Shelley Moorhead must be incredibly naive, daft or opportunistic.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is "known throughout the world as the Mother of Africa. She's a living legend," Moorhead is quoted as saying in the Source [see the front-page story titled "Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to visit V.I.," posted Jan. 19], adding that "her focus is now on promoting the rights of children and women." This statement cannot possibly be coming from anybody who knows this woman's history.
Allow me to clarify the record on 10 points:
1. Madikizela-Mandela is not known in South Africa as the "Mother of Africa"; she's more like the "Mommy Dearest of Africa." Her bodyguards, self-confessed murderers, called her "Mommy." She also is known by the sobriquet "Mother M&M" (for "Murder and Mayhem").
2. The charges against her at the 1997 Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under the 1995 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, were abduction, kidnapping, torture, murder and the abuse of power.
3. Thirty witnesses against her before the Amnesty Committee accused her of the deaths of 13 people, including a boy and a girl. Their testimony was televised, it was covered by the world press and the proceedings were published for all to read.
If one says, well, the witnesses are convicted criminals, one must wonder why she employed them in the first place, since three had already been charged with putting "flaming necklaces" on their political enemies. When she sought to clear her name of these charges, nobody in South Africa believed her — not Bishop Desmond Tutu, not Soweto, not even the African National Congress party. Only the naif American press!
4. She had already been convicted of kidnapping 14-year-old Stompie Seipei and then trying to destroy the reputation of Paul Verryn, the clergyman who had given the boy sanctuary, by insisting to the press that Verryn had a sexual attraction for boys. Verryn is now the revered Bishop of Johannesburg, so much did the public believe her.
Only months after Nelson Mandela's release in 1990, Winnie Mandela was charged with involvement in the 1988 kidnapping of four youth activists and the murder of a fifth, James "Stompie" Moeketsi Seipei. Her bodyguards, a group of thugs known as the Mandela Football Club, were charged with the actual murder. But, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (organized by her onetime friend Bishop Tutu) would discover in 1997, her "involvement" in kidnapping and murder was ultimately "complicity." Thirty witnesses testified to her murderous intents, one of them claiming that she killed Seipei herself, although her chief bodyguard (her erstwhile lover), Jerry Richardson, chivalrously attempted to take the blame – all the time claiming that she ordered him to do it!
5. She was never charged with Stompie Seipei's murder, which occurred in her home, because her bodyguard and former lover Richardson claimed that he had killed the boy (and dozens of others); however, he testified that she told him to kill Stompie Seipei. Against the testimony of another, he took blame for the murder; why would he lie, otherwise?
In 1991 Winnie Mandela was convicted of kidnapping and of being an accessory to assault relating to Stompie Seipei's death; after appeal, however, her six-year sentence was reduced to two, and thence suspended and reduced to a fine of R15,000, which women all over the world contributed to paying without considering, apparently, the implications of their paying off a fine for a capital offense.
Another witness, Katiza Cebekhulu, claimed (in a book by a London journalist named Bridgton) to have seen Madikizela-Mandela involved in the murder of Stompie Seipei; Cebekhulu was flown in to testify that Mandikizela-Mandela stabbed the boy with garden shears before Richardson took him off to be tortured to death.
The gay community, constitutionalized in South Africa, filed a long series of charges against her on this matter, terming the basis of her defense and justification for the events of 1989 "logically flawed and untenable. In blunt terms she asserts that ‘black children' needed to be ‘rescued' only to be subjected to torture and assaults at her home. This is an outrageous abuse of trust."
6. Her motive in killing Stompie Seipei or having him killed, as one chooses to believe, was not that he had betrayed paramilitia under her control, as she claimed he had done, but because he was "sleeping" with a white man, the minister who is now the bishop. Her attempts to destroy this man's reputation are untenable: first, because homosexuality was approved by the African National Congress, and second, because her action was despicable, especially in her attempt to regain her own reputation, tarnished by charges of child-abuse.
7. The father of Nikodemus Sono, another boy, testified that she had brought his son to him, accused the youth of treachery, and claimed in the father's face that the ANC would dispose of the matter. The father testified that she had then taken the boy away and that he never saw his son again. By all accounts, she was the last person to see the boy alive. The ANC denied any involvement or knowledge of the matter.
8. According to seven witnesses, Madikizela-Mandela also had a girl named Koekie Zwane killed.
9. Desmond Tutu, once a personal friend, begged her to confess before the Amnesty Committee, and she refused, Tutu writes in his 1998 book, "No Future Without Forgiveness." She blamed her bodyguards for the murders, and her bodyguards blamed her. Whom would one believe? Those who confessed to other murders? Or Mother M&M?
10. "What it aims to do is uplift us," Moorhead says of Madikizela-Mandela's intended visit to the Virgin Islands. I say her intent is to poison us morally!
I realize the temptation to rub elbows with the famous, and I doubt not that if Adolf Hitler were found alive on St. John, I'd try to get his autograph. But a word of advice: Distance yourself from this woman – if the U.S. government is foolish enough to grant her a visa to come here.
Few in this territory will have read the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Amnesty Committee, fewer yet the South African newspapers. But the facts are these: This woman not only lost her seat in South Africa's Parliament as a result of failing to clear her name but has been dumped by the African National Congress as a political pariah.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has utterly failed to clear her name of the charges of murder and mayhem; she was not exonerated by the Amnesty Committee, she was not granted amnesty, and she is not anything like "a leader" of anything in South Africa at this time.
She could not confess her involvement in the murders, as Archibishop Tutu urged her to do, because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was forgiving only political murders. Mommy Dearest's murders were not political but personal.
Those who know all this will respond to her possibly impending visit with indifference, if not distaste.
Editor's note: St. John resident Richard Dey is a retired pathologist active in historical preservation and human rights groups. A reviewer for numerous publications and a contributor in the history of science for several encyclopedias, he has served as a volunteer in special education at the Julius E. Sprauve School.
