When reading stuff about Nelson Mandela I keep in the back of my mind his views as expressed in: How to Be a Good Communist, by Nelson Mandela (PDF) and authoritarian communism's number one priority: maximum secrecy (How to Master Secret Work, by ANC & SACP (PDF)).
Authoritarian communists practice secrecy, to hide their true agenda's and motives, corruption and illegal acts, and mostly their violence, so as to put forth a fake untrue image of themselves and their organisation, as 'democratic'.
 John Maher of Delancey Street: A Guide to Peaceful Revolution in America, by Grover Sales [*Amazon*] |
Democratic communists (i.e. they only accept people who want to join their commune, after having been fully-informed, not lied to behind secrets and fake agenda's. You join voluntary and you can leave anytime.) include John Maher, the founder of Delancy Street Foundation; whose work and practice is totally different than that of the ANC.
Mahatma Gandhi's struggle also favoured transparency and honesty, to keep his movement accountable.
Nelson Mandela was also the founder of Umkomthe We Sizwe, whose military intelligence (security department) was Umbokodo.
This is a poem that former ANC member, Sam Mngqibisa wrote about his education as an Imbokodo officer, as quoted in Women in the ANC and SWAPO: Sexual Abuse of Young Women in the ANC Camps, by Olefile Samuel Mngqibisa (Elty Mhlekazi) (PDF). [This document is included, among many others, as an evidentiary document in Radical Honesty SA Amicus Curiae to Concourt in Citizen v. McBride (PDF), the contents of which are being massively censored by the SA media.]
Give a young boy — 16 years old — from the ghetto of Soweto, an
opportunity to drive a car for the first time in his life.
This boy is from a poor working class family.
Give him money to buy any type of liquor and good, expensive clothes.
This boy left South Africa during the Soweto schools uprising in 1976.
He doesn't know what is an employer.
He never tasted employer-exploitation.
Give him the right to sleep with all these women.
Give him the opportunity to study in Party Schools and well-off
military academies in Eastern Europe.
Teach him Marxism-Leninism and tell him to defend the revolution
against counter-revolutionaries.
Send him to the Stasi to train him to extract information by force from
enemy agents. He turns to be a torturer and executioner by firing
squad.
All these are the luxuries and the dream-come-true he never thought
of for his lifetime...
This Security becomes the law unto itself.
I ask myself, how would South Africa have been different, if the founders of the ANC had decided to practice transparency and honour and integrity, and to hold themselves and their culture accountable for how they treat their children, how they breed children for economic, sexual slavery and cannon fodder purposes. What if Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela had chosen to start a campaign to encourage blacks to adopt a cultural trait of personal responsibility and concern for their children, whereby they refrained from procreation until they could provide for a stable and loving environment for their offspring in a small committed family environment.
What kind of 'father' refuses to reply to the letters of his illegitimate daughter for 12 years? What kind of organisation and friends stand around such a man and don't accuse him of being a scumbag for his behaviour towards his children?
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Secret affairs of Madiba surface
June 13 2010 at 09:55AM
Sunday Tribune
 Nelson Mandela and Evelyn Ntoko Mase at the wedding of Walter and Albertina Sisulu in 1944. Evelyn was a cousin of Sisulu and divorced Mandela after she demanded he choose between her and the family (four children, one died in infancy) and the ANC. [Photo: Nelson Mandela.org] |
Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was first published in 1994, the year he became president of South Africa, but it owes its origins to events on Robben Island, his prison 20 years earlier. Some of his fellow ANC inmates cooperated with him in secretly writing a memoir that was smuggled out of the jail.
Mandela would write during the night and pass the finished pages to another prisoner, Mac Maharaj.
The book was never published, although Mandela used an incomplete version as the basis for his autobiography.
When I asked Maharaj two years ago whether readers would have learnt much about the real Mandela from it, he said, no, that was part of the problem: Mandela's reluctance to give of himself.
Maharaj used to joke with Mandela about that on Robben Island: "This thing is shaping up to be a f****** political instrument."
Mandela: "What do you want?"
