Winnie Madikizela-Mandela dies at 81
JOHANNESBURG » Even the name given to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at birth — Nomzamo, “one who undergoes trials” — foretold a life of struggle.
During her nearly 38year marriage to Nelson Mandela, she fought for black majority rule even as she vowed to escape the shadow of the great man.
And although many South Africans called her the “Mother of the Nation,” she would become engulfed in criminal convictions and scandals.
Madikizela-Mandela died Monday in a Johannesburg hospital at the age of 81 after a long illness, her family announced. She will be honored with a state funeral on April 14, President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday evening after paying a condolence visit to Madikizela-Mandela’s home in Johannesburg’s Soweto township.
Over the years, Madikizela-Mandela became a symbol of the suffering caused by South Africa’s system of white minority rule known as apartheid and became a force against it, ultimately serving as a member of parliament.
She and her husband began a family before Nelson Mandela went underground and then was imprisoned for more than a quarter-century. Left with two young daughters, Madikizela-Mandela was persecuted by police and banished to a remote town where neighbors were forbidden to speak with her.
As Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison seeking reconciliation and forgiveness, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela wanted the perpetrators of apartheid punished.
“What brutalized me so much was that I knew what it is to hate,” she once said in a South African television interview.
Madikizela-Mandela’s story grabbed the imagination of people around
the world. It’s been told in books as well as the Hollywood movie “Winnie,” starring Oscar-winning actress and singer Jennifer Hudson.
The young Winnie grew up in what is now Eastern Cape province and came to Johannesburg as the city’s first black female social worker. Her research into the high infant mortality rate in a black township, which she linked to poverty caused by racism, first sparked her interest in politics.
“I started to realize the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live, the appalling conditions created by the inequalities of the system,” she said.
In 1957, she met Nelson Mandela, a rising lawyer and anti-apartheid activist 18 years her senior, and they married a year later following his divorce from his first wife.
The first five turbulent years of their marriage saw Mandela going underground to build the armed struggle against apartheid, and finally to prison in 1963, while his wife gave birth to two daughters.
“The wife of a freedom fighter is often like a widow, even when her husband is not in prison,” Mandela wrote. But he added: “Winnie gave me cause for hope. I felt as though I had a new and second chance at life. My love for her gave me the added strength for the struggles that lay ahead.”