Antiapartheid activist Winnie Madikizelamandela dead at 81
NEWYORK: Winnie MadikizelaMandela, whose hallowed place in the pantheon of South Africa’s liberators was eroded by scandal over corruption, kidnapping, murder and the adulterous implosion of her fabled marriage to Nelson Mandela, died early Monday in Johannesburg. She was 81.
The South African Broadcasting Corp said she was admitted to hospital over the weekend complaining of the flu after she attended a church service on Friday. She had been treated for diabetes and underwent major surgeries as her health began failing over the past several years.
Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and eloquent, Madikizela-mandela was inevitably known to most of the world through her marriage to the revered Mandela. She commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and post-apartheid leaders who followed Mandela could never ignore her appeal.
Madikizela-mandela retained a political presence as a member of Parliament, representing the dominant African National Congress, and she insisted on a kind of primacy in Mandela’s life, no matter their estrangement.
In time, her reputation became scarred by accusations of extreme brutality toward suspected turncoats, misbehaviour and indiscretion in her private life.
In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the 1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto. She was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, but South Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her punishment to fines and a suspended one-year term.
By then her life had begun to unravel. The United Democratic Front, an umbrella group of organisations fighting apartheid, expelled her.
In 1996, Mandela ended their 38-year marriage, testifying in court that his wife had been having an affair with a colleague.