Consider these color photographs, introduced as evidence in a South African trial virtually ignored by the outside world. They show the scarred and mutilated torsos of two teenage torture victims, brothers named Peter and Phillip. (Peter was only sixteen, so the brothers' last name was withheld by the court in accordance with South African law.) Peter and Phillip claim they we roused from their beds in the dead of night by masked gunmen and taken to a prefabricated shack in someone's Soweto backyard, where they were accused of treachery to the struggle and ordered to confess. When they balked, Peter was hanged by the neck from the rafters until the rafters broke. Then the torturers put a plastic bag over his head and half-drowned him in a bucket of water. After that, some women tied Phillip's hands behind his back and forced him to sit in a chair. A man produced a penknife and started carving freedom slogans onto the boy's body: a big "M" for Mandela on his chest, "Viva ANC' on his thigh. And finally,omeone fetched a car battery and the wounds were etched into Phillip's flesh with sulfuric acid.

It was just another atrocity in a season of atrocities in most respects save one: it allegedly took place at the home of Mrs. Winnie Mandela, first lady of the Charterist movement and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, subject of ten thousand hagiographic newspaper and magazine profiles, several sycophantic books, at least three prospective Hollywood movies, and an on-again, off-again miniseries to be produced by Harry Belafonte. . . .

Schoolchildren in Mrs. Mandela's neighborhood grew so tired of being bullied by her thugs that they eventually burned her house down in broad daylight while her neighbors looked on indifferently, none bothering to throw so much as a cup of water onto the flames. Every journalist in Johannesburg knew the gory details, but no newspaper that I know of printed them -- not at the time, at any rate. Why? I'll tell you why. Because white reporters and editors didn't want to be branded racists, and black reporters were "paralyzed by fear," to use George Wauchope's phrase. If you lived in Soweto, there were some things you dared not say for fear of being labelled a sellout. Sellouts did not live long. One of the township's most prominent black journalists chuckled bleakly when I asked why the full story of the arson attack on Winnie Mandela's home hadn't yet been written. "You write it," he said. "You're white, you might get away with it."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe