Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman Who Multiplied

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie

This ‘Brazen: Reflections’ series was born out of a desire to continue the conversations springing out of the ‘Too Early For Birds: Brazen’ theatre performance in Nairobi in July 2018. TEFB-Brazen was a mix of straight-up scripted theatre, narration, poetry, music and dance that featured the little-known stories of six fearless women in Kenya’s history – freedom fighters like Field Marshall Muthoni wa Kirima, Mekatilili wa Menza and Wangu wa Makeri; democracy activists Philomena Chelagat Mutai and Zarina Patel and even one iconoclastic yet nameless woman warrior who brought down Lwanda Magere, the legendary ‘Man of Stone’ in Kenyan folklore. The story of each hero was narrated by a corresponding mirror character on stage. The ‘Brazen: Reflections’ series seeks to explore the idea of brazenness, what it means in our daily lives, whom the idea of brazenness privileges or erases, and the place that brazenness has in imagining freedom.

In September 2006, I came face-to-face with the murderous nature of Apartheid, while attending a self-development course in Cape Town. In a course of this nature in which people are seeking to transform themselves, it was inevitable that Apartheid would rear its ugly head. Yet when it did come, it came without warning. A white woman was at the microphone, working with the course leader through the devastating impact of the sexual molestation she had suffered as a six-year-old girl. And then out of nowhere, a middle-aged white man declared that he was going to leave the course as he found the conversation irritating and irrelevant. This was on the second day of the 3- and-a-half day course.

Lucky for all the participants, he allowed the course leader to talk him into staying and then he agreed to deal with what in the woman’s story had triggered in him. I must add that before this moment he had been a coachable star pupil.

The reason for his desire to run away snuck up on him as the coach worked with him. Let’s call the guy X and let’s tell his story. Imagine you are an 18 year old teenager preoccupied with the concerns of a normal 18 year old boy. Football, girls, keeping your mother off your back, and what university will accept you with those grades.

But all these preoccupations are put on hold because you are conscripted to serve your race in the violent war that is being waged to maintain white domination in South Africa. So you start your training in the National Service, which is mandatory for all white youth. The training to be a soldier is tough; this, after all, is the apartheid-era South African army, a military super power with nuclear weapons. An army developed with the might of Israel and assorted western friends. But for this 18 year-old, the training is mostly fun as these situations of extreme hardship can be, when you get to test yourself, when you get to find out what you made of.

By end of the training young X is now a real soldier and goes off to fight for his race. One day after a few weeks in active combat in the bush, he finds himself in a room. In that same room is a black man whom they called a “terrorist,” half dead from three days of brutal torture. Before that, they had subjected him to solitary confinement for 6 months. They had beaten the soles of his feet with a switch, and worst of all they had electrocuted his testicles. They were sure that was guaranteed to break them and make them spill all the beans. But not this one. Maybe it was true that he didn’t know anything, as he had kept wailing during the times he was conscious.

So there was X. In the company of an enemy who refused to crack, and white soldiers — some at the same low rank as him, and several of higher rank. But out of all of them, he was the latest recruit. Was this the reason the commander picked him to administer the lethal injection?

He hesitated, and then it dawned on him – he was being given the honour of killing a man. He of all the new recruits had been picked for this singular distinction. And a soldier obeys. So why did he feel so empty after the man stopped breathing? Why did he feel his body stop smiling? Why did he want to run away? Only his training saved him from bolting from the room, as he felt himself shrink and almost disappear.

Later did he wonder what was it him that made him so easily selectable. Did he spend many moments staring at his face in the mirror, looking for what had given him away like some girl who finds herself chosen amongst many girls to be sexually assaulted?

The coach then asked the question on all our minds.

How many did you kill? Mr X admitted to “about a dozen”. That’s how he put it. About a dozen. Conjuring in my mind images of a dozen eggs. Or a dozen hot-cross buns or a dozen of anything else. But there were many other white South African men in the room. Mr X’s confession gives them permission, and all of a sudden I find myself surrounded by Apartheid era killers, on the wrong side of history. But what was gratifying was that they had not escaped the consequences of their actions. They were paying the price for the murders they had committed, by living in a state of eternal unease. For most of them this was the first time they had ever talked about what they had done and how it had impacted them.

Read also: The Brazen Edition

Through the coaching Mr X realised the price of the murders he committed during the war. In the moment he realised he had to kill the battered and bruised black man lying helpless on the floor bleeding, Mr X lost his humanity and lost faith in humanity.

At the time of the self-development course, Mr X was in his forties and was now assessing what losing faith in humanity had cost him. He was a successful business man with a knack for starting successful companies. But he was twice divorced and kept shutting down businesses and running away. Before the course he thought he just loved to travel to faraway places. But he soon began to understand his actions as a continuing desire to get away from that moment when he killed his first black man. Although his government, his ancestors, his white community had worked hard to erase the humanity of black people, his reaction to his first murder confirms how unsuccessful these efforts had been. And when the other white former soldiers in the room started to share their experiences, they echoed Mr X’s suffering. The killing of black people during apartheid had broken these white men.

But like Teflon, whiteness also saved them. They were monsters but did not appear monstrous. We in that room did not naturally recoil from them in horror. Somehow their crimes seemed too tidy to be seen for what they were.

But this story is about Winnie Madikizela Mandela and her brokenness. If being in the powerful position of perpetrator like our friend Mr X could break you, imagine being on the receiving end. And not just on the receiving end but being Mandela’s wife. What they can’t do to him, they can do to you and they do.

If you really want to get a glimpse into the previously murderous intentions of those white men under Apartheid, look at what they did to Winnie Madikizela Mandela. Yet the Teflon effect means we never keep our attention on the brutal violence of these white men. We keep going to the nice neat lethal needle about to plunge into the body of the “terrorist”. We think of Winnie as somehow being the cause of her own incarceration and again we let the white men go free. Stompie is forever burning in our minds, a young boy that has a tyre round his neck, paraffin and fire.

So let’s go back tell a bit of the story of Winnie’s life under Apartheid. One day a military contingent is unleashed at night, at a time calculated to terrifying. The contingent descends on your home. How many? Enough to intimidate and frighten. They have come to take you away. You plead with them to allow you to take your two young children to your sister and they refuse.

How many mothers have had the experience of giving birth to their hearts? I mean it. When I gave birth to my child I gave birth to my heart. How could I live away from my babies not knowing if they were safe or not? And there was Winnie knowing her children were alone at home in Soweto. Apartheid was a murderous system and what made it even worse was that it was clearly thought out. It was scientific. Clinical. Intentionally cruel with an agenda to break those it deemed enemies. And who was a worse enemy than Winnie Madikizela Mandela? And so they went for her with all the weapons they had developed to fight their war, fought to keep South Africa a white paradise.

That first time they put Winnie in solitary confinement, (now wait for it) naked, with no water, in darkness, for 18 months. If you are a woman imagine being naked. Imagine having your period every month and having no protection. You cannot wash yourself and you have no privacy. I don’t know how long I would last. And then the children. Where are they? Are they safe? I just read Tsotsi by Athol Fugard. Tsotsi starts out as an ordinary young boy of ten years, living with his mother. One day Apartheid decides to demolish his home without warning to make way for white homes. He loses his mother and is left out in the cold to survive. He survives, but becomes a hardened thug who enjoys killing just because, preying on his own people, the victims of Apartheid.

So Winnie serves her 18 months horror term, at the end of which she is released – but the torture and Apartheid’s quest to break her is not over. Now she must serve house arrest in a remote community. By now Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is exhibiting her brokenness.

They say she traumatised the little conservative community with drinking loud reveries and seduction of young men. When I once expressed outrage at her betrayal of the great Nelson Mandela, my aunt retorted “But is she a tree?” I had to laugh at my own hypocrisy.

So by the time Winnie Madikizela-Mandela arrived at her house, back in Soweto after an eight year banishment, apartheid had succeeded in its intention. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a broken woman.

Let’s go back to that white woman at the front of the room. Her older cousin touched her private parts with malign intentions. Although she was six years old she knew his intentions. It was his intention to hurt her, and that put a crack into the fabric of her humanity that she now carried around with her. That’s all it takes to break someone – a malign touch. And what if the perpetrator uses a sledgehammer to break you repeatedly? How broken do you become?

But Winnie Madikizela Mandela was fighting a war. In a war is there time to nurse your wounds? Can you take a moment for a break? Can you have that healing touch or find a psychologist to help you deal with your issues? I know you know the answer. Even with a broken wing you must fly. You must lead from the front. You must be the Mother of the Nation. The world depends on you. And so Winnie learnt to fly with her broken wings, and the world is a much better place for it. Thank you Winnie Madikizela Mandela for being one of the original brazen women.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Sitawa Namwalie

April 2018

‘‘She talked about forgiveness, and it’s one of those things that whenever she spoke about, she would have tears in her eyes but the tears wouldn’t roll down her face,’’ Zodwa Zwane, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s personal assistant, stated in her eulogy on April 11, 2018, during an ANC memorial service at Orlando Stadium in Soweto, Johannesburg. ‘And she would say Zodwa, I don’t have tears anymore. I have felt pain up to the highest threshold.’’

Seth Mazibuko, who was the youngest member of the Student Action Committee that led the Soweto students’ uprising starting in June 1976 – which resulted in the killing of hundreds of students by apartheid police (estimates range between 176 and 700 deaths, with over 1,000 injured) – said that Madikizela-Mandela was an eternal source of strength to his generation. He recalled that fateful 16th of June 1976 when school children were shot by apartheid police for participating in a protest against the introduction of Afrikaans as the official language of instruction in schools. Madikizela- Mandela – driving a maroon Volkswagen Beetle – and journalist Sophie Tema – driving a white Volkswagen Beetle – rushed to the scene and ferried the dead bodies of the massacred children away. Among those killed was 12-year-old Hector Pieterson who became the face of the uprising when the photo of 18-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying a fatally shot Pieterson was widely circulated across the world.

Mazibuko credits Madikizela-Mandela with admitting him into a proper psychiatric hospital after he was released from prison at the time when he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He says that decision alone – of getting him proper medical care – could only be taken by someone who truly cared for him. Madikizela-Mandela taught him how to cook, as well as reprimanded Mazibuko whenever he transgressed.

‘‘The saddest part of the news of her passing is that it has happened at a time when we needed the energy and gallant spirit of a mother of the nature and stature of Mama Winnie,’’ Mazibuko stated. ‘‘Some of us in the struggle are still hurting. We needed the motherly side of Mama Winnie that would urge us to keep going. We needed a voice as strong as that of Mama at this time when the ANC is talking of renewal and unity.’’

People like Mazibuko had not just lost a leader, but a mother-figure as well. When he was sent to prison at Robben Island aged 16, it was Madikizela-Mandela who went out of her way to look after his own mother. There were many more instances where Madikizela-Mandela went above and beyond the call of duty to assist. That being said, it wasn’t lost on Mazibuko that there were sustained onslaughts to isolate and discredit Madikizela-Mandela as she fought apartheid and even after the ANC assumed power in 1994.

‘‘There is no struggle that is clean,’’ Mazibuko said. ‘‘The struggle was conducted on the dirty streets of Soweto, and here was someone willing to fold her sleeves and get her hands dirty. When other people were in exile, it was Mama who kept us together. When freedom came, she never enjoyed it. She was pushed away. We owe her an apology before we say ashes to ashes.’’

Tokyo Sexwale, the former Premier for Gauteng province, the Minister for Human Settlements and an ANC liberation stalwart, was the only person who had lived in the same house with Madikizela- Mandela before being jailed at Robben Island in 1977, where he served 13 years after being convicted for terrorism and conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government. Sexwale had taken shelter at Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto residence as a 17-year-old ANC activist, a home where he stayed in for three years before embarking on Ukhonto we Sizwe activities, which landed him in jail. On arriving at Robben Island, Sexwale said that the prison’s most famous detainee, Nelson Mandela, wanted to know every little detail about life in his Soweto home, asking about his wife and two children – how they dressed, how each of the kids performed at school, how they coped with his absence – information Sexwale readily volunteered.

‘‘I saw with my own eyes the torture, the humiliation by the police who came in to break things, to take clothes off the laundry line and throw them into the rubbish dump… and she would go and pick them up and wash them all over again with tears in her eyes,’’ Sexwale recalled. ‘‘I saw the tears of joy whenever it was time to visit Mandela at Robben Island and the tears of sadness whenever she returned from Robben Island. I saw the police slapping her. I saw them calling her bitch in her own house.’’

‘‘When they slapped her she fought back,’’ Sexwale continued. ‘‘They would hit her with fists and whenever I tried getting up to intervene they would kick me. And the children, Zenani and Zindzi, would be there from time to time whenever they were back from school in Swaziland. Then on the night they came to take her away for detention, she was kicking and screaming, telling the men that the things they were doing to her wouldn’t stop her people’s liberation.’’

‘‘No person should go through the life of Winnie. Let alone a woman, a mother,’’ Sexwale said of Madikizela-Mandela on April 2. ‘‘We have lost one of our best. Winnie was like a candle caught in the crosswinds. She was an indefatigable person, a fighter and a defiant resistor to the end. She even refused – when I spoke to her last week – to have a wheelchair. She would not succumb. She was defying gravity. The nation has lost a heroine… one of our best… a mother not only to her two daughters but a mother to the nation of our unwashed masses….’’

ANC Deputy Secretary General Jesse Duarte – who is the only woman serving as a member of the party’s ‘‘top six’’ officials – remembers Madikizela-Mandela as nothing but a nurturer, a mother to whoever needed one. No child who needed a place to stay was ever turned away from Madikizela- Mandela’s home, and whenever anyone was arrested, Madikizela-Mandela made sure their families were taken care of and lawyers were hired for them. When Duarte was released from prison in 1988, where she was detained without trial for close to a year, she first stopped to see Albertina Sisulu, the struggle stalwart and wife of Walter Sisulu, who had recruited her into the ANC back in 1979 when she was 26. Her next stop was the Soweto home of Madikizela-Mandela, who told her that now that she was back from prison it was time to recommit to the liberation struggle because the difficult work they had started was not yet complete.

‘‘Comrade Winnie Mandela is the Winnie Mandela of the people of Ivory Park, the Winnie Mandela of the people of Slovo Park,’’ Duarte eulogised Madikizela-Mandela on April 11. ‘‘She is the Winnie Mandela of the poor, the Winnie Mandela of the working classes of this country. She gave everything she had. She kept very little for herself and her family. She gave us her life, her commitment. She never betrayed our struggle. She did not betray the revolution….’’

Speaking at the United Nations headquarters in New York on April 4, former South African Vice President (to Thabo Mbeki), UN Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN-Women, Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, elaborated on how and when Madikizela-Mandela was christened Mother of the Nation, and why she was enormously deserving of the reputable title.

‘‘She believed she was a rock, and therefore she had to be there for people to lean on her,’’ Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka said. ‘‘She fought a system that was brutal, and the fact that she was defiant at every turn gave many of us the courage to fight back in our own small ways because we had this larger-than-life personality who was leading from the front. She was not the wife of an icon. She was an icon in her own right, standing next to another icon.’’

‘‘For decades when we couldn’t relate to the leaders,’’ Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka continued, referring to top ANC leaders who were either in jail, underground or exiled, ‘‘she was the go-to person who helped glue the different groupings in the country together. That is why she was called Mother of the Nation…She will be solely remembered as a gallant fighter against apartheid who fought for women, fought for her community and fought for the oppressed people. Period.’’

One group which understood what Madikizela-Mandela’s motherhood and nurturing side felt like was the then expelled leadership of the ANC Youth League, among them Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, the duo which went on to become president and deputy president of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). On learning of their expulsion from the party for supposed ill discipline in their push for a radical economic transformation agenda, the expellees’ first stop was the Soweto home of Madikizela-Mandela, who embraced and comforted them. Much as the group went ahead to form a political party that became a sharp thorn in the ANC’s flesh, Madikizela-Mandela maintained a very public, uninhibited motherly attitude towards them.

