Nelson and Winnie Mandela were both Communist terrorists. But while Nelson Mandela could play the political prisoner and the saintly martyr, his ex-wife couldn't be anything more than a sociopath. The media obituaries evade all the uncomfortable and unpleasant facts of her life. The word, "courage" is often used. It has the same relevance to her that it does to Goebbels or Beria.
Winnie Mandela was a monster. If there were any justice, she would have died behind bars.
Here's a reminder of what the media obituaries now won't mention.
Winnie Mandela's Ex-Bodyguard Tells of Killings She Ordered - New York Times
But when Jerry Richardson, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's chief bodyguard in the late 1980's and one of her closest confidants, finally began talking today, his story was chilling.
''My hands are full of blood today because I would be instructed to kill and I would do like I was told,'' he told South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Mr. Richardson, 48, who is serving a life sentence for the killing of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, described beating, torturing and killing people whenever ''mommy'' (his name for Mrs. Mandela) asked him to do so. He was officially the coach of a soccer team she sponsored, the Mandela United Football Club. But the team rarely played, he said.
Mr. Richardson told of using garden shears to kill Stompie Seipei in 1989 after beating him for days. He said Mrs. Mandela participated in the beatings, using her hands, fists and a whip. But she never did any of the killing, he said.
He said he had participated in four killings she ordered, saying that when he returned from one such killing, she embraced him and said ''My boy, my boy.''
This is the monster whose death the media treats as an occasion for mourning.
"I slaughtered him (Seipei) like a goat," Richardson said, as Seipei's mother, Joyce, left the hearing hall in tears.
He said he and another football club member, "Slash", went to look for a place where they could kill Seipei. They decided on a rocky patch of ground near a railway line in Noordgesig, Soweto.
He said Madikizela-Mandela had participated in the beating, punching the youths with her fist. The youths were later sjambokked and lifted into the air and dropped onto the concrete floor.
A few days later, Richardson and "Slash" took Seipei to the site in Noordgesig they had chosen. Richardson said he had to help Seipei walk because "he was very sick and very weak".
When they reached the site, Richardson said he made Seipei lie on his back and separated a pair of garden shears.
He said he stabbed Seipei in the neck. "I put the shears through Stompie's neck. They went to the back... It was a stabbing motion, not a cutting motion," Richardson said when asked precisely how he had killed Seipei. He pointed to behind his right ear as he spoke.
Here are your anti-Apartheid saints in all their psychotic glory. Be proud of them. Very proud.
A witness in the assault and kidnap trial of Winnie Mandela testified Thursday she beat him with a rubber whip and sang as he screamed in pain.
'She was singing when she started the assault on us,' Barend Thabiso Mono told the Rand Supreme Court, reflecting earlier testimony from another of the four alleged victims, all black males.
Saying he had been lying on the floor 'screaming,' Mono, 21, said he heard the wife of black leader Nelson Mandela 'singing while she was hitting me with a sjambok (rubber whip).'
Referring to Mrs. Mandela, 56, as 'mommy,' Mono said she had beaten him and the three others through the night of Dec. 29, 1988, the day he has testified that she ordered their abduction from a Methodist Church hostel in the black township of Soweto.
Under cross-examination by George Bizos in the trial's 13th day, Mono denied that his evidence on Mrs. Mandela singing differed substantially from that of Kenneth Kgase, 31, who last week gave an account of his treatment by Mrs. Mandela.
Kgase had said she was 'humming a tune and dancing to the rhythm' between beatings.
'These things happened,' Mono said, after Bizos told him Mrs. Mandela would claim she had not been at her Soweto home the night the four were allegedly beaten there.
She quickly retained as chief counsel Bizos, who defended her husband in 1963 during the trial in which he was convicted on charges of plotting to overthrow the government.
Of course she did.
A former friend and now confessed enemy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Wednesday that the ANC Women's League president instructed her to sing loudly while four teenage activists were assaulted at her home in Orlando West, Soweto.
Xoliswa Falati said: "Madikizela-Mandela told me to sing loudly to drown the voices of those being brutally assaulted."
The motive for the brutal murder of a 14-year-old boy provides some valuable insight into Winnie Mandela and the ANC.
I was stunned. I was aware of Stompie — sometimes known as Stompie Seipei. He was a legendary child, even at 14, the leader of a group of black youths in the Orange Free State who regularly clashed with apartheid’s cops. Gabriel insisted Stompie and I had met — that he was part of a group of youths I had once ferried to a trial in Pretoria. There had been no reports of Stompie’s murder; no reports he was even missing.
Then Gabriel laid out his incredible story. He, Stompie and two other youths had been kidnapped by Winnie Mandela’s thugs from a church rectory in Alexandra township, and brought to her house in Diepkloof, Soweto.
There, he said, they were brought into a garage — still unaware of where they were — when a door opened and “Mrs. Mandela” appeared. They were floored.
Gabriel said “Mrs. Mandela” then launched into a verbal attack on them. She was enraged that the youths had been staying at the rectory of a progressive, anti-apartheid pastor in Alexandra township by the name of Paul Verryn, accusing them of homosexual activity. Stompie denied it — and the beating began.
It was vicious. The thugs used fists, feet, shoes, whips, Coke bottles, whatever was handy, Gabriel said.
But Gabriel was clear: it was “Mrs. Mandela” who started it.
Stompie was later taken away. But Gabriel and the two others were kept against their will for nearly three weeks, he said.
I asked how he could be sure Stompie was dead.
“How do I know?” said Gabriel. “Because when I last saw him his head was soft.”
He placed two fingers on the soft part of his upturned forearm and pushed it.
“Just like this,” he said.
I remember first hearing rumours of her recklessness shortly after landing in the country, and asking a fellow correspondent who knew the terrain well whether they were true.
“You can’t go there,” he said. The world would never believe it, he stressed. And whoever dared to tell it would be pilloried.
At the gravesite in Soweto on Tuesday, family members sang hymns as the bodies were exhumed — while officials with the African National Congress tried to prevent journalists from speaking with the surviving families.
As South Africa approaches the Malema era, it's important to go on telling the truths about the monsters who made all this happen.