Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

Ken,

I strongly disagree with your take. I'm pressed for time, but three points:

1. That Winnie "had Stompie killed" is not a settled fact but a contested probability. Her Mandela United Football Club bodyguard whose testimony resulted in her conviction and enabled him to obtain a much-reduced sentence for his crime of killing Stompie confessed in jail that he was an informant planted around Winnie by the apartheid regime's intelligence services. In fact he recanted twice. First he testified that Winnie ordered Stompie's killing. Then he confessed on tape from jail that he feared that Stompie had discovered that he was a state informant and was about to tell Winnie, causing him to kill Stompie on the false ground that he, Stompie, was an informant, an askari. Then, during the TRC, the former bodyguard again went back to his original story that Winnie had instructed him to kill Stompie. Since Winnie's conviction, some operatives of the apartheid regime's intelligence and disinformation campaign have given interviews that also contradict the "Winnie had Stompie killed" narrative. The truth probably lies somewhere between the "Winnie had Stompie killed" claim and the "Winnie is innocent" counter-claim. Revolutionary crimes, crimes committed in the heat of revolution are difficult to unravel, solve, or explain. Therefore, we should not simply adopt the apartheid regime's version. This is a regime that, we now know, had one priority in the chaotic transition period: to discredit, disgrace, and thus politically decapitate Winnie so that her radical socialist and revolutionary politics would not influence her husband and derail his moderate, conciliatory economic and political agenda in the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid.

This is not to say the MUFC, which Winnie funded and promoted, did not do terrible things--they did. They tortured and settled personal scores, using the cachet and street legitimacy of their connection to Winnie. But so did the ANC, as you yourself said. However, apart from Winnie, which other members of the ANC high command or its military wing has been humiliated on account of the torture and other unsavory things they did or tolerated during the struggle?

Revolutions are messy, fratricidal affairs--all of them. I have no time to give examples, but look at how barbaric and murderous the much celebrated French Revolution was. Many of the ANC male honchos, like revolutionaries elsewhere, oversaw or tolerated crimes, but we chalk up these incidents to the fog of revolutionary warfare, and to the effect of the intelligence operations of the apartheid regime, which planted spies, informants, and other reactionary figures in the anti-apartheid movement, resulting in a high trust deficit and an equally high rate of paranoia, suspicion, and intra-movement recriminations--with many innocent victims.

Instead of blaming Mandela, Chris Hani, Tambo, and other male revolutionary figures for these crimes, we appropriately blame the apartheid regime for creating a climate of internal distrust that produced paranoia, which in turn turned black against black in the form of executions, necklacing, etc. And we say appropriately that these revolutionaries may have tolerated or even ordered these crimes but that in the end they, like their own victims, are victims of the unfortunate success of the apartheid regime's psychological and intelligence operations, which depended on infiltration and a vast network of internal spies. Winnie and other anti-apartheid revolutionaries succumbed to the apartheid regime's efforts to engender distrust and intra-black violence in the movement, but who among us could have held out under such regime violence, pressure, betrayal, and psychological warfare?

No one was a bigger victim of this type of sponsored betrayal and espionage than Winnie, yet some of us do not extend to her the correct analysis that casts these flawed anti-apartheid revolutionaries as victims of the apartheid state's dirty war against the movement for liberation, an analysis that correctly assigns ultimate responsibility where it belongs: the apartheid state.

2. I want to suggest that this bias is both a function of gender and race. First the gender dimension. In a male-dominated society, we have a hard time forgiving female indiscretion and wrongdoing, period. I teach a course on the Mandelas once a year. My male students, and even some of the female ones, always get hung up on Winnie's infidelity, but somehow excuse or overlook Nelson's more egregious sexual infractions prior to his jailing. Nelson, by his own account, was a serial adulterer who was not faithful in any of his relationships (prior to Graca). Yet he gets a pass. Not only that. When it comes to the Stompie tragedy, the entire class tends to unite in condemnation of Winnie's guilt, but is curiously forgiving of the murders and tortures committed by the armed wing of the ANC during the violent phase of the liberation struggle. This is evidence of sexism, including internalized sexism on the part of women. Why should her infidelity diminish her heroism when the greater sexual infidelities of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. have never hurt their heroic status? Is this not sexism at work?

