QWhat would Madiba have thought of this division within his own clan? After discord, particularly related to his will or his place of burial, a new conflict is causing trouble within Nelson Mandela’s family. Several of the grandchildren of the former South African president accuse the latter’s eldest daughter of having substituted objects intended for an auction, Courrier International reports on Saturday February 12. Initially stored at the home of the Nobel Peace Prize winner in Johannesburg, the goods mentioned were to be entrusted to the auction house Guernsey’s, in order to raise funds to build a garden in memory of the deceased. In the meantime, they would have been “stolen” by Makaziwe Mandela who would have offered them on the market without the agreement of the other heirs.
One of the politician’s descendants, Ndaba Mandela, told the Sunday Times that her aunt would have taken “the bed, the paintings, the carpets…” in the course of March 2021. According to her words, the suspect would have wanted to keep the receipts for her personal profit: “If it was honest and disinterested, why didn’t she tell us about it? If that was the case, we might have voted as a family to put some of my grandfather’s items up for sale. “A complaint for acts of theft has been filed. Originally scheduled for January 28, the auction has been canceled.
A family trust tactic?
As early as November 2021, in a press release, one of the lawyers for the eleven grandchildren had warned the New York house Guernsey’s of these disappearances: “The members of the family claim that the auction offers at least eleven objects of great value , ten are iconic shirts of President Mandela, and his passport, which were taken from the house in Houghton (one of the neighborhoods of Johannesburg, editor’s note) in circumstances that raise many questions… without permission. For this part of the lineage, this affair would be a maneuver orchestrated by the legatees of the historic residence in question, who would consider selling it.
