Running to Keep Up
The President visited a schools and clinic project in the Northern Cape on 19 February 1999. It was a Friday afternoon and I was working in Cape Town at the time. Virginia accompanied the President on his visit on that particular day. As I had befriended the commander of the Presidential Protection Unit in Cape Town, Hein Bezuidenhout, we decided to have a drink in their canteen to end the week and avoid peak-hour traffic when going home. These were the days before news spread as fast as it does now; not everyone had a cellphone and people were not connected on the internet to get news updates continuously.
As I prepared to join Hein in the canteen I received a call from former President P. W. Botha on my mobile; he wanted to speak to the President to tell him that Schalk Visagie had been shot. ‘Lady, I want to talk to Mr Mandela right now.’ He spoke to me in Afrikaans but he was obviously angry and irritated. He never called him President Mandela, but always Mr Mandela. It was as if he couldn’t make the leap to having complete unconditional respect for Mr Mandela as a President. I told him that the President was in mid-air and I could hear that he didn’t quite believe me. He ended the conversation without saying goodbye. Schalk was Mr Botha’s son-in-law. He was a policeman and the President liked him as he was progressive in his thinking and clearly had some influence over his wife, Rozanne. Rozanne was very conservative and earlier the President had tried to get them to persuade her father to appear in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995.
On 11 February 1998, eight years after the President’s release from jail, he invited Rozanne and Schalk Visagie, Rozanne’s sister Elsa and her husband to join him for dinner. The President asked me to arrange the dinner and I was somewhat uncomfortable calling on Rozanne Botha, knowing very well how the family felt about Nelson Mandela. It took me some hours to respond to the President’s request. A request by the President for someone to have a meal with him was usually greatly appreciated and welcomed by those invited. I knew in this instance it might be different. It was clearly not a great deal for Rozanne to be invited by the President to have dinner, but I realized that they were still filled with anger and regret because their father was driven until his back was against the wall to surrender power at the end of apartheid and to hand over to President F. W. de Klerk, who would later call the first democratic elections in South Africa.
The President met with them over dinner to try and lobby them to persuade their father to appear in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body set up by President Mandela’s administration to allow people the opportunity to apply for amnesty for deeds they may have committed during the apartheid years. If perpetrators came clean and presented the truth on injustices they may have been party to, they could apply for amnesty. This was to give people on both sides of apartheid the opportunity to first of all make peace with themselves, but also for families who lost loved ones and who still had unanswered questions to get closure. People wanted answers and thousands of people in South Africa wanted closure surrounding the deaths or mysterious disappearances of loved ones. It was not a matter that needed closure by any one side only. South Africa needed to heal as a nation and it was only going to be possible if all parties decided to participate in the TRC hearings. The Botha family couldn’t agree unanimously on the matter – Rozanne was especially fiercely opposed to it out of fear that her father could be prosecuted or humiliated – and former President Botha went to his grave years later with many answers that could have provided solace to many people.
I knew that the President would be concerned for Schalk so I tried to reach him, but was told that they had just taken off from the venue they had visited. They were en route back to Pretoria. News quickly broke of the incident and I could sense tension in the air. I thought therefore that I had to inform the President as on many occasions I’d learned something like this could snowball into a much bigger political issue if one procrastinated. I called the control tower of the South African airforce in Pretoria to contact the pilots and ask them to inform the President that Schalk Visagie had been shot. My idea was to tell him once he landed in Pretoria that Mr Botha was livid and insisted on speaking to him.
Hein and I had our first drink. I told him what had happened and he called some of his colleagues in the police force to try and get more information. Schalk was previously part of a gang-related investigation unit in the police and from the information the police had at the time they suspected that it was possibly an act of revenge from a gang after he brought some of its members to book.
Then I received a call from the airforce to inform me that the President decided to turn his plane around mid-air and proceed to Cape Town. He’d instructed them to let me know and said that I would know what to do. Hein and I got into action. It was like gears falling into position as everyone started calling whoever had to be informed of the President’s expected arrival in Cape Town. We decided to proceed to the airport ourselves. It was Friday afternoon and the traffic was moving at snail speed. Hein managed to organize half a convoy and an advance team to go to the hospital, which was not far from the airport. We were both very tense. We took our jobs extremely seriously and this was one of those occasions where that mattered. The President landed and while we drove to the hospital I briefed him.
