Like the dust I rise
REVERED by many as the epitome of Imbokodo – the grinding stone – Mama Winnie is actually known in Thembuland as Nkosikazi Nobandla Madikizela-Mandela.
Much has been written about her public life as a political activist, so ours is to reflect on some of the aspects of her life that we wish to celebrate today, as she turns 80 years of age.
This is a very critical age in African communities because she has now transcended being merely a wife, a mother or even a grandmother. In our culture, an elderly woman of such advanced age is a spiritual medium; she is a man in her own right who now has the authority to enter even the sacred spaces within the homestead and she possesses most of the critical information about rituals.
One of her critical tasks is that of mediating on disputes and rivalry that may occasionally arise within the family.
Arguably, Mama Winnie maintained a more cultural posture than her husband – the former president, the revolutionary, the world icon who was a Thembu kingdom prince himself. After all, Mama Winnie was raised in a culturally rooted community in Mbongweni village, outside the small town of Mbizana in the Eastern Cape. And after studying and becoming the first black social worker in South Africa, she started to be more exposed to the nature of the struggles of our people, with her work putting it into context.
Thus her own political activism was formally launched.
It is no coincidence that in her late seventies she took on the struggle to defend the rights and privileges of the many voiceless and faceless African women all over the country by deliberately taking the matter of her Qunu marriage home to court, effectively trying to leave a legacy in which civil law would also provide for that which is already provided for in our long-standing customary law.
This is that the marriage home belongs to the wife who was there when it was built. Custom dictates that “akukho mfazi wakhela omnye”, loosely meaning “no one wife should be forced to build a home for another”.
The house and the wife can’t be separated because, in our custom, the house is the wife and the wife is the house.
This was overlooked by many so-called women’s rights activists. It