Winnie Mandela, the former wife of former South African president and anti-apartheid icon, Nelson Mandela, died yesterday aged 81, triggering an outpouring of tributes to one of the country’s defining and most divisive figures.
She died in a Johannesburg hospital, her family said in a statement, adding that she had “fought valiantly against the Apartheid state” and that she was known “far and wide as the Mother of the Nation”.
Family spokesman Victor Dlamini in a statement said the woman many South Africans have described as the “Mother of the Nation” and a champion of the black majority passed away at the Netcare Milpark hospital in Johannesburg. “She died after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year. She succumbed peacefully in the early hours of Monday afternoon surrounded by her family and loved ones,” it added.
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) said she had attended church in Soweto on Easter Friday before being admitted to hospital complaining of flu. She had also suffered from diabetes for some years. The family said it will release details of her memorial and funeral services when they are finalized.
Winnie was the second of Mandela’s three wives, married to him from 1958 to 1996. Winnie had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year, according to her family. She had back surgery a year ago. After hearing of her death, some people gathered yesterday evening outside her home in the Soweto area of Johannesburg to sing tributes. A number of national and local politicians arrived and police closed the street to traffic.
Winnie, who was married to Mandela for 38 years, played a high-profile role in the struggle to end white-minority rule, but her place in history was stained by controversy and accusations of violence.
Mandela, who died in 2013, was imprisoned throughout most of their marriage, and Winnie’s own activism against white minority rule led to her being jailed for months and placed under house arrest for years.
“She kept the memory of her imprisoned husband Nelson Mandela alive during his years on Robben Island and helped give the struggle for justice in South Africa one of its most recognizable faces,” the family said.
Most of Winnie’s marriage to Nelson was spent apart, with Nelson imprisoned for 27 years, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone and to keep alive his political dream under the repressive white-minority regime.
Early career
Born Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela on September 26, 1936, in Bizana, a rural village in the Transkei district of South Africa, Winnie eventually moved to Johannesburg in 1953 to study at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work. South Africa was under the system known as apartheid, where citizens of indigenous African descent were subjected to a harsh caste system in which European descendants enjoyed much higher levels of wealth, health and social freedom.
Tributes
Leading the tributes, anti-apartheid campaigner and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu described her as “a defining symbol” of the battle against oppression. “She refused to be bowed by the imprisonment of her husband, the perpetual harassment of her family by security forces, detentions, bannings and banishment,” Tutu said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, described Winnie in a televised tribute as a “champion of justice and equality” and a “voice for the voiceless.” “Her courageous defiance was deeply inspirational to me, and to generations of activists.” In the ruling African National Congress (ANC), head of policy Jeff Radebe described her as “an icon of the revolutionary struggle.”
But her reputation came under damaging scrutiny in the twilight years of apartheid rule. In 1986, she was widely linked to “necklacing”, when suspected traitors were burnt alive by a petrol-soaked car tyre being put over their head and set alight.
In 1990 the world watched when Nelson Mandela finally walked out of prison hand in hand with Winnie. The following year, she was convicted of kidnapping and assault over the killing of Stompie Moeketsi, a 14-year-old boy. As a parliamentarian after South Africa’s first all-race elections, she was convicted of fraud. She continued to tell the party “exactly what is wrong and what is right at any time,” said senior ANC leader Gwede Mantashe.
She remained undaunted even unto death
Just last month, she was reportedly shown in television footage joking with Cyril Ramaphosa, the newly-appointed president who paid a courtesy call to her home in Soweto, the township where she lived for decades.
Dressed in full ANC colours of yellow, black and green, she asked Ramaphosa, who is known for his morning runs, “Why don’t you get tired?”
“We can’t get tired when you have given us work to do‚“ Ramaphosa said, paying fulsome praise to her appearance.
She had also expressed support for the current leadership of the ANC party which her husband led to power in the euphoric post-apartheid elections of 1994.
Suggestions that Winnie remained extremely close to Nelson Mandela in his final years were fuelled in a recent book by his doctor. Vejay Ramlakan wrote that Winnie not Mandela’s widow Graca Machel was with Mandela when he died in 2013. The book was withdrawn by its publishers under pressure from Mandela’s family.
