Mandela after his release from a South
Africa prison in 1990. She often acted as a
conduit to his followers during his
imprisonment. They divorced in 1996.
Greg English/Associated Press
By Alan Cowell April 2, 2018
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hallowed
place in the pantheon of South Africa’s
liberators was eroded by scandal over
corruption, kidnapping, murder and the
adulterous implosion of her fabled marriage
to Nelson Mandela , died early Monday in
Johannesburg. She was 81.
Her death, at the Netcare Milpark Hospital,
was announced by her spokesman, Victor
Dlamini. He said in a statement that she died
“after a long illness, for which she had been
in and out of hospital since the start of the
year.”
The South African Broadcasting Corporation
said she was admitted to the hospital over
the weekend complaining of the flu after she
attended a church service on Friday. She had
been treated for diabetes and underwent
major surgeries as her health began failing
over the last several years.
Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and
eloquent, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela
(Madikizela was her surname at birth) was
inevitably known to most of the world
through her marriage to the revered Mr.
Mandela. It was a bond that endured
ambiguously: She derived a vaunted status
from their shared struggle, yet she chafed at
being defined by him.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was cheered by
supporters after appearing in court in
Krugersdorp, South Africa, in 1986. She
commanded a natural constituency of her
own among South Africa’s poor and
dispossessed.
Associated Press
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela commanded a
natural constituency of her own among
South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and
the post-apartheid leaders who followed Mr.
Mandela could never ignore her appeal to a
broad segment of society. In April 2016, the
government of President Jacob G. Zuma gave
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s
highest honors: the Order of Luthuli, given,
in part, for contributions to the struggle for
democracy.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela retained a political
presence as a member of Parliament,
representing the dominant African National
Congress, and she insisted on a kind of
primacy in Mr. Mandela’s life, no matter
their estrangement.
“Nobody knows him better than I do,” she
told a British interviewer in 2013.
Increasingly, though, Ms. Madikizela-
Mandela resented the notion that her anti-
apartheid credentials had been eclipsed by
her husband’s global stature and celebrity,
and she struggled in vain in later years to be
regarded again as the “mother of the
nation,” a sobriquet acquired during the
long years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment.
She insisted that her contribution had been
wrongly depicted as a pale shadow of his.
“I am not Mandela’s product,” she told an
interviewer. “I am the product of the masses
of my country and the product of my
enemy” — references to South Africa’s white
rulers under apartheid and to her burning
hatred of them, rooted in her own years of
mistreatment, incarceration and banishment.
Conduit to Her Husband
While Mr. Mandela was held at the Robben
Island penal settlement, off Cape Town,
where he spent most of his 27 years in jail,
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela acted as the main
conduit to his followers, who hungered for
every clue to his thinking and well-being.
The flow of information was meager,
however: Her visits there were rare, and she
was never allowed physical contact with him.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela attended her
husband’s trial in Pretoria, South Africa, in
1962. Associated Press
In time, her reputation became scarred by
accusations of extreme brutality toward
suspected turncoats, misbehavior and
indiscretion in her private life, and a
radicalism that seemed at odds with Mr.
Mandela’s quest for racial inclusiveness.
She nevertheless sought to remain in his
orbit. She was at his side, brandishing a
victor’s clenched fist salute, when he was
finally released from prison in February
1990.
At his funeral, in December 2013, she
appeared by his coffin in mourning black —
positioning herself almost as if she were the
grieving first lady — even though Mr.
Mandela had married Graça Machel, the
widow of the former Mozambican president
Samora Machel, in 1998, on his 80th
birthday, six years after separating from Ms.
Madikizela-Mandela and two years after
their divorce. It was Mr. Mandela’s third
marriage.
In 2016, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela began legal
efforts to secure the ownership of Mr.
Mandela’s home in his ancestral village of
Qunu. She contended that their marriage had
never been lawfully dissolved and that she
was therefore entitled to the house, which
Mr. Mandela had bequeathed to his
descendants. High Court judges rejected that
argument in April. After learning that she
had lost the case, she was hospitalized.
Her lawyers said she would appeal the High
Court judgment.
‘She Who Must Endure’
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was
born to a noble family of the Xhosa-speaking
Pondo tribe in Transkei. Her first name,
Nomzamo, means “she who must endure
trials.”
Her birth date was Sept. 26, 1936, according
to the Nelson Mandela Foundation and many
other sources, although earlier accounts gave
the year as 1934.
Her father, Columbus, was a senior official in
the so-called homeland of Transkei,
according to South African History Online ,
an unofficial archive, which described her as
the fourth of eight children. (Other accounts
say her family was larger.) Her mother,
Gertrude, was a teacher who died when
Winnie was 8, the archive said.
As a barefoot child she tended cattle and
learned to make do with very little, in
marked contrast to her later years of free-
spending ostentation. She attended a
Methodist mission school and then the
Hofmeyr School of Social Work in
Johannesburg, where she befriended
Adelaide Tsukudu, the future wife of Oliver
Tambo, a law partner of Mr. Mandela’s who
went on to lead the A.N.C. in exile. She
turned down a scholarship in the United
States, preferring to remain in South Africa
as the first black social worker at the
Baragwanath hospital in Soweto.
The Mandelas were married in June 1958.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
One day in 1957, when she was waiting at a
bus stop, Nelson Mandela drove past. “I was
struck by her beauty,” he wrote in his
autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.”
Some weeks later, he recalled, “I was at the
office when I popped in to see Oliver and
there was this same young woman.”
