Person

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

South African anti-apartheid activist and politician (1936–2018); social worker, wife of Nelson Mandela for 38 years, and a militant leader in her own right during his imprisonment.

Trained as South Africa’s first Black female social worker, Winnie Madikizela married Nelson Mandela in 1958 and became a prominent activist during the decades of his imprisonment, enduring banning orders, detention, and torture by the apartheid state. She was a galvanising and increasingly militant figure in the 1980s liberation struggle — endorsing ‘necklacing’ (executing suspected collaborators with a burning tyre) — and was later convicted in connection with the kidnapping and death of a young man, Stompie Seipei, by members of her ‘Mandela United Football Club’. The couple separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Her life resists the flat verdicts of hero or villain; the biographer Jonny Steinberg treats her cruelty and her compassion as one psychic architecture rather than a contradiction.

In the wiki

  • Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era — Jonny Steinberg refuses the ‘flat-out bad person’ verdict as both bad craft and bad history. He does not soften what she did — the bitter irony, he says, is that the supposed champion of the oppressed hurt people who were poor, young, Black, and defenceless — but he assembles the whole into a single psyche whose antinomies are continuous, not contradictory. He traces the pattern to her childhood as one of eleven children of fiercely ambitious parents who openly picked winners and discarded losers; she learned to make herself the favourite, and carried a lifelong pattern of weak boundaries and a need to ‘colonise’ the heads of those close to her — which, Steinberg argues, made her a poor prisoner under torture, because she let her torturer’s hatred deep into her psyche, hatred she later described as the fuel of her activism.

See also