Good Morning, Mr Mandela

Author’s Note

In June 2013 the son of the ANC stalwart Oliver Tambo, Dali Tambo, conducted an interview with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Mugabe said: Nelson Mandela is too much of a saint. He has been too good to white people at the expense of blacks in his own country. Some agreed while others protested. To some extent I think the man had a point. It could well have been perceived that way. And yet, in a conversation with Richard Stengel, quoted in Conversations With Myself, Madiba himself said a long time ago, ‘People will feel I see too much good in people. So it’s a criticism I have to put up with and I’ve tried to adjust to, because whether it is so or not, it is something which I think is profitable. It’s a good thing to assume, to act on the basis that … others are men of integrity and honour … because you tend to attract integrity and honour if that is how you regard those with whom you work.’

Somehow in the Mugabe interview I felt responsible for this perception that he has been too good to white people. Indeed he has been too good to me, but I want to believe that he felt proud of how he changed this insignificant life. He often said that if you change one person for the better, you have done your duty. He has not only changed my life but millions of others. He has done way beyond what is expected of a single human being and perhaps for that he deserves to be hailed as a saint after all.

In another conversation with Richard Stengel, Madiba said, ‘Your duty is to work with human beings as human beings, not because you think they are angels. And, therefore, once you know that this man has got this virtue and he has got this weakness you work with them and you accommodate that weakness and you try and help him to overcome that weakness. I don’t want to be frightened by the fact that a person has made certain mistakes and he has got human frailties. I can’t allow myself to be influenced by that. And that is why many people criticize me.’

I try not to think ‘Why me?’, to understand why Nelson Mandela chose me. If I do, I think of these quotes above. In the nineteen years we spent together he learned my weaknesses, he learned my strengths, and he invested in my strengths to make me the person I am today.

I served him for almost twenty years and was his PA until he left us on 5 December 2013. In 2009 I decided to start writing this book to pay tribute to him. I mostly wanted to record my experiences in the hope that others would be changed and influenced by my story too. My book is therefore a tribute to Khulu, as I knew him.

This is not his story. This is my story, and I am content with it. But the reader may be disappointed if they expect me to wash too much dirty laundry in public. I would not disrespect the trust Nelson Mandela had invested in me. That is the biggest honour he could have bestowed on me – to trust me – and I intend to cherish that for the rest of my life. What I decided to write about and what I decided to omit as far as he is concerned is based on that trust. It is therefore not a tell-all book.

It is also not a book of great political insights or a thematic dissection of his life. It’s a simple story of my experiences with him. One of the most important lessons I have learned from this great man over the years, reaffirmed by his wife Graça Machel to me later in life, is that you only have one person to account to and that is yourself. You have to go to bed at night with your own thoughts and conscience, and after writing this book I need to feel the comfort of a pillow of a clear conscience. I need to make him proud because as much as it feels that our lives were overshadowed by negativity and turmoil over the last couple of years, there is a beautiful story to be told, and I need to admit that I am part of that story and that it is my duty to tell that story. Above all, I need to know in my heart that if he had to read this book he would be happy with what I told and he would agree with the detail, and spending sixteen of the last nineteen years with him, day in, day out, I know what he would be comfortable with in the public domain and what he would not, and that is what is mine to protect.

The book is therefore a collection of anecdotes, sometimes at my own expense, of a road well travelled. No regrets and only lessons to be learned. I am an emotional billionaire, and if nothing extraordinary happens to me for the rest of my life I will still be content with my memories until the day I die. I have had a rich life. Most people will not experience what I have been witness to, and my story is therefore one of change, of slow metamorphoses of the mind and a belief system to where I am today. The reader has to decide if there is any part he or she can identify with or lessons they can learn from my story. It is not for me to decide.

It would also be incorrect to assume that I was the only one, or a special one, around Madiba. I played a particular role in his life, mostly concerned with his public life. But there are many others, household staff, office staff, security and medical personnel, who played equally important roles in his life and who he was totally dependent upon. Some of them are included in my story but I simply couldn’t pay tribute to each and every one of them.

I have tried my best without exception and that is the best I have to give. I hope to contribute to Nelson Mandela’s legacy in a small way by sharing the privileges and experiences I have had to anyone open to receiving them. If I change one life by touching another with my story, I have done my duty.

