Death was shock to the nation, says ex-president
THE country has lost one of its pillars and strong leaders in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former president Jacob Zuma said.
Speaking at Mama Winnie’s home in Orlando West‚ Soweto‚ yesterday‚ Zuma said he had been shocked on learning the mother of the nation was gone.
“I was shocked because she would go to the hospital and come out.
“It had become a comforting thing that whenever she went, she would come back.
“It was a big shock. It was not just a shock to me and my family but to everyone. It was too sudden.
“Not just a mother to the family but a mother to the organisation‚ the ANC‚ and a mother to the nation. One of our pillars has fallen.
“She was a leader‚ recognised not just within the ANC but the country and by the world.
Not because she was a wife of our leader‚ our icon Nelson Mandela‚ but because in her own name and right‚ she made a contribution to our struggle.”
Zuma said Madikizela-Mandela had influenced many oppressed people to fight for freedom.
“There are many who joined the struggle because they saw her fighting with her husband in prison.
“She represented many of the mothers who had their husbands in prisons or in exile whose names are not known‚ some will never be known.
“We have lost a mother‚ a leader‚ a comrade‚ a cadre of a special type. No one can doubt her contribution‚ that she did shorten the distance to our final day of liberation.”
AT some point, we all suffer. And we all endure. Such is humanity’s lot. How we respond to adversity can be defining.
A few will suffer and endure because of self-inflicted folly.
Others have it thrust upon them, by dint of circumstance for which they have little to no responsibility.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela suffered and endured, all because of an indefensible and grotesque programme of racial engineering that saw her husband, former president Nelson Mandela, jailed for 27 years.
When he emerged from his incarceration, he was embraced by a world that saw him as a veritable saint.
Apartheid was on its knees and the great man came with an offering of peace.
By the time he died in 2013, his star shone brighter than ever in the firmament.
Any question of his human fallibility was answered with another question: “Who’s perfect, anyway?”.
Mandela suffered and endured a great deal, too.
None other than Madikizela-Mandela made sure the world knew that. For this cause she toiled endlessly.
But try, for a moment, to appreciate what her suffering entailed.
She was outspoken and defiant, necessarily so, at a time when those in charge were hostile, white, male and intent on a hateful, nationalist agenda that viewed blacks as Untermensch. They tried to crush her at every turn.
In a sense she was a true soldier, on the battlefield day in, day out, with the singular goal of victory in mind.
A woman activist, a wife, a mother, fighting an ugly war in an ugly world.
Yes, there were darker episodes in her life and these will surely stalk her name in death.
When all is said and done, our nation is marked by these two legacies forged in the cauldrons of apartheid, both shaped by unwanted suffering and endurance; one gilded, another girded, by a selfless struggle that is as much about history as it is about our future.