The Week

The “Queen of Africa”: fearless, ruthless and defiant

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“She was tortured; her food was served on the unrinsed lid of a sanitary bin; and she slept on the floor of a 10ft x 5ft cell”

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela 1936-2018

“Rarely can there have been someone who was called to greatness and yet failed that calling as decisively as Winnie Madikizela-mandela,” said The Guardian. One of the defining figures of the anti-apartheid struggle, she showed extraordin­ary levels of courage in the face of unspeakabl­e brutality and vicious injustice. She became known as the “Mother of the Nation”, and the “Queen of Africa”. But by the time of her death last week aged 81, “she was neither, her reputation irrevocabl­y mired in murder and fraud”.

Born in the Eastern Cape in 1936, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was the daughter of devoutly Methodist teachers, and one of nine children. As a child she was a tomboy, and a fierce one. According to her biographer, she was involved in numerous fights, and when she tired of using her fists, she fashioned herself a knuckledus­ter by driving a nail into the bottom of a tin can, which she swung at her sister, ripping her face (she said she’d been aiming for her arm). For this, and other misdemeano­urs, she was thrashed by her mother, Gertrude. Yet mother and daughter were close, and Winnie, only nine at the time, was devastated when her mother died. And for all her aggression, she had a selfless side to her character, which led her to study social work at university. Although her family had struggled, it had not been particular­ly poor. Working as a social worker in a hospital in Johannesbu­rg opened her eyes to what she described as the “abject poverty under which most people had to live”, as a result of the “inequaliti­es of the system”.

Regal, elegant and beautiful, Winnie had many suitors in the 1950s, said The New York Times, but in 1957 she met and fell in love with Nelson Mandela, by then a leading figure in the liberation struggle. He was 18 years her senior, and they married a year later, after he’d divorced his first wife. Their marriage was unconventi­onal from the start. He was, at that time, preoccupie­d with organising the defence for the five-year-long Treason Trial, and, as commander of the ANC party’s armed wing, lived in the shadows. Determined not to be subsumed by her husband’s reputation, she became active in the resistance herself, and – while pregnant with their first child – was briefly jailed for taking part in a mass protest against laws restrictin­g black women’s mobility.

On her release, she found she’d been sacked from her job. Then in 1961, soon after their daughter was born, Nelson Mandela went undergroun­d; he was arrested in July 1962 and sentenced to life in prison in 1964. With her husband and many other leaders of the movement either in prison or exiled, Winnie Mandela worked tirelessly to keep his name, and the struggle, alive. She endured daily harassment by the police, and many beatings; she was often dragged out of her bed in the middle of the night, and spent 491 days in solitary confinemen­t from 1969 to 1970, said The Independen­t. She was tortured; her food was often served on the unrinsed lid of a sanitary bin, or covered in bird droppings; and she had to sleep on the floor of a 10ft x 5ft concrete cell. Yet she refused to be broken, and on her release she resumed her campaign. In 1976, she was banished for eight years to a remote, white-only town in Orange Free State, where she lived in a one-room shack that was twice burned down. The years of imprisonme­nt hardened her, she said – they scarred her soul and taught her how to hate. Returning to Soweto in the 1980s, burning with anger, drinking heavily and apparently paranoid, she became a liability to her own movement. At a rally in 1986, she endorsed a series of “necklacing­s”, in which suspected police informers and other enemies had petrol-soaked tyres placed around their necks. “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” she said. That year, from her large house in Soweto, she founded the Mandela United Football Club. Its members, regarded as her personal bodyguards, terrorised the township and were accused of committing a string of violent crimes at her instigatio­n, said Paul Trewhela on Spotlight. africa. The most notorious was the 1989 murder of Stompie Seipei, a 14-year-old boy who was abducted, beaten and “kicked around like a football” before having his throat slit. The Soweto doctor who treated him before he died was shot dead, while one of the witnesses to the atrocity was reported to have had his teeth knocked out, before being whisked to a prison in Zambia, to stop him testifying about Winnie Mandela’s alleged participat­ion in the killing.

During Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison, Winnie Mandela was allowed to visit her husband no more than twice a year. She had not remained faithful to him, but when he was released, in 1990, she was by his side, delivering a black power salute for the cameras. The following year, he stood by her when she was convicted of abducting Stompie Seipei, and sentenced to six years in jail (reduced to a fine on appeal). Even after they separated, he gave her a role in his National Unity government. But she was so insubordin­ate he fired her soon after, and when their divorce was finalised in 1996, he admitted that she’d been “cold” to him after his release, and blatant in her infidelity. “I was the loneliest man during the time I stayed with her,” he said.

In 1997, South Africa’s Truth and Reconcilia­tion Commission, chaired by Desmond Tutu, found that she’d been “politicall­y and morally” responsibl­e for at least a dozen “gross” human rights violations committed by Mandela United. Tutu begged her to show remorse; grudgingly, she conceded that things had gone “terribly wrong”. She was easily demonised, yet many South Africans shared her view that the brutality of the apartheid regime had necessitat­ed a violent response – and that the fight for justice was ongoing. Thus she remained a powerful force within the ANC, and served in several government roles until 2003, when she was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years in jail (which was overturned on appeal). Even after that, she remained a revered figure, and in 2009 she was re-elected as an MP.

At Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013, Winnie insisted on standing by his coffin, as though she was still his wife. But two years earlier, she had given an interview in which she castigated him for losing his revolution­ary zeal in prison, and making too many concession­s to his white oppressors. “He let us down.” Defiant to the last, she said: “I am not sorry. I will never be sorry. I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything.”

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