WINNIE MANDELA, FORMER WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA, DIED ON MONDAY. SHE LEFT A LEGACY OF CONTROVERSY IN SOUTH AFRICA, WHERE SHE’S BOTH REVERED AND REVILED.
Remembered for time in captivity, rocky marriage
Long after her divorce from South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was still called the Mother of the Nation. And in many ways, she epitomized the socalled “new” South Africa far more than her idealized former husband.
She was beautiful and violent. Her bravery under the brutal apartheid regime won her lasting respect and adulation; allegations that she was the kingpin of a deadly vigilante group during the 1980s earned her fear and mistrust.
One of South Africa’s most prominent and polarizing figures, Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, died April 2 in Johannesburg. She was 81.
Fraud convictions, insubordination and allegations of crimes from corruption to murder all seemed, at different points, to spell her downfall. Yet Madikizela-Mandela always rebounded.
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born in a remote swath of South Africa called Pondoland on Sept. 26, 1936.
Her father, Columbus, was a schoolteacher, and he taught local children a different type of history.
She wrote in her 1984 autobiography: “(Columbus) would put the textbook aside and say: ‘Now, this is what the book says, but the truth is: these white people invaded our country and stole the land from our grandfathers.’ ”
Soon after Madikizela-Mandela obtained her social-work degree, she met Nelson Mandela. Not a year after their first date, Nelson showed Winnie the house of a dressmaker and told her she should get fitted.
“That’s how I was told I was getting married to him!” Madikizela-Mandela said. “I asked, ‘What time?’ I was madly in love with him.”
The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which police killed dozens of unarmed protesters, focused the world’s attention on South Africa — and on the Mandelas.
At the time, Nelson Mandela was one of the defendants in what would become known as the Treason Trial — a case against dozens of people involved in the creation of the Freedom Charter, a blueprint for what participants hoped would be a future democratic South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was found not guilty in 1961, but he went into hiding soon thereafter.
Over the next years Winnie would be arrested, harassed and “banned” — forbidden from most social contact. She was the target of police informers. Beginning in 1969, she spent 18 months in solitary confinement. She was interrogated without break. She was forced to sit upright, for days and nights, to the point that her body swelled and she blacked out.
Later, she was exiled to a shack in the remote town of Brandfort.
Yet as the state increasingly isolated her, her international profile grew. Less publicized was her alleged increased drinking and extramarital relationships, or the questions about what she did with all those international donations to her social welfare programs in Brandfort.
When a defiant Madikizela-Mandela returned to Soweto in 1985, it was a far more violent place than she had left, crawling with gangs and police brutality. Her rhetoric fit right in.
“We have no guns — we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol,” she said at a rally in April 1986. “Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”
“Necklacing” was a method of killing, often used against suspected police informants, in which a gasoline-soaked tire was forced around someone’s body and then set alight. The speech caused an international outcry, particularly in western capitals.
Over New Year’s, 1988-89, a 14-year-old named James Moeketsi Seipei, or “Stompie,” disappeared from her house. Although she forcefully denied involvement, others later testified that she ordered — and even took part in — the murder of the teen.
She never went to jail for the Stompie case. She appealed, and in June 1993 the court upheld her kidnapping conviction but overturned the accessory to assault conviction. Her sentence was suspended and she was fined.
In 1992, Nelson announced their separation. He was pained but gracious. Four years later, suing Winnie for divorce, he was less generous. When he emerged after 27 years in prison, he said, the woman he once called his “darling” had changed. She was blatant in her infidelity, he added, and cold. “I was the loneliest man during the time I stayed with her,” he said.
The judge granted the divorce.
In 1998, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, condemned her for human rights violations after evidence from 30 witnesses. She only apologized after an emotional plea from Tutu during the hearings.
But her followers — and her party — seemed to forgive, or ignore, these alleged trespasses.
WE HAVE NO GUNS — WE HAVE ONLY STONES, BOXES OF MATCHES AND PETROL.