Brandfort

It, it was a, a, a flight that we did quite regularly.

My, my entire family is from Bloemfontein, and my, my grandparents, my maternal grandparents farmed outside Bloem towards, uh, Brandfort, and I used to spend a lot of time there and with my, my paternal grandfather and, and grandmother in Bloem itself.

So we would, from what I can recall, fly up and down quite regularly, and that was an, uh, an exposure to, to, uh, to heli- at least to flying.

But the helicopter flying itself actually was much later.

In 1977, the South African government loaded Winnie Mandela into a vehicle and drove her hundreds of miles from Johannesburg.

They deposited her in Brandfort, a conservative Afrikaner town in the Free State, in a small house without running water.

The township was called Fathekele, "Handle with care." The authorities believed they were burying her.

They had miscalculated badly.