Her parents were the 'royal family' of the ANC; her father imprisoned, her mother hounded. Zindzi lived with Winnie through the scandal of the 'football club' years and her subsequent trial. Already with four children, she finally married last year, after her parents' separation
Sunday, 3 January 1993
PICTURE the scene. A ballroom in a big city luxury hotel. A wedding  reception. A band in tuxedos playing Fifties jazz. Floating in a sea of  satin, 800 glittering guests. The bride, mermaid-like in a lace, pearl  and sequin dress designed by the family couturier. 
The bridegroom, a  fairy-tale prince in black and white suit, silver bow-tie and  gold-buckled lizard-skin shoes. 
The bride's mother, a cloaked Cleopatra  draped in gold and emerald-green silk. 
The bride's father, all  restrained opulence, grey, venerable, stately.
But there are turbulent undercurrents. The mother  has a young lover. He is not among the guests but his ex-lover, the  mother of his child, is.  Inexplicably, so is one of the mother's old  lovers, from 10 years ago. Still more inexplicably, the two ex-lovers,  man and woman, are sitting side by side. The bride's mother sweeps past.  Sees them. Stops. She fixes her gaze on the man who scorned her.  Tossing her head in the direction of his companion, she hisses: 'Go on]  Take her] Take her]'
It could be the script for a Joan Collins soap. But  it isn't. This is real-life drama. 
Some locals call it 'Revolutionary  Dallas'. 
The hotel is the Carlton, Johannesburg's finest. 
The band is  the African Jazz Pioneers. 
The actors: the hierarchy and friends of one  of the world's oldest liberation movements, the African National  Congress. 
The bride: Zindzi Mandela, Nelson's and Winnie's second-born. 
The bridegroom: Zwelibansi Hlongwane, a shop-owner several years  Zindzi's junior. 
The mother's absent lover is Dali Mpofo, a lawyer half  Winnie's age,
while Dali's ex, whom Winnie calls 'the white hag', is  Terry Oakley-Smith, a university lecturer. 
The lover from the early  Eighties is Matthews 'MK' Malefane, once an ANC guerrilla, now a  television producer.
Only a handful of people  witnessed the hissing episode. Otherwise, Winnie played her regal role  to perfection (though one detractor described her as 'the Empress of  Hell'). 
But she did not have a happy wedding. Grim-faced for most of the  night, Nelson treated her as if she didn't exist, not addressing a word  to her. When it came to his speech, he spanned the family history, but  made no mention of his wife, from whom he separated six months earlier.   At the cake-cutting ceremony Nelson and Winnie stood properly on hand,  then, as the band struck up a waltz and the young couple danced, the  guests waited for Zindzi's mother and father to follow suit before  taking to the floor themselves. But Nelson turned his back on Winnie and  returned stiffly to the top table.
It was not  always thus. During Winnie's trial, in May 1991, when she was convicted  on kidnapping and assault charges and sentenced to six years pending an  appeal, he stood by her, the devoted husband, and refused to accept her  guilt. He also refused to admit what everybody else was aware of - her  brazen affair with Dali Mpofo. But about 12 months ago, something  happened that changed everything.
According to  somebody who has been close to Zindzi for years, one night towards the  end of 1991, in the Soweto mansion known alternately as 'Winnie's Folly'  and 'the Parliament', Nelson and Winnie had a furious row.  Rumours  spread like wildfire in ANC circles that Nelson had found Winnie and  Dali in bed together - which, if true, would only have confirmed any  suspicions he may have tried to suppress; suspicions founded on the  whispering of his peers, on the luxury trips - Concorde flights and  limousines - the pair had taken to New York and Los Angeles a few months  earlier, and on Winnie's extraordinary decision to persuade Dali to  abandon the law for a job as her deputy in the ANC's social welfare  department.
