Stompie winnie madikizela mandelas biography
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Jonny Steinberg’s splendid 550-page biography, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, ends on a note of pathos with a poignant tale from Nelson Mandela’s deathbed.
Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat. Verryn took Kgase to a doctor and then to his friend Geoff Budlender, a lawyer, where Kgase described abductions and assaults perpetrated by MUFC.
James "Stompie" Seipei, the 14 year old child who was brutally kidnapped and murdered by the Mandela United Football Club, with Winnie herself directly implicated.
Soon afterwards, Winnie was also courted by the future chief of the Transkei, and her father’s future boss, Kaiser Matanzima, whom happened to visit Baragwanath hospital as a disitinguised visitor that year. Shortly afterwards she was sacked from her post at Baragwanath hospital. Following the trauma of incarceration, on February 4 1959 Winnie gave birth to a daughter she named Zenani.
On March 30 1961, nine days after the police murdered sixty-nine people during a Pan African Congress (PAC) anti-pass demonstration at Sharpeville, a police raid on the Mandela home saw Nelson arrested and Winnie left by herself, in what would become her overarching experience of marriage.
Winnie’s Influences
Winnie had a few influential presences in her life: chief amongst them were Lillian Ngoyi, who, along with Helen Joseph, were the only two women accused in the Treason Trial; Albertina Sisulu; Florence Matomela; Frances Baard; Kate Molale; Ruth Mompati; Hilda Bernstein (who was the first Communist Party member to serve on the Johannesburg Council in the 1940s); and Ruth First.
In the weeks that followed the violence of June 16, Winnie and Dr Motlana had their hands full attending to youth and parents who had been arrested, injured or killed in the riots. Thus the court accepted Winnie’s false alibi that she was not in Soweto when the assaults on Seipei and others were taking place. To make matters worse, there also occurred the repossession of all of her furniture after Nelson had neglected to make provision for regular hire purchase payments following his arrest.
‘Inside Boss,’ the expose written in 1981 by former BOSS spy, Gordon Winter, just one of many people Winnie put her trust in, only to be badly betrayed.
However, Winnie’s joy at having a second child and seeing her husband’s name cleared was immediately tempered by the news that the ANC executive required him to go into hiding. Nelson had not discussed this with his wife, simply taking the support of his family for granted. ?
The Order of Luthuli in Silver
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Awarded for:
Her excellent contribution to the fight for the liberation of the people of South Africa.
It also strongly implies that she was behind the murder of her doctor Abu Baker Asvat (who’d examined Seipei) but leaves the question open as to whether she’d ordered Seipei’s murder.
Read more: Nelson Mandela's legacy is taking a battering because of the dismal state of South Africa
Inevitably, with a book on two such immensely significant lives, the author will choose to emphasise some things and leave out others.
She had just fallen foul of Prime Minister John Vorster’s1967 Terrorism Act, No 83, which allowed the arrest of anyone perceived to be endangering the maintenance of law and order. This helped create a closer bond with her father, who was known for his aloofness despite wielding a great love for his children. It stipulated that anyone could be arrested without warrant, detained for an indefinite period of time, interrogated and kept in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer or a relative.
Winnie was kept in solitary confinement for seventeen months.
Her house in Brandfort was bombed twice.
Following the attainment of democracy in 1994, Madikizela-Mandela became a Member of Parliament and Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture. Therefore she was able to benefit from an education that was on par with her White peers at the time. She passed her junior certificate (Standard 8) with distinction and then went on to study at Shawsbury, a Methodist mission school at Qumbu.
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. ?
[xxxviii] Naipul, Nadira (July 16 2010). Image source
As events in South Africa began to reach fever pitch in the late 1980s, with international calls for Nelson’s release resulting in massive pressure on the Apartheid government, life on the ground was more precarious and dangerous than ever.
Furthermore, in Soweto the MUFC were quickly gaining a reputation for operating with impunity as a kind of vigilante mafia under the tutelage of their coach, Jerry Richardson, who later revealed himself to have been a police informer during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).[xxv][xxvi]
Joyce Mananki Seipei and Jerry Richardson, Johannesburg, 1997.
Once there the couple were allowed to meet for just 30 minutes, separated by dual wire mesh, no seats, and a security detail in easy listening distance. In the midst of her harassment by the apartheid government in the late 1980s, she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, majoring in International Relations, at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Madikizela-Mandela’s involvement in the South African liberation struggle dates to the 50s.
Over the coming hours it transpired what the police had in store. The Mandela residence was also a site for frequent police raids, during which policemen would awaken the household with loud banging on the doors in the early morning and set to turning the whole house upside down.