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    Winnie Mandela Dead

    From the seemingly loyal wife of the leader of the ANC to involvement in murder. She fell a long way.

    #2
    She scared the shit out of me as a kid. Necklacing was a thing often talked of in primary school. Everyone knew of a case just a few towns over their cousin had heard of/definitely seen. You’d think the Fife Free Press would have been on it.

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      #3
      Her necklacing comment was pretty bad, though one can see where that awful practice came from. It is a shame, and an indication of the media's pervasiveness, that it's this she's mostly remembered for internationally (and her part in the killing of Stompie Sepei). What is not the leading part of the Western narrative is her heroic defiance in banishment in Brantfort and her 17-months in solitary confinement. Or her immense courage, to which anybody who marched by her side can testify.

      After Nelson Mandela's release -- and without Winnie, there'd not have been Brand Mandela -- she diminished her own reputation by various scandals, and by her arrogance. But she also fought hard for the disempowered and against patriarchy. She deserves massive credit for that.

      The story of her solitary confinement is worth reading. For 17 months, the only person she saw was her interrogator, a notorious torturer. Her cell had a few basic items (including a urine-stained blanket). The light-bulb was on 24 hours a day, and she was permitted no reading or writing material. She'd recall that what kept her sane was interacting with insects.

      With that in mind, it's a bit easier to see how she might not have had massive problems with the necklacing of people whose collaboration with the apartheid regime led to the detention and torture, and even murder, of political activists. It does not justify necklacing -- nothing does -- but it's nit really that difficult to understand where that practice, and support of it, came from.

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        #4
        Thanks G-Man. A SA friend just shared this post by Charlene Smith on facebook
        I am so appalled by some white trash know-nothing comments about Winnie Madikizela Mandela, that I need to weigh in. If Madiba could forgive and honor her, and then not punish white South Africans for what we put her and others like her through, how DARE you judge her?

        Winnie Mandela, when I first met her in 1976, was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, tall, imperious, with a gorgeous deep voice and a low sexy laugh. I interviewed her after she had to stop work for a cobbler, because security police harassment was so intense, business to the store fell off.
        It had been this way for thirteen years, ever since the jailing of her husband, Nelson Mandela in 1963. Now that she has died the clichés about her life are rolling in thick and fast. How eager we are to forget, and in refusing to remember we perpetuate the harm she experienced in life.
        The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in 1989 found she played a role in the murders of Stompie Seipei (13), evidence suggested she stabbed him twice in the throat, and the deaths of Lolo Sono, and others. In 1992, she was charged with ordering the death of Dr. Abu-Baker Asvat. A decade later she was charged and convicted on multiple counts of fraud and theft, but never served jail time.
        And yet, she deserves our empathy and I will tell you why.
        In the 70s she was a source of inspiration to many young people, some of whom flocked to her home after the 1976 uprising. Some went into exile, others remained and coached by her, became leaders of the United Democratic Front.
        Winnie was banished to a dusty village, Brandfort, hundreds of miles from her Soweto home, and that, and an incident in 1969 broke her. In 1969, security branch came to her Soweto home at 3am. She was alone with her daughters, aged 10 and nine. Winnie asked to fetch her sister one street up so the girls would not be alone. The police refused, she was taken and her children left alone.
        She spent 18 months in solitary confinement, naked, not allowed to wash, and not allowed out for exercises. She did not know what had become of her girls. When she would speak of this with me, her whole countenance would change. She was not allowed sanitary towels when she had periods, nor water or cloths to clean, and so the blood caked on her. She made friends with cockroaches. I've been in the cell at the Old Fort that she was held in. It is narrow with high, thick walls, it is oppressively dark when the door is closed, as it was for 18 months.
        I believe she experienced profound Post Traumatic Stress. It was never treated, instead; she was expelled to Brandfort. She had a classic four-room house with a biggish yard. Money from mostly American donors saw her build a large bedroom with a quilt on it made by American sympathizers. She used to wait at the Brandfort post office at around 11am each day for phone calls or would make phone calls out. People who visited her were arrested and charged.
        Winnie was isolated and lonely, it was here that the drinking and drug taking began and affairs with younger men, including a dreadlocked filmmaker. The conservative black folk of Brandfort township grew to loathe her.
        She would get visiting international dignitaries like Senator Edward Kennedy with his large entourage in 1985, but it deepened resentment of her.
        When she came back to Johannesburg, in defiance of her banning order, Madiba was already in secret communications with the apartheid government. She formed the Mandela United Football Club, it became an instrument of torture and murder of young men wrongly accused of being spies. At the TRC hearings where its activities were recounted, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who knew her long put his head on the table and cried.
        Mandela wrote, "I have often wondered whether any kind of commitment can ever be sufficient excuse for abandoning a young and inexperienced woman in a pitiless desert."
        And so, when he came out of jail in 1990 it was with his hand in hers, even though a few Sundays before his release her explicit love letters to a young lawyer were released. On the night of his return to Soweto, she left the house in the early hours of the morning with the lawyer in full view of the world's media camped outside.
        Zwelakhe Sisulu who accompanied them to the U.S.A. not long after said she would yell at Madiba in hotel rooms. The entourage were not sure how to cope with these outbursts.
        Archbishop Tutu revealed, "Mandela said to me that he was never so unhappy as in the period after he was released until he decided to leave Soweto."
        Winnie was unrepentant, she ran up huge bills on Mandela’s tab, was convicted on multiple counts of theft and fraud, and became an embarrassment.
        Lots of false pieties will be said about her now. The truth is that once there was a beautiful, proud woman who studied social work with an older woman, Albertinah Sisulu. Through her she met a handsome, brilliant lawyer called Nelson Mandela. They fell in love. He divorced his first wife to marry her. They had two children. Their marriage was passionate. He adored her, I don't believe he ever loved anyone as much. However, their life was never normal because of his political activities, which she embraced.
        When Mandela went to jail he was comparatively safe compared to the perilous life she experienced. The apartheid state punished her because of him, and too because of her; she was an effective conduit for sending young people into exile for military training.
        She was a devoted and exceptionally loving mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I'm not sure how Zindzi, esp. will cope now.
        Because of the poison that is racism she was tortured beyond anything anyone should endure, and because she was so venerated none loved her enough to give the help she needed.
        Winnie is the Conscience of a Nation that has already forgotten the tragedy of apartheid history; even in her death, people do not realize how she suffered, how damaged she became and how it hurt her and those who cared for her most.
        South Africa today has one of the worst crime rates in the world, it has millions of damaged people – they are apartheid’s legacy. It is in remembering and healing a wounded people that we honor the legacy of Winnie Madikizela Mandela.
        Sleep with the angels Nomzamo.

