Murphy Browne © April 2-2018
NOMZAMO WINIFRED MADIKIZELA MANDELA
"If you are to free yourselves you must break the chains of oppression yourselves. Only then can we express our dignity, only when we have liberated ourselves can we co-operate with other groups. Any acceptance of humiliation, indignity or insult is acceptance of inferiority."– 1976
Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela was born on September 26, 1936. Her Xhosa name is Nomzamo ("She who tries"). Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela was born in the village of Mbongweni, Bizana, Pondoland, in what is now the Eastern Cape Province. She was the fourth of eight children of Columbus and Gertrude Madikizela, both educators. Columbus was a history teacher and a headmaster and Gertrude was a domestic science teacher. After completing secondary school, she went to Johannesburg to study social work at the Jan Hofmeyr School, despite restrictions on the education of Africans during the apartheid era. She earned her degree in social work in 1956, and later earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of Witwatersrand. She held a number of jobs in various parts of what was then the Bantustan of Transkei; including with the Transkei government, living at various points of time at Bizana, Shawbury and Johannesburg. Her first job was as a social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.
She met lawyer and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela in 1957 and they got married in 1958. Winnie and Nelson Mandela had two daughters, Zenani (born 1958) and Zindziwa (born 1960). Nelson Mandela was arrested and jailed in 1963 and was not released until 1990. While Nelson Mandela was jailed by the white minority apartheid regime Winnie waged war against the regime in various ways. For her activism she was repeatedly detained, beaten, arrested and even exiled. In 1965, a banning order was handed to Winnie. Previously her banning order had limited her movements from ‘dusk to dawn’ but her new banning order barred her from moving anywhere other than her neighbourhood of Orlando West. At one point she was jailed and forced to spend 18 months in solitary confinement. White police frequently broke into her house and Winnie Mandela wrote: “…that midnight knock when all about you is quiet. It means those blinding torches shone simultaneously through every window of your house before the door is kicked open. It means the exclusive right the security branch have to read each and every letter in the house. It means paging through each and every book on your shelves, lifting carpets, looking under beds, lifting sleeping children from mattresses and looking under the sheets. It means tasting your sugar, your mealie meal and every spice on your kitchen shelf. Unpacking all your clothing and going through each pocket. Ultimately it means your seizure at dawn, dragged away from little children screaming and clinging to your skirt, imploring the white man dragging Mummy away to leave her alone.” On the night of 12 May 1969 Winnie awoke to the familiar sounds of a police raid. Her children were home for the school holidays and the police made a particularly thorough investigation of everything in the house. After ransacking the property, they tore Winnie away from her daughters and bundled her into a police van. The Mandela home in Soweto is still scarred by bullet marks on the front porch from shots fired by the white security forces during the height of apartheid. Despite this Winnie Mandela kept on fighting.
Nelson Mandela may well have been forgotten by the world except that the amazing woman he had married shortly before being sentenced to life imprisonment would not allow that to happen. Mandela acknowledged the role that Nomzamo “Winnie” Madikizela-Mandela played in the anti-apartheid struggle. “My former wife is a remarkable person whom I respect even today. She suffered a great deal and kept the name Mandela alive when I was in jail. She also looked after my children and played a very prominent role in the struggle.” In “Part of My Soul Went With Him” published in 1985, Madikizela-Mandela documented that struggle including the years of police brutality, false imprisonment and harassment by the white supremacist culture of the minority settler community of whites in South Africa.
Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela-Mandela transitioned to the ancestral realm on April 2, 2018. She was an African warrior woman in the tradition of Nana Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Nzingha, Sanité Belair, Nanny of the Maroons, Fannie Lou Hamer and many others.
Murphy Browne © April 2-2018
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