Making The Trials of Winnie Mandela has taught me many things but the most important is this: history is not simply important. It is existential. A nation that loses its grip on history loses its grip on itself.
The reaction to the film has been extraordinary and in some quarters revealing. People across the great breadth of South African society and far beyond it have not merely been moved by the documentary. They have been provoked. Some have been triggered. A few have been offended — and for that, I make no apology.
A film about Winnie Mandela that left everyone comfortable would have been a film not worth making.
What at the start was intended to be a single 90-minute film grew, over years, into a seven-part leviathan. It had to. The conventional accounts of Winnie were too thin, too cowardly, too politically convenient — on every side of the argument.
The hagiographers wanted a saint. The prosecutors wanted a monster. Neither was telling the truth and the South African public has been short-changed by both camps for 30 years.
But this is not only Winnie’s story. It is the story of one of the most difficult fights for freedom the world has seen, told through and by the most authoritative grassroots freedom fighters of the modern era.
These are voices that the comfortable version of history has too often muffled — the foot soldiers, the organisers, the women who held the townships together while the world’s cameras pointed elsewhere.
Their testimony is what gives the series its weight. Without them, it would be just another documentary. With them, it is a record.
Lies of omission
South Africa is, despite its ancient roots, a young democracy — only 32 years old. So colossal was the achievement of that democracy that the individuals who drove the process, on all sides, have had their nuanced, private, personal contributions flattened into the sound-bite simplicity of “apartheid ended, democracy prevailed”.
The formulation is comforting. It is also a lie of omission. The transition was uglier, more contested, more morally compromised than the official version permits.
Winnie’s life is the clearest window onto that truth.
It was that conviction that drove me in the mid-1990s to launch the African Oral History Archive — to capture, on film, the testimony of key players before nature silenced them forever. Some of what we recorded then will, in time, force a rewriting of the official narrative.
I am at peace with that. History does not belong to the people who win the press conferences. It belongs to whoever has the patience to sit with the witnesses and listen.
The Winnie Mandela I knew was not the woman framed by convention. It took time for trust to build, on both sides, not least because, as a white man, I belonged to the cohort that had historically sat in hostile judgment of her.
The judgement was not only skewed — it was self-serving. It allowed a comfortable white South Africa and a comfortable international audience to project onto Winnie the violence and disorder that were, in fact, the inevitable product of the system she was fighting.
She became the dark mirror in which liberal opinion could see its own anxieties and call them moral clarity. She was not merely a participant in our history. She was that history — in all its fury and contradiction.
Privilege and dedication
Making the series was a privilege. Working alongside the extraordinarily talented team built by the now-late Mandy Jacobson — one of Africa’s great documentary filmmakers and a force of nature whose absence is felt on every frame — was a privilege of a different order again.
Her instincts, her standards and her refusal to accept the easy version of any story shaped this film and shape what comes next. The team she assembled has carried that standard forward with a discipline she would have demanded.
The project demanded tunnel-vision dedication. We pored through mile after mile of archive videotape. No detail was too small. No source was ignored, no matter how inconvenient to receive opinion.
We have catalogued the lot — particularly the raw rushes of the source interviews — and are exploring ways to share that material through a public academic archive.
Future generations should not have to take our word, or anyone else’s, for what was said.
They should be able to watch the testimony themselves and draw their own conclusions.
We took on everything: the Mandela United Football Club period, the affairs, the drinking, the criminal convictions including the suspended sentence for kidnap and accessory to assault, the allegations of involvement in 14 murders. We did not bury any of it.
Nor did we permit any of it to stand as a stand-alone verdict on a life, because to distil a human being down to a single question — Was she good? Was she evil? — is the laziest form of moral reasoning available to a society. To view the world in binary terms is a failure of imagination.
We in South Africa, more than perhaps anywhere on Earth, ought to know the danger of insisting that all history is black and white. We paid the price for that thinking once. We do not need to pay it again.
The Trials of Winnie Mandela is only the beginning. There are extraordinary African stories untold — stories of struggle, of statecraft, of betrayal, of brilliance — that the world has either ignored or been told in someone else’s voice. We are going to tell them.
The work has barely started. To grasp where we came from is to stand a better chance of grasping where we are going. That is what history is for. Not comfort. Not consensus. Clarity.
Ivor Ichikowitz is the chairperson of the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, founder of the African Oral History Archive and executive producer of the documentary series The Trials of Winnie Mandela.