Winnie Mandela suffered racial hatred under apartheid and gender bias from men

In the aftermath of the startling news on April 2 that Winnie Mandela had died, a Kenyan mainstream media outlet headlined a story thus: “South Africa’s flawed heroine dies”. In death, as in life, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela, 81, was a misunderstood woman. Is there such a thing as a “flawless heroine?” I can swear by Madiba’s name that the person who wrote that headline was a man.

Nelson Mandela, the black Pimpernel and famous husband of Winnie, and whose name she carried till her death, was as “flawed” as Winnie, his feisty second wife. I do not remember the same media outlet talking of “flawless Nelson Mandela is dead”. Or indeed of any media anywhere in the world describing Mandela as a “flawed hero”, for that matter.

You are either a statesman or not, a hero or not. The gendernisation of Winnie’s accomplishments by the media is a further testament of its compartmentalisation of women’s achievements and role modelling in society. Again, Mandela was really never described as a “hero”, much less a flawed one: He was great, Madiba, Tata, statesman, visionary.

A MAN'S ORBIT

Which brings me to my second observation: The world is very much still a man’s orbit. Winnie was not only (deliberately) misunderstood and misinterpreted, she was also gender-discriminated even by media institutions (run by sometimes misogynist men) that ought to know better. Viewed through the kaleidoscope of gender lenses, she was a woman first and a human being second; too many men suffering from a patriarchal complex. If the apartheid system discriminated against her racially, the man’s world sought to bring her down through gender bias: She did not get any respite from men – black or white.

The first widely known, documented and circulated “character flaws” of Winnie Mandela was through a book by Fred Bridgland, the British journalist, who is now writing her biography. In Beneath the Surface of South Africa’s Shame, Winnie’s flaws are characterised, through her financial corruption, as “cradle snatching”, but above all her involvement in Stompie Moeketsi’s and Lolo Sono’s brutal deaths. Stompie was a 14-year-old boy from Parys, a small town in Orange Free State, while Sono was a 21-year-old youth from the Soweto slum of Meadowlands whom Winnie and her Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) suspected of being informers.

VICTIM AND VILLAIN

William Gumede, the South African journalist, author and academic at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, whose book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC was a sold-out, describes Winnie as both a victim and villain: “a polarizing figure in the 1980s”. Charlene Smith, my South African journalist friend, now a resident of Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, certainly knew Winnie in all her facets, because she interviewed her numerous times during her struggle against the Boer regime. Writing about Winnie after her death, Charlene had this to say of her: “In the 1970s, she was a source of inspiration to many young people, some of whom flocked to her home after the 1976 (Soweto) uprising. Some went into exile, others remained and, coached by her, became leaders of the United Democratic Front (UDF).”

But it is the travails that she underwent under the fascist apartheid regime that can make even the strongest of the macho men break down with emotions. “Winnie was banished to a dusty village, Brandfort, hundreds of miles away from her Soweto home and that with an incident in 1969 broke her.” And, pray, what was the incident? “In 1969, security branch came to her Soweto home at 3.00am. She was alone with her daughters, aged 10 and nine. Winnie asked (the police) to fetch her sister one street up so that the girls would not be alone. The police refused, she was taken and her children left alone,” recalls Charlene.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

Charlene recounts Winnie’s harrowing experience in the police cells, at the Old Fort that is not known to many people. “She spent 18 months in solitary confinement, naked, not allowed to wash, and not allowed out for exercises. She did not know what became of her girls.” Charlene says every time Winnie recounted this experience, her whole body physiology would change. “She was not allowed sanitary towels, when she had periods, nor water or clothes to clean and so, the blood caked on her.”

There is cruelty and there is cruelty. Winnie persevered all these inhuman treatment. And because she was all so human, Winnie became lonely and isolated. “It was here that drinking and drug taking began and affairs with younger men, including a dreadlocked filmmaker,” says Charlene. “The conservative black folk of Brandfort Township grew to loathe her.”

Many years later, I met one of those “younger men” – not the filmmaker – but Dali Mpofu, the tall handsome, light-complexioned lawyer in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa. He was supposed to be one of Winnie’s and South Africa’s shame because he was her “public lover”, many years her junior. Dali, a dashing jolly man with an easy smile and demeanour and who is from East London, in Eastern Cape, is a good sport: My South African friends would tease him on being “Mama’s boy” and he would take it all in his stride.

