Winnie Mandela — The unflinching mirror and unforgiven truth of SA’s unfinished reckoning

Ours is a country which satisfies no particular narrative. Many compete; the “rainbow nation”, as Desmond Tutu named us, has faded, along with many dreams dashed.

Yet, watching the documentary The Trials of Winnie Mandela, we are reminded again of just what was wrought to gain our democracy. Freedom is not free, and for better or worse, Winnie Mandela is integral to our country’s history.

Everyone has a pre-conceived judgement of Winnie Mandela.

She may have been young, but as Madiba said to his lawyer George Bizos early on, “I married trouble”. And so it was that Winnie set about a life while Madiba was sentenced to life imprisonment, which propelled her into the heart of South Africa’s political struggle, and in so doing, into the heart of our country’s complex history. Hers was, for a long while, “the face” of Nelson Mandela and thus the face of the struggle against apartheid, especially to the outside world.

She has long been part of South Africa’s political landscape, controversially so, even posthumously. It is trite to say that there was nothing straightforward about Winnie. As a “Pondo girl” (her words), she was used to playing with the boys and was taught to fight. That instinct never really left her and possibly developed further within her while she was subjected to solitary confinement and harassed by the apartheid regime. Her scorn for Madiba’s forgiveness of his persecutors does not go unnoticed and in the end she seemed a lonely woman, still raging, never at peace.

Winnie was at once a kind of femme fatale, a regal African queen, an intelligent and powerful interlocutor for Madiba, but also a woman with deep flaws which wove a tragic thread throughout her life. She was without a doubt brave and powerful, yet as with all ordinary men and women whose persona became synonymous with a cause, she became a stick figure, a kind of ideal citizen.

As American political scientist Adolph Reed Jnr once wrote about how he wanted to debate the legacy of Malcolm X:

“… He was just like the rest of us – a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.”

In interviews for the documentary, Winnie repeatedly says that too many concessions were made to white people while there was no reckoning about the economic system that benefited whites and drove the economy. Hers was a call to arms to bring about a “new” South Africa.

Power of violence

As academic Shireen Hassim says, Winnie had a compelling belief in the sanitising power of violence. Since 1994 there have been many debates about the nature of our democratic settlement, the compromises made and how black people gained the vote but remain (mostly) devoid of economic power. That debate will continue as we continue to experience, even decades on, the devastating impact of apartheid on the material condition of black people, exacerbated by post-apartheid governance failures and State Capture.

Winnie’s belief in the power of violence and her own anger possibly found expression in the necklacing calls during the late 1980s, the violence that was inevitable in her perhaps euphemistically named Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) and the stories those young men told of the violence she personally visited upon them. She denied all of these allegations of violence until her death, and her testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) can only really be described as a mixture of defiance and evasion. The very casual way members of the MUFC speak of violence in the documentary shows clearly just how broken our country has been and is. As academic and writer Nadia Davids says “violence is our twelfth language, one we should stop being so fluent in”. Its roots are long and deep in our country.

Winnie’s rallying cry throughout and also to her granddaughters, who had the difficult task of “interviewing” their “Big Mommy”, as they called her, was that it was “war” and therefore the rules did not apply. Yet, in war, international law tells us, rules do still apply (ius in bello) – rape, for instance, is classified as a war crime.

The documentary does not push Winnie to set out her own understanding of constitutional democracy. Instead we are left with only her comments on gaining power (there is no distinction in any of the interviews as to what happens after power is wrested from the minority. Is it exercised as a form of control or dispersed democratically with checks and balances?). The constitutional democracy with its checks and balances on power proved inconvenient to Winnie, of course; her long absences from Parliament and her fraud conviction in 2003 are all met with the same evasive responses – that she was simply trying to help “the people” and so was justified in transgressing the rules.

