Winnie Mandela no more
johannesburg — Winnie Mandela, the former wife of South African anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, died on Monday aged 81, triggering an outpouring of tributes to one of the country’s defining and most divisive figures.
She died in a Johannesburg hospital after a long illness, family spokesman Victor Dlamini said in a statement. Winnie Mandela, who was married to Nelson Mandela for 38 years, played a high-profile role in the struggle to end White-minority rule but her place in history was stained by controversy and accusations of violence.
“It is with profound sadness that we inform the public that Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela passed away at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa on Monday,” her family said. —
She refused to be bowed by the imprisonment of her husband, the perpetual harassment of her family by security forces, detentions, bannings and banishment.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Mama Winnie has lived a rich and eventful life, whose victories and setbacks have traced the progress of the struggle of our people for freedom”
Cyril Ramaphosa,
then vice-president
She kept the memory of her imprisoned husband Nelson Mandela alive during his years on Robben Island and helped give the struggle for justice in South Africa one of its most recognizable faces.”
Winnie family statement
From every situation I have found myself in, you can read the political heat in the country.”
Winnie wrote in a biography
johannesburg — 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 after a legal wrangle that revealed her affair with a young bodyguard.
With or without Nelson, Winnie built her own role as a tough, glamourous and outspoken black activist with a loyal grassroots following in the segregated townships.
“From every situation I have found myself in, you can read the political heat in the country,” she said in a biography.
Winnie was born 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.
It was her political awakening, especially her research work in Alexandra township on infant mortality, which found 10 deaths in every 1,000 births.
“I started to realise the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live, the appalling conditions created by the inequalities of the system,” she said.
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 tortured her, tried locking her up, confined her to Johannesburg’s Soweto township, and then banished her to the desolate town of Brandfort, where her house was bombed twice. She was allowed to visit her husband in prison rarely, and they were always divided by a glass screen.
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 head 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 Moeketsi, a 14-year-old boy.
Moeketsi, who was accused 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. —