I remain grateful and indebted for ever …

Prologue: Zeldina

It was early 2000s. I was in my thirties. I stood outside our office door in Johannesburg, as usual, awaiting the arrival of Nelson Mandela to receive him, escort him into his office and brief him on events for the day. Whenever his car appeared around the corner, my face lit up, no matter how much pressure I was under. The smile that painted my face was one loaded with love and admiration, like one would have when you see your dearest grandparents. His car came to a standstill and the bodyguards emerged. We greeted and briefly exchanged pleasantries before they opened the heavily armed car door for Madiba to step out of the car. Madiba is Nelson Mandela’s clan name in South Africa. It is also the term with which people endearingly refer to him. Some call him Tata, which means ‘Father’, but most people refer to him and address him as Madiba. I called him Khulu, an abbreviated version of Tata um’khulu which means ‘Grandfather’.

While getting out of the car, our eyes met. I exclaimed, ‘Good morning Khulu.’ He called me Zeldina. He was handed his walking stick to support himself to get out of the car. The stick was made from ivory, a gift from his good friend Douw Steyn. He didn’t care much for material things but his walking stick was one of the few items he valued and protected with his life.

‘Good morning Zeldina,’ he said as he emerged from the car. His face lit up with his usual smile although I detected some reserve. Once the bodyguards had him steady on his feet, they handed him to me. He would support himself on his walking stick and hold onto my arm with his left hand.

‘How are you this morning Khulu?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine Zeldina,’ he said but he didn’t continue as he usually did, asking after my well-being. That was another sign that something bothered him. As we walked into his office I thought of giving him a few moments to gather his thoughts before I started overloading him with information about the day. Once his office door was closed he opened up:

‘You know Zeldina, I had a dream last night.’

I responded with a ‘Yes?’

‘I dreamt that you left me, that you deserted me …’ he said.

I was dumbstruck. Me? Zelda la Grange? Abandoning Nelson Mandela? How could he ever conceive me doing something like that? At the time I had been in his service for almost ten years. What would cause him to feel that I would abandon him? To the contrary, because of my early childhood I was the one who feared abandonment. I had to set his mind at ease. I put my left hand on his left hand which was holding onto my right arm and said, ‘Khulu, I would never ever do something like that and you should please never think about that ever again. I can give you my assurance that I will never abandon you.’ And then added on a lighter note, ‘In any event I think you are going to abandon me or chase me away before I can abandon you.’

He looked at me, laughed half heartedly, lifted his eyebrows and then responded: ‘I will never do that.’

That was the warmth of our relationship. We needed affirmation from each other. We looked after each other. I have grown to love this man who was once my people’s enemy. He resembled fear in our eyes. Growing up in apartheid South Africa as a white Afrikaner, we had spent our lives oppressing the same people that Nelson Mandela represented. He was the voice of the oppressed and the liberation struggle. Less than fifteen years after his release from prison, here I was trying to explain and defend my commitment to the man we once despised.

Apartheid was the system introduced by the white government in South Africa in the 1940s. It advocated for white supremacy and black oppression and was a clear set of legislation providing for the separation and segregation of white and black in South Africa. The laws of apartheid were upheld in churches and schools, on beaches and in restaurants, and any areas where the white minority could feel intimidated by the presence of black people.

Yet I walked next to Nelson Mandela for most of my adult professional life – each of us holding onto the other. I was a young Afrikaner girl whose views and mindset were changed by the greatest statesman of our time. Yet to me, he was more than my moral conscience. I had learned to care for him, because he cared for me. He shaped and changed my thinking because for him to employ a white Afrikaans-speaking young woman as his Personal Assistant was not only unprecedented, it was unheard of.

1 Childhood

On 29 October 1970 in Boksburg to the east of Johannesburg, South Africa, I was born and not left to die but to make it good, like most babies that are brought into this world.

On the same day, Nelson Mandela was already beginning his ninth year in prison. In prison since 1962, and then convicted for sabotage after the Rivonia Trial in 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He and other political prisoners were incarcerated on Robben Island, a desolate island off the coast of Cape Town, for opposing apartheid.

At the time my father worked at a construction company and my mother was a teacher. They were very poor. My only sibling, my brother Anton, was three years old when I was born. Because our parents were white, we were born to legal privilege. That was the way it was in South Africa in 1970. Even though my parents’ families shared the same holiday destination every December, my parents only met in Boksburg once my mother was studying to become a teacher and my father was working in the postal service.

