A biography

Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela was born on September 26 in 1936 and grew up in Bizana, a village in the Transkei district of South Africa. In 1953, she moved to Johannisburg and started to study pediatric social work at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work. After finishing her studies, Mandela decided to work as the first Black medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg although she had actually got a scholarship to study in America. During that time, she had many apartheid experiences, for example how worse medical supply for black people was. Those experiences triggered her intension to liberate all black South Africans from the oppression that came with apartheid.

In 1957, Winnie Mandela met Nelson Mandela, who, at the time, was the leader of the ANC and tried to end the apartheid system. They fell in love and married in June 1958. Winnie moved to Nelson’s home in Soweto and was thereafter known as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. They had two children,  Zenani and Zindzi, who Winnie had to raise almost alone because of the many times Nelson spent in prison. In 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment, but Winnie continued her working to end apartheid. Therefore, she was arrested by the government under the Suppression of Communism Act and spent more than a year in solitary confinement where she was tortured. But that was not her only imprisonment - she stated that she has been jailed more times than she could count.

Winnie took part at the Soweto uprising in 1976, „a series of demonstrations and protests led by black school children“. In 1977, she was therefore banished to Brandfort, a township in South Africa, where she met Nomafa Moahloli although she actually wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone. They became good friends and Moahloli always supported Winnie’s fight against apartheid.

Winnie returned to Soweto and continued to criticize the regime in 1985, being called the „Mother of Nation“ by her advocates. But she seemed to have changed, because she promoted deadly retaliation against Black citizens who collaborated with the government in her speeches. She also founded the „Mandela United Football Club“ which was her group of bodyguards and stooges. In 1989, a 14-year-old boy named Stompie Moeketsi, of whom Winnie thought that he was a traitor, was abducted and murdered by the Football Club. There were criminal proceedings in 1991 in which Winnie was considered to be responsible for the death because of having ordered it.

However, in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela was freed and the apartheid regime fell. Despite her crimes, Winnie was elected the president of the ANC Women’s League on 8 December 1993 and held the position for ten years. In 1994, her husband Nelson was elected South Africa’s first black president. Thereafter, Winnie became deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology, but she was expelled from her cabinet post by her husband in 1995 because of affiliations and rhetoric seen as highly radical. In 1996, the couple divorced after 38 years of marriage, though having spent only few years together due to their imprisonments.

Winnie Mandela had to again face the consequences of her crimes when she was found responsible for "gross violations of human rights" by the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997. Despite those issues, Winnie Mandela was re-elected to the South African parliament in 1999, but resigned from her post in 2003 due to convictions of economic fraud that were later reversed.

In 2013, Nelson Mandela passed away. Until her own dead on April 2, 2018, in Johannesburg, which was a cause of a kidney infection, Winnie Mandela gave many interviews in which she not only spoke about her resistance to apartheid, but also had to make statements about the crimes she was accused of.

Winnie Mandela remains a very popular, but also controversial activist and politician and will always be remembered as one of the most important women of South Africa.