At ten on the morning of May 24, Payne arrived at the Mandelas’ new house in the Orlando East section of Soweto. Payne spotted the armed security officers from the ANC guarding the perimeter and gained her first look at the controversial house whose construction she had defended two years earlier. Three-stories tall, with four bedrooms, she found it, in her words, “to be tastefully furnished, but not lavish.”
In the living room, Payne drank coffee with Winnie Mandela, whom she met for the first time after years of correspondence. Nelson Mandela greeted Payne while still clad in his pajamas. The two sat down and he answered her questions for thirty-five minutes, twenty more than the fifteen-minute audience that had been promised. Payne asked about the ongoing negotiations with the government and resistance among white South Africans. Despite his imprisonment, Mandela remained conciliatory in freedom. “The majority of whites want to see a peaceful change,” Mandela told her. “Whites have nothing to fear from sharing power with all the people of South Africa.” Payne was amazed at Mandela’s attitude. “Ethel could not understand why Mandela was not angry,” said C. Payne Lucas of Africare who saw Payne upon her return to the United States.
The interview completed Payne, dressed in colorful floral outfit with a long strand of pearls, stood next to the much taller Mandela in his red bathrobe tied closed with a cord. When she returned to the United States Payne told her friends that lots of reporters had interviewed Mandela since his release but she was the only one to have done so while he was in his bathrobe.