Upon arrival at the hospital Rozanne appeared, obviously still in shock. Schalk was still in theatre being stabilized and the President called Rozanne and other family members into a private meeting room. Mr P. W. Botha wasn’t there as he lived in a town called ‘Wilderness’ at the time, about five hours’ travel from Cape Town. The President expressed his sympathy and offered support to the family in a genuinely sympathetic way. We called Mr Botha too and the President expressed his sympathy and sadness over the matter. Mr Botha was brief but told the President that he had warned him that crime in the country was getting out of hand and that the President had to really step up and take this to task. I couldn’t hear the entire conversation but the President seemed calm while I could hear Mr Botha raising his voice on the other side. Then as we left, Rozanne accompanied us to the exit and told the President, waving her finger at him as her father was known for doing: ‘Mandela, if something happens to Schalk tonight it will be on your conscience. It will haunt you for the rest of your life.’ She was obviously in shock and I cannot imagine her fear at that point, but I thought she was completely out of line and disrespectful.
I was always very offended when someone didn’t call him Mr or President but just addressed him using his first name or surname. In a way it was derogatory. And it was an Afrikaner thing to address people with respect (or then with the lack thereof if you didn’t have respect for them). I turned to her and said: ‘That’s enough, Rozanne. We have to leave . . .’ and we left. As we walked outside the President took my hand but he was quiet. I was visibly upset, and thinking back to that day I realize how much the world had changed for me by then. Here was the black President holding my hand to comfort me while we were leaving behind my people in distress. He was genuinely concerned for Schalk but I think he didn’t take easy to all the emotions being flung around. Schalk did survive and we didn’t hear from him again.
Like the country, I had moved a long way from the time of P. W. Botha and apartheid. Many people in South Africa, especially the black youth, feel that Madiba’s attempts to reconcile and unify our country were over-credited. They are of the opinion that the moments when South Africa was unified were limited to sporting events when the country briefly appeared to be in celebration mode. According to them, those were superficial moments that did not last. I understand how they feel, although such thinking in my opinion is also prejudice. We have not made the progress in economic transformation which we had hoped for and generally people are frustrated and angry. Some young people even go as far as saying that Madiba sold out to the whites, because he did not force transformation fast enough. Yet, what South Africa needed at the time was healing and to present a consolidated front to the world to gain the confidence of international investors. Madiba was like true north on a compass: we all know where we are supposed to go but he knew that we had to take a slightly different approach to achieve stability first.
Some angry young people feel that things have not changed, but the advantage of my age is that I can attest to the change I have seen and experienced. I am a product of that change.
* * *
The end of an era was approaching. In May 1999 the second democratic elections were planned in South Africa. President Mandela repeatedly indicated throughout his term that he would only stay for one term of office, after which he would hand over the reins. He did so mainly hoping that others would follow suit but also because I think he was eager to have a bit of freedom himself. In 1997 Deputy President Mbeki was elected President of the ANC and voted their Presidential candidate for the elections in 1999. President Mandela symbolically handed over power to the Deputy President two years into his term. He was adamant that Deputy President Mbeki was at the helm and that his own role was purely ceremonial. It wasn’t that easy though. While the day-to-day running of the country was largely left to Deputy President Mbeki, President Mandela was still lawfully the executive head of state and there were certain obligations he couldn’t give up.
We hardly had anything personally to do with Deputy President Mbeki and very seldom saw him in the buildings we shared. President Mandela would often call him to report events to him or even to ask for his advice. Being the considerate human being that he was, he never wanted to be seen to make anyone feel inferior to him. On the occasions that we did see the Deputy President their interactions were limited to formal exchanges, and I personally got the idea that the Deputy President felt that the President didn’t always do the right thing. That was my personal impression from a distance. I also learned that Deputy President Mbeki’s father, who was imprisoned with President Mandela, wanted a more senior role in government after his release but only became a Member of Parliament and that was apparently the cause of uneasiness. I never dwelled on it though. Mrs Zanele Mbeki was always friendly and stately but quiet.
I was literally surviving day by day. The President was depending on me even more than before, and even though a new private secretary had been appointed it still didn’t prevent the President from calling me day and night. He would sometimes call me at 2 a.m. and ask me to remind him to do something the following morning. It was not that he was more considerate for those with families but he knew that I didn’t mind him calling on me.
