Mandela, Winnie 1934–

Winnie Mandela 1934–

South African political activist

At a Glance…

Antiapartheid Activities Jeopardized Family Life

A Striking Symbol of Defiance

Banned and Imprisoned

Launched Social Programs

Legal Difficulties Tarnished Reputation

No Regrets and an Abundance of Hope

Selected writings

Sources

As the wife of African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela is widely recognized throughout the world as a symbol for the political goals and ideals of the black people of South Africa. She has, at various times, been either highly revered or severely criticized by her fellow citizens and has suffered numerous punishments for her protests against apartheid—South Africa’s system of enforced racial inequality that denies political rights to the country’s black majority. In the years since 1958, Winnie Mandela has been detained, imprisoned, harassed, and threatened by government authorities; she was held in detention for more than two years and was “banned”—denied certain personal freedoms and forced to live in an appointed location—for almost 27 years. She coped with a long separation from her husband, whose life sentence in prison for engaging in antigovernment activities with the ANC was eventually lifted in 1990. She also faced a 1991 conviction in a controversial kidnapping and assault case.

Winnie Mandela was born in rural Pondoland in 1934. Her mother, a domestic science teacher and religious fundamentalist, died when Winnie was only nine years old, leaving nine children, the youngest of which was three months old. Winnie’s father, Columbine, was a history teacher and later served as minister of agriculture in the Transkei, a self-governing territory of South Africa. Winnie attended Bizana and Shawbury schools in the Transkei and graduated from Jan Hofmeyer School of Social Work of Johannesburg in 1955. She subsequently took a position at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, becoming the first black medical social worker in South Africa.

The year Winnie moved to Johannesburg to attend Jan Hofmeyer was also a time of increased antigovernment activity for the ANC. Nelson Mandela and others led the nationwide Defiance Campaign against government apartheid regulations, and many people, especially in the urban areas, were politicized through the campaign. When Winnie went to Johannesburg, her interest in the ANC’s operations led her to establish connections in the antiapartheid movement; she befriended various members of the ANC, including Adelaide Tsukudu, the wife-to-be of the ANC’s president in exile, Oliver Tambo. In 1957 friends introduced Winnie to Nelson Mandela, a lawyer and member of the ANC executive committee

At a Glance…

Born Nkosikazi Nobandle Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, in 1934, in Bizana, Pondoland, Transkei, South Africa; daughter of Columbine Mandikizela (a history teacher and government official) and a domestic science teacher; married Nelson Mandela (an attorney and political activist), June, 1958; children: Zindziswa, Zenani Dlamini (both daughters). Education: Graduated from Jan Hofmeyer School of Social Work, 1955.

Medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, Transvaal, South Africa, beginning in 1955; member of Federation of South African Women and other women’s political groups; joined Women’s League of African National Congress (ANC) in 1957 and became head of its local branch; participated in numerous demonstrations protesting South Africa’s apartheid policy of racial segregation; named a banned person by South African authorities, 1962; acted as spokesperson and carried on political activity on Nelson Mandela’s behalf, 1964-90; arrested many times for political activities; held in solitary confinement, 1969-70; served a six-month sentence for violating banning orders, 1974; named head of social-welfare department of ANC, 1990.

Awards: Robert F. Kennedy Humanitarian Award, 1985; Third World Prize, 1985.

Addresses: Home—Soweto, Transvaal, South Africa.

who was one of the accused in a treason trial taking place at that time. The pair began a courtship that was brief and rather unorthodox because of the time Nelson Mandela had to devote to his court case and law practice. Nevertheless, on June 14,1958, Nelson received permission to go to the Transkei where he and Winnie were married.

1958 also marked the beginning of Winnie Mandela’s encounters with the security police—in September, she and thousands of other women were arrested for demonstrating against the government’s pass laws, which required blacks to carry identification documents showing their assigned residence and employment at all times. She was detained for two weeks and then released. At the time of her arrest, Mandela was a member of the national executive committee of the Federation of South African Women and chairperson of its Orlando branch and belonged to the national and provincial executive committees of the ANC’s Women’s League. She lost her job as a social worker at the hospital because of her arrest—a significant financial setback since she was the wage earner in the family.

