Breakfast with Nelson Mandela

Me and the late Harry Gwala, in front of Nelson Mandela, back in the early 1990s in Pietermaritzburg

A few months after Nelson Mandela’s release, he came on a visit to the Kwazulu-Natal region, to assess for himself what was going on in relation to the terrible violence which was wracking the province. I was, at the time, working quite closely with Harry Gwala, who was also a Robben Island prisoner and, by virtue of that, the de facto leader of the ANC in the area.

Gwala was an amazing, albeit flawed man. He suffered from a terrible degenerative disease, which meant that he had no use of both his arms. You would think this would be something of a limitation, but it wasn’t. He was an orator like none I have ever heard. He could get a crowd raging, or weeping, or quiet and obedient, within a few sentences.

He was an unashamedly unreformed Stalinist. (In fact, I would sometimes sit turning pages of this or that work by Stalin, which he would be reading at the time). He held Stalin and Shakespeare on probably the same level – both with deep reverence and he would quote both, from memory and with the same amount of passion.

He was also a warlord, I’m afraid. He had an outright hatred of Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement – which was a breakaway Zulu-based movement in Kwazulu-Natal, which was friendly with (and many would say supported by) the apartheid state. He did not believe that talking to them would do any good and he believed that we, in the ANC, should fight fire with fire. His warlike stance was, undoubtedly, a contributing force in the escalating violence of the time.

But he called Mandela to come and visit the province. And he came. He stayed at Harry Gwala’s tiny house. It was all supposed to be fairly low key. He wanted to meet people and get to know what was happening. What we did not expect was the kind of support the man had. “Mike”, Harry Gwala said to me, “we have a secret weapon here”.

So, we drove Nelson Mandela all over Pietermaritzburg. Up hill and down dale. We drove him into every township, and wherever we went, he was greeted with crowds of people. Sometimes, it was almost impossible to actually drive the cars. People were singing, chanting, shouting, waving. People were crowding around the vehicle. People were crying. People were laughing. It was indescribable.

Early one morning, during the visit, it may have been 6 o’clock, I got a telephone call from Harry Gwala. “Mike”, he said, “I want you to come here now”. Being the naturally obedient type, I jumped into my clothes and ran to organise another priest to say Mass at the seminary, where I was teaching. I jumped into the car and rushed to Gwala’s house, which was not too far away.

I was met at the gate by Gwala. “I have to go somewhere urgently”, he said. “Please keep Madiba (Mandela’s clan name) company for breakfast”. Needless to say, I was a bit taken aback.

As I entered the lounge of Gwala’s house, I could see Mandela sitting, with his back to the window, dressed in a lounge suit. Gwala escorted me in and introduced me to Mandela. He did not rise to meet me, but shook hands very warmly, as though I was an old friend, and asked me to sit with him. (There was no dining-room in the house. Breakfast was going to be served on our laps and in the lounge). There I was, sitting, alone, with the mythical Nelson Mandela. Here was the man who had been in prison for 27 years; who had made that immortal speech from the dock about being prepared to die in the fight against white domination and against black domination; the man who picture none of us were allowed to see until very recently; the man on whom the hopes of millions of people in the country depended. There I was, about to have breakfast with him.

We spoke for quite some time. It was mostly on the situation in Kwazulu-Natal. And I could tell, even then, that his view of the world was one very different indeed from Harry Gwala. But there was one incident, during that breakfast, which remains indelibly etched in my memory.

At one point, one of the women who had been cooking breakfast in the kitchen came in and whispered in my ear, that there was someone who desperately wanted to see Mr Mandela. She addressed the request to me, out of a kind of reverence for Mandela himself – almost as though the use of a proxy was necessary in the face of such eminence.

I asked Mr Mandela, if he would mind meeting a young member of the ANC youth. He had no hesitation. “Of course!”, he said, “Of course!”. The message was relayed. Then, shuffling into the room, on his knees, with his eyes averted, came a boy, who could not have been more than 17 years old. He was on his knees, out of respect. He averted his eyes, because to look at the man would be too much of a disrespect for his person.

Mandela was holding a teacup full of tea. When he saw the youth come in, he passed the cup to me and, saying nothing, struggled to his feet, with a fair amount of difficulty. The youth was now terrified and started shaking. “I always stand in the presence of a young lion”, said Mandela. “Thank you for coming to see me”.

When I see the politicians of today, puffed up with too much food; expensive whiskey; and too much reverence being shown to them for their less than admirable persons, I remember this incident. I think I can say, without any doubt, that it changed me forever. I am pretty sure it had the same effect on that young boy.

Another great leader, (one whom I had the privilege of serving under as a priest), made the same point, in different words. Desmond Tutu said that we need to genuflect to our neighbours. Ah yes, these were really great leaders. How much they stand out and how sad the contrast with what we have today.

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is dead

Thabo Mbeki’s Health Minister is dead. She died of “complications” which stemmed from a liver transplant she had some time ago. On her tomb, whether she likes it or not, and whether it is “disrespectful” or not, will be the words “Aids denialist”. That will not be speaking ill of the dead - it will simply be stating the truth about some of her life.

