The Work of Women: A Pan-African History of Women Who Remade the World does not treat women’s lives as supplementary to established political narratives. It starts with the understanding that women have always analysed power, developed strategies of resistance, built institutions and theorised the structures that shaped their worlds.
They did this in fields, factories, courtrooms, union halls, crèches, classrooms, underground networks, prisons, exile communities and colonial towns. Their ideas were not detached from the circumstances of their lives. They developed through the circumstances of their lives.
The work of women is also more literal than that. It is the work that has sustained households, communities and economies while remaining largely outside the histories written about them. It is agricultural work and factory work, teaching and nursing, organising and campaigning.
It is also cooking, cleaning, raising children, nursing the sick and holding households together through migration, imprisonment, poverty and war. Across generations, women have done the work required to keep life going even when the political and economic systems surrounding them have made that life precarious.
Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela-Mandela was no different. She was born in September 1934 in the village of Mbongweni near Bizana in Pondoland in the Transkei. At the time of her birth, the Transkei formed part of the African reserves consolidated under the 1913 Natives Land Act and expanded through the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act. The statutes restricted African land occupation to designated territories and placed ultimate control of that land in the hands of the South African Native Trust.
The reserve economy was sustained by migrant labour. Adult men commonly left for months or even years to work in urban industry or the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, while women and older family members maintained agricultural production during these absences. Migrant labour by men, therefore, was sustained by women’s unpaid work at home.
Madikizela-Mandela’s father, Columbus Madikizela, was a schoolteacher and later served as a headman recognised by the Native Administration. Her mother, Gertrude Madikizela, had teacher training but worked for periods as a domestic worker. Employment opportunities for African women in rural districts were limited.
Even women with formal training encountered restricted appointment opportunities. Domestic service in white households or agricultural labour provided income but wages were low and conditions often insecure. In their own households, black women’s labour sustained food production, childcare and daily maintenance. Girls were expected to assist with water collection, cooking, cultivation and the care of younger siblings.
Gertrude died when Madikizela-Mandela was nine years old. Along with grief, the death of a mother in a rural household carried practical consequences. Responsibility for younger children shifted within the extended family network. Madikizela-Mandela spent periods living with relatives while continuing her schooling.
In the early 1950s Madikizela-Mandela left the Transkei for Johannesburg. African movement into urban areas was regulated by influx control legislation and African women required permits tied to employment to reside legally in the city.
She completed her training with distinction and, in 1956, was appointed as a medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. Her appointment made her the first black medical social worker at the hospital. Her work required the assessment of patients’ social circumstances, home visits in townships and hostels and liaison with municipal welfare departments. She dealt with families affected by forced removals, pass law arrests, tuberculosis, mine injuries and overcrowded housing.
This was another form of the work of women: entering homes and hospitals and encountering, at intimate range, the consequences of political decisions. Apartheid was not experienced only in parliament, in legislation or in confrontation with the police. It entered the household. It determined where a family could live, whether a parent could remain in a city, what work was available, what hospital treated them and under what conditions children were raised.
Domestic work runs through the lives of black women throughout history. It is part of their history, not incidental to it. Across the world, black women were pushed in vast numbers into domestic service in other people’s households. They cooked meals they would not eat, cleaned homes they did not own and raised children not their own, while their own families were left to absorb absence, exhaustion and poverty. This was true in South Africa, in the Caribbean, in the United States and across the colonial world more broadly.
Professional employment for black women in the 1950s remained rare. Madikizela-Mandela’s position therefore placed her within a small group of black women holding formal posts. At the same time, her continued residence in Johannesburg depended on compliance with pass regulations and employment documentation.
In 1957, while working at Baragwanath Hospital, she met Nelson Mandela. They married in June 1958 in Orlando, Soweto. The marriage placed her in a household under surveillance. Their first daughter, Zenani, was born in 1959 and their second daughter, Zindzi, in 1960. For Madikizela-Mandela, childbirth and early motherhood occurred alongside intensifying political repression. As surveillance increased, police searches of the Orlando home became more frequent. Documents were confiscated and visitors questioned. The domestic sphere functioned within conditions of inspection and uncertainty.
After Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 and sent to Robben Island, the machinery of the apartheid state increasingly turned on Madikizela-Mandela. Banning orders limited her movements, prohibited her from attending gatherings and prevented her from being quoted in the press. Police conducted regular searches of her home. Visitors were monitored. Her movements were recorded.
In May 1969 she was arrested under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act. Her young daughters were present and clung to her as she was removed from the house, without any assurance about where she was being taken or when she would return. She was placed in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison. Her confinement extended to roughly 17 months.
Here, too, the work of women assumed its most elemental form: the work of maintaining the self.
Madikizela-Mandela was questioned repeatedly about alleged underground activity, contacts with activists and efforts to reorganise the ANC. She could not see her children and received no visits for extended periods. There was no release date towards which she could count down.
Years later, writing about her imprisonment, she described solitary confinement as “a process designed to destroy the person long before it destroyed the body”.
She was eventually acquitted in the Pretoria Twelve trial, redetained and finally released in 1970 under another banning order. Then, in May 1977, the state removed her from Soweto. Madikizela-Mandela and Zindzi were transported about 400km to Brandfort in the Orange Free State. She was placed in a four-roomed house without electricity, running water or adequate sanitation. Police monitored the house, intercepted mail and restricted contact with residents.
The intention was isolation. What emerged instead was another expression of the work that runs throughout this history.
Over time, small networks formed around practical concerns. Although supplies were scarce and subject to interruption, Madikizela-Mandela organised assistance for families facing food shortages. She established a small crèche and later a clinic structure funded through donations from church groups and supporters.
In a place intended to diminish her political influence, she returned to forms of work that had characterised her life before her marriage and before imprisonment: welfare, care, organisation and the building of institutions around the immediate needs of a community.
The distinction between domestic, social and political work becomes difficult to sustain here. A crèche makes it possible for a mother to work. Food assistance keeps a household alive. A clinic responds to needs that poverty and segregation have made more dangerous. The work of care becomes the work of survival and under conditions in which deprivation is politically structured, survival acquires political meaning.
By the mid-1980s, South Africa was convulsed by township uprisings, states of emergency and mass detention. Madikizela-Mandela returned to Soweto and became one of the most recognisable figures of internal resistance.
When the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela released in February 1990, the restrictions that had structured her life for decades were removed. She subsequently held positions in the ANC Women’s League, served on national executive structures, entered South Africa’s first democratic Parliament in 1994 and briefly served as deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology.
But the history that followed cannot be separated from controversy. Allegations concerning the Mandela United Football Club, including the abduction and killing of Stompie Seipei, resulted in criminal proceedings. In 1991, Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault, although the sentence was later reduced on appeal. She subsequently appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where testimony concerning violence and intimidation became part of the public record.
To write women into history does not require that they be made uncomplicated. That, too, is part of the argument of The Work of Women. Women need not be reduced to supporting characters in the lives of men but neither must they be turned into symbols emptied of contradiction. They acted within history. They made choices within it. They built, resisted, organised, endured and sometimes became implicated in the violence of the worlds through which they moved.
Madikizela-Mandela died in Johannesburg on 2 April 2018. Nomzamo from Bizana lived a bold life in the vortex of the struggle against apartheid. She inspired millions and became a central figure in sustaining resistance during periods when leadership was imprisoned or in exile. At the same time, the violence of the system in which she operated and the methods that emerged within that context left a legacy that continues to be contested.
Publishers Note: This is a reconstructed piece from the chapter on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the author’s introduction in The Work of Women: A Pan-African History of Women Who Remade The World.
The Work of Women: A Pan-African History of Women Who Remade the World is published by Nyenyezi Books.