It is widely documented that there were differences within the ANC about who would succeed President Mandela. Cyril Ramaphosa and Thabo Mbeki were the contestants. Senior ANC members were divided on the matter. From the first time I met Mr Ramaphosa I liked him. Mr Mbeki was distant and appeared dismissive towards me. Regardless of my lack of knowledge about the ANC I was always trying to uphold the ANC’s good intentions in public. I often wondered whether the President regretted supporting Mr Mbeki’s nomination as President of the ANC or his successor at a time after his retirement when the government really treated him badly, but soon learned that the President considered regret as the most useless emotion and there was no use in asking ‘what if’.
President Mandela was always forthright in that he didn’t run the country but that the Deputy President did most of the work. President Mandela’s role was that of nation-builder and he passed with distinction. To this day I think history has provided us with the right leader at the right time, or South Africa could have easily gone up in flames. I often compare our democracy with the growing process of a child. Up to the age of five you simply have to feed the child, care for it and love it. That is what President Mandela did best. From five to fifteen years you have to start educating the child and shape it into a personality, and that is exactly what President Mbeki did. With distinction. Now we are in the teenager phase and we experience the growing problems in our country similar to that of any adolescent. And as with an adolescent we can no longer blame our youth and we have to start acting responsibly.
In the first few months of 1999 the President worked at a pace that would see any younger head of state crawling on all fours. He was campaigning for the ANC, building schools and clinics, attending to official obligations and in between finding time and insisting on fetching and dropping his wife at the airport, attending to his children’s and grandchildren’s issues and then also embarking on saying ‘goodbye’ or taking leave of structures, people, business, institutions and even foreign countries before his retirement. Or should I say from the outset, his first attempt at retirement? The President’s private secretary, Virginia Engel, had a health condition and she was off sick for an extended period of time, so most of the travelling and work load came down on me. But I was ready to take on whatever was needed to see the President through the last couple of months of his term. Change is inevitable and I was ready to drive myself past the finish line, probably for the first time in my life at full speed. I often sat in planes and helicopters trying to comprehend what had happened to me. A certain sadness would then fill my heart. I hadn’t fully experienced what had happened because I was so obsessed with doing more than what was expected of me, always over-delivering, that I probably missed some valuable opportunities to get a deeper understanding of what was historically happening around me.
On 1 April 1999 the President took representatives of McDonald’s, Datatec and Nokia to the Eastern Cape, visiting three different areas where he wanted these respective companies to build schools and clinics in the communities of Bizana, Mbongweni and Baziya, very remote communities in the rural Transkei. The President never had a McDonald’s hamburger. He just never ate fast food and he didn’t know what a hamburger was. It is not something he was brought up with and his distance from society also meant that he missed out on many things that evolved around us. We take it that everybody should know what a hamburger is. During his speech in the community where he introduced McDonald’s the name slipped his mind and he referred to them as ‘the people who make these sandwiches’. I thoroughly enjoyed that reference and so did the representatives from McDonald’s. It also provided much laughter to the community. There were these moments, some of them which seem so distant to me now, when you completely forgot that this was Nelson Mandela.
The President had no problem calling together competitors to work together. In his schools and clinics project he would easily call together rivals, like the two cellular phone operators at the time or both BMW and Mercedes-Benz. When I once asked him about it he said that when people are competing to do good, it inspires them to do even better. It made perfect sense although I thought it was only Nelson Mandela that could get some rivals to sit together sometimes. It was entertaining to watch how companies would almost compete to showcase what they were able or willing to do.
* * *
President Mandela made sure he left not necessarily the best but the biggest for last. His last state visit was scheduled for April 1999 and would include Russia, Hungary, Pakistan and then China. He was hoping to strengthen ties with these countries prior to his departure from public office and to pave the way for a solid relationship to trade on in future. He also wanted to thank both Russia and China for their support during the apartheid years by honouring them with a state visit.