During the 2017 doctorate graduation ceremony of MP and EFF spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Madikizela-Mandela, who was in attendance, congratulated ‘‘her boys’’ in her usual joking manner, telling them that ever since they went to parliament they had been doing exactly what she had asked them to go and do. Madikizela-Mandela spoke of how she had told the EFF to go and wake the ANC up, since the liberation movement was sleeping. ‘‘You have done a better job because no parliamentarian sleeps anymore,’’ a jovial Madikizela-Mandela said to enormous applause. ‘‘Everyday you insult us, you are doing exactly what I sent you to do in parliament.’’

In their condolence message to the Mandela and Madikizela families – typed in their characteristic red ink – the EFF castigated the ANC for denying South Africa its first woman president. This was in reference to the December 1997 ANC Mafikeng elective conference, where Madikizela-Mandela intended to offer herself for election as the party’s deputy president to Thabo Mbeki, a move which could have seen her rise to the country’s presidency post-Mbeki.

The bottleneck was that Madikizela-Mandela had not been nominated by ANC branches before the conference, as was procedure, meaning she needed a nomination from the floor of the conference backed by 25% of delegates. Madikizela-Mandela requested Mbeki, who was chairing the session – flanked by Jacob Zuma on his right and Nelson Mandela on his left – to briefly adjourn the conference so that she could speak to delegates and get her nomination on course, something Mbeki called canvassing. Mbeki declined to adjourn, leaving Madikizela-Mandela with no choice but to quash her ambition. Jacob Zuma was elected ANC deputy president unopposed, setting on course his future disastrous presidency.

Yet when Mbeki and his friend-turned-foe Jacob Zuma were threatening to tear the ANC apart during the party’s 2007 Polokwane elective conference – which they eventually did following Mbeki’s defeat and subsequent recall as president of South Africa – it was Madikizela-Mandela who summoned the moral courage before the conference and confronted the two men, asking them to shelve their ambition for the ANC presidency and instead settle for a compromise candidate, an initiative which bore no fruit, seeing that the livid duo was keen on going all the way. As she spoke to the two men, Madikizela-Mandela reported that they both used one phrase in reference to each other – ‘‘Mama, you don’t know that man.’’ It took a decade after Jacob Zuma’s 2007 election as ANC president in Polokwane for the party to regain a semblance of unity following the December 2017 Nasrec elective conference where Cyril Ramaphosa was elected ANC president, leading to the recall of a stubborn Jacob Zuma, who had hugely dented the party.

Asked how Madikizela-Mandela should to be remembered during an April 6 interview, Thabo Mbeki ardently pushed the argument that it was ill-advised to single out personalities and celebrate them as individuals, when in fact they had been part of a collective. Mbeki insisted that Madikizela- Mandela was part of the liberation effort, and that she should therefore be remembered in that context – as one in the midst of many. He seemed to be making the argument that even if individual members of the movement – like Nelson Mandela – had previously been celebrated as icons in their own right on the occasion of their passing, then it was time to change that culture. It appeared the former president feared that Madikizela-Mandela was about to be lionised. Unfortunately for Mbeki, there was never going to be moderation in the remembrance of the Mother of the Nation, a nation extending beyond South Africa’s borders.

Mbeki’s perception of Madikizela-Mandela as an attention-seeker is best illustrated by an incident during the 25th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto students uprising in 2001. Mbeki, at the time South Africa’s president, had already arrived at the anniversary celebrations when Madikizela-Mandela made her late entry. Amid cheers from the crowd, Madikizela-Mandela walked up to the high table where she went to hug Mbeki, who while declining the hug, knocked Madikizela-Mandela’s cap off her head, an act Mbeki says was accidental.

‘‘She did something wrong… she liked arriving at meetings late, deliberately… in order to get applause,’’ Mbeki said of the incident. ‘‘She comes in alone, and people’s attention is drawn away from the person speaking… she did that systemically. So when she came on stage and wanted to embrace me I told her you can’t do wrong things like that repetitively.’’ His remarks attracted the wrath of Madikizela-Mandela’s supporters, coming as they did just days after her passing.

The irony of the whole situation is that during the anti-apartheid struggle, when the ANC leadership was either exiled in Zambia or imprisoned, it was Mbeki and other ANC intellectuals who made a conscious decision to settle on Nelson Mandela as the face of the movement, a choice hugely influenced by the fact that Mandela’s wife had built her own larger-than-life profile as a revolutionary who was constantly targeted by the apartheid regime. For Mbeki and his comrades, pairing the profiles of Nelson Mandela and that of Madikizela-Mandela was an act of genius, Mandela having served 27 years in prison and Madikizela-Mandela having become the globally renowned liberation stalwart and persecuted wife of the long-serving prisoner. While it suited the ANC to exploit Madikizela-Mandela’s “Mother of the Nation” stature, she was also isolated and labelled as an ill-disciplined disruptor when it was convenient, especially when she posed a direct political threat to the powers-that-be within the organisation.

Mbeki may or may not have an axe to grind with Madikizela-Mandela or her legacy – and he recently stated that he and Madikizela-Mandela had a cordial relationship despite the mishaps – but what remains clear is that theirs could be a manifestation of the divide between forces on the ground, as represented by Madikizela-Mandela and Chris Hani, and the top exiled ANC leadership, as represented by Mbeki – two groups who hugely contributed to the struggle but who seemed to look at the frontline from different prisms.

The ANC has always refuted the perception that its ranks are split into three: the Robben Islanders, constituting Nelson Mandela and his Rivonia trial comrades; the external exiles, consisting of the likes of Mbeki; and the in-xiles (internal exiles) consisting of the likes of Madikizela-Mandela. The jury is still out on these divisions. Mbeki had wanted to join the Umkhonto we Sizwe fighting force after his undergraduate studies, but ANC president O.R. Tambo declined his request, insisting that Mbeki needed to return to Sussex University to pursue his Masters degree. Much as Mbeki would later undergo military training in Moscow, where he and Chris Hani marked their 28th birthdays together, he would remain an intellectual and ideologue within the ANC, never a gun-carrying fighting cadre. On the other hand Chris Hani and Madikizela-Mandela commanded ground forces. This in turn set the stage for the grouping of perceived militants like Hani and Madikizela-Mandela on one side, and supposed moderates like Mbeki on the other, which affected how they related with each other within the organisation.

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‘‘I am not used to hearing such nice things being said about me,’’ Madikizela-Mandela said on the occasion of her 80th birthday in September 2017 as she entered the Johannesburg venue of the gala. ‘‘I am one of the lucky few to be told such heartwarming things when I am still alive.’’

Historically, the African liberation struggle – in all its forms and shapes – has been a highly patriarchal affair, both by design and by default that seeks to quarantine and limit women. The rise of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela from Nelson Mandela’s wife to a tour de force within the ANC and beyond should be viewed in the context of an African woman beating not only her cultural and societal inhibitions, but going ahead to challenge – head on – the oppressive white occupational state which even the men in her midst who had all the privileges patriarchy afforded them found hard to confront. Madikizela-Mandela first defied patriarchy, before proceeding to defy apartheid. According to South African feminist writer and journalist Gail Smith, in the final analysis, Madikizela-Mandela won the battle against apartheid but she lost the fight against patriarchy, which reared its ugly head even in her death.

Young women across the world have pushed back on Madikizela-Mandela’s demonisation and retold her story – warts and all. Standing outside Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home, Cape Town’s executive mayor Patricia de Lille was overcome by emotion as she spoke to a reporter after viewing Madikizela-Mandela’s body, which was brought back to the residence that April 13 evening, where it spent the night before burial the following day.

‘‘It’s really hit me now… because the whole week, two weeks, you know you still hope… and you know we prayed for her… she’s our mother…’’ de Lille said, unable to weave words together, teary eyed, her voice shaking with palpable grief. ‘‘You know she’s no more and her memory will live with us,’’ de Lille continued after regaining composure. ‘‘But we must continue to put up the fight for the poor, the landless, the homeless, because that’s what Mama lived and died for. When I saw her tonight for the last time I recommitted myself to that path of making sure that there are more people in our country who must taste the fruits of freedom and not just a few. That has always been the dream of Mama.’’

De Lille, who was reportedly in trouble with her party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), for choosing to attend a memorial service for Madikizela-Mandela organised by her party’s rival, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), next to the Brandfort house where Madikizela-Mandela was banished in 1977, had retorted that in African culture, when a mother died, it was mandatory for one to go and pay one’s respects. She referred to Madikizela-Mandela as her sister, mother and comrade. She didn’t need to ask anyone for permission to mourn, De Lille said.

‘‘The violence and the torture just made her more resolute,’’ de Lille continued. ‘‘Later she was saying there’s no more pain left and there’s no more fear left but at the same time she was a very soft person, with a heart of gold. We could come to her at anytime. If I just wanted to let off whenever I questioned myself whether it’s worth it to carry on with the struggle, I used to come here and spend hours with Mama and by the time I left I just knew I couldn’t give up. I had to continue. Now that she is no longer there we all have to commit ourselves to work even harder to make sure we look after the poor of this country… tonight I can feel that I have seen her for the last time, but she taught us to never give up… to press on… press on… press on… and that is what I will continue to do.’’

Barely an hour after Madikizela-Mandela’s body returned to Soweto, a high-level memorial event attended by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was held at the United Nations in New York. The words of Cuba’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo, possibly captured best the collective mood and sentiment of the evening:

‘‘The Apostle of our independence Jose Marti said, ‘Death is not true when the work of life has been fulfilled.’ Winnie was and is living history. She was Nelson’s voice on the streets of her country and around the world when he was imprisoned by the apartheid regime…Her spirit of resistance earned her admiration from honourable people but also the fear of her enemies who could never bring her to her knees. She has been rightly called the Mother of the South African Nation, but she was more than that. Her motherly embrace transcended the borders of her homeland because with the victory of the South African people over apartheid Africa was reborn… Winnie is the expression of the rebellious and fearless spirit of all African women.’’

Asked why it was imperative for her to be present to witness Madikizela-Mandela’s casket – draped in the ANC’s green, yellow and black flag – being carried off the hearse and up the hill leading to her home, a woman wearing a red doek said, ‘‘It was important for me to be here. Mama Winnie was the Mother of the Nation. She fought for us through thick and thin,’’ she said. ‘‘No woman can stand the pain that Winnie withstood. She was strong in jail. She never had time to stay with her family or her kids but she remained strong. I wish I could be like Winnie. I wish every woman can be as strong as her.’’

Asked what she felt at that emotional moment, a younger woman standing next to the woman in a red doek quoted Madikizela-Mandela. ‘‘You strike a woman you strike a rock,’’ she said, ‘‘She was the embodiment of the strength of the African woman.’’ A young man standing behind the two women – dressed in a yellow ANC T-shirt and a black marvin and carrying a black backpack, said, ‘‘I felt like crying because uMama Winnie fought for us… today I am literally still here because of people like her… go well uMama.’’

‘‘No woman can stand the pain that Winnie withstood. She was strong in jail. She never had time to stay with her family or her kids but she remained strong. I wish I could be like Winnie. I wish every woman can be as strong as her.’’

‘‘The sad news that has led us to this moment, this moment when you see the casket of uMama Winnie Madikizela Mandela draped in the ANC flag,’’ South Africa Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) Aldrin Sampear reported, standing on a partly deserted street corner outside Madikizela- Mandela’s home. ‘‘Inside this house is the body of uMama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The body that was bruised and battered. The body that said there’s no type of pain that I have never experienced. The body that spent 491 days in prison. The body that after seven days (of non-stop interrogation) was urinating blood. The body that was electrocuted. The body that made sure that body would overcome and fight for the freedom of South Africa.’’

At the poignant moment when Madikizela-Mandela’s body was being carried past her gate and into her Soweto home – with the gathered crowd ululating and shouting Amandla! once the casket entered the compound – a somber-looking American civil rights leader, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and members of the Umkhonto we Sizwe veterans association sang in unison the liberation dirge Hamba Kahle over and over again in line with the tradition of honouring struggle stalwarts. Hamba kahle mkhonto//Wemkhonto/Mkhonto we sizwe – safe journey spear, yes spear, spear of the nation. The spear of the nation had indeed fallen.

The ANC logo has a hand holding a spear. On the logo of the opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a hand-held spear sits across the map of Africa. When Nelson Mandela and his comrades Walter Sisulu and Joe Slovo decided to launch an armed struggle against apartheid and formed a military wing of the ANC, they named it Umkhonto we Sizwe (Xhosa for spear of the nation).

It goes without saying that nothing symbolises the anti-apartheid struggle more than the spear. It increasingly appears that that spear is a woman, and that woman is Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the Mother of the Nation.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie ‘‘They set up my father as the saint and set up my mother as the sinner,’’ Zindzi Mandela is quoted saying about her famous parents in Pascale Lamche’s film Winnie.

Of all front-row ANC freedom fighters – men and women – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was singled out as the only leader to appear before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in her personal capacity, where she was implored by Desmond Tutu o apologise to the country for whatever might have gone wrong under her watch. Tutu had argued then that her confession would be good for the country.

The ANC employed the use of violence during the anti-apartheid struggle, including deploying bombs in strategic government installations, some of which exploded and killed the wrong targets. It was widely held – and as stated by ANC stalwart Ahmed Kathrada during a BBC HardTalk interview – that some bombings were carried out by unruly ANC cadres. These crimes were pegged not on individuals but on the ANC, which sent senior representatives to the TRC to either explain and defend its position or to apologise. The same collective leniency of being represented by the ANC was not extended to Madikizela-Mandela. The liberation sins attributed to her and those around her were placed squarely at her feet, prominent among them being the 1989 killing of 14-year-old Moeketsi “Stompie” Seipei, who was suspected of being a police informer.

‘‘The one person who kept the fire burning when everyone was petrified,’’ Madikizela-Mandela said of her essential if lonely and thankless role in the anti-apartheid struggle in Lamche’s film, a moment in which moment her eyes got watery. ‘‘And I didn’t blame them because those dark apartheid forces were killing our people like flies. I didn’t blame them. When sometimes I would shoot that fist alone, and they were too petrified… then they put me on trial before the TRC, and Desmond Tutu sat there judging me… judging me….’’

Stompie had been a marked young radical activist in what was the then Orange Free State, the province where Madikizela-Mandela had been banished to in 1977. After participating in a student protest, he and his comrades were arrested and heavily tortured by the apartheid police. Upon their release, Ace Magashule – who is the current ANC Secretary General and who was himself a young ANC activist in the Free State at the time – organised for the evacuation of Stompie and his other teenage comrades. He found them a safe haven in Soweto, Johannesburg, where Madikizela- Mandela had established herself as the undisputed leader of the liberation struggle.

Not too far away from Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home was the residence of Paul Verryn, a bishop who offered sanctuary to Stompie and his comrades. At the time, Madikizela-Mandela was surrounded by the Mandela United Football Club – a footloose group of young activists who alternated between freedom fighters and an untamed group of area boys who terrorised anyone who did not ascribe to their beliefs. It was at Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home – where tens of young activists streamed in and out, seeking guidance and support – that Ace Magashule taught Stompie how to use an AK47 and how to deploy a grenade. Such were the precarious prevailing circumstances. They were in the middle of an armed struggle against apartheid.

On the night when Stompie’s body was found not too far away from Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home, he and three of his comrades had been picked up from Verryn’s residence by members of the Mandela United Football Club after allegations that the bishop had sexually assaulted the young activists surfaced. At the end of the night, Stompie’s three colleagues went back to the bishop’s home. It is believed the three were allowed to return to Verryn’s residence either because they had given credence to the sexual assault claims and Stompie had not substantiated the allegations, or because Stompie was suspected to have been a secret police informer planted in their midst. Stompie’s death would remain an albatross around Madikizela-Mandela neck for decades, until Pascale Lamche’s film seemed to decisively exonerate her.

