is hard to tell when you can’t sleep and all you do is to doze off now and again whenever the mind decides to stop over functioning for a while.

The cell measures 15' x 5' (This is in feet. South Africa metricated between 1971–73. This would measure 4.5 x 1.5 metres) or is it?

 I’ve walked miles and miles in this cell, round and round, backwards and forwards in a desperate attempt to kill the empty long lonely minutes, hours, weeks, months which drag by at a snail’s pace gnawing at the inner cores of my soul, corroding it, scarring it, battering it about, tearing it to pieces in the second bout round number two (The journal was started after Mrs Mandela and her co-accused were acquitted and immediately re-detained) of the Terrorism Act boxing match between the 22 and the Security Branch.

The trouble with this match is that it has a biased referee; it may go on for years. The referee wants my side to lose, and he goes out of his way to break my side. No rules and regulations have to be observed by his side whilst my boxers are forced at gunpoint to observe rules and regulations.

The match has already had a bad start for someone; history will decide who of these two teams had this bad start. All I know is that both sides are determined to win the main match at whatever cost.

The first bell rings at 6am means it is time to get up, make my ‘bed’ and clean my cell. To make up my bed takes about five minutes for I have just two sisal mats, four blankets, the bitterly cold cement floor as my bed.

I roll up the two mats, leaving about one foot of the mat underneath sticking out so that I can put my cold feet on this when I sit on the folded mats on top of which I put the neatly folded blanket to make my chair higher and a little more comfortable.

Both the blankets and the mats tell many tales each time I fold them up.

Perhaps the mat underneath has the worst story to tell for about a quarter of this mat is full of blood, maybe the blood all over this mat on top is the same, but how did it come to appear to have been sprinkled all over the top mat?

I wonder if it’s the same blood which seems to have been scrubbed hurriedly off the wall, beneath the window and right at the corner which I have chosen for my bed.

Whoever scrubbed it used a lot of [V]im, the hands must have been shaking badly or trembling for some reason, it’s very untidily scrubbed.

I am next to the assault chamber. As long as I live I shall never forget the nightmares I have suffered as a result of the daily prisoners’ piercing screams as the brutal corporal punishment is inflicted on them. As the cane lashes at them, sometimes a hose pipe, you feel it tearing at your own flesh mercilessly.

It’s hard to imagine women inflicting so much punishment. I have shed tears time without number quite unconsciously and often forget even to wipe them off. These hysterical screams pierce through my heart and injure my dignity so much.

The hero of these assaults is barely 23 years old, very often the screaming voice appealing for mercy is that of a mother twice her age but of course she is white, a matron [at] that, this qualifies her for everything.

The prisoner is at her mercy, life and all. She even bangs their heads against my cell wall in her fury. As the blood spurts from the gaping wounds she hits harder.

This matron has formidable assistants too in this business from what I hear through my cell window just above the assault chamber. They are Scantsu and Joyce.

Scantsu is also known as Maureen, she has recently been paroled to the Minister of Justice because of her ‘exceptionally good conduct’ which earned her ten months remission because once in 1968 she chased and caught an escaped female prisoner whom she assaulted mercilessly as part of her ‘good conduct’.

 These ‘assistants’ receive prisoners on their arrival daily from court after the formalities of entering them into the huge reception book in the front office where matron Wessels spends most of her time.

There is so much change of staff you never know who is doing what at a time, where and when.

I have been in this prison for over a year but I only have a vague idea of sections which I have been transferred to one time or another.

Behind the project:

In 1969–1970 Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was detained and held in solitary confinement for a total of 491 days. When she was eventually charged, Mrs Madikizela-Mandela was allowed to see her lawyers to consult with them and to take notes.

David Soggot, her lawyer, encouraged Mrs Madikizela-Mandela to write down her experiences in prison. So during the consultations she wrote the journal (and other info) and at the end of each consultation, gave what she had written to Soggot to take away with him.

This journal eventually came to light more than 20 years later when David Soggot’s widow was going through his personal effects and realised the significance – both personal and historical – of the journal she had found in her husband’s study.

The excerpt is published with permission from Pan Macmillan South Africa.

To purchase a copy of this book, head on over to Kalahari.com.

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