Despised and loved in equal measure
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: b September 26, 1936; m Nelson Mandela; 2d; d April 2, 2018, aged 81.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela held centre stage as political prima donna throughout the most turbulent era of South African history, switching roles with breathtaking panache from the heroine of the revolution, to the comic queen of low farce, and to the ugly sister of shady deals and dirty deeds.
To call her ‘‘controversial’’ was to understate the intensity of passions that she aroused in South Africa. She was despised and denigrated or loved and revered in equal measure.
As a consummate populist political figure – as well as an instinctive performer – she appeared to thrive on deep loathing as well as wild adulation.
Her behaviour, particularly as the African National Congress moved towards power, ensured that she would never be overlooked by history. Not for her the role of demure wife at the side of Nelson Mandela. She was, in her own view, the ‘‘mother of the nation’’ and no secondary status would do.
Again in her own eyes she had held the ANC together, almost single-handed, in its darkest days of apartheid. With its leaders, including her husband, imprisoned or forced into exile, she had carried on the struggle. She had become a figurehead of the incipient revolution, posing with astonishing success as an icon of compassion and concern for the downtrodden black masses, and displaying unwavering fortitude in defying at every turn the heavy handed and cruel attentions of an Afrikaner government intent on sustaining white rule at any cost.
Her courage, often reckless, could never be questioned. Over a period of 20 years she was jailed, abused and harassed, with early morning police raids on the modest home she had shared with Nelson Mandela in Soweto. In time, she was banished to the small, dusty town of Brandfort in the Free State. Even from that remote spot she continued her open defiance, constantly teasing and thwarting the authorities.
The first signs that the relentless harassment by the security police had taken their toll emerged only when she returned to her home in Soweto in the 1980s, when that sprawling township was the epicentre of the violence that was to bring apartheid to its knees. She had started drinking heavily while in Brandfort and her friends noted wild mood swings. She became violent on numerous occasions, attacking people who annoyed her – including children – with any weapon to hand, be it belt buckle or broken bottle.
She was also becoming notoriously promiscuous. Few expected a strikingly good-looking and intensely personable woman like Winnie Mandela to remain celibate during her husband’s protracted and enforced absence, but she began to flaunt her many affairs and flings.
Her public behaviour, too, became more erratic. Never shrinking from dressing up for the part, she took her revolutionary fervour to sinister levels by wearing designer-style Che Guevara combat fatigues. She also advocated the continued use of the infamous ‘‘necklace’’ method of execution for those perceived to be informers – it involved a petrol-filled tyre draped around the neck and shoulders of the victim and set alight to ensure a slow and agonising death.
At the same time, Winnie Mandela was gathering around her home a large group of youths, homeless and hardened by the township wars. In a seemingly innocent fashion, she encouraged them to form a football club named, with typical insouciance, Mandela United.
They did, indeed, play a couple of games, but it was soon horrifyingly clear to the neighbourhood that their main function was to act as a vigilante gang, seeking out, beating and murdering anyone suspected of opposing ‘‘the struggle’’ or, more often, those who dared to utter even the mildest criticism of Winnie and her lifestyle.
In the late 1980s it was clear to the whole of Soweto that Winnie Mandela, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, was out of control. She presided over kangaroo courts in her home, where youths accused of being ‘‘sellouts’’ were ritually and brutally assaulted, and she took part in nightly whippings and beatings.
Several victims disappeared, never to be seen again. The discovery of the mutilated body of one, 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, was to lead to the closure of this grotesquely inglorious period of her life – but, remarkably, not to the end of her political career or ambitions. The ‘‘coach’’ of Mandela United was convicted of Stompie’s murder, but it was another two years before Winnie Mandela came before the Rand Supreme Court, charged with complicity in the abduction and assault that led to the killing.
In the meantime she had been by Nelson Mandela’s side on February 11 1990 as the world watched in astonishment and delight as he was triumphantly released from prison. She had also worked diligently to consolidate her own position in the ANC hierarchy, sensing that political power was nigh.
By the time of his wife’s sensational trial in Johannesburg in 1991, Nelson Mandela was fully aware of the depths to which she had sunk, of her drunken, violent rampages, and of her serial infidelity. He was, however, still in love with her. It was his duty – as a husband, father, trained lawyer and South Africa’s leader-in-waiting – to put in an appearance, despite being under intense pressure from leading figures within the ANC to distance himself from his wife’s misdemeanours. Those colleagues were urging a quick divorce, when politically expedient.