For a long time throughout the 1990s, Madikizela-Mandela found it near impossible to exonerate herself from accusations that she had either killed Stompie herself or given orders for his killing. That she had publicly endorsed the use of “matches and necklaces” to liberate South Africa – a euphemism for placing a tyre around a person and lighting it up – played into the narrative that she was the de facto leader of a ragtag militia that embraced vigilantism.

As future investigations revealed – and as shown in Pascale Lamche’s film – Jerry Richardson, the Mandela United Football Club coach who served as Madikizela-Mandela’s bodyguard and who was convicted in 1990 for killing Stompie, was found to have committed the murder for personal reasons. Unlike his earlier assertions that he had received instructions from Madikizela-Mandela, Richardson later confessed to having been a police informer himself, thereby resorting to killing Stompie, who had in fact found out that Richardson was indeed a police informer. At the time – and as revealed by various apartheid security officials – there had been a well-orchestrated smear campaign against Madikizela-Mandela that was aimed at eroding her moral credibility as an ANC leader.

Paul Erasmus, a former Security Branch official, recently spoke to a Johannesburg reporter about how Madikizela-Mandela was under complete surveillance and how the apartheid state ran a well- oiled character assassination campaign against her. This is corroborated in Lamche’s film by Vic McPherson, an operative of the state’s Covert Strategic Communications (Stratcom), who confessed to working in cahoots with at least 40 journalists in executing psychological warfare on Madikizela- Mandela, a campaign that was sanctioned by South Africa’s then president P.W. Botha. This included the making of a vile documentary shown on 40 American TV channels, which resulted in Madikizela- Mandela being declared an international terrorist in the United States.

Erasmus spoke of how whenever Madikizela-Mandela attended a meeting where alcohol was served or consumed, state agents would quickly spread word – whether true or false – that she had overindulged and misbehaved. This misinformation would be carried strategically on both local and international media platforms for maximum effect. These distorted and embellished media reports were also targeted at creating distrust and planting seeds of discord within the ANC. Whether the courts acquitted her of whatever she was accused of or not, Madikizela-Mandela’s name would continue to be dragged in the mud in what was a well laid out public perception war.

‘‘I would get first grade intelligence from Soweto,’’ Erasmus told the reporter. ‘‘Winnie’s house was bugged. She was under continuous surveillance. The entire soccer club and literally everyone who surrounded Winnie were Security Branch informers… so everything Mama Winnie did was conveyed to me. My job was to sift and work the formula and get the stuff out.’’

In their pursuit to curtail the meteoric rise and moral credibility of one of the most prolific anti- apartheid forces within South Africa, the state infiltrated Madikizela-Mandela’s environment by whatever means possible. As is the case in such operations, those picked as informers may or may not have known they were being used to fight the enemy’s war, since part of the recruitment of informers is done through third parties with whom those around Madikizela-Mandela would innocently share information, not knowing it would get transmitted to the apartheid state.

‘‘I am telling you this as a fact,’’ Erasmus continued. ‘‘They were all working for the Security Branch, including Winnie’s aide de camp at the time… The deaths started when one found out about the other, and Jerry (Stompie’s convicted killer) went as far as admitting this in court…’’

According to Erasmus, the disinformation campaign was targeted at neutralising certain radical elements within the ANC, starting with Chris Hani and Madikizela-Mandela as prime targets. Hani had been the highly popular and charismatic commander-in-chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe – the ANC’s fighting unit – as well as Secretary General of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which for a long time has remained an ideological alliance partner of the ANC. He was assassinated in cold blood by a lone gunman on the morning of April 10, 1993 as he walked back to his house after picking the day’s newspapers in the company of his daughter, who witnessed the assassination.

There were fears that South Africa would erupt into a civil war following Hani’s death, first because his killing seemed like a means to clear the ANC of hardliners who were popular with the masses but who did not believe in making compromises with the apartheid state, and second because his troops, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, were still armed at the time. Nelson Mandela – whose on-the-ground popularity was always compared to that of the militant Hani (who was seen as a probable future president) – had to address the country that evening and call for calm. With the magnetic Hani out of the way, Madikizela-Mandela remained the one dangerous loose cannon for the apartheid regime. They went after her hard.

‘‘We couldn’t attribute it to the enemy completely,’’ Madikizela-Mandela said of Hani’s murder in Pascale Lamche’s film, suggesting that his murder might also be the work of those who objected to Hani’s overt opposition to giving too many concessions to the apartheid regime during the negotiations with the ANC following Mandela’s release from prison. ‘‘When he was killed, one of the hopes of the country was gone. Here was a man who led the military wing of the ANC. We literally worshipped Chris Hani. We dreamt of a South Africa where he would be president one day.’’

Nelson Mandela – whose on-the-ground popularity was always compared to that of the militant Hani (who was seen as a probable future president) – had to address the country that evening and call for calm. With the magnetic Hani out of the way, Madikizela- Mandela remained the one dangerous loose cannon for the apartheid regime. They went after her hard.

George Fivas, who was South Africa’s police commissioner between 1995 and 1999 – around the time when investigations into Stompie’s murder were reopened under the ANC government – came out recently to categorically refute the allegations that Madikizela-Mandela was complicit in Stompie’s murder. These and other claims prompted speculation that the ANC was trying to nail Madikizela-Mandela for the killing, thereby incapacitating her politically within the organisation.

Sydney Mfumadi, South Africa’s Minister for Safety and Security between 1994 and 1999, who served under Nelson Mandela and under whose ministry the police service fell, has since come out to refute claims that the ANC had anything to do with the reopening of the investigation into Stompie’s murder, a claim that Fivaz supports.

‘‘A lot of people still say Winnie killed Stompie,’’ an ageing Fivas told a reporter at his Johannesburg private security consultancy office. ‘‘Somebody is still feeding the international media the story. I am telling you, after a proper investigation we never found anything to substantiate that claim… There was no evidence to implicate Winnie in Stompie’s murder.’’

According to Fivaz, when Madikizela-Mandela thanked him for exonerating her of Stompie’s murder during the TRC hearings, he told her, “You must understand I was not here to do you a favour. I was here to basically tell the TRC what I know as the gospel truth.’’

****

There is no denying that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – like most revolutionaries of her time – was provoked into militancy. The times demanded it, the cause required it, and the enemy necessitated it.

Nothing captures this more aptly than Madikizela-Mandela’s own words when she stated, ‘‘I am a product of the masses of my people and the product of my enemy.’’ The fact that Nelson Mandela founded Umkhonto we Sizwe – the military wing of the ANC – is usually treated as an inconvenient footnote by those who seek to paint him as the patron saint of peace. Yet Mandela’s own militancy before his imprisonment was a reflection of how desperate the times were. Apartheid in all its forms and shapes was a violently dehumanising system of government that necessitated full blown warfare as its black South African subjects fought back to reclaim their humanity. Madikizela-Mandela, just like her former husband, was therefore both a war-time general and a peacetime general, adjusting accordingly with the times and circumstances.

What many forget is how violent South Africa was at the time. The April 1979 death by hanging of one of South Africa’s most celebrated liberation struggle heroes, the 22-year-old Solomon Mahlangu, is a clear indication of how volatile things were as the ANC and others like Robert Sobukwe’s Pan African Congress (PAC) fought apartheid. Mahlangu and two of his comrades got busted by a policeman in Johannesburg as they tried boarding a public transport van, each of them carrying heavy suitcases full of pamphlets, guns and explosives. As the policeman grabbed one of the suitcases, an AK47 and a hand grenade fell out. The three comrades ran in different directions, with Mahlangu and Mondy Motloung deciding to hide in a warehouse. They got accosted and badly beaten, resulting in Motloung suffering severe brain damage, which made it impossible for him to eventually stand trial alongside Mahlangu.

Two individuals got shot and killed in the warehouse as the policeman charged after Mahlangu and Motloung. Their killings was blamed on the young revolutionaries during trial. Charged for murder and terrorism in 1977, Mahlangu was hanged in 1979 after his appeal was rejected. His last words – ‘‘My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight.’’ – remained a liberation rallying call in South Africa. His death remains one of the bitter memories of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Apartheid was a monster that also spawned black-on-black violence. While discussing a chapter in his PhD thesis on Black Youth Politics in 2014, South African MP and spokesman of the far-left opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, referred to an incident in June 1993. Ishmael Bujozi, a foot soldier in the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), was being buried at the Everton Cemetery in Johannesburg. His death had resulted from the IFP’s rivalry with the ANC, where youths from both parties took turns attacking each other. An hour after the burial – when Bujozi’s family and IFP members had left – Bujozi’s body was exhumed and burnt by local ANC youths. News got to his family and the IFP, who immediately planned for a second burial. During the second funeral, a huge crowd of ANC youths from nearby settlements gathered outside the cemetery. Later that week, Bujozi’s body was exhumed once again and hanged on the cemetery fence, where it stayed for days.

Ndlozi wondered what death a corpse dies and what the exhumation meant. Did the exhumation reflect on the one who lived in the body, the one who buried it, or the one who exhumed it? In his view, the exhumation was a violation of the sanctity of the graveyard. Nothing was sacred, nothing was safe.

It is through this lens that we must to look at members of the Mandela United Football Club who became both victims and perpetrators of the same kind of violence. It was a stormy time, and Madikizela-Mandela, with all her good intentions, found herself at the centre of a maelstrom.

****

On Tuesday April 10, Stompie’s mother, Joyce Seipei arrived at Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home to pass her condolences to the bereaved family. She was accompanied by ANC Women’s League officials from the Free State. After meeting Madikizela-Mandela’s two daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, Mrs. Seipei walked out of the home accompanied by her son’s teenage-hood comrade, the ANC Secretary General Ace Magashule, who first brought Stompie from the Orange Free State to Soweto. Looking on was ANC spokesman Pule Mabe.

It was a stormy time, and Madikizela-Mandela, with all her good intentions, found herself at the centre of a maelstrom.

On Sunday April 8, following Madikizela-Mandela’s passing – Mrs. Seipei had spoken to the South African media from her Free State province home. She told the media that she didn’t believe that Madikizela-Mandela was involved in the murder of her son. She remembered Stompie as a brilliant and courageous young man whose untimely death had devastated her. It all felt surreal.

‘‘The bones of my own younger brothers are still in Tanzania,’’ Magashule, who was present, said, referring to the tens of ANC fighters who died in training camps across Africa. ‘‘I am the one who recruited them and took them to Tanzania. I recruited my cousins. They too died in the struggle. The bones of Stompie’s comrades are still exiled in Angola. We all knew it was a matter of life and death.’’

‘‘A lot of comrades have died because of lies,’’ Magashule said, recalling the turbulent times when being called an impimpi – meaning traitor – was equated to a death sentence. There having been allegations of tens of ANC cadres having faced firing squads inside ANC training camps on suspicion of being spies for the enemy. ‘‘The ANC was highly infiltrated. Nelson Mandela asked us not to share this information publicly because it could have crippled the organisation.’’

The footage of Joyce Seipei eulogising Madikizela-Mandela – the woman who was for a long time accused of killing Stompie – is the sort of image that would make sceptics wonder whether Mrs. Seipei had been subdued into partaking in an ANC self-cleansing exercise. Yet there was a sense that this was no public relations stunt – that Stompie’s mother knew all along that Madikizela- Mandela was innocent of her son’s murder.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie 1961

Nomzamo

‘‘Apartheid was not a friendly system to fight against. You had to be tough and sometimes get militant in order to fight decisively. I don’t think you can charge David for picking up a stone and throwing it at Goliath. She fought the best way she knew how.’’ – Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

When Thabo Mbeki was asked to eulogise Winnie Madikizela-Mandela following her passing on April 2, 2018, the former South African president revisited his first memories of her back in 1961 at the Mandela home, House Number 8115, Orlando West, Soweto. Speaking at the Thabo Mbeki Foundation in Johannesburg, he recalled how Nelson Mandela, then a leading figure in his country’s banned liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), would ask Madikizela-Mandela to invite Mbeki over to the Mandela home for lunch. Mbeki – who was barely 20-years-old but was already actively involved in the ANC Youth League – was staying with the family of ANC secretary general Duma Nokwe, who didn’t live too far away from the Mandelas.

According to Mbeki – who only figured out years later what these lunch invitations were all about – Nelson Mandela and top ANC leaders met secretly and deliberated on matters affecting the movement, after which Mandela asked his wife Winnie to call in the youthful Mbeki to act as Mandela’s sounding board for whatever the ANC elders had discussed. Mandela never explicitly told Mbeki what the meetings were about, but on returning from exile decades later, it was Madikizela- Mandela who confided in Mbeki what those lunches – which she sat through – were all about. Mandela had tactically settled on using Mbeki as a political guinea pig for gauging how the ANC youth would react to propositions the apex leadership was toying with.

It was during these lunch-cum-sounding-board meetings at the Mandela home that Mbeki got to know Madikizela-Mandela, not as a front row comrade in the struggle, but as Nelson Mandela’s wife. The revelation that the then politically active Mbeki – whose father Govan Mbeki was similarly deeply involved in the ANC dealings and who would be jailed alongside Nelson Mandela – considered Madikizela-Mandela more as his leader’s wife than as a comrade-in-arms indicates how much work the future “Mother of the Nation” had to put in so as to earn her place on the high table of revolutionaries. In Mbeki’s recollection, Madikizela-Mandela became politically active during the Rivonia treason trial, where she was photographed carrying a placard that said, ‘‘We stand by our leaders.” Madikizela-Mandela had in fact been politically active before that trial, much as that might have been her coming out moment as the public face of the struggle.

Madikizela-Mandela’s radical upward trajectory – of finding her own political practice within the ANC away from the shadow of Nelson Mandela and his comrades, some of whom he was facing trial with and who got jailed alongside him not too long after he married Winnie – is readily corroborated in a new documentary film, Winnie (2017), produced by celebrated French filmmaker Pascale Lamche.

The film, which Madikizela-Mandela endorsed as easily the most accurate representation of her life story ever done by anyone, comprises both old and new footage. There are interviews of her unflinching young self: the militant revolutionary saying she’s ready to take up a gun at that moment and kill for the sake of securing her people’s freedom. Such interviews are interpersed by those of the already greying Mother of the Nation who speaks with heavy introspection, questioning how the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, tried to overtly persuade her into making a public apology during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997, something she says she found difficult to forgive and forget, feeling unfairly judged by Tutu.

‘‘My husband was never there when both children were born,’’ a young Madikizela-Mandela says in the film, her unmistakable voice trembling with conviction as she revisited life with Mandela. ‘‘He was either in prison or out gathering information about their treason trial. I never even heard him address a single meeting. He never discussed anything political with me. I am not his political product, actually. I have never been. I never had the opportunity to be one….’’

Madikizela-Mandela had always spoken of how dominating Nelson Mandela was; she made fun of how, instead of asking her hand in marriage, Mandela instructed her to ‘‘take the car and go and tell your parents I want to marry you.’’ When she was once asked whether she took offence with Mandela’s bland proposal, the ageing Madikizela-Mandela giggled, saying she was a young girl who was beholden to the man she had grown to love, and that she believed in the cause he was fighting for. Mandela handled everything, including ordering her wedding dress – which she fondly remembered as a beautiful number – leaving Madikizela-Mandela a bewildered spectator.

‘‘My husband was never there when both children were born,’’ a young Madikizela- Mandela says in the film, her unmistakable voice trembling with conviction as she revisited life with Mandela. ‘‘He was either in prison or out gathering information about their treason trial. I never even heard him address a single meeting. He never discussed anything political with me. I am not his political product, actually. I have never been. I never had the opportunity to be one….’’

