Ferial Haffajee
African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma will take the party’s manifesto to Free State’s Mangaung stadium tomorrow alongside Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Bets are on which leader gets the loudest vivas.
Two weeks ago, ANC president Thabo Mbeki had to halt a crucial election launch speech as Madikizela-Mandela arrived late at Orlando stadium. An adoring crowd immediately stopped listening to Mbeki while they welcomed her.
>From the valleys of Shobashobane in KwaZulu-Natal to Kliplaat outside Port Elizabeth and in the shadows of apartheid’s Voortrekker Monument in Winburg, Madikizela-Mandela has shown she will be a crucial crowd-puller in the run-up to the June 2 election.
She has become the ANC’s biggest conundrum – at once one of its most popular and most reviled politicians. She has drawn the largest crowds and provided hot sound bites about farmers and opposition leaders. But in most cases she has carefully toed the party line.
With Mbeki a newcomer to winning hearts and minds, Madikizela-Mandela is showing that you can’t keep a good (or bad) woman down.
On Sunday, she dressed up in the red-and- white uniform of the Methodist church in Meadowlands – her pious image beamed around the world. At one with the congregation, she blended into the choir, singing from a bible. This was Winnie the-populist on show. Displaying charisma, she is outshining other leaders who have grown aloof in power. She is a veteran politician who knows how to play a crowd and will change her image to suit the times.
In the 1980s, the khaki military fatigues were her signature tune. Now she is the churchwoman, the ANC Women’s League leader and occasionally the suave stateswoman dressed by Nandipa Madikiza, who provides haute couture to the new rich and famous.
“This woman understands the power of the image,” says feminist writer and academic Gail Smith, who has studied Madikizela- Mandela.
She constructed the identity of herself as mother of the nation, says Smith, and remains so in many hearts and minds. To understand Madikizela-Mandela and how she can occupy a prime election spot means to understand how literally she took the role of mother.
With her training as a social worker, Madikizela-Mandela knew how to access resources for impoverished communities.
It began with her work in Soweto in the 1970s where she trained a phalanx of young women activists in ministering to those who lost their homes to forced removals – the hungry and the poor. By the 1980s, in Brandfort, she was the banished hero of world fame. Depicted like an Aung San Suu Kyi of her time, she built up a Free State following which abides to this day.
But she was also the link between Free State’s young activists and Chris Hani’s guerrillas based in Lesotho.
In her strongholds across the Eastern Cape (from where the Madikizela clan reigns), the Free State and Gauteng, her support base is drawn from those she recruited, who recall her good works; who remember her as the mother of the nation before she took a tumble under a welter of claims that put Winnie in the pooh.
“She kept such an open house,” remembers her friend, Fatima Meer. “People would come and stay all the time. She has a spontaneous generosity. Once I was at her house when a pensioner came to her. He had nothing. She immediately went out and bought food and clothes for him.” Then there are the children she has adopted.
At a recent shooting in KwaZulu-Natal, Madikizela-Mandela turned up with boxes of clothing and food which she got local companies to donate. At a wake for those who were killed, she sat on a mat with the family while other politicians were received like dignitaries and perched on chairs.
Crafty or caring? The jury’s out. But she displays great favour for the underdog, as her recent public displays of support for poet Mzwakhe Mbuli and Department of Foreign Affairs official Robert McBride show.
On the day President Nelson Mandela married Graa Machel in July last year, his former wife was in the Eastern Cape attending the reburial of the bones of Umkhonto weSizwe soldiers.
“She has become a political figure in her own right,” says Smith, adding that she has shrugged off her image as wife of the leader.
In the ANC her star has risen steadily since her separation from Mandela in 1992. In 1994, she was at number 31 on the national list. Three years later, she was placed number 15 in the race for party leadership at its Mafikeng conference, and earlier this year she leapfrogged to number 10 on the party’s national list, which means she was among the few leaders nominated by every province and most allied structures like the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party.
Some of her political supporters swear that on votes alone she should have been placed higher on the list. It is a claim the party denies, saying its lists are not gerrymandered except to accommodate the disabled and other beneficiaries of affirmative action.
Before the election, there is an element of rapprochement between the party and the prodigal daughter with whom it has always had a love-hate relationship. In the United States recently, she called Mbeki a “young intellectual” and told a gathering of black Americans: “I am one of those who will see to it he gets the ANC the two-thirds majority to govern your motherland with the iron fist he needs …”
But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s finding that she was “politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club” is one that walks by Madikizela-Mandela’s side. The ghosts of Stompie Sepei, Abubaker Asvat, Thabiso Mono and others who died during her football club’s reign of terror are likely to prune her presidential aspirations.
This bumptious woman is also characterised as “obstinate”, “defiant” and in 1997 as a “wayward charlatan” by Steve Tshwete, whom she may yet outlive politically. She did not claim a cent in maintenance from Mandela but she is fighting him for the Orlando West matchbox house where her children’s umbilical cords are buried.
ANC leaders hold their breath when she hits a grandstand because she knows little organisational accountability and shoots from the hip. But while Democratic Party leader Tony Leon may call Madikizela- Mandela the “great untouchable of South African politics”, she is likely to be one of the more common faces on this election trail … and the next.