Winnie Madikizela Mandela
Apr. 6th, 2018 04:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keilissShe never relinquished the Mandela part of her name, but really she needed no surname. If you say Winnie or Ma Winnie or Mam Winnie here, there's no confusion, we know who you mean - when the news broke on the Monday after Easter I phoned my cousin and said "Winnie's passed" like I was talking about a family member. For 81 years there was only one, flawed but totally unique and human.
She was pretty, vivacious and very, very bright, a social worker at a time when many black girl children had only rudimentary education at best. When she met Nelson Mandela he was totally smitten and they were married when she was 22 -- I think he was about 18 years older and I read somewhere that her father wasn't at all happy. He was arrested four years later and she was left at the age of 26 as the public face of a banned organisation and with two baby girls to raise (not that the public saw pictures of her, of course, unless they could get hold of overseas papers)
In the years that followed she was banned, which meant she was unable to work, threatened, tortured, imprisoned -- she once spent over 400 days in solitary confinement - and even banished to a small town in the middle of nowhere where she knew no one, couldn't speak the local language, and feared for her life (her response to all that was typical, she started a clinic and a soup kitchen). She survived terror so great that in the end it made her immune--- Ma Winnie was a byword for fearlessness. She is the woman who shoved back at white policemen and demanded a table and a chair in her prison cell -- and got them.
There were serious missteps, yes. There will always be unanswered questions over events in the late 80s. and early 90s. And there was certainly enough mess in her personal life for Mandela to finally divorce her despite doing his best to stand by her after his release. But millions more love her than hate her, she was the one person who could literally go anywhere and confront any situation and be respected and listened to. She was the bridge, the person who could talk reason to angry people or bring different factions of the ANC together - she was bulletproof and above political ambition and not afraid to criticise anyone, from the president down.
As a woman, a wife, and a mother I look at her life and cannot sit in judgement on the dark side. I can't imagine what she went through, how it was to be a beacon in the darkness for an entire people but unable to live a normal life with her children or spend time with her husband --- for the first years of his imprisonment she could only see Mandela once every six months. That she was scarred, maybe a bit warped, by what she went through, seems only natural. But she was still one of the role models I gave my daughters when they were growing up - a woman who could be knocked down but would get back up every time, angrier than the last, who would do what had to be done, not back down, and not quit.
Hamba kahle, Ma Winnie. Rest now.
(pictures: on her wedding day and at the ANC conference last year - hope I look half as good at 80!)
She was pretty, vivacious and very, very bright, a social worker at a time when many black girl children had only rudimentary education at best. When she met Nelson Mandela he was totally smitten and they were married when she was 22 -- I think he was about 18 years older and I read somewhere that her father wasn't at all happy. He was arrested four years later and she was left at the age of 26 as the public face of a banned organisation and with two baby girls to raise (not that the public saw pictures of her, of course, unless they could get hold of overseas papers)
In the years that followed she was banned, which meant she was unable to work, threatened, tortured, imprisoned -- she once spent over 400 days in solitary confinement - and even banished to a small town in the middle of nowhere where she knew no one, couldn't speak the local language, and feared for her life (her response to all that was typical, she started a clinic and a soup kitchen). She survived terror so great that in the end it made her immune--- Ma Winnie was a byword for fearlessness. She is the woman who shoved back at white policemen and demanded a table and a chair in her prison cell -- and got them.
There were serious missteps, yes. There will always be unanswered questions over events in the late 80s. and early 90s. And there was certainly enough mess in her personal life for Mandela to finally divorce her despite doing his best to stand by her after his release. But millions more love her than hate her, she was the one person who could literally go anywhere and confront any situation and be respected and listened to. She was the bridge, the person who could talk reason to angry people or bring different factions of the ANC together - she was bulletproof and above political ambition and not afraid to criticise anyone, from the president down.
As a woman, a wife, and a mother I look at her life and cannot sit in judgement on the dark side. I can't imagine what she went through, how it was to be a beacon in the darkness for an entire people but unable to live a normal life with her children or spend time with her husband --- for the first years of his imprisonment she could only see Mandela once every six months. That she was scarred, maybe a bit warped, by what she went through, seems only natural. But she was still one of the role models I gave my daughters when they were growing up - a woman who could be knocked down but would get back up every time, angrier than the last, who would do what had to be done, not back down, and not quit.
Hamba kahle, Ma Winnie. Rest now.
(pictures: on her wedding day and at the ANC conference last year - hope I look half as good at 80!)
