Her activism helped rid South Africa of apartheid rule.
WINNIE MADIKIZELAMANDELA 1936-2018
Winnie MadikizelaMandela, whose hallowed place in the pantheon of South Africa’s liberators was eroded by scandal over corruption, kidnapping, murder and the implosion of her fabled marriage to Nelson Mandela, died Monday in Johannesburg. She was 81.
Her death, at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, was announced by her spokesman, Victor Dlamini. He said she died “after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year.”
The South African Broadcasting Corp. said she was admitted to the hospital over the weekend complaining of the flu after she attended a church service Friday.
Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and eloquent, Madikizela-Mandela (Madikizela was her surname at birth) was inevitably known to most of the world through her marriage to the revered Mandela. It was a bond that endured ambiguously: She derived a vaunted status from their shared struggle, yet she chafed at being defined by him.
Madikizela-Mandela commanded a constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and the post-apartheid leaders who followed Mandela could never ignore her appeal to a broad segment of society. In April 2016, the government of President Jacob Zuma gave Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s highest honors: the Order of Luthuli, bestowed, in part, for contributions to the struggle for democracy.
While Mandela was held at the Robben Island penal settlement, off Cape Town, where he spent most of his 27 years in jail, Madikizela-Mandela acted as the main conduit to his followers.
In time, her reputation became scarred by accusations of extreme brutality toward suspected turncoats, misbehavior and indiscretion in her private life.
She nevertheless sought to remain in Mandela’s orbit. She was at his side, brandishing a victor’s clenched-fist salute, when he was finally released from prison in February 1990.
Mandela, approaching 40 and the father of three, declared on their first date that he would marry her. Soon he separated from his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, a nurse, to marry Madikizela-Mandela on June 14, 1958.
In a crackdown in May 1969, five years after her husband was sent to prison, she was arrested and held for 17 months, 13 in solitary confinement. She was beaten and tortured. The experience, she wrote, was “what changed me, what brutalized me so much that I knew what it is to hate.”
In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the 1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto. Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard was convicted of murder. She was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, but South Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her punishment to fines and a suspended one-year term.
By then her life had begun to unravel. The United Democratic Front, an umbrella group of organizations fighting apartheid, expelled her. In April 1992, Mandela announced that he and his wife were separating.
In 1996, Mandela ended their 38-year marriage, testifying in court that his wife was having an affair with a colleague.