Maharaj: "This is not a biography - the man, the person has got to come out."
Mandela: "What do you mean?"
Maharaj: "Well, your first wife, what kind of person was she, what did you do after your first marriage broke up, before it broke up?"
Mandela: "I don't discuss that with young boys like you." (Maharaj was about 40, Mandela 60.)
Maharaj persuaded Walter Sisulu, Mandela's friend and mentor, also a prisoner, to speak to him.
A few nights later Mandela wrote a note to Maharaj that said: "In that section where I write about the break-up of my marriage, insert the following sentence: 'And then I led a thoroughly immoral life.' "
 Nelson Mandela poses for an Eli Weinburg photograph with Batshaka Cele, a relative of second wife Winnie Madikizela Mandela |
Maharaj went back to him: "I want to know who you led this immoral life with."
"No," said Mandela, "I won't talk about that."
The reader will search high and low in Long Walk to Freedom for any reference to Mandela's immorality. History had been revised.
By the time it was published he was on his way to becoming South Africa's first democratically elected leader and was already widely regarded as the world's elder statesman - perhaps our greatest living beacon of moral authority. An admission of immorality might have detracted from his heroic reputation - especially when the "immorality" began during his first marriage and not after it ended.
Mandela's first wife was a nurse called Evelyn Mase. They met in 1944 when he was working part-time in Johannesburg as a legal clerk and studying to be an advocate.
"I think I loved him the first time I saw him," she told Fatima Meer, a friend who wrote his first biography.
"Within days of our first meeting we were going steady and within months he proposed."
 Ruth Mompati: Born: 14 September 1925, Vryburg, North-West Province (then Western Transvaal), South Africa |
They were radiant, she said, on the day of their wedding in Johannesburg in 1944; Mandela was 26 and Evelyn 23. Their first child, a boy, Thembekile, was born in 1946 and about a year later they moved into a small house, 8115 Orlando West, in what is now Soweto.
It was, Mandela said in his memoirs, "the opposite of grand but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily proud".
Last March the Soweto Heritage Trust opened the house as a museum. Its curators interviewed Winnie Mandela, Mandela's second wife, who insisted she had been the first and only Mrs Mandela to live there. Zindzi, one of their daughters, revealed not long afterwards that she had only just discovered it was not true.
The incident was not only indicative of a tendency to rewrite history but also a pointer to some of the ill feeling that has arisen between the offspring of Mandela's first family and his second. These are sensitive, delicate, personal issues, not only involving Mandela but others, too.
They speak of hidden tragedy and blighted lives and I can write about them only because people have been open with me, wanting to see the truth aired at last.
I was encouraged by those around Mandela to write about him as a human being.
Don't write about the icon, came the plea; he knows he is not a saint, he has flaws and weaknesses just like everyone else.
So who is Nelson Mandela, the human being?
 Ruth Mompati, Mayor of Vryburg |
In 1953 Mandela and another young African attorney, Oliver Tambo, set up the first black law partnership in South Africa. Ruth Mompati - who later played a part in the break-up of Mandela's first marriage - was a key figure in the firm.
An ANC activist and former teacher who had abandoned the profession because the new apartheid regime considered "natives" did not merit a proper education, she had retrained as a shorthand typist.
When I met her in 2008 she had just turned 83 but was still "dignified and reserved" as others remembered her.
After she started working for Mandela & Tambo, her husband moved to Durban to work, coming home now and again. This has led to some speculation.
"Mandela was my boss, my leader, my friend," Ruth said, adding, perhaps just a little disingenuously: "I never know what people want me to say."
A journalist had asked her once if they'd had a relationship.
"He said that Nelson Mandela was a ladies' man and he wanted me to say I was one of the ladies." Ruth thought the journalist was rude and took exception to his questions.
I interviewed her in her home town, Vryburg, where she was then mayor. She was still not very open to discussing personal matters, but I persevered.
She wagged a finger at my tape recorder and asked me to turn it off. Though she denied it, people close to Mandela are confident in asserting that she had a child by him.
