Boniface Mwangi: It was Winnie who made Mandela a man

Once a prophet was sent by God to beseech the people to repent and return to the Lord or perish. Indeed the man of God went to the city and told the people as much.

Days, weeks, and years passed by, but the people hadn’t perished yet, but he kept repeating the same message over and over again.

In their anger, the people asked the prophet: “Why do you keep saying these things? We heard you the first time you arrived in our city.” The prophet told them: “I say these things so that l don’t forget why God sent me here.”

Winnie-Madikezela Mandela was South Africa’s prophetess. She passed away last week at the age of 81 years and, in her death, the international press and enemies of black consciousness went after her.

Winnie was married to Mandela for seven years and they had two children with him before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.  It was Winnie who kept Mandela’s name alive while Mandela was in prison for 27 years.

Without Winnie’s voice, Mandela would have been just another freedom fighter, jailed and forgotten. It was Winnie who was brave enough to say that Mandela sold out.

“Mandela did go to prison, and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary, but look what came out,” she said. “Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks.” Mandela sold out the struggle. Winnie never sold out, she never broke and never ran into exile

For speaking against apartheid and keeping Mandela’s name alive, Winnie paid a heavy price. In 1969, she was detained for 491 days in solitary confinement.  In 1974, she was sentenced to six months in jail for communicating with a photographer Peter Magubane.

Even speaking to a friend was illegal. In 1977, she was uprooted from her Soweto home and placed under house arrest for eight years in a small town, Brandfort.  Winnie Mandela was different; she was strong, she refused to break.

Torture, jail, confinement and house arrest didn’t break her down. She refused to be domesticated by the apartheid government, to submit to them and to keep her head down. South Africa’s bill of rights came at a cost of 3,508,235 million lives, affected directly by the apartheid government.

Displaced from their homes, as well as, facing detentions, massacres, executions, and political assassinations.

When South Africa gained independence Nelson Mandela kissed and hugged the oppressors of the new South Africa and called it the Rainbow country. But the new South Africa was not so different from the old. Black people could now queue and use the same facilities as white people, but that was all.

The only true freedom they acquired was the right to vote for a black president. Economically, the plight of blacks is still the same as it was before the end of apartheid.

During the day, the majority of black people meet fellow white South Africans at their work places and at night, as the whites go back to their suburbs, the blacks retire to their townships.

Winnie Mandela spoke against that. She spoke about the economic apartheid and that made her an easier target. Her character assassination was to dull her voice from speaking out on such things.  She made Nelson Mandela famous. Mandela had the heart to forgive his tormentors but, in an ironic twist, refused to forgive Winnie, the person who made him a legend.

The ANC was willing to forgive the apartheid government that had displaced, tortured, jailed and killed black South Africans, but they decided to prosecute fellow comrade Winnie.

In her death, she speaks, “All what we fought for is not what is going on right now. We cannot pretend like South Africa is not in crisis, our country is in crisis and anyone who cannot see that is just bluffing themselves.” 

She said: “It is only when all black groups, join hands and speak with one voice that we shall be a bargaining force which will decide its own destiny.”

The writer is an award-winning photojournalist and human rights activist