“It is an honour to stand before you this evening, on this auspicious occasion of the launch of the Qhakaza: Pain Undefined exhibition curated by one of the most iconic fashion artists of our time, Gift Kgosierileng. This evening, we gather here in memory and celebration of a great revolutionary, Mama Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela, whose life and legacy has inspired generations of African, men and women alike, to actively participate in the imagining and fashioning of a higher civilisation. Before I delve into this legacy, I want to reflect briefly on the venue in which we are gathered, for, like Mama Winnie’s life, it is an important part of our collective memory.
The year 1910, when the Women’s Jail was built, is an important year in our country’s history. It was on the 31st of May 1910 that the Union of South Africa was created. This new nation, which united the British colonies of Natal, Cape, Transvaal and the Free State, was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. It was created after a long period of negotiations between the four colonies – and The Union of South Africa, which was essentially a White union, laid the foundation for racial segregation policies that would underpin apartheid. And while the Statute of Westminster would only be approved in 1931, codifying the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Dominions, there is no question that it was in 1910 that Black people in our country became subjects of the empire.
The establishment of the Union of South Africa set parameters for the horrors that would define Black life, including the building of the Women’s Jail that we are gathered in this evening. While the prison initially housed common law prisoners across the racial divide, it did not take long for it to become a site for the imprisonment and brutalisation of Black women. Black women brewing beer illegally as a means of providing economic support to their families and maintaining a tradition of beer brewing for cultural and ancestral reasons, were kept within these walls. Black women transgressing the unjust pass laws that effectively rendered them stateless and without ability to move freely, were kept within these walls. By the late 1950s, the Women’s Jail was filled with thousands of women who were arrested for protesting against an apartheid system that had rendered them non-human.
One of these women was Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela, a woman who has come to be known as the Mother of the Nation. The Women’s Jail was built 26 years before Mama Winnie was born in the rolling hills of Mbhongweni in Bizana. And though she, like many Black people, knew the horrors of colonialism intimately, it was within these walls, and the walls of other prisons across South Africa, notably, the Pretoria Central Prison where she spent months in solitary confinement, that she would know the evil of apartheid. Within these walls and those of Pretoria Central Prison, she was dehumanised, tortured and beaten to within an inch of her life. Reflecting on her life as a constant prisoner of the state, Mama Winnie would write in her biography, 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 that these experiences hardened her. More than this, they reaffirmed her commitment to a struggle that she never doubted was just.
Ladies and gentlemen, I intentionally began this address by weaving the story of Mama Winnie with that of the formation of the Union of South Africa and the establishment of the Women’s Jail because they are inseparable. To understand who Mama Winnie was, it is important to understand the prevailing material conditions in which she was born – a Union of South Africa that was a dominion of the colonial and imperial British Empire. And to understand her strength and resilience, it is important to recognise that apartheid functioned spatially – that it used the natural and built environments to facilitate segregation and the brutalisation of Black women. I will come back to this socio-spatial dialectic later in my presentation.
In preparing for this public lecture, I went through the archive of Mama Winnie that has been produced by scholars and activists. In this archive is a book titled The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela by Sisonke Msimang, which was published in 2018. The year 2018 is significant for a number of reasons, the most significant being that it was the year that Mama Winnie passed away. Describing this moment, a young social activist and scholar, writing for the Journal of Public Administration, had the following to say:
“The death of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on the 2nd of April 2018 marked the birth of a movement that has been gestating in the imaginations of many South Africans, particularly those of my generation to whom the Mother of the Nation was, above all else, a giant on whose shoulders we have stood in times of turbulence. Mama Winnie’s death came at a time when winds of change are blowing through the country, directed by the radically unapologetic and unconventional generation of young Black activists who are grounded in progressive discourses anchored on a pillar of intersectionality. It is these young radicals who, identifying as intersectional feminists, have sought to re-claim the memory of Mama Winnie, to rescue it, once and for all, from the draconian clutches of a heteronormative society that has sought to systematic erase her from the books of history, to place her neatly in the shadow of men who, in comparison to her indomitable spirit, are best described as mediocre”.
In South Africa, today, where memory is contested, many debates have emerged about the legacy of Mama Winnie. But one thing about which there is no question, as asserted in the above text, is that her memory has been subjected to painful erasure, her contributions minimised. But as the global system of politics assumes a Big Man posture, and neo-patrimonialism replaces a genuine, people-centred democratic order, the memory and legacy of Mama Winnie has become particularly important because while this characterisation is not often used to describe her, she was, fundamentally, a democrat. This must be emphasised because narratives about Mama Winnie have often sought to characterise her outside her commitment to collective leadership and a belief in the centrality of community.