On 28 April 1999 we arrived in Moscow with all the fanfare, bells and whistles one could expect. President Boris Yeltsin was our host. We stayed in the Kremlin and I still consider it one of my most awkward experiences. I always felt like I was being watched, even alone in my room, although I was probably just imagining so. Passages were as wide as highways and people behaved like machine-like robots. Emotions were rarely expressed and everything appeared to have been rehearsed a thousand times. It all unnerved me but, being a disciplinarian myself, I kind of liked it. Language was a big problem. It was difficult asking for food to the President’s liking and then when it came to our own food it was even worse. Rich food and vodka for breakfast. The only way I could get an egg for breakfast was to imitate a chicken several times. Saying ‘cluck cluck’ in the Kremlin while flapping your imaginary wings is never very graceful.
We visited the burial sites of J. B. Marks and Moses Kotane, former ANC leaders and communists who were instrumental in shaping the President’s life. We laid a wreath and spent a few minutes of silence around their grave sites.
Next we visited the mausoleum on the Red Square where Lenin’s body was exhibited. One of the little pleasures of travelling with the President was that they would close down the mausoleum for our visit so we could do so in private without interference from the tourists around the site. On the few occasions that we actually did sight-seeing we avoided having to stand in queues to buy tickets or get access to places. Protocol officers briefed us before descending into the grave site: No talking, no eating or drinking and under any circumstances, no photographs. We quietly went down the steps until we saw Lenin’s mummified body. No one uttered a word.
What we had forgotten was that the President’s hearing was already not good, and when the Russian protocol officer briefed us the President in all likelihood didn’t hear the instructions. We were all quiet, almost admiring the body of the dead Communist leader. It was kind of spooky. And then, without any warning, the President with his booming loud voice said: ‘So, how long has he been lying here?’ The protocol officer was shocked beyond belief and looked at us for explanation or order, I don’t know which. No one responded, out of pure shock, and the President repeated the question to even more chaos. Zenani, his daughter who accompanied us on the visit, then said to him, ‘Daddy, you are not allowed to talk,’ and he whispered back but loud enough for anyone to hear: ‘Oh OK, I’m sorry.’
We also went to watch the world-renowned ballet Swan Lake at the Bolshoi. I was very impressed to be able to say that I stayed in the Kremlin, saw Lenin and watched Swan Lake at the Bolshoi. The fact that I walked that history with Nelson Mandela added to my delight. And for an Afrikaner this was something quite out of the ordinary, having spent so much time during my childhood praying for the abolishment of communism in these countries. Indeed times had changed.
The ballet was every bit of what I had imagined it would be. The dancing, decor, music, everything was brilliant. I sat right behind the President because he always wanted to know where I was in case he needed something. I touched his shoulder before the show started and told him I was right behind him in case he wanted water or anything.
Russians have a custom that they add ‘ina’ behind a man’s surname to identify the wife of that person. Therefore Yeltsin’s wife would be called Yeltsina. Just before the visit, I am told there was a discussion about my name in Maputo. The names that run in the Machel family, like Gracina, Josina and so on, sparked the discussion and apparently the President decided there that my name had to be changed to Zeldina. In Russia, with the occurrence of ‘ina’ at the end of these surnames, he was reminded of this discussion in Maputo and so he kept calling me Zeldina. We all found it very amusing. Needless to say, the name stuck and he called me Zeldina right up to the end, as every other person now does. I am reminded of him every time.
The President never realized the loudness of his voice and how recognizable it was. Between two of the ballet items he turned his head towards me and in the silence of the moment after the audience had stopped applauding he said, ‘Zeldina, you and I should be doing that,’ and pointed to the stage and ballerinas. We all burst out laughing and luckily I think only the South Africans and the few people in the audience from other countries but Russia could understand. It was hilarious and for minutes later we all laughed out loud. Luckily our laughter was drowned in the music but he enjoyed his own joke and kept on smiling for a long time.
It is also the only time I saw the President drinking any strong spirits, such as vodka. He was a stern believer that you should do what is possible not to offend the host, so he did exactly what was required of him. At the night of the state banquet he was heavily in conversation with President Yeltsin. President Yeltsin was a dramatic talker and, not knowing what they were discussing, it looked like they were arguing. In between they took a few vodka shots although President Mandela was only sipping his, and then without announcement President Yeltsin jumped up and left the room. He left President Mandela at the table for about fifteen minutes and it made me nervous as I thought they really had had a fight and he had left. He returned later to say that he had a call from President Clinton which he had to take, and apologized during his speech. Back in the Kremlin I told the President about my worries and he laughed at my assumptions that he would have an altercation with President Yeltsin. He did however raise the issue of Lenin’s burial with Yeltsin, telling him it was time for Lenin to go to his grave. President Yeltsin was adamant that Lenin should stay in Red Square. President Mandela disagreed with him. But they remained on good terms.