Whatever did happen that night, it  is undoubtedly true that in the last months of 1991 and the early part  of 1992, Nelson spent less and less time at home. The following March,  the story was partly corroborated by Winnie herself, in a letter she  wrote to Dali Mpofo, which was later leaked to the Sunday press. Among  melodramatic recriminations - 'Before I am through with you you are  going to learn a bit of honesty and sincerity and know what betrayal of  one's love means to a woman'; 'Remember always how much you have hurt  and humiliated me . . . ' - Winnie mentioned that she had not been  speaking to Nelson for five months, the period which would have elapsed  between the alleged row and the date of the letter. 'I keep telling you,  the situation is deteriorating at home,' she wrote. One month later,  their separation was announced.
Today, Winnie  still lives at the mansion in disgrace, shorn of all her official ANC  titles. Nelson lives with his servants and bodyguards in an exclusive  Johannesburg suburb.
That night Zindzi's life  changed, too. She fled from her mother's house to the home of her lover,  now husband, Zweli. She also - to the amazement of those who knew her -  sought refuge in God. She joined the fundamentalist church, to which  the zealously apolitical Zweli belongs, and has since been the image of a  devout, Bible-reading Christian.
THE  CIRCUMSTANCES of Zindziswa Mandela's birth in December 1960 offered no  indication of the pomp that would one day attend her wedding. She was  born in the 'non-European' section of a Johannesburg hospital. At the  time, her father was 600 miles away in the Transkei, where one of his  two sons by his first marriage, Makghato, had been taken ill. Hearing of  the birth, he dashed back and, furious at the poor attention mother and  newborn child were receiving, gathered them up and took them to the  small red-brick family home in Soweto. Here 'their spell of normal  family life', as Mandela's biographer Mary Benson described it, 'was all  too brief'.
Zindzi did not have, and has never  had, any experience of normal family life. Her father went underground  when she was four months old, set up the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we  Sizwe ('Spear of the Nation') when she was one, and spent another eight  months evading the police - they called him 'the Black Pimpernel' -  before his arrest on 5 August 1962. On 7 November he was sentenced to  five years in prison for leaving the country without valid papers and  for 'incitement to strike'.
A year later he was  tried again, together with his oldest comrade-in-arms, Walter Sisulu,  and five other members of the ANC's military wing. By the end of the  trial, in June 1964, Mandela was revealed as the ANC's top military  commander and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Zindzi,  then four, and her elder sister Zeni, five, accompanied their mother to  the Pretoria Supreme Court on the day that sentence was passed, but  neither was allowed inside the building. The most Zindzi would have seen  of her father was a black fist defiantly stuck out of the window of a  police van. The next time she saw him she was a teenager, on a visit  with her mother and sister to Robben Island, South Africa's Alcatraz.  They spoke for half an hour, divided by a thick glass partition.
'He  managed to take my mind away from the environment,' Zindzi told a  reporter later, 'and made me think of more comfortable circumstances. He  said: 'You know, I can imagine you sitting on my lap at home and having  a Sunday roast with the family.' '
Things back  home were hardly Sunday-roastish. Throughout the Sixties Winnie endured  constant police harassment and intermittent arrest. In May 1969 the  security police burst into the family home at 2am and arrested her. As  she was dragged off, the children clung to her skirt, begging the police  to leave their mother alone. Winnie remained in jail, mostly in  solitary confinement, for the next 16 months.
School  offered the sisters no respite or consolation. As small children they  were expelled from school after school, simply for being who they were.  The police would interrogate family friends who took them to school in  the morning and, at one point, the security police detained one of the  headmasters. It was decided to pack them off to a convent school, Our  Lady of Sorrows, in neighbouring Swaziland.
But  they were unhappy there, too, and, after the intervention of their  anxious father, it was Sir Robert Birley, a former headmaster of Eton,  and his wife Lady Birley who arranged for the girls to move to a school  where they were at last able to settle and complete their studies.
Sir Robert Birley
Lady Birley 
Waterford,  also in Swaziland, retains to this day a reputation as an enlightened  private school where black and white children do O-levels and A-levels  and mix without friction. The daughter of Walter Sisulu, Mandela's  prison companion, was head girl there during Zindzi's time. Zindzi  herself was never in the running.
