Now Winnie will be forever free
JOBURG: MADIKIZELA-MANDELA GETS FREEDOM OF CITY
Mashaba proposes council chambers be renamed.
She may have had to wait her entire lifetime – and an additional five months after her death – but Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was finally honoured by the place she called home yesterday when the City of Joburg awarded her the freedom of the city.
Mayor Herman Mashaba also used the opportunity to propose a name change, suggesting the city’s council chambers be named after Madikizela-Mandela.
Speaking in the council chambers, where the metro met to honour Madikizela-Mandela with a Freedom of the City Category 1 award, Mashaba called on the council to “expedite the approval of a proposal to name the City of Joburg’s Council Chambers after Winnie Madikizela-Mandela”.
Mashaba said: “We are Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and she is us.”
He said no one could forget when Winnie, after many stints in detention, emerged and declared: “There is nothing the apartheid government can do to me any more.”
Winnie’s dream of a democratic South Africa remains a dream deferred, according to Mashaba.
“Her sacrifices have been reduced to nothing but a footnote. We see this as she has been referred to as Nelson Mandela’s wife.”
He reminded council members that it was Winnie who kept the memory of the ANC burning in the 1960s and rekindled the memory of Nelson Mandela.
The freedom of the city recognises and rewards the most outstanding service delivery candidate, service, or product at a national level. National government departments usually submit nominations with a motivation and the winning national department or candidate is chosen and approved by a panel of judges.
Madikizela-Mandela’s family said although the celebration comes after her passing, “it is better now than ever”.
A granddaughter of Madikizela-Mandela, Zamaswazi DlaminiMandela, said although the family was honoured and grateful that the City of Joburg and many others were celebrating their beloved mother so profusely, it was sad it was only coming after her passing.
She said, “I think in light of the fact that it is her birthday [on Wednesday], it is a good way to celebrate her, her life and her achievement and also what she did and sacrificed, not only for us as a family but for her own personal life. She had said she never got to be a mother, a wife or a woman. I think it’s time we remind ourselves that the work she did was not in vain.
“I know that if she was standing here she would say it is not for her alone, it is also for all those women who she fought with, whose lives were lost, who weren’t able to be ordinary citizens in a very difficult time in our country. Let this not be the end of the celebrating of my grandmother’s legacy.”