‘‘He sent me to my parents and retreated to his liberation work,’’ a retrospective Madikizela- Mandela had said. ‘‘We didn’t even have much time to ourselves on our wedding day because we immediately got back into struggle work. The ANC was like a drug to us. It was our opium.’’

On one occasion, Madikizela-Mandela wrote in one of her better-known love letters to Mandela – at the time a prisoner in Robben Island – of how ‘‘history had denied her of him,’’ wondering whether he had the picture of his wife as her young self, still in her early 20s at the time of his imprisonment. It was a love akin to that of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife and comrade Coretta Scott King, who aside from deeply loving each other, shared a set of political beliefs. Like Coretta Scott King, who led a protest in Memphis four days after her husband’s assassination in the city and before he was buried – Madikizela-Mandela similarly took up Mandela’s cause following his imprisonment. Unlike Coretta Scott King who was already a public figure, Madikizela-Mandela, who had been a backroom operative, was now thrust into the limelight.

As if describing the young Madikizela-Mandela, journalist Barbara Reynolds, who wrote My Love, My Life, My Legacy – Coretta Scott King’s posthumous memoir – speaks of Coretta Scott King’s commitment to the cause she and her husband had jointly believed in for years, but which Martin Luther King Jr. – just like Nelson Mandela – was seen as a leading frontline mobiliser.

‘‘As much as it hurt her to lose the man of her life, the man that she loved, the movement was bigger than a person,’’ Reynolds says of Coretta Scott King on the passing of her husband, only that in Madikizela-Mandela’s case Mandela was not dead but imprisoned. ‘‘She had to be the persona that would symbolize the movement so that people would not quit in despair.’’

Madikizela-Mandela married Nelson Mandela in 1958, and in 1962, when she was 26, Mandela was arrested, getting sentenced to life in 1964, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone for the next 27 years. She herself was arrested and detained for her defiance a number of times, serving her longest prison stint in 1969, when she was placed for 491 days at Pretoria Central Prison, .mostly in solitary confinement. She was heavily tortured during this period, including being interrogated for seven consecutive days at one point, which Madikizela-Mandela says drove her to urinate blood in what she considered her body’s coping mechanism with the inhumanity meted on her. As part of her punishment, she would not be supplied with sanitary pads, an unfortunate state of affairs that left her desperate and swathed in her menstrual blood inside her cell, where she was at times left naked. Madikizela-Mandela was later on in 1977 banished to Brandfort, a little town in the then Orange Free State, where she was domiciled in a hugely unkempt house. To Madikizela-Mandela, banishment was akin to solitary confinement.

It was while in solitary confinement that Madikizela-Mandela contemplated suicide, making a calculated attempt to kill herself in slow motion so that no one would know that she taken her own life. The slow death was intended to not embarrass Mandela and her two daughters, since suicide was taboo. Asked what her most painful memory throughout the struggle period was, Madikizela- Mandela pointed to the night she was being taken for her longest detention when apartheid police smashed the windows in her house and broke the door, shouting for her to come out. They then barged in, dragging her out of the house. Her two little daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, were terrorised and traumatised by how the police manhandled their mother. They grabbed onto her dress, screaming, ‘‘Mummy don’t go!’’

The sights and sounds of her daughters holding onto her and screaming stayed with Madikizela- Mandela for a long time. She was pained by the fact that her daughters were being compelled to be first-hand witnesses to the state’s violence against the only parent they had around them.

Asked what her most painful memory throughout the struggle period was, Madikizela- Mandela pointed to the night she was being taken for her longest detention when apartheid police smashed the windows in her house and broke the door, shouting for her to come out. They then barged in, dragging her out of the house. Her two little daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, were terrorised and traumatised by how the police manhandled their mother. They grabbed onto her dress, screaming, ‘‘Mummy don’t go!’’

Nelson Mandela’s longtime friend and struggle comrade Ahmed Kathrada, who was jailed for 26 years alongside Mandela at Robben Island, understood Madikizela-Mandela’s predicament better than most. Kathrada – better known as Uncle Kathy, especially to the Mandela children back in the day who wondered how come they had an Indian uncle – had offered his Johannesburg home, the infamous Flat 13, Kholvad House, to serve as a safe house for anyone who needed a place to work from or stay, a space which became a regular refuge for the Mandela children whenever their parents got arrested. It was a tradition for the flat to have an open-door policy for comrades in the struggle, a practice set in motion by its previous owner, the anti-apartheid lawyer and journalist Ismail Chota Meer, from whom Kathrada inherited the flat. These were the high levels of comradeship the Mandelas experienced within the anti-apartheid movement, where class, race and religion were secondary.

In the Foreword to Madikizela-Mandela’s prison memoir 491 Days, which chronicles her painful detention from May 1969 to September 1970, Kathrada wrote of Madikizela-Mandela’s unenviable situation in his reflection of what life must have been for those who stayed in the frontlines of the anti-apartheid struggle upon his and Mandela’s imprisonment. He appreciates the unmitigated risks faced by those outside prison:

‘‘Yes we were suffering, but after taking every hardship and every deprivation into account, it could not be disputed that we were protected. No policeman could barge into Robben Island or into Pollsmoor Prison and start shooting. This was not the case with comrades outside prison. They were the very cold faces of the struggle. They had no protection. Comrades such as Winnie Mandela, the 600 unarmed, defenceless school children who were slaughtered in the Soweto uprising, leaders and members of the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Students (COSAS). In the face of adversity and danger, they kept the flag flying.’’

Madikizela-Mandela came from an outward-looking family, both her parents having acquired Western education not limited by the offerings of their immediate environment. Her father, Columbus Madikizela, was a history teacher who later rose to become a head teacher and minister for Forestry and Agriculture in the Transkei government. Her mother, Gertrude Madikizela, the first domestic science teacher in the Bizana locality, passed on when Madikizela-Mandela was nine, leaving her to mother her siblings, her being the oldest daughter in the family following her elder sister’s demise. Born into traditional royalty, Madikizela-Mandela’s grandfather was Chief Mazingi, a wealthy trader married to 28 more wives after Madikizela-Mandela’s grandmother.

Madikizela-Mandela attended the John Hofmeyr School of Social Work, earning a degree and becoming South Africa’s first qualified black social worker. On leaving school and before getting her first job, she became an understudy to the mother of jazz musician Hugh Masekela, who was a social worker and health inspector at the Alexandra Township in Johannesburg. By then, Nelson Mandela was already courting Madikizela-Mandela, who was covertly getting involved in political work. Mandela would come around to the Masekela’s home from time to time, becoming acquainted with the legendary musician. This resulted in Mandela writing Masekela a moving personal letter – smuggled out of Pollsmoor Prison – as the latter marked his 45th birthday in 1984. The letter inspired Masekela’s popular song Bring Back Nelson Mandela.

As they nurtured their young love before his imprisonment, Mandela fondly referred to his wife – who was almost half his age – as Zami, short for her first name Nomzamo, meaning ‘‘she who never stops trying’’ in Xhosa. Theirs was a fairy tale of love in a time of revolution that was brutally interrupted by Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment.

The unforgiving effects of fighting apartheid from the frontline took a toll on Madikizela-Mandela. She was deliberately smeared, projected as reckless, angry and murderous. Post-1990, upon Mandela’s release and election as president, internal rifts within the ANC further materialised. Her growing influence became a threat to a certain clique’s grip on power.

Others, beholden to the patriarchal ANC power structure, considered her to be too unruly. Then allegations of infidelity surfaced – specifically her rumoured affair with Dali Mpofu, who later became chairperson of the militant opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Madikizela-Mandela was sacked as deputy minister – having been a vocal critic of the ANC, which she felt was reneging on its radical liberationist politics – and her marriage to Mandela ended in divorce in 1996. The struggle, it seemed, had contaminated a great love story.

Thandi Modise, the chairperson of South Africa’s National Council of Provinces (NCOP), who became the first woman to be arrested in connection with Umkhonto we Sizwe (ANC’s military wing) activities in 1979, having risen to become one of the handful female commanders in the fighting force, considered Madikizela-Mandela a mother, a friend and a comrade. In eulogising Madikizela- Mandela, Modise revisited the words of a female prison warder during her own detention at John Vorster Square Police Station, now renamed Johannesburg Central Police Station. ‘‘If you think you are being humiliated, wait until I tell you the story of Winnie Mandela,’’ the warder said. The tale, which Modise heard from a weeping male comrade, was about how during Madikizela-Mandela’s detention, she was made to wear a fake crown of thorns and paraded naked in the male section of the prison. It was this sort of humiliation that made ex-prisoners fight even harder upon their release.

Upon her release in 1988 after serving an eight year prison term – after being arrested in 1979 while four-months pregnant – Modise’s first port of call was Madikizela-Mandela’s Soweto home, where she was sneaked in by Peter Mokaba, the future combative president of the ANC Youth League. She couldn’t get inside the house for security reasons since Madikizela-Mandela was under heavy surveillance, so she settled for a quick chat across the fence to pledge her loyalty and to reassure Madikizela-Mandela that the struggle continues. ‘‘As a young girl I joined the struggle because there was a Winnie Mandela somewhere, because there was someone who had gone through worse than I had gone through,’’ Modise said. ‘‘She was a woman of strength, a woman who fought for her people, a woman who was human and made mistakes.’’

‘‘If you think you are being humiliated, wait until I tell you the story of Winnie Mandela,’’ the warder said. The tale, which Modise heard from a weeping male comrade, was about how during Madikizela-Mandela’s detention, she was made to wear a fake crown of thorns and paraded naked in the male section of the prison. It was this sort of humiliation that made ex-prisoners fight even harder upon their release.

From that brief 1988 across-the-fence encounter, Modise and Madikizela-Mandela went on to work closely together, including in the ANC Women’s League where they served alongside each other for a decade starting in 1993 to 2003, with Madikizela-Mandela as president and Modise as deputy president, both elected twice to serve a five-year mandate. As such, aside from their comradeship in the struggle – having been political prisoners, a predicament suffered by many frontline anti- apartheid freedom fighters – Modise and Madikizela-Mandela built both a personal and official working relationship, allowing them to nurture trust and confide in each other.

Modise remembers what she calls her two most difficult weekends spent in the company of Madikizela-Mandela. ‘‘The first was when Tata (Mandela) was removing her as deputy minister in 1995…We tried speaking to her. We asked her to back down and apologise. She said she hadn’t done anything wrong. She got removed.” The reason for Madikizela-Mandela’s removal – according to Mbeki during a recent interview – was that she allegedly travelled out of South Africa without the president’s (Mandela’s) required authorisation.

‘‘The weekend before her divorce I received a call from Tata,’’ Modise said, recalling the second thorny weekend. ‘‘He said to me, ‘Tell your mother she must accept the divorce.’ I spoke to her and she said, ‘You are my daughter’s age mate… you do not understand Abatembu [Mandela’s clan]. My in-laws have not told me I am divorced. I am not divorcing this man.’.” To Modise, it was a difficult and sad weekend because Madikizela-Mandela ‘‘truly loved this man’’. Revisiting Madikizela- Mandela’s presence at Mandela’s bedside at the time of his passing in 2013, Modise said, ‘‘It didn’t matter whether there was a divorce or not. These people loved each other.’’

According to Modise, Madikizela-Mandela had always dreamt of having a large family, but on Mandela’s imprisonment, she knew she would only have two children. ‘‘She was a very loving person. Those arms would just open up and envelope people,’’ Modise said, fondly remembering Madikizela-Mandela’s warmth towards those who came to her. ‘‘She had the courage to weep about things. She fought but deep down she was a softie, she cried over things, and that’s what endeared her to all of us.’’

The person who Madikizela-Mandela grew to be – from a mother of two left behind by Mandela to Mother of the Nation – was as the result of a mixture of many factors, but in Modise’s eyes, Madikizela-Mandela never lived under her husband’s shadow even though she shared his commitment for South Africa’s liberation. ‘‘She was never anyone’s shadow,’’ Modise said. ‘‘She charted her own path, and sometimes when you chart a path you trample on toes and make mistakes. The thing about Winnie was her ability to find her footing again and always be on the side of the oppressed.’’

‘‘She was never anyone’s shadow,’’ Modise said. ‘‘She charted her own path, and sometimes when you chart a path you trample on toes and make mistakes. The thing about Winnie was her ability to find her footing again and always be on the side of the oppressed.’’

‘‘I don’t think Winnie has been given enough credit. I think we love her but we have not credited her for the work she has done,’’ Modise said. ‘‘She produced a lot of intellectuals and women activists within the ANC. But it is not just about Winnie. The history of strong women in the South African liberation struggle is being eroded. South Africa, like other countries, is a place where after liberation, the true story of women is pushed aside because women must now go back to where they belong. That is what Winnie Mandela was fighting against. Patriarchy.’’

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Sitawa Namwalie

The representation of women in political leadership globally hovers around 20% of most governments, parliaments, heads of state, according to United Nations documentation. Between 1995 and 2015, there was approximately a “major” 10% increase (from 12-22% parliaments; 12-19% executive branch; 6-18% cabinet ministers. According to The World’s Women 2015.

A few factors contribute to this blatant underrepresentation. Women are seldom leaders of major political parties, which are instrumental in forming future political leaders and in supporting them throughout the election process. Gender norms and expectations also drastically reduce the pool of female candidates for selection as electoral representatives, and contribute to the multiple obstacles that women face during the electoral process. The use by some countries of gender quotas has improved women’s chances of being elected. Yet, once in office, few women reach the higher echelons of parliamentary hierarchies

So how does Winnie Mandela fit into this framework. Clearly she was a leader not so much of her political party (African National Congress) but of the people, a grassroots organic leader. And clearly as well, she was betrayed by that same movement, from gaining the political power to make changes at the state level; and in part by her then husband, Nelson Mandela as he became president of South Africa. Still in my view, she functioned as a kind of shadow or alternative president, and definitely rejected the mythical “First Lady” paradigm with its expectations of a certain compliance.

This mythology of the first lady has been substantially challenged recently by the presence of black women, who are historically the anti-thesis of the idealized white female identity historically aligned with service to white male patriarchal power.We can say as well that Winnie Mandela, like Michelle Obama in the United States, presented images of beauty, strength in her physicality, and presence as a black woman and an unabashed sense of personal style but above all an amazing love for family and community and people in general.

For women, like Winnie Mandela who end up having to resist that compliant construction, instead there is a deliberate construction, as I have argued elsewhere, of a “selfin resistance to colonial/patriarchal order.” This is resonant in the idea of leaving (or staying with) the ‘Great Man.’ As other women who were married to world leaders reveal, such a decision is always fraught with drama as the subsequent activities are still always carried out in full public view. So in many ways, though their relationship ended after his release from his twenty-seven years imprisonment as a political prisoner, Winnie had left the “Great Man” emotionally, although she continued to support him politically.

The life of Winnie Mandela and the end of that relationship for example is illustrative. Although Winnie Mandela had waited 27 years, it was not a passive waiting. Throughout the years, she tirelessly advocated for her husband’s release, created a movement in her husband’s name which in many ways almost destroyed her given the activist choices that were made in the face of the world’s last and most horrendous system of oppression – apartheid — was not seen still as having given enough. Recent filmic documentation from agents and operatives for South African government intelligence agencies reveal that they wanted her as far from Nelson as possible as he was being groomed for the presidency and once he became president. In fact it is even clearer now that the apartheid state launched a campaign to malign her, through creating and placing horrible stories about her in the media which were then circulated worldwide and worse still through placing their agents in her security service who committed criminal acts attributed to her. For her part, Winnie functioned and aided the military wing of the ANC as one of its soldiers technically providing support for those engaged in armed struggle. She became the voice of resistance and consistently grew in confidence, in service and in articulation of the goals of South African liberation as outlined in its Freedom Charter. The attempts to discount or trivialize her contributions, based on sexuality provides proof that women as leaders are more often evaluated in terms their sexuality than by their political contributions unless these are recovered and made meaningful by other thinking individuals.