From Russia we went to Hungary. I think the President was excited to end his term in office and therefore the visit was relaxed and enjoyable. Our protocol officer in Hungary told us about twenty times that Budapest, the capital, is actually two separate cities, Buda and Pest, divided by a river. We ended up teasing one another about it, repeatedly asking everybody around us: ‘Did you know that Budapest is actually two different cities?’ Even the President checked a few times whether we knew it was two different cities and we enjoyed him participating in our teasing. His sense of humour never failed.
From Budapest we went to Pakistan for a two-day state visit and then continued on to Beijing in China. If you thought that you had a problem in Russia with food and the language barrier, China was worse. We were told that two days before our visit all factory activity was stopped to clear the air of pollution. Whether that was really honestly the truth I don’t know, but I probably wanted to believe it. Again I noticed in Beijing that everything worked like a machine. Emotions were far off and people were rehearsed in their responses. Some of the delegation went to see the Great Wall of China but I didn’t feel that it was wise to leave the President alone for that long, especially in a country where hardly anyone spoke English and he definitely didn’t speak or understand a word of Mandarin. Our colleagues returned, exhausted, and I was a little sad that I didn’t see the Wall but decided that everything was worth the sacrifice.
* * *
Returning to South Africa we were gearing up to take our leave from the Presidency after the elections. Luciano Pavarotti was hosting a concert in Pretoria and the President and Mrs Machel attended the concert. It was very emotional for us all and almost announced in a stately way the beginning of the end of the term. The President was looking forward to his retirement. Little did I know that he was looking forward to doing less of what he had to do and doing more of what he wanted to do.
On 14 May the Presidency hosted a farewell for its entire staff attended by the President. It was a wonderful event and a party for us all. Once the President left the function we danced until late at night, saying our goodbyes. By now we had fostered great friendships and we were celebrating a successful term and great achievements. In any normal office environment you become friends with people, but in a Presidency it is as if you know there is a shelf life to the particular structure’s existence and when the sell-by date approaches you become sentimental and emotional, even if it feels to you at the time that the term was dominated by challenges. You don’t even necessarily like everyone but you foster bonds with people probably because you are forced into a situation of this highly stressed environment and you learn to co-exist for the benefit of the success of the legacy of that term. We had a fairly small office in comparison to the other Presidencies that followed. We were effective and although we had made our fair share of mistakes, we had done a good job in supporting the President’s focus on reconciliation and building national unity.
We were campaigning for the elections day and night and travelling around the country non-stop in the weeks leading up to the vote. I was tired and emotionally depleted from pure exhaustion. The President repeated the same speech, off the cuff, over and over again to such an extent that I could anticipate exactly what he would say next. It is that last stretch when you see the finish line and you decide to give it your everything until you cross that line. He was there; I was about two laps behind him. People would often say: ‘If the President can operate at that speed, why are you tired?’ What people didn’t consider is that the support staff didn’t have their own support staff. No one bought the bread in my house, no one did the washing or drove me from point A to point B. You had to invent ways to deal with the ordinary course of life in between while dealing with the rest of the President’s life on his behalf. I wouldn’t say it was easier on him, and he was more than twice my age, but one underestimates the stress the most mundane things can cause in your life if you continuously work at such speed as we did.
On 19 May, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud from Saudi Arabia arrived in South Africa for a farewell visit. His plane was set to arrive at around 7 p.m. By 11 p.m. I was still at the airport awaiting him. The President asked me to be at the airport to ensure that things went smoothly. We waited and waited and I was irritable by the time the plane touched down. We still had a dinner to attend and I kept phoning the President to update him on the Saudis’ arrival time. Even though he was tired he was willing to wait until the Crown Prince arrived and willing to attend a dinner at whatever hour. By midnight the Crown Prince had arrived at the Presidency in Pretoria with his entourage of fifty-plus and the dinner commenced. One of my colleagues, Lizanne van Oudshoorn from Protocol, was on duty too that night. When the President stood up to start his speech at the dinner, I asked Lizanne to stand in for me as I was at breaking point. It was close to 2 a.m. and having heard the President’s campaign speech four times earlier that day I realized that I was too tired to listen to it for the fifth time. Regardless of the fact that he must have been tired, he was optimistic about the elections and the future of South Africa, sounding ever so energetic whenever he spoke about the prospects of the new South Africa. The President wasn’t fazed about the time and he enjoyed the Crown Prince’s visit.
