Autobiography of winnie mandela

Despite the banning order, Winnie did in fact manage to visit Nelson again in prison. However, a half hour meeting through glass, observed and recorded by security police and subject to extreme self censoring was a distinctly unsatisfactory experience. While Nelson and his ANC cadres on Robben Island accommodated themselves to being politically inert and concentrated their efforts on intellectual pursuits, Winnie found herself at the coalface of the struggle.

The police raids were relentless, with intrusions into her home sometimes happening up to four times a day. Her house was routinely burgled, vandalised and even bombed. To the Apartheid regime she became a significant political figure in her own right, as opposed to merely being the feisty wife of Nelson Mandela. In May Winnie was arrested again, this time for meeting with another banned person, her good friend and photographer for Drum magazine, Peter Magubane.

By the mid s, unrest amongst the South African youth had become increasingly volatile. Steve Biko had founded the Black Consciousness Movement in as a riposte to what he saw as unhelpful white liberal paternalism. In the weeks that followed the violence of June 16, Winnie and Dr Motlana had their hands full attending to youth and parents who had been arrested, injured or killed in the riots.

Nonetheless, a simple scapegoat had to be found for the Soweto uprising and Winnie fit the bill. Once again she was detained. The police held her in custody for five months, eventually releasing her in December without charge. In January , she was served with a fresh five year banning order. Brandfort : a Banishment. There was, in fact, a far graver fate awaiting Winnie in in the early hours of the morning on May 15, a police contingent arrived at her doorstep to take her away to the station.

Over the coming hours it transpired what the police had in store. Brandfort lies around kilometres south-west of Johannesburg and 50 kilometres north of Bloemfontein. Prior to her arrival in Phathakahle, the township there, the Department of Bantu Affairs had informed locals that a dangerous female — indeed, a terrorist — would be moving there and that they should avoid contact with her at all costs.

Autobiography of winnie mandela

Instead of being demoralised by her isolation and the endemic racism of local shop-owners, Winnie continued much as before, flouting racist Apartheid legislation and dumbfounding conservatives with her audacity not to be cowed by unjust segregationist laws. Opinion polls taken during her first two years in Brandfort showed that she was seen to be the second most important political figure in the country after Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Part of what kept Winnie motivated was her exceptional ability not to become demoralised and her inexhaustible tenacity to keep busy. While she was living out her banishment she established a local gardening collective; a soup kitchen; a mobile health unit; a day care centre; an organisation for orphans and juvenile delinquents and a sewing club.

She was at last free to return home to her house at , Vilakazi Street, Orlando West. When Winnie returned to Johannesburg, the place she had come to identify as home, in , she found it was a changed and more dangerous place than the one she had left behind. Nonetheless, shortly after returning home, Winnie again set to doing what she had always done and looked for ways to help those she saw as vulnerable.

To this end, Winnie established a place for disenfranchised youth to feel at home, organise, and socialise. There already existed in Soweto a Sisulu Football Club and it was therefore not an unusual moniker for the group to adopt. During the long years that Nelson had been in jail and Winnie had been struggling by herself, the couple had moved in starkly opposite directions.

Whilst Nelson and his Robben Island coterie had become more academic and statesman-like during their years cut-off from grassroots politics, Winnie on the other hand was forced to become a soldier on the ground. During her decades of police intimidation and harassment; her emotional brutalisation having had her family torn apart and her closest friends betray her ; and her physical imprisonment and banishment, Winnie had developed combative defences against a world that was unfailingly hostile.

Once established in Soweto, these rumours refused to dissipate and her frequent public appearances in khaki uniform did little to quell speculation that her approach to liberation was becoming increasingly military driven and violent. On April 13 in Munsieville, Winnie gave a speech that would become immediately infamous. Winnie Mandela, wearing her khaki slacks, helps bereaved comrades carry the coffin of an Apartheid victim.

Despite the government making grand concessions by releasing top ANC members such as Govan Mbeki at the end of ; in the townships, murder, disorder and civil unrest were the order of the day. Furthermore, in Soweto the MUFC were quickly gaining a reputation for operating with impunity as a kind of vigilante mafia under the tutelage of their coach, Jerry Richardson, who later revealed himself to have been a police informer during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission TRC.

Photographer Jillian Edelstein Image source. Winnie relocated to a bigger property - some would say a mansion — in Diepkloof and the MUFC moved with her. A thick veil of murkiness continues to engulf the truth around what happened to Stompei Seipei in , the fourteen year old activist who fell foul of the MUFC. At the TRC hearing, the extent of clarity surrounding his death amounted to the following: that he went missing from his home, was beaten and ultimately murdered with a pair of gardening shears.

Dr Asvat reported that Stompie was vomiting and could not eat and declared that he had suffered permanent brain-damage. James "Stompie" Seipei, the 14 year old child who was brutally kidnapped and murdered by the Mandela United Football Club, with Winnie herself directly implicated. Photographer Gille de Vlieg. On 27 January, Dr Asvat himself was murdered by two young men posing as patients.

Cyril Mbatha and Nicholas Dlamini were subequently convicted of his murder. Political prisoners who had not committed violent crimes were to be released and executions of prisoners on death row were to cease. Also, in a major move, Nelson Mandela was to be released from jail. Just over a week later, on February 11, Nelson walked out of Victor Verster Prison hand in hand with Winnie to a reception of hundreds of thousands of supporters.

The couple were finally reunited after almost 30 years of separation. Winnie was cleared of the murder itself but sentenced to five years in prison on four counts of kidnapping and one year as an accessory to assault. In the event she was granted leave to appeal and her bail was extended, with the courts eventually ordering her to serve a two year suspended sentence and pay a fine of R15 However, the allegations, the trial and the penchant for controversy were all taking their toll on the Mandelas, and the image of the happy couple was fading fast.

In her new role as head of Social Welfare, Winnie continued to court controversy when financial irregularities began to show up on her receipts and rumours emerged surrounding a possible affair she was having with her deputy, a young articled clerk by the name of Dali Mpofu. On September 6 , The Sunday Times got hold of a letter Winnie had written to Mpofu making mention of, amongst other things, ANC welfare department cheques that had been cashed for him.

In August , Nelson instituted divorce proceedings against Winnie and in March , the divorce was finalised. By the time the TRC was established in February , Winnie had enough accusations made against her to warrant an appearance at an in camera hearing of the Human Rights Violations Committee. Winnie appeared before the TRC in , which judged her to have been implicated in a number of assaults and murders carried out by the MUFC.

Following the end of Apartheid, Winnie continued to campaign for issues she strongly believed in. This latter incident both highlighted her principles and gestured towards the ever fractious relationship she had with then President Thabo Mbeki. Winnie arrived an hour late to the event, and despite interrupting a speech by the chairman of the National Youth Commission, received a huge outpouring of support when the crowd saw her stepping out of her car.

Mbeki was already onstage and visibly unamused by the interruption. In an English newspaper, The Evening Standard, published an interview with Winnie by Nadira Naipul that claimed to accurately quote her talking disparagingly about her relationship to her husband, Desmond Tutu and the TRC. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains an enigmatic figure in South African society and history.

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