Winnie Mandela: The young mother who refused to be broken

THE death of South Africa’s veteran anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the age of 81 has sparked a national debate about how she should be remembered.

The more traditional sections of society, including her staunch supporters, want us to remember her as a faultless woman.

Others, particularly those who are still in the trenches fighting the old battles in favour of white supremacy, want us to remember Mrs Madikizela-Mandela as a violent and deeply flawed individual.

But anyone who wants to truly understand the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela I knew needs to go back in time and trace the steps of humiliation she suffered under the racist system of apartheid.

She was a freedom fighter; a revolutionary who was at the coalface of the anti-apartheid struggle — not an armchair activist who waged a revolution on Twitter or Facebook.

She was left to raise two young daughters when her husband of four years, Nelson Mandela, was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life in prison on the notorious Robben Island prison.

An activist in her own right, Mrs Madikizela-Mandela was once arrested in her pyjamas. The police refused to grant her permission to get her relative, who lived a block away, to come and stay with her children.

In 1969, she was locked in solitary confinement for 491 days. She was even left in her cell when she was on her period, without sanitary towels.

Her cell was adjacent to a torture chamber.

“Prisoner number 1323⁄69” wrote in her diary, which was later published in a book entitled 491 Days, that the screams of women being beaten from across the walls will never leave her mind. Later, at a time when many other anti-apartheid leaders were languishing in jail or in exile, she not only represented the liberation movement. She was The Movement.

When the apartheid regime found her to be too powerful to handle, it resorted to banishing her from her home in the commercial capital, Johannesburg, to the small rural town of Brandfort in what was then the Orange Free State, a bastion of white supremacy.

She was not allowed to receive visitors, but she travelled daily to the local post office to make phone calls telling the world about the brutality of the apartheid system. - BBC