By Ryhaan Shah
The world lost a hero this week in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She died age 81. She was a major campaigner against the injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in an article for the British newspaper “The Guardian”, journalist Afua Hirsch wrote that the charges that had been brought against her for the murder of the teenager Stompie Moeketsi had been an attempt by the apartheid regime to smear her and her followers.
Hirsch went on to write about Winnie Mandela: “She was, as the world’s media have had to be repeatedly reminded this week, not an ‘activist’: she was a leader in a liberation struggle. She survived – during more than 35 years of apartheid – surveillance, threats, harassment, arrest and imprisonment, 491 days in solitary confinement and eight years in exile. The methods of torture used against her included, according to one account, denying her sanitary products so that she was found, in detention, covered in her own menstrual blood.”
Some of the press coverage on her death referred to her as a “bully” and as “controversial”. But others saw her, as Hirsch did, as heroic. A woman whose husband had been unjustly imprisoned and was left to bring up the family alone was, perhaps, expected to while away her years quietly and with womanly patience. That Winnie Mandela never did. There was too much at stake and there are a few places that you can hear her speak of her experiences in her own words.
One such is in VS Naipaul’s travel book The Masque of Africa published in 1988. Naipaul’s travels took him through central and southern Africa and he wrote about his experiences and about the people he met along the way.
When he reached Soweto, South Africa, he sought an interview with Winnie Mandela. “You have no idea what the name Mandela meant,” she told Naipaul. “It meant imprisonment and interrogation. This was a period where people vanished or were killed by the security forces for being members of the [African National Congress] ANC. The greatest danger was the leadership would perish in prison, and that people would get disheartened and lose faith. So I exposed myself, and did it quite deliberately. I had by then lost all fear. When you undergo every possible humiliation or torture, there is nothing left. You lose all fear. One night they just came and threw all my things in a van, and I was banished to a desolate place for nine years.”
About her husband, Nelson Mandela, who divorced her on his release from prison amidst the scandal of her involvement in Stompie’s murder, she said, “You must remember that the Mandela who went in” – went in: went to jail – “was a revolutionary, and the Mandela who came out was preaching peace and compromise …. The way to dilute a person is to commercialise him, and they have. The man who went to prison would not have allowed this commercialisation ….”
Of South Africa’s freedom, she told Naipaul that it was a “compromised freedom” and a “white confidence measure” that “took malleable blacks and made them partners. But those who had struggled and had given blood were left with nothing ….”
This past week, I was a panellist on a forum arranged by the University of Guyana on “Race, Reality and Reconciliation in Guyana” where everyone spoke positively about the idea of a reconciliation process. Winnie Mandela had a very different take on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. She was scornful, Naipaul wrote, and thought “it was especially hard for black people, who had suffered so much, to appear before that Commission and condemn themselves for resisting.”
“It should be an individual process and not forced on a society,” she said. “I think it is a terrible insult to women and men who sacrificed their lives for removing apartheid. They had to go and account for their actions. Not many people know what it was like living under that regime day in and day out. What they forget is that for over four decades black people had lived as non-people. The abnormality of racism had become a normal reality for them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not a realistic idea. It opened up wounds that could not heal …. I was not the least bit sorry for what I did.”
Naipaul wrote that he was astonished by the passion in her reply when he asked her how much had survived in her of her tribal Xhosa culture. “I am defined by my culture,” Winnie Mandela said.
May she rest in peace.
