No need to supplant one Winnie story with another

For personal and political reasons I thought it prudent to adopt a vow of silence during the 10 days of mourning. Out of fear, I decided not to write or say anything about the legacy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

There are many things I found disturbing about elements of the Mama Winnie narrative in the days leading up to her funeral.

First, there was an attempt to demonise her through, among others, an attempt to foreground what one of our 24-hour news channels referred to as “difficult moments”. Second, and to the extent that there was a need to respond to a single story that sought to reduce her life to that of evil incarnate, this was drowned out by the amplification of another: the single story of courage, bravery, suffering and pain. In the end, what dominated the period of mourning was a clash of single stories.

One story seeks to lionise uncritically and the counter-story is about uncritical demonisation.

Both are dismal because they ignore the fact that the story of Madikizela-Mandela is a story of many stories, the preponderance of which are, in my view, about her courage, pain and suffering. Over the years there have been ceaseless attempts to reduce the font of her heroic contribution to the liberation struggle. This coincided with the commitment to magnify her faults.

Some magnified the font of her mistakes with the aim of erasing the sins of apartheid, an evil against which she fought, sparing neither effort nor sacrifice in the struggle against its ravages. Others sought to demonise her for her uncompromising spirit.

The apartheid regime sought to crush the spirit of the oppressed by destroying one of the most heroic products of the struggle against apartheid.

While all of this is true, to airbrush the faults of a historical figure is to dehumanise that figure in ways that are not dissimilar to the propaganda of her enemies.

In my view, Mama Winnie’s faults magnify both her humanity and contribution to the liberation struggle. But I am not going to pretend there will ever be consensus about what those faults were.

In case I am misunderstood, I am not suggesting that the evil that was resident in apartheid leaders humanises them in the same way. While their evil is part of the human condition, theirs was a soul rotten to the core. When we say a person was good, we are by no stretch of the imagination suggesting that they were unblemished angels.

To those who arrogated to themselves the role of high priests and priestesses of the single story, there was no need to bully those who did not show any fidelity to your narrative. There was no need to supplant one single story with another. Again, I must remind you that every cause, no matter how noble, has its tyrants. The tyranny of the single story is, ironically, one of the things Mama Winnie fought against. The single story, when imposed uncritically, can be quite dangerous.

Because some among us were uncritical of the single story of Paul Erasmus and his Stratcom, Mamma Winnie could have been killed in the streets of Soweto to the sound of celebratory applause and ululation in the background.

Because some among us are today uncritical of the single story of Paul Erasmus and his Stratcom, those who are accused of being purveyors of propaganda against Mama Winnie stand accused of murdering her legacy.

To a certain degree Mama Winnie was a victim of our gullibility. In the days, weeks and months to come, others must not become victims of our gullibility irrespective of the single story to which they have attached themselves.