‘The Cry of Winnie Mandela’ captures pain of waiting wives

“Let’s talk about Winnie,” a woman suggested.

“Winnie?”

“Yes, Winnie. Winifred Nomzamo Zanyiwe Mandela,” she emphasised.

Mamello Letlala, aka Patience, had suddenly become impatient with the women’s self-pity and monotonous mourning of their circumstance. She wanted the ibandla to expand their view and bring in some freshness from out there.

And where else to get but from Nomzamo, the worldwide famous sufferer and bearer of a pain similar to their own.

And so, after initial shock, the women agreed to ‘play the game.’ They brought Winnie Mandela into their midst and heaved her onto a table in the middle. The four women turned and tossed her from side to side with probing, penetrating questions. They dissected every aspect of the liberation heroine’s life in the 27 years of struggle and waiting.

REAL PEOPLE

Actually, this did not happen in any real place with real people. It is an imaginary event that takes place in an imaginary novel carried in an actual novel called The Cry of Winnie Mandela.

The book, by Njabulo Ndebele, examines break-up of families in South Africa during the apartheid era. It delves into the physical and emotional anguish of African women left by their husbands amid stringent expectations of fidelity by a misogynistic society. Ndebele defines society as a human entity created by men with the compliance of women.

The author assembles the four women who waited in pain and vain for their husbands to return – from prison, from abroad, from mining cities, even from other women or wherever they disappeared to. Though the circumstances of their men’s departure were different, their waiting and suffering is the same – agonising, anxious, desperate, helpless, exhausting, even maddening.

The Cry of Winnie Mandela combines fiction, mythology and snippets from the (auto) biographical works of Nelson and Winnie Mandela.

 And it begins at the end, literally - the blurb of an imaginary book that poses; “So what does a woman do in the absence of her husband…?”

WOMEN’S SUFFERING

As if to trace the origin of women’s suffering the absence of their disappearing husbands, the author anchors the story on Penelope, the acme of the waiting wife in Greek mythology.

 In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope waited 19 years for her wandering husband, Odysseus. She waited painfully and faithfully, “through an absence without duration,” and became the ultimate symbol a faithful wife “so loyal so true.”

Ndebele aptly christens the four women descendants of Penelope. They meet in the house of the 2nd descendant under the name Ibandla labafanzi abalindile (a gathering of waiting women), later renamed, “a gathering of women in mourning” (Ibandla labafanzi bomlindelo).

The first descendant’s husband went to look for a job in the South African minefields after a severe drought decimated his crops. He kept coming regularly, then irregularly and eventually stopped coming altogether.

The second descendant’s husband went to study medicine in Scottland, hoping to become the first doctor in his village.

 He took so long to complete his studies. His wife waited stoically and sent him money every month. When he returned after 14 years, he found her with a child. He left her, for another woman, a nurse.

THIRD DESCENDANT

Patience Mamello is Penelope’s third descendant. She married her childhood friend and lover after both completing university. But soon her husband failed to return home after work. By next morning she was still waiting.

Weeks into her solitary waiting, he writes to inform her that he had been a freedom activist and had fled the country into exile. Later, he was captured and imprisoned. Patience waited patiently for his release and return home. But when he was released he went on to marry a white woman.

Descendant number four had a slightly different scenario from her peers. Her husband was physically present but emotionally distant. He wandered and philandered around until he died, probably of an STI.

An aspect of spousal separation that emerges from the book is the dissimilarity of things marital between a wife waiting at home and a husband serving a long or indefinite jail term.

A confined husband retains only the image and memories of his wife as he last saw her. As Winnie says of Nelson: “He remembered me in an unchanging way, the way someone you last saw as a baby remains in your memory a baby, unaffected by years.”

Not so the wife, in and about whom life happens. As it did for Penelope, a pack of cuckolds lurk in the shadows “poking at her vulnerabilities, …in an open field of uncertainty and anxiety, testing the limits of her love, loyalty and faith.”

FRENCH GIRLS

Indeed while the second descendant’s husband was studying endlessly abroad, he lay with many Scottish and French girls and had them terminate his pregnancies.

The remedy for their anguish is for waiting women to assert themselves once their husbands return.

They should not be carried away by their husband’s heroic stories and courses in their public struggles.

Penelope appears to her descendants, now five with Winnie, as Stranger. She appeared suddenly on their way to celebrate their resolution to take charge of their destiny. She endorses their resolve, for she, too, has seen the light and regrets the faithful example she set 2,000 years ago.

Apparently Odysseus left her on the morning after their first night together in 19 years of absence. This time she decided not to wait and embarked on a worldwide tour to free women “from the burden of unconditional fidelity I placed on their shoulders.”