The present focus of attention on South Africa has resulted in significant publicity on behalf of the few prominent black figures in the country. The best known of those is Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) who is serving a life sentence for sabotage. The campaign in the West lionizing Mandela has as a natural by-product transformed his wife, Winnie, into a heroine of black resistance to apartheid.
While resistance to apartheid is itself to be admired, Winnie's radical approach exacerbates the cycle of violence and undermines the efforts of more moderate leaders such as Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi to bring about peaceful change.
Winnie Mandela was born as Nomzamo ("one who will suffer many trials," in her native Xhosa language) Winifred Madikizela in 1934, in the Pondoland region of what is today the "independent" black homeland the Transkei. Her father, Columbus Madikizela, was a prominent member of the community, a successful farmer, and a schoolteacher who later became minister of agriculture and forestry of the Transkei. Educated by her Methodist mother, a woman of strong religious conviction, Winnie was an excellent student, first in the Transkei and later at the Hofmeyr School in Johannesburg, where she graduated as a social worker and trained nurse.
She started working as South Africa's first trained black woman social worker at the Baragwanath Hospital, one of the largest in Africa. All her studies were pursued on the basis of scholarships, and she was even offered a scholarship to continue her college education in the United States but turned it down.
From the beginning of her stay in Johannesburg, Winnie came into contact with active members of the ANC. Her roommate was the girlfriend of Oliver Tambo, today ANC's main leader in exile, and one of the doctors she worked with at Baragwanath was Nthato Motlana, one of the most active leaders of the Soweto radicals today. Young, attractive, and intelligent, she caught the attention of chief Kaizer Matanzima, now the president of the Transkei royal house.
Through Tambo, a distant relative of hers, and through Matanzima, she met Nelson Mandela, then already one of the most prominent ANC leaders.
Thus, Winnie was able to enter into contact with the most prominent political leaders of the Xhosa, the second-largest black people in South Africa and the group most closely associated with ANC. Well-educated at a time when the black population was still largely illiterate, Winnie was naturally seen as a member of that select group of black lawyers and doctors.
No 'country bumpkin'
Nevertheless, she has for a long time preferred to describe herself as "a little country bumpkin from Pondoland" and to downplay her privileged background. Even today she and her children are in a position seldom reached by the black "masses" she likes to identify with: One of her daughters, Zeni, is married to one of the members of the Swazi royalty, while the other, the outspoken Zinzi, is a student at the University of Cape Town.
The Mandelas were married in 1958
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