My grandfather’s family originated from French Huguenots who fled the south of France during the 1680s to escape the persecution of Protestants by the Catholic authorities. The La Grange family originated from a small town called Cabrières in the region of Avignon; a place I discovered and visited twice in the decades after my birth as a result of working for Nelson Mandela.

My father was one of two siblings. Their parents lived in Mosselbay, a coastal town along the picturesque Garden Route in the Cape Province. My grandmother’s sister was the first qualified female pharmacist in South Africa and up to this day the Scholtz family own and run a reputable pharmacy in the town of Willowmore in the Eastern Cape. She was therefore quite an impressive woman and someone we automatically looked up to as a result of her unique achievement.

I was also very fond of my dad’s father. His name was Anthony Michael but we just called him ‘Oupa Mike’ (Grandpa Mike). He used to visit us a few times a year and then stay with us for a few weeks. He smoked a pipe and the smell of smoke irritated us. He would sit on one particular chair and constantly wipe his hand on the arm rest. His skin was old and cracked and the tobacco from stuffing his pipe stuck in those cracks. When he left our home the armrest was black, much to my mother’s irritation, but nobody ever said he couldn’t smoke in the house.

My mother was the eldest of three siblings from the Strydom family. The only famous family with that surname was that of J. G. Strijdom (also sometimes spelt Strydom), the sixth Prime Minister of South Africa who served between 1954 and 1958. He was succeeded by the ‘Father of Apartheid’, H. F. Verwoerd. When I learned as a child about a Strijdom being Prime Minister, I convinced myself that we were somehow related even though no real connection exists.

My mother’s father died in a motorcycle accident when my mother was only twelve years of age. I often asked my mother whether she recalled the night they received the news about her father’s death. She has mostly avoided talking about it, but has said that she recalled been woken up by someone knocking on their front door and then hearing my grandmother crying hysterically.

My grandmother had few options about the upbringing of her children. She had a clerical job at the South African Railways and it was financially impossible for her to raise three small children by herself.

She decided to send my mother, being the eldest, to an orphanage. The children’s home was in Cape Town, which is why my mother still detests the city. For her, it stinks of abandonment.

Ma only saw her siblings and my grandmother once a year during the December holidays. Both the La Grange and Strydom families camped in the same area close to Mosselbay, called Hartenbos, during the December holidays, but they never knew about the other’s existence.

My mother’s childhood memories are limited to suffering, neglect, sadness. The world was suffering the consequences of the Second World War, slowly recovering from the economic recession, and my mother, even as an Afrikaans child in the 1940s in South Africa, felt those consequences through poverty. I greatly admire her for not holding a grudge against my grandmother, whatever the circumstances.

Grandma Tilly, my mother’s mother, was part of our everyday life, even though she had given up my mother as a child. She lived close to us and I would often visit her on my way from primary school, as she conveniently lived halfway between our house and the school. Before she moved closer to us, Grandma Tilly lived opposite the Union Buildings. Sitting on the hill overlooking the city of Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, the Union Buildings were built by Herbert Baker and were the seat of the apartheid government. Imposing, monumental and beautiful – for my family, it was like living across from the White House.

On Sundays the La Granges and the Strydoms, my uncle’s family, would all visit my gran in her apartment for lunch and then go for a walk on the manicured lawns of the Union Buildings. The Union Buildings represented ultimate authority and we walked up the steps with great respect. My cousins, brother and I would play on the grounds, rolling down the sloping lawn, laughing all the time. We were happy children growing up in apartheid South Africa.

Ours was a typical privileged white family, benefiting from apartheid through good education, access to basic services and a sense of entitlement to the land and its resources. Apartheid was our regime’s political solution to enforce segregation and the separation of races, classes and cultures.

Instituted by the Afrikaner leaders in the late 1950s, the then Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, called it ‘policy’. ‘Our policy is one of good neighbourliness’, implying that the Afrikaner cared for all racial groups in South Africa. But the reality was that apartheid was a way of ensuring that Afrikaners benefited from the economy, opportunities and wealth of the country’s natural resources, at the expense of others.

By the mid 1970s the apartheid government had created a racist state based on decisions taken in the Union Buildings. Black and white people were separated, not allowed to marry, befriend, have sex together or to live in the same cities. These were the so-called Group Areas Act provisions in South Africa, an attempt to prevent people from freely moving around and living lives within the same boundaries. Black people couldn’t ride in the same buses or swim in the same sea as whites. Due to its apartheid policies, South Africa was suspended from participating in the business of the United Nations in 1974, and followed by a resolution passed in 1977 a mandatory arms embargo was imposed against us. However, the United States, Britain and France opposed the expulsion of South Africa from the UN despite several resolutions calling for it.

