Winnie Mandela

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born on September 26, 1936, in the village of Mbongweni near Bizana, in the Pondoland region of what was then the Transkei territory of South Africa ^[1]. Her Xhosa first name, Nomzamo, means one who undergoes trials, a name that later observers found fitting. Her parents, Columbus and Gertrude Madikizela, were both teachers, and the family belonged to the amaPondo people. She was one of nine children, and her childhood was shaped early by loss: her mother died when Winnie was about nine years old ^[2].

Despite the hardships of rural poverty and the racial restrictions of the era, she excelled at school. She completed her secondary education at Shawbury, a Methodist mission school, and then moved to Johannesburg in 1953 to study at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work ^[1]. The move from the rural Eastern Cape to the segregated metropolis exposed her directly to the machinery of apartheid, which the National Party government had been building into law since 1948.

She qualified as a social worker and in 1955 took a post at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, becoming the first qualified Black medical social worker at that institution ^[2]. Her early research into infant mortality in Alexandra township connected the deaths she recorded to poverty and to the political system that produced it. That analytic link between social conditions and state policy pushed her toward activism.

In 1957 she met Nelson Mandela, then a 38 year old lawyer and a leading figure in the African National Congress, at a bus stop in Soweto. He was in the middle of the marathon Treason Trial and in the process of divorcing his first wife. The two married on June 14, 1958, in Bizana ^[1]. They had two daughters, Zenani, born in 1959, and Zindziswa, born in 1960.

Married life under apartheid gave the couple little peace. Nelson Mandela was consumed by the Treason Trial, then went underground in 1961 and was arrested in 1962. In 1964, at the Rivonia Trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment ^[3]. Winnie Mandela, still in her twenties with two small children, was left to sustain the household and, increasingly, the public memory of her husband.

Her own activism had begun before his imprisonment. She joined the ANC Women's League and took part in the mass women's protests against the extension of pass laws to Black women, and she was jailed briefly in 1958 while pregnant ^[2]. From the early 1960s the state treated her as a threat in her own right, issuing the first of many banning orders against her in 1962, which restricted her movement, barred her from gatherings, and forbade the press from quoting her ^[1].

For anyone asking who was Winnie Mandela during the long years of her husband's imprisonment, the answer lay in her refusal to disappear. The apartheid state subjected her to nearly three decades of surveillance, harassment, and punishment. In May 1969 she was detained under the Terrorism Act and held for 491 days, most of it in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison, where she was interrogated and, by her own detailed account, tortured ^[4]. Her prison journal from this period was published decades later as 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69.

Released in 1970, she was placed under renewed banning orders and repeated house arrest. After the Soweto uprising of June 1976, in which police killed schoolchildren protesting the imposition of Afrikaans in classrooms, the government blamed activists like her for the unrest. In 1977 she was banished without trial to Brandfort, a small town in the Orange Free State where she knew no one and did not speak the local Sotho language ^[2]. She lived there under restriction for eight years, yet turned exile into organizing, helping establish a creche, a clinic, and welfare projects for local residents ^[5].

Through all of this she remained the most visible link between the imprisoned ANC leadership and the world outside. Foreign journalists and diplomats sought her out, and her defiance made her an international symbol. Supporters began calling her the Mother of the Nation, a title that captured the moral authority she carried through the darkest years of apartheid ^[3].

Winnie Mandela returned to Soweto in 1985 after her Brandfort house was firebombed, and she re-entered township politics at their most violent hour. The mid 1980s brought states of emergency, mass detentions, and brutal contests between activists and suspected collaborators. In a 1986 speech she appeared to endorse necklacing, the practice of killing suspected informers with burning tires, remarks that alarmed allies at home and abroad ^[3].

During this period she surrounded herself with a group of young men known as the Mandela United Football Club, who acted as her bodyguards and enforcers. Members of the club were implicated in assaults, abductions, and killings in Soweto. The most notorious case was the December 1988 abduction of four youths, one of whom, 14 year old James Seipei, known as Stompie, was later found dead ^[4]. In 1991 a court convicted her of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault; on appeal the assault conviction was overturned and her six year sentence was reduced to a fine and a suspended term ^[1].

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission examined the club's activities in 1997. The commission found her politically and morally accountable for gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club ^[6]. At the hearings, pressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she conceded that things had gone horribly wrong. She continued to deny direct involvement in the killings until her death.

When Nelson Mandela walked free from Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, Winnie was at his side, hand in hand, in one of the century's most photographed moments ^[3]. The marriage, however, did not survive the transition. The couple separated in 1992, and their divorce was finalized in 1996. She thereafter used the surname Madikizela-Mandela.

Her political base remained strong, particularly among the poor and the young who saw her as one leader who had never left the townships. In 1993 she became president of the ANC Women's League, and in April 1994 she was elected to the first democratic Parliament. President Mandela appointed her Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology in the new government, but dismissed her in 1995 amid allegations of insubordination and misconduct ^[1].

Controversy trailed her later career. In 2003 she was convicted of fraud in connection with a bank loan scheme, a conviction partially overturned on appeal in 2004, and she resigned her parliamentary seat and ANC positions for a time ^[2]. Yet her popularity within the party endured. She returned to Parliament after the 2009 election and consistently polled among the top members elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee, remaining an MP until her death ^[5].

In her last decade Madikizela-Mandela became an elder of South African politics, frequently critical of the ANC leadership's record on poverty and inequality while remaining loyal to the movement itself. She reconciled publicly with Nelson Mandela's family and was a prominent presence at his funeral in December 2013 ^[5].

Her health declined in her final years, and she was hospitalized several times with a kidney ailment. She died in Johannesburg on April 2, 2018, at the age of 81 ^[3]. The government granted her a special official funeral, and tens of thousands of mourners filled Orlando Stadium in Soweto on April 14, 2018. President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the eulogy, and speakers from across the political spectrum, including her sharpest former critics, acknowledged the price she had paid for the country's freedom ^[5].

Any honest Winnie Mandela biography must hold two truths at once. Among the clearest Winnie Mandela achievements was her role in keeping the anti apartheid struggle visible when its leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or dead: she absorbed banning orders, 491 days in solitary confinement, and eight years of banishment, and never renounced the cause ^[4]. She also broke ground as a professional woman, as Baragwanath Hospital's first Black medical social worker, and as one of the most powerful female politicians of the democratic era ^[2].

At the same time, the violence associated with the Mandela United Football Club and the death of Stompie Seipei left permanent damage to her reputation, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings remain part of her record ^[6]. Debates about how to weigh her defiance against these findings continue among historians, and a 2017 documentary and posthumous reassessments have argued that apartheid era disinformation campaigns deliberately magnified the case against her ^[5].

The basic Winnie Mandela facts, a rural childhood in Bizana, a marriage that became a political institution, decades of state persecution, grave controversy, and a mass funeral attended by a grieving nation, describe a life inseparable from South Africa's own turbulent passage from apartheid to democracy. Streets, buildings, and a Johannesburg municipality region now carry her name, and her home in Orlando West stands near the Mandela House museum on Vilakazi Street, a district that draws visitors from around the world ^[1].