Winnie Mandela / The Times 2.4.2018

February 11, 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, was one of the great moments of recent history. Hand in hand with his wife, Winnie, he walked through the gates of the Victor Verster prison near Cape Town to an ecstatic reception from the world’s media and throngs of jubilant supporters. If it all looked a bit too perfect — the great freedom fighter reunited with the beautiful woman who had so bravely championed his cause during his incarceration — it was.

Winnie Mandela had indeed been a leader of the fight against apartheid, a symbol of black resistance to white minority rule, and had paid a very heavy price. She had suffered imprisonment, torture, solitary confinement, internal exile and constant interrogation, surveillance and harassment by the regime’s security forces.

However, that was only half the story. There was a much darker side to the woman known as “Mama Winnie” and “mother of the nation”. As a result of her mistreatment, perhaps, she had grown imperious, capricious and prone to violent rages. In the years before Mandela’s release she used thugs to terrorise not South Africa’s whites, but poor blacks in the slums of Soweto. On her orders those thugs abducted, beat and killed those that she took against — not just men, but mere boys too.

She was corrupt. She used her ill-gotten funds to live in a style far beyond the reach of the poor black masses she claimed to champion, although the masses did not seem to mind. They saw her as a black Eva Perón. They loved her for her courage, for her style, for her defiance of the white authorities and, later, of a complacent African National Congress (ANC).

She was unfaithful too. She had affairs before and after her husband’s release. Two years after Mandela left prison the golden couple of South Africa’s liberation struggle separated. Four years after that they divorced. Mandela, who was by then the country’s president, sorrowfully told the judge that not once since his release “has she ever entered my bedroom while I was awake”.

“She was a tremendous stalwart of our struggle, an icon of liberation,” Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, once said of Winnie Mandela, but he added: “Something went wrong — horribly, badly wrong.”

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born in a village near Bizana in what is now Eastern Cape province. She was the sixth of 11 children of Columbus Madikizela, a relatively prosperous school principal turned businessman, and his wife, Gertrude. Their daughter’s first name, Nomzamo, meant one who undergoes trials, and it proved prophetic.

Her parents were disciplinarians. She and her siblings had to stand to attention when their father came into the room, and were regularly beaten. Her mother died when she was nine years old. She was no academic, but she rose to become head girl of her high school through sheer assertiveness and force of personality. From Bizana, Madikizela-Mandela — as she styled herself after her divorce — went to study social work at the Jan Hofmeyr school in Johannesburg and became, after graduating, the first black female social worker at the city’s leading black hospital, the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.

Nelson Mandela first spotted her as he drove past a bus stop outside the hospital where she was standing, and was struck by her beauty. A week later she and her brother arrived at his law firm seeking legal advice. “I cannot say for certain if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but I do know that the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzamo I knew that I wanted to have her as my wife,” he wrote in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom. “Her spirit, her passion, her youth, her courage, her wilfulness — I felt all of these things the moment I first saw her.”

Mandela was 18 years her senior and already married, but he divorced his wife, Evelyn, and married his second bride in 1958 despite her father’s severe misgivings. He warned his daughter that she was marrying a man who was already married — to the anti-apartheid struggle.

There was no time, or money, for a honeymoon. Mandela and other ANC leaders were too busy agitating, organising and preparing to stand trial on treason charges. The Mandelas had two daughters in quick succession, Zenani and Zindzi, and soon caught the attention of Johannesburg. “At social occasions, with their charisma and their sharp clothes, they were a model public couple of the late Fifties, bringing an aura of American glamour to their politics,” Anthony Sampson wrote in his biography of Mandela. However, the time they spent as a normal married couple in their Soweto home was brief.

Mandela was acquitted of treason in 1961, but was forced underground. He was arrested in 1962 and spent the next 27 years in prison. For much of that time his wife was permitted only occasional 30-minute visits in the presence of guards, with a glass screen between her and her husband, and 21 years passed before Mandela was allowed even to touch his wife. However, throughout his imprisonment on Robben Island she was, he wrote, “an indispensable pillar of support and comfort”. In one letter from prison he told her: “Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love, I would have fallen apart many years ago.”

Madikizela-Mandela was not a political creature when she met her husband, but she quickly became one. She joined the ANC Women’s League and was arrested and detained for two weeks with hundreds of others for protesting against the government’s racial pass laws, but that was nothing compared to the persecution that she faced after Mandela was imprisoned.

If he became the great martyr of black South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, she became his fearless champion and outspoken mouthpiece in the outside world — and a prime target for the regime’s security forces.

She was put under surveillance, harassed, detained and subjected to house arrest. On one occasion, when her house was being searched, she knocked a policeman to the ground and was charged with resisting arrest. She was subjected to a series of banning orders restricting her freedom of speech, travel and association. In 1969 she was arrested under the draconian Terrorism Act, dragged away from her young daughters and locked up for 18 months in Pretoria Central Prison, where she was tortured, humiliated and kept in solitary confinement. “The only reason I survived was because I had the Mandela name,” she said, adding that the experience taught her “how to hate my political opponents”.

She was imprisoned for another five months after the Soweto uprising of 1976. Shortly after her release she was banished to Brandfort, a grim town 250 miles from Johannesburg dominated by white Afrikaners. She called Brandfort her “little Siberia”. She lived in a small, spartan bungalow with no heating or running water and refused to pay rent on the grounds that the house was a jail, not a home.

Madikizela-Mandela spent the next eight years in Brandfort, but she was hardly silenced. The ANC promoted her as a symbol of its struggle. A stream of foreign journalists and diplomats travelled to see her, as did luminaries such as Edward Kennedy, the US senator, who called her a “source of inspiration”, and Richard Attenborough, who was making the film Cry Freedom.

