Winnie as I love to remember her: so beautiful, so serene and yet to experience bitterness and hatred

And yet – there is a sense of embattlement in her eyes. It’s as if she has been resisting all her life. She had only three years of happiness with Nelson, and those years were filled with the stress of knowing that the power of the enemy was great.

I remember so well how much we feared for her after the Rivonia trial, in which Nelson was sentenced to life and his exile on Robben Island. I was 14 or 15, just starting to be obsessed by politics. Even at that age I took a handful of posters well after dark and tacked them to trees, protesting against Apartheid. We felt relatively safe in our sequestered Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg – even though my parents knew quite a few of the Jewish Anti-Apartheid activists, including Dennis Goldberg and Rusty Bernstein. Even though our phone was probably tapped, probably because of Father’s support for black trade unions. Even though Mother made her protests with the Black Sash, those immensely brave women who, wearing their mourning sashes protested in silence at the death of democracy. For much more detail, read my first novel Umfaan’s Heroes.

While I was having my middle-class adolescent white privileged guilt and indulging in safe protests Winnie’s house was being raided, she was arrested, people she knew and loved were dying and the ANC and Umkonto We Sizwe were waging war on the madness of Apartheid.

The death of Winnie Madikizela Mandela leaves me so conflicted. During the bitter years of the Struggle against Apartheid she represented incredible fortitude. She was certainly one of my idols, on a level with Martin Luther King and Nelson himself. And then came the horrible stories of the murder of Stompie Makoetsi, allegations of corruption and the sheer madness of the so-called “Football Team”, her acolytes who terrorised and killed many in the townships. Finally, there were the “necklacings”, the killing of so-called traitors by burning a tyre around their necks.

But remember this: before  her transformation from a beautiful idealistic freedom fighter to a brutal manic leader of a lunatic fringe came her arrest, imprisonment and torture. In her words, she was “brutalised” by it.

Of course there is no excuse for many of her actions, but there is, at least partly, an explanation. And part of that explanation is the sheer brutality and injustice of Apartheid, an inhuman system of racial division enforced by brutal laws and an establishment prepared to use cruelty without limit. Compared to the actions of the South African Police, BOSS and the whole security establishment, Winnie’s actions were fairly insignificant.

We need to remember her as beauty distorted by cruelty. And ultimately, as the Mother of the Nation.