Even though my country was an international pariah, we kept on playing and laughing at the seat of government. This was because my people were protected. Protected from men like Nelson Mandela. It was people like him – black and determined to overthrow the government, challenging white superiority – who we feared.

Neither of my parents were politicians or worked for the government. But we supported the regime. We were, I suppose, racists. We epitomized the typical Afrikaner middle-class family at the time: law-abiding citizens, cheerleaders for whatever the church and government dictated. Our respect for authority and the ties to the Dutch Reformed Church superseded common sense. Like any other Afrikaans family, we attended church services on Sunday morning without fail and participated in all related activities to exhibit our model citizenry.

So apartheid was in our home. We lived by segregation. It was all acceptable and unquestionable, not only because the National Party government in power dictated it but also because our church endorsed it.

Black people were anyone who wasn’t white. Coloured and Indian people were black in our eyes too. ‘Coloured people’, now referred to as ‘brown’ people, originated from different groups, just like the Afrikaners, but some of their forefathers were Qash-skinned. Therefore they were regarded as ‘black’ in South Africa.

The white Afrikaner has a mixed genealogy that includes Dutch, French, German and British blood. Although unthinkable at the time, it has emerged in modern history and studies that almost all white Afrikaner people have DNA that can be traced to black and brown ancestry in South Africa – facts not all white Afrikaners easily accept.

At the time of apartheid you didn’t even contemplate anything but simply did it. I knew that all black people were required to carry a pass book and they had to show their pass books randomly to police that stopped them. I didn’t know that they were only allowed to move in areas that their passes allowed them to move in, and if they didn’t have a pass for a specific area they would be arrested for transgression of the pass act and thrown into jail, before being deported to their own area. If you had a pass for Johannesburg, you couldn’t move in Pretoria – two cities barely thirty miles apart. It was the government’s way of controlling black people’s movements.

According to our church, we were right. We did the ‘right’ thing. And yes it was right, as in direction to the right. The utmost conservatism.

Like most white families we had a black live-in domestic worker. Her name was Jogabeth. Reminiscing about those days one cannot help but come to the realization that most white children of my age were brought up by black people. They were not only domestic workers but surrogate mothers. As a child Jogabeth was part of our family to a certain extent, and within limits – apartheid limits. She stayed in a back room. She had a toilet but no bath or shower. She had a separate cup and cutlery and was not allowed to use ‘ours’. I cannot recall that my parents ever told her she was not allowed to use anything of ours but she knew and we knew. It was unspoken. Yet, Jogabeth was my lifeline.

Touching a black person was taboo. Apart from the fact that white people were considered superior to black people, we were brought up to believe that they were not as clean as we were, they apparently smelled different and the texture of their hair was different to ours. You would never dream of touching a black person’s hair or face. It was just unthinkable. Yet Jogabeth carried me on her back when I was a toddler. Although I never would have touched her hair, her hands, arms and her bosom comforted me whenever I needed it. Because she brought us children up, in our eyes she wasn’t as black as other blacks. She posed no threat to us and she served us and therefore she was more acceptable to us than other black people.

I remember on many occasions being bullied by my brother and how Jogabeth had to comfort me after losing the battle. She was my safe house and I knew that, as long as I was in her care, I was protected from my big brother’s bullying. And then during such times, I found comfort in her arms, close to her chest.

When I was twelve years old and my father was employed by the South African Breweries, eventually working his way up to become logistics manager, political unrest against apartheid played a role in my life for the first time. The head offices of the SAB were situated in the Poyntons Building in Church Street, Pretoria. On Friday, 20 May 1983 my dad was scheduled to fly to Cape Town to attend to business there. Just before 4 p.m. a bomb blast shook the entire city of Pretoria in its core. The story broke on the news immediately and it was reported that the car bomb exploded right in front of the Poyntons Building.

When news was received my mother called my dad’s office, but there was no response. She called the airport to check whether he was on the flight at around 6 p.m. but the airport authorities refused to release information on passengers, as they always do. We couldn’t find anyone that could confirm whether my dad was still in the building at the time of the explosion, whether he had safely left by the time of the explosion or whether he possibly walked past or drove out of the parking garage at the time of the explosion. He often attended business luncheons at restaurants in the surrounding areas of his head office and we feared for the worst. It was only at about 9 p.m. that night, when he arrived at his hotel in Cape Town, that he called to inform us that he was safe. It was the longest five hours of my life. We were relieved that he was unharmed. I didn’t ask why resistance to apartheid would be so strong, or take such violent forms. The violence only served to strengthen my belief in apartheid, the inherent difference between black and white.

