The good, bad and ugly
WINNIE: ANTI-APARTHEID STRUGGLE ICON HAD FAIR SHARE OF CONTROVERSIES
Married to South Africa’s first democratically elected president for 38 years.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s marriage to Nelson Mandela and her anti-apartheid activism ensured many South Africans saw her as “the mother of the nation”, but her past was littered with dark controversies.
Born Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela and always known simply as “Winnie”, she was married to Nelson for 38 years – one of the most storied romances of modern history.
Most of their marriage was spent apart, with Nelson imprisoned for 27 years, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone and to keep alive his political dream under the repressive white-minority regime.
In 1990, the world watched when Nelson Mandela finally walked out of prison – hand in hand with Winnie.
But they separated just two years later and divorced in 1996.
Winnie was born on September 26, 1936, in the village of Mbongweni in what is now Eastern Cape.
She completed university, a rarity for black women at the time, and became the first qualified social worker at Johannesburg’s Baragwanath Hospital.
Nelson Mandela, who was then married to his first wife, met Winnie at a bus stop in Soweto when she was 22.
They wed in June 1958 but he soon went underground, pursued by the apartheid authorities.
In October that year, Winnie was arrested for the first time at a protest by women against the pass system that restricted movements of black people in white-designated areas.
After Nelson was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, Winnie was also in and out of jail as the police hounded her in a bid to demoralise him.
Government security forces banished her to the desolate town of Brandfort, where her house was bombed twice.
Throughout the height of apartheid, Winnie remained at the forefront of the struggle, urging students in the Soweto uprising in 1976 to “fight to the bitter end”.
But in the 1980s, the militant-martyr began to be seen as a liability for Mandela and the liberation movement.
She had surrounded herself with a band of vigilante bodyguards called the Mandela United Football Club, who earned a terrifying reputation for violence.
Winnie was widely linked to “necklacing”, when suspected traitors were burnt alive by a petrol-soaked car tyre being put over their heads and set alight.
Her notoriety was reinforced by a speech in 1986 when she declared that “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”.
In 1991, Winnie was convicted of kidnapping and assault over the killing of Stompie Seipei Moeketsi, a 14-year-old boy. Moeketsi, who was accused of being an informer, was murdered by her bodyguards in 1989.
Her jail sentence was reduced to a fine and she denied involvement in any murders when she appeared before Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
“She was a tremendous stalwart of our struggle and icon of liberation – something went wrong, horribly, badly wrong,” Tutu said as damning testimony implicated her.
She served as a deputy minister in President Mandela’s government, but was sacked for insubordination and eased out of the top ranks of the ruling party. –