Address by L N Sisulu, MP, Minister of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation at the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela commemorative event, Lindsay Junior Secondary School, Ngqamakhwe, Ward 20, Eastern Cape.
Distinguished guests,
Comrades,
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for the honor of the request to come here and pay tribute to Mam Winnie on her birthday in commemoration of her immense contribution to our struggle. Allow me to deliver this in English because even though I’m talking to you gathered here, what I want to say about this heroine of ours is meant for all of us to reflect on a life given to struggle.
All her adult life Mam Winnie’s passion, with its pain, its complexities, its controversies, its victories never veered from the determination to free her husband and the people of this country.
I agreed to give this commemorative lecture because I have been preoccupied with reflections of her life. Although I have known her almost all my life, it is only in the last two years of her life and thereafter that I have been seized with some of the things I want to raise today. What drew me to her was because she had wanted to discuss the state of the politics of the organisation. I got to understand what it was that made her who she was. I found in her a depth and vision that has so often been trivia, used in the media, an edit that so often was so negative.
Where does one start to reflect on the life of one so large and so complex and so pained? So let’s start at the beginning. Mam Winnie comes to Johannesburg from her East Pondoland home after her matric to study to become a social worker. She is dashingly beautiful and intelligent. She has grown up very much in her doing all those things that otherwise boys would do because that is the way her natural instincts drove her to do. She in time settles down in Johannesburg, a new setting and she is aware of the power of her physical appearance. Soon she marries the prominent politician, Madiba. In the mind of the media and all around her she is just the beautiful wife of Mandela.
She lives in the shadow of this great man, providing him with all the support he needed. When he is arrested and she realises that she is directly in the face of police brutality, she responds in the only way she can with an anger and the same aggression meted against her. In pictures of her outside the court during the Rivonia Trial you see the tigress in her as she protects her children and from then the tigress was unleased. She reverted to the tom boy she was when she grew up and fought back with the same arrogance that she got.
What came next was a litany of the same repression that was given out to all other families of the Rivonia Trial. Naked vengefulness and she continued to respond in kind. Throughout this time she was Nelson Mandela’s wife carrying on his work. However as she grew in stature she came into her own. In her own right the people began to respond to her, she became rooted in her community and combined with her social worker background, she became a people’s hero: brave, defiant and resilient. The rest is all well known to all of you about her.
What I want to put across to you today is a number of thoughts and my conclusion of those thoughts.
Long before we learnt of feminism, she defined her version of this. She was very clear of her rights as a woman and that these were equal to that of any man’s rights. The equality we often repeated in all our slogans, that equality was real; she could live it and make it possible for all other women to understand that their rights were equal to that of men.
At a time when this was not fully distilled she was seen as defiant, but let’s just pause and think about it: what exactly does defiant mean? That one can’t step across certain regulated patterns of behavior and who regulated those patterns of behavior.
Like anyone who treads where no one has trod before, there will be glitches along the way. She had her fair share of them. Often this was because she attracted the young, often over hasty with little political education, only their over exuberance and anger. When these youngsters acquired a bad reputation in the neighborhood, she was invariably associated with it and it took her a long time to shake this image off.
The ANC in exile was particularly perturbed by the activities of these youth and many messages were sent to Mama Winnie to distance herself from them, but that was either too late or too close for her to see the danger. In this mailshot the security branch would invariably try their luck either by discrediting her or infiltrating their own info to the youth. She was particularly instrumental in attracting the youth and keeping them active and she was their hero.
When the Women’s League, especially the younger Women’s League was particularly disgruntled with her and eight of them withdrew from the League, the response they received from the leadership was: okay you are unhappy with Winnie, tell us which one of you or the combination of you would fill Orlando Stadium? Because Winnie could single handedly do that and so the ANC was intensely aware, for us to grow we need numbers. Winnie had them.