'She was very  beautiful, very sure of herself, but very sharp,' a school contemporary  recalls. 'Already when she was 13 the boys were dead keen on her. Unlike  Lindiwe Sisulu, neither of the Mandela girls took any interest in  politics. They were the fashion queens - they dressed far better than  any of the other girls, even though we all came from well-off  backgrounds. The difference between them was that Zeni was terribly  popular. She was the fat, happy girl, ever approachable. Zindzi was  surly and intense, the beautiful bitch type.
'She  was always surrounded by minions. Minions, but not friends. There were  always people hanging around her. She moved with her royal retinue and  you had the sense that whatever she said, went. There was a turnstile  you had to go through between the section of the school where the  classrooms were and the dormitories. She would stand there threatening  to 'get' people.'
The image Zindzi projected at  Waterford was not the one of her harboured by her imprisoned father. He  saw a girl, as his letters show, whose exposure to wealthy children only  reinforced her sense of poverty and privation. In one letter to a  friend in 1974 he worried about the impossible expectations being  generated in his daughters' minds. 'Judging from the girls' letters,' he  wrote, 'travelling to Europe and America has become quite a craze at  their school.'
In bemoaning his inability to  satisfy his children's wishes, he regretted also what he saw as the  suffering and the heroic destiny his paternity necessarily imposed upon  them. And not entirely without reason.
Winnie  Mandela, in her biography Part of My Soul, bemoaned her inability to be a  parent. 'Many times when the girls came home from school they found the  house locked and had to look in the newspaper to see if I was detained.  The school principal would call them and say: 'Look, don't be disturbed  when you see press reports that your mother is in detention again.' '
Orphans  for all practical purposes, the sisters were looked after at home by a  shifting assortment of guardians, some more loved than others. Zindzi,  in contrast to the more agreeable Zeni, developed at an early age a  precocious compassion for her mother's afflictions.
When  she was 12, Zindzi wrote to the United Nations Special Committee  Against Apartheid urging them to press the South African government to  provide security for her mother. 'The family and Mummy's friends', she  told the UN, 'fear that an atmosphere is being built for something  terrible to happen to Mum. As you know, my mother has been a victim of  several attacks and we believe that these attacks are politically  motivated.'
In 1974 a prominent schoolboy  activist in Soweto died in a parcel-bomb attack and it was feared the  Mandela girls, whose Soweto home had been attacked, would be next on the  list. Zindzi was to recall later in life how she became 'totally  immune' to these threats. 'My mother has made us strong,' she is quoted  as saying in Part of My Soul. 'Once in court, when Mummy was convicted -  I think it was '71 - I started crying and outside court she said: 'You  must never cry, because you are giving them satisfaction if you do so.'  When you live with someone like my mother, you learn to live without  fear.'
The fact was, though, that she did not  live with her mother and, for all the bluster and the bullying bravado  her peers saw at school, there lurked insecurity and an intense sadness.  Her poetry revealed as much.
In 1978 a  collection of her teenage poems was published under the title Black As I  Am. 
The book was dedicated to her parents and the opening poem spoke of  her feelings about her father.
A tree was chopped down
and the fruit was scattered
I cried
because I had lost a family
the trunk, my father
the branches, his support
so much
the fruit, the wife and children
who meant so much to him
tasty
loving as they should be
all on the ground
some out of his reach
in the ground
the roots, happiness
cut off from him.
Zindzi's  literary endeavours pleased her father, but he urged her to polish her  work, not to become complacent. In a remarkable letter, remarkable in  that he revealed an aesthetic dimension to his character never glimpsed  in his political persona, he urged her to refine her raw feelings, spoke  of Homer and, quoting from a book called The Necessity of Art, advised  her that 'the artist is not mauled by the beast, he tames it'. Such  letters must have created a pleasant diversion for Nelson Mandela, an  illusion of make-believe paternal normality which, to this day, he seeks  to keep alive. For he knew that far more dangerous animals preyed on  Zindzi's daily life than the beast of art. In 1977, after she had  written the poem about the trees and branches, the most painful episode  began in the life of mother and daughter.