Antiapartheid Activities Jeopardized Family Life

In 1960, after police fired on a group of people protesting the pass laws in the small town of Sharpeville, nationwide and worldwide demonstrations against apartheid ensued, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency. Thousands of people were subsequently detained and the ANC was outlawed. Although he had already been released on bail during the treason trial, Nelson Mandela and other defendants were detained for nearly five months.

After a trial that lasted four and a half years, the court found the defendants in the treason case not guilty. The few months between March and December of 1961 would be the only time—until 1991—that Nelson and Winnie and their two young girls would have any semblance of a family life. In December, after the ANC was outlawed, Nelson went underground, addressing meetings throughout the country and abroad with the purpose of establishing a military wing of the ANC. He was apprehended in 1962, however, and charged with inciting Africans to strike in a 1961 work stoppage and with illegally leaving the country. While serving a five-year sentence on these charges, he was found guilty of sabotage in another trial and was sentenced to life in prison in 1964.

Meanwhile, Winnie Mandela had her own run-ins with the government and was banned in 1962. Since her husband’s trial was held in Pretoria, a city outside her restricted area, Winnie was required to obtain special permission to attend it. She and the other companions of the men on trial appeared at the courthouse in traditional tribal dress, hoping to inspire people and evoke a sense of militancy against the white government of South Africa. When the authorities outlawed the dress, Winnie, in a gesture typical of her defiance, chose to wear gold, green, and black, the colors of the outlawed ANC.

After the trial, Winnie Mandela was left to raise two children on her own without a source of income. Although she had visitation rights, she was not allowed any physical contact with her husband for the next 22 years. “That is part of one’s life one does not even want to remember … I could only visit him once in six months,” Winnie recounted to D. Michael Cheers in Ebony. “We had to keep [a] link through letters and through visits when they were increased,” she continued. “At the end of [the prisoners’] stay on Robben Island, we could visit them two times a month. And it would be a visit of two people at a given time. That helped a lot to keep the family ties and to sort of keep that link between him and the children. Before that, all they did was read about their father.”

A Striking Symbol of Defiance

Mandela recounted her experiences as the wife of a jailed political dissident in her 1984 memoir, Part of My Soul Went with Him, which New York Times Book Review contributor Paula Giddings called “not only a compelling account of political defiance but a moving love story as well.” Recalling in the work the time when her husband was first imprisoned, Mandela explained, “the difficult part was finding myself with a spotlight on me. I wasn’t ready for that.” A photogenic woman who is a striking symbol of defiance in her traditional dress, Mandela garnered international recognition as a spokesperson for the black cause in South Africa. She noted in Part of My Soul Went with Him that “I had to think so carefully what I said—as [Nelson’s] representative. I don’t mean careful because of my banning orders but because of the responsibility.”

With more stringent restrictions imposed on her by the government in 1965, Mandela was forced to leave a position she held with the Child Welfare Society because she could not travel outside of Orlando in Soweto. She remained banned, except for two weeks in 1970, until 1975. As documented in her memoir, Mandela did not understand why she was banned in 1962, since she had delivered only one inflammatory speech, and years later, she asked security branch head Johan Coetzee to explain. Coetzee pointed to the government’s wariness of Mandela and told her: “There is a saying in Afrikaans that if you have a field with a lot of pumpkins and you see a pig next to those pumpkins, you don’t have to be told that the pig is going to eat those pumpkins.”

On several occasions between 1962 and 1975 Mandela was charged with violating her banning orders. In 1967 she was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment for failing to give her name and address to security police in Cape Town where she had been allowed to visit her husband at the prison on Robben Island. Her sentence was soon suspended, but in May of 1969, she and 21 others were detained under the Suppression of Communism Act, having been accused of promoting the aims of the outlawed ANC. Though the charges were withdrawn, Mandela was immediately redetained in 1970 on the same charges and placed in solitary confinement in Pretoria Central Prison under Section Six of the Terrorism Act.