Since patriarchy is so entrenched in societal thinking about women’s roles in political leaders’ lives, one of the ways that women have accessed power is through marriage to a “great man.” At times, they are ones who help to cultivate them along the way. Still, these women’s contributions are always minimized in order to reduce them to the role of appendages. However, in all the professional-political marriages I have studied, the wife has a particular skill set that allows the man to take his leadership to the next generation. In the Winnie Mandela case, she reports that Nelson called on her to help fund raise. While this was clearly an ulterior motive to get to meet her, he clearly recognized a certain sophistication and competence in her bearing and in her delivery of social services to her community, which he realized right away would make her the ideal partner for someone in his situation.

The Winnie Mandela case reveals the fact that black women have continuously exercised leadership in many different ways. This leadership has tended to be subject to historical erasure given the ways that histories have been written to privilege white/male power. So, until her passing, some members of a new generation in South Africa indicate that they were not taught about her contributions in the ending of apartheid.

Men who were leaders of major nationalist movements throughout the 20th century often had wives/women who were ideologically in tune with their various projects. Winnie was clearly one of these women and excelled I believe even beyond Nelson’s expectations. Winnie Mandela says in Part of My Soul Went With Him:

“So there never was any kind of life that I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life, where you sit with your husband and dream dreams of what life might have been, even if we knew that it would never be like that”

“I knew when I married him that I married the struggle, the liberation of my people.” (65).

Thus we see that there has been a consistent pattern of women contesting their exclusions, challenging attempts at dispossession and asserting the parallel right to occupy leadership positions, particularly when they have the credentials, experience and ability to lead. Since women’s contribution in twentieth century activist movements was often taken for granted, it made it easy for them to be written out of history in relation to the men in their lives. But in the Winnie Mandela’s case, we see a deliberate set of actions to defy being written out of history: an awareness of the place of black women in society; a conscious assumption of a political role in the liberation of her people.

Generic organic leadership of activist women like Winnie Mandela remains still further away from recognition. But I think Winnie Mandela created another leadership paradigm. Her trajectory without Nelson charts the activism generated by the understanding that the rights of women are fundamental to national rebuilding following the ravages of corrupt and violent male leadership.

This discussion has paid attention to the ways in which women like Winnie Mandela have written political leadership into existence and therefore have contributed to an ongoing understanding of some of the world’s current social problems as they pursued a range of cultural and intellectual advances. New and continued questions remain about the nation as a masculine construct, created for the benefit of male leadership. We continue to ask: What new institutions and leadership paradigms, especially in Africa, have really been created to take us into the future?

In her speech titled “Being a Black Woman in the World” delivered in Chicago, Illinois, for the V103’s Expo for Today’s Black Woman, we get a direct sense that her ideological orientation shaped by the black consciousness movement had a women’s rights component, indicated as follows:

“By inducing pride and dignity in Black people, the Black Consciousness Movement demanded of Black people to become their own liberators, thus expediting the subjective prerequisite for liberation. An important aspect of the Black Consciousness Movement was its location of the possibility of change within the Black community. This lesson applies to Black women wherever they are.”

Winnie Mandela, while identified as the wife of Nelson Mandela became the primary activist on the outside from 1962-1990, during the 27 years of his incarceration. So lets us raise in closing a hypothetical question: What would have happened in terms of delivering more progressive gains to black South Africans if Winnie Mandela had become the president of South Africa instead of Nelson? We will never know now. Perhaps state power corrupts and one is never able to achieve all that is expected when one takes formal political office. This is one possible reading of what happened to Nelson Mandela, when, as an elderly man, he became president after years of incarceration. So while we are happy for his release, still in a final assessment, we can say that in the same way that Nelson was denied this leadership for 27 years, by the white power structure of apartheid and then groomed for leadership in a way that would create a compliant process of transfer. For those same twenty-seven years, by contrast, Winnie Mandela a woman, denied the formal recognition that she deserved as the leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, nonetheless functioned in my view as an alternative, organic president, and as a consistent critic of the failures of leadership evident in South Africa still.

Recognized as perhaps the most significant woman who exercised leadership at critical junctures in her country’s history, perhaps staying outside of the official political structures, while experiencing the same pattern of hardship, denials, great pain and a series of trials and tribulations, that black South Africans experienced, gave her a different relationship to the larger community of South Africans and world citizens. One can see a certain poetic justice in her being named “Mother of the Nation.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie It was a gathering of women. Mothers, sisters, daughters and wives of black male ex political prisoners. They had been gathered at Cowley House, Cape Town by the Robben Island Museum to share and document memories and stories of their Journeys to Robben Island Maximum Security Prison.

Cowley House, became a remarkable haven for those, whom under very difficult and often brutal circumstance were granted permission to travel and be in Cape Town for the sole purpose of visiting loved ones on the island. An arduous journey. It required bureaucratic application processes; permissions from various authorities including Prison Services, permission from Homelands authorities to travel, permission to be in Cape Town or the Western Cape, accumulating the funds to take a bus or train of some means of transport to the Cape…and finding accommodation in which to stay overnight. Many of the women had themselves served under house arrest and detention, been brutalised by the apartheid state in its attempt to break the spirits of those who chose the path of resistance and or, whose family members had done so.

(I recall so vividly tata S, an ex political prisoner and survivor of the Lesotho massacre, with heartbreak laced in each of his words and silences, explaining just how it shattered him to see his wife in the prison visitor space after many years of separation. She had been starving as he, the main breadwinner was no longer able to support the family. And so emaciated and skeletal she had somehow found a way to visit him and reassure him of her support.) maWinnie agreed to participate at the gathering on one condition. On arrival at Cowley House for the Women’s Reference Group, she drew us aside and requested a quiet private meeting space. She said that, as her story was already very well documented, recorded and shared within the public domain, she wanted the day to be about the other women who were present, not her. She impressed upon us that the women had stories which were layered with hurt and humiliation and that possibly, the greatest hurt was being ignored by history.

And for the duration of that day’s exchange, I observed maWinnie, gently and compassionately deflecting attempts to defer to her. Calmly prodding and reminding each of the women gathered of a particular incident or event which had taken place on their journeys. And most of all, I observed how she kept silent, attentively listening. There are a number of lessons and affirmations which remain invaluable to me to draw on and reflect in practice as a feminist ‘memory maker’.

Firstly, how disciplined and comfortable silence grants permission for others to speak and share intimate stories of pain and hardship. That even though the Listener or Observer may have book knowledge or an idea of ‘the Story’, it was important to remain silent and have the Speaker albeit slowly, painstakingly tell their own story. This takes great discipline. The ability to be quiet and trust that the process of storytelling will unfold as it should. And on that day, it most certainly did.

Secondly, that ‘standing down’ from power and influence vested in one as an individual, institutionally or historically, for whatever reason, is a necessary step in putting together the intricate narratives of the collective. That merely ‘saying’ that one is there to listen and understand is not enough, it needs to be a conscious practice. And requires the ability to recognise the power vested in one as an authority or knowledgeable one. And I continue to wonder about this as we see standoffs between groups, the creeping in of that nefarious combination of power+judgement into discourse and relationship. And the discomfort of living within contradictions and questions, as opposed to answers found within ideology alone. As the day progressed, and the stories unravelled, it became clear that the individual stories made up significant parts of a whole. That what appeared to be quite ordinary was in fact rather extraordinary. And that what appeared contradictory was complementary.

Thirdly, I was struck by just how much maWinnie was an Archive and clearly consciously so. She was a formidable memory bank of stories, places, people, events and emotions. And that her ‘paying attention’, being wholly ‘present’ requires a certain kind of Listening for and in between words and silences.She was able to gently remind someone of an incident and a reaction to an incident as if it was not a decade or two past. I still wonder whether in the poverty of our her-story making process as a nation, is this absence of the emotive or visceral or rather, an inability to read it when it is present. And that the damage done by the exclusion of women’s stories is more harmful because of history’s form which attempts to erase feeling and emotion.

Fourth, that being kind, gentle and compassionate are parts of maWinnie’s whole. That the formidable, fiery and sassy is not a juxtaposition or contradiction thereof. That living in the landscape of the ‘whole’ story, whether the individual or collective requires an ability to hold opposites in unison, and thus to include the seemingly irreconcilable. She suggests to me, that living life whole requires living within contradictions and finding a space for the unresolved. I cannot imagine what the “not knowing” when her husband, partner, comrade would be released did to her soul. I do know, that when 27th April 1994 came around, many of us walked to the polling stations as if in a daydream. The reality or realness of something which was spoken of in hope fuelling slogans such as ;”Freedom in our Lifetime” too overwhelming to comprehend on any rational level.

And in storytelling and memory making – being able to hold these unresolved questions and contradictions, however tentatively or tenuously – reveals the Truth in ways which awaken Hope and Imagination.The polar opposite to this would be a shutting down or closing off and stagnation which half – truths provide[1].

As I contemplate once again, how the very act of remembering and living the legacies of those, such as maWinnie requires us to gently and with respect, interrogate, investigate and possibly represent, the values and principles they lived by in our very rendering of their memory.

[1] We see this in countless exhibitions or memorialisation projects where half-truths about World War One and Two largely exclude the participation of people of the South and so the absence of stories; of the Mende, the deepening desire for Freedom from colonial rule, the place of women in science and technologies which aided the war efforts and so on, reiterates prejudice, racism and abject misogyny which at least parts of these war efforts was attempting to stop.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie First of all, let’s dispel the myth that ignorance is bliss. It can be. States of unawareness can be a cushion, feathered down and fuss-free, when one needs a respite from the little annoyances of life. But ignorance is not a day-to-day frivolity that many of us, who have always lived on this continent and know the violent repercussions of one misstep, can afford. Clearly there was not a lot of bliss prancing about during the apartheid years and Black people just conveniently forgot to throw a celebratory parade. To call what happened to the majority population during this regime anything less than what it was – a brutalizing of human spirit – would be a supreme disservice.

So let’s rather call ignorance a journey. A series of stops and way-stations where, the passenger, draws ever nearer to something approaching the truth. Or a truth, whatever the case may be. You may, of course, decide to stay where you are. Never exploring, never wandering or wondering, and thus never knowing. There is a smug comfort in knowing that one day the world will come to you, because that is the pervasive and diffusive nature of all things human. The truth may one day find its way to you. But when you’re Black and female, it’s more likely to kick down your door than knock.

I met Mam’Winnie in stages.

Stations. Stops. Dilutions and exaggerations.

My earliest memory of hearing the name ‘Mandela’ was in the mid-eighties. My parents had a staggered bedroom, with a main bedroom that opened onto a dressing room-foyer where us children were sometimes allowed to play, listen to the radio and just watch our parents be parents in muted fascination. On a Liberian radio station is where I heard the song ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by The Special A.K.A, which was quite a hit back then.

“Who is this Mandela man? Why is he…unfree?” I didn’t even know what to call the opposite of liberty. The concept was very contrary to an ideal that every African and we Liberians especially enjoyed, or so my young mind believed. The only opposite of freedom and joy I knew of was BellehYalla. BellehYalla was our nation’s worst prison, mythical and monolithic in the way it blocked out the sun in every child’s imagination. People sang songs for criminals who ended up in such places?

My father went on to explain some of what life was like under segregation in South Africa, how Mandela was a freedom fighter in jail for a long time for trying to level the playing field for the Black citizens. I fired a lot of questions. My father was one to joke if the rare mood took him so surely he was joking now, about an African country where people had so little and could do even less. Didn’t they own things, like land? Yes, apparently the country was theirs, but then White people came along and took it. But how could that be? Did White people often go around taking massive things like whole countries away and no one did anything to stop it? My father looked especially wry as he answered yes, it did happen all the time and when I was older and studying history, I would learn all the colourful ways how.

I remember one thing I could not wrap my head around: where was this Mandela’s wife, while he rotted away for a million years? What was she doing in the meantime? My father cleared his throat and adjusted his clothes and muttered something about minding the children and keeping the home and waiting.

My mother, who tended to silently watch these occasional educational exchanges between my father and any one of us five children with a mysterious wry smile of her own, came over when he left the room to busy himself with something else. “She’s helping in her own way,” my mother soothed me, knowing I had the tendency to overimagine and get overwrought. “She’s fighting how she can.” A few years later my own idyll was shattered, if indeed my country had ever truly been the beacon for Negritude and hope that it believed itself to be. The 1990 civil war had me exiled from home and confused about wars, politics and the courageously destructive statements men make. Several years and one too many new countries later, any political appetite I could have had was snuffed out. Coming to live in South Africa, Cape Town no less, as a postgraduate student perked up my interest somewhat. I got to look at a different sort of beast close up. Stories about apartheid came alive. I had learned in my many junior and secondary schools about Bantu homelands and the regularity with which children grew up without a constant imprint of their father because he was away somewhere. Swallowed by the mines, by the cities, by the struggle. I heard much of Robben Island; you had to, with the White tourists pouring in every summer and interrupting your delicious restaurant dinners with their typhoon of tears of how this lovely man had suffered so much and still he forgave. I did not visit that white rock prison until I had some years under my belt, until the Capetonian sunshine had properly baked the overindulgent Mother City into my skin. I wanted to really feel things when I went to Robben Island.

I did not, not much. It was interesting and educational, but not riveting and wrenching. Bear in mind, I considered myself a pretty jaded young woman by this point. Proximity dulls the knife even more. Robben Island was a major tourist attraction in my city and I had learned too much via osmosis to be well and truly, pearl-clutchingly shocked. I was going for the most part to treat my mother, who was visiting at the time. Most of all, it turned out that Robben Island was no BellehYalla. I expected dungeons and neck chains. But flushing toilets, separate cells, regular meals… My knowledge of the typical African prison had never evolved beyond “no mammal should be here”, and justifiably so. But from the looks of things, all prisons were not created equally. Troupe Nelson had suffered, yes, but they’d had some dignity. As I studied the commemorative plaques on the walls, photos of revolutionaries in action, the sacrifice is not lost on me. Still, I looked around and wondered: where were the wives? Where was The Wife?

Stops. Stations. Titrations of truth.

Sometime during my Cape Town years, in the mid-2000s, a biography of Winnie Mandela was foisted on me. It was ‘Winnie Mandela: A Life’ by Anne Marie du PreezBezdrob, a popular one during that time. I was going to read it without prompting, really I was, but other books of a more fiction-bent, galvanizing nature kept getting in the way. The jaded young woman considered the nature of non- fiction too invasive to be reading material she sought out willingly. Autobiographies and biographies were heavy work of the navel-gazing variety, the payoff often too slim for my liking. I tended to steer clear. But the look on my best friend Inonge’s face brooked no nonsense as she thrust it under my nose, after days of heavy hinting did not work. This was a book we as women, Black women, had to read. I could return to my silly crime and fantasy novels afterwards. Still, I did not immediately relent. Why did I need to know more about Winnie? I knew enough. She had done some important stuff, she was the ex-president’s ex-wife. Wasn’t she bitter now? Wasn’t there a short Google page I could read with just the highlights, some ANC cliff notes? This felt like homework.

So I did some preliminary digging. There was a wealth of intriguing archival memorabilia and articles just a mouse-click away. One online photograph in particular struck me. Winnie in the 1960s, toting a metal pail of water, of something, in the township. So this was where she had been. Gone was the girl in the iconic wedding picture giggling beside her new husband, a girl who, let’s face it, had no goddamn idea what she was getting into. No idea that a nation would start to look up to her in his absence. In her place was this woman forging herself under fire: raising kids alone, facing the daily grind of laundry and assembling meals and assorted etceteras, all whilst in the grip of a police state.