Early  one May morning, 20 policemen arrived at their house in Soweto and  ordered them to pack their things. Winnie was to be banished to  Brandfort, 300 miles away in the Orange Free State. The police dumped  mother and daughter at a small house in this small, dusty township which  would be their enforced home for the next seven years.
Mary  Benson wrote: 'It was the most alien environment the state could have  chosen: politically and culturally the essence of Afrikanerdom; indeed  it was here that Hendrik Verwoerd (the architect of Apartheid) had spent  formative years as his father hawked Bibles and religious tracts for  the Dutch Reformed Church. The Mandelas spoke neither of the local  languages, Afrikaans and Sotho.' It was here that Winnie and Zindzi  cemented their bond and began their descent into dissolution, expressed  in Zindzi's case by bearing four children from four different fathers,  and in both cases by their involvement with the nefarious Mandela United  Football Club.
Zeni wisely flew the family nest  shortly after their arrival in Brandfort.
To the distress of her father, who wanted her to persist with her studies, she married a Swazi prince in 1978. One of the few lighter moments during this period in Zindzi's life concerned her anxiety, expressed in a letter to her father, that, in keeping with Swazi royal custom, she would have to attend her sister's wedding bare-breasted. He wrote back, urging her not to be embarrassed. 'The beauty of a woman lies as much in her face as in her body. Your breasts should be as hard as apples and as dangerous as cannon balls. You can proudly and honourably display them when occasion demands.'
To the distress of her father, who wanted her to persist with her studies, she married a Swazi prince in 1978. One of the few lighter moments during this period in Zindzi's life concerned her anxiety, expressed in a letter to her father, that, in keeping with Swazi royal custom, she would have to attend her sister's wedding bare-breasted. He wrote back, urging her not to be embarrassed. 'The beauty of a woman lies as much in her face as in her body. Your breasts should be as hard as apples and as dangerous as cannon balls. You can proudly and honourably display them when occasion demands.'
Whatever the rigours of this  particular ordeal, they were as nothing compared to what came next.  Zindzi, now in her late teens, suffered a nervous breakdown and had to  turn to psychiatric help. The conventional wisdom, as recorded in all  the books on the Mandelas, is that the claustrophobia of Brandfort,  added to the relentless snooping by the police, became too much for her.  People who knew her at the time said the crisis came after she got  pregnant and then lost the baby at birth.
Whatever  the truth, her father was never fully informed. He wrote to her early  in 1979 reassuring her that 'moodiness' was a condition that affected  everybody. Somewhere deep inside he may have had a clearer sense of what  was happening. Some of his dreams at the time betrayed the profound  sense of guilt he has since owned up to experiencing over his decision  to sacrifice the interests of his family in the cause of 'the struggle'.  In a letter to Winnie written in June 1980, and recorded in a biography  of Nelson Mandela, Higher than Hope by Fatima Meer, he described two of  his dreams: 'Zindzi was still a baby of about 18 months and I was  stunned when I discovered that she had swallowed a razor blade. It was  such a relief when she spewed it out. I dreamt about you and the girls  on the following day. This time Zindzi asked me to kiss her. When I did  she complained that my kiss lacked warmth.'
Back  in the real world, Zindzi meanwhile sought warmth with a number of  lovers - always, her acquaintances say, men over whom she towered in  terms of education and social position. Oupa Seakamela, who fathered her  first child in 1980, was the Mandelas' Mr Fixit - he repaired the car  and did odd jobs in the house. The baby girl was named Zoleka, which  means tranquillity.  Nelson disapproved, but none the less cherished the  notion that the pair would marry. They did not.
