Winnie Mandela

ON Saturday last, South Africa paid its last respects to, undoubtedly, its most famous daughter and heroine, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela.

In their tens of thousands, the most famous of South African politicians, surviving anti-apartheid activists, and other leaders from the region, gathered to pay their homage, through song and praise, and say their final goodbye to an iconic figure who became apartheid’s most implacable foe.

Apartheid or separateness was a brutal system of institutionalized racist discrimination that served to uphold white supremacy and domination of the majority black population of South Africa by the minority white rule. It was the most iniquitous man-made system, next to slavery, that had been inherent of laws that were designed to reduce its targeted captive segment of South Africans to an ordered life that was cruel in its least descriptive of inhumane manifestation, to one where daily, decent existence had been non-existent.

As a reminder, among its most infamous of obnoxiously discriminatory dogmas, were the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, and the Immorality Act of 1950 that made illegal marriage or sex across racial lines; and the Population Registration Act that categorized South Africans into four racial groupings.

Then there was the Bantustan arrangement that decreed the forced removal, one of history’s largest, of blacks from their homes into segregated homelands called Bantustans. In fact, there were ten designated homelands that were determined to be the original homes of black South Africans. Any South African who accepted this deportation–for that is what it really was–became deprived of his/her South African citizenship.

This was the system that governed the lives of black South Africans, of which another evil, the Pass Laws, brought about the shocking bloody Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960, when white South African police killed a reported 75 black South African protestors; and which treated blacks as pariahs in their own country, ostracizing them to precisely separate use of all public facilities, further degrading them to non-people.

It was this extreme brutalization of human beings that had shaped the mental understanding of Winnie Mandela, who took the mantle of the continuation of the struggle after her husband, Nelson Mandela, had been imprisoned for life. A now immortalized quote of hers, in 1996, reinforces this stark fact, “I am a product of the masses, of my country and the product of my enemy.’’

It can be said that it was her husband and fellow activists who had lit the earliest flame for the first shots against the cruelty of apartheid, but it was Winnie Mandela and her indomitable leadership which fanned the flames of rebellion brighter, and which attracted a younger generation of black South Africans that epitomized the 1976 Soweto Township uprisings; the latter that began the final phase for the overthrow of a system that treated black South Africans akin to animals.

Winnie Mandela, during her years of leading the struggle in what was definably a war of national liberation against an equally implacable foe, deadly in its intent of continuous perpetuation of a system of human repression, became the highest priority for racist, white South Africa security apparatus. Not only did she suffer periods of imprisonment, including solitary confinement, where there was even the denial of sanitary products, but also severe beatings and torture, forced removal and banishment.

Even journeys to visit her imprisoned husband were difficult, as she had many times been forced to journey the 800 miles via road, rather than by air travel or train. In its entirety, apartheid was an entrenched bastion of human oppression that had the support of the legal and moral framework of a state that sought to uphold its racist ideology of white supremacy by any and all extremes, as evidenced by the many executions of activists who dared challenged the system; and the many beating deaths, with that of Stevo Biko being one of the infamous highpoints of this internecine struggle to end an example of man’s inhumanity against man. No amount of international protests in the form of resolutions and peace marches, and boycotts could have ended such a murderous system.

Nor was apartheid any friendly social milieu that had exuded any sense of human decency and accommodation. It occasioned the kind of challenge, a no-holds barred revolution, led by Winnie Mandela to free her fellow blacks and their country in the process, from what was another form of modern day slavery. Because of her perceived immoderate actions during her leadership of the anti -apartheid struggle, she had been the target of many forms of criticisms.

However, despite such controversial views, a freed South Africa from the yoke of apartheid slavery would never have become a reality had it not been for her visionary, brave, and selfless leadership, during which she suffered immensely. She belongs to the pantheon of Southern Africa’s liberation leaders.

Winnie Mandela was loved and despised, but she earned her place in history through her blood, sweat and tears in the revolution against apartheid. Despite her isolation and flaws, her role in the ANC-led liberation struggle was crucial to black South Africans liberation.

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