Guest post by Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo, Drew University
“I am not Mandela’s product. I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy” – Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela-Mandela
Forgive me this brief moment of self-indulgence before I focus more expressly on the task of this piece. On Friday, April 13th, 2018, my friend and fellow South African sister, Bongiwe Bongwe, and I attended the memorial service for Mama Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the UN headquarters in New York. Our train ride there was occupied by long mournful reflection on South African politics and, in general, the opportunity to be able to express the deep sense of loss we felt and our common admiration for Madikizela-Mandela was meaningful. However, once we arrive at the UN the experience shifted to some degree from a mournful one into a bit of a sour annoyance. What had caused this on the one hand, was a feeling of exasperation at the subordination of Madikizela- Mandela’s leadership and legacy to the career of her ex-husband, Nelson Mandela. Yet, more prominently on the other hand, was a frustration at the repeated sexual harassment we experienced. First there were uncomfortable and seemingly harmless stares, then overdetermined compliments that were followed by tacky advancements and the predictable requests for numbers. Then we were followed and badgered for pictures. And then followed again, but this time as we feigned urgency and made our way to the bathroom, we were accused of lying and trying to escape when it was not clear to either one of us why we were expected to account to the desires of a male stranger. While the memorial service was still more meaningful to us than this brief recounting might suggest, I begin with this particular story as a long way to go about introducing this piece as it continues to mourn for the loss of Madikizela-Mandela. However, it also functions to express the ways in which the sense of loss felt for Madikizela-Mandela’s leadership has been made even more painful by the realization that despite all the tremendous contributions she has made for South African life, women are still not adequately respected in public (let alone private) spaces. Women and their bodies are still expected to be navigated and regulated in relation to the desires and agendas (political or otherwise) of men. And when they expressly refuse to do so, the near inevitable response is vilification.
The re-emergence of debates surrounding Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s life and legacy following her passing on April 2nd, 2018, seems to suggest that South Africans have struggled to talk about and determine what her leadership has meant for the country while she was alive. It goes without saying that her life as public figure in South African politics has always been extremely complicated, yet, while she has been subject to both praise and condemnation, her pronounced status as the mother of the nation has been long established. Unsurprisingly, there have been innumerable articles and other public proclamations that have surfaced in the past weeks to tell of her life, singing her praises, recount her alleged sins, and mourn for the loss of her. However, I have encountered very few voices that have ventured to speak directly to the lessons that can be learnt from observing Madikizela-Mandela’s life and death. While I am prone to more demure approaches to such posthumous signification because I prefer to be cautious about avoiding the canonization of public figures, Madikizela-Mandela’s defiant spirit has conjured something that wants to liken itself to her boldness in this piece. To some degree, we have become well acquainted with who Madikizela-Mandela was in South African politics, but what has her life meant to us? What lessons have we learnt now that she is gone? The following piece will suggests three main lessons upon which we can begin to reflect.
The first, and arguably the most obvious, lesson relates to women in public spaces. I have no doubt that Madikizela-Mandela has been inspirational to many women (and men) in her political career, in part, because of the distinct lack of representation of women in politics but especially because of her particular political prowess. However, the ways in which her life in politics unfolded over the years, and principally her contested position in the post-apartheid context suggests a disparity in the kinds of work women and men are expected and required to perform in the public sphere. Reading back through the reports from the TRC hearing and submissions, being reminded by recent articles of the ways in which she sustained ANC anti-apartheid work in the years during Mandela’s imprisonment, as well as rereading of the brutality she endured while doing so has pointed me (among others—including but not limited to Zenani Mandela and Julius Malema) to a disproportion in the labour women shoulder in public arenas. Madikizela-Mandela took up both the physical and emotional work of keeping the anti-apartheid resistance alive. Following the dissolution of the apartheid state, arguably, she was placed with the burden of izinhlungu zomzabalazo—by this I mean both the express trauma and guilt that accompany an armed resistance to brutal regimes. Even when that trauma and guilt is not always immediately named or felt the ever-persistent moral repudiations and the life-threatening trials of struggle linger and take their toll. And that toll had been specially placed on Mam’ Winnie.
A recollection of Desmond Tutu’s dramatic plea during a 1997 TRC hearing for an admission that “something went wrong” and the general demand that Madikizela-Mandela offer a public account of and perform remorse for the tragic (and ambiguous) deaths under her leadership during the resistance to apartheid—a spectacle not imposed on her male counterparts—highlights how she was singled out as a female leader to endure the moral burden of the costs of the “new” South Africa. She as the “mother” of the nation was left to do the emotional labour of shouldering responsibility for the perceived moral failings of the anti-apartheid movement(s) and was unduly vilified as a violator of human rights. She died with the weight of a guilt and trauma that rightfully belongs to all of us who live and enjoy the freedoms of the new nation she is affectionately claimed to have mothered.
