Winnie Mandela

When I think of Winnie Mandela, my heart is at once elated and deflated. Elated by her beauty and boldness, her courage and charisma and the undeniable role she fearlessly played in uprooting the world's worst system of racial segregation against people of African descent.

Mama Winnie, by her very life, by her countless acts of self-sacrifice in a land where even angels dreaded to tread, wittingly redeemed the reality of her people and restored their dignity as human beings worthy of the rights and privileges afforded to all others in the new South Africa.

My heart is simultaneously deflated by the terrible tragedies that marred Mama Winnie's life and gave her no respite unto her final breath. Before becoming the Mother of the Nation, a most apt and affectionate designation, she was a child, a daughter who lost her own mother at the age of nine, a girl named Nomzamo, "she who must endure trials" and endure she did, until the very end. Without her tenacity and grit and unique ability to organize all kinds of people and empower them to bring about change, it is arguable that apartheid would have persisted much longer.

It is also arguable that Mama Winnie kept the man in Mandela alive by the international attention she was able to draw to the unparalleled brutality of the apartheid regime. In a world before the Internet, in a reality most repressed and insular, Mama Winnie and courageous others coordinated and collaborated to keep the agenda of a liberated South Africa at the forefront of the globe's conscience. She resisted countless attacks, braved manifold arrests and survived unspeakable torture to keep the idea of a free and fair South Africa trending decade after decade.

History is replete with the elaborate heroics of men. Its walls are decorated with detailed tales of their glorious feats. Songs have and continue to be written and sung in honour of men's sacrifice and the rolls of their records continue to grow. The archivists for women, especially African women remain remiss.

It is all too quiet in their aisles and the tragedy today, as it has been in the past, is the fact that we have yet to break with tradition and celebrate our heroes and heroines while they are alive. The tragedy today, beyond the terrible loss of one of Africa's liberation icons, is the loss of the opportunity to right the wrongs she so gallantly endured through the years.

It could be said that when one Mandela walked out of prison that balmy morning on February 11, 1990, the other Mandela was ushered into another to serve a sentence of international vilification. The world, almost in concert, demonized one Mandela and lionized the other, invalidating the foundation that Mama Winnie had built to secure the freedom in which Tata led the rainbow nation.

In time, I hope that the chronicles will show there was no Winnie without Nelson and no Nelson without Winnie. Indeed, in time reality will reflect that like two sides of the same coin, the Father and the Mother of the Nation, the Mandela Janus contributed equally and eternally to the redemption of all South Africans.