This was what being the satellite parent entailed. The power of notoriety and glory of mystique were never yours, not fully, not when national security perpetually kept your business in the street. You would never be a son of rebellion or sun around which revolutions revolved. The satellite stands vigil and waits. But satellites also absorb information and detonate strategically. The girl was a woman now, her body underneath her cheap polyester jersey softened by children, the stress of her day already shadowing her face. She looked so ordinary it was frightening, because I knew she was frightening. Any woman raising children alone and fielding threats on their behalf knows this reality too well.

She reminded me of my mother. That photo hit me hard.

So I read about the Nomzamo before the Winifred, and put the two together. The book was not without its flaws and omissions of nuance, but it gave flesh and breath and breadth to a woman I had not known, allowed myself to know, was in there. I read more, picked up information from her career over the years and blended colours to make a more complete picture. As I have matured, so have my empathy and understanding. My desire to be acceptable, to apologise like a good girl, to always have my interior world and motives understood are things I crush underfoot as many times as is required to keep my spirit intact.

I knew nothing of Nomzamo-Madikizela. But we journeyed out to meet each other, she and I.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie African traditions and cultures have always held an awareness of the life cycle, from birth to death and the afterlife. The life cycle made us aware of the transitions from birth, through initiations, to child-bearing and rearing, to old age, to death, and thereafter to the journeys to the spiritual worlds of the ancestors and spirits.

In the afterlife, ancestors held sway on the day-to-day life of every community in many ways. Ancestors were consulted, honoured, and venerated, and in moments of crisis, asked to intervene (or stop intervening), so that life could return to an even keel. In many ways, the ancestor was not just an idea, but also a part of daily living, part of the eldership. Interestingly, ancestors included both female and male persons who had lived and transitioned.

Scholarship is awash with various studies on the idea of the ancestor – a continuing member of society, an elder who has a say in the day-to-day life of the community. Growing up, we learned, some of us via folklore, and some via Geography, History and Civics (GHC) classes (and some of us, through both) that ancestors are an active part of spiritual life. In a sense, ancestors are an extension of God, the creator, the primordial ancestor, the source of all life, or at the very least, an active part of the pantheon of the spiritual life of the people, which included the Creator and the spirits.

“Civilised” Africans stopped the practice of venerating ancestors because of an internalised conflict that pitted these ancestors with a God that was a watered-down white variation, incapable of seeing the value of honouring those from whom we came, those that walked before us and prepared the way for us.

Of course, critical discourse on ancestors has waned over the years, in part due to what I call the colonio-patriarchal gaze, which introduced functionalism and structuralism as part of its anthropological and religious distortions of African culture. The “civilising” and “missionising” discourse that classified our understanding of ancestors as a pagan and primitive practice consigned the nuanced view of the afterlife to a fixed idea of worship. “Civilised” Africans stopped the practice of venerating ancestors because of an internalised conflict that pitted these ancestors with a God that was a watered-down white variation, incapable of seeing the value of honouring those from whom we came, those that walked before us and prepared the way for us.

Worse, the colonio-patriarchal gaze also consigned women to the margins, entrenching racist- patriarchy as the default position. While in Old Africa women held esteemed positions of honour and of power, post-colonial Africa conceptualised women on a Victorian model that needed women to be hapless and helpless before men. Nanjala Nyabola, in one of her op-eds in the Tana Forum, calls this the “patriarchal understanding of the role of women that merely exchanged European patriarchy for an invented African tradition that has all but erased the herstories of women”. This erasure was based on an invented African tradition extended to the continuum of the living and the afterlife, and worse, to the understanding of women’s being as only relevant where connected to men.

We see this in our storytelling, for example, where women are either Mama-so-and-so, or a wife/part of a harem of wives/ a saintly grandmother, full of wisdom, demure. Women’s needs must subscribe to a certain way of being, despite the many ways in which women have continued to resist from time immemorial. We only need to think of women like the late Prof. Wangari Maathai and the women who resisted the occupation of Uhuru Park alongside her to understand that women have historically resisted the proscriptions of colonio-patriarchy.

Which brings us to subject of the transition of Mama Winnie Madikizela As soon as news of Mama’s passing broke, the Kenyan dailies joined their international counterparts in weaving a tale deeply steeped in colonio-patriarchy. “Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie dies at 81”, the Standard newspaper announced, setting the tone that positioned Winnie as irreverently connected in a previous way, an ex to the great Nelson Mandela.

“Winnie Mandela: South Africa’s flawed heroine dies”, the Nation broke the news, further positioning this ex of a great man as fundamentally flawed. Three days later, the Nation would follow up with the headline: “Mandela and his 3 wives: Evelyn, Winnie and Graca”, diverting the story from Winnie’s transition from life to the afterlife to the male prowess of Mandela, who had three wives. In this article, quoted from AFP, Mandela’s first wife Evelyn, a “cousin of ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu”, was described as “a demure country girl in sharp contrast to…his feisty wife Winnie” – (of course, even the framing of Evelyn’s identity as also connected to the Walter Sisulu apart from being Mandela’s first wife cannot be missed).

To erase Mama Winnie’s herstory is to erase the injustices of apartheid. It is to condemn her for fighting during war. It is to ridicule her for not being a demure, village girl in the face of violence, rape, plunder and racism. It is to reward apartheid and its adherents.

The “contrast” is made deeper when we are told that while both women came from the same village, “Winnie took to the city”. Indeed, the idea that the city as a space that “unsanitises” women from demure to troublesome is as old as colonio-patriarchy itself. The city becomes the place where women are “urbanised” into becoming ungovernable, mainly through empowerment, education being the top of the list. While Evelyn “buried herself in religion”, Winnie would deliver incendiary speeches, get jailed, and even kept a “young lover”. These qualities, decidedly non-rural and non- religious, turning Winnie into a “flawed” phenomenon. These “flaws” became the sum total of her life, the distillation of all her life’s work, including keeping the fire of revolution burning in South Africa while her husband spent 27 years in jail.

Even her imprisonment is framed differently. For Mandela, prison life only served to turn him into a monkish sage who would preach forgiveness and win the Nobel Peace Prize. For Mama Winnie, prison only served to enrage her, morph her into a beast that would kill innocents such as Stompie, take young lovers, and create the football club that she used as a personal militia. Let us also not forget that while in prison, Winnie was subjected to the most humiliating torture.

While married to Nelson Mandela for about 38 years, it would emerge that the couple only spent a total of five years together. These five years would become the lynchpin of the reading of Winnie’s life – how she spent her solitary years being unfaithful and indiscrete towards her iconic husband, how she disgraced him by using her young lovers to kill innocents, and how she dared to “maintain” her young lover even after her larger-than-life husband came back to her from a 27 year-jail term.

Those who have advocated for a more nuanced reading of Winnie’s life have been vilified and asked to consider that Mama Winnie was not perfect, that she had her flaws. While a compelling argument, the point is not lost that those pointing at her “flaws” are doing it from the position of colonio- patriarchy.

The timbre of these reports is not just disturbing; they, for me, point to a deeper narrative where women who transition from life to the afterlife are not accorded the same dignity and veneration that men are. This is one of the lasting legacies of colonialism, where women were relegated to the margins of men’s lives, both when living and in death. The invention of a picture of “African womanhood” that does not work for the majority of African women who stand up to be counted becomes problematic because it does not work, period. To erase Mama Winnie’s herstory is to erase the injustices of apartheid. It is to condemn her for fighting during war. It is to ridicule her for not being a demure, village girl in the face of violence, rape, plunder and racism. It is to reward apartheid and its adherents.

Compare, for instance, the soft, even magnanimous, approach to the death of P.W Botha, who was actively opposed to anti-apartheid activities and was found guilty of human rights violations by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Or the rewarding of F.W. de Klerk with a Nobel Peace Prize despite his support of apartheid and state-sanctioned violence against South African blacks towards the end of apartheid when he was the president of South Africa.

For both men, apartheid is contextualised so that their crimes against blacks appear less abhorrent than those committed by their predecessors. For example, history is kind to Botha for not being as “brutal” as his predecessors. This kindness and nuanced reading is missing when Mama Winnie is dubbed a “flawed” ex-wife. In fact, her crimes take on a salacious character. The brutal murder of Stompie is often connected to her supposed “flings” with younger men. The story even subtracts from the horrible death of Stompie, and becomes firmly hinged on Winnie’s supposed and imagined sexual life.

Such salacious readings are mainly consigned to women throughout history. The great painter Frida Kahlo’s story has always been centred on her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera, and hinged on her imagined sexual life, rather than the breathtaking beauty of her work, and her incredible life story. Many pundits seek to remind us of the ways in which the late Prof. Wangari Maathai was divorced from her husband, and led a “nude protest” at Uhuru Park. Her hard-won Nobel Peace Prize becomes a footnote, as does her life’s work in education and the environment, which she began as a teenage girl.

Female ancestors, embodying the earth, were seen as giving the earth its fertility. Part of the pantheon of the spiritual, their names were evoked for blessing, fertility and the wellbeing of the earth.

So why then must we see these women who have transitioned as ancestors? Why must we honour them, and seek to vociferously end the erasure of their lives? Film-maker Ava Duvernay popularised the saying “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams” after breaking out as the first African-American woman to direct a big-budget film production. In subsequent interviews, she directly made reference to female ancestors, paying homage to them by saying that she would never had accomplished her life’s work if these female ancestors had not laid the groundwork.

For us in Kenya and in Africa, this is doubly true. Our female ancestors have continued to lay the groundwork for us, propelling us to become who we are today. Our departed grandmothers and mothers have left us with nuggets of wisdom, joy, and even pain, with which we have forged ahead into becoming. Our female elders and ancestors, from Queen Nzinga of Angola to Mekatilili wa Menza of the Mijikenda, Queen Lozikeyi of the Ndebele, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti of Nigeria, Miriam Makeba, Wangari Maathai, and now, Winnie Mandela, have all dug on rock to ensure we find footing in soft ground. They have led revolutions, won wars, led armies, and won countless, if unappreciated and erased, victories. Paying homage to them as elders and ancestors is the least we can do. Paying forward their labours is imperative. The soil they dug up from rock cannot be desecrated with erasures, and without action. We must resist erasures, and continue with the tasks of planting where they gave us soil, so that future generations will find rock-hewn forests.

There is also the belief that the state of the earth is commensurate with the status of women, both those that are alive and those that have transitioned. If we are to observe the state of the earth today, it is clear what the status of women is. The transition of Mama Winnie reminds us that we must resist and reclaim the spaces of our female ancestors from colonio-patriarchy. This is the urgent and imperative assignment of our generation.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie

“Kweli itashinda kesho, kama leo haitoshi.” ~ Shaaban Roberts

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, you have left us, but you will be immortalised forever in history as one the greatest leaders of the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Courageous, revolutionary, intelligent, loyal, beautiful, loving and dignified is how you are now epitomised. You defied all stereotypes through a sharp revolutionary, intellectual and political stance for which you paid a high price. This personal reflective celebratory expose commemorates your life in the inside of politics. It reviews the public and private space and imagination as epitomised by your extraordinary life Winnie Madikizela- Mandela. The feminist saying that the personal is political is truly reflected in your interpretation and negotiation of life. Referred to as “Woman” and “Mother” in the poetics of the politics of national liberation, you have become the symbol of freedom and future through so many innovations and commitments. We remember the price of courage of “staying true” by redefining and reimagining yourself through the struggles, our compass, our true North, and its significance for becoming and future.

“You did not die, but multiplied!”

May you continue to grace the universe and our lives in your splendour and may your life and sacrifice not be in vain!

Many across the world, and more so black women and feminists are deeply thankful. We are greatly indebted that you led by shining example, and we will never forget you and how you refashioned our imagination of who we are and how we could be, and become.

May your indomitable spirit continue to give us courage, to guide us!

Warrior Queen Winnie Madikizela-Mandela! We know that if you were man or white, you would have won numerous Nobel Prizes for peace, equality and justice, for that is what your life was about, the best exemplar, our heroine. We pray that this is yet to come! You are, would have been, and will be decorated with medals of honour, courage and valour from the tallest ceiling to the floor. You are a hero many times over, whose indomitable spirit will be commemorated with emblems, buildings, institutions, documents, documentaries and monuments that will remind us who you were, what you did, and for what you stood!

They will remind us that you were here!

Oh, I wish you were here to see and hear the tributes that should have flowed before. But you knew, you were loved and revered. You must know! People continue to testify of your courage during the time that you lived and now that you have gone to join the ancestors.

Oh! Indomitable One! It is hard to believe that you are gone, if only just away. You were here!

“She did not die, she multiplied!” is ringing all over the world and it is being heard!

This multiplying has been welling: a rallying call and has now burst everywhere like spring, sprouting! Inspiring so many people, young and old. Women, particularly black women, as we watched you, inspired; the iconic vision of our freedom. We grew strong and bold! We saw you, as we marched in exile, or stood nights at Trafalgar Square, followed your tribulations with sorrow and hope, praying that one distant day Apartheid would fall! And the day came in our life-times because of you and so many others like you.

You stood bold in the ANC, the ANC Women’s League, in African people’s struggles, in women’s struggles, in the struggles of the oppressed and dispossessed, symbol not just in South Africa but the globe, the “Mother” of the nation, the voice of Nelson Mandela in his absence, the voice of reason for a liberated South Africa, leader in the ANC, of the Mkonto we Sizwe, the head of your family, mother to brave Zenani and Zinzi and so many more, and the Queen of ethical transgressive justice for us, for others, for yourself, to the very last, O Beautyful One!

In our eyes, you triumphed.

Beautyful, Powerful Revolutionary Queen! We hail you!

It was a very tall order, if we think about it very carefully. Living in the global public glare in the eye of the Apartheid storm and a fierce and vicious enemy that targeted you, in the eye of racial and African patriarchal storm, in the eye of a nation still struggling to find equitable justice, a nation struggling to recover restorative justice for itself, dignity and peace for its people. In the eye of the ANC storms, the tough party of freedom and Government, in the eye of Mkonto we Sizwe, in the eye of the family, in the eye of your own heart, mind and soul.

O Valiant Warrior Queen! O! how you paid

Without bowing to the powerful enemy who came in all shades, shapes, sizes and hues and who did not and still will not STOP trying to crush your spirit… for it is that, which they sought and seek to destroy as the battle for the freedom for equality for justice for peace for restorative justice for land for equitable distribution of resources for dignity for humanity for hearts, minds and souls and love continues.

Amandla!

There needed to be a very strong person. And you answered the call of history: Winnie Madikizela- Mandela. You! You never shied away!

We shall never forget!

We shall never forget what you stood for facing the father of all battles against Apartheid, for principled peace, land, justice, restorative justice, dignity, redistribution and equality when Africa’s children needed and continue to need you most. You understood the protracted and ongoing nature to dismantle the evil wrought by Apartheid systems and their trails. We will continue to lean on your courage, your vision, your wisdom, your intelligence, and your insight, your vigilance, your example and hope.

O Exemplary Political Visionary!

You stood, in the darkest hours and throughout your life on the right side of history. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. You loved your land and became the icon of freedom, with your fist always defiantly raised to the very end, unbowed, symbolising that the struggle continues. The day of freedom continues to come and become. Your children Zinzi and Zenani are many and many more are multiplying by the day! And the day will come!

You did not die, but multiplied.

You stood! Stood so tall in so many places at once, and in the place of so many.

Stayed.

Stayed the course. You, who with others loved Africa so much, who loved Africa’s children, who loved your own children and family so much that you were willing to pay and paid multiple high prices! From being incarcerated, exiled, banished, separated from your loved ones, beaten, tortured, disenfranchised! But you kept going! While so many others fell by the wayside, colluded, grew weary, while others perished, and others paid and continue to pay with their livelihoods and suffering, while others have paid the ultimate price! How could we forget the monster of Apartheid and what it did and continues to do to the children of Africa and the world?