Whatever the roots of her lack of accountability and over the years her sinking into a kind of depravity, the seeds and precursor to ANC excesses and State Capture were planted early on and long before 1994. The banality of evil that ran throughout society is also clear in the interviews with Security Branch members; their insular world views, their depravity too, have created a society even now of violence and mistrust. In the circumstances, it is surprising that South Africa wrought anything at all, let alone a constitutional democracy.

Feminist critique

Much of the documentary includes a feminist critique of Winnie which, in part, goes something like this – there were many men who were accused of corruption, drinking excessively, conducting affairs, yet only Winnie was vilified and also hauled before the TRC as a specimen of sorts. If all cannot be brought to account, none should – or certainly Winnie should not have been, Sisonke Msimang proffers, with disagreement from writer Palesa Morudu.

The Msimang argument is problematic even while understandable. How does that translate to crime, in general, in a post-apartheid South Africa? Taken to its logical conclusion, if all corporate fraudsters cannot be prosecuted, why should Markus Jooste have been singled out? If all who commit femicide are not able to be prosecuted, why prosecute Oscar Pistorius? As Morudu says, black mothers were entitled to answers about the disappearance of their children. Clearly Winnie was comfortable flouting norms, rules and later, the Constitution. We should not try to diminish a critique of how very dismissive Winnie Mandela was of the Constitution and the way in which it applied to her.

But, Msimang’s critique also helpfully points us to the complexity of Winnie as a woman, mother and struggle icon.

The TRC itself was deeply flawed and that failure to reckon with our past meaningfully has created a fault-line within our democracy. As Antjie Krog wrote in Country of Grief and Grace:

But if the old is not guilty
does not confess
then of course the new can also not be guilty
nor be held accountable
if it repeats the old
(things may then continue as before but in a different shade)

Ariel Dulitzky says: “Memory, what one remembers, how one remembers it, why one remembers it, defines the type of society we are and we want to be, that is, our identity as a society. They not only force us to remember the victims, but also to think critically about our history of racism and apartheid, civil war, dictatorship or political oppression. Memory must not only remember and try to avoid the most serious forms of violations of human rights, but it must also be a rejection of the new forms of abusive exercise of power. […] Because, ultimately, the challenge for a policy of memory is not building memorials or installing sleepy statues, but creating more fair, egalitarian and democratic societies.”

Despite socioeconomic progress, we know that we remain very far from the ideals of a truly free South Africa. This week, StatsSA released the usual devastating unemployment data, stating: “While the national unemployment rate stood at 32.7% in Q1:2026, the burden was disproportionately carried by the youth, with those aged 15–24 facing the highest unemployment rate at 60.9%, followed by those aged 25–34 at 40,6%.” Add to this ever-deepening inequality and we can understand why so many are disillusioned with democracy.

Chris Hani was prescient when he said: “I think finally the ANC will have to fight a new enemy. That enemy would be another struggle to make freedom and democracy worthwhile to ordinary South Africans. Our biggest enemy would be what we do in the field of socioeconomic restructuring.” He then listed the challenges: jobs, houses, health, education reform, a culture of care, fighting corruption and abusing the state. Hani ended: “We must build a different culture in this country… different from the Nationalist Party. And that culture should be one of service to people.”

Lessons from Winnie Mandela’s life

That struggle is more pronounced than ever before. It is our job to pick up the cudgels and build a better country and not break it down. Winnie Mandela’s life, as complex and divisive a figure as she was, reminds us that we can and must do better to improve the material conditions of those who are marginalised. These are in the words of Alexandra Fuller .writing about Zimbabwe, but which could equally be said of those on the margins in our own country “[...] people who are alive only because they are cunning, ingenious and endlessly resourceful. In theory they are ‘peasants’. In practice they are brilliantly versed in the skill of surviving.”

So, at the heart of this new struggle must be both the memory against forgetting and an unflinching commitment to accountability by those in power ensuring that the majority of South Africa’s people have the economic choice to live as they choose. Winnie Mandela’s life is a reminder that there is much work to do in that regard as well as to deal with our past. That past has left no-one, black or white, untouched by its effects. All of us live everyday life in its long shadow. DM