Banned and Imprisoned

Mandela served 17 difficult months in detention—most of it in solitary confinement. She described her imprisonment in Part of My Soul Went with Him: “Those first few days are the worst in anyone’s life—that uncertainty, that insecurity.… The whole thing is calculated to destroy you. You are not in touch with anybody. And in those days all I had in the cell was a sanitary bucket, a plastic bottle which could contain only about three glasses of water, and a mug.… The days and nights became so long I found I was talking to myself.… Your body becomes sore, because you are not used to sleeping on cement.” Perhaps the most difficult aspect of her detention, though, was the separation she endured from her daughters, who were sent to school in Swaziland, a kingdom of South Africa.

Upon Mandela’s release in September of 1970, the government renewed her banning orders for five more years, only two weeks after they expired. She was also restricted to her home in Orlando at night and on weekends and public holidays and was prohibited from having any visitors at all, except her two daughters. Between 1970 and 1973 she was accused several times of violating her banning orders, but all of the convictions were set aside on appeal. In October of 1974, though, she was sentenced to six months in Kroonstad Prison for meeting with another banned person. Finally, after 13 years of being banned, she tasted “freedom” when the government did not renew her banning orders for a 10-month period.

During this time, Mandela helped organize the Black Women’s Federation, and later, she helped establish the Black Parents’ Association to assist people with medical and legal problems that followed the actions of police during a 1976 Soweto riot. Mandela’s freedom was brief, however, because in August, after the riots, she and thousands of others were apprehended under the Internal Security Act for their involvement in antigovernment activities. She was held until December of 1976 and, on the 28th, received new banning orders, which were eventually made more rigid: she was banished from her Orlando home to Phatakahle, a black township of about five thousand people located in a province called Orange Free State.

Launched Social Programs

Winnie Mandela was confined to the Brandfort area for eight years. During that time, because she had become a figure of international standing, Mandela received many foreign visitors at her isolated farm community. Through her contacts and training she helped the local black community establish a nursery school or creche, a soup kitchen for the school children, and a mobile health unit, and she initiated self-help projects that ranged from growing vegetables to knitting clothes to sewing school uniforms. While in Brandfort, she was charged innumerable times with violating her banning orders—she entertained visitors frequently despite her restrictions and 24-hour police surveillance.

In August of 1985 Mandela’s Brandfort house was firebombed, an act she blamed on the disgruntled government since, prior to that, she had defied her banning orders by returning to her home in Orlando. Faced with her refusal to return to Brandfort, the government amended her banning orders to allow her to stay anywhere in South Africa except in the Johannesburg and Roodeport magisterial districts. Mandela also ignored that order, and the police tried several times to forcibly remove her, but she always returned. Eventually, in February of 1986, the authorities provisionally withdrew their charges. Advised by her lawyers that her banning orders were invalid, Mandela began making speeches—in one she allegedly advocated the use of violence to protest the government—and soon the government officially lifted her restrictions.

Legal Difficulties Tarnished Reputation

Winnie Mandela moved out of her Orlando home and into a large newly built house in an exclusive area of Soweto. She soon became a controversial figure in Soweto, and in 1988 other antiapartheid groups took steps to distance themselves from Mandela. Much of the problem surrounded the so-called Mandela United Football Club, a group of young men who lived in Mandela’s house and acted as her bodyguards. Many members of the club were implicated in robberies, assaults, and murders in the Soweto area, and the club was condemned by neighbors of Mandela, who accused the young men of intimidation and extortion.

The most serious development came when two members of the club were charged by police in the kidnapping and beating of three black youths and the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old renegade Stompie Moeketsi, an extraordinary young leader whose 1,500-member “children’s army” had opposed the tactics of oppressive groups like the football club for years. Mandela claimed that the charges were lies made up by the police and that Moeketsi had died of beatings and sexual abuse incurred at the Methodist church in which he had previously been hiding out.