In her incisive book, Sisonke reflects on how, when Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, of which Mama Winnie was a clandestine member, was largely ineffective as a fighting force, she became a one-woman resistance army. The idea of Mama Winnie as a one-woman resistance army, while correct, must be contextualised so that it does not land in the minds of people as meaning that she was individualistic. What this characterisation means is that at a time when the brutality of the apartheid regime had rendered our national liberation movements ineffective due to the incarceration, exiling and killing of our leaders and activists broadly, Mama Winnie did not sit idle. She mobilised communities to continue where the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the lesser-known South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO) that was formed by the late Tsietsi Mashinini who led the June 16 1976 Soweto student uprising, could not.
Mama Winnie, who qualified as the first Black social worker in Johannesburg in the 1950s, was deeply invested in community. As an active member of the Methodist Church, belonging to the women’s manyano, she used her faith as a lever of Black women’s unity. This principle of uniting Black women was also evidenced in her establishment of an organised community of Black women whose husbands and children had been murdered, exiled and incarcerated by the apartheid state. For the women of Soweto, who were isolated in a township where police and military vans had a permanent presence, this became a refuge – a safe space where they could grieve, remember and fight for their loved ones.
On a wintry night in 1977, the apartheid police had broken down the door of Mama Winnie’s Orlando East home, bundling her and a young Zinzi into a truck, then driving them to Brandfort, a small Afrikaner town in the Free State. There, they had been dumped at house number 802, an insultingly small house with mud floors that had to be dug out. The aim was to isolate Mama Winnie, to erase her from the consciousness of Black people who were energised by the June 16 1976 uprisings months prior. The logic was that, in banishing her to a small Afrikaner town where no-one spoke her language, and where the little conveniences she had created for herself in Soweto were non-existent, and where a community of women and young people that she had created would be out of reach, she would cease to be at the centre of discourse. This was a gross miscalculation.
In the true spirit of the one-woman resistance army that she was, Mama Winnie integrated into the Brandfort community, becoming actively involved in assisting youth at risk, feeding the hungry, organising reading circles for young people, and helping community-based women’s organisation. There, in Brandfort, where she was supposed to disappear and die, Mama Winnie built a strong community that, in many ways, contributed to the struggle for our liberation and the march to democracy. She understood a principle that would ultimately underpin our constitutional democracy – that the mark of a progressive society is the strength and organisation of its communities. When communities are organised, governments can be held to account. This is what she sought to do, for she was deeply committed to the struggle for the liberation of Black people from the clutches of the apartheid regime. And she did it while maintaining her dignity in the face of dehumanisation and de-civilisation at the hands of the apartheid regime.
Programme Director, I said earlier on that I would come back to the issue of the socio-spatial dialectic. Apartheid functioned spatially. The segregation of people along racial, gender and class lines were done with intent. The building of prisons that lacked basic infrastructure and amenities, prisons intended for the incarceration of Black people, was done with intent. The prolaterianisation of Black people in Mpondoland from whence Mama Winnie came, and other parts of South Africa, was intended to facilitate their impoverishment and landlessness. She was born of these people, who had fought for decades against the annexure of their lands. When we understand this, we can then begin to understand the socio-spatial dialectic, which conceptualises the complex inter-relationship between social and spatial structures, whereby the spatialities produced by societal processes themselves have causal influence over those processes. This dialectic defines Mama Winnie, and serves as an important foundation on which to build the memory of her life and legacy. To remember Mama Winnie without remembering the spatial and political context of her life is an injustice – one that must cease to define how she is written and spoken about.
I wish to conclude my presentation by reflecting on how patriarchy has sought to have Mama Winnie remembered. A few years ago, during the public hearings into the renaming of William Nicol Drive into Winnie Mandela Drive, a struggle that was hard-fought and ultimately won, those in opposition to the renaming kept referring to what they deemed her political crimes, and to her well-known statement asserting that South Africa would be liberated with a matchbox and tyre. This characterisation must be reflected upon because it is rooted, above all else, in the idea that women revolutionaries should pass a test of respectability that no man ever has.
There are countless examples of how the people’s war declared by national liberation movements was littered with demonstrations of leaders trading in fiery rhetoric and various degrees of recklessness for which men were applauded while women were vilified. Great leaders such as Harry Gwala, affectionately and heroically referred to as the Lion of the Midlands, was implicated in political crimes that did not diminish him in the same way Mama Winnie’s did, despite the fact that she was operating within the conventions of the ANC at the time – a party which archives demonstrate was openly in support of the use of violence as a means to an end. The very transgressions for which Mama Winnie was and has been vilified in some quarters, were a call made by the movement itself, as unearthed transcripts from Radio Freedom demonstrate.
Ladies and gentlemen, how we remember the life and legacy of Mama Winnie matters. It is a question not only of honouring our history but of challenging unjust power. It was Milan Kundera who, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, states: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. With the launch of this powerful exhibition, may we never forget Mama Winnie, a one-woman resistance army, a Sister in Christ, a community builder, a revolutionary, and the Mother of the Nation. Thank you.”