Zindzi,  again to her father's distress, started to spend part of her time in  Soweto, away from her family and the various guardians - a doctor, a  lawyer, always respected members of the community - Winnie had arranged.  Two years later she had her second child, a boy she named Gaddafi, by a  Rastafarian boyfriend called Mbuyiselo. The relationship ended after he  assaulted her - so badly that he left her for dead. The case made the  newspapers. He was charged and convicted but escaped with a small fine.
Before  engaging in the most disastrous of all her relationships, Zindzi had  her crowning moment of glory, the one instance in her life when she  lived up to the Mandela myth and played the liberation princess. The  date was 10 February 1985. Her mother was back in Soweto, but an order  banning her from engaging in political activity remained in place. It  fell to Zindzi to read out a letter from her father to a mass meeting in  a football stadium. It was Mandela's reponse to an offer by President P  W Botha to release him on condition that he renounce violence - and his  first public communique in nearly 23 years.
In  the confident, declamatory tones of a Shakespearian heroine, she  introduced her father's letter. 'My father and his comrades at Pollsmoor  Prison send their greetings to you, the freedom-loving people of this  our tragic land, in the full confidence that you will carry on the  struggle for freedom. My father says . . .' And then she read out the  famous text, fleetingly the incarnation of one of the 20th- century's  greatest men.
'I cherish my own freedom dearly,  but I care even more for your freedom. Too many have died since I went  to prison. Too many have suffered for the love of freedom. I owe it to  their widows, to their orphans, to their mothers and to their fathers  who have grieved and wept for them . . . Only free men can negotiate.  Prisoners cannot enter into contracts . . . I cannot and will not give  any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free.   Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.'
THE  FOLLOWING year, the Mandela United Football Club was formed and Sizwe  Sithole entered Zindzi's life. The football club, which was really  Winnie's private army, saw to it over the following three years that a  good many more black South Africans were added to the list of widows and  orphans. Sithole, one of the club's most notorious enforcers, fathered  Zindzi's third child, Bambatho - today the apple of his grandfather's  eye. On 31 January 1990, Sithole was found hanged in a Johannesburg  police cell.  A judge appointed by President F W de Klerk to conduct an  inquiry ruled that he had committed suicide out of shame at having  confessed to the police everything concerning the role Winnie and Zindzi  played in the football club's affairs.
Ostensibly the club was a philanthropic exercise to get Soweto youths off the street. In reality, it gave Winnie and Zindzi, who were now living back at the old Mandela home, a measure of protection they had not enjoyed before. At this time, around the end of 1986, as Mandela's name became more and more famous and the worldwide clamour grew for his release, the two women increasingly perceived themselves as royalty-in-waiting. 'Winnie's boys' provided them with a court, a retinue - not unlike Zindzi's Waterford 'minions'.
Ostensibly the club was a philanthropic exercise to get Soweto youths off the street. In reality, it gave Winnie and Zindzi, who were now living back at the old Mandela home, a measure of protection they had not enjoyed before. At this time, around the end of 1986, as Mandela's name became more and more famous and the worldwide clamour grew for his release, the two women increasingly perceived themselves as royalty-in-waiting. 'Winnie's boys' provided them with a court, a retinue - not unlike Zindzi's Waterford 'minions'.
Mother and daughter never went on a  public outing without a dozen or so of the football club boys in tow,  all dressed in matching tracksuits. The fact that these boys were  invariably illiterate, impoverished and tended to have criminal  backgrounds did not diminish, apparently, the illusion of grandeur.   Winnie and Zindzi saw themselves as queen and princess. Soweto saw them  as mafia bosses. The murder of the 14-year-old activist Stompie  Moeketsi, whose body was found in February 1989, revealed the football  club's activities to the world. But in the three-year period leading up  to it, the club was involved in at least 15 other murders. Club members  appeared in four murder trials and three were sentenced to death. Until  then the boys all lived in the Mandela house, which became part  barracks, part prison and part boarding-school. Winnie was, as it were,  the headmistress; Zindzi the head girl and Sithole head boy, the  enforcer of discipline.
