National Post (National Edition)
WINNIE MANDELA 1936-2018: A DEFIANT, COMPLEX LEGACY
DEAD AT 81 She displayed fierce bravery under the apartheid regime, but also allegations that she was the kingpin of a deadly vigilante group during the 1980s.
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 so-called “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 Monday in Johannesburg. She was 81.
She was a political insider who often played the role of outsider. While other leaders moved to luxurious, previously all-white suburbs, Madikizela-Mandela stayed in Soweto, the black township southwest of Johannesburg.
She at times harshly criticized the African National Congress — the political party that she also called her “family” — most recently condemning it for the continued economic disparity that has left millions of black South Africans in poverty. Yet since the end of apartheid in 1994, she served many roles in the South African government, from member of Parliament to the head of the ANC Women’s League.
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.
“I want you to know where I come from so you can tell where I am headed,” she told a crowd at American University in 1996 after acknowledging that Americans must be “puzzled” by stories of her. “I’m like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons … I stand defiant, tall and strong.”
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.
“We had our textbooks, naturally written by white men, and they had their interpretation,” Madikizela-Mandela wrote in her 1984 autobiography. “Then (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.’
“There is an anger that wakes up in you when you are a child and it builds up and determines the political consciousness of the black man,” she added.
Soon after Madikizela-Mandela obtained her socialwork degree from the Jan Hofmeyr School in Johannesburg, she met Nelson Mandela. And then she became immersed in the resistance that would define modern-day South Africa.
The two developed what others described as a passionate relationship. They held hands in public; they went to jazz clubs. Not a year after their first date, Nelson showed Winnie the house of a dressmaker and told her she should get fitted. He asked how many bridesmaids she would like to have, Madikizela-Mandela recalled in her autobiography.
“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 long-running case against dozens of people involved in the public creation of the Freedom Charter, which was a blueprint for what participants hoped would be a future democratic South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in organizing the group’s defence against allegations that it had plotted a violent overthrow of the government.
Although he had nothing to do with the violence at Sharpeville, Nelson Mandela was taken into custody soon after the massacre. Winnie became his spokeswoman. Her role within the ANC began to shift from spouse to leader.
Although Nelson Mandela was found not guilty in 1961, 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.
“The whole experience is so terrible, because I had left little children at home in bed and I had no idea what had happened to them.”
She was given food, but it was often served in unrinsed sanitary pail lids. Often the food was covered in bird droppings.
She was contained by herself in a concrete cell, five by 10 feet; she slept on the floor. As the weeks passed, she became delirious.
Later, she was exiled to a shack in the remote town of Brandfort.
Yet as the state increasingly isolated her, her international profile grew. The ANC leadership connected her with journalists who wrote about how she had started a daycare and had taught other women to plant vegetable gardens. 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.
When Nelson Mandela left prison in 1990, Winnie was there. But she was soon charged in connection with Stompie’s murder. Although witnesses disappeared, she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault.
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.
Nelson continued to support his wife publicly, but rumours suggested all was not well in the Mandela marriage. 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.
“Without condoning her misdemeanours, we must acknowledge that she is a victim, she is damaged and hurt,” said future South African president Kgalema Motlanthe, who at the time was ANC Secretary General. “When someone is subjected to the kind of consistent persecution and harassment she suffered from the apartheid system, something is bound to snap. We understand that and will always be there for her.”
I WANT YOU TO KNOW WHERE I COME FROM SO YOU CAN TELL WHERE I AM HEADED. I’M LIKE THOUSANDS OF WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA WHO LOST THEIR MEN TO CITIES AND PRISONS ... I STAND DEFIANT, TALL AND STRONG. —WINNIE MADIKIZELA-MANDELA IN AN ADDRESS TO AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN 1996