Rather than write about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, I want to write about how she has been talked about: what she has ”meant”, how and why interpretations of her have ranged so dramatically between extreme idealisation to vilification — both inside South Africa and beyond.
On one obvious level, the answer rests on her previous prominence as Nelson Mandela’s wife: she has been visually represented as the photogenic symbol of her incarcerated husband. A woman to be looked at, whose striking, aloof and emphatically African appearance aroused strong feelings of solidarity, sympathy and admiration from opponents of apartheid.
She has also been written about as the vocal proxy of her husband. Together with his banned presence, the voice of Nelson Mandela was made substantial by the substituted voice of ”Winnie”.
I first saw Winnie Madikizela-Mandela when I was a student in the mid-1980s. Striding across the campus surrounded by reporters and students, she was wearing a fur coat, large earrings and an enormous Afro. She did not appear to be conscious of anything but herself.
At the time, Winnie was emphatically defined by the (marginal) left-wing South African media as the mother of the nation, and by the international media mainly as the ennobled spectacle of black South African oppression and defiance. She was invincible, the dignified spectacle of injustice against blacks.
She was defined both as a symbol of assertive black womanhood and as a figure of black anger and defiance.
She graced the pages of the foreign media; she was hosted, toasted and quoted from Amsterdam to New York. Black feminists looked up to her in the United States and in the African diaspora.
It was towards the late Eighties that the media began to seize on ugly stories — stories about the orchestrated murder of a small boy, about lovers and private armies masquerading as soccer teams, about misused funds, an extravagant lifestyle, and about shady deals.
We could speculate endlessly about the extent to which Winnie was set up, and the extent to which the state’s propaganda machinery built on ”evidence” and ”facts”. Evidence against Winnie jointly consolidated conventional stereotypes of black women as other: sexual promiscuity, excess, immorality and imperviousness to codes of social decency and morality.
Yet the stories subsided. By the time of Mandela’s release, Winnie’s image was once again idealised, restored now primarily as that of first lady.
But by this time, Winnie had accrued around her too much meaning, too many images and too much idiosyncratic presence to be absorbed by the singular figure of her husband.
African National Congress patriarchs agonised over the dilemma of how to keep Winnie in line and erode her powers as a central figure within the ANC — a leader in the future government — without alienating important constituencies and encouraging factionalism. The fathers of the new government handled her with a mixture of caution and dismay.
How did the vilification of Winnie acquire the prominence it did?
We need to acknowledge the intersecting agendas in different campaigns of discrediting her. One is specifically racial.
A second is primarily gendered. The dread and anxiety within a future black-dominated male government that she would have far too much autonomous power and uncontainable meanings for a first lady.
In the Nineties Winnie was maligned and marginalised by many ANC kingpins and by the progressive media.
Many of the narratives of her deviance or immorality are anchored in a very specific, although often hidden, notion of sexual excess. The distaste/horror/repugnance/outrage/squeamishness often shown towards Winnie has a lot to do with projections about her sexuality, about her alleged promiscuity, about her young lovers, and about insatiable and aggressive sexual desire.
Not long ago, I listened to a black man give his account of how she once greeted President Thabo Mbeki: ”She came at him like a demon with her mouth wide open and her tongue right out”, and he graphically mimed.
I was profoundly shocked. He didn’t seem to register, though, and went on to eulogise the contrasting graciousness of Graça Machel.
The guardians of morality do not include only the racists, the sexists and the elite, but also progressive reporters, ordinary women in the street and activists.
The orchestrated chorus shouts Winnie down as wild and willful, unspeakably bad, beyond the pale, not a good role model, deviance incarnate.
The politics of Winnie MadikizelaMandela’s deposition can most clearly be explained in terms of her deviation from the image of ”role model”, one of the most bandied about compliments paid to black women.
Women like Albertina Sisulu and Mamphela Ramphele are admirable role models: Sisulu by virtue of her austerely self-effacing image and absolute and unqualified respectability; Ramphele because she straddles an incredible contradiction — an extremely independent woman, evidenced in her successes in a global patriarchal world of power represented by the World Bank.
Winnie’s multiple images allow others to make meanings that connect with their social experiences of powerlessness and subordination. Her images do not offer conventional role models.
I realise now why Winnie as a signifier of resistance and power endures for so many marginalised constituencies in South Africa and, indeed, groups around the world.
She offers a symbol of contradiction, of subversion, of disrespect, of impatience, an anarchic symbol, a symbol that appeals to those who have nothing at stake in the available status quo.
Desiree Lewis is coordinating editor of Feminism Africa. This article first appeared in the journal Chimurenga