A strict code of conduct  was applied. The boys had to be in the house by a specified hour of the  night and had to sign a book registering their times of entry and  departure. Deviations from the rules were addressed by a haphazard  paramilitary tribunal which dispensed internal justice. Offenders would  be beaten with sjamboks - thick black leather whips - by the jury and  executioners of the kangaroo court.
The mafia  element manifested itself in the habit Winnie fell into of dispensing  favours to her few admirers. A woman might, for example, come and report  her husband's infidelity. Godfather-like, Winnie would dispatch her  boys to give the man a sound beating. Zindzi's role in all this has  always been kept relatively quiet, but there is no question that she was  involved in the family business. There was the case of Oupa Seheri, who  carried out a double murder in a Soweto shebeen (a bar) in February  1988. He was charged, convicted and sentenced to death. The court found  that the murder weapon - as well as a number of other weapons - had been  stored in Zindzi's bedroom, under her bed.
Such  was the notoriety the club acquired that the red mini-van they used  became more feared in Soweto neighbourhoods than the vehicles driven by  the security police. One Sunday morning, a time when the streets of  Soweto teem with activity, Zindzi was house-hunting in a section of  Soweto called Zola.  She was in the red mini-van. Lost, she stepped out  of the vehicle to ask directions. When the door opened, everybody in the  street scattered, running for dear life.
Zindzi,  an acquaintance said, was appalled and shocked. Not until then had she  grasped the fear and loathing Winnie's name had come to generate in  Soweto. The point must have struck home all the more forcibly a few  months later, when a mob of schoolchildren attempted to set the Mandela  house on fire. A neighbour later said that it had been the  children'sintention to burn not only the house, but also those inside  it. A gang-rape by the football-club boys of a girl at the school in  question had proved the final straw for the community.
IN  DECEMBER 1989, two months before Mandela was released from prison, he  met Winnie and Zindzi at his house in the prison grounds. He knew he  would be out soon and informed them that it was his intention to bury  the past and resume family life afresh.  At a press conference the day  after his release, he was asked whether he felt any bitterness or any  regret. None, he replied, save for his wish that he could have been  around to attend to family matters. For the next few months Mandela  toured the country, often with his wife,his daughter and her baby Bambatho accompanying him.
'The  Royal Family', as they are known in some ANC circles, played their  roles to perfection. The cracks were papered over and Mandela himself  gave flesh to the make-believe world of family harmony he had invented  in prison.  Zindzi looked radiant at every public function. At home she  wore dungarees and listened to jazz during the day. At night she liked  to party. She got a job, in due course, with Operation Hunger - an  impeccably worthwhile project to feed the needy - black and white. All  in all, she acted convincingly the part of the suburban, twentysomething  daughter.
Someone who has watched the family  closely over the past three years notes that Zindzi has become like her  mother in at least one respect. She indulges in the habit of buying her  lovers the most expensive, ostentatious suits, watches and shoes. Both  Dali Mpofo and Zindzi's husband Zweli dress in a manner way beyond their  earnings.
Zindzi, though, the family  acquaintance says, has had the wisdom to realise that whatever it is she  has become in life, she owes it all to her father.  'Whereas Winnie  would lose her cool completely with Nelson, lose all respect, Zindzi was  always the ambassador, the one who tried to smooth things over. She is  vivacious, full of energy like her mother - and like her, she drinks -  but she is more sober-minded. You can see that she values her father's  opinion, that she respects him, that she loves him, that she knows also  that she derives her power from him. With Winnie it's less easy to tell  what she's thinking.'
Nowhere less so than the  day in May 1991 when Winnie emerged from Johannesburg's Rand Supreme  Court, minutes after she had been convicted on charges of assault and  kidnapping, with a broad smile of triumph on her face. It was her  husband, walking next to her, whose grim expression reflected the  disaster that had overtaken his family.