She was finally sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. In the two years before the appeal was heard, South Africa was in political and social turmoil as apartheid was abandoned and the country advanced to its first democratic election which would, inevitably, bring the ANC to power. Winnie Mandela, still with widespread popular support despite the gruesome details revealed during the trial, was in the thick of the infighting within the ANC.
Nelson Mandela initially stood by his wife in her attempt to retain important positions within the movement, but the ANC’s top brass, most more aware of her perfidy than he, urged him to leave her. Finally – and reluctantly – he agreed that they should be divorced.
If the powerful anti-Winnie lobby in the ANC hierarchy hoped that this would end her political ambitions, they, like many before and many after, seriously underestimated the woman. The appeal court in Bloemfontein, ‘‘after serious and anxious consideration’’, reduced her sentence to a suspended one and a modest fine. She was soon re-elected as president of the ANC’s powerful Women’s League and, intimidated by her grass-roots support base, the movement waived its own rules to allow her to be elected as a member of parliament.
Winnie Mandela was back, and would clearly remain a vital part of South Africa’s political life for many years to come.
Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela was born in 1936 in the Bizana district of the Transkei in the Eastern Cape, heartland of the Xhosa people and the region that spawned South Africa’s future black leadership, including Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
Hers was a typical pastoral childhood in the moist, green uplands of one of South Africa’s most spectacular coastal areas. It was relatively privileged because her hard-working father was of senior tribal status but, according to her autobiography, she was aware that her family had desperately wanted a boy and she was precociously determined that she would be ‘‘as much value as a son’’.
Her mother died shortly after the birth of the couple’s eighth child. Winnie was 10 years old and angered that the Christian God her parents had worshipped could so prematurely deprive a family of its mother. Her father was a distant, authoritarian figure, yet he insisted on the best education he could afford for his children, particularly Winnie who was proving herself to be exceptionally bright. She attended first the school her father had founded and was soon obsessively literate, reading everything that she could find and astonishing her teachers by mastering elementary Latin.
Her father was impressed enough to pay for her secondary education at the prestigious Shawbury High School, where she was an above-average student. Most of the teachers were graduates of Fort Hare University, the alma mater of many of emerging Africa’s leaders and, in the eyes of the Afrikaner government that had come to power in 1948, a hotbed of black nationalist activism.
Winnie Madikizela matriculated with the aims and objectives of the Defiance Campaign, the first organised black opposition to the raft of apartheid laws introduced by the government, ringing in her ears.
Her father had already decided that Winnie, always good with children and full of energy, should become a social worker – in those days one of the most eminent professions that could be followed by a black woman. At the newly formed Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work in distant Johannesburg Winnie showed no inclination to get involved, preferring instead to devote her considerable energy to the practical side of social work. After graduation, she was appointed one of the first social workers at Baragwanath Hospital, the largest of its type in Africa, on the edge of Soweto.
Here she was exposed, for the first time, to the harsh and cruel conditions imposed on black people by the mountain of apartheid laws. ‘‘I started to realise the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live, the appalling conditions created by the inequalities of the system,’’ she wrote.
There was a sense of destiny when Nelson was introduced to Winnie Madikizela through mutual friends. She admitted that she was in awe of a man whom she regarded as a father figure. On their first date he took her to his favourite Indian restaurant in Johannesburg, chuckling as she choked on her curry. He later took her for a walk in the veld and asked her to help raise money for the ANC. ‘‘Politicians are not lovers,’’ Winnie later said when describing that first meeting.
They were married less than a year later, on June 14, 1958. Nelson was unable to give the groom’s address because he was under a banning order and not allowed to speak to any gathering. He was also facing his first trial on treason charges and spent his honeymoon with other lawyers preparing his defence.
Police harassment was relentless. A weaker woman might well have buckled under such pressure, but Winnie Mandela was made of much sterner stuff.
Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were acquitted, but the ANC had already taken the momentous decision to abandon its passive resistance campaign in favour of armed militancy. His young wife, now with two baby daughters, became virtually a single mother as her husband went underground to organise the ANC’s military wing.
She was also suddenly thrust into the spotlight after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, as the international press descended on South Africa and sought her out for interviews.
