The growing distasteful commentary by white South Africans and some Negropeans on the death of Winnie Mandela not only displays their sadistic nature towards black lives, but that they have always wanted Winnie Mandela's blood.
When the brutality of their earnest system of murder, hatred and ceaseless violence couldn't break her convictions and loyalty to freedom nor kill her unyielding resilience during apartheid peak hour, they sought to speak ill about her to finish what apartheid couldn't do, which is to assassinate and terminate her character.
What they forget is that Winfred Nomzamo Madikizela Mandela was never for them; they who stripped her of her personal dignity, imprisoned her against her universal human rights, ridiculed her private life and injured her womanhood.
Winfred was for us the African children, whose parents were criminalized by whiteness and all its elements, for demanding their freedom, African voices and their land from a bitterly hateful settler minority. Winfred was for the migrant blacks who were forced by the white establishment to go waste their lives away at the peripheral wasteland of racial hatred, engineered poverty, tribal drunkenness and generational seed of ignorance and death.
Today, they cry over Stompie Seipie as if they ever cared about him when they actually killed millions of Stompie Seipie's because they wanted to get to Winfred and those she protected with her life. At some point, South Africa was a huge industrial imprisonment complex to hold back black lives. Its poorly established hospitals and schools for blacks were concentration camps for blacks to die. The South African police and the army, not only beat, hanged and hated black lives but fed chemical and biological agents to both the young and old simply because they were black militants who agitated for freedom and for the collapse and removal of white minority rule.
The white men in South Africa today has no moral codes to pass judgement on whether Winfred was right or wrong. They have no such capacity. They shouldn't even be allowed to possess such audacity to be parasitic to her death because they have always wanted to see her black body wheeled to the graveyard in Soweto, accompanied by cries of shack dwellers and poor migrant workers. They wanted her dead many years ago. They wanted her prosecuted and persecuted where the system failed. Simply because she was Winfred Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela.
Winfred was strong, beautiful and angry. And they hated that. They despised Winfred for her strength because she was us. And because she was us, she was in a perpetual state of rebellion and Revolution.
They wanted to railroad her, to distract and destroy her.
But they failed.
At some point when the struggle to free the African Child and the family from the yoke of white rule, and the struggle was zigzagging to the horizon, it was Winfred who breathed a new lease of life into it. She singlehandedly resuscitated a people's revolution when all men were either in bandages, imprisoned or forced to run to foreign bushes and hostile environments to regroup.
She held many forts for many people.
Even when there will be a time in the future when it will no longer be profitable and fashionable to quote struggle heroes and freedom fighters to justify blackness, Winfred will always remain what Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkhruma calls "A Black Star."
She was way ahead of the politics of politics. She was about the politics of black African people.
And Winfred was beyond the rhetoric of freedom songs and the politics of oppression because some of those who persecuted her in freedom, were her own comrades and black people whom she sacrificed so much for by giving them her all. Many still tell hurtful lies about her sincerities in a bid to silence her character in democracy, but they failed because they couldn't touch her inner soulful mystery. When they wanted to write her off pages of history, black lives from squatter camps, mining and cotton fields of South Africa, walked her back into history books to represent them in the house of the master and Uncle Toms.
And anyone who sought to tame her was always compensated with her full flight into immeasurable rage. No one could railroad her. She refused to listen and to behave. Winfred was defiant to the last drop of blood against any human system that sought to silence her in marriage, in war and peacetime. She was too rebellious to cry for herself and her black children. Instead, she healed the wounded, nursed the broken pieces of black lives back to life, comforted the widows whilst leading the militant and radicals to the battlefields across the country. For many years, she became the struggle anchor of our lives so much so that it didn't matter to us when she lost her titles as the First Lady. Infact, she carried our brokenness and hers and soldiered on. With the weight of our suffocation and burden of desperate agitations, she walked taller in pointed ways to the promised land, which like Martin Luther King, she will never fully enjoy because she was betrayed by many because none was braver and clearer than Winfred Madikizela Mandela.
Still her life sadness and brokenness is nothing compared to her nurturing rebellious nature that earned her the undisputed title of "Mother of the Nation". She fought for the African Child way better than biological mothers did for their own.
Even in death, Winfred is still rebellious. She just decided to go unexpectedly when everybody is resting during Easter holidays to test their faith in humanity and universality of beliefs. She was an unusual being. A very rare animal that fought some of her biggest battles alone without retreat. She used her awake mind and depth of her consciousness to fight army generals and their troops. She prevailed over the world of injustices, war and hate, without firing a single bullet.
She fought a great fight; a long, bitter fight that can never be measured by the length of time nor the amount of blood lost in rage and endurance.
Go well Nubian Beauty. Go well the black rose of the black revolution across the world. You will forever remain our black goddess; the deity of a black revolution both in life and death. Soon, we the black ones, will worship the grounds you walked in your times of great pains and the greatest moments of joy of all your 81 years. Go well fighter.
Rest in Power
Mama Nobadle Nomzamo the princess of Madikizela family.