Just  under a year later, Nelson Mandela read out a statement to a crowded  press conference announcing his separation from his wife. He remarked on  the marital 'tensions' that had arisen 'in recent months', but insisted  that he would never forget the manner in which she had stood by him  during his years in prison. Nor, he said, would his love and affection  for her ever diminish.  When he had finished, he stood up and said, 'I'm  sure you'll appreciate how painful this is for me. This conference is  now over.' Not one reporter broke the silence as he walked gravely out  of the room.
The last straw for the ANC was the  revelation that money had gone missing from the social welfare  department over which Winnie Mandela and Dali Mpofo presided. There is  an allusion to that in Winnie's letter to Mpofo. She speaks of a 160,000  rands sum (pounds 36,000) which she had drawn for him from the bank and  whose disappearance Mandela had ordered his lawyer to investigate.  'Ntombi (who works at the department) is guessing about the cheques we  used to ask her to cash for in the name of the Dpt and how I gave you  all that money.'
Small wonder her husband  scarcely talks to her any more. Small wonder the ANC have completely  marginalised her. Small wonder, too, that Zindzi left home and found  religion.
AT ONE POINT during the reception at  the Carlton, an old friend had passed up a note to him. 'Smile Nelson]  You look like John Vorster (South Africa's prime minister in the  Seventies) used to in parliament]' He read the note and burst into that  famous smile photographers always love, before rapidly reverting back to  his equally famous Sphinx-like stare.
During  the wedding he sustained the myth of family normality at all the  appropriate moments. At the religious ceremony itself, in Johannesburg's  Central Methodist Church, he beamed with genuine feeling when the  couple kissed, he beamed when Zindzi marched down the aisle on her  husband's arm and he beamed when they stepped into the white limousine  somehow conjured up for the occasion. And he played his part in the  speech at the reception.  'She's not mine now', he said, as fathers are  supposed to.  He did not, however, pay for the wedding which, according  to the Johannesburg press, cost pounds 50,000. Nor did he pay for the  wedding night in the Carlton's pounds 400-a-night presidential suite.  Who exactly did pay for it is not certain, although it is known that Sol  Kerzner, South Africa's most celebrated business tycoon, made a  substantial contribution. Kerzner also laid on the honeymoon at one of  his five-star Mauritius hotels. Once married to a former Miss World,  Kerzner owns Sun City, the Las Vegas of the African continent, only 90  minutes' drive from Johannesburg. He owns a string of similar casino  resorts round the country, all situated in apartheid's most terrible  creations, the black 'homelands'.
Zindzi,  however, is not the only ANC-related figure to have benefited from his  largesse. In June this year he paid for a lavish party to celebrate the  50th birthday of Thabo Mbeki, the ANC's shadow foreign minister. The  party, at which a number of other senior ANC officials sipped champagne  with Johannesburg's wealthy white elite, was held only 24 hours after  the massacre at Boipatong township in which 41 people - most of them ANC  supporters - died. Whether Kerzner's capitalist instincts have rubbed  off on the ANC leadership isn't clear, but Zindzi herself seems to have  picked up a few tips. Her wedding was organised by a PR company which  she commissioned to sell the event's publication rights. A magazine  called Femina, part of the South African Cosmopolitan stable, was  offered the domestic and international 'exclusive' for pounds 6,000.  Femina turned the offer down.
AN OLD friend of  Zindzi who was at the Carlton reception said he hoped the marriage would  last, her faith in God endure. But he doubted it. Zindzi's choice of  husband, he said, again reflected the old tendency to go for men she  could control in a way she never managed to control her father. Zweli,  he suggested, offered a timely escape from the mad merry-go-round, a  refuge from the role she was fated to play. 'For Zindzi the world's  always been a stage,' the old friend said. 'She has never been Zindzi  the individual.  She's always been Zindzi the actress, playing Mandela's  daughter. That part could have taken different forms - look at Zeni.  But if Zindzi was less wise, less concerned with self-preservation, than  her sister, she was also more loyal. She chose not to ignore the pain  and the burden of the family heritage and she stuck by her mother. For  all her sins, that was fine and honourable. But she's paid a terrible  price.'-
 













 
 
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