There is no ignoring the fact that there was a huge chasm between Winnie and the leadership of both the ANC in Exile and the UDF and that it caused a great deal of strain. My simplistic answer would be that by deliberately isolating her to Brandfort, the regime had intended to have such outcome and it certainly succeeded. Added to that was the successful attempt to infiltrate what was otherwise a natural support base of the youth around her. Fueling this much later was her personal relationship with Madiba as it strained.
The one thing that none could take away from her was she was a force with whatever faults, she was a revolutionary - a rebellious revolutionary and had an impatience with the time it took to free her people.
Part of the reputational damage that Winnie suffered in the late eighties was that because she commanded so much popularity it was easy for her to make it on her own. And so you will all know, NO organisation likes that. However, the security branch liked that because they thrived on driving a wedge among our ranks and in that way weaken us.
At the Mafeking elective conference of the ANC in 1997, Mam Winnie stood as Deputy President against Cde Jacob Zuma. I must make this point to you. I have great respect for all the leaders of the ANC and I say this because I do not want you to misunderstand what I’m about to say. At the conference as you all know each nominated candidate is asked whether they accept their nomination. When the IEC put the question to Winnie there was a tense moment, should she accept the nomination and if so what would she do if she lost against Cde Zuma. A painful moment for all who were there and she finally declined. Imagine if she had agreed and won. That would have been the first elected female Deputy President of the ANC.
Let us reimagine her impact on South African politics if after Mbeki, she had become the President and perhaps Zuma after her. I am certain that the patriarchical tendencies in society and the organisation would have been attended to. She would not have allowed us to be where we are right now. Her instinctive feminism would have made sure that the hallmark of her presidency dealt with the rights of women. We would not be where we are right now with the rampant rape and killing of women, where the femicide and the scourge against women would not be where it is now. The constant violation of young women and the rising rate of rape. I am certain this would have been attended to.
I am not implying that she would single-handedly resolved such deep-rooted societal problems and the deeply entrenched power relations, but our children would not be in constant violation by young men and randomly die of the wim of men. The one thing I am certain of is that the main pillar of her presidency would have dealt with these power relations that has so distorted society.
The feminist in her would have made this the hallmark of her time in the Presidency. While Mandela’s Presidency ushered in freedom, the new constitution, the framework of a new government of the people and put us up as a global player and made us the proverbial flavour of the world, Mbeki’s Presidency set about the transformation of the state, the definition of ourselves as Africans, the restructuring of the economy so that it incorporates all sectors of society and gave us NEPAD and the African Renaissance to integrate us into the African continent.
Mam Winnie’s Presidency would have been aimed at protecting women. The pain she felt as a woman under Apartheid made her extremely sensitive to women’s vulnerability and she would have retained this spirit of radical revolutionaries, especially among the youth.
Every President has her of his successes. Zuma had the electric charisma that drove us forward, dealt with the epidemic of Aids and brought it under controle and provided the youth with free education. Now we are in a New Dawn and deal with the challenges of the economy.
I am putting this across to you to indicate that we would have gained so much more, had Man Winnie been given the opportunity and it would have taken nothing from anybody. Reimagine how much more caring we would be as a society. Youth being youth, they will always be robust and out of line. I want you to imagine, what if Malema’s disciplinary case in the ANC was during Mam Winnie’s presidency. Would he have been expelled for his transgressions? Maybe he would have, because the disciplinary processes are independent.
Imagine further, if she was the President of the ANC, would there have been the creation of the EFF? Not that I begrudge them the right to exist, but I am certain that with Mam Winnie at the helm of the leadership of the ANC, they would not have created their own organisation. You can hear even from their appropriation of all our policies that within a different dispensation, they would not have created a separate organisation, because their policies are just a radical expression of our own policies. Now they collaborated to our losing the Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Tshwane Metros. We have mismanaged the potential that we had and I wish it had worked out differently.
In previous phases we did manage our leadership. There was a seamless transfer from Mandela to Tambo when he went into exile and a seamless transfer back to Mandela after he was released from prison.
