WINNIE MANDELA
On 11 February 1990, Nelson Nelso
Mandela was
released eleased from from 27
27 years’ imprisonment. Waiting
for him h was his wife, Winnie. Twenty years on,
Stylist investigates the woman behind the icon
t was a summer’s afternoon in
Johannesburg, 1957, and an event
was about to take place that would
I change the world. Leaning against
a bus stop outside Baragwanath
Hospital was a pretty young woman who held a job
as the hospital’s first black social worker. Just at
that moment a lawyer drove past and spotted her.
Winnie Madikizela didn’t know it then, but with
that glimpse, her fate was sealed. Nelson Mandela
would pursue her to become his wife, setting her
on a path to become one of the most celebrated
and vilified political female icons of our time.
Today, the controversy surrounding Winnie
Madikizela-Mandela is as strong as ever. As Jennifer
Hudson prepares to play her on-screen in Winnie
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THE
GOOD
WIFE?
WORDS: LOUISE MILLAR
and Sophie Okonedo’s portrayal of her for
last week’s BBC4 drama receives rave reviews,
debate rages about the true character of this
famous wife and politician. Hailed by some as
a great humanitarian, the ‘Mother’ of South Africa,
she is dismissed by others as an aggressive abuser
of human rights. But arguments rage over whether
she was always set to stray from the path, or
whether the decades of torture and repression she
endured at the hands of apartheid eternally scarred
Winnie and led to her public downfall?
Winnie was always going to be different. Born
on 26 September 1936 into the rural community
of eMbongweni in South Africa’s Eastern
Cape Province, her parents, Columbus
and Gertrude, were already considered to
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