Winnie becomes ANC women leader, govt minister
Winnie was elected president of the ANC’s Women’s League. Then, in 1994, Nelson Mandela won the presidential election, becoming South Africa’s first black president; Winnie was subsequently named deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology. However, due to affiliations and rhetoric seen as highly radical, she was ousted from her cabinet post by her husband in 1995.
A controversial Media Figure
Winnie was a controversial media figure. In a 2010 Evening Standard newspaper interview, she sharply criticized Archbishop Desmond Tutu and her ex-husband, disparaging Nelson Mandela’s decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with former South African President F.W. de Klerk. Winnie later denied making the statements. In 2012, the British press published an email that Winnie Mandela had composed, in which she criticized the ANC for its general treatment of the Mandela clan.
A life of struggle
The young Winnie grew up in what is now Eastern Cape province and came to Johannesburg as the city’s first black female social worker. Her research into the high infant mortality rate in a black township, which she linked to poverty caused by racism, first sparked her interest in politics.
In 1957, she met Nelson Mandela, an up-and-coming lawyer and anti-apartheid activist 18 years her senior, and they married a year later. The first five turbulent years of their marriage saw Mandela going underground to build the armed struggle against apartheid, and finally to prison in 1963, while his wife gave birth to two daughters.
Winnie always was aware of the danger of being in the shadow of her husband’s all-encompassing personality.
Even before they were separated by Nelson Mandela’s long stay in prison, she had become politicized, being jailed for two weeks while pregnant for participating in a women’s protest of apartheid restrictions on blacks. The apartheid police later harassed her, sometimes dragging her from bed at night without giving her a chance to make arrangements for her daughters.
In 1977, she was banished to a remote town, Brandfort, where neighbors were forbidden to speak to her. She was banned from meeting with more than one person at a time.
The woman who returned to Johannesburg in 1985 was much harder, more ruthless and bellicose, branded by the cruelty of apartheid and determined vengeance. In her book “100 Years of Struggle: Mandela’s ANC,” Heidi Holland suggested that Madikizela-Mandela was “perhaps driven half-mad by security police harassment.” In an infamous 1986 speech she threatened “no more peaceful protests.”
Instead, she endorsed the “necklacing” method of killing suspected informers and police with fuel-doused tires put around the neck and set alight. “Together hand-in-hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” she said.
How she and Nelson divorced
She met Mandela in 1957. The next year they married. she was a young bride, 16 years his junior as she was 22. He was married at the time to Evelyn Mase. In 1992, the Mandelas separated, and then divorced in 1996, after a legal wrangle that revealed she had had an affair with a young bodyguard. During her old age, she re-emerged as a respected elder who was feted as a living reminder of the late Mandela and of the long campaign against apartheid.
The Mandela marriage that survived decades of prison bars dissolved with a formal separation in two years after Nelson Mandela was released. “Their personal relationship broke down,” said George Bizos, a human rights lawyer who represented Nelson Mandela at the 1960s Rivonia trial that led to his long imprisonment.
“Nelson Mandela called two other senior members of the ANC after his release and he actually said, ‘I love her, we have differences, I don’t want to discuss them, please respect her,’” Bizos said. “And he shed tears to say that we have decided to separate. He loved her to the end.”
The couple divorced in 1996, two years after Mandela became president in South Africa’s first all-race elections, with Mandela accusing his wife of infidelity.
As the mother of two of Mandela’s children, Winnie and her ex-husband appeared to rebuild a friendship in his final years. After Mandela’s death, however, she became involved in disputes over his inheritance.
Her Soweto experience
Monitored by the government, Winnie Mandela was arrested under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and spent more than a year in solitary confinement, where she was tortured. Upon her release, she continued her activism and was jailed several more times. Then after the Soweto 1976 uprisings where hundreds of students were killed, she was forced by the government to relocate to the border town of Brandfort in 1977 and placed under house arrest. She described the experience as alienating and heart-wrenching, yet she continued to speak out, as in a 1981 statement to the BBC on black South African economic might and its ability to overturn the system.
In 1985, after her home was firebombed, Winnie returned to Soweto and continued to agitate against the regime even during government media bans. Her actions continued to cement the title bestowed upon her, “Mother of the Nation.”
But Winnie also became known for endorsing deadly retaliation against black citizens who collaborated with the apartheid regime. Additionally, her group of bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, garnered a reputation for brutality. In 1989, a 14-year-old boy named Stompie Moeketsi was abducted by the club and later killed.