During the UDF period and specifically its formation in 1983, as a historian I am informed that one leader was chosen for the UDF. Upon realising the deep patriarchical reservations against a woman president, the leadership of the UDF tried a different strategy and created three presidencies to ensure that there was the greatest level of unity. Three national presidents were therefore appointed, namely Archie Gumede, Oscar Mpetha and Albertina Sisulu.
Mam Winnie was a product of her circumstances. She married a man whose primary occupation was the struggle. She was young, she was beautiful, and she had more than her fair share of that! She was confident and articulate. Most of the other women in the struggle were older than her. She was alone and after her husband’s imprisonment further exacerbated this condition by sending her into internal exile in Brandfort into complete isolation.
It did not help their cause because what they forgot to factor in was that she was by nature a very friendly person and in no time the Brandfort community was in love with her. Added to this, the Apartheid state had forgotten she was by training a social worker. So in the end, far from subjugating her, they increased her reach of popularity. There was no stopping Winnie.
In their dirty tricks campaign, the Apartheid state did everything they could to discredit Mam Winnie in the public space and with Madiba, often telling him stories of how unfaithful she was in his absence. This they did in the hope that they would break the powerful bond the two had. Mandela was a naturally judicious leader. He listened to what they said and immediately threw it out of his mind.
No trick was spared to bring Winnie down. When she died, African Woman across the continent grieved. Because she was so loved across the continent. Women represented all of her values.
She was in touch with various layers of young people and she felt embraced by them. Her public defiance of all protocol and especially of the white establishment resonated with them. So comfortable was she with them that enrolling at Wits University and obtaining a degree in political science in the 1980s in her late 40s was no big deal for her and this I believe is what put her in good stead with them. She was one of them. She was forever young at heart as rebellious as they were and could easily relate to young people. This I believe was what made her vulnerable to the machinations of the Apartheid state’s infamous Mandela Football Club.
Life was tough for Mam Winnie and I realise it in its fullest now that I look back at her life. In fact I must say this, life was tough, very tough for people in this political space and yet somehow today there seems to be a sense that these political families had and have a good life, a complete and deliberate distortion no doubt created to drive a wedge. The Apartheid system was vicious and destroyed so many of our people who stood up for our rights.
If you can imagine how terrible Mam Winnie’s life was, you can imagine how her children were affected by it, because in their narcissistic behaviour, the Apartheid state aimed at any individual’s weakest link and destroyed them from that point of view. The children would have experienced their own, person trauma, as well as that of their mother. They were banished to Brandfort, where they knew nobody, they had to live on a single income and all the stories put out about their mother would have been like an arrow piercing their heart.
I guess the only way any of those families would survive was to put up a brave face and go on. Every family that dared to defy Apartheid has a terrible story to tell.
For the first time, I recently read the biography of Thabo Mbeki, A dream deferred. I had deliberately avoided reading it, because I expected it to be too emotionally raw. But it is well written and though I have know him all my life, I discovered in the book the pain of his life. The pain of losing a child, possibly murdered by the Apartheid state, a brother murdered for his political beliefs, a half brother, murdered by the Apartheid state. And yet, the public impression of him is that of a cold, distant man.
This is part of what we should begin to reinterpret, removing the lies and see people’s contributions to the struggle for what it is. The story of Apartheid is too horrific to simplify. We should use at all times the opportunity to educate the young about the fight that was put up to give them a better future. No country goes through what we have gone through without the young understanding what was sacrificed for them.
Those last two years of Mam Winnie’s life, apart from her family and a few friends, she was at her loneliest. I guess that is an inevitability we all will face. Perhaps I got to know her too late as a person. She was always a part of my family, but I had never had the kind of in-depth understanding of her as I did in the last two years. My own family’s relationship with Winnie was a difficult one.
My father’s first cousin, in Xhosa we don’t distinguish the separation so in fact my father’s sister was Madiba’s first wife with whom he had three children, the last being my cousin/sister Makaziwe. We were young when the divorce happened but I cannot up to now work out how the family navigated that but my father accepted Winnie as a member of the family and there was a continuous careful management…..you know mos every family has this experience.
I thank you
