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
JOHN CARLIN
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.'
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'.
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.'-
