Special official funeral declared for Winnie Mandela

In 1977, she was banished to an area of South Africa known as the Orange Free State.

Holness said Winnie Mandela’s death brings into focus the significant struggle of black people throughout the world against racism and in particular apartheid in South Africa. Admittedly, eyebrows were raised when she endorsed “necklacing” – burning the betrayers of the anti-apartheid struggle by setting alight a tyre around their necks.

We remember her incredible smile and that true beauty is more than glowing skin.

Born in 1936, Madikizela-Mandela trained as a social worker, and according to Blackpast.org, she was notably the “first qualified black medical social worker” at the Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg. “She was the voice for the voiceless”. For some, she was the “Mother of South Africa”, a revolutionary who fought the brutality of the apartheid regime to bring equality to her country. It said it will release details of her memorial and funeral services when they are finalised.

There are many questions that relate to the role of this colossal in the liberation struggle – and post-apartheid South Africa – that historians should critically examine. Yet ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe said this week that Winnie Mandela was one of those who could tell “exactly what is wrong and right” and that the ANC would miss her guidance.

Imprisonment, banning, harassment, house arrest, solitary confinement and having her husband and father of her children, Isithwalandwe Tata Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, did not break Mama Winnie’s fighting spirit. Winnie might have looked pompous to many because through it all, just as she starred apartheid in the face, she refused to be defined by her mistakes and ever carried her head high.

“But for Madikizela-Mandela, the end of apartheid marked the start of a string of legal and political troubles that, accompanied by tales of her glamorous living, kept her in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons”.

During that same year in 1991, Madikizela-Mandela was also appointed to the executive board of the African National Congress (ANC), Blackpast.org notes.

In 2001, a television camera caught Mbeki brushing Madikizela-Mandela away and knocking off her hat after she arrived an hour late for a rally to commemorate a 1976 anti-apartheid uprising by Soweto schoolchildren and students.

In a statement, Wits University, where Madikizela-Mandela obtained a degree in political science in the 1980s, described Madikizela-Mandela as an activist and leader at the forefront of the struggle for freedom.

In the Struggle she refused to be seen as only a wife of President Mandela, though she was lovely.

“The Government of Antigua and Barbuda has learned of the passing of Mrs Winnie Mandela, the first wife of Nelson Mandela, who was instrumental in bringing freedom to South Africa”. Her personal bodyguard, known as the Mandela United Football Club conducted a reign of terror in Johannesburg’s black township of Soweto.

“The nation was ill-prepared for her departure and people are grieving very deeply”.

She was not a saint, but her stature as a leading light of the movement can’t be erased on the basis of some errors of judgement at some points in her life.

Condolence books would also be placed at OR Tambo International Airport, Parliament (Tuynhuys), at the Union Buildings, all provincial legislatures and premier offices, and in Brandfort, Umtata and at Madikizela-Mandela’s hometown in Bizana.

We have a responsibility to refuse to imprison her contribution as if to suggest that without Nelson Mandela she was not her own person.

“Together hand-in-hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country”, she said.