Theologically speaking, it may be worthwhile to further question the validity of Tutu’s deontological proclivities in his TRC treatment of Madikizela-Mandela and, in general, the validity of the use of similar moral frameworks for the understanding and (e)valuation of the acts of resistance. The Kairos document had already begun to do such work in the late 1980’s. Speaking in relation to violence and resistance it states:
The State and the media have chosen to call violence what some people do in the townships as they struggle for their liberation i.e. throwing stones, burning cars and buildings and sometimes killing collaborators. But this excludes the structural, institutional and unrepentant violence of the State and especially the oppressive and naked violence of the police and the army. These things are not counted as violence. And even when they are acknowledged to be ‘excessive,’ they are called ‘misconduct’ or even ‘atrocities’ but never violence. Thus the phrase ‘Violence in the townships’ comes to mean what the young people are doing and not what the police are doing or what apartheid in general is doing to people. If one calls for nonviolence in such circumstances one appears to be criticizing the resistance of the people while justifying or at least overlooking the violence of the police and the State.
It is somewhat of a mystery to me why we have largely failed to apply similar nuancing to the moral consideration of Madikizela-Mandela’s political life. To fail to do so is to leave the violences of patriarchy, even within the ANC, largely uncriticized—vilifying a woman for the work from which the male leaders of the institution have benefitted is (toxic) masculinities’ replication of imperial/colonial hypocrisy.
Additionally, the second lesson to be learnt from her life and death, then, is perhaps that western moral frameworks have always been and continue to be inadequate as a measure for the struggles of African people. Madikizela-Mandela loved South Africa and its people; that love fueled a longstanding resistance. That is to say, for the African—particularly the African woman—in many ways, love is resistance. And resistance is rough. It is rough on the body and rough on the soul. The loss produced by resistance is tangible and irrevocable. Yet, to continue to respond to the resistance and the accompanying losses with the uncritical use of pacifying deontological moralities may distract us from the fact that the various losses we bear are frequently what mark the distinction between the displays of resistance from the actualizations of resistance. There are those who acknowledge that blackness is still the site of struggle—that the oppression and pain is real and brutal—yet are unwilling to come to terms with the sight of black struggle. That resisting violence is a violent experience. Under the pressure of a global deontological gaze—escalated by the spectacle of the TRC—the leaders of South Africa’s early democracy arguably used Madikizela-Mandela to shield themselves, in part, from the consequences of the (moral) dangers, deteriorations, and losses of struggle and resistance, while she herself was offered little protection from the same danger, deteriorations, and losses. Said another way, the ANC had always claimed to be an armed struggle against the apartheid state that aimed to create “a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa.” Yet, the actions of anti-apartheid and post-apartheid ANC has shown a tendency towards protecting and attending to the struggles of men while subordinating the resistance of women even as the men significantly benefitted from the work of women.
A black political movement should know, above all, that the specificities of our bodies and our experiences are not removed from our ideologies. This is why the third lesson to be learnt from Madikizela-Mandela, while often treated as a lesser, more trivial interest, must be allocated more seriousness in its implications. And this lesson manifests itself in her fashion. It is difficult to think of Madikizela-Mandela without recalling her many dazzling outfits. And although many still consider fashion to be the trivial vanities of femininity, the growing cultural recognition of Afrocentric aesthetics, in Africa and the diaspora, indicates that Madikizela-Mandela was both a political and cultural icon. She embodied unapologetic blackness. An uncompromising love for herself and her people that manifested itself in her political life and in the very clothes she wore. She resisted with any and all means available to her. Moreover, one cannot wholly claim to work for the improvement of black lives (anywhere) if they do not acknowledge that the black experience is cut across subject positions that go beyond the able-bodied, heterosexual masculine experience. Madikizela-Mandela’s aesthetics, then, is appreciated in its capacity to boldly perform and affirm African femininity even when the feminine voice was and is still slighted, appropriated, and betrayed. The loss of Mama Winnie hurts and her absence will be deeply felt. If we are to appropriately honor her we will continue to mourn and reflect on her life, but we must also continue to resist with body, mind, and spirit. The work she pioneered is not yet complete. Rest in Power. A luta continua.
About the Author:
Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo is an American based, South African Ph.D. Candidate in the Bible and Culture Program at Drew University. Her research focuses on popular cultural productions of narrative (both ancient and contemporary), with a primary interest in gender and sexuality studies, critical race and literary theories concerning the representation and functions of violence in literature.
Featured image: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (Gille de Vlieg)