If Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was still alive, she would have turned 88 years yesterday.
Born Winifred Nomzamo Zanyiwe Madikizela in a small village in Pondoland, she looked after her father’s cattle and dabbled in stick fighting with the boys who tried to bully her. Years later she moved to Johannesburg where she worked as a social worker. In the later years, she met her husband, Nelson, with whom she had two daughters, Zenani and Zindzi.
Through her guts and determination to defeat apartheid, Winnie became the matriarch of South Africa’s resistance movement in the 1980s. Her unyielding spirit catapulted her among the country’s proverbial tried and tested leaders of South Africa. Intense efforts by the regime to thaw and blunt her into a pliable woman failed dismally. Her fighting spirit instantly earned her the status of a Mother of the Nation. Increasingly, in the years preceding the dawn of a new era of democracy in the 1990s, she became bolder and took the proverbial bull by its horns.
As the walls of apartheid colonialism began to crack in the face of mass resistance, the sobriquet ‘First Lady’ to describe her resilience stature could not have come at the right time. Hated with a passion by the regime and the white populace in general, she was christened the ‘Mother of the Nation’ by those who saw in her their voice of reason against the injustices of racial opression. She stood firm in her belief that the only way to bring about an end to apartheid was to overthrow the regime through violence.
“The only language that amabhulu will understand is the barrel of a gun,” she once told her supporters.
Invariably, as the struggle intensified, with the masses rising against the government in the mid-1980s, the police excesses became the order of the day in black townships. Sensing victory, Winnie became bolder and told the world:
“With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we will liberate this country.”
The world squirmed and pilloried her on the floor.
Alarmed by the possible damage her utterances might cause the secret talks her husband was having with the regime behind bars - Nelson, by now a semi-prisoner - reined her in and exhorted her to take it easy. He dangled the carrot of cohabitation in a prison bungalow he was occupying at Victor Verster Prison just outside Paarl. By this time the government that had over the years treated him with utter disdain and tagged him a dangerous communist-inspired terrorist, was beginning to warm up to him and treated him with the deference of a de facto President of the country. The heavy prison garb that he wore on Robben Island was replaced with fine suits, open-neck shirts and soft shoes. Winnie was not beguiled. Her husband’s charm offensive of calling her by her endearment name, Zami, failed. Instead, she was furious.
“I will not be a volunteer prisoner Nelson. Open your eyes and smell the coffee,” she retorted.
Subsequently, she dismissed with contempt his instruction to disband the increasingly notorious Mandela United Football Club that was growing a reputation for its excesses than putting the ball behind the net. The team was a collection of young boys some of whom terrorised the local community through their gangster activity. The team was coached by Jerry Richardson who later turned out to be a police spy.
As a result of their differences on these and other issues, Mandela sulked and never spoke to his wife for months.
Winnie’s statement on matches and tyres was perhaps the most radical and ‘inflammatory’ that appealed to the militant youth, hitherto referred as the ‘young lions’.
In later months she met with Mshoshovu, a ruthless Umkhonto We Sizwe Commander, who, in his operations between January and September 1987, shook the security establishment to its core. Mshoshovu, also known as Vee, staged daring attacks on the enemy was believed to have claimed the lives of an estimated 21 policemen, 16 of them white. He worked closely with Winnie and is believed to have inspired her with his dare-devil attacks on the police.
Mshoshovu was part of Matrosov, an MK guerilla unit that had been infiltrated to South Africa by Chris Hani, MK’s chief of staff at the time. Their mission was to cause havoc and attack the police and military installations. They were received by Winnie who clothed, fed and found them accommodation through her underground network.
It is against this backdrop that Winnie’s anger and outburst must be understood. Here was a young woman whose marriage to her husband was short-lived, literally. In his days, Nelson was hardly at home as he attended back-to-back meetings. Dinner at table with family was far in-between and eventually fizzled out.
Soon her husband was banned by the government and he was forced to leave his family and go underground to pursue the goals of the struggle. The final blow came after Mandela was arrested and sentenced to five years for leaving the country illegally and for inciting violence. Two years later he was sentenced to life together with his comrades for plotting to overthrow the State through violent means.
In 1969, five years after his imprisonment, the pendulum swung toward his wife as the police focused on Winnie. They found that she was involved in underground activities to revive ANC structures that had been destroyed by the police after the Rivonia Trial. One cold winter morning they raided her house and dragged her screaming to their vehicles in front of her two daughters who were minors at at the time. They hurled the most denigrating expletives at her after turning her house furniture up side-down in search of ‘terrorist weapons’. Subsequently, she was held in solitary confinement for 18 months on suspicions of colluding with others in recruiting youths for military training abroad.