The intention here is not to cast her as some kind of scarlet woman. She fought long and loyally for the ANC and made great personal sacrifices, leaving her family and children to go underground and be among the first women to receive military training for its armed wing. She did not see her two sons again for eight years. Later, both died in terrible circumstances.
 Circa 1980s: From left; Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph and Amina Cachalia, taken at a Women’s Day celebration in Johannesburg. [SA History] |
Once the difficult subject was raised and the tape recorder was off, she said she knew people would say she had had a son by Mandela, but it was simply not true.
However, she did not, in so many words, deny the affair.
Besides Mompati, there were other women, too, some with names that do not appear elsewhere.
One of Mandela's oldest friends, Amina Cachalia, describes Mandela as tight-lipped about these matters even now: "When I asked him about Ruth, he said, 'Don't talk nonsense'."
Despite his denials, Amina has no doubt that he had quite a few girlfriends. He liked women, she said, especially the good-looking ones.
Dolly Rathebe - a bikini-clad cover girl for Drum magazine - had an affair with Mandela but, again, it was not talked about.
A singer and actress, Dolly was a contemporary of Miriam Makeba and her band, the Skylarks.
  Dolly Rathebe |
When I asked the former Skylark, Abigail Kubeka, in 2008 about Dolly and Mandela, she leant out of her chair, pretended to lift up the edge of the carpet and sweep that story underneath it, putting her finger to her lips and saying, "Sssh".
It appears that Dolly was among those who carried a torch for him through the prison years and had hopes that he might come to her after his release in 1990.
Evelyn rarely spoke ill of Mandela and always affirmed her continuing love for him.
So perhaps she, too, was hopeful.
Dolly, Amina, Evelyn and who knows who else?
Without naming names, Evelyn gave her account of the break-up of their marriage to Fatima Meer and Fred Bridgland, a reporter who found her fuming gently at the manner in which her ex-husband's release in 1990 was being compared to the second coming of Christ.
"It's very silly when people say this kind of thing about Nelson," she said. "How can a man who has committed adultery and left his wife and children be Christ? The world worships Nelson too much. He is only a man."
David James Smith 2010. Extracted from Young Mandela by David James Smith published by Weidenfeld at R195. Available from bookshops nationwide this week.
This article was originally published on page 21 of The Sunday Tribune on June 13, 2010
» » » » [IOL: Sunday Tribune (PDF)]
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'Nelson Mandela had illegitimate daughter', it is claimed
Nelson Mandela, the Former South African president, may have fathered an illegitimate daughter following a brief affair with a woman he met in Cape Town, in 1945, his foundation has admitted.
Aislinn Laing in Johannesburg, Telegraph.UK
Published: 9:22PM BST 06 Aug 2010
 Nelson Mandela and Mpho Pule |
Nelson Mandela and Mpho Pule Mpho Pule spent almost 12 years battling to see the man she believed was her father but died just a month before his office wrote to say that they were close to confirming her claim.
Now her children are continuing her fight to be recognised as the seventh child fathered by the former apartheid-era freedom fighter.
Verne Harris, a spokesman for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said yesterday that Mrs Pule's claim matched the documentary record of his life, but stressed that only a DNA test would provide absolute confirmation.
"This is the point at which we hand the matter over to the family," he said.
While the allegation that the former South African president, now 92, was unfaithful while married is not new, no claim of paternity is ever known to have been confirmed.
Mrs Pule, a former bakery worker and mother of six from a township near the Free State city of Bloemfontein, is said to have found out who her father was from her grandmother in 1998.
She told her that Nelson Mandela had conducted a brief affair with her mother Seipati Jane Monakali in Cape Town in 1945 by which time he had been married to his first wife, Evelyn, for a year and already had a son. Mrs Monakali died in 1992 without revealing her secret.
Mrs Pule is reported to have repeatedly contacted the foundation in the hope of meeting her father.
Her calls and letters went unanswered until last October, when the foundation wrote to say it had "verified" the information she had sent them and asking her to contact them. Unfortunately, Mrs Pule had died of a stroke a month earlier.
