is precious. So has a love for which I can only be grateful.’
Message in a Bottle
Introduction
I met Nelson Mandela for the first time in 1990. I was 23 years old. We only spoke for a few minutes, but those minutes would change my life forever. At the end of our conversation, he said: ‘You need to remember that . . . you have a voice. People will listen to you. You have to think carefully what to do with that power.’
So started a journey during which the challenge put to me by Mandela would become my constant companion. How to use my voice in service of others would inform almost all of the big decisions I would be confronted with, and the choices I made would lead me down a path that fills me with amazement even today, more than two decades later.
After all, what were the chances that a young Afrikaner woman, from staunch Afrikaner farming stock, who married the grandson of ‘the architect of apartheid’, would meet Nelson Mandela and be asked to represent his party in the first democratic parliament? Or that a few years later she would be asked to become an ambassador, and the head of UNICEF in a foreign country?
I suspect it is because they share my surprise at the unlikelihood of all this that many friends, colleagues and loved ones have over the years asked me to write my story. Despite their encouragement, I resisted the idea for a long time. I am a deeply private person, and the idea of exposing my life, my soul, and especially my precious and loving memories of the last few years, to scrutiny, filled me – and continues to fill me – with horror and fear. But over the last two years, I found myself writing late at night, not able to rest until I had allowed my thoughts and memories to take form on paper. And so the book seemed determined to write itself, whether I wanted it to exist or not.
During those long, dark nights, I gradually became aware that the writing was born from a deep desire to try to remember who I am. It felt as if the shock and pain that followed the devastating events of April 2010 and beyond had scrambled my DNA, leaving me at a loss when I tried to remember who I was and what I was meant to do in life. It seemed that the only way to fix things and to find my voice again was to write, and to remember the past.
But there was another even more compelling reason. Almost exactly twenty years after Mandela’s challenge to me, I was asked to use my voice again. This time it was by the man I loved. He asked me to promise him that I would talk about him and his life after his death. Thinking that we still had many decades together ahead of us, it was an easy promise to make. Two weeks later, he was dead.
As the months went by, I knew I would never heal or rest until I had honoured the promise I had made to Gerry. After his death, I gave one interview. I had hoped it would never be necessary for me to talk publicly about him again, since everyone seemed to remember the man that he was. But as the months went by, and especially after the coroner’s inquest, things changed. Gerry’s legacy and memory were rewritten to the point where I could not recognise anything of the man I knew so intimately. This was exactly what he had feared so much, and why he had asked me to promise I would make sure to speak about him and his life, ‘warts and all’.
Before this book was published in Ireland and the United Kingdom in October 2012, many people warned me that I should keep quiet, that my speaking out would have many negative consequences for me and even for my children. I was told that I would never find work again, that many people would hate me, and that I was putting my life and my children’s lives in danger. When I decided to speak out against apartheid and joined the ANC in 1990, I received almost identical warnings. It would have been much easier to have kept quiet then, but my conscience would not allow me to. It is the same relentless stirring of my conscience that has driven me to write this book now.
When the book appeared in Ireland, it became the centre of a media storm. I expected beforehand that some people would be critical of the content, as would be the case with any publication. What shocked me, however, was that my right to have written the book, to tell my story, was questioned. Some commentators suggested I did not have the right to publish the book, and there was an attempt through the courts to stop the book from appearing. After the legal challenge was resolved, a few celebrities used their access to the media to encourage the Irish public not to read the book. These people readily acknowledged that they had not read the book, nor would they, and so had very little if any first-hand knowledge of the content. Yet, they still went on what can only be described as an orchestrated campaign to stop people buying the book. As someone who had grown up during the last years of apartheid, I was shocked that the basic right to ‘freedom of speech’, a fundamental cornerstone of any democracy and civilised society, could be called into question.
Thankfully many (also in the media) did not agree and defended my right to tell my story. And so despite – or perhaps because of – the attempts to silence me, thousands of people in Ireland bought the book and it became a number one bestseller, which surprised me. What was even more heart-warming was the number of letters and e-mails I received from those who had read it. Without exception they were kind and thanked me for speaking out. As was the case after Gerry’s death, it was this caring and kind attitude of so many Irish people that helped me to weather the storm in the difficult weeks after the book’s publication.
One of my biggest dilemmas in writing this book was how to deal with the stories of the seven children who shared Gerry’s, and my, life. From the outset, it was important to me to protect their privacy as much as possible. I am thankful to my children for allowing me to tell a few of the personal stories of our life together. Since they were born, I have always protected my children from the media and public exposure. In fact, part of my motivation in taking up the diplomatic posting, and also to stay in Ireland, was to ensure as much anonymity as possible for them, and to take them away from the inevitable public interest in the Verwoerd legacy in South Africa. Of course, it became a lot more difficult to protect their privacy in recent times, but it is something I will continue to do as long as they want me to. It is for this reason that I am not publishing any current photographs of my children in this book.
Even though I know Gerry would have wanted me to write some of the stories that illustrate the extraordinarily close relationship he had with his children, and the central role they played not only in his life, but also in our life together, I decided not to. I love Gerry’s children deeply, and feel very protective towards them. So in order to protect their privacy, I refer to them only in general, and in instances where it would have been bizarre not to. I am conscious that the telling of the story of their dad’s last few years might be difficult for them. I can only hope that, in time, they will find comfort in the fact that in writing this book, I seek only to correct some of the terrible things that were said about him after his death.
I debated at length whether to write about everything that happened after Gerry’s death. This period was so painful that I did not particularly want to revisit it. But over the months that followed I received a stream of letters and e-mails from women who were second partners and who found themselves in similar (or far worse) circumstances to mine after their partners died. Their letters spoke of the enormous grief and pain they experienced when they were left unacknowledged as the legitimate partner after the passing of their loved ones. Almost all of them begged me to speak out about this. So again it seemed to me that I was being asked to use my voice. I therefore decided to write about what I experienced after Gerry’s death, in the hope that when faced with similar circumstances in the future, those involved would handle the situation with sensitivity, not only towards the second partner, but also towards the children involved.
I recently celebrated my 45th birthday. Given the average life expectancy, it is fair to say that I am at least halfway through this life. As I look back on the first half of my life, it strikes me that I did not plan much of it. It seems my journey has been determined by my response to the challenges and opportunities that crossed my path. Most of the decisions and choices I made led