On 2 June 1999 the second democratic elections were held in South Africa. President Mandela went to the polling station close to his house and cast his vote. It was always intriguing to watch. When the President wasn’t doing anything impressive or spectacular, there was no audience. When he went about everyday life, few people were interested. But the day he voted, the strangest people showed up wanting to accompany him to the polling station. Few people actually took the time and trouble to take interest in what was challenging for him. It was clear that self-interest was going to become an agenda for many people even way beyond his retirement. After his vote the media asked him: ‘Who did you vote for, Mr President?’ and he responded: ‘For myself.’ I thought that was funny although people could have misinterpreted it.
Before the elections President Mandela called me into his office one day. He asked me to sit down and I knew that something serious was to follow. He hardly ever asked me so formally to sit down. But a formal request like this was different and his tone was serious. ‘Zeldina, I want you to retire with me.’ My response was: ‘Well Khulu, I’m a bit young to retire but if you mean you want me to keep working for you, of course I will.’ He just laughed. After five years he knew me better than anyone else. He had seen me grow up in a way and thinking back at earlier days he must have laughed when he was by himself about my ignorance and stupidity. But he recognized my tenacity and commitment.
Even though our lives were so different, I realized that there is a chance this person will not abandon me. Nelson Mandela didn’t leave me behind. He took me with him. It was obviously one of the greatest, if not the greatest honour of my life, being chosen by Madiba to serve him beyond his retirement.
Every retiring President in South Africa is afforded some rights in retirement. One of these is keeping a full-time secretary on the payroll of the President’s office but then using his/her services exclusively. It also included a telephone line, some administrative support such as a fax machine, etc., but that was the basics apart from security and official car transport within South Africa. Days before his retirement we started packing up our personal belongings at our offices in the Union Buildings.
* * *
On 11 June the President presented the last set of credentials to incoming ambassadors. I watched him really enjoying it for this last time. I was always surprised at his memory when it came to remembering the names of heads of state.
On 13 June the ‘Brother Leader’, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, visited the President to bid farewell. Since the early 1990s the President had been involved in the process related to the court case that dealt with the Lockerbie plane incident in which 270 people were killed. First Mr Mandela asked President George Bush, Snr, in the early 1990s to agree that the trial be held in a neutral country. President Bush agreed to the suggestions from Mr Mandela but the British Prime Minister, John Major, refused. Then when Tony Blair became Prime Minister he put the request to him and they agreed that the case would be heard under Scottish law in The Hague in the Netherlands. A long process followed, during which the President negotiated with Gaddafi to have the two suspects delivered to The Hague, and finally Prince Bandar from Saudi and Prof. Jakes Gerwel succeeded in persuading the Brother Leader to deliver the two suspects for trial.
Later, in 2002, we visited Barlinnie Prison in Scotland where the Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was serving a minimum twenty-seven-year sentence following that trial. Al-Megrahi was unhappy with his conditions and sent word through Gaddafi that he wanted to speak to Madiba. There was little Gaddafi could do himself, as he was still considered an enemy by the West despite keeping his promise of delivering the suspects of the Lockerbie bombing and compensating the families of the victims who died in the plane crash. Yes, compensation could never bring back a life, but Gaddafi had delivered his promise yet still the West did not suspend all sanctions as they had promised. There was nothing Madiba could do to convince the West to suspend the sanctions. He had great appreciation for Gaddafi acting reliably and was willing to look into al-Megrahi’s situation when asked to do so.
