In March 1987, on a scheduled visit to her husband in Pollsmoor prison, Winnie Mandela spoke about many urgent matters: the arrest of their daughter, Zindzi, after a machine pistol was discovered under her bed; the Mandela United Football Club and its escalating skirmishes with the police; the war evolving between the youth of Soweto and state-sponsored vigilantes.

Amid these life-and-death issues Winnie Mandela mentioned, apropos of nothing, a story she had just read in the Weekly Mail; two famous black businessmen, Nthato Motlana and Gibson Thula, had formed a company to buy out, on the cheap, US and European enterprises heeding the call to disinvest from apartheid SA...