The enigma that is Winnie
Is a collection of autobiographical essays by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola
MANY of us have an idea of Winnie Mandela. Some of our ideas have undoubtedly been influenced by her own choices, her self-representation, her utterances, her decisions on who to associate with, and so forth.
At the same time, a large amount of what we know about her – as Winnie, as Winnie Mandela, or as Winnie Madikizela-mandela, comes to us in a reinterpreted form, spread via word of mouth.
A decade ago, before she and I were friends, I interviewed the socialist feminist film-maker Xoliswa Sithole, Peabody winner and twice British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) awardee, among numerous other accolades.
In that interview she told me that although she wanted to maintain a career in front of the camera, she decided to start making her own plays because of the paucity of the kinds of roles she wanted to play. She calls these “Angela Davis, Winnie Mandela kinds of roles”. She wanted roles of women characters with presence and voice. Women such as Davis and Mandela: complicated, layered, unconstrained.
She wanted roles that reflected women who were not a type: women who defied stereotype and patriarchal limitation. Roles of difficult women were so few and far between that Xoliswa Sithole decided she would no longer act; she would make films instead.
Winnie’s complicated life is not for everybody. Sometimes, there are concerted efforts to make her smaller than she is. This, however, is not exclusive to the Winnie we see through her detractors.
In a 2013 article for The New Yorker, republished in a few British and US outlets, Nadine Gordimer wrote about Nelson Mandela, mourning his loss and recalling a specific conversation with him, told to her in a confidence the Nobel Laureate now felt justified breaking after his death. In that conversation, Gordimer recalled how devastated Nelson Mandela was by Winnie’s affair with activist Dali Mpofu, or that she had lovers while he was incarcerated for 27 years.
Gordimer’s narrative is of a heart-broken husband, disappointed at what he assumed was a loyal, doting wife. Gordimer is aware of the many ways in which the expectation of fidelity to a spouse locked up for nearly three decades is highly gendered and difficult, if not impossible. Again, Musila’s valuable interjection here was to remind me that Gordimer highlights how hers and Mandela’s friendship is started off by her novel, Burger’s Daughter.
After someone had sneaked the Nelson Mandela’s widow, Graça Machel, left, and his former wife,winnie Madikizelamandela, right. novel into prison for Mandela, he had written her a letter about it. The novel, she says, is about the challenges of children of revolutionaries, living under daily threat of imprisonment. What is striking here, as Musila’s feedback underscores, is the irony of Gordimer’s lack of empathy and understanding for the burden of what Njabulo Ndebele in his novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Mamphela Ramphele in her scholarship had already described as political widowhood and its challenges.
Musila wrote to me “in the piece, Gordimer chooses to recognise Mandela’s human vulnerability to hurt; and in the novel, daughters’ vulnerabilities, but not mothers and wives; who, it seems to her, remain locked in their roles as dutiful mothers and political widows”.
I had missed this connection, not having read this novel since my Honours dissertation on Gordimer, submitted in 1994. However, I insert it here in gratitude for Musila’s sharp literary critic eye. The hurt Musila highlights is muted in Gordimer’s essay because hers is an attempt to speak about a different aspect of the statesman: the intimate life of her friend, to cast a light on aspects of his life that made him who he was, not just a heroic, saintly figure lost to the world.
But the novelist achieves so much more than this. She writes about Winnie in a very specific way: her failure to be a good wife. For Gordimer to fully sympathise with her friend’s pain, she grapples with the source of his devastation: an unreasonable and yet real expectation of spouse fidelity in the face of nearly three decades of absence.
Gordimer must also be aware of the enduring fascination with “waiting” women in South Africa’s political and literary cultures under apartheid. Often coded as “dutiful” wife-hood, Mamphela Ramphele has much more aptly dubbed it “honorary Winnie and Nelson on their wedding day in 1958. widowhood”.
What Winnie fails at here, and what devastates her husband, is dutiful wifehood and honorary widowhood. It should be unsurprising that the man written of as legitimate national patriarch should be devastated by this failure. The expectation of dutiful wifehood is designed to buttress heroic nationalism. That is its function. However, Winnie “fails” because she refuses the burden of symbolism. She insists on being a messy, flesh and blood woman instead. Across the world, feminist scholarships have consistently illuminated that flesh and blood women pose a problem for nationalism as they’re interested in lives that are more than symbolic.
Many social media responses marked Gordimer’s revelation as inappropriate: betrayal of confidence or a snide comment on Winnie that both placed unreasonable expectation and flattened her at a time when she needed sensitivity, and by some this was seen as an open attack on Winnie. Where Gordimer tried to shine a light on Nelson’s (heteropatriarchal) devotion, her readers focused their attention on who such devotion works against.
What is interesting in this essay for me, in addition to Gordimer’s full humanisation of her friend, Winnie Madikizela-mandela’s ex-husband, is the way in which Madikizela-mandela appears here, not as herself, but as proxy for something else. from Reflecting Rogue: Inside the mind of a
This is an extract
feminist by Pumla Dineo Gqola, published by Mfbooks Joburg. Available in all good book stores with a recommended retail price of R240.
About the author: Gender activist, award-winning author and full professor of African literature at Wits University, Pumla Dineo Gqola has written extensively for both local and international academic journals. She is the author of What is Slavery to Me? (Wits University Press), A Renegade Called Simphiwe (Mfbooks Joburg) and Rape: A South African Nightmare (Mfbooks Joburg).