Mr. Mandela, approaching 40 and the father
of three, declared on their first date that he
would marry her. Soon he separated from
his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, a nurse, to
marry Ms. Madikizela-Mandela on June 14,
1958.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was thrust into the
limelight in 1964 when her husband was
sentenced to life in prison on charges of
treason. She was officially “banned” under
draconian restrictions intended to make her
a nonperson, unable to work, socialize, move
freely or be quoted in the South African
news media, even as she raised their two
daughters, Zenani and Zindziswa.
In a crackdown in May 1969, five years after
her husband was sent to prison, she was
arrested and held for 17 months, 13 in
solitary confinement. She was beaten and
tortured. The experience, she wrote, was
“what changed me, what brutalized me so
much that I knew what it is to hate.”
After blacks rioted in the segregated
Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1976,
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was again
imprisoned without trial, this time for five
months. She was then banished to a bleak
township outside the profoundly
conservative white town of Brandfort, in the
Orange Free State.
“I am a living symbol of whatever is
happening in the country,” she wrote in
“Part of My Soul Went With Him,” a memoir
published in 1984 and printed around the
world. “I am a living symbol of the white
man’s fear. I never realized how deeply
embedded this fear is until I came to
Brandfort.”
Contrary to the authorities’ intentions, her
cramped home became a place of pilgrimage
for diplomats and prominent sympathizers,
as well as foreign journalists seeking
interviews.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela cherished
conversation with outsiders and word of the
world beyond her confines. She scorned
many of her restrictions, using whites-only
public phones and ignoring the segregated
counters at the local liquor store when she
ordered Champagne — gestures that stunned
the area’s whites.
Banishment Took Toll
Still, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s exclusion
from what passed as a normal life in South
Africa took a toll, and she began to drink
heavily. During her banishment, moreover,
her land changed. Beginning in late 1984,
young protesters challenged the authorities
with increasing audacity.
The unrest spread,
prompting the white rulers to acknowledge
what they called a “revolutionary climate”
and declare a state of emergency.
When Ms. Madikizela-Mandela returned to
her home in Soweto in 1985, breaking her
banning orders, it was as a far more
bellicose figure, determined to assume
leadership of what became the decisive and
most violent phase of the struggle. As she
saw it, her role was to stiffen the
confrontation with the authorities.
The tactics were harsh.
“Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of
matches and our necklaces, we will liberate
this country,” she told a rally in April 1986.
She was referring to “necklacing,” a form of
sometimes arbitrary execution by fire using
a gas-soaked tire around a supposed traitor’s
neck, and it shocked an older generation of
anti-apartheid campaigners. But her severity
aligned her with the young township radicals
who enforced commitment to the struggle.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was surrounded by
supporters in the black township of Kagiso
in 1986. Associated Press
In the late 1980s, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela
allowed the outbuildings around her
residence in Soweto to be used by the so-
called Mandela United Football Club, a
vigilante gang that claimed to be her
bodyguard. It terrorized Soweto, inviting
infamy and prosecution.
In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the
1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto.
The body of one, a 14-year-old named James
Moeketsi Seipei — nicknamed Stompie, a
slang word for a cigarette butt, reflecting his
diminutive stature — was found with his
throat cut.
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard
was convicted of murder. She was sentenced
to six years for kidnapping , but South
Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her
punishment to fines and a suspended one-
year term.
By then her life had begun to unravel. The
United Democratic Front, an umbrella group
of organizations fighting apartheid and
linked to the A.N.C., expelled her. In April
1992, Mr. Mandela, midway through
settlement talks with President F. W. de
Klerk of South Africa, announced that he and
his wife were separating. (She dismissed
suggestions that she had wanted to be known
by the title “first lady.” “I am not the sort of
person to carry beautiful flowers and be an
ornament to everyone,” she said.)
Two years later, Mr. Mandela was elected
president and offered her a minor job as the
deputy minister of arts, culture, science and
technology. But after allegations of influence
peddling, bribetaking and misuse of
government funds, she was forced from
office. In 1996, Mr. Mandela ended their 38-
year marriage, testifying in court that his
wife was having an affair with a colleague.
Only in 1997, at the behest of Archbishop
Desmond M. Tutu at South Africa’s Truth
and Reconciliation Commission , did Ms.
Madikizela-Mandela offer an apology for the
events of the late 1980s. “Things went
horribly wrong,” she said, adding, “For that I
am deeply sorry.”
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela at a 2009 gathering
to honor her former husband, who died four
years later.
Yet the catalog of missteps continued, cast
into sharp relief by her haughty
dismissiveness toward her accusers. In 2003
she was convicted of using her position as
president of the A.N.C. Women’s League to
obtain fraudulent loans; she was sentenced
to five years in prison. But her sentence was
again suspended on appeal, with a judge
finding that she had not gained personally
from the transactions.
To the end, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela
remained a polarizing figure in South Africa,
admired by loyalists who were prepared to
focus on her contribution to ending
apartheid, vilified by critics who foremost
saw her flaws. Few could ignore her
unsettling contradictions, however.
“While there is something of a historical
revisionism happening in some quarters of
our nation these days that brands Nelson
Mandela’s second wife a revolutionary and
heroic figure,” the columnist Verashni Pillay
wrote in the South African newspaper The
Mail and Guardian, “it doesn’t take that
much digging to remember the truly awful
things she has been responsible for.”
Joseph R. Gregory contributed reporting.
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