MANDELA’S FIREBRAND DAUGHTER
Zindzi Mandela, who has died aged 59, was three when her father was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. Thereafter, she was brought up by her mother, Winnie, whom she saw being persecuted by the security forces, often jailed and finally banished. She was 15 when she met her father again, in 1975. He recalled in his memoir that he’d been nervous about the meeting; but was delighted to find that she’d grown into a beautiful young woman, who was as “strong and fiery” as her mother. She had been anxious about the visit too, she said, but such was her father’s charm, she was able to forget their bleak surroundings. In 1985, when the Apartheid regime offered Mandela a conditional release, it was Zindzi who read out his rejection of the terms, in front of a cheering crowd in Soweto. But when Nelson Mandela was finally freed, and became South Africa’s president, Zindzi, who had become an activist in her own right, did not share his desire for reconciliation. “We didn’t understand Dad at all; we weren’t mentally or emotionally prepared for peace,” she explained.
Zindziswa Mandela was born in Soweto in 1960, and was 18 months old when her father was arrested. As her mother was living under constant threat, friends paid for her and her sister to go to boarding school in Swaziland. The police, she said, would make sure to arrest Winnie Mandela in time for the holidays. “We returned to an empty house so often I lost count.” In 1977, when Winnie Mandela was exiled, Zindzi went with her, said The Daily Telegraph. It was in the Orange Free State that she trained with the resistance: “We were preparing for warfare,” she said. In the 1980s, she and her mother returned to Soweto, where she earned a fearsome reputation as an activist. When she heard that her father was to be freed, she was at the funeral of her baby’s father, the ANC activist Clayton Sithole, who had killed himself in prison.
For a few years, she lived with her father. She was irritated that though she was 29, he treated her like a teenager, but touched that when her baby woke up, he’d get up to feed him, “because he’d missed all that”. (She eventually had four children by different fathers.) She didn’t speak to him for a while after he and her mother split up, but then served as his de facto First Lady. A published poet, she worked as a lawyer and a diplomat: in 2014, she was made ambassador to Denmark. Last year, she was criticised for tweeting her strongly worded opinions about white land ownership. She refused to apologise.