Her short married life was already at an end, for she was to see Nelson very briefly thereafter. He was the much sought-after ‘‘black pimpernel’’, dodging the security police and criss-crossing South Africa’s borders clandestinely to organise and orchestrate the antiapartheid revolution within and outside the country.
In 1963 he was finally arrested with other ANC leaders at a farm north of Johannesburg and charged with high treason – the Rivonia Trial of 1963-64. This time the authorities were serious. Mandela escaped the death penalty only because of his eloquence, but he was jailed for life and sent to the notorious Robben Island prison, off Cape Town, to serve his sentence.
If the authorities hoped that Mandela’s wife would disappear into some weeping middle distance, they were severely mistaken. As she saw it, Winnie Mandela was the surrogate leader of the South African revolution – and it was a role in which she revelled.
She was repeatedly arrested and jailed by an Afrikaner government that simply did not understand that a woman, especially a black woman, could show such defiance, let alone express with such graphic passion the plight of South Africa’s oppressed majority. ‘‘They threw the book at her but she returned it every time with interest,’’ said a friend. ‘‘Winnie enjoyed the fight, knowing that she had the support of the deprived masses out there who knew she was with them.’’
Instinctively, Winnie Mandela found her metier as a born politician, appearing in any troubled area to assure the populace that liberation was nigh.
From prison she was banished to exile in remote Brandfort in 1977, but that did not have the effect that the government had hoped for. She captivated the local community, terrified the small white population and established her modest home in that distant town as a shrine to her jailed husband. There she was visited by increasing numbers of international anti-apartheid activists who had become aware of the South African predicament by the publicity she had generated.
Winnie Mandela continued to flout all the restrictions placed upon her, returning frequently to Soweto to consult with ANC Women’s League colleagues, to organise opposition and to defy the system at every turn.
By the time South Africa’s white government slowly realised that the only way forward for the country was to start some form of negotiation with the ANC"s leadership, in exile or in jail, Winnie Mandela regarded herself – and styled herself – as ‘‘mother of the nation’’.
The pressure under which she had been living had, however, taken its toll. When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of South Africa in May 1994, Winnie was not at his side. The ANC was trying to ease her into the background. Yet, like the Afrikaners before, they seriously underestimated her.
Winnie Mandela proved the point by being resoundingly re-elected president of the influential ANC Women’s League. She launched her own campaign, visiting the townships and squatter camps and winning yet more support for her sharp criticism of the new black government for its lack of concern for the deprived and poor.
Poverty was good for politics, but not for Winnie Mandela’s own lifestyle. Her expensive taste in clothing, jewellery and foreign travel was indulged to the full. She travelled everywhere in chauffeur-driven limousines and accompanied always by a formidable gaggle of bodyguards.
She built for herself a mansion on the outskirts of Soweto. Large sums of money that came her way within her ambit as a social worker, charity organiser and political figure remained unaccounted for. Substantial loans from banks and well-meaning individuals were simply never repaid.
She was involved in numerous shady deals with people of dubious reputation. She chartered a jet to fly to Angola to complete a personal diamond deal – the jet was never paid for. Despite remaining an MP, she rarely attended parliament. And when parliament attempted to discipline her, she responded contemptuously with a high-court injunction.
Her open contempt for the government increased when Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as president in 1999. She taunted and mocked the new leadership at every turn, claiming that had it not been for her support, Mbeki would never have become president. When warned that her behaviour was preventing the ANC from giving her a senior position in government, she responded with haughty arrogance: ‘‘If my people want me to be deputy president, I will be deputy president.’’
The scandals mounted, but her support, adoration even, among the rank-and-file was unwavering. She never hesitated to play the racial card when her misdemeanours appeared to be surfacing. In 2003, when she was convicted of fraud and theft by using ANC Women’s League stationery to secure loans for non-existent members, she described the case as ‘‘a joke’’, pointing out that the magistrate, prosecutor and investigators were white.
She was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, but remained free on bail pending an appeal. In July 2004 an appeal judge overturned the theft conviction, but not the one for fraud, and gave her a suspended sentence.
It was not long before she sensationally re-emerged, however. She backed Jacob Zuma in his bitter campaign to oust Mbeki as ANC leader in 2007 and was elected to the National Executive Committee the same year. Then, in the run-up to the 2009 general election, and to the horror of her critics, she secured a leading position on the ANC’s list of future MPs, suggesting that Zuma saw her as a key electoral asset.