XPost: alt.obituaries, soc.culture.south-africa, soc.culture.african   
   XPost: za.politics, soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Winnie Mandela was a hero. If she’d been white, there would be no   
   debate   
      
   Afua Hirsch   
      
   Tue 3 Apr 2018 15.00 BST   
   Last modified on Tue 3 Apr 2018 22.00 BST   
      
   Heroes are curious things. Ours have roots in the ancient Graeco-Roman   
   sense of the concept, which places a premium on military victory.   
   What’s problematic is how many of our heroes embody an inherent level   
   of violence, as is unsurprisingly the case with people whose main   
   accomplishments arise from war. We are tolerant about people who   
   regarded the working classes as an abomination (Wellington), the   
   transatlantic slave trade as a good idea (Nelson) or Indians as   
   repulsive (Churchill), because we think the ends – defeating Napoleon   
   or Hitler – justified the means.   
      
   Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as the press coverage of her death this   
   week shows, is not entitled to the same rose-tinted eulogy as our   
   white British men. She is “controversial” and a “bully”. One newspaper   
   columnist was boldly willing to abandon his usual restraint in not   
   writing ill of the dead specially for this “odious, toxic individual”.   
      
   The media reports have raised the horrific murder of 14-year-old   
   Stompie Moeketsi, though few have been unduly troubled by the fact   
   that this was a crime she always denied any involvement in, or by the   
   ample evidence of the lengths to which the apartheid regime went to   
   infiltrate and smear her and her followers.   
   South Africa's 'Mother of the Nation', Winnie Madikizela-Mandela dies   
   - video   
      
   Sadly, I suspect much of the newly discovered outrage sparked by   
   Madikizela-Mandela’s death has little to do with any recent conversion   
   to the cause of Black Lives Matter, or accompanying grief for the fate   
   of little Stompie – one of so many black children who lost their lives   
   during the brutality of apartheid and the struggle against it. What   
   it’s really about is a reluctance to admit that apartheid was so   
   wrong, and so entrenched; and that without the resilience and vision   
   of Madikizela-Mandela, and those of her ilk, it would not have been   
   brought down.   
      
   Britain’s heroes are allowed to have waged war. The warriors against   
   white supremacist oppression, on the other hand, are not. When, for   
   instance, I questioned Piers Morgan over the appropriateness of having   
   a 50-metre column in Trafalgar Square to commemorate Admiral Nelson,   
   he spat that Nelson Mandela has a statue despite being a “terrorist”.   
   When I debated with a renowned naval historian over his adulation of   
   the admiral, the argument wound its way to Haiti – the only example in   
   history of slaves successfully overthrowing their masters and   
   establishing their own republic – and whether this was a victory for   
   the enslaved over their oppressors (my view) or a tragedy for the   
   plantation owners who were killed in the process (his).   
      
   There is no end to the contortions in our psyche. Who now – outside   
   South Africa, where I have heard its demise lamented more than once –   
   would defend the apartheid regime? It’s easy to condemn in hindsight.   
   Yet we have forgotten what it actually takes to overthrow such tyranny   
   when the legal and moral force of a sovereign state was on the side of   
   white supremacy. Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have   
   done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books,   
   badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure   
   and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.   
      
       Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room   
      
   It took women such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She was, as the   
   world’s media have had to be repeatedly reminded this week, not an   
   “activist”: she was a leader in a liberation struggle. She survived –   
   during more than 35 years of apartheid – surveillance, threats,   
   harassment, arrest and imprisonment, 491 days in solitary confinement   
   and eight years in exile. The methods of torture used against her   
   included, according to one account, denying her sanitary products so   
   that she was found, in detention, covered in her own menstrual blood.   
      
   I doubt the Daily Mail, recalling Madikizela-Mandela’s life this week   
   as “blood-soaked”, appreciated the irony of this choice of phrase, nor   
   that of judging her – rather than the apartheid regime she helped   
   overthrow – the “bully”.   
      
   Our ambivalence about apartheid is the elephant in the room. As a   
   nation, one of our techniques for glossing over this uncomfortable   
   fact has been overly beatifying Nelson Mandela, whose posthumous glory   
   has always struck me as coming at the cost of forgetting the others.   
   Who now remembers the names of Robert Sobukwe – the profound   
   pan-Africanist whose medical treatment for fatal lung cancer was   
   obstructed by the apartheid government, or Elias Motsoaledi, convicted   
   at Rivonia alongside Mandela and not released from Robben Island until   
   26 years later.   
   Winnie Mandela was loved and loathed, but she earned her place in   
   history | Ralph Mathekga   
   Read more   
      
   We consider Nelson Mandela to be safe because of his message of   
   forgiveness, because of truth and reconciliation, because he accepted   
   the Nobel peace prize with apartheid-regime president FW de Klerk –   
   decisions to which Madikizela-Mandela was fundamentally opposed. She   
   was a radical until the end. Each rejection of that radicalism is an   
   endorsement of the tyranny she fought against.   
      
   But is it surprising that we endorse it? An endless litany of heroes   
   were either architects of, or happy to take part in, the very   
   apartheid Madikizela-Mandela sacrificed so much to help end. Among   
   them are those at the centre of our current statue wars – Cecil   
   Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, Jan Smuts – all immortalised on prominent   
   plinths. It’s hard to resist the conclusion – comparing the fact that   
   it’s these people whom we immortalise, and those such as   
   Madikizela-Mandela whom we demonise – that we are still undecided   
   about which side of history we, as a nation, are on.   
      
   It doesn’t have to be this way. Denmark this week unveiled its first   
   statue of a black woman. It does not commemorate someone who fed   
   neatly into diversifying the existing order – the limited kind of   
   black hero we in Britain seem willing to accept – but the “three   
   queens” of the Caribbean island of St Croix, who led an unprecedented   
   revolt against Danish colonial rule. Doing so requires Denmark to take   
   a new look at its true history, seeing through its 20th-century   
      
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