My Mentor
Vanity Fair
I puzzled for some time about what to say in this piece. When I was coming of age, there was no such thing as a formal mentor. People “looked out” for others from their old school or college. But, as the daughter of working-class Jamaican immigrants, I was totally outside all the networks. The significant black female role models of the time were Tamla Motown singers like Diane Ross, with their wigs and synchronised dance steps. (Not much of a template for someone who wanted to be a politician). My obdurate feminism prevented me forming the type of flirtatious and deferential relationships with older men that helped other women. I was an outsider in race, class and gender. As I moved from public service to the media and then into politics, I could look around and see no-one who looked like me.
Such were the perils of always being the “only” or the “first”. I was the only black girl at my state grammar school. I went on to be one of only two black women at Newham College, Cambridge. Then I was the only black woman in my year’s intake of Civil Service fast-track trainees. I was the solitary black member of staff at the National Council for Civil Liberties (and was regarded with suspicion by white colleagues because, with my smart clothes and confident manner, I was not their idea of an oppressed black woman). I was one of the first black women to be elected as a Councillor in London. And I was the first black woman elected to Parliament. I gradually grew used to the rarefied air that I breathed at the top of the successive mountains that I scaled. When I was a new MP, my friends had to point out to me that everywhere I went in Parliament, people stared. I had no footsteps to walk in. There were no role models. And mentors there were none.
But no career exists in a vacuum. If I had no mentors to help and give advice, there was one black woman in public life who burned through the stratosphere like a meteor. She was the incomparable Winnie Mandela.
At this point sensitive readers will choke and begin composing angry letters to the editor. How dare I speak well of a woman convicted of fraud and suspected of murder? Someone Nelson Mandela had to abandon?
There is no doubt that Winnie Mandela had a dark side. In Soweto she ignored the mainstream black resistance and set up her personal vigilante group, the Mandela United Football Club. The “club” became a violent gang of enforcers. It all came to a horrible climax with the death of Stompie Moeketsi. In a sensational trial in 1991 Winnie was sentenced to six year’s imprisonment for his kidnap and assault. (This punishment was reduced to a fine on appeal). When Nelson Mandela was elected President in 1994 he appointed her deputy minister, only to sack her the following year. In 1996 he divorced her on grounds of adultery. In 2003 she was convicted of fraud and theft (though the latter conviction was subsequently overturned). As recently as June this year she was refused a visa by the Canadian government. In August I was a guest at an elaborate ceremony in London to mark the unveiling of a statue of Nelson Mandela. Although frail, he had flown in especially. Dignitaries were out in force. There were choirs, films, and speeches. No-one mentioned Winnie.
But, for the long years that Mandela was in prison, one person kept his name alive, and that was Winnie. Many important ANC leaders were imprisoned with him, but Mandela is the name the world knows. When my son was a toddler, the children at his nursery school (who knew of no other politician) could sing “Free Nelson Mandela” and tell you all about Winnie. At one point she was perhaps the most famous woman on earth. And her courage was astonishing.
She met Mandela in 1957; they married the following year. In their first four years of marriage they lived together for only five weeks. He was constantly on the run. He was arrested in 1962, tried and, in 1964, taken to Robben Island, where he remained for 18 of his 27 years in prison. But people have forgotten that, for most of that period, Winnie herself was in and out of prison and subject to banning orders.
Her first banning order, in 1962, restricted her to Soweto. Five years later she was arrested in Cape Town on a visit to see Mandela and spent a month in prison. After further spells in prison, some spent in solitary confinement, she was sent into internal exile in 1977. She was taken from her cell and driven hundreds of miles from Johannesburg to the desolate town of Brandford. She remained there for nine years, cut off from friends and family. Her house was bombed twice and she was arrested for defying her restriction order and returning to Johannesburg.
Many people would have been broken by all this. But at the end of two decades of fear and hardship she blazed more beautiful and defiant than ever. I will never forget the television pictures of Mandela walking out of prison hand in hand Winnie.
Of course, it all went horribly wrong. As well as the violence and financial malpractice, there were rumours of her infidelity. Mandela divorced her, under pressure from the ANC leadership. But I believe that he never stopped loving her. He apparently blamed himself for what the beautiful girl he had married had become. He felt that, if he had not been in prison all those years, he could have protected her from some of the events that had brutalised and changed her.
So I never had a mentor in the conventional sense. But, for a young black girl beginning her odyssey through the white, male world of British politics, Winnie Mandela at the height of her fame was a revelation. She stood alone incomparably beautiful and surpassingly brave. And all the scandals of her later years cannot take that away.
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