She advocated HIV positive patients to eat garlic, beetroot, African potato (Madumbe), lemon juice AS A SUBSTITUTE for ARVs. That is the point at issue. No-one would suggest that eating these things would be bad for you. No-one would suggest that they may not even possibly be good. But to suggest that ARVs are harmful and these things can be used to substitute them, is simply criminal, when you are the Health Minister of the country.

The first time I met her was very soon after the exiles were allowed back into the country after apartheid. It was in the ANC office, in Pietermaritzburg. She and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (who was at the time still married to Jacob Zuma) had come to have a meeting with that extraordinary man, Harry Gwala, who ruled the Kwazulu Natal Midlands with a grip of iron, despite the fact that he had lost the use of his arms whilst a long term prisoner on Robben Island.

It was, really, mandatory for any upwardly mobile returning exile to pay their respects to him. He was, in some respects, a King-maker, in both the ANC and the Communist Party. He was undoubtedly influential, certainly in the early days, after his release. And so, there was a trickle of exiles, returning to the country; somewhat unsure of themselves – and needing to establish themselves, either within an existing powerbase, or alongside one.

Now Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang had, during their stay in the United Kingdom, run some sort of exiled Health Trust (if I am not mistaken, it was called the Health and Refugee Trust). I never quite understood what it was supposed to have done or what purpose it served. But it seemed to pay them a salary and it seemed to have access to a certain amount of funds. So, they came, ostensibly to talk about transferring that fund (and the work it was doing) back to South Africa, now that the Exiles had been allowed to return.

We sat around a large table, rather squashed in a fairly small room, which is what passed for the ANC meeting room in its then offices. I remember Harry Gwala being his usual, gentlemanly, cultured self (he was a lot of other things as well, but he was also that!). Eloquent words of welcome came from his mouth. His use of the English language impeccable; his speech always peppered with accurate quotations from Shakespeare and Stalin – both of whom he knew extremely well indeed.

And I watched Manto Tshabalala scan the room. She had extremely thick glasses, giving her an Owl-like appearance. She paid extremely careful attention when we all introduced ourselves. I watched her noting who was there and who was who.

A couple of years later, I encountered her again. This time, when I was working in the HIV/AIDS section of a Non-governmental organisation called the National Progressive Primary Health Care Network (NPPHCN). She was not in the Aids section of the organisation. She was in the Primary Health Care part. So I worked with her and watched her behaviour over one or two years, in an organisational setting.

She was extremely difficult to work with. It seemed to me that there was more than a tinge of racism to her make-up – but more than that, I got the impression she was highly manipulative and fundamentally lazy (intellectually and otherwise) – and that she would go to the most elaborate and extraordinary lengths, to mask that laziness.

So, her arguments would be, almost always ad hominem. (Why bother with the details, or the intellectual integrity, if you could bluff and bluster your way through your job?) I also came to see her has extremely ruthless and power-hungry. There was an almost bitter edge to her and this came out in the way she spoke to people – particularly people she did not see as important to her rise to wherever it was that she was going. So, I have to say, I steered clear of her. Once or twice I gave her a lift in my car to places she was going, but at all times I kept the conversation general and vague.

I was, therefore, extremely surprised when she was made Health Minister. I knew she had her eye on the position from the moment she stepped off the plane on her return from exile, but Mandela gave it to her rival, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, instead. But Manto wasn’t going to give up on that one, and eventually she got what she wanted.

That she abused her powers; that she was a disaster as a Health Minister; that she was a kleptomaniac while in Exile; that her medical Degree from the Soviet Union was a little suspect; that she was an alcoholic and that she probably was the cause of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, because of her Aids denialist polities – is common cause. But the issue of how she got to that position and how she was sustained and protected in that position, and how he was rewarded by yet another Ministerial position (even in the Zuma government) and how she maintained her extraordinarily high level of popular support within the ANC (number 55!) – that remains, for me, a complete mystery.

She was given a transplant liver – some say through jumping the queue by abusing her position in government - but that one has no proof of. There were (what seemed to me at any rate) very clear reports of her drinking bouts, even after receiving the new liver. Yet she continued to be supported by people very high up.

I do not understand why she continued to be supported, despite everything. It cannot be because the ANC will support its own, no matter what. There have been numerous examples, in recent history of where the ANC does not do that – where it is prepared to simply kick people out and leave them out in the cold - but not in the case of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. It is a real mystery.

And her legacy - and consequently the legacy of the ANC in relation to HIV and AIDS, because of her and because of the President who supported her and the members of that government that kept silent instead of opposing her, is the entirely unnecessary deaths of thousands of people. There is no circumspect way of putting that.

I, for one, still continue to support the ANC. I have to say though, her death makes that support, just a fraction easier. The explanation as to why she was supported by the Movement, so unflinchingly, throughout her political life, remains more than difficult.