We celebrate you! We pour libation as the heavens open with thunder and lightning at your farewell and we are thankful to the Gods and ancestors.

Even the heavens join in weeping, celebrating your greatness!

We will forever commemorate you in deed and thought and you will forever remain in our hearts. History will remember you the Great Leader Queen Madikizela-Mandela, the Great One of Africa! Amandla! Amandla! Amandla!

Lala Salama Mama Mzalendo Wetu! Lala Ngoxolo. Rest in Peace! Hamba Kahle.

Mayibuye i-Africa!

Channelling the spirits who manifested while I was writing in no particular order:

The 1956 Women’s March, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson Mandela, Zenani Mandela-Dlamini, Zinzi Mandela, Lebogang Mashile, Graca Marcel, Pitika Ntuli, Dumile Conco and family, Bhekiziwe (Bek), Abdilatif Abdallah, Diane Abbot, Nelson Mandela, Dedan Kimathi, Claudia Jones, Ranjana Ash, Sojourner Truth, Micere Mugo, Wangari Maathai, Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Ruth First, Pio Gama Pinto, Those who fought for Kenya’s land and freedom particularly Dedan Kimathi, Desiree Lewis, Keiko Miyamoto, Harry Thuku and the women who came to free him in the “Riot” of 1922, Mekatilili wa Mwanje, Carole Boyce Davis, Wandia Njoya, Muthoni Wanyeki, Muthoni Likimani, Queen Amina of Zaria, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, Anumbai Patel, Mbuya Nehanda, Muraa wa Ngiti, Mmatsilo Tumei Motsei, Gcina Mhlope, Angela Davies, Fatimah Kelleher, Maya Angelou, The Berlin Crew, The Bayreuth Posse, Phoebe Boswell, Wanjiru Kihoro, Nish Matenjwa, Audre Lorde, Miriam Makeba, Toni Morrison, Pumla Gqola, Njabulo Ndebele, Mbulelo Mzamane, Vusi Mchunu, Amrit Wilson, Diana Ferrus, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Steve Biko, Jessica Horn, Bumi Matlayane Sexuale, Sibongile Ndashe, all the Weavers; Umoja; All African Feminists, Black Feminists, Women and feminist movements worldwide, All African Freedom Movements, Black Lives Matter, The Feminist Forum, particularly the dearly departed; The brave people of South Africa, particularly all those who fought for, and those who died for freedom; The brave feminists & women of Kenya and Africa who continue to defy all kinds of odds. The brave people of Africa and the Africana world. The brave people everywhere who continue to fight for a free, equitable and just world. And remembering all those who perished for Africa’s freedom.

Kweli itashinda kesho…

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Sitawa Namwalie

It is not unusual that when a liberation struggle hero dies, many voices come to the fore, to bear witness, to lament, to remind, to narrate. It is unusual that there is a particularly gendered vitriolic account the kind of which has accompanied the passing of Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela Mandela.

In the cacophony of patriarchy-anchored, misogynistic utterances upon her death; in the outright dismissal of her positive significance to her community, country, continent and the world; in the mal- narration and disinformation meant to occlude, while excusing blatant wrongs done to her primarily by a very male culture, prior to and after the 1994 ‘independence’ of South Africa, it can too easily be with scorn, justified anger, lashing out, and dignified silence that we choose to respond. What I suggest, rather, is that we are at this moment, in honour of her indefatigable spirit, called upon to get to work: to continue her life-long work; to reflect on the gendered aspects to struggle and its representation – any struggle for liberation – and to draw what lessons we can for the future of the work of liberation movements, as continuation or reconstruction, from a gendered perspective.

In such moment, it can also become easy to forget the male feminist voice that could offer more balance and nuance, in part because being male, it can get immersed under the rest of the shrill, insulting salvos; and in part because it has always been so faint within the cacophonous, discordant, Winnie Mandela – and later Winnie Madikizela Mandela – narrative song.

This is not what Winnie Madikizela Mandela would want, I aver. A woman who lived inclusivity, rejected injustice, and fought for those at the margins – male and female – would not rejoice in the silencing of any voice. In particular, Winnie Mandela so believed in the critical role that liberation movements could play that, she would no doubt welcome a balanced reconfiguration of the feminist liberation movement, shaped not by patriarchy’s valorization or vilification, necessarily, but by such clear re-examination towards charting necessary new frontiers, and contributed to by such diversity as is near representative of reality as is possible.

The recognition then, of the sheer importance of such voices as the male feminist requires that we amplify it to better examine it for the lessons it might elicit – and this is what I propose to do in these few pages. I focus specifically on the literary text by Njabulo Ndebele, entitled The Cry of Winnie Mandela. The focus on the literary text is necessary because, ‘underlying literary texts are ideological structures that ‘mediate the transformation of social structures into the thematic preoccupations as well as into the aesthetic structures and styles of the texts.’ To follow this argument, novels and biographies/autobiographies are ideological discourses, better understood if situated within the context out of which they derive. Novels in Africa, publication of the bulk of which coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in Africa, perhaps much more so.[1] The literary text in South Africa, and Njabulo Ndebele’s novel in particular then, is not innocent. While it shares the ‘African’ experience, South Africa, the last bastion of white colonial rule in Africa, is often singled out for the particularity of the history out of which it is fashioned, for the lessons it might have drawn from the rest of Africa, and for its relevance in the continuing process of re-fashioning ‘Africa’ (or not).

South Africa attained ‘independence’ with the establishment of democratic rule in 1994. As the last ‘colony’ in Africa, South Africa is often seen as a mirror in which the people of Africa can see themselves: ‘a uniquely bare and ugly vision of the mix of social, economic, political, religious and racial forces which have affected everybody in thepost-colonial dispensation.’ It is also a mirror of possibilities. Rosemary Jolly posits that ‘as critics, teachers, and students, we need to forge a language that goes beyond apartheid; that refuses to hypostasize South Africa as the model in which the colonized black and the settler white eternally confront each other in the ‘ultimate racism’. Authors of The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, observe that the frequent re- designations of races under apartheid ‘demonstrated the sheer fictionality of suggesting that these racial divisions were either fixed or absolute, as did the necessity of passing a law against miscegenation between the races’ (the ‘Immorality Act’ aimed at ‘racial purity’). In the post- independence era, calls shifted from ‘a narrow cultural homogeneity’ to more heterogeneity and plurality. For South Africa, a country founded on the back of migration, and for long, characterised by racial division and gender separation, notions of identity, diversity, and interaction become paramount in envisioning the forging of a new nation. How are these configured in the symbolism of Winnie Madikizela Mandela in Ndebele’s post-apartheid narrative? First, a few, often touted, framing historical facts on South Africa:

1652: The first Dutch settlers arrive in the Cape of Good Hope

1806: The English come to South Africa. They are to later become the economically dominant group

1830’s: The Great Trek (arguably began in 1836) and resultant displacement of the African groups already present; which coincided with the Mfecane wars or Difaqane (as it is often presented in historical texts)

1902: Up to 1910, a period of enforced anglicization

1910: Declaration of the Union of South Africa. South Africa is partitioned between the main white groups, Afrikaner and English

1948: South Africa declared an apartheid state. Racial Segregation institutionalised and subsequently pillared on a series of laws enacted in quick succession

1950: Population Registration Act passed. People classified according to race. ‘White’ was a single category; people of mixed blood were subdivided into ‘Cape Coloured’, ‘Malay’, ‘Griqua’; also ‘Chinese’, ‘Indian’ and ‘other Asian’. White thus became single biggest category under a policy of ‘divide and rule’

Followed by: Prohibition of Mixed Marriages act, The Native Labour act and the Reservation of Separate Amenities act as well as the Extension of University Education act, barring non-whites from universities

1953: Bantu Education act: Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd declares

‘There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. Racial relations cannot improve if the result of Native education is the creation of frustrated people who, as a result of the education they receive, have expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa do not allow to be fulfilled immediately.’

1958: 14 June, Nelson and Winnie Mandela marry. Winnie is 22

1959: Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act: 8 ethnic homelands called Bantustans set up. Effectively, 13 percent of the land in SA set aside for more than 70 percent of its people

1960: Declared ‘Africa Year’ by the UN in support of the principle of independence after a long era of colonisation. Chief Albert Luthuli, leader of the ANC, calls for an international boycott of South African products to protest apartheid

1962: November 6, UN votes to impose sanctions against SA

1962: November 7, Nelson Mandela is sentenced to 5yrs with hard labour: for incitement to strike and for leaving the country without travel documents

1962: December, Winnie Mandela receives her first banning order, restricting her to the magisterial area of Johannesburg, prohibiting her from entering any educational premises, and barring her from addressing any meetings or gatherings where more than two people were present. The media no longer allowed to quote anything she said. Effectively, she would need permission to visit Nelson in prison

1963: Minister of Justice, BJ Vorster, introduces the 90 day law: security police given the right to detain people in solitary confinement for successive periods of 90 days without being charged or brought to court.

Albertina Sisulu is the first woman to be detained under this law. The first death of a detainee under this law recorded the same year, 5 September 1963 (4 months since its inception): Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle

1963: 11 July, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, and Arthur Goldreich arrested

1963: 9 October, The Rivonia Trial commences. 10 accused. Sabotage and Conspiracy. Acquitted on a technicality as Nelson could not have committed sabotage while in prison. Jubilation is short-lived as the accused got promptly imprisoned again under the 90day rule

1964: 12 June (2 days before Nelson and Winnie’s sixth wedding anniversary), Nelson Mandela and his co-accused sentenced to life imprisonment

1982: Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, academic and author of several books and editor of several radical newspapers, killed by letter bomb in Mozambique

1986: Winnie Mandela’s banning order finally relaxed. After 8 yrs in ‘exile’ in Brandfort, she finally goes back home to Soweto

1990: February, Nelson Mandela released after more than 27yrs in prison

1992: April, Mandela announces his separation from Winnie Mandela, referring to her throughout as ‘Comrade Nomzamo’ ( Can we have some context to Comrade Nomzamo)

1992: 6 September, Winnie’s letter to Dali Mpofu is published, unedited, in the Sunday Times

1994: First Democratic elections in South Africa. Nelson Mandela is sworn in as president

1996: March, after 38 yrs of marriage, 27 yrs of separation, and 4 yrs of living apart, Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s divorce is finalised at the Rand Supreme Court. ‘The end of one of the world’s great love stories’.

The (re)making of Winnie Madikizela Mandela: Narrating woman in post-apartheid South Africa

The preamble of the constitution of the ‘new’ South Africa drawn up in 1996 states: ‘We, the people of South Africa, /Recognise the injustices of our past; /Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; /Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.’[2] In the new South Africa, inclusion was to be the baton for measuring true independence. While most of the literature coming out of South Africa had hitherto focused on the struggle for liberation, beyond 1994, post-apartheid, post-independence South Africa was to be reflected in modes of writing that have often echoed those of post-independence Africa in general.

In the novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Ndebele offers us ‘post-nationalist’ black writing ‘that breaks with the stance of “protest”, … advocating a conscious ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’.[3] Here we are presented with four women during the liberation struggle, who await the return of their men. They are dubbed Greek mythological Penelope’s descendants. Through the women, Ndebele offers comment on the historically inscribed position of the woman across cultures and geographic demarcations? In making the link between the women featured in The Cry of Winnie Mandela, Ndebele points to the commonality of women’s place across class and the racial barrier.

The first of the women, Mannete Mofolo, is left in Lesotho while her husband migrates to the mines of South Africa and eventually does not return.

The second woman is initially unnamed, and we later find out she is Delisiwe Dulcie S’Khosana. To delay naming Delisiwe is to allow for introspection and the possibility of finding her within each one of us. It is to point to the possibility of her universalism; of the possibility of any name suiting her, for she is any woman, unspoken and unspoken of. She represents that many. She is a teacher whose husband goes away to study medicine. Together they cherish the ideal that one day he will be the first black medical doctor in the East Rand township. She ´keeps’ him, making financial sacrifices to ensure that he attains his goal. In the tenth year, she falls pregnant and in the twelfth, the husband returns, accuses her of infidelity and leaves her for another woman. The new woman is a nurse.

The third woman is Mamello ‘Patience’ Molete. After five years of marriage, her husband flees into exile. She had had no knowledge that he was involved in politics. Twenty-five years later, he is a free man who chooses not to return to Mamello. She loses both her husband and herself to the schizophrenic world of post-apartheid South Africa where the ‘enemy’ has instantly become the lover, friend, and partner. He marries a white woman, and they later have children, ‘products of freedom’

A wounded (also initially unnamed) woman, is the fourth, Marara Joyce Baloyi, whose husband is ‘there but not there. I mean, I saw his body around the house, but my husband had left.’ He drinks and sleeps around while his wife keeps house and ‘stand(s) upright and declare(s) her love and loyalty’ to him. Upon his death, she spends a lot of money on his funeral as per the demands of custom.

Ndebele finally presents to us the last and connecting point to all the women: Nomzamo Winnie Mandela. She is the embodiment of the historically constructed waiting woman of South Africa. A symbol of defiance and contradiction. A woman who is presented as journeying, not frozen in her waiting. She shatters barriers and in the conversations that ensue amongst all the women, homo- sociality is born; the women gain a voice and mode of speaking hitherto unavailable to them – even the ‘unspeakable’. Above all, they each seek to find themselves before embarking on a metaphorical journey of the discovery of their racial other and predecessor, Penelope.

Gender is central to the conceptualisation and expression of the nation, and of the future.

In evoking the voice of the silent and silenced, Ndebele re-opens the debate on gender representations in post-independence African literature and the debate on male feminism within the African literary context. Ndebele offers us a glimpse too into the making of post-apartheid South African masculinities in his quest to ‘rediscover the ordinary.’ In doing so, he offers possible opportunity, through the figure of Winnie Mandela, at once diverse, at once singular, always symbolically omnipotent. He leaves us too with many questions, not least of which is, after such a long-sustained gender gulf, can men and women reconcile – from a point of real knowledge and empathy – and together produce a society free of gender bias?

In the wake of the death of this symbol of hope and in the face of misrepresentations, renewed efforts at educating men and women become urgent, as Spivak argues, not only to be free of gender bias, but to also not consider the consequences of gender-freedom to be demeaning to themselves as men and women, and necessarily destructive of the social fabric.

[2] The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. p.1.

[3] Graham Pechey, ‘Post-apartheid narratives’ in F. Barker et al, eds. Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) p.167.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Sitawa Namwalie

“Not until you have discovered what is worth dying for is life really worth living.” Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela

Reminiscent of Freire’s analogy of liberation as a painful childbirth and while the evocation of ‘Mother’ can be suspect as witnessed in disempowering narratives of women who must carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, it interests me that people in South Africa as well as continental Africa and the Diaspora referred to departed Elder, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela as Mother of the Nation, Mam’Winnie, uMam’Winnie, Mama Winnie or Mama Africa.

I hold‘Mama’ in esteem and context as an embodiment of the ‘Source’ and ‘Force’ that brings forth life. The life of a person, a people or a nation.The life in the ‘Fruit’ of the struggle for freedom and human dignity – liberation.

I first heard of Winnie Mandela during my teenage years. I simply knew of her then as the late South African Freedom Fighter, Nelson Mandela’s wife. It wasn’t until my young adult years that I started developing a deeper understanding of her role as a Freedom Fighter and Liberation Leader in her own right. Everything I knew about Madikizela-Mandela was based on numerous stories told by local, regional and international media over the years, often portraying her as a highly contentious leader on a personal and professional level.

