MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is neither villain nor saint

Last week, Netflix released the much-anticipated documentary series, The Trials of Winnie Mandela, and it has remained on the platform’s Top 10 watchlist in South Africa.

Like many South Africans, I watched the seven-part documentary series with great interest, curious to see how her grandchildren, who produced it, would capture the life and times of a woman who raised them, and whose legacy remains highly contested nearly a decade after her death.

Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela meant different things to different people, and the strength of the documentary series lies in how it captures this reality. Some participants were clear in their dislike of Mama Winnie, with one stating boldly that he hated her. Others were just as clear in their love for her, and it is beautifully captured in how they speak of her compassionate spirit and unwavering commitment to the struggle for the liberation of Black people in South Africa.

Participants such as Sisonke Msimang and Nakedi Matthews Phosa reflected on the nuances that shape how Mama Winnie is remembered.

Msimang’s approach, which is captured in her book, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, centre the double standards that define how Mama Winnie was treated by both the apartheid regime and the democratic government.

Hers is a particularly important perspective that compels us to reflect on how the vilification of Mama Winnie cannot be divorced from the heteronormative patriarchal society in which she lived. No reasonable person can dispute this analysis, for men within the Congress Movement who espoused the same views as Mama Winnie did not endure the ostracisation and demonisation that she did.

Mama Winnie herself is captured in her own words in the documentary series, with her granddaughters interviewing her from the comfort of her home, asking some questions that enabled her to tell part of her story in her own words. That interviews with her took place in the final years of her life is particularly important because it allowed her to reflect on the path she had walked on, enabling space to contemplate on the choices she made decades ago, and how she viewed them many years later.

This matters because human beings are in a constant state of evolution, allowing us to look back at specific moments in our lives with a different understanding.

The two participants who stood out for me were Palesa Morudu and Mondli Makhanya. Morudu, a renowned communication strategist based in the United States, and Makhanya, a seasoned journalist, provided perspectives that demand engagement. Their participation has been condemned by many South Africans, particularly members of the Congress Movement, who have gone as far as to accuse them of being part of the right-wing agenda that seeks to demonise Mama Winnie.

I don’t believe that either individual is right-wing in the sense that it is being argued across social media, but I do think that Morudu, in particular, is engaging in the deeply problematic depoliticisation of both Mama Winnie and the liberation struggle. This is captured in her simplistic argument about the incorrectness of violence.

This argument disregards the political context in which Mama Winnie existed, a context that was defined by structural violence.

It is not possible to make sense of Mama Winnie’s thinking and actions without first understanding that she existed in a world in which violence was built into the fabric of society.

The laws, policies, and institutional practices of apartheid were inherently violent, and it was not possible to dismantle them without a significant degree of violent resistance. When your very existence is subjected to economic, social, cultural, political and environmental violence, as was the case for Mama Winnie, it is inevitable that your own resistance would assume a violent character.

Morudu would be hard-pressed to mention a single nation in the world that dismantled colonial and apartheid violence without engaging in significant violent resistance.

Thus, for her to moralise violence in the context of apartheid, and to present Mama Winnie as a violent person without engaging with the nuances that informed her political choices, is disingenuous.

Makhanya, on the other hand, attempts to engage somewhat with these nuances, particularly as it relates to the double standards that are applied in how Mama Winnie is remembered in contrast to how male freedom fighters are.

But like Morudu, he too often tithers on the simplistic when it comes to understanding how structural violence shaped her and the decisions that she made.

Makhanya’s views on Mama Winnie are not unknown, over the years, he has been a staunch critic of her legacy and has even gone as far as to call her a “virus in the body politic” as well as referring to her in insulting terms such as “damaged goods” (in reflection on how hardened she became following her banishment to Brandfort) and “wayward”. He, too, does not reflect in any meaningful way on how Mama Winnie’s brutal existence could not have produced a “polished” revolutionary.

Where I agree with Morudu and Makhanya is on the assertion that Mama Winnie’s role as a patron of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC), which features prominently in the documentary series, should be analysed with objectivity.

The facts around the deaths of Stompie Seipei and Dr. Abu-Baker Asvat may never be known – a point that is made by one of the participants in the documentary series who was involved in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

He argues, correctly, that the scope of the TRC was limited, relying on personal disclosures rather than actual investigations. For this reason, the validity of accusations levelled against Mama Winnie at the TRC remains untested, and what is in public record comes from discredited individuals whose stories even officials of the apartheid regime could not corroborate.

The 1991 trial also did not find her guilty of Stompie’s murder, but of being an accessory after the fact. There was basically no direct evidence linking her to the murder.

But what is not in question is that the MUFC was involved in heinous acts that were described by the community as a “reign of terror”.

How much of this Mama Winnie knew about is unclear. She may have, under those conditions, believed that the MUFC boys who were under her protection were being politically targeted – a reasonable belief given the circumstances of her life. In the documentary series, officials from the Security Branch of the apartheid police confirm that she was under constant surveillance and that a lot was done to brutalise her.

Her protection of the boys must be understood within the context of a woman who was isolated, targeted and under constant surveillance – and who had buried many comrades who died in the hands of a regime that placed no value on Black lives.

But such protection undoubtedly enabled this reign of terror, and this is something that we must acknowledge because failing to do so minimises the legitimate pain of those who suffered in the hands of the MUFC to which Mama Winnie was patron.

These people who were victimised by the MUFC were Black people. They are our people. Their experiences should not be lent to the cruelty and injustice of erasure and trivialisation.

I struggle with the binary way in which the legacy of Mama Winnie is framed. I reject the perspective that she was a villain and also the perspective that she was a saint.

She was none of these things. Mama Winnie was a product of a political environment whose brutality de-civilised Black people, including her.

The suffering that she endured in the hands of the apartheid regime, from numerous arrests to banishment, undoubtedly hardened her.

I do not know of anyone who could be held in solitary confinement for over a year, constantly tortured, separated from her husband for nearly three decades, endlessly violated in her own home, repeatedly separated from her young children, and brutalised in the manner that Mama Winnie was, who would not have been hardened or driven to madness.

We cannot argue about the structural problems of democratic South Africa, including violence in our communities and the disintegration of Black families, being a legacy of apartheid, then turn around and argue that Mama Winnie’s life should not reflect the chaos of the time.

Conversely, it is an injustice to her legacy to frame her as a saint. It denies her the one thing she needs most, and the one thing that the system so intentionally did everything to strip her of – her humanness.

The most powerful way to remember Mama Winnie is by humanising her. This requires that we see her in her complexity as a woman who was revolutionary, progressive, sometimes regressive, courageous, naïve, compassionate, hardened, beautiful, flawed, intellectual, chaotic, visionary, mad…and above all, human.

All these things can be true at the same time. Remembering her this way, in all her contradictions, does not diminish her. It affirms that her place in our struggle for liberation, our struggle of re-imagining ourselves into existence, and our struggle of memory against forgetting, is worthy of being remembered – and that she deserves a place in our collective memory as a revolutionary human.