By the time she returned to Johannesburg in 1985 she had changed. She was said to be drinking heavily and engaging in extramarital affairs. She built herself an ostentatiously large home in impoverished Soweto, which became known as “Winnie’s Palace”. She was driven around in expensive Mercedes cars, sold the film rights to her story and at one point tried to license the Mandela name. Believing herself to be untouchable, she adopted militant friends, dressed in paramilitary fatigues and employed increasingly inflammatory rhetoric that dismayed the ANC leadership and played into the regime’s hands.

Blessed with a keen sense of theatre, she famously told a rally at Munsieville in 1986: “We have no guns. We have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol. Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” The practice of “necklacing” involved putting petrol-filled tyres around people’s neck and setting fire to them.

She also surrounded herself with a gang of “bodyguards” — young armed thugs who were dubbed the “Mandela United Football Club” (MUFC). Operating from her home they terrorised, kidnapped and murdered other blacks, unjustly labelling some of them collaborators or informers. Most notoriously, they abducted four youths from a Methodist mission house on December 29, 1988, and severely beat them. A few days later the mutilated, decomposing corpse of one, 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, was found on waste ground. The coup de grace had been delivered with a pair of garden shears.

Shortly after that Abu Baker Asvat, a doctor who had examined Moeketsi in Madikizela-Mandela’s home after the boy was beaten, but before he was killed, was himself shot dead in his surgery. The ANC set up a Mandela Crisis Committee to try and restrain her, but without success. Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s president, was forced to admit: “We can’t control her.”

After his release in 1990 Mandela initially refused to believe the mounting allegations of brutality and corruption being levelled against his wife. “Perhaps I was blinded to certain things because of the pain I felt for not being able to fulfil my role as husband to my wife and father to my children,” he conceded.

Madikizela-Mandela’s protestations of innocence began to unravel as members of the “football club” were convicted and her disenchanted former friends and employees broke their silence. In 1991 she stood trial on charges of kidnapping and assault. Mandela attended the proceedings, which were accompanied by rumours of witnesses disappearing or changing their stories. She was sentenced to six years imprisonment, but that sentence was reduced on appeal to a £3,000 fine for kidnapping.

There were allegations of corruption too, and brazen liaisons with other men including a young lawyer named Dali Mpofu. In April 1992 a desolate Mandela was forced to accept the truth and announced that he was separating from his wife. South Africa’s most celebrated couple divorced in 1996. He continued to blame himself, saying she “married a man who soon left her. That man became a myth and then the myth returned home and proved to be a man after all”. She told an interviewer: “I was the most unmarried married woman.” In the autumn of 1992, following the separation, a leaked letter showed that Madikizela-Mandela and Mpofu had misappropriated funds from the ANC’s welfare department, which she had been running. She was forced to resign from all her positions within the ANC, but not for the last time she confounded those who wrote her political obituary.

She retained a huge and devoted following among the poorest blacks. The marginalised masses dismissed the charges against her as the work of her enemies. She whipped up her followers with shameless populism and they in turn ensured that the ANC could not sideline her.

In 1993 she was elected as the president of the ANC Women’s League. In 1994 she was elected to parliament in South Africa’s first free elections. Mandela, the country’s new president, appointed his estranged wife deputy minister of arts. A year later he was forced to sack her following more financial shenanigans, and after she had criticised the new government for appeasing whites.

Yet in the spring of 1997 she won the presidency of the ANC Women’s League for the second time, and was a serious contender to become the ANC’s deputy president until her infamous past caught up with her again.

By this time Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission had been empowered to grant amnesties to those who confessed crimes and could demonstrate that their transgressions were politically motivated. Madikizela-Mandela refused to seek an amnesty, although she was accused of complicity in at least eight murders.

That November she appeared before the commission, which had heard eight days of shocking allegations about her role in the murders of Moeketsi, Dr Asvat and others. She arrived adorned with jewellery, in a white Mercedes limousine, surrounded by bodyguards. She insisted that those who had testified against her were lying. Tutu, an old friend of the Mandelas, begged her to apologise. “It is true that things went horribly wrong,” she said, but that was as far as she would go. In 1998 the commission found her “politically and morally responsible for the gross violations of human rights committed by the MUFC”. It concluded that she was “implicated directly in a range of incidents — including assaults, abduction and the murder and attempted murder of at least a dozen individuals”.

Madikizela-Mandela’s defiance, and the harrowing testimony about her violence, vengefulness and jealous rages, probably cost her the ANC deputy leadership. At the party’s annual conference shortly afterwards only about 125 of the 3,500 delegates supported her bid and she withdrew from the contest.

While other members of the MUFC served long prison sentences, she suffered no penalties. She remained an MP, and a member of the ANC’s national executive, even after she was convicted of theft and fraud in connection with a bogus loan scandal in 2003. An appeal judge subsequently overturned her conviction for theft and gave her only a suspended sentence for fraud.

In her later years Madikizela-Mandela, the great survivor, continued to steal the limelight periodically. She would accuse ANC leaders of failing the poor and being interested only in enriching themselves, but the party needed her stardust and her popular appeal. She published her memoirs, was the subject of a movie and liked to mix with celebrities.

She is survived by her daughters, Zenani Mandela-Dlamini, who is South Africa’s ambassador to Argentina, and Zindzi Mandela-Hlongwane, who is the country’s ambassador to Denmark.

In 1998 Mandela married Graça Machel, the widow of a former president of Mozambique, but he never entirely severed links with his first wife. Madikizela-Mandela visited him in hospital in his final days. She was at his bedside when he died. When he left her nothing in his will, she contested it — and lost.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, South African politician, was born on September 26, 1936. She died on April 2, 2018, aged 81, after a long illness