Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the meaning of history
My esteemed readers, I missed you all! I am glad to be back after a long sabbatical. My opening salvo this Friday is on the passing of Mother of the New South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She passed away quietly in a South Africa hospital on Easter Monday, 2nd April, after a brief illness, age 81.
She was born Nonzamo Winnifred Zanyiwe Madikizela on 26 September 1936 in the village of Mbongweni in Pondoland, Eastern Cape in South Africa. The fourth of 8 children of Columbus and Gertrude Madikizela; both parents were teachers. Winnie was apparently a bright kid who showed early promise of leadership. She was head girl at her local high school. She later attended the famous Jan Hofmeyr School in Johannesburg, taking a degree in social work. She was nobody’s intellectual loafer, having subsequently taken another degree in International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The Hofmeyr School was the brainchild of the liberal statesman and intellectual Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr who served under Prime Minister Jan Smuts as minister of finance and minister of education. Hofmeyr was a child prodigy who entered Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar at the extraordinary age of 14; an all-rounder in mathematics, philosophy and jurisprudence. Hofmeyr was one of the great “ifs” of South African political history. If it was the liberals under him that had won the elections in 1948 instead of the National Party who instituted Apartheid under Daniel François Malan; and if he had not died so young, the entire course of South African history might have followed a different trajectory.
Winnie Madikizela began her professional career at Barangwanath hospital in Soweto. As fate would have it, in 1957 she met a dashing young lawyer by the name of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela who was in the process of walking out of his marriage of 10 years with Evelyn Mase. Nelson was driving past one day when he spotted a damsel of uncommon beauty and grace waiting by the roadside. He later inquired about her and got to know that she was Winnie Nonzamo Madikizela, a social worker. She was only 22. In her own words: “The next day I got a phone call. I would be picked up after work. Nelson, a fitness fanatic, was there in the car in gym attire. I was taken to the gym, to watch him sweat! That became the pattern of my life….”
Nelson and Winnie were married on June 14, 1958. On the day of the wedding the bride’s father warned his daughter: “If your man is a wizard then you must become a witch.” The union was ill-starred from day one. As she was later to confess, she did not marry a man; she married a struggle. Within barely 20 months of their wedding, he was arrested and charged with high treason. He fled into exile in Botswana, Ethiopia, Algeria and Nigeria. Mandela received military training in Addis Ababa and Algiers; spending several months in Nigeria and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa was the first African leader to secretly donate a substantial amount in aid of the ANC liberation struggle.
Those strains in the early years of their marriage were to get worse during his 27 years of incarceration in Robben Island. Of this she says: “I had so little time to love him. And that love has survived all these years of separation … perhaps if I’d had time to know him better I might have found a lot of faults, but I only had time to love him and long for him all the time.”
Convicted of treason in June 1964, Mandela and 10 of his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment in Robben Island. The Soweto students uprising of June 16, 1976 and the massacre of more than 200 defenceless children drew universal condemnation from the world community of nations. The cold-blooded execution of Steve Biko, leader of the students Black Consciousness Movement by the security forces in September 1977 pricked the conscience of civilized humanity. It was not before long that the international community accepted that economic sanctions were imperative if this evil regime were ever to be removed.
Within South Africa itself, the Mass Democratic Movement was gathering momentum, bringing together labour unions, students, the churches and civil society. Among its moving spirits were Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Allan Boesak, Helen Joseph and Albertina Sisulu. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela made extraordinary sacrifices for the struggle, a fact that is not always fully acknowledged. The majority of African countries boycotted South African goods and banned transport or diplomatic links with the Apartheid regime. The charismatic Samora Machel of Mozambique was brought down in a mysterious plane crash within South African territory in October 1986. Ironically, Winnie flew to Maputo to be with Graça Machel and to comfort her on the death of her husband. They were friends.
The shy country girl whose only ambition was to succeed as a social worker was soon caught up in the maelstrom of tempestuous upheavals. At a time when hope was dim; she was the symbol of honour and national defiance. On those rare moments when she was allowed to visit her husband in prison, she was the one who often brought back news of hope: “Nelson Mandela says the struggle is my life”. She was tortured, exiled, imprisoned, kept in solitary confined and subjected to all sorts of indignities. Her home was once set ablaze and she and her children were left at the mercy of the elements. Winnie Mandela could have compromised, but she chose the high moral ground of liberation; standing with the people in their hour of maximum peril.
By the decade of the eighties, the years of struggle were beginning to take their toll. In the words of the noted South African political commentator Allister Sparks: “The essential qualities – her imperiousness, her wilfulness, the combative and survivalist spirit – that helped her get through the hard years also brought about her downfall.”