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          #5
          That is a fine tribute.

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            #6
            I Am sorry but that is wrong - and I rarely contradict G-M on matters apartheid. The whole narrative - here anyway - was someone who had been treated horrendously and reacted bravely who then became a vicious thug. The necklacings of perceived informers could perhaps be seen - as with Che's similar executions - as not condonable but, in the context, understandable. What happened with Stompie Sepei was unforgivable and the reason Mandela did so was for expediency. Of course, there were the affairs and controversies after that but the real indictment was what happened to Stompie Sepei (and, probably, others).

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              #7
              Where was that Bored? All the stuff I've seen in the mainstream press has been very much focused on the negative. I don't think anyone offering a slightly more sympathetic reading of the trajectory of her life is trying to overlook what she became just trying to provide a bit of context.

              That's certainly what I read the piece I posted as doing

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                #8
                Ah, apologies, I was talking about the contemporary perspective rather than commentary since her death. I haven't read any of that.

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                  #9
                  Rian Malan has a good essay that gives the anti-Winnie viewpoint.

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                    #10
                    He would, that right-wing, crypto-racist fuck.

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                      #11
                      It's possible that she was both a great freedom fighter and a murderer and they do not cancel each other out. Every person is a multiple self. She lacked her husband's PR skills.
                      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 03-04-2018, 21:32.

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                        #12
                        I think a great freedom fighter then a murdering fuck. I don't think that bad PR kills covers being a murderer.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                          It's possible that she was both a great freedom fighter and a murderer and they do not cancel each other out. Every person is a multiple self. She lacked her husband's PR skills.
                          hey, one day you're a barman in the Crown, the next you're trying to stop the police from burning down your house, then before you know it, you're stuffing the corpse of a widowed mother of 10 into a sand dune, and telling everyone that she left her kids for a man.

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                            #14
                            The necklace murder is more shocking because of her close proximity to it, whereas a US President orders a drone strike that fries several kids from a different continent.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                              I think a great freedom fighter then a murdering fuck. I don't think that bad PR kills covers being a murderer.
                              She remained a great freedom fighter in as far as she articulated the frustrations and aspirations of the masses who have not been liberated from economic oppression, doing so until her final illness. Most South Africans don't see her as a murdering fuck with bad PR skills, but as the Mother of the Nation, and even the "conscience of the nation" (which, really, is the title that belongs to Desmond Tutu). To her, it's the judgment of those constituencies that mattered.

                              The reaction to her death by most South Africans suggests that her PR skills were pretty good. Even the hostile reaction of most whites is a testament to her ability to speak for the black masses; those that do so well tend to be hated the most by whites.

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                                #16
                                This, by Afua Hirsch in The Guardian, is a good reflection on the reaction to the death of Winnie. She underplays the effect of boycotts in ending apartheid; it would be more correct to say that the activism of Winnie Mandela, and her mentoring of leaders in the struggle, inspired and solidified international opposition to apartheid.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by G-Man View Post
                                  The reaction to her death by most South Africans suggests that her PR skills were pretty good. Even the hostile reaction of most whites is a testament to her ability to speak for the black masses; those that do so well tend to be hated the most by whites.
                                  Not all, of course, as you would be including me in that.

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                                    #18
                                    You're not a white South African though.

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                                      #19
                                      Good point, well argued.

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