A life filled with the struggle
Winnie was a fearless leader to millions of oppressed people, writes Sandile Ngidi
NOMZAMO Winnie Madikizelamandela, who has died at the age of 81, undoubtedly belonged to a stellar generation of African revolutionaries.
Thrust into the belly of liberation politics in the late 1950s, Winnie soon rose to become an inspiration and a fearless leader to millions of South Africa’s oppressed people.
When senior leaders of the broad liberation movement were banned, imprisoned or exiled, she was a pillar of strength to political activists and ordinary citizens alike.
More than 40 years ago, Winnie was banished to that Afrikaner backwater called Brandfort. This was after she had refused an ultimatum to either opt for exile or return to the Transkei.
She turned her house arrest and banishment in Brandfort into a site of struggle through community development and the pursuit of the underground Struggle in bold defiance of the wrenching brutality of the apartheid state.
Daring desolation, a biting winter, physical and emotional displacement and a myriad sordid acts of intimidation, psychological torture and trauma, Winnie withstood the cruel test.
She kept ties with activists not only in Soweto and other parts of the country, but also reconnected with the exiled ANC.
Undoubtedly in her triumph over various adversities lie the seeds of personal tragedy and loss, a dichotomy that is a recurring theme in the lives of so many formidable individuals who defy the odds.
Winnie was a product of her times, a product of ugly and demeaning historical conditions for the majority of black South Africans.
This charismatic figure kept the flame of hope alive and energised struggles for freedom for all – against immense odds.
Winnie raised her voice and her clenched-fist black power salute against armed soldiers and marauding military monsters for the better part of the apartheid years.
Consequently, she faced numerous threats to her life, arbitrary attacks on her integrity and indescribable dirty tricks to crush her spirit and her mass appeal.
Although getting married to Nelson Mandela on June 14, 1958 was an act of enormous love, it was also a statement of defiance since Mandela had already developed a reputation for his ANC work and had begun to be seen as a dangerous man by the apartheid state.
From the onset, the romance competed heavily with politics – a passion the couple fortunately shared.
Inspired by the famous Women’s March against the pass laws in 1956, Winnie, Albertina Sisulu and others undertook a similar march in 1958 from Phefeni station in Orlando to the city centre.
That Winnie was going to be a thorn in the flesh of the apartheid government was noticed early on and made official with her first banning order on December 28, 1962. For the first time, Winnie’s freedom of movement, association and expression were severely restricted.
In many respects,
Winnie’s life story was about ending her people’s quest for emancipation from colonialism and the racist and economic injustice that persisted even after apartheid officially crumbled.
Hers was a dream for a total overhaul of a heinous system that dehumanised and brutalised people at will.
The revolutionary
Winnie fully understood the international solidarity aspect of all human rights struggles. She supported – among others – the US civil rights struggles and advocated for the freedom of Namibia and Israelioccupied Palestine.
The Winnie that we must remember was also a humble Mpondo girl, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, born the fifth of nine children at Mbongweni village in Mbizana, in the Eastern Cape on September 26, 1936.
Her father, Columbus, was a revered local history teacher who later became a government minister in Kaizer Matanzima’s Bantustan regime. Both her father and her science-teacher mother, Nomathamsanqa Gertrude Mzaidume, valued education and instilled a great sense of personal ambition in the young Winnie.
Her becoming the first black social worker in Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital fitted the storyline of someone with a limitless hunger for achievement.
Winnie was always relevant. The SASO-BPC triallists and Black Consciousness activists such as Lybon Mabasa, Aubrey Mokoape, Terror Lekota, Muntu Myeza and Saths Cooper held Winnie in the highest esteem. She personally gave them moral support while they were on trial. For the Soweto ’76 leaders and those of the ANC Youth League, Winnie was always an uncompromising leader, mother and equal.
At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, former apartheid security agent and policeman Paul Erasmus revealed that for years Winnie’s household had been under 24-hour police surveillance. Erasmus confirmed the long-held suspicion that the so-called trainer of the notorious Mandela Football Club, Jerry Richardson, was no soccer ace but a bloody apartheid spy.
He also revealed that the National Party had, in the late 80s, on the eve of embarking on what appeared to be sincere political talks with the ANC, set up a special police unit whose main task was to compromise Winnie and, indirectly, Nelson Mandela and the ANC.
Character assassination propaganda included spreading rumours that Winnie was an alcoholic and that she had an affair with Barclays Bank managing director Chris Ball.
There is no doubt that when Nelson Mandela announced that he and
Winnie were getting divorced in 1996, over and above personal differences that became irreconcilable between the two, the work of apartheid’s dirty tricks character assassination propaganda against Winnie also worsened relations in the Mandela household.
Not all decisions Winnie took endeared her to the exiled ANC and those who led the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) inside the country in the latter part of the 1980s.
The exiled ANC’S call to make the country ungovernable and the intensification of radical political thought from the 1970s onwards, had heightened the political temperature and eroded accepted codes of political discipline.
Not all orders from Lusaka and other command centres of the banned ANC and its military wing umkhonto wesizwe (MK) made sense to those on the ground.
Some were distorted by spies operating within the apartheid state and inside the broad liberation movement.
Recent historical readings of the ANC’S military exploits towards toppling the apartheid state now reveal that promises of full-scale guerrilla warfare came down to rhetoric and little else.
On the other hand, for the likes of Winnie, the harsh realities on the ground demanded braving the dusty streets in the thick of darkness and literally fanning the flames of insurrection.
Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela Mandela’s untold traumatic experiences will for a long time be difficult to memorialise and give objective meaning to.
This is partly so because in a post-apartheid South Africa, our recent past is highly contested, and our liberation history and its legitimacy are on trial.
Despite the best public relations spin in the world, many who sacrificed their lot for our democracy remain the nameless and the demonised.
And those few who survived the darkness are constantly being urged to mute their call for justice and equality. They are being reduced to lifeless objects and relics of an insignificant past that must be quickly forgotten.
Only by remembering can we avoid such past horrors. Like the shoes displayed in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that declares: “We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses/we are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers/from Prague and Amsterdam/and because we are made from fabric and leather/and not of blood and flesh, each of us avoided the hellfire.”
Long live Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-mandela.