TONY LEON: What really happened with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and George Fivaz
'Mrs Mandela herself, and notwithstanding very public and parliamentary clashes between us, sent me a hand-written note of appreciation'
EXTRACT
I approached Fivaz and he quite correctly sent a team to interview the sequestered Cebekhulu in England. But of course - postmortem - all that detail is omitted and elided.
But two things amazed me in this brazen attempt to clumsily rewrite history. First, on receiving Fivaz's response to me - a year later - that Cebekhulu was an "unreliable witness", it was I who provided his letter to the newspaper, which aptly gave it front-page splash treatment. And then Mrs Mandela herself, and notwithstanding very public and parliamentary clashes between us, sent me a hand-written note of appreciation. It sits - should any of the angry revisionists be of mind to search - with my papers housed at the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at University of the Free State. And the entire episode appears in granular detail in my biography.
Novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes a young biographer in search of his late subject's legacy. He writes of someone who "was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories". Two recent South African deaths and their memorialisations have provided both a personal and national perspective on Hollinghurst's universal truth, even if his subject was the stuff of fiction. The furious narrative and counternarrative on the consequential life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela drew to mind the words of another novelist who also, in his own country's struggle for freedom, moved from protest to power. Vaclav Havel's take on Soviet tyranny was how the regime tried "to create an outpost of the state in the mind of every citizen".I found myself drawn again into the controversies around the George Fivaz police investigations of one of the kidnapped members of the Mandela United Football Club, although this too was utterly miscast. There was no secret plot in...
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