Review | ‘Winnie and Nelson,’ a powerful, tragic portrait of a historic marriage

So began the epic partnership of South Africa’s most famous, beloved and beleaguered couple, charismatic public figures whose love affair became a national legend and a personal nightmare. They fought a brutal system of racial oppression that did enormous damage to their lives, their marriage and their family. And while they were at war with the police state that sought to crush them, they often warred with each other as well.

Jonny Steinberg, a prizewinning South African author and scholar, has written a powerful, intimate and ultimately heartbreaking account in “Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.” But it is a portrait not just of a marriage but of a nation struggling to cast off its chains. Together, these two strong-willed, wounded souls constructed a fable of adoration and loyalty — Nelson the stoical martyr, Winnie the devoted spouse. The truth, as Steinberg lays out in painstaking detail, was far more complex.

Nelson Mandela and his fellow activists were confident that the winds of change blowing through the rest of colonial Africa in the 1950s would inevitably sweep away White rule in South Africa. Instead, the country’s regime hardened, creating a cradle-to-grave system of white supremacy called apartheid, and evolved into a full-fledged police state. It enacted detention without trial, banned political movements and their leaders, and engaged in mass roundups of activists and, inevitably, in torture and extrajudicial assassinations.

After the African National Congress and other opposition movements were outlawed, Mandela and his comrades turned to armed resistance. Dubbed “the Black Pimpernel,” Mandela went underground in 1961 and helped launch a bombing campaign against government offices and infrastructure. But the organization, riddled with informers, was quickly crushed by the security police. Tried for terrorism along with 10 fellow defendants, Mandela defiantly invited the death penalty in a public address to the court, in which he insisted he had turned to violence after all peaceful means had failed. Sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, he endured hard labor and crushing solitude, his name and photograph banned from the media as the regime sought to bury him in a grave of anonymity.

Winnie Mandela fought to keep her husband’s legacy alive, but she seldom saw him during the early years of their marriage, and only during rare prison visits after his arrest in 1962. Still, as Steinberg narrates in grim but vivid strokes, her phone was tapped, her employers pressured into firing her, her friends and companions imprisoned or turned into informers. She herself was arrested, brutalized and imprisoned for 491 days — “some 400 of them in solitary confinement” — then a five-year order confined her to her Soweto home. When that period expired, she was arrested again and exiled to a rural village without running water or electricity, where she remained for more than four years. Meanwhile, the authorities planted claims that she had become an informer.

Still, she resisted. “In my husband’s absence,” she wrote from prison in 1970, “I am the leader of my people.”

After more than a decade of enforced obscurity, Nelson and Winnie emerged as the spiritual leaders of a new generation of Black activists who ignited an uprising against apartheid that began in Soweto in June 1976 and spread to ghettoized townships across the country. The government responded with brute force, killing hundreds and imprisoning thousands, triggering international economic sanctions against the regime.

Meanwhile, a complex and poignant drama was taking place behind the scenes. Using Nelson’s prison letters to Winnie, Steinberg traces how Nelson became more and more obsessed with her, heartbroken as he learned of her various love affairs and frustrated at his inability to protect her and his children from the forces of oppression. Steinberg writes with empathy about Nelson’s desperate longing for the strong, angry woman he barely knew and could not control.

Nelson had never expected Winnie to remain celibate during his 27-year imprisonment. But he chafed at and agonized over her increasingly brazen public behavior. She drank heavily, seduced men less than half her age and endorsed the practice of executing alleged police collaborators by “necklacing” — placing a tire filled with gasoline around the neck of a suspected informer and setting it ablaze. “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” she publicly declared in the mid-1980s.

By that time, Nelson Mandela had become a global figure — about 600 million people watched a worldwide televised celebration of his 65th birthday, held in absentia at London’s Wembley Stadium. The African National Congress-in-exile used his name and image to fuel its international campaign against apartheid.

Steinberg starkly recounts how the violence in rebellious Black townships turned inward, with armed gangs colliding in battles encouraged and inflamed by the security police. Having returned to Soweto in 1985, Winnie created her own security force of young thugs, named the Mandela United Football Club and centered on her home, harnessing their violence for her own purposes. In 1988, the house was burned to the ground by local youths furious at the rapes of schoolgirls by club members.

While Winnie became more radicalized, Nelson was becoming more conciliatory. Having concluded that the heavily armed regime could not be defeated militarily, he engaged in talks aimed at a peaceful transfer of power. His White enemies came to admire him. “One is struck by his spiritual power,” one intelligence report said. “The lack of bitterness, his natural courtesy, as well as his personal integrity.”

In February 1990, South African President F.W. de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress and released Nelson from prison. Winnie greeted him triumphantly at the prison gate and stood next to him as he addressed a jubilant crowd in downtown Cape Town. Among those standing behind him was his wife’s lover, Dali Mpofu, whose “time on this earth coincided, almost exactly, with Nelson’s time in prison.”

“Winnie had sent her husband the starkest message: she was no Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return,” Steinberg writes.

Still, Nelson used his influence to try to protect Winnie from prosecution and to help her gain power within the freedom movement. He insisted that the international anti-apartheid movement pay her lawyers when she was charged and convicted for her role in the kidnapping of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered by her security squad. And when Nelson became president in the first multiracial election in South Africa’s history, he appointed her as a deputy cabinet minister — and fired her a year later, after she was accused of misusing public funds.

Nelson finally divorced Winnie in 1996. While his public performance as president was warm, gracious and conciliatory, his private pain over the alienation of his wife and children was evident to those who saw him regularly. “He was one of the saddest human beings I have known,” Barbara Masekela, his chief of staff in those years and later South African ambassador to the United States, told Steinberg. “From time to time, you felt it come out of him. … There was just a stillness, a grim, frightening stillness, and an almost unbearable sadness.”

He remarried in 1998. Yet toward the end of his life, beset by dementia, he would call out for Winnie. She held his hand as he died in December 2013 at age 95. She would die four years later.

Many of the details in Steinberg’s masterful account have long been public knowledge thanks to court cases, newspaper articles and previous books. But his supreme contribution is in his ability to portray clearly and critically Nelson Mandela’s flaws and Winnie Mandela’s crimes, while expressing sympathy and understanding for both their courage and their pain.

Glenn Frankel is a former southern Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post and the author of “Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa.”