Her family are now waiting to hear from Mr Mandela's daughter Zindzi, who is said to be handling the claim. No one from Mr Mandela's family could be reached for comment yesterday.
» » » » [Telegraph.UK]
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'I am Madiba's lost daughter'
Jackie Mapiloko, Amabhungane
Aug 06 2010
Mpho Pule was a grandmother in her fifties when she was told that Nelson Mandela was her father. She spent the next 12 years trying to meet him.Dear Tata, Please kindly be advised that this is not an easy letter for me to write. However, pardon my request as it touches on a very long-outstanding sensitive and confidential matter. My request therefore it is to kindly request you to let me meet you, as I believe you are my father and I am your daughter.
These were the last words written by 63-year-old Mpho Pule in August 2009 in an emotional letter to Nelson Mandela, a man she believed was her father. In September, a month after she wrote the letter, Pule died from a stroke in her home in Bloemfontein.
A former bakery worker, who was a mother to six children and grandmother to 12, Pule never got to read the letter from the Nelson Mandela Foundation sent in October 2009 saying that "all the information provided by you has been verified".
Pule, who bore a striking resemblance to the former president, began trying to meet Mandela in 1998 after being told of her father's identity by her grandmother. Her own mother, Seipati Monakali, had died with the secret years earlier.
Pule made many phone calls to the foundation over the years -- in vain. Finally she enlisted the help of a family friend, Martin McKenzie, a primary school teacher from her community of Bochabela in Bloemfontein, to act as an intermediary. McKenzie has sent 13 letters since 2005, which the foundation and Mandela family initially received with suspicion -- they believed he was interfering in a sensitive family matter that should be dealt with by the two families involved.
At the end of each letter from the foundation, McKenzie was reminded not to contact the media.
But after Pule's death and a meeting with her children, who felt they owed it to their mother to try to meet Mandela, McKenzie decided to go public. Last week he told the Mail & Guardian that he never doubted the sensitivity of this matter, which is why he followed every instruction from the foundation, the Mandela family and Pule's family to keep her secret under wraps.
His biggest fear, he said, along with that of the Pule family, was how the news would affect the ageing former statesman. Before handing me the documents that would show the trail of letters that flowed for years, McKenzie hesitated a moment. He sat me down in his mother's small kitchen in Soweto, placed his hands on my head and said a prayer.
"Heavenly Father, I'm putting all my trust in this young woman and I pray that you give her the strength to tell this story the way Mme Mpho would have wanted it to be told. Amen."
Seeking Mandela
It was in 1998 that Pule learned the identity of her father from her now 85-year-old grandmother, Winfred Monakali, a former law firm secretary, who lives in Bloemfontein. The letters in possession of the M&G tell the story of Pule's mother, Seipati Monakali, who met Mandela in Cape Town in 1945, where they had a brief affair.
Three months after Pule's birth, Monakali moved to Bloemfontein, where she married David Itholeng and had three more children. She died in 1992 without telling Pule about her father.
After her initial approach to the foundation failed in 1998 Pule visited the local municipal offices to get a schedule of events Mandela would be attending in Bloemfontein. She planned to introduce herself and make arrangements for a meeting.
During one of his visits to a Medi-Clinic in Bloemfontein, Pule scrambled through his security and past the throngs of reporters and photographers to get a glimpse of him.
A picture obtained by the M&G shows a disappointed Pule being blocked by one of Mandela's security personnel as he gets into a car. She asked for a copy of the picture from one of the media photographers.
McKenzie continued to write to the foundation on Pule's behalf. He said he eventually received a call from Verne Harris, the project manager for the Centre of Memory at the foundation, in August last year telling him that an investigation had been instituted and that they needed Pule to write them a letter giving a brief account of her background.
Pule then told her story in her own words, sending off her letter in August last year.
After that, McKenzie said Harris told him telephonically that the Mandela family had been informed about the matter. But it was too late for Pule -- a written response from the foundation arrived a month after her death. In the letter, dated October 6 2009, Sello Hatang, communications manager at the foundation, confirmed that an internal investigation had authenticated the documentary record supplied by Pule and confirmed that it matched the biographical and historical record of Mandela's life.