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the opposition African National Congress’s military wing, accepted responsibility for the bomb in which 19 people were killed – 8 black people and 11 white people – and more than 217 were injured. The Church Street bomb exploded at the height of rush hour. The two men involved in planning and executing the bombing were also killed, as the bomb was detonated by accident too soon.

Umkhonto we Sizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’, was established in 1961 after Nelson Mandela and other founding members of MK decided that violence in South Africa was becoming the only way to respond to the violence exercised by the apartheid government. Since the government resorted to violent means in fighting the ANC and keeping black people oppressed under apartheid laws, MK was the ANC’s response to such violence. In Nelson Mandela’s speech during the closing moments of the Rivonia Trial in 1964, when he was charged with acts of terrorism and after which he and others were sentenced to life imprisonment, he noted about MK: ‘It would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.’

Having gone to Ethiopia and Morocco in 1962 to receive military training and to secure support for MK, Mr Mandela was prepared to resort to violence. However, I am not sure whether he knew while he was imprisoned what ANC cadres were doing outside and whether those imprisoned were consulted about such acts of violence. In 1983 Oliver Tambo was President of the ANC; Nelson Mandela was already sixty-five years of age, spending his twentieth year imprisoned, and communication was difficult with prisoners. I subsequently asked him whether he was aware of the Church Street bombing and he said that they had been briefed after the incident.

The ANC knew it needed to force the hand of the racist regime. To do that they would have to turn to violence. The government was not prepared to abolish apartheid or improve the living conditions of black people and they would rather fight the black force with violence. The ANC’s response was violence. They did that by targeting strategic installations, crucial to the state. The Poytons Building was strategic because the South African Air Force Headquarters was situated in the same building.

I was generally oblivious to what was happening in the country, the poverty of blacks and the violence, but I knew that we lived in separate cocoons and that we were fighting one another in a bitter battle because we were not able to co-exist. It was pressed upon us instinctively, because of the way we lived, that when approached by a black person, you turned and walked the other way. You didn’t make conversation and you feared them. They were not our friends. I was quite happy with my life as it was and knew that we were locking doors and windows from an early age out of fear that black people might attack us at night. It never crossed my mind that we could be harmed by white people too. It was always ‘black’ people. I didn’t ask why they might attack us, or who they were, or what their lives were like. I only knew that they were dangerous.

On Sundays we solemnly prayed in church for the men defending our borders. It was the right thing to do because everybody else did it. Well, all the other whites in my community. I didn’t know which border but I knew they were fighting black people. My knowledge was limited to whites protecting the border from infiltration by more black people. How strange that then one didn’t ask the question, which black people? Were we protecting our borders from infiltration by more black people or were we protecting our borders from other military forces in the region infiltrating South Africa to support the ANC? You were told just this: we are fighting black communist people. I was brought up to believe that all black people were communists and atheists. Yet on Sundays black people gathered in small groups in open spaces, holding church services. I disregarded seeing that and cannot remember that the contradiction to what I was brought up to believe ever bothered me. As a child it is easy to follow when you grow up in an environment that is safe. Perhaps if I had been oppressed, didn’t have access to a decent school, a proper house, electricity and water, I would have asked different questions, and my brain would have developed into being more inquisitive about injustice at an early age. In any case it didn’t.

Today I also realize that the community you are brought up in chooses to live in a particular way. The people around you, grown-up adult people, decide what is socially acceptable and what is not. You live that life not realizing that there is a life beyond: issues, policies, world events and tendencies that influence your world. When you live in comfort you don’t ask questions, and there was no need for me to question what was happening beyond the walls of our house. No person is born a racist. You become a racist by influences around you. And I had become a racist by the time I was thirteen years old. By that calculation I should never have become Nelson Mandela’s longest-serving assistant. But I did.

Zelda La Grange

GOOD MORNING, MR MANDELA

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GOOD MORNING, MR MANDELA

Author’s Note

Prologue: Zeldina

Part One

‘IF IT ISN’T GOOD, LET IT DIE’

1970–1994

1

Childhood