3. The broader conceptual issue has to do with the nexus of race and heroism, of course, and Afua's essay argues that point brilliantly and compellingly with several examples. We do not expect white heroes to be morally perfect, to be flawless. White intellectuals with the power to value and devalue, with the power to establish or undo a paradigm, hardly question the heroism and revolutionary bonafides of white "heroes" on account of their crimes, personal foibles, or moral deficits. These white men (and women) are given a pass. The examples are too numerous to list. We allow these "heroes" to be human, that is, to have flaws and to have committed infractions, to have made bad judgments, and to have committed egregious errors or even crimes of power and passion. We do not let those deficits overwhelm the credit column of their ledger. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi does a great job of outlining the genealogy of this racist thinking, and supplies a convincing counterpoint to it. Black heroes and blacks in general who desire reckoning and status have no margin of error and have to exhibit moral perfection in order to obtain recognition and rights, an unrealistically high moral standard that is never extended to white heroes of regular folks. That is the broader conceptual and philosophical issue at stake, which you are skirting.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

When the anc performed torture, its supporters objected. When winnie mandela had stompie killed, many of her supporters objected.

Why erase the flaws of organizations we support, give them free hand to commit the very acts we are opposed to when supporting them?

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 3 April 2018 at 18:25
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Winnie Mandela

 

Impressive article.

 

My appreciation of Nelson Mandela is deeply diluted by my understanding of what he did to Winnie. I see him as allowing her to be sacrificed as a deal to end a war soaked in the blood of Back people.

 

I wonder what the business of the public was in the information he gave in court during their divorce that she did not allow him into the bedroom after he left prison. With all his fame and power, could he not have got a private divorce instead of dragging their private issues into a public divorce court proceedings?

 

Why was Winnie being branded for murder while the end of apartheid rule was conducted on the basis of mutual forgiveness? Why did he allow her to be indicted for difficulties with paying bills for a relative's schooling after he had left prison?

 

I read something about her having had sexual relationships with other men while he was in prison and sustained those relationships after he came out.

 

So?

 

What more was to be expected, since he had spent so long in prison? A realistic understanding is to see their marriage as sacrificed to the anti-apartheid struggle and a resolution to their almost inevitable marital challenges as best carried out with the discretion due to two heroes who gave up so much of their lives for something bigger than themselves.

 

Winnie Mandela was the icon of the struggle while he was in prison. The person who fought out the bitter war in daily battles of mind and often of blood and bone. Their ideological and relational difficulties should have been kept private to themselves, not allowing those who had murdered and dehumanised so many to try to humiliate her while elevating him, giving those dehumanisers a last laugh even as they conceded political power while most likely holding economic power.

 

 

 

 

 

On 3 April 2018 at 22:20, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jumoyin@gmail.com> wrote:

Still "controversial" in death...

Winnie Mandela was a hero. If she'd been white, there would be no debate

Afua Hirsch

Peaceful protest did not end apartheid: it took revolutionaries. And it shouldn't be difficult to choose between a system of racial supremacy and a person who helped overthrow it

440 

Published: 15:00 WAT Tuesday, 03 April 2018

 Follow Afua Hirsch

Heroes are curious things. Ours have roots in the ancient Graeco-Roman sense of the concept, which places a premium on military victory. What's problematic is how many of our heroes embody an inherent level of violence, as is unsurprisingly the case with people whose main accomplishments arise from war. We are tolerant about people who regarded the working classes as an abomination (Wellington), the transatlantic slave trade as a good idea (Nelson) or Indians as repulsive (Churchill), because we think the ends – defeating Napoleon or Hitler – justified the means.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as the press coverage of her death this week shows, is not entitled to the same rose-tinted eulogy as our white British men. She is "controversial" and a "bully". One newspaper columnist was boldly willing to abandon his usual restraint in not writing ill of the dead specially for this "odious, toxic individual".

The media reports have raised the horrific murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, though few have been unduly troubled by the fact that this was a crime she always denied any involvement in, or by the ample evidence of the lengths to which the apartheid regime went to infiltrate and smear her and her followers.

