Mama Winnie an inspiration for all who fight for justice

WE CELEBRATE the unstoppable, fearless Mama Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela. She is now 80 years old. There are indeed few parents in the world who understand the youth and its inevitable capture by a generational spirit more than Mama Winnie.

This gift Mama Winnie has managed to champion since her own youth when, in the mid-1950s, she was already concerned with the generational continuity of the black youth.

Working at Baragwanath Hospital she conducted research that indicated worrying levels of the child mortality rate within the black community in Alexandra, standing at 10 in 1 000 births.

The black youth movement in the township schools that challenged the murderous apartheid regime is indebted to her fearless affirmation.

It was Mama Winnie who was the central pioneer behind the parents’ affirming of the youth uprising of 1976 and its legitimate fight against Bantu education, and the murderous apartheid regime itself.

During the 1976 student and youth uprisings, she established the Black Women’s Federation and the Black Parents’ Association. It was her role in these formations, which were openly aligned to Black Consciousness ideology, that got her detained in 1977 under the Internal Security Act and banished to Brandfort in Free State.

This isolation, torture and detention must be elaborated as an important affirmation to the 1976 students’ uprising which many parents would have sought to suppress, and condemn their children not to challenge the system.

That is what revolutionary parenting means and it is even more urgent today with many of our youths taking to the streets in the fight for access to higher education.

We should ask where are the parents’ associations behind the students who are being harassed and brutalised by police today, simply for asking for access to higher education.

To celebrate Mama Winnie is to call out this important history and her contribution in ways that inspire uncompromising movements for justice in our own present.

To celebrate her birth is to pick up the spear that is her life and each day refuse that a black African child anywhere must be oppressed or denied opportunities because of the colour of their skin.

To celebrate her is to assume the radical spirit that made her withstand the torture at Brandfort, the isolation, starving and pain, all in the name of justice.

To this day, Mama Winnie still lives in Soweto. Like many struggle elders with her credentials, she could have chosen to live in Houghton or any of the white suburbs in Johannesburg.

Yet, 22 years after this dysfunctional democracy that has failed to change the lives of black people, she is still a resident of Soweto.

This must account for her continued isolation because no matter what, she will always speak the truth, the truth that is part of her life and her lived experience.

This is why she intimately knows the struggles of the poor, who many politicians claim to speak for and to lead.

In Mama Winnie, we celebrate courage and selflessness. These are important virtues that those who lead us today have forgotten or completely ignored.

They have sacrificed them at the table of political convenience and expediency, only to gain access to the comforts of bourgeois life.

It is indeed impossible to be selfless without at some point being courageous. This is the mark of the calibre of leadership that we will always need, but need even more urgently today.

There is no doubt that many who laid down their lives for the struggle understood this. Yet, today, they who yesterday were giving their lives for freedom are being used to suppress fearless fighters who speak truth to power.

It is because of her that we too chose the truth over the convenience of careerism.

It is because of her inspiration that we decided to heed to a generational call for economic freedom in our lifetime.

We, too, like the generations of the 1970s and the 1980s, counted on her inspiration to fight for what is right, no matter the consequences.

We are her children and she will aways be our mother.

The mother of all who fight for justice on the continent and all of the oppressed world.

Her fearlessness as a woman is precisely why Africa and the oppressed world honour her and will always find in her a timeless inspiration to fight for the betterment of our people.

Happy Earth Day mama, may you find great health in the days of your elderliness.