How do we write about Winnie’s
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s legacy should not be reduced to the uncomplicated heroism that exemplifies today’s personality politics
First, the facts: regardless of what Euro-American pundits or obituary writers conclude about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — or what some white (and some black) South Africans say around the braai — she was a hero to the majority of South Africans, and still is. Just witness the spontaneous outpouring of visitors and vigils at her home in Soweto and around the country.
Various people and political movements have long appropriated Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as a symbol. Her death intensifies this.
For a long time, depending on your point of view, Madikizela-Mandela served as an extreme militant or radical liberationist. She was contrasted with Nelson Mandela’s “reasonable” conciliatory stance towards whites and capital at the end of apartheid.
Such comparisons are now, as they were then, unhelpful. They also serve conservative ends. Those who make them conveniently forget that Nelson Mandela went to prison for advocating armed struggle.
Although some headlines sought to relegate Madikizela-Mandela’s significance to that of “Madiba’s former wife”, she was a major leader of the struggle in her own right and developed a political identity independent of her former husband.
The ANC claims MadikizelaMandela as part of its more centrist orthodoxy. But it is also the case that, despite ANC leaders now lining up to eulogise her, many in the organisation never liked her, didn’t know what to do with her or were long at odds with her brand of radicalism. Thabo Mbeki’s interview in the days following her death provided a glimpse into that viewpoint.
Outside the ANC, MadikizelaMandela still provokes strong, contradictory reactions: the opposition Democratic Alliance leader, Mmusi Maimane, reading the political mood, said “she was principled and stood up for the truth”. Young black women, for whom Madikizela-Mandela was a feminist black icon, photographed themselves #AllBlackWithADoek, and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) declared her “the first woman president South Africa never had”.
By contrast, Paul Trewhela, a political prisoner who edited the underground journals Freedom Fighter and Searchlight South Africa but left the South African Communist Party and today is ideologically closer to the DA, compared her with Hitler and Stalin. An obituary by news agency Reuters combined an honorific with an old slur from Britain’s right-wing tabloid press: She was “mother, then mugger” of the nation.
However you feel about her, she led a big life that intersected with almost every major current of recent South African history. Engaging seriously with that life is a way of engaging seriously with history. Done properly, it could help us to understand not just how South Africa got here but also where we are going.
The country faces a long overdue attempt to resolve the land question and deepening class and racial inequalities. Understanding MadikizelaMandela’s activism might help us through the quagmire.
Understanding her struggles would mean avoiding the tendency to create new silences about how the struggle unfolded, its patriarchal character, or its strong-arm tactics that at one time seeped throughout the movement with devastating consequences.
There has been an unfortunate tendency in public life to silence complex discussions about MadikizelaMandela’s political life. On the right, people who believed the apartheid propaganda about her, or those who are invested only in her weaknesses and faults, gloss over her heroic actions. By the same token, those on the left who wish to push back against the critiques neglect the full range of her actions. It becomes a zero-sum game.
Madikizela-Mandela became politically aware as a child in rural Transkei and was involved in political work as a trainee social worker in Johannesburg after she moved there. But it was her marriage to Nelson Mandela, then already a veteran ANC leader, in 1958 that thrust her into the national (and international) political spotlight.
After only one year of marriage, Nelson Mandela went on the run. Shortly afterwards, he went to prison, only emerging more than 29 years later. From then on, the mainstream framing of MadikizelaMandela characterised her only in terms of her relationship to Nelson Mandela; she existed to “keep Nelson Mandela’s memory alive”. This required that she lived up to the stereotype of dutiful, waiting wife.
Instead, over the next two decades, Madikizela-Mandela emerged as probably the most visible leader of the resistance alongside Steve Biko. And she transcended Mandela and the ANC in the process. Her rise coincided with the decline of the ANC, when its activists were subjected to bannings, imprisonment and exile and ageing between 1964 and 1976.
While the party took some time to get back on its feet, Madikizela-Mandela proved adept at sensing the changing political currents and crossed political boundaries. She worked openly with Black Consciousness activists — whom the ANC leadership in exile despised — and provided open support and solidarity to activists leading the 1976 student uprising, so much so that the government blamed her principally for the uprising.
Her reward: she was first detained and then, in 1977, banished to Brandfort, a small town in the Orange Free State. But instead of cowering, Madikizela-Mandela radicalised the town’s black residents, flouted the rules of her banishment and recruited combatants for the ANC’s armed wing.
She did all this in the face of constant harassment, banning, imprisonment, nearly 18 months in solitary confinement and torture. When reviewing her life, one is struck by how painful and lonely banishment was for her, as a woman, a wife and a mother.
She wasn’t as revered as Mandela but was subjected to similar acts of brutal punishment and humiliation, meant to strip her of her dignity.
What also stands out about this period is how she openly taunted and challenged the state and its agents, police and spies. Go back, look at film footage. There are extraordinary recordings of Madikizela-Mandela serving as a pallbearer, carrying the coffins of activists. This act is usually reserved for men. The effect on people was remarkable. It still is — on women, especially.
One effect of this was the challenge she represented to the ANC about what a woman should be or do in the context of political struggle or in social movements, in terms of challenging patriarchy. This is why she became a hero to feminists. As a black woman she also represented a challenge to white liberals and the apartheid regime, striking fear in the heart of white patriarchy.
This is the Winnie — the rebel who didn’t care much for the niceties of politics or what her opponents thought of her — that her admirers and supporters want us to remember. This image resonates strongly with student movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, and the causes of black youth and the EFF.
As for the ANC, it wants to use Madikizela-Mandela’s memory to contain, manage and corporatise political radicalism for electoral purposes and, at the same time, consign militant ideology to the past.
It is what happened to MadikizelaMandela after 1986 that divides opinion. In the very short period between 1986 and 1989 her politics took a dramatic turn after she returned — in defiance of the police — from Brandfort to her house in Soweto. She had to reinvent and reinsert herself in a newly configured political world.
While she was in Brandfort, things had changed somewhat for the better for resistance politics. The United Democratic Front, founded in 1983 to oppose apartheid reforms, had transformed into a national resistance movement inside the country and was operating openly.
In 1985, black trade unions — taking advantage of reforms to labour laws — had formed a national federation, Cosatu. The result was the first real mass movement against apartheid since the 1950s. More crucially, the terrain of struggle had shifted. Politics was no longer reliant on charismatic individuals, like Madikizela-Mandela, who often acted alone. Even the ANC in Lusaka wanted in, lest they become irrelevant.
There was now a new generation of leaders operating in a mass movement. There were literally thousands of Madikizela-Mandelas, radical and throwing themselves at the regime fearlessly. They led countrywide boycotts over rent, over conditions in schools, over sham elections and they did so openly carrying ANC flags and adopting the Freedom Charter. This new form of organisation also, crucially, demanded co-ordination and accountability. They had structures and meetings.
During this period, MadikizelaMandela became associated with a new kind of politics, one that combined personality and militarism and little accountability. As the needle shifted, she became more militant still. She started to dress in militarystyle garb and moved around with bodyguards.
One consequence of this political posture was, sadly, that she began to oversee and embolden the Mandela Football Club’s thuggishness. The gang lived under her roof and she provided them with political cover. They terrorised her neighbours in Soweto and revenge killings — which saw the club acting as a “court” to hear family disputes and deliver