NOT ALONE, BUT LONELY

Winnie was as much a product of a segregationist system as she was a product of a rocky short-lived romantic life/marriage curtailed by the vicissitudes of a wicked political system and later by a marriage that she held in abeyance for 27 years that went sorely sour. Married in 1958, by Mandela, after he divorced his first wife Evelyn Mase, she lived with him for only six years, with Mandela jailed for life, after his infamous Rivonia Trial in Johannesburg that took place between October 1963 and June 1964. She was to reconnect again with the love of her life in 1990.

As fate would have it, she again lived with Mandela – post imprisonment – for only six years, before he divorced her in 1996, to marry the former Mozambican first lady, the erudite and gracious Graca Machel.

Winnie, stoic and unbelievably beautiful – Charlene recounts that when she first met her in 1976, she “was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: tall, imperious with a gorgeous deep voice and a low sexy laugh – in all her years on earth was not alone, but she was a terribly lonely lady. For the 27 solid years, she waited on Mandela, she was constantly harassed by a state that was hell-bent on banishing and punishing her – for being the custodian of a name that personified the South African anti-apartheid struggle – that led the state to be largely shunned by the civilised world, because of daily amplifying its inhumanness through her life and work.

'WAR CRIMES'

As a daughter, sister, wife and above all a mother to her two children – Zindziswa and Zenani – later on adopted by the South African nation as its mother, Winnie carried the aspirations of her people in an epoch that was both dangerous and unpopular. Dangerous, because the Boer South African state had the notoriety of murdering its opponents – men and women.

That the apartheid regime did not take her out is a puzzle to date. Unpopular, because war has many sides, even when you are fighting on the same side. It had never been expected that every black South African and, of course, the liberal whites would be happy with her being referred to as the Conscience and Mother of the Nation. Even with her stoicism against a brutal regime in place, she still had the added disadvantage of being a black woman.

As documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa in the mid-1990s, she committed certain atrocities and “war crimes”, which were empathetically understood to have occurred in a time of conflict and despondency. The post-apartheid, independent state stood with her as indeed the nation, remembering her many sacrifices – personal and the ones she shouldered on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC).

TUMULTUOUS LIFE

But if the TRC confessions were meant to absolve her (she was sentenced to jail for six years, but asked to pay a fine instead), the turmoil she was undergoing in her private life in the aftermath of her war with the apartheid regime proved un-absolvable. During the TRC hearings, chaired by Cape Town Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he broke down after listening to all the terrible crimes that had been committed by Winnie. In his public shedding of tears, Tutu was remembering all the sacrifices that she had undergone both in private and public. It was his way of asking the South Africans and the world to empathise with her. People remember a weeping Tutu asking Winnie to ask for forgiveness, but a defiant Winnie standing her ground. “I could have done better”, is all she said.

The divorce from the larger-than-life President Nelson Mandela was a blow that even the apartheid state had not handed to her. Irrespective of all her marital misdemeanours (and they were many and appalling), Winnie’s love revolved around Mandela: She had never stopped loving Madiba – in and out of jail. The involvement of Dali in her romantic and social life was unavoidable and a necessary interlude in her tumultuous life: It was part of the trials and tribulations of living in a time of war, as a feisty young full-blown woman.

MARITAL NEMESIS

Despite the post-prison unhappiness he had to endure with a Winnie he had left behind bewildered and young, but whom now he could not cope with, Mandela himself was to confess his dying love for Winnie: “I have often wondered whether any kind of commitment can ever be so sufficient excuse for abandoning a young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert.”

After the divorce, Winnie became even lonelier: The person who would have given her succour in the evening of her life and after all the hard knocks and struggles fighting a racist juggernaut had walked away into the arms of a marital nemesis.

Winnie will be buried at Fourways Memorial Park, in Orlando West, Soweto, north of Johannesburg, on Saturday, April 14, 2018. Khamba gatla mawesizwe, Nkosi hamba nawe Winnie. Go well Mother of the Nation. God be with you.

Mr Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti