Winnie Mandela Documentary: A missed opportunity

By Vusi Gumbi

History rarely agrees on its heroes, particularly a figure that refuses to be contained by a single story. Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was one such figure: revered and contested, sanctified and scrutinised, all at once. In life and in death, she commanded a presence that transcended the noise of political convenience and moral simplification. The world may very well debate her methods, question her choices, and revisit her past from different perspectives, but it never denies her impact. She stood at the front line of the country’s most violent and transformative era – and she did not flinch.

Despite the wide range of narratives presented in local and global media reports following her death on 02 April 2018 – from unflinching praise to critical reappraisals – one thing, however, remained strikingly consistent: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was universally acknowledged as the “Mother of the Nation” and a formidable anti-apartheid champion.

Irrespective of how her legacy was framed, media outlets and commentators in South Africa, Africa and the world recognised her unwavering commitment to justice and the liberation of Black South Africans.

Her passing drew tributes from a broad spectrum of influential figures. Moussa Faki Mahamat, then Chairperson of the African Union Commission, hailed her as a fearless freedom fighter who embodied the struggles of African people. From the United States, civil rights icon the late Reverend Jesse Jackson travelled to South Africa to honour her life and legacy, proclaiming that, “in the darkest hours of the struggle to free South Africa…the face of hope and courage was Winnie Mandela”.

These and many other tributes underscored her symbolic and political significance – not only to South Africans but to oppressed peoples around the world. Heads of States, international dignitaries and activists from all walks of life came to pay tribute to this gallant figure who had come to personify defiance, resilience, and liberation.

Like all South Africans, I finally watched the Netflix documentary titled, ‘The Trials of Winnie Mandela’.

By their nature, documentaries play a pivotal role in educating and informing the public, often telling unknown stories. There is no denying that Mama Winnie is an enigma – a complex human being shaped by the politics of time and space; born out of the harsh realities that rendered Black lives insignificant.

Mama Winnie emerged out of a violent period that rendered any peaceful means of attaining liberation, futile – led by an apartheid government that consistently resorted to violence as its means of control, a minority regime for whom violence was not just a tool, but a language. In her own words, “I am a product of the masses of my country. I am the product of my enemy.” Unlike leaders of the liberation movement, who were either jailed or exiled, she came face to face with the brutality of apartheid. She was hardened by it.

Mama Winnie operated under immense pressure and within a context defined by repression and constant surveillance. This is, after all, a woman who was consistently tortured, harassed and imprisoned; who spent 491 days in solitary confinement and was banished from her home for nearly a decade.

There is also no denying that in the course of waging the struggle for liberation, there were moments when things went wrong: times when the intensity, urgency, and brutality of that era led to actions that remain difficult and contested. In reflecting with the benefit of hindsight, one can acknowledge that there may have been decisions or actions she herself might have approached differently.

Yet such reflections should be held alongside a fuller understanding of the extraordinary circumstances she endured, and the profound role she played in sustaining the spirit, building the momentum and keeping the fires of resistance burning, particularly during some of the darkest days of South Africa’s history.

This documentary, however, has contributed to the longstanding history of casting doubt and creating a narrative that questions and downplays her role in the struggle. This woman got a raw deal: from the apartheid regime; from the man whose name she fought to the bitter end to keep alive, Nelson; from her political home, the African National Congress. One would’ve hoped that this documentary would give an honest, unbiased account of the lives and times of a flawed woman who emerged as the champion of South Africa’s poor, downtrodden, and systematically dejected masses.

This documentary painted Mama Winnie more as irrational, erratic and a ruthless woman who was at the center of the destruction of Black lives; it portrayed her as an adulterous woman who shamed and embarrassed Nelson Mandela. And less did it shape her as the heartbeat of the revolution, who was only 28 years old when she became the face of the struggle for liberation: formidable, unwavering and relentless in her resolve. This documentary doesn’t show that in townships where uprisings were being brutally suppressed, Mama Winnie stood tall, defiant and held her head high with her fists clenched in resistance as she began changing the course of history. Instead, her time in Soweto, throughout this documentary, is shrouded in controversy of the Mandela United Football Club – reducing her role to harbouring young boys who led the reign of terror in the townships.

It was a missed opportunity. Rather than offering a balanced and nuanced account, one that grappled with the many aspects of the struggle she often waged in isolation, the seven-part documentary settles for a narrower, more convenient narrative. What it should have revealed is that revolution, in its truest form, is not sustained by courage alone, but by a fierce and uncompromising demand for justice.

The Mother of the Nation was forged in precisely those conditions. Harassment, solitary confinement, and exile were not footnotes in her story, neither were they incidental; they were the very forces meant to break her. They failed. Instead, they hardened her resolve. She emerged, consistently, more defiant: unyielding in her commitment, unafraid of the cost. She became more than a political figure; she became the embodiment of Black resistance, a living conscience of a nation in revolt. The struggle for liberation, in Mama Winnie’s eyes, were anchored in the words of her teacher who used to shout, “the unification of Germany, Bismarck believed, could not be attained by parliamentary speeches and debates, but by means of blood and iron”.

History will continue to wrestle with the contradictions and complexities of her life, as it should. That is inevitable. What cannot be rewritten, however, is that the country’s freedom was not won on theoretical lenses – it was carried, fiercely and unapologetically, by those who were anchored by the belief that one day, a brighter day will come. And among them, Mama Winnie: fearless, relentless, and when the moment demanded it, uncompromising to the point of madness.

Vusi Gumbi is a PhD candidate in Political Studies at the University of Johannesburg.