As the regime was intensifying its infiltration of the townships in order to weaken and destroy the liberation movement, she created the Winnie Mandela United Football Club to protect and to deal with infiltrators known as askaris. Her infamous speech at a town hall meeting in Munsieville was the turning-point: “We have no guns. We have only stones, boxes of matches, and petrol. Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” It was in such an atmosphere that 14-year old Stompie Moeketsi met his death in the hands of one of her bodyguards Jerry Richardson. The situation deteriorated to such a level that even the ANC high command had to issue a statement condemning her excesses. In the words of a British journalist: “This trajectory from political widow and defiant anti-apartheid activist to gangland leader appeared part-Shakespearean drama and part-political soap opera.”
It was in this context that the Oppenheimers and other visionary industrialists prevailed on the government to begin dialogue with the ANC and other opposition groups. Chris Hani, Thabo Mbeki, Cyril Ramaphosa and other brilliant young minds were involved in these delicate secret talks. The negotiations finally culminated in the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990. On that day of all days, 11 February 1990, the spectacle of him walking hand-in-hand with Winnie captivated the whole world. Unfortunately, as they got home that same day, as Mandela later revealed, Winnie showed him to the visitor’s bedroom. He described it as the loneliest day of his life. As it transpires, she already had something going with Dali Mpofu, a young lawyer half her age.
Soon after when she was scheduled to fly to the United States on ANC-related business she requested to fly with her “lawyer” Mpofu. Nelson rejected the idea. She still flew off with him anyway. When her husband phoned her hotel room later, it was Mpofu that picked the call. Throughout his prison years, according to his confidante and lawyer George Bizos her husband had never expected Winnie to be celibate; only that she should be at least discrete. Instead, she continued to flaunt her lecherous, drunken escapades. It was the last straw.
There were other problems. She scoffed at the idea of walking behind Nelson in the way the Duke of Edinburgh does behind Queen Elizabeth II. But those were not the only sore points. While sharing a platform in Germany, she openly contradicted her husband’s call on the people of kwaZulu to Natal throw their weapons into the sea. She would not acknowledge or even respect the ANC hierarchy, which for Nelson, was sacred.
The years of transition were to prove among the most difficult in the history of South Africa. The regime made a last-ditch effort to orchestrate inter-ethnic violence. There was humungous bloodshed. The April 1993 assassination of Chris Hani by Janusz Walus, a white right-wing Polish emigrant, nearly plunged South Africa into civil war. Madiba was wise enough to avoid the bait of those who were hell-bent on orchestrating violence and bloodshed. Part of his greatness lies in this ability to keep a cool head at those crucial tipping points of history when one wrong move could have set off a chain of irreversible catastrophes.
During their painfully open divorce trial in a Johannesburg courtroom, Mandela declared: “Ever since I came back from prison, not once has the defendant ever entered our bedroom while I was awake. The bedroom is where a man and woman discuss the most intimate details. There were so many things I wanted to discuss with her, but she is the type of person who fears confrontation. I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her. If the entire universe persuaded me to reconcile with the defendant I would not…I am determined to get rid of the marriage.” The decision to divorce Winnie in March 1996 must have been one of the most painful decisions he ever made. Despite marrying her doppelganger the delectable Graça Machel, it’s clear that, in life as in death, no one could ever take Winnie’s place in his heart.
During the hearings of the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she turns up in a glistening white state-of-the-art Mercedes Benz, bodyguards in tow. It was a scene hardly calculated to earn her any sympathies. The Commission determined that she was “politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club.”
I was privileged to have met the late pan-African icon at a dinner cocktail at the Transcorp Hilton sometimes in January 2014. I noticed she was rather frail and withdrawn. She had difficulty standing and preferred to sit most of the time. But as first impressions go, I was not particularly impressed. I met the grand dame of African song, her contemporary Miriam Makeba. We met in Dakar and we met again in Lagos. On both occasions she was warm and outgoing. Old age never took away her warmth, grace and sparkle. Winnie, on the other hand, struck me as one of astronomer Stephen Hawking’s black holes; a force-field of gravitational power that sucks in light and energy, giving nothing out. I went away dispirited.
A national memorial service will be held on 11 April while she will be given a state burial on Saturday 14 April. Despite her foibles, Clio, the goddess of history, will absolve her. Winnie Madikizela-Mendala was a symbol of courage in dark times; a champion of freedom and human dignity. She fought the good fight and it left its toll on her life and family. She will go down in history as one of the great African women of all times.
Obadiah Mailafia
Dr. Mailafia is a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, a development economist and public finance expert with a DPhil from Oxford