At 4.30p today I shall be showing the film Winnie Mandela (2012),
in my course, African History Through Film.
The date for showing this film was arranged December 2017- when I created the syllabi for spring.
So you can imagine my shock to hear of the passing of this great woman, on April 2-
two days before the planned showing.
I have just asked Moses Ochonu for permission to circulate in the class his 3-page illuminating
commentary on Stompie- making full acknowledgement of USA Dialogue, of course.
What a memorable week!
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 3:00 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Subject: RE: Can I please use this in my film class today? I am showing the film "Winnie Mandela".
Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History
Department of History
Vanderbilt University
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2018 1:42 PM
To: Ochonu, Moses
Subject: Can I please use this in my film class today? I am showing the film "Winnie Mandela".
"Winnie and the Stompie Affair"
Prof Moses Achonu
USA- Dialogue
April 4, 2018
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.
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