Capetonians pay tribute to maWinnie
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was many things to many people throughout her life
CAPETONIANS gathered at St George’s Cathedral last night to pay tribute and celebrate the life of Struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died on Monday at the of 81.
Among the speakers were former finance minister Trevor Manual, former ANC MP Vytjie Mentor and former ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa.
Former MP and singer Jennifer Ferguson sang in memory of Madikizela-Mandela.
Minister in the Presidency, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, yesterday announced the official memorial service for Madikizela-Mandela would be moved from the Regina Mundi Church to the Orlando Stadium in Soweto to accommodate the expected large number of mourners.
The service will take place on Wednesday while the funeral will be held at Fourways, north of Johannesburg on April 14.
Dlamini Zuma said the Department of International Relations would announce the list of foreign guests soon.
“The diplomats based here will be the ones confirming who will attend. That is all handled by the department, but we know that there will be people coming in from around the world,” she said.
Dlamini Zuma was accompanied by members of the inter-ministerial committee tasked with overseeing the funeral.
They included Communications Minister Nomvula Mokonyane, Gauteng Premier David Makhura and Intelligence Minister Dipuo Letsatsi-Duba.
The Struggle stalwart and former wife of the Nelson Mandela died at Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg on Monday.
She had been ill and had been in and out of hospital since the beginning of the year. The “Mother of the Nation”, as she was affectionately known, was lauded for holding the fort in the fight against apartheid when activists, including her late former husband, were arrested and jailed.
She was hounded by state security police and subjected to imprisonment, torture, house arrests and several banning orders.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a Special Official Funeral Category 1 for Madikizela-Mandela, in recognition of her contribution and sacrifice for her country.
“In line with this declaration, the national flag shall, with immediate effect, fly at half-mast at all flag stations countrywide and at South African diplomatic missions abroad. This will be observed until the evening of April 14,” Ramaphosa said.
NO OTHER woman – in life and after – occupies the place Winnie Madikizela-Mandela does in South African politics. An ANC stalwart, she nevertheless stands above, and at times outside, the party. Her iconic status transcends political parties and geographic boundaries, generations and genders. Poets have honoured her, writers have immortalised her and photographers have adored her.
Her life has been overburdened by tragedies and dramas, and by the expectations of a world hungry for godlike heroes on whom to pin all its dreams, and one-dimensional villains on whom to pour its rage. Yet perhaps it is in the smaller and more intimate stories of our stumbling to make a better world that we are best able to recognise and appreciate the meaning of the life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
In her particular life, we may see more clearly the violence wrought by colonialism and apartheid, the profound consequences of fraternal political movements to whom women were primarily ornamental and, yes, the tragic mistakes made in the crucible of civil war.
Her political power stemmed from the visceral connection that she was able to make between the everyday lives of black people in a racist state, and her own individual life. State power, in all its vicious dimensions, was exaggerated in its response to her indomitable will – and in its stark visibility, personified.
Fearless in the face of torture, imprisonment, banishment and betrayal, she stood firm in her conviction that apartheid could be brought down. She said what she liked, and bore the consequences. Her very life was a form of bearing witness to the brutality of the system.
Many obituaries will outline the broad sweep of her life; few will mark the extent to which her revolutionary ideas were shaped before she even met Nelson Mandela. To most of her social circle in the 1950s, for a long time into the 1980s, and certainly for Nelson Mandela’s biographers, Madikizela-Mandela was a young rural naif who charmed the most eligible (married) man in town.
This way of seeing her as primarily beautiful, and not as an emerging political figure, has coloured both contemporaneous accounts of Madikizela-Mandela (for she was surely too young and beautiful to have a serious political idea) as well as scholarly accounts of the period (which focused on the thoughts and actions of men).
This misrecognition resonated in the ANC, which had no way of accommodating Madikizela-Mandela’s political qualities other than by casting her in the familiar tropes of wife and mother. Astutely, she embraced the role of mother and wife of a political leader and fashioned it into a platform for her own variant of radicalism, drawing on recent memories of the forcible dispossession of land and its impact on the Eastern Cape peasantry, and black consciousness.
