No Madiba without his Winnie
Ihave always struggled with celebrating Mandela Day. For me, it’s a window-dressing gimmick: giving is not a show-and-tell affair lasting all but a day – but more particularly because the emerging black feminist in me can’t identify with the man.
He may have been a struggle icon, but his failure to rise to the occasion for the woman who stood behind him is what makes him unrecognisable – so unrecognisable that it chips away at all his good works. Works he could not have done without a wife, no matter how flawed she was.
She kept the home fires burning, raising his offspring, continuing to echo his name so that it may not be lost in the archives of history: say what you will, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was the tenacity that Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela needed.
We did not all make it to leadership’s promised land – especially women have not seen this land of milk and honey. Yes, women must be addressed as equals – but mostly we are degraded, seen as ungovernable, tolerated. We are called angry, bitter and with a misplaced sense of importance.
Madikizela-Mandela was no different. Her sacrifices were muted because her shadow was engulfed in patriarchy. Their stances may have been different, but the couple’s sacrifices were the same. Why are we celebrating one and not the other?
The place of the woman requires praise. Today, we are the parents who are forced to step in for the absent fathers.
But we stay, as did Madikizela-Mandela, despite her sacrifices being tainted because of a society smothered in patriarchy.
It was the inactions in all things gender-related of the Nelson Mandela Foundation that gets me; the same foundation that has, through its silence, allowed for the dissemination of the name of Madikizela-Mandela.
We have immortalised Mandela, the human being and have dumbed down to simply being followers of a character. But where is the empathy for his ex-wife?
I do not reject Mandela the man, but Mandela Day must be bigger than one individual. A family in its entirety was sacrificed.
We cannot separate the man from an entire family to suit our agenda.