Winnie fought apartheid but forgot to fight patriarchy

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the fearless anti-apartheid activist, former wife of the venerable Nelson Mandela dubbed “Mother of the Nation” by grateful South Africans was finally laid to rest on Saturday after a state funeral at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto, her home for much of her life and the crucible of black resistance against white minority rule. Her family rightly summed up her contribution to the fight against minority rule by describing her as “one of the greatest icons of the struggle against apartheid [who] fought valiantly against the apartheid state and sacrificed her life for the freedom of the country.”

True, from the moment her then husband, Nelson Mandela, was arrested and imprisoned, young Winnie took over and became the focal point of the struggle. Like her daughter Zenani said amidst tears during her burial, it was Winnie that kept the memory of Nelson Mandela alive throughout the period of his incarceration. This she did at great cost to herself, her mental health and her family.

She was variously tortured, imprisoned, subjected to house arrest, held in solitary confinement for 18 months under dehumanising condition, kept under surveillance and banished to the remote Afrikaner dominated dusty town of Brandfort in the Orange Free State in a ramshackled house with no floors, ceilings, running water, nor electricity to live a lonely and frustrating life away from family, friends and acquaintances for ten long years. She took the brave decision to remain in South Africa and face the wrath of the apartheid regime rather than leave on exile like many liberation fighters of the time. Despite her persecution and brutalisation, she remained strong, firm and a constant thorn in the flesh of the apartheid regime.

In a leaked letter to Jacob Zuma in 2008, former South African President Thabo Mbeki alluded to the role the ANC created for her in their anti-apartheid struggle:

“In the context of the global struggle for the release of political prisoners in our country, our movement took a deliberate decision to profile Nelson Mandela as the representative personality of these prisoners, and therefore to use his personal political biography, including the persecution of his then wife, Winnie Mandela, dramatically to present to the world and the South African community the brutality of the apartheid system.”

But her sufferings were real and not just a role assigned her by the ANC. She developed an addiction to painkillers and alcohol (for which she was subsequently vilified by the ANC) as a result of the injuries and pains caused by beatings by the apartheid police. More importantly, the brutality of the apartheid regime got to her and changed her. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy”, she once declared.

She became convinced that the struggle against apartheid could never be won through peaceful. “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,” she declared at a town hall meeting in Munsieville.

That was the point of departure with her imprisoned husband, who she later complained had been softened by his long stay in prison and the high command of the African National Congress, ANC. While Nelson Mandela, after his release, was advocating a peaceful and negotiated dismantling of the apartheid system, Winnie’s mind was fixed on the arms struggle and she wasted no time in contradicting her husband publicly on many occasions. She could also never understand why Mandela had to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1993, with his jailer F.W de Klerk.

“Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers of blood” she told the London Evening Standard in 2010.

She was vehement that the deal was a bad one for the blacks and undid all their efforts for which they sacrificed everything for

“The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded,” she said.

But the disagreement with her husband and the ANC was not entirely ideological. It has a lot to do with her gender and refusal to restrict herself to her assigned role. The ANC could not conceive of her as a political figure in her own right outside the traditional roles of wife and mother. While she was astute enough to embrace those roles and use her position as the wife of a political leader to fashion a platform for her own brand of radicalism, which neither the ANC nor her husband could contain, she also felt constrained and shackled by those roles and constantly wish to step out of them leading to her marginalisation from the powerful decision making structures of the party.

Although she belonged to the generation of South Africans that literally gave up everything and most of their adult lives to fight to liberate black people from the yoke of white minority rule, she paid direly for stepping outside the agreed parameters of the official party line and charting her own course. Their lives were broken irretrievably by the struggle and they could no longer lead normal lives in the society. They made mistakes in their personal lives and perhaps due to hubris, felt unduly entitled to the riches of the South African state due to their unusual sacrifices in the fight against apartheid. But unlike her male counterparts whose faults were overlooked or coloured to present good views, her personal life and choices were always under spotlight and she was judged harshly for them.

Perhaps, reading the mood of the nation and especially of the ordinary people who still hold her in high esteem, President Ramaphosa offered a belated apology for the country’s and particularly the ANC’s failure to honour Winnie for her contribution to the liberation of the country.

“I’m sorry Mama that your organisation (ANC) delayed in according you its honour. I’m sorry that we delayed this much, to this point,” he said in an eulogy.

Firebrand opposition leader, Julius Malema, expelled from the ANC over his radical views and calls for expropriation of land without compensation, but who is personally very close to Winnie Mandela went to great lengths to portray her revolutionary credentials: “She never sold out”, he said. True, while she valiantly fought the evil regime of apartheid, she forgot to fight against patriarchy, another inequality that continues to circumscribe the rights of women and keep them perpetually at the margins of society.

Christopher Akor