Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hallowed place in the pantheon of South Africa’s liberators was eroded by scandal over corruption, kidnapping, murder and the implosion of her fabled marriage to Nelson Mandela, died on April 2nd in Johannesburg. She was 81.
Her death, at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, was announced by her spokesman Victor Dlamini. He said in a statement that she died “after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year”.
The South African Broadcasting Corp said she was admitted to the hospital over the weekend complaining of the flu after she attended a church service. She had been treated for diabetes and underwent major surgeries as her health began failing over the past several years.
Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and eloquent, Madikizela-Mandela (Madikizela was her surname at birth) was inevitably known to most of the world through her marriage to the revered Mandela. It was a bond that endured ambiguously: she derived a vaunted status from their shared struggle, yet she chafed at being defined by him.
Madikizela-Mandela commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and the post-apartheid leaders who followed Mandela could never ignore her appeal to a broad segment of society. In April 2016, the government of President Jacob Zuma gave Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s highest honours: the Order of Luthuli, given, in part, for contributions to the struggle for democracy.
Political presence
Madikizela-Mandela retained a political presence as a member of parliament, representing the dominant African National Congress, and she insisted on a kind of primacy in Mandela’s life no matter their estrangement. “Nobody knows him better than I do,” she told a British interviewer in 2013.
Increasingly, though, Madikizela-Mandela resented the notion that her anti-apartheid credentials had been eclipsed by her husband’s global stature and celebrity, and she struggled in vain in later years to be regarded again as the “mother of the nation,” a sobriquet acquired during the long years of Mandela’s imprisonment. She insisted that her contribution had been wrongly depicted as a pale shadow of his.
While Mandela was held at the Robben Island penal settlement, off Cape Town, where he spent most of his 27 years in jail, Madikizela-Mandela acted as the main conduit to his followers.
In time her reputation became scarred by accusations of extreme brutality toward suspected turncoats, misbehaviour and indiscretion in her private life, and a radicalism that seemed at odds with Mandela’s quest for racial inclusiveness.
She nevertheless sought to remain in his orbit. She was at his side, brandishing a victor’s clenched fist salute, when he was finally released from prison in February 1990.
Noble family
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born to a noble family of the Xhosa-speaking Pondo tribe in Transkei. Her first name Nomzamo, means “she who must endure trials”.
Her birth date was September 26th, 1936, according to the Nelson Mandela Foundation and many other sources, although earlier accounts gave the year as 1934.
Her father, Columbus, was a senior official in the so-called homeland of Transkei, according to South African History Online, an unofficial archive, which described her as the fourth of eight children. (Other accounts say her family was larger.) Her mother, Gertrude, was a teacher who died when Winnie was eight, the archive said.
As a barefoot child she tended cattle and learned to make do with very little, in marked contrast to her later years of free-spending ostentation. She attended a Methodist mission school, and then the Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, where she befriended Adelaide Tsukudu, the future wife of Oliver Tambo, a law partner of Mandela’s who went on to lead the ANC in exile.
She turned down a scholarship in the United States, preferring to remain in South Africa as the first black social worker at the Baragwanath hospital in Soweto.
Her beauty
One day in 1957, when she was waiting at a bus stop, Mandela drove past. "I was struck by her beauty," he wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Some weeks later, he recalled, "I was at the office when I popped in to see Oliver and there was this same young woman."
Mandela, approaching 40 and the father of three, declared on their first date that he would marry her. Soon he separated from his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, a nurse, to marry Madikizela-Mandela on June 14th, 1958.
In a crackdown in May 1969, five years after her husband was sent to prison, she was arrested and held for 17 months, 13 in solitary confinement. She was beaten and tortured. The experience, she wrote, was “what changed me, what brutalised me so much that I knew what it is to hate”.
After blacks rioted in the segregated Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1976, Madikizela-Mandela was again imprisoned without trial, this time for five months. She was then banished to a bleak township outside the profoundly conservative white town of Brandfort in the Orange Free State.
When Madikizela-Mandela returned to her home in Soweto in 1985, breaking her banning orders, it was as a far more bellicose figure, determined to assume leadership of what became the decisive and most violent phase of the struggle. As she saw it, her role was to stiffen the confrontation with the authorities.
Kidnapping
The tactics were harsh. In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the 1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto. Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard was convicted of murder. She was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, but South Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her punishment to fines and a suspended one-year term.
By then her life had begun to unravel. The United Democratic Front, an umbrella group of organisations fighting apartheid and linked to the ANC, expelled her. In April 1992, Mandela announced that he and his wife were separating. In 1996, Mandela ended their 38-year marriage, testifying in court that his wife was having an affair with a colleague.