Hatang wrote: "We have regarded the matter as one of great importance, and consequently appointed a senior staff member [Mr Harris] to deal with it. He has kept in touch with you throughout, has ensured that all the information provided by you has been verified and has liaised closely with Mr Mandela's family."
In her own words
In Pule's four-page letter she describes growing up without knowing who her father was.
"In all my born days, I have never known as to who is my father as my mother, Seipati Jane Monakali, never wanted to share this information with me. As I believe that she was trying to protect me.
"As a matter of fact, my other grandmother namely Miss Winfred Nosipho Monakali, has always known about who is my father. Where upon in 1998 after I have personally confronted her as to who is my father. In response, quite verbatimly, she said to me ‘your father is Nelson Mandela'."
She gives a detailed background about her childhood and the stories she was told about her father.
"I remember that when I was still young you used to write my grandmother some letters, notifying us as to when will you pay us a visit. And you also used to send some money through one of the old founder members of the ANC.
"All this time when these things were happening, I was told that it was my father who was doing all these things. But all along I was not aware at all that it was you."
In conclusion she wrote: "I tried in vain to request a meeting with you by writing letters to your offices. For some reason, as it appears these letters have never reached you. All this considered, it is almost 12 years since I have been waiting with the hope that one day, as they say once in a blue moon, I will have a lifetime opportunity of meeting my honorable father, in our lifetime."
A humble request
When McKenzie told the foundation about Pule's death and requested a meeting with Mandela and his grandchildren, Hatang referred him to the Mandela family instead.
"I hereby request that one of the senior uncles in the family, as is tradition, contact Ms Zindzi Mandela in order to secure a meeting and find finality to this matter," wrote Hatang.
In a letter dated December 30 2009 to Zindzi, McKenzie pleaded: "We kindly wish to submit a humble request for a meeting between the two families.
"We trust that you are somehow informed about the nature of this matter, as the verification process of the submitted information is successfully completed by the foundation."
Three months later Zindzi responded, confirming that she had been told about the outcome of the investigation.
"As Mr Sello Hatang of the NM Foundation has previously advised you, it is our custom that the affected families communicate directly and not through an intermediary.
"Would you therefore kindly ask the relevant members of the Pule family to contact us? We will no longer be dealing with this matter through you.
"We trust that you shall not forward this email or any further communication to the media," she wrote.
This was the last communication from the Mandela family and two letters since, written by Pule's eldest daughter Goitshasiwang Segopa to Zindzi in April this year, have gone unanswered.
The response
Verne Harris of the Nelson Mandela Foundation told the M&G that the foundation handles an enormous volume of letters on behalf of the family, including occasional claims of paternity.
In almost all instances, he explained, these claims are without merit. "It's our job to protect the family by filtering these claims and ensuring that only those which reach a certain standard of plausibility are taken further."
This process, Harris said, involves a basic test of whether the claim matches the historical record -- "for example, was Madiba in prison at the time the child was allegedly conceived ... that is the first hoop they have to get through". The second, he said, is verification of the documentary record. "In this case, unlike nine times out of 10, both hoops were cleared, and this is the point at which we hand the matter over to the family." Harris said that this did not constitute absolute proof that Pule was Mandela’s daughter in the way that a DNA test would.
He confirmed that the information was passed on to Zindzi Mandela and that she had started the process of getting in touch with the Pule family.
Attempts to contact Zindzi directly were unsuccessful. However, she told the M&G through the foundation's communication manager, Sello Hatang, that the family was still mourning the death of Zenani Mandela and that she would assign an elder from the family to respond, but could not say when that might happen. No statement had been received by the M&G's print deadline. Other family members referred us to Zindzi and further attempts to contact her before going to print were also unsuccessful.
» » » » [Amabhungane]
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'I'm Madiba's love child'
Solly Maphumulo, IOL
August 13 2010 at 06:42AM
A second woman who claims to be Nelson Mandela's love child has come forward.
Onicca Nyembezi Mothoa, 63, of Soshanguve north of Pretoria says all her attempts to meet the man she believes is her father have been in vain.