Nevertheless, Mandela’s bodyguards soon came under suspicion in two other murders, and South Africa’s two largest organizations—the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the banned United Democratic Front—both made formal statements in 1989 dissociating themselves from Mandela and her entourage. Embarrassed by the circumstances, even the ANC stepped up its pressure to have the football club dismantled, and after discussions with her husband, Mandela announced that the bodyguards would be removed from her home. By that point, however, Mandela’s once lofty reputation in the eyes of her people had been somewhat tarnished.

No Regrets and an Abundance of Hope

Choosing to support his wife, Nelson Mandela, upon his release from prison on February 11, 1990, declared a “deep appreciation for the strength given to me during my long and lonely years in prison by my beloved wife,” and told Winnie, “I am convinced that your pain and suffering was far greater than my own,” as quoted by Christopher S. Wren in the New York Times. With her reputation temporarily rehabilitated, Mandela was appointed head of the ANC’s social-welfare department in August of 1990. Her legal troubles were far from over, however, and she was ordered to stand trial when the three surviving youths of the Soweto kidnapping testified in the trial of Jerry Richardson—who was convicted of killing Moeketsi—that Winnie Mandela took part in the beatings. “At least I will be able to stand a proper trial,” Mandela was quoted as saying in Time, “and clear my name properly.”

The judge assigned to Mandela’s ensuing court case, however, described her testimony as “vague, evasive, equivocal, inconsistent, unconvincing and brazenly untruthful,” and convicted her on the charge of accessory after the fact to the assaults; she was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison. Freed on bail, Mandela won a reprieve in July of 1991 when she was given permission to appeal her conviction, a process that could take months or years. The result of Winnie Mandela’s legal difficulties, surmised Wren, is a “dented” image for the ANC and potential setbacks in substantive discussion between the ANC and South Africa’s president, F. W. de Klerk. “Mr. Mandela said … that the conviction would not directly affect negotiations,” observed Wren in May of 1990, “yet it is hard to see how he could trust the Government if his wife were in prison.”

Despite the controversy surrounding Winnie Mandela, she continues to represent the persistence of South African blacks in their struggle to abolish apartheid. Newsweek reporter Joseph Contreras noted that “Winnie Mandela’s greatest contribution to … her country … may have been the encouragement she gave her husband during the long, lonely years before hope suddenly blossomed and celebrity exacted its price.” Mandela herself wrote in Part of My Soul Went with Him, “I knew when I married [Nelson Mandela] that I married the struggle, the liberation of my people.” She expressed no regrets in a 1990 Ebony interview about her role in the decades-long effort to eradicate South Africa’s ruling government. “In the end,” she declared with unwavering hope, “we shall attain our freedom at whatever cost.”

Selected writings

Part of My Soul Went with Him, edited by Anne Benjamin, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984, Norton, 1985.

Sources

Books

Benson, Mary, Nelson Mandela: The Man and the Movement, Norton, 1986.

Contemporary Authors, Volume 125, Gale, 1989.

Mandela, Winnie, Part of My Soul Went with Him, edited by Anne Benjamin, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984, Norton, 1985.

Periodicals

Chicago Tribune, October 16, 1983.

Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1985.

Ebony, December 1985; May 1990.

Maclean’s, February 12, 1990.

Ms., November 1985; January 1987.

Newsweek, December 16, 1985; December 30, 1985; April 29, 1991; May 27, 1991.

New York Times, August 18, 1985; February 17, 1989; September 25, 1989; February 18, 1990; April 17, 1991; May 14, 1991; May 15, 1991; May 19, 1991; July 17, 1991.

New York Times Book Review, December 8, 1985.

People, September 28, 1987.

Time, February 25, 1982; October 1, 1990; February 25, 1991; May 27, 1991.

Washington Post, August 26, 1985; September 23, 1985; December 24, 1985; May 12, 1985.

—Virginia Curtin Knight