Winnie Madikizela was born in a rural Eastern Cape village called Bizana in September 1936. Her parents, Columbus and Gertrude, were teachers and her childhood was marked by the stern Methodism of her mother and the radical Africanist orientation of her father.
Her rural background made her aware of land dispossession as a central question of freedom. By her own account, she learnt about the racialised system of power early in her life. From her father, she learnt about the Xhosa wars against the colonisers, and later would imagine herself as picking up where her ancestors had failed.
After six short years together, Madikizela-Mandela’s husband, Nelson, was sentenced to life imprisonment. By this stage, she too was inextricably involved in the national liberation movement, politics with single parenting. She was attuned to the mood of people, and was more of an empathic leader than a theorist or tactician.
She joined the ANC Women’s League and the Federation of South African Women, and participated in several campaigns. She was militant to the core. On one occasion, when a policeman arrived at her house with a summons and dared to pull her arm, she assaulted him and had to defend herself in court for the action.
In the ANC Women’s League and in the federation, she held positions as chairperson of her branch in Orlando, and was a member of their provincial and national executives. In the 1970s, with her close friend Fatima Meer, she formed the Black Women’s Federation. It was a short lived organisation with few campaigns, but signalled an adherence to the new township based politics that was sweeping the country.
Her mode of work in any case was not that of painstaking organisation building; she was more capable as a public speaker and as someone who could connect with people in the harsh conditions of life in apartheid’s townships. She attended funerals and counselled families, acts of public courage that sustained activists. She offered a form of intimate political leadership, instinctively aligning herself with people in distress.
If the apartheid state had hoped to break her, they failed. She was fearless in the face of the state’s attempts to silence her. Her home was repeatedly invaded and searched, and she was arrested, assaulted and imprisoned several times. Then, in 1977, in an act of extreme cruelty, she was served with a banishment order to a place in the Free State called Brandfort – a place she had never heard of nor had she ever visited.
As she put it: “When they send me into exile, it’s not me as an individual they are sending. They think that with me they can also ban the political ideas. But that is a historic impossibility… I am of no importance to them as an individual. What I stand for is what they want to banish.”
But although the state did not break Winnie, by her own account it did brutalise her.
The consequences were awful, not just for her but also for Paul Verryn, and especially for the families of Stompie Seipei and Abu Asvat. This period in her life, and in South African politics generally, is one that will not only occupy our moral energies, but also shape the ways in which narratives of violence in the 1980s are written. These were dark times in a country weighed down by states of emergency and militarised control. The exaggerated quality of Madikizela-Mandela’s life had to bear, too, the nightmares of our nation’s struggles to free itself.
Commentators like to use words such as maverick and wayward to describe her, but these tendencies developed because the regular structures of the ANC could not easily accommodate a powerful woman with a radical voice. Stepping outside the agreed parameters of the official party line, as she frequently did, was a form of asserting her independence, a form of refusal of the terms of political cadreship that were available to women in the ANC and in society more generally. It also allowed her to build alliances with the new voices emerging after 1994, from standing with the Treatment Action Campaign against Thabo Mbeki’s policies on HIV/AIDS, to supporting the formation of the EFF. It accounts for the tremendous affection for her among young activists who are equally wary of the sedimented power structures in politics.
The endless stream of photographs that picture her in romantic embrace with Nelson Mandela, even now in her death, and despite their divorce, miss this fundamental point: the marriage was only a small part of her life, not its definitive point. To present her simply as wife, mostly as mother, is to erase the many struggles she waged to be defined in her own terms.
Hassim is Professor of Political Studies, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand
This article first appeared in The Conversation.
I AM OF NO IMPORTANCE TO THEM AS AN INDIVIDUAL. WHAT I STAND FOR IS WHAT THEY WANT TO BANISH