Highest honour for Mama Winnie
President Ramaphosa says the ANC’S highest award will be made posthumously to Madikizela-mandela
THE ANC will bestow its highest honour, the Isithwalandwe/seaparankoe, on Winnie Madikizela-mandela, said President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Madikizela-mandela deserved to be honoured by the party she served for more than 60 years, he said at her funeral yesterday.
In September 2016, Madikizelamandela offered to take Ramaphosa along with EFF leader Julius Malema to Marikana to meet the widows of mineworkers killed during the massacre. She died before she could take him there.
Ramaphosa said now that Madikizela-mandela had died, he had been left to visit Marikana alone, but would be guided by her spirit. “I am sure Julius Malema will go with me,” he added.
Ramaphosa described Madikizela-mandela as a great African woman and the “big mama of the nation” who provided leadership during the country’s most difficult period.
“She was perpetually in the trenches. As men ran away, she was there,” he said.
Ramaphosa said Madikizelamandela had laid bare the edifice of patriarchy and loudly spoken truth to power. Her life had been about service to her people and alleviation of suffering, he said.
Earlier, ANC chairperson and mining minister Gwede Mantashe, said Madikizela-mandela and the late ANC veteran Albertina Sisulu had not walked in the shadows of their husbands.
“They were leaders in their own right,” he said.
Meanwhile, Malema took a swipe at ANC leaders who had distanced themselves from Madikizelamandela when she faced a “smear campaign” by apartheid agents.
Malema, who had a close relationship with Madikizela-mandela despite being booted out of the ANC, pulled no punches in attacking those who agreed with the narrative that the struggle icon had a hand in the murder of Stompie Seipei.
He said he had spoken to Seipei’s mother, who had exonerated Madikizela-mandela of all allegations against her.
Madikizela-mandela’s daughter Zenani Mandela-dlamini, in her tribute at the funeral, launched a scathing attack on former police commissioner George Fivaz for belatedly clearing her mother from involvement in the murder of Sepei.
The attack on Fivaz came after he admitted that the police had then been looking for every piece of information which could link Madikizela-mandela to the murder of Seipei but failed to find a “shred of evidence”.
She described those who had labelled her mother a murderer as “hypocrites”.
“And to those who have vilified my mother through books, on social media and speeches, don’t for a minute think we’ve forgotten. The pain you inflicted on her lives on in us. Praising her now that she’s gone shows what hypocrites you are. Why didn’t you do the same to any of her male counterparts and remind the world of the many crimes they committed before they were called saints?”
Mandela-dlamini said it had become clear “that South Africa, and indeed the world, holds men and women to different standards of morality”.
“The apartheid state developed a sophisticated and brutal infrastructure for our oppression. It was intolerant of any talk of democracy, especially from a woman activist,” she said.