Mother of a Nation

Mama Winnie Mandela is an iconic figure, yet one, that many foreign continents are little acquainted with.

She is known for her firebrand politics. She spent three decades fighting for her husband’s release and is known as the Mother of the Nation.

She was a qualified social worker in a time when few African women were educated.

In difficult years with two small children she was banished to Brandfort in the Free State province (away from her home in Johannesburg) for eight lean years– a time during which she was separated from her youngest child, Zenani, a torture in itself.

From 1956 when Mr. Nelson Mandela and Mama Winnie met, Mr. Mandela was already facing charges for treason and in 1958 her words were that, she “married the struggle and not the man.”

Mama Winnie’s intellectual strength, her powers of articulation and her disarming beauty were both legendary and fearsome. Her looks and her intellect were also mutually reinforcing. In part this was because the subject of beauty and desirability in African women has always been about more than lines and proportions and whatever is in the eye of the beholder – it has been about whether Africans are fully human.

In societies in which the white gaze is normative, the very notion of African beauty has been oxymoronic. Despite overwhelming evidence indicating white male sexual desire for African women (and men for that matter), the orthodoxy of apartheid insisted that blacks were no better than animals they were not capable of complex thought and therefore any physical attraction between whites and blacks was immoral and unnatural – it was an attraction between varying species. The manufacture of these myths — the simplicity of the African mind and the brutishness of the African physique – served as important justifications for apartheid. Mama Winnie embodied in a very public manner – the shattering of these ideas.

Mama Winnie was everything African — and African women in particular — were not supposed to be. She was unafraid and independent-minded, going to considerable lengths to indicate that she was not a product of Nelson Mandela — she was forged by the needs of African women. In interviews, she has always been forthright and unrepentant in her articulation of the “sickness” of racism in South Africa and she is simultaneously – from the perspective of the white gaze (ridiculous as it is) stunningly beautiful.

Mama Winnie became the thorn in the side of the white minority regime in a manner that cannot be over-stated. She was not simply the wife of Nelson Mandela – a terrorist who in his own right was intelligent, defiant and articulate. She was a beautiful, compelling, clever woman who refused to apologize or bow down. She was always on message – always prepared to raise a clenched fist. Always prepared to say the unsayable. Always impeccably stylish in a manner that in the mind of the enforcers of apartheid – was appealing to the women of Ladies Home Journal and to their cleaners.

It was no wonder then that the regime subjected her to such profound mental and physical anguish. They forced her children out of the country and so Zindzi and Zenani

had to study in Swaziland. Whenever it was school holidays, the authorities would conveniently raid her home and detain her so that she would be deprived of the opportunity to see them. In addition to banning her for seven years to Brandfordt, they also harassed her daily when she returned. Mr. Mandela may have been in jail, but Mama Winnie was in an exile of sorts.

She took to traveling with bodyguards. Her home was a fortress – with high walls and large gates and a phalanx of security. By the mid-1980s she declared, “with our matchboxes and our necklaces we will liberate this country,” to white South Africans she appeared deranged; no longer an ambassador.

Amongst black people on the streets – not those in the leadership but those who lived hand-to-mouth and were looking for charismatic and rooted inspiration – Mama Winnie was always a hero. Tired of the platitudes of the ANC in exile, and fired up by the promise of the United Democratic Front, which organized mass rallies and insisted on making liberation more urgent, people who lived in South Africa’s townships came to see her as the Mother of the Nation. For who had suffered more than Mama Winnie Mandela? Like countless black women she knew the pain of being separated from the man she loved, by authorities that had no regard for African love and family ties. Like thousands of black people who had endured the indignities of goal for infringing on one of the thousands of petty laws that kept apartheid in place, she too was familiar with the inside of a jail cell. Like hundreds and thousands of African women who found themselves living far away from their children, through no fault of their own, Mama Winnie too understood how that felt.

And unlike the ordinary black masses, Mama Winnie had a platform. There were microphones in her face. And at every opportunity, when given the chance to repent, she stood defiant and unrepentant. Again, and again and again, she spat in the face of the apartheid regime. Mama Winnie has the quick wit and sharp intellect; the common touch. The propensity to deviate from the script to delight and surprise and yes, dismay.

Interestingly, there are few women in contemporary party politics who operate in her mold. Mama Winnie was never one for feminist rhetoric, but she was a powerful proponent for women’s rights. She was authentically able to articulate the relationship between racism and sexism, without using academic language that alienated the people on whose behalf she fought.

Mama Winnie’s slay is undeniable. With her uncompromising brand of politics, her Instagram-ready good looks, her Twitter-style barbs and her take-no-prisoners brand of feminism, Mrs. Mandela is far more au courant today than any of the women who currently occupy the South African political stage – even those decades younger.

There aren’t any many women in this generation who can step out of the shadows and emulate Mama Winnie Mandela’s courage.

Mama Winnie Mandela need not fear being forgotten. Her fearlessness is needed now – more than ever.

Adapted from article of Sisonke Msimang