 Play Video. Duration: 02:00

Sadly, I suspect much of the newly discovered outrage sparked by Madikizela-Mandela's death has little to do with any recent conversion to the cause of Black Lives Matter, or accompanying grief for the fate of little Stompie – one of so many black children who lost their lives during the brutality of apartheid and the struggle against it. What it's really about is a reluctance to admit that apartheid was so wrong, and so entrenched; and that without the resilience and vision of Madikizela-Mandela, and those of her ilk, it would not have been brought down.

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Britain's heroes are allowed to have waged war. The warriors against white supremacist oppression, on the other hand, are not. When, for instance, I questioned Piers Morgan over the appropriateness of having a 50-metre column in Trafalgar Square to commemorate Admiral Nelson, he spat that Nelson Mandela has a statue despite being a "terrorist". When I debated with a renowned naval historian over his adulation of the admiral, the argument wound its way to Haiti – the only example in history of slaves successfully overthrowing their masters and establishing their own republic – and whether this was a victory for the enslaved over their oppressors (my view) or a tragedy for the plantation owners who were killed in the process (his).

There is no end to the contortions in our psyche. Who now – outside South Africa, where I have heard its demise lamented more than once – would defend the apartheid regime? It's easy to condemn in hindsight. Yet we have forgotten what it actually takes to overthrow such tyranny when the legal and moral force of a sovereign state was on the side of white supremacy. Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.

Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room

It took women such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She was, as the world's media have had to be repeatedly reminded this week, not an "activist": she was a leader in a liberation struggle. She survived – during more than 35 years of apartheid – surveillance, threats, harassment, arrest and imprisonment, 491 days in solitary confinement and eight years in exile. The methods of torture used against her included, according to one account, denying her sanitary products so that she was found, in detention, covered in her own menstrual blood.

I doubt the Daily Mail, recalling Madikizela-Mandela's life this week as "blood-soaked", appreciated the irony of this choice of phrase, nor that of judging her – rather than the apartheid regime she helped overthrow – the "bully".

Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room. As a nation, one of our techniques for glossing over this uncomfortable fact has been overly beatifying Nelson Mandela, whose posthumous glory has always struck me as coming at the cost of forgetting the others. Who now remembers the names of Robert Sobukwe – the profound pan-Africanist whose medical treatment for fatal lung cancer was obstructed by the apartheid government, or Elias Motsoaledi, convicted at Rivonia alongside Mandela and not released from Robben Island until 26 years later.

Winnie Mandela was loved and loathed, but she earned her place in history | Ralph Mathekga

We consider Nelson Mandela to be safe because of his message of forgiveness, because of truth and reconciliation, because he accepted the Nobel peace prize with apartheid-regime president FW de Klerk – decisions to which Madikizela-Mandela was fundamentally opposed. She was a radical until the end. Each rejection of that radicalism is an endorsement of the tyranny she fought against.

But is it surprising that we endorse it? An endless litany of heroes were either architects of, or happy to take part in, the very apartheid Madikizela-Mandela sacrificed so much to help end. Among them are those at the centre of our current statue wars – Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, Jan Smuts – all immortalised on prominent plinths. It's hard to resist the conclusion – comparing the fact that it's these people whom we immortalise, and those such as Madikizela-Mandela whom we demonise – that we are still undecided about which side of history we, as a nation, are on.

It doesn't have to be this way. Denmark this week unveiled its first statue of a black woman. It does not commemorate someone who fed neatly into diversifying the existing order – the limited kind of black hero we in Britain seem willing to accept – but the "three queens" of the Caribbean island of St Croix, who led an unprecedented revolt against Danish colonial rule. Doing so requires Denmark to take a new look at its true history, seeing through its 20th-century rebranding as a liberal bastion that saved Jews from the Nazis, and whose empire was "not as bad as others".

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. We see ourselves as a moral, decent and rights-respecting nation. But when we are tested for our true moral grit, we keep failing. The death of Madikizela-Mandela is another opportunity to choose between a narrative of white supremacy and the one that overthrew it. If the media coverage of her death is anything to go by, this is, apparently, a deeply controversial choice.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist

 

 

--

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, PhD.,
Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Babcock University,
PMB 4010, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria. 
Official Email: yacob-halisoo@babcock.edu.ng
The Editor, Journal of International Politics and Development: jipad@babcock.edu.ng
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