Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: Anti-apartheid campaigner dies at 81

a reply to: Spider879

Notice I said:
"My guess is the prevelant US opinion on her is total indifference."

The opinion of 17% of the population doesn't reach the level necessary to qualify as the "prevalent" opinion in the US.

In fact its highly likely that a majority, (51%) of the US population can't find SA on a map!

I don't know much about her,but this here is a perspective:

a reply to: Spider879

Hero? Oh well we differ on what is known as a hero then. Mine do not include those who slit the throats of young boys,or encourage the horrors of necklacing murders. BUT to each their own

a reply to: katerinaGrace

I made no excuse of the horrors committed in her name, but I can see how the system broke her, I also will not ignore how she tried to hold a family together and continued to fight against oppression.
Again one can hardly find a hero without blemish especially those under arms.

originally posted by: Spider879
a reply to: katerinaGrace

I made no excuse of the horrors committed in her name, but I can see how the system broke her, I also will not ignore how she tried to hold a family together and continued to fight against oppression.
Again one can hardly find a hero without blemish especially those under arms.

The System did not break her in my opinion, only her wanton feelings that she was above all laws and tried to break the system herself in a very bad way.

From the independant :

Winnie Mandela was beautiful and brave, but was intoxicated, and ultimately destroyed, by the arrogance of her self-importance and the exercise of her power.

By the time I first met her, in the late Eighties, Winnie’s influence in the black townships was already eroding, though she retained much of the physical beauty that Nelson and a dizzying succession of paramours, had once seen in her.

We met clandestinely, in Soweto, where children were that day boycotting school, as they had done periodically for several years. During our interview, I recounted how youngsters, worrying about ever getting a decent qualification and therefore a job, had told me that they wanted to return to school, yet feared that if they defied the boycott they could be victimised as traitors or even necklaced with a burning tyre.

Link to the full interview here : www.independent.co.uk...

Hailed as mother of the ‘new’ South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s legacy as an anti-apartheid heroine was undone when she was revealed to be a ruthless ideologue prepared to sacrifice laws and lives in pursuit of revolution and redress.

www.reuters.com...

There’s complicated, and then there’s Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. While there is something of a historical revisionism happening in some quarters of our nation these days that brands Nelson Mandela’s second wife a revolutionary and heroic figure, it doesn’t take that much digging to remember the truly awful things she has been responsible for.

This comes from South Africa and I encourage you to read it : mg.co.za...

How can some of you call her a hero?

She was rotten to the core...

Sadly

Lags

a reply to: ShadowChatter

Same but we're in the post Mandela effect era, now known as the Winnie Mandela Effect, anything goes.

I think a lot of people were surprised the other night when I shortly expressed my condolences on Winnie Mandela's passing as a white South African very concerned about current politics and events in my country (and I'm certainly not a left-winger or ANC supporter). I wasn't in the mood or state to extrapolate or start a thread at that point (the Easter bunny brought me vodka), but I think what I wrote in that thread is also relevant here. So I'll quote myself:

When I heard Winnie Mandela passed away the other night, it didn't seem appropriate to speak ill of her. But then again people in other countries aren't held to our traditions, so they could let rip into the negative aspects of her legacy straight away. For me it was more a courtesy and respect thing, because despite my strong opinions currently, I'm not totally isolated from other population groups in the country, their traditions, languages and divergent sense of history.

Although she wasn't in public life perhaps for over a decade, she was one of those celebrity politicians that made part of my youth and memories, and it's a chapter closed in my own experience. Perhaps a bit like PW Botha (who also got a state funeral from erstwhile ideological enemies), and begrudgingly nobody said anything bad around the time of his passing, although a lot of white males suffered under his militarized rule as well. But when I heard, I still said, "I'm sorry to hear, and condolences ...". It's more a cultural courtesy thing, at least until the funeral is over.

Oddly enough it was former President Thabo Mbeki who found himself in hot water from his own ANC party for his critique of Winnie Mandela so shortly after her death (rather than any of the opposition parties). It seems that both black and white South Africans still have a lot of respect for the concept of "elders", whereas Mbeki spent most of his formative years in exile (his own legacy hardly clean; especially his AIDS denialism). Added to this is that Mbeki was seen as one faction of the ANC after 1994, and Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela the more populist faction to replace Nelson Mandela, and many suspect that Mbeki's faction had a hand in Hani's assassination (behind the hapless white patsies), according to some conspiracies, in cahoots with the CIA. Whatever the case, Mbeki was seen as very disrespectful by his own party this week.
citizen.co.za...

I think one does need to have at least a bit of respect, diplomacy and humanity when public figures pass away.

Originally posted in: www.abovetopsecret.com... (p.7).

Not to be an apologist for some very bad historical things, but she was also the first black female social worker in SA.

And when she pitched in the 1980's things got done.

It was a very strange time, because there were state and liberation movement spies, double spies, and constant paranoia everywhere.
It was the Cold War in Africa.

But all the other ANC leaders, even their pictures were banned, so for a while she became the public face of the movement.

But when she came to a rural place, for example, and the people complained there's no running water, a month later those water pipes were there.
She even had the begrudging ear of the apartheid state, who were increasingly trying to portray themselves as more humane (they even offered to release Nelson Mandela if he swore to never use violence again - an offer he repeatedly refused).
But to a lot of people, she was genuinely concerned about their plight.