Deeply polarizing perceptions of Madikizela-Mandela continue to emerge following the news of her death on Monday, April 02, 2018 at age 81. People in South Africa and across the globe have eulogized this revolutionary leader in a variety of ways creating what feels like an emotionally charged, ‘love-you-hate-you-shut-up’ mosaic of ‘raw-ripe’, ‘bitter-sweet-sour’and in-between, powerful depictions – as if in competition for voice, space, light and life.

The concept of the cycle or continuity of life unfolds as the world mourns this revolutionary. She continues to inspire global narratives that are forcing many to ‘look’ at her life’s trajectory as a liberation leader – in life and death! A dynamic reflecting a duo-extreme and of shades in-between depending on what we ‘see’ when we ‘look’. A symbolic,’narratives tag-of-war’strives to cement what Sisonke Msimang and others have called Madikizela-Mandela’s legacy.

Based on what I have read, watched and conversations with people on and off social media, I have been struck by the varying descriptions of Madikizela-Mandela. Some of the words and phrases I have come across describe her as defiant, resilient, fierce, fearless, spirited, strong, brave, unbreakable, courageous, out-spoken, bold, passionate, resilient fortitude, flawed, militant, charismatic, radical, firebrand, despicable, complex, violent, murderous, corrupt, terrorist, tarnished, bully, kidnapper, Mandela’s ex-wife, among others.

Read also: Winnie and Wambui, a Tribute to Sisters in the Struggle

In some cases, these words hinge on a one-sided view of a wonderful, loving and beloved liberation leader or a cold-blooded, corrupt politician and adulterous murderer. Some have drawn their perceptions of Madikizela-Mandela from both ends of the spectrum while others remain conspicuously silent. Silence is a form of communication.

Zukiswa Wanner called out what she termed, “pseudo-intellectual attacks” some people are “writing about this complex woman” noting in a one of her Facebook posts, “On Mam’Winnie: If the black man is always suspect, the black woman is always guilty. And I ain’t got time for those who push the latter narrative, thank you”.

Rasna Warah called out “white-media vilification” of Madikizela-Mandela and the hypocrisy of a global patriarchal double-standard which ignores prominent male political leaders’ real or perceived transgressions yet takes “all gloves off when it comes to Winnie”. Warah also noted, “Winnie Mandela was no doubt a deeply flawed human being. But which South African can claim to have remained completely untouched or undamaged by the extreme violence and blatant racism of the apartheid era? If anything, we should admire Winnie Mandela for refusing to allow the apartheid regime to crush her fearless spirit – a spirit that could be bent but which could not be broken.”

Zukiswa Wanner reminded her fellow citizens in South Africa, “There is no historical record of men in the ANC or Pan Africanist Congress who raped their comrades, who stole resources donated by our anti-apartheid allies for those in camps in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, and suffering the consequences for doing so”.

Wanner continued, “Instead, our collective vilification has been towards the one person who suffered more than most in the last 30 years of apartheid because she was a woman who did not behave as we expected. What we have is a record of Madikizela- Mandela being asked at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to apologise for her involvement in Stompie Seipei’s murder. Jerry Richardson, the “coach” of the Mandela United Football Club, was sentenced to life for the teenager’s murder. Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory in the assault of Stompie. Her sentence was reduced to a fine and a suspended two-year sentence on appeal”.

An excerpt from one of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook posts on Madikizela-Mandela, “Her beauty, strength, courage, resilience, out-spokenness, defiance, militant charisma and radical fire often inspired me to stand tall in difficult times” … and… “yet her reported human failings also shook me to the core because they were outright vile”. Nyanzi resolved her multiple and conflicting perceptions of Madikizela-Mandela noting, “the greatest attribute was her beautiful complexity as a human being” who was “full of contradictions that make her life a grand enigma for inquiring minds. She was neither perfect nor pure evil. She was a huge paradox comprising several smaller paradoxical puzzles. Her tenacity and resilience astound me.”

Some people have praised and acknowledged Madikizela-Mandela’s contributions and position as a frontline leader in the liberation struggle in South Africa. Swift rebuttals and ‘clap-backs’ to local, regional and global media outlets emerged citing deliberate attempts to erase and minimize her role and stature as a liberation leader by referring to her as “anti-apartheid campaigner”, “anti-apartheid crusader”,“anti-apartheid stalwart”, Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife and anti-apartheid activist”, “flawed heroine”, among others.

One cannot help but wonder why Madikizela-Mandela was loved by many but also detested,by some, perhaps in equal measure. As I reflect upon the myriad ways Madikizela-Mandela has been portrayed by different people, the Social Psychology concept of ‘person perception’ that explores how we form impressions of one another comes to mind.

Social Psychologists believe that ‘person perception’ attributes various “mental processes” to how we form impressions of one another and how these, influence subsequent conclusions, judgements we make about people, and the way we interact with them. iresearchnet.com indicates that forming impressions of other people can “occur indirectly and requires inferring information about a person based on observations of behaviors or based on second-hand information.” It also explains that we can form impressions of other people “more directly and require little more than seeing another person.” The website concludes that direct and indirect types of person perception “provide a foundation from which subsequent judgments are formed and subsequent interactions are shaped”.

When we form our impressions of others through “indirect person perception” our “general perception of a person is the product of inference”. This means that “many of the personal attributes” that “we may want to know about another person (e.g., whether the person is loyal, honest, or contemptible) are not directly observable”.

These “attributes or traits must be discerned—either from observing the person’s actions (actually watching the person behave in a loyal or honest manner) or from interpreting information provided by a third party (what a roommate conveys about a person or what the experimenter reveals)”.

According to iresearchnet.com, “personal attributes that observers notice about another person need not be inferred because they are directly observable and are therefore noted immediately”. These personal attributes include categorical judgments about other people such as their sex, race, and age. This process prompts the questions; “What sex? What race? and How old?” are “likely to be among the first impressions that observers form of others”.

Perceptions: A Journey Reflection on what informs my personal impressions, perceptions and conclusions about Mandikizela-Mandela find root in a journey that started during my teenage years where my initial knowledge of her was simply, Nelson Mandela’s wife, based on what I read in the media.

As I matured into young adulthood and developed interests in social justice, my evolving consciousness enabled me to grow my understanding beyond my teenage view of her as Nelson Mandela’s wife. Since I did not know Madikizela-Mandela, personally, to form personal impressions of her through observation, to for instance infer whether she was loyal or honest, I therefore utilized “indirect person perception” to form impressions of her based on “information proved by a third party” – the media.

It is therefore important that I continue reflecting upon the validity of the third-party information that has influenced some of my perceptions of her therefore broadening the scope of sources that corroborate or challenge the ones I have relied on in the past. As an outsider to South Africa it is also important that I listen to voices from within on this matter, but I cannot make assumptions that every voice that I hear from South Africa will be accurate.

Most importantly, I must also seek to learn what Mandikizela-Mandela says about her life and contributions to the liberation struggle, in her own words. Her book 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69, a diary of her days in solitary confinement for 18 months, the documentary film Winnie as well as Alf Kumalo and Sukiswa Sukiswa Wanner’s book 8115: A Prisoner’s Home are great sources to add to your reading/viewing list.

My reflections have helped me pay attention to how stereotypes and cultural assumptions we hold related to the “direct person perception” dimensions of race, sex and gender can influence our impressions of one another. These intertwine within an interplay of culture and the dynamics of power.

The way power is expressed and experienced from a race, culture and gender perspective can influence our perceptions of one another. Afua Hirsch explored some aspects of how racial bias and sexism have shown up in some obituaries, “The death of Madikizela-Mandela is another opportunity to choose between a narrative of white supremacy and the one that overthrew it. If the media coverage of her death is anything to go by, this is, apparently, a deeply controversial choice”.

Patricia Hill Collins’ “domains-of-power heuristic” offers a compelling framework for analyzing power that considers the complexity of intersectionality. Collins posited, “power relations can be analyzed both via their mutual construction, for example, of racism and sexism as intersecting oppressions, as well as across domains of power, namely structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal”.

According to Collins, the structural domain of power consists of “public policies that organize and regulate the social institutions such as “banks, insurance companies, police departments, the real estate industry, schools, stores, restaurants, hospitals and governmental agencies”. Madikizela- Mandela’s struggle for justice touched on all these areas of power that discriminated against Black and Brown South Africans.The questions become; do I believe that all people regardless of race or gender have a right to equal access and opportunity to these critical resources, social services and facilities that help foster basic human dignity, nourishment, wellbeing and development? How do my beliefs and assumptions on this matter influence my perception of Madikizela-Mandela as a Black woman and leader who defended these rights?

Collins argued that “when people use the rules and regulations of everyday life and public policy to uphold social hierarchy or challenge it, their agency and actions shape the disciplinary domain of power”. Madikizela-Mandela resisted the apartheid system’s rules, regulations and public policies that discriminated against Black and Brown South Africans. The questions become; do I believe in or challenge the idea that all people, regardless of race or gender have a right to be protected from rules, regulations and public policies that uphold social hierarchy? How do my beliefs and assumptions on this matter influence my perception of Madikizela-Mandela as a Black woman and leader who championed this cause?

Collins further explained, “the cultural domain of power refers to social institutions and practices that produce the hegemonic ideas that justify social inequalities as well as counter-hegemonic ideas criticize unjust social relations. Through traditional and social media, journalism, and school curriculums, the cultural domain constructs representations, ideas and ideologies about social inequality”.

“Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. …the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom”. Paulo Freire

Madikizela-Mandela challenged systems of domination that propagated social inequalities through an apartheid-inspired educational system, media, ideas and ideologies that include patriarchy which positioned women as less than, less deserving of opportunities, resources, being treated with dignity and respect and judged on a different and higher set of standards than men. Zukiswa Wanner reminded us, “Our patriarchal and puritanical brains, as men and women, relegated her to an ex- wife who cheated on our revered Saint Nelson while he was in prison.”

South African women have come out in large numbers to defend Madikizela-Mandela’s legacy in what they perceive as attempts to erase her contributions to the liberation struggle. As a Black woman and liberation leader who opposed the apartheid system and all it stood for, relentlessly, she suffered at the hands a sophisticated and vicious Security Branch smear campaign that as Shannon Ehbrahim reported,was designed to “discredit and isolate her”.

The questions become; do I believe in or challenge the social institutions and practices that produce ideas and ideologies of domination “that justify social inequalities”? How do my beliefs and assumptions on this matter influence my perceptions of Madikizela-Mandela as a Black woman and leader who criticized “social institutions and practices which produced hegemonic ideas that justified social inequalities?

Collins argued that the “interpersonal domain of power encompasses the myriad experiences that individuals have within intersecting oppressions”. Madikizela-Mandela and others in South African suffered the indignities of apartheid. Many of them lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and justice. While my goal isn’t to portray Madikizela-Mandela as a helpless victim of apartheid power transgressions because she was a powerful force to contend with, along with others, she was jailed, banned, harassed, detained, held incommunicado in solitary confinement, often denied food, basic feminine sanitary items and at times denied access to the medical attention and legal counsel she needed.

The questions become; do I believe in or challenge the dehumanizing acts of brutality that were unleashed upon Madikizela-Mandela and others by the apartheid regime’s power excesses? How do my beliefs and assumptions on this matter influence my perceptions of Madikizela-Mandela as a Black woman and leader who along with others, suffered the apartheid regime’s power excesses?

“A new world will be born not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those who are in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of contest. Honour belongs to those who never forsake the truth even when things seem dark and grim, who try over and over again, who are never discouraged by insults, humiliation and even defeat”. Nelson Mandela in a letter to Winnie Mandela, June 23, 1969

We know that Madikizela-Mandela endured the yoke and brunt of the dehumanizing whip of apartheid, stoutly, and in all her humanness as an act of unapologetic resistance, a site of undying hope bringing forth a new world from the abyss of a protracted and odious struggle to uphold human dignity.

Leading social change requires leaders who show up. Showing up is a critical first task and test for leaders of change. A leader who shows up can recruit and inspire others to also show up in support of the desired change. The social change process requires people who show up and are not afraid to stand up to be counted. The social change process is messy and unpredictable. While it requires planning, strategies, structure, resources and action, the leader and the people must understand that it is emergent. Madikizela-Mandela’s commitment to the cause of social justice was undeniable because she showed up and did so, authentically.

I use the term authenticity here to mean she was committed to showing up as herself. She was not afraid to be herself even in the face and risk of physical and emotional injury to her person. She led change through action and unwavering courage while acknowledging her full humanness as she suffered the pain of the struggle. Her passion to serve her people while showing up, authentically and unapologetically, defined her leadership.

We were uncomfortable with a person who lived by her own rules and refused to reconcile and join the mythical rainbow nation that we wanted to believe in. She continued to live in her Orlando West home. She continued to attend functions, when she wanted to at a time it suited her, and she continued being unapologetic about who she was because she knew — though we chose to ignore it — she suffered to get South Africa to its present state. Zukiswa Wanner

Leading social change through action means navigating outside the comforts and context of ‘armchair revolution’ but within largely invisible peripheries, trenches and valleys that know the pain and suffering of the oppressed. Madikizela-Mandela did this and for the long haul, despite the heavy hand of a dehumanizing apartheid machinery.

We were all caught up in that war of liberation Self no longer mattered, country came first.

When they were incarcerated, on hindsight, they looked after our leaders because from then on, the violence in the country was untold.

We were the cannon fodder.

We were the foot soldiers We were vulnerable

We were exposed to the viciousness of apartheid.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

One may wonder, what inspired Madikizela-Mandela, a young mother in her twenties to join the liberation struggle?

“To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity”. Paulo Freire

Through her leadership, Madikizela-Mandela drew the world’s attention to the situation in South Africa and this could not have been achieved through lip service. The passion and courage she embodied were grounded in the values that she held dear. Her personal conviction and commitment to the values of racial, socioeconomic, political justice and equality, fairness and democracy were the path that illuminated possibilities and action for liberation, dignity and a “fuller humanity” (Freire) for all people in South Africa.

“My flesh is nothing more than sea shells washed up to the coast by heavy waves of stormy political seas, my soul like the sea will always be there. I would have been filled with shame if I was unable to get up and defend those ideals (that) my heroes and our patriots have sacrificed their lives for”. Winnie Mandela in a Letter to Nelson Mandela, March 08, 1970

I end my reflections noting that paying tribute to Madikizela-Mandela by acknowledging her great contributions to humanity through her leadership for social justice does not mean that we chose to ignore her humanness and humanity. She was as human as each one of us. She did what she did, when she did and with what she had. We are grateful.

Only she, walked in the shoes she wore and those of us who have no idea what it was like to live and stay alive in what Madikizela-Mandela called a “war of liberation”, can only imagine.

I choose to pay more attention and listen to the voices of my South African sisters who have a deeper grasp of who Madikizela-Mandela was. I hold them in care. Deeply grateful to ‘Dada’ Zukiswa Wanner who has been kind and generous by sharing her insights on Mama #Winnie.

In attacking Madikizela-Mandela, MondliMakhanya in an article this past Sunday attacks all of us who love our people and our country unstintingly. He attacks all of us who are human and fallible because humanity is about the possibility of fallibility.

He attacks all those of us who hold other black people with respect, whatever our disagreements with them.

Makhanya attacks us all because #WeAreAllWinnieMandela.

And to uMam’Winnie, as the children would say, we did you dirty.

May we be kinder to you in death and may we learn to protect each other and our country to ensure that all South Africans are treated with the dignity that they deserve. With the dignity we did not afford you. Hamba kahle, mkhonto.

Zukiswa Wanner ‘No love lost: What Winnie hate says about us’

Rest in Power Departed Elder Nomzamo Winifred ZanyiweMadikizela-Mandela

Ref Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic; 30th Anniversary Edition

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, an Original Brazen Woman who Multiplied

By Sitawa Namwalie Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.