Winnie Mandela

WINNIE MANDELA A Heroine who has never been Praised. Why?

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (born Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela; 26 September 1936) is a South African politician who has held several government positions and headed the African National Congress Women’s League. She is currently a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Although still married to Nelson Mandela at the time of his becoming president of South Africa in May 1994, she was never the first lady of South Africa, as the couple had separated two years earlier after it was revealed that Winnie had been un-faithful during Nelson’s incarceration. Their divorce was finalized on 19 March 1996. As a controversial activist, she is popular among her supporters, who refer to her as the ‘Mother of the Nation’, yet reviled by others, mostly due to her alleged involvement in several human rights abuses, including the kidnap, torture and murder of 14-year old ANC activist Stompie Moeketsi, in 1989. In March 2009, the Independent Electoral Commission ruled that Winnie Mandela, who was selected as an ANC candidate, could run in the April 2009 general election, despite having a fraud conviction.

Early life:

Her Xhosa name is Nomzamo. Nomzamo means “trial (having a hard time in life)”. She was born in the village of eMbongweni, in the Pondo region of what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. She held a number of jobs in various parts of what was then the Bantustan of Transkei, including with the Transkei government, living at various times in Bizana, Shawbury and Johannesburg.

She met lawyer and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela in 1957. They were married in 1958 and had two daughters, Zenani (also called Zeni) (born.1959) and Zindzi (born.1960). In June 2010, Winnie was treated for shock after the death of her great-granddaughter, Zenani, who was killed in a car accident on the eve of the opening of South Africa’s World Cup. Despite restrictions on education of blacks during apartheid, Winnie earned a degree in social work from the Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, and several years later earned a Bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Witwatersrand, also in Johannesburg. She is also a qualified Social Worker. Apartheid:

Winnie emerged as a leading opponent of the white minority rule government during the later years of her husband’s long imprisonment (August 1963 – February 1990). For many of those years, she was exiled to the town of Brandfort in the Orange Free State and confined to the area, except for the times she was allowed to visit her husband at the prison on Robben Island. Beginning in 1969, she spent eighteen months in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison. During the 1980s as well as the early 1990s, she attracted immense national and international media attention and was interviewed by many foreign journalists as well as national journalists such as Jani Allan, then Leading Columnist of the South African Sunday Times.

In a leaked letter to Jacob Zuma in October 2008, resigned President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki alluded to the role the ANC created for her in the anti-apartheid struggle:

‘‘In the context of the global struggle for the release of political prisoners in our country, our movement took a deliberate decision to profile Nelson Mandela as the representative personality of these prisoners, and therefore to use his personal political biography, including the persecution of his then wife, Winnie Mandela, dramatically to present to the world and the South African community the brutality of the apartheid system’’.