To break her spirit the police subjected her to one of the most brutal forms of torture, and deprived her sleep for seven consecutive nights. Eighteen months later the court acquitted her and her 21 comrades of all the trumped-up charges. The police redetained them immediately and threw them back to their solitary confinement cells at New Lock (renamed Kgoshi Mampuru)
Not happy with the turn of events, the police embarked on a concerted campaign to subject her to relentless harassment. In 1976 Captain Arthur Benoni Cronwright, an avowed racist Commanding Officer of the Special Branch at John Vorster Square Police Station in Johannesburg, told a detainee in an apopletic rage how the police hated and despised Winnie. This was after she had been detained for being part of a group of students that tried to stage a march in the city centre to demand the release of all detained fellow students and the withdrawal of security forces from the townships. The enraged captain asked him who had organised the protest march and when he told him that it was the Soweto Students Representative Council, Cronwright broke his jaw with a solid punch and spat on his face.
“I hate you bloody k*ffirs and that b***h Winnie,” he ranted.
Subsequently, he tried to force the hapless detainee to write in his statement that Winnie had organised the march, but he refused.
The hatred for the Mother of the Nation was not confined to the enemy. Some of her own comrades in the ANC held her in disdain, going as far as as labelling her ‘a CIA agent’. Agent provocateurs took advantage of the political toxic alchemy at the time, and spread rumours about some people, which led to many people being killed for wrong reasons by mobs.
Hundreds of houses were razed to the ground by mobs who never bothered to check the malicious information. In 1985 Maki Skhosana in Duduza on the East Rand was a classical example. She was necklaced (burning a person with a tyre around their neck) at the funeral of a student that had been killed by the police. Maki was alleged to have been romantically involved with a policeman. It later turned out that a wrong Maki Skhosana was killed.
Winnie was not exculpated from the smear campaign to tarnish her image. As a result, her house was burnt down on several occasions by enraged mobs. However, her spirit was not dampened. She soldiered on with her perilous underground work for the ANC.
Acting on intructions from Pretoria, the police persecuted Winnie relentlessly, banishing her to her house and later forcefully took her to Brandfort in Orange Free State and dumped her in a derilict house that looked as though it had been occupied by vagrants. Years later when she had had enough of the harassment, she defied her banning order to Brandfort and returned to her house in Soweto. It was during this period that people frequented her house to come and complain about their social problems, including the high rate of crime and police harassment. Instead of reporting to the police, locals looked up to Winnie as their saviour.
At the height of the revolution in the 1980s, MK cadres who found themselves wanting with basic needs like food and accommodation, looked up to her for help. Through her underground connections she accommodated, clothed and fed them.
Furthermore, in the late 1980s she worked with playwright Mbongeni Ngema to recruit youths for military training in the ANC camps. The story was that they were being sent to America for training in theatre.
She was motherly, spoke soporically with each word measured. The word ‘you know my son’ interspersed her sentences as a sign of utter respect for younger comrades. It was a different ball game altogether when the police raided her house and ransacked her furniture.
“I guess raiding Mandela’s house and asking his wife morbid questions polishes your ego Captain,” she screamed at the top of her voice
“I’ve known you for many years as a Captain and who knows, maybe after this raid you stand a chance of being promoted. Is it not better that you go and study so that get promoted?”
In one of the raids the police saw red after tracing to her yard the blood stains of an MK guerilla who had earlier been involved in a shootout with them at a house in Dube township. The guerilla was believed to have shot dead and wound several policemen during the incident. When the search yielded nothing, the leading officer asked her why the bonnet of her car was warm and where did she go so early?
She was enraged. “Is that why you locked up my husband away so that you should be my guardians?”
“You see Mrs Mandela I’m asking you so nicely and you are being rude,” responded the officer.
“I would ask you how do you spell the word ‘rude’ but I’ll spare you the embarrassment of being illiterate,” she retorted.
Her stature as an outspoken community leader grew in leaps and bounds and this worried the police. Subsequently, through their “Stratcom” they embarked on a concerted smear campaign to discredit her. In his book, former Security Policeman, Lieutenant Paul Erasmus, says a police team dedicated to smearing Mama Winnie, was set-up in Witwatersrand. The campaign was directed from the SB (Special Branch) head office in Pretoria. Winnie, like any other human being, had her own faults - some of which put her in serious trouble with some leaders.
The Stompie Seipei saga was singularly the most damaging in her political history. However, later when I came to know the real facts, I found that the man who killed Stompie, Jerry Richardson, the agent provocateur, claimed to have killed the young activist on Winnie’s instructions. Having joined the Mandela Football Club as the head coach, it emerged that Richardson was infiltrated by the Security Police to spy on Winnie. Her weakness was that she was too trusting of anyone who shouted the word ‘amandla’. In a bizarre twist in 1988, two MK guerillas who stayed at Richardson’s house at Winnie’s request, died in a gun battle with members of the Security Police. Richardson’s neighbours later told how days before, Richardson was frequently seen getting into a car that was driven by white men at night.“
The article is an extract from Themba Khumalo’s book titled The Funeral of Six Mourners which is scheduled to be published later
I'm a former underground activist, having worked with the late Mam Winnie Madikizela-Mandela for a number of years to advance the cause of the revolution. Subsequently I was arrested by the Security Police and sentenced to eight years imprisonment, which I served until I was released in 1990 when the government unbanned all political organisations and freed political prisoners. I’m a retired civil servant.
The Star