Even in death, Mama Winnie still unites South Africans

The “sanctification” of Winnie Mandela during 10 days of national mourning and countrywide memorial services to mark her passing last week at age 81 has elevated her into an unparalleled position as the unquestioned heroine of the struggle against South Africa’s past repressive racist policies.

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, born on September 26, 1936, was a young social worker in her early 20s when she met Nelson Mandela, the man she would marry.

Once Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the anti-apartheid struggle, she came to stand in his stead as the front person for the decades-long battle against colonialist oppression and brutal white minority rule.

Her death in a Johannesburg hospital last week after a long illness has seen the legacy of “Mama Winnie”, as she has almost universally come to be called here, transcending the many controversies and difficulties of her hard-fought life.

TRIBUTES
The current national mourning period, with many memorial services held across all nine provinces of South Africa this week, and the thousands upon thousands of tributes poured out for her in the wake of her passing, have outstripped even the expressions of grief, gratitude and honouring that Mandela himself had received.

“Mama Winnie”, in death enjoying fully once again the title of “Mother of the Nation”, has been almost completely “rehabilitated” in terms of the legacy being bestowed on her life, both officially and unofficially.

In one of the memorial services, held this Tuesday in her birthplace of Bizana in the Eastern Cape province, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa put the official seal on the full and complete “sanctification” of her legacy.

She had, he said, never betrayed the struggle against apartheid.

She had never wavered in her determination to set her fellow South Africans free.

RESOLUTE

She had always rebounded from the numerous assaults on her person and reputation with renewed vigour and determination.

And she had always been a loyal and faithful member of South Africa’s now-ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, Ramaphosa said.

Even after the 1994 settlement which saw South Africa narrowly avoiding what had been a looming race war, “Mama Winnie” had appreciated that “Uhuru had not yet arrived”, Ramaphosa added, and therefore she knew that the struggle for political, social and economic equality and freedom for all South Africans, especially the formerly oppressed, continued.

The praise-singing has been for her courage in the face of imprisonment, where she endured maltreatment and nearly 500 days in solitary confinement, for her steadfastness in facing the years of loneliness in her own “little Siberia”, as she described her period of internal exile in the tiny, dusty town of Brandfort in the Free State province, far from her home in Soweto outside Johannesburg, and for her fearlessness in the face of relentless harassment and intimidation from the apartheid regime.

There is no doubt that she is fully deserving of all this.

ACTIVISTS
During the 1970s, when the ANC’s armed struggle had largely ground to a halt under the ruthless pressure of SA’s white minority rule security establishment, and then again in the 1980s when the “township rebellion” against apartheid took full flight, she was at times virtually the sole voice and face of the anti-apartheid struggle on the home front.

For her role as the woman who stayed behind to represent the husband who would become a world icon, and the movement they had both dedicated their lives to, she is much loved.

She guided literally thousands of young activists into playing external and internal roles against the racist system into which they were born.

For bearing the brunt of the apartheid regime’s violent ire against any form of dissent, while Mandela and his fellow ANC leaders languished in prison or were in relative safety in exile, she is much-revered and duly honoured.

POLICE SPIES
Winnie, far more in her passing than in her life, has become the embodiment of all the good that has flowed from the end of racist rule.

But to achieve this, some facts have had to be glossed over and some uncomfortable periods in her life rewritten.

The so-called “Stompie affair”, in which she was implicated and found responsible in the abduction and beating of a 14-year-old activist who subsequently turned up dead at the hands of a close associate of hers, allegedly because she feared the diminutive Stompie was a police spy, has been revisited.

Former apartheid-era dirty tricks security police figures are saying that she was “virtually surrounded” at all times in that era by police spies.

The new narrative is that whatever she was forced to do in the dark days of the mid to late 1980s, when the apartheid system was beginning to show cracks, thereby drawing an ever-fiercer response from this country’s racist ruling elite, may be understood and excused because of the extreme conditions under which she operated.

SUPPORTERS
Having defied the apartheid regime in the mid 1980s by leaving Brandfort and returning to her home in Soweto, Winnie drew to her a throng of young radicals who wanted to oppose apartheid however they could.

In her they found a friend, a mentor, a fellow radical and fierce warrior who inspired loyalty, love, devotion and respect, and who taught that new generation the key elements of the liberation struggle.

According to the narrative of those memorialising her life this past week, Winnie was constantly under threat of violence, intimidation, arrest, torture and death, but she never lost resolve or courage and was always an inspiring figure to be looked up to.

The conduct of the notorious Mandela United Football Club from the mid to the late 1980s, consisting mostly of orphaned and “lost” youth who were drawn to her, and who sometimes conducted themselves violently and viciously towards their fellow Sowetans, has been put down to an effort by the apartheid regime to surround her not only with spies but with agents provocateur.

'SHUNNED'
So successful were these efforts to discredit her, goes this line of historical assessment, that by the end of the 1980s, the ANC’s internally-affiliated anti-apartheid bodies, including civil organisations, union bodies and churches operating under the auspices of the “Mandela Crisis Committee”, had distanced themselves — and the rest of the anti-apartheid struggle — from her.

But all that is now being seen from a very different perspective.

Whatever she did that would not now be considered acceptable behaviour is being held in the light of the extremis of her position back then, when she stood fearless and alone against the hated apartheid system, becoming the “Lioness of Africa”, as she has also been called during the national mourning and life celebrations of the past week.

Her formal elevation back to the position of “Mother of the Nation”, with all stains and taints removed, was cemented by not only President Ramaphosa’s remarks at her birthplace memorial service, but during a mass rally at Soweto’s Orlando football stadium on Wednesday.

HONOUR
So intense has the focus on her role in “the struggle” been that newly-elected ANC secretary general Ace Magashule has come under fire for his previous role as premier of the Free State where he failed to see through the refurbishment of the tiny matchbox home she lived in while in internal exile in Brandfort, into a museum in her honour.

That step will now surely be taken as South Africans of all stripes complete the re-appraisal of a life lived almost totally in service to the people she wished to see set free.

Politicians from virtually all parties have gone out of their way to align themselves with her courageous fight for freedom.

Mama Winnie — the “Lioness of Africa” — will be laid to rest tomorrow in a national funeral ending the 10-day mourning period that has redefined and re-affirmed her legacy.