As we entered the prison surrounded by Scottish prison officials the mood was sombre. We entered al-Megrahi’s cell, which consisted of a living area, a bathroom and kitchen. Comparing that to Madiba’s old cell on Robben Island I thought al-Megrahi had something more like a suite. He was obviously touched to receive Madiba and we conversed with him for a long time. He produced evidence that he thought was not taken into consideration in court and he complained that it was very difficult for him to practise his Islamic faith, since he was in solitary confinement and was not able to worship with others. Madiba listened carefully and with sympathy but clearly he was not going to argue for the case to be re-opened. Afterwards, Madiba addressed a huge press conference, during which he pleaded for al-Megrahi to be moved to another prison in a Muslim country. (Al-Megrahi was later moved to Greenock jail out of solitary confinement and later released as he was terminally ill. He passed away in 2012 at the age of sixty in Tripoli.)
Prince Bandar and Prof. Gerwel were both awarded the Order of Good Hope, South Africa’s highest honour, for their success in bringing about the trial in The Hague. The President had a close relationship with Gaddafi as a result of these negotiations and Gaddafi had to know that he could trust Madiba before he would co-operate. I also suspected that Madiba was entertained by the fact that the Brother Leader publicly expressed his fearlessness of the West. The West had not supported President Mandela during the time of apartheid, in general maintaining their links with the apartheid regime as a bulwark against communism. It was therefore an emotional day for Gaddafi when he came to bid farewell to President Mandela from his Presidency.
We only saw him on a few occasions after President Mandela’s retirement and the last time, during President Zuma’s inauguration, I made a point to ask whether he didn’t want to pay a courtesy call upon Madiba. I never received a response and Madiba was shocked when he was killed in 2011. No person deserves to die without dignity. I will never condone what he did to his own people but in my view he was always good to us and to Madiba and he earned respect in our eyes for that and always delivering his promises during those negotiations. Madiba was loyal to those in whom he invested friendship and the Brother Leader was one of them. He never omitted to point out the mistakes he thought Gaddafi made, but they maintained mutual respect even while expressing their differences at times. Another of Madiba’s great lessons: you can have a vast difference of opinion with someone but that never justifies disrespect.
* * *
We travelled to Cape Town for the swearing in of the new President and Parliament and to prepare for the inauguration of President Mbeki in Pretoria on 16 June. Attending the inauguration at the Union Buildings it was the first time that I saw any kind of interaction between Mrs Machel and Mrs Winnie Madikizela Mandela.
Up to that point I had only seen Mrs Mandela at a distance on a few occasions. We had no contact with her of any kind. It was one of those unspoken rules that when you work for the President you don’t ask questions about his relationships with his family or his former wives. Apart from the four grandchildren who lived with the President we only occasionally saw Zindzi and Zenani, the two daughters from that marriage. When I saw the look in their eyes when Mrs Mandela and Mrs Machel passed each other in the crowd at the inauguration it scared me. There was no relationship between the two women and I could never imagine them being friendly.
I have learned over the years to have appreciation for Mrs Winnie Mandela. I was angry at her when I learned that she maintained physical distance from Madiba following his release, yet her affair with Dali Mpofu was widely talked about. It must have hurt him. Yet Mrs Machel was the one to bring me around to accepting and appreciating the fact that if it had not been for Mrs Mandela, Madiba may have given up hope over the long years in prison. Apart from the fact that she was mother to two of his children, she represented hope for him and she must have been the person he dreamt about at night; the person he longed to touch and to be with. I grew a sense of understanding for her and also how lonely she must have become without him. It is only once we really experience loneliness ourselves that we can fully comprehend its darkness, and as I matured awareness of these things in life often occupied my mind.
On the day of the inauguration of President Mbeki we woke up as usual and prepared for the ceremony. We attended the ceremony, after which President Mandela returned to his office in the Union Buildings to collect his personal belongings. The office was deserted because it was a public holiday. As I entered the glass doors where I first entered his office five years earlier I quietly started sobbing. He held Mrs Machel’s hand as we walked down the passage to his office. I walked a few yards ahead of them and the only sound to announce their arrival was the familiar sound of the security door opening in front of them as they approached and automatically closing behind them. Our offices leading to his were already empty. I left them alone in his office as they went through his drawers and bathroom to clear the limited items he had left in the office. I later took them a small box in which we packed his things and he saw that I was crying. He looked at me and said: ‘Zeldina, you are overreacting.’ He said those same words back in 1994 when we first met; he said them under different circumstances and I was crying at that time for exactly the opposite reasons. In 1994 I was crying because of guilt and fear of what lay ahead; now I was crying because it was all over. Little did I know what really lay ahead . . .