How we fix icon in our minds a measure of progress
Awar has broken out over Winnie MadikizelaMandela. There are the white men on social media who say she was evil. And there are enraged counterclaims that she was a great woman, one of the greatest in our history.
But the truth is that here and now, in the immediate wake of her death, her legacy remains profoundly unsettled; whether what anybody is saying in these days will make sense in future is impossible to know. How will Winnie be remembered in 50 or 100 years from now? Will she be considered a great woman, one of the greatest?
The answers to those questions will tell us much about who our grandchildren have become and how they feel about one another.
There are many reasons why Winnie might always be revered; the most obvious is her response to suffering. When she was tortured, she declared herself torture’s child, full of fury and rage. The more the apartheid state hurt her, the more defiant she became.
Fortitude under suffering has long been revered in SA’s history. Winnie’s former husband, Nelson Mandela, became loved when he began to suffer. In 1960, when he went underground, black SA watched with bated breath, convinced the apartheid state would catch him and hang him. The prospect of his early death embodied the collective suffering of black people, his impending martyrdom their redemption.
It was, ironically, from Nelson that Winnie learned that to suffer with nobility before a South African audience was to be adored.
She might also be revered in future because she was an ungovernable woman. The more the state hunted her, the less tame she grew. The more the ANC tried to tie her to organisational discipline, the more maverick she became.
She did what she wanted, said what she wanted and slept with whom she wanted. It was as an ungovernable woman that she commanded distaste and adoration in the late apartheid years; and it is as an ungovernable woman that she may pass into legend.
But it is by her response to one of humanity’s most enduring questions that Winnie will most likely be remembered: what to do about the past? Does one forgive the injustices of those who have wronged one? If so, on what terms?
Winnie was one of the world’s most eloquent proponents of the refusal to forgive. She tied this refusal to an account of her experiences, declaring that she was the product of the violence her enemy inflicted upon her. She exhibited her life as evidence that the past does not die and that its wounds do not heal.
Nor would she apologise for her own violence; black people, she said, should never apologise for what they did when they were oppressed. In generations to come she may well be remembered, along with Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, as a legendary proponent of the violence of the oppressed.
Is this how Winnie will be remembered by our grandchildren? I hope for their sakes that they do not think of her as great. Is there greatness in the idea that wounds never heal? Is there transcendence in the notion that the past never dies? If our grandchildren take succour from these ideas it will be because they are in a dark place, fighting endless battles.
I would rather our grandchildren salute Winnie as a figure of her times, far away and increasingly strange, brave and exotic and no longer of this world. Such will be the measure of how far they have come.
IS THERE GREATNESS IN THE IDEA THAT WOUNDS NEVER HEAL? IS THERE TRANSCENDENCE IN THE NOTION THAT THE PAST NEVER DIES?
Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.