In an exclusive interview on Thursday, Mothoa, too, claimed she was the iconic leader's child.
Last week, it was reported that Mpho Pule, born in 1945, had spent almost 12 years battling to see the man she believed was her father. She reportedly died last year, a month before Mandela's office wrote to say that they were close to confirming her claim.
As in Pule's case, the physical resemblance between Mandela and Mothoa is remarkable.
Mothoa was born in Atteridgeville in 1947 to Sophie Majeni, at a time that Mandela's political activism was peaking.
She says Madiba and Majeni met while her mother was working as a domestic worker in Pretoria.
But she says her struggle to meet the man she believes is her father has been a bitter one.
Mothoa made two trips to Qunu last year. She went back last April during Madiba's grandson Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela's traditional wedding to French-speaking teenager Anais Grimaud. The wedding was at the Mvezo Great Place in Mthatha.
Mothoa is now saving money for a second trip later this year.
"Tata is my father, I know he will remember me. Last year, when I went to Qunu, he remembered my mother's name. The bodyguard told me he said it's Sophie, the beautiful 'bush lady'. The bodyguards still refused to let me in."
An induna (village headman), Mbamatshe Majola, confirmed Mothoa had been to Qunu several times. "She told me she is Mandela's daughter, I believed her," he said. "The minute I laid eyes on her, I knew she is a Mandela. It was like I am looking at Tat'omkhulu (Mandela)."
Majola said he had offered Mothoa accommodation and introduced her to Napilisi Mandela, the president's younger half-brother.
Meanwhile, Majeni and Mandela's secret liaison encountered problems immediately Mothoa came into the picture. When Majeni's parents realised their daughter had a child by the firebrand politician, they forced her to go into hiding.
This week, Mothoa's uncle, Zondo Mahlangu, was uncomfortable at first about speaking.
"This is a very difficult thing to talk about. That's why it was a secret for so many years. We knew Mandela was her father," he said.
Her family was paralysed by fear at the thought of being associated with Mandela, who had become a thorn in the side of the white-led regime. In the end, Majeni lost contact with Mandela.
Mothoa said photographs of Mandela her aunt had kept for decades were destroyed in 1976.
"Mandela was at the time like a curse word to all boers.
I did not know anything or have a clue then," she said.
When she turned to her mother for answers to problems she encountered at every stage of her life, Majeni would plead ignorance and tell her daughter just to get on with things.
The hardship continued later when she arrived in Pretoria in search of work.
"I used to cry because I did not know why people hated me so much," she remembers.
"Everywhere I went I was maltreated and fired. I had a stigma. Even black people did not want to be associated with me."
In 1968, when she turned 21, there was a hint of why she had become an outcast. "A white man pointed a finger at me and said, 'This is Mandela's child'.
"It was the first time I had heard (this)."
Shortly after that, her stepfather, Levy Mothoa, who had raised her as his own, explained to her that she was Madiba's daughter.
Her mother still refused to talk about it.
Mothoa says when she was preparing for exams, people always thought she was studying political tracts.
Eventually, she moved to Cape Town, but it was as if she had taken Pretoria to Cape Town with her.
"I was ill treated by all my employers... They provoked me all the time. They knew I was stubborn and they wanted me to get into a fight so I could get arrested."
Her mother died in 2003 still refusing to discuss her paternity with her.
"She was very secretive. She refused to discuss it with me.
"But I heard she was hurt when they had to part ways in order to protect me and her."
Since her mother's death, Mothoa has gone to the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Mandela's Houghton home in search of answers and to meet and, perhaps, speak to Madiba.
At the Nelson Mandela Foundation, she couldn't get beyond the security gates, she says.
A woman came and spoke to her. "She would not let me see him. She said I should leave the old man alone, he needed to rest."
Despite all this, she won't give up. "I won't give up till he dies. I have never given up," she said.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation has been sent emails and SMSes since Wednesday. Spokesman Sello Hatang said on Thursday he needed an extra day to respond.
This article was originally published on page 1 of Pretoria News on August 13, 2010
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