South Africa Lost Its Mother

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and ex-wife of Nelson Mandela died the age of 81 at a hospital in Johannesburg after a long illness.

Also seen as the “mother of the nation”, by the people of South Africa, who admired her leadership, firebrand rhetoric and courageous activism against a brutal racist regime. Madikizela-Mandela was one of the few remaining representatives of the generation of activists who led the fight against apartheid.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was one of the greatest icons of the struggle against apartheid, who fought valiantly against the apartheid state, sacrificed her life for the freedom of the country and helped to give the struggle for justice a shape in South Africa. 

Born in the poor Eastern Cape province, Madikizela-Mandela’s childhood was filled with racial hatred and she became further politicized at an early age in her job as a hospital social worker.

Attractive, articulate, clever and committed, the 22-year-old Winnie caught the eye of Mandela, 18 years her elder, at a Soweto bus stop in 1957. They were married a year later. But the union was short-lived. Mandela had gone underground by 1960, was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason.

During her then husband’s 27-year life imprisonment, Madikizela-Mandela campaigned tirelessly for his release and continued fighting for the rights of black South Africans, establishing a massive personal following.

Tortured and subjected to repeated house arrest, she was kept under surveillance. In 1977 she was successful in her escape to a remote town in another province. She returned to Johannesburg in 1985 and this time more mature and much harder, more ruthless and bellicose, branded by the cruelty of apartheid and determined vengeance.

Madikizela-Mandela once said about her experience of years in solitary confinement changed her. “What brutalised me so much was that I knew what it is to hate,” she said.

“The years of imprisonment hardened me ... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”

As the violence of the apartheid authorities reached new intensity, Madikizela-Mandela was drawn into a world of violence, atrocity and reprisals.

She gave the call for a violent movement, when she said, “We have no guns – we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol,” she told a township crowd. Together hand in hand, with match boxes and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” Necklacing was the term for killing a perceived traitor with a petrol-filled burning tyre around the neck.

She was found guilty of ordering the kidnapping of a 14 year old boy Stompie Seipei, also known as Stompie Moeketsi, who was beaten and later had his throat slit by members of her personal bodyguard, the “Mandela United Football Club”, in 1989.

Within a year, she gave the clenched-fist salute of black power as she walked hand-in-hand with Mandela out of Cape Town’s Victor Verster prison on 11 February 1990. It was a crowning moment for South Africa and both of them as husband and wife, which led to the end of centuries of white domination when Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.

But for Madikizela-Mandela, the end of apartheid marked the start of a string of legal and political troubles, which kept her in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

Appearing at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up to account for atrocities committed by both sides in the anti-apartheid struggle. In its final report, the TRC ruled that Madikizela-Mandela was “politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the MUFC”.

In 1992 Madikizela and Nelson Mandela separated and her reputation had fallen further when Mandela sacked her from his cabinet in 1995 after allegations of corruption. The couple divorced a year later.

“I have a good relationship with Mandela. But I am not Mandela’s product. I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy,” she told reporters then.

Still unafraid of controversy and still popular, in 2008 she took up the cause of immigrants who had come under attack in widespread riots. A year later, she won a parliamentary seat.

Though she was harsh about his record in office, Madikizela-Mandela could be seen almost daily visiting her ailing former husband during his last months in 2013.

In her later years, Madikizela-Mandela had frequent run-ins with authority that further undermined her reputation. Despite this, Madikizela-Mandela remained a venerated figure in the African National Congress, which has led South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Madikizela-Mandela’s given name, Nomzamo, has been variously translated as “one who strives” and “she who must endure trials”. She lived life in her own terms, giving South Africa a dignified shape as its Mother.