South Africa’s ‘Mother of the Nation’ dies at 81
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela and for decades one of South Africa’s most prominent and polarizing figures, died Monday at a hospital in Johannesburg. She was 81.
Her family confirmed the death in a statement, according to several South African newspapers, and said she had been hospitalized for an illness earlier this year.
At the time of her death, long after her divorce from the country’s first democratically elected president, Madikizela-Mandela was still called the Mother of the Nation. And in many ways, she epitomized the so-called “new” South Africa far more than her idealized former husband.
She was beautiful and violent. Her bravery under the brutal apartheid regime won her lasting respect and adulation; allegations that she was the kingpin of a deadly vigilante group during the 1980s earned her fear and mistrust.
She was a political insider who often played the role of outsider. While other leaders moved to luxurious, previously all-white suburbs, Madikizela-Mandela stayed in Soweto, the black township southwest of Johannesburg.
She at times harshly criticized the African National Congress — the political party that she also called her “family” — most recently condemning it for the continued economic disparity that has left millions of black South Africans in poverty. Yet since the end of apartheid in
1994, she served many roles in the South African government, from member of Parliament to the head of the ANC Women’s League.
In the late 2000s, she emerged again as a leading political player. She
was one of the top vote-getters to the ANC’s executive committee and in 2008 was listed in the No. 5 slot on the party’s parliamentary ticket — above many other senior politicians and cabinet members.
Fraud convictions, insubordination and allegations of crimes from corruption to murder all seemed, at different points, to spell her downfall. Yet Madikizela-Mandela always rebounded.
“I learned to deal with the police ... to be tough ... to survive,” she told a crowd at American University in 1996 after acknowledging that Americans must be “puzzled” by stories of her. “I want you to know where I come from so you can tell where I am headed. I’m like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons ... I stand defiant, tall and strong.”
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born in a remote, beautiful swath of South Africa called Pondoland on Sept. 26, 1936.
Her father, Columbus, was a schoolteacher, and although he appreciated missionaries — especially the Germans, who inspired him to add the “Winifred” to his daughter’s name — he taught local children a different type of history.
“We had our textbooks, naturally written by white men, and they had their interpretation,” Madikizela-Mandela wrote in her 1984 autobiography, “Part of My Soul Went With Him.” “Then [Columbus] would put the textbook aside and say: ‘Now, this is what the book says, but the truth is: these white people invaded our country and stole the land from our grandfathers.’
“There is an anger that wakes up in you when you are a child and it builds up and determines the political consciousness of the black man,” she added.