Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, later known as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, was born on 26 September 1936 in the village of Mbongweni near Bizana in Pondoland, in what was then the Transkei and is now part of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Some earlier accounts gave her birth year as 1934, but the date most widely used by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and reference works is 1936. She was the daughter of Columbus Madikizela, a history teacher and later a local official, and Gertrude, and she grew up in a Xhosa-speaking family. Her given name, Nomzamo, is often translated as “she who must endure trials,” a phrase that later commentators treated as prophetic.
She trained as a social worker, moving to Johannesburg in the early 1950s and becoming one of the first Black women to practise in that field in the city. Work at Baragwanath Hospital and research into infant mortality in the townships drew her toward politics. She linked the conditions she saw to the structures of racial discrimination and poverty under apartheid. In 1957 she met Nelson Mandela, then a lawyer and rising figure in the African National Congress, who was involved in the Treason Trial. They married on 14 June 1958 (some sources give 19 June). She was his second wife; he had separated from Evelyn Mase. The couple had two daughters, Zenani, born in 1959, and Zindziswa (Zinzi), born in 1960. Their married life together was brief. Mandela went underground, was arrested in 1962, and in 1964 was sentenced to life imprisonment after the Rivonia Trial. For the next twenty-seven years Winnie Madikizela-Mandela lived as the public face of a marriage defined by absence.
During those years the apartheid state subjected her to repeated banning orders, surveillance, detention, and internal exile. Banning restricted where she could go, whom she could meet, and what she could say. In 1969 she was detained under security legislation and held for about seventeen months, much of it in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison, before being acquitted in the so-called Pretoria Twelve case and released under further restrictions. She later described solitary confinement as a process meant to break a person before it broke the body. In 1977 she was banished to the small Free State town of Brandfort, where neighbours were forbidden to speak to her and she was limited in the number of people she could meet. There she helped organise a crèche and a clinic, working with local doctors and relief organisations. The years of harassment made her a symbol for many opponents of apartheid. International media and the ANC in exile presented her as the steadfast partner of the imprisoned Mandela and as a leader in her own right. Supporters called her the Mother of the Nation.
She returned to Soweto in the mid-1980s as the township uprising intensified. The woman who came back was widely described as harder and more militant than the social worker of the 1950s. She became associated with the Mandela United Football Club, a group of young men who acted as her bodyguards and operated from outbuildings at her home. The club was accused of intimidation, assault, and killings in Soweto. The most notorious case involved four youths abducted in late 1988. One of them, fourteen-year-old James Moeketsi Seipei, known as Stompie, was beaten and later found with his throat cut. Jerry Richardson, the club’s coach and her chief bodyguard, was convicted of the murder. In 1991 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was convicted of kidnapping the youths and of being an accessory to assault. She was sentenced to six years in prison. On appeal the conviction was reduced to accessory to assault, and the sentence became a fine and a suspended term. She did not serve the original prison sentence.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later examined the period. In 1997, pressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she offered a qualified apology for things that had gone wrong, while denying direct responsibility for the worst acts. The commission found that she had been responsible for gross violations of human rights through the Mandela United Football Club. These findings, together with the criminal conviction, permanently divided opinion about her. To many she remained a victim of a brutal state who had been forced into impossible choices and then scapegoated. To others she had crossed into the abuse of power, terrorising the same communities the liberation movement claimed to defend.
Nelson Mandela was released on 11 February 1990, and she walked beside him from Victor Verster Prison. The public reunion did not restore the marriage. They separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Mandela testified that the relationship had broken down; allegations of her personal conduct formed part of the proceedings. After the divorce she used the surname Madikizela-Mandela. In the first democratic election of 1994 she won a seat in Parliament and was appointed deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology in Mandela’s government. She was dismissed from the cabinet in 1995 amid allegations of irregular conduct. She remained active in the ANC Women’s League, serving for a time as its president, and retained a following inside the party, especially among those who preferred a more confrontational style of politics.
Further legal trouble followed. In 2003 she was convicted on numerous counts of fraud and theft linked to a funeral-fund scheme; her broker was also convicted. The convictions led her to step back from frontline politics for a period, though she later returned to public life and to Parliament. She continued to speak in radical terms, at one point offering to act as a human shield against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Near the end of her life she was involved in litigation over claims to property associated with Mandela under customary law, despite the divorce.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died in Johannesburg on 2 April 2018 at the age of 81. Her funeral drew large crowds and official honours, reflecting the hold she still had on parts of the South African public. Assessments of her life remain split. She endured detention, banning, exile, and the long imprisonment of her husband, and she helped keep the Mandela name and the anti-apartheid cause visible when many leaders were jailed or in exile. She was also convicted in connection with kidnapping and assault, implicated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the violence of the Mandela United Football Club, and later convicted of fraud. Any serious account has to hold both records at once: the resistance to apartheid and the harm done in the name of that resistance. She was neither only a symbol of endurance nor only a figure of scandal. She was a political actor whose choices, under extreme pressure and afterward, left a record that is still argued over in South Africa.