Remembering Mama Winnie: Till we avenge our struggle martyrs instead of commemorating their assassinations, white minority supremacy will never end in South Africa

By Kim Heller

In the cradle of humankind, white supremacy is a mother who nurses her spawn on the umbilical cord of black pain. White supremacy feeds her progeny with the enduring obsessive devotion that only a mother knows. Today, almost twenty five years into democracy, the milk of white supremacy continues to flow freely in South Africa sustaining white privilege and well-being, while millions of black mothers across the nation wake to the everyday ache of an impoverished new dawn in which they are unable to nourish their newborns...

The marriage of white convenience and black compromise between oppressor and oppressed in 1994 on the bloodstained bedding of colonialism and apartheid atrocities, was both politically ineffective and morally incapable of giving rise to a truly liberated nation. Freedom in South Africa cannot be healthily reared on a feeding formula that has no measure of social justice and reparation.

The Rainbow Nation delivered a stillborn of economic liberation for whom few of us mourned or wept. Most of us chose not to cast our eye on this pained death.

Rather we celebrated the unconsummated joy of racial reconciliation and the birthing of the Rainbow Nation. Today we should weep for the stillborn liberation that we lost in 1994. We should cry out for economic liberation now, in a collective burst of political consciousness, for if we again abort the birth-cry for a truly free nation, we will forever lie in a crib of compromise, in the force-feed of whiteness.

It is painfully ironic that nourishment for the Rainbow Nation comes largely from black South Africans, oppressed under the colonial and apartheid regimes of terror.

On the whole, black South Africans have tended affectionately to reconciliation and social cohesion in South Africa as if it was a precious being to be loved and nurtured. It is painfully shameful that the majority of white South Africans, the colonial and apartheid oppressors, have shown little or no tender loving care towards reconciliation and social justice in the ‘new’ South Africa.

As white South Africans, we have shed few white tears for the pain we have caused to the black mothers and daughters of this country or cried over the plunder of their dreams, lost in the cruel clasp of the terrorism of racism.

The death of the mother of our nation, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, has exposed, how even in the after-birth of apartheid, the very hopes and dreams of black South Africans have remained in a state of capture. The death of Madikizela-Mandela illuminates how black lives in our Rainbow Nation continue to be tangled and strangled in the forceps of white ideology, instruction and instrument.

As the horror of Stratcom; the government’s omnipotent covert operation to damage and diminish black revolutionary leaders, such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, is fully unveiled. We will learn many painful and inconvenient political truths about the total onslaught by white supremacy and its black collaborators, not only on the mother of the nation but on the black nation as a whole.

While the alleged betrayal of the mother of the nation, by some of her own comrades must be fully confronted; Stratcom should not develop into a ‘divide-and-rule’ battle between comrades, which would be a victory for white supremacy. After all, black disunity is the oiling gel of white supremacy.

Stratcom is best understood in the context of an omnipresent, depraved and desperate bid to ensure that whiteness remains the twenty-four-hour-a-day watchtower of South Africa’s economy, society, political and intellectual feed. In the words of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s daughter, Princess Zenani Dlamini-Mandela, “the apartheid state developed a sophisticated and brutal infrastructure for our oppression”.

In her moving tribute to her mother during the State funeral, Princess Zenani Mandela-Dlamini spoke of how Winnie Madikizela-Mandela fought against “the shackles of the system of terrorism and white supremacy known as Apartheid”. There are too few leaders in the ANC who have confronted white supremacy as fearlessly as Winnie Mandela, and the ANC often appears afraid to disrupt whiteness.

Perhaps the ANC needs to understand that in protecting whiteness, it is persecuting blackness. For as long as the ANC leaders tug expectantly at the treacherous teat of white supremacy, this political party will not deliver black liberation in South Africa. Stratcom is be used to spotlight white supremacy – a system that allows former apartheid leaders to roam free in South Africa, while APLA prisoners languish in prison, and sees top leaders curtsy at the crown of colonial masters, yet fail to kneel in forgiveness at the knees of Marikana widows.

It is time to collectively confront white supremacy with the courage and fortitude of Winnie Mandela. The great revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon said “each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” I believe that the youth of this country has the political courage and fortitude to do this.

In her beautiful tribute to her mother, Zenani said of Winnie “she made the choice that she would raise two families: her personal family and the larger family that was her beloved country. And to her there was no contradiction in this choice, because she cherished freedom as much as she treasured her family. She was not prepared to choose between the two. She believed it was her calling to defend and protect both from the constant assaults by the Apartheid State”.

Zenani also said “one of the most important measures of how someone’s life has been lived is the extent to which they touched others. By this measure my mother’s life was a remarkable one”.

When a mother dies, she leaves behind a longing that will forever linger in a child’s heart. When the mother of the nation dies, she leaves behind a nation whose after-tears never ends.

I weep for the pain we caused to a selfless mother and her two magnificent daughters. The shame of being white in South Africa, weighs heavily on me, especially on days like this.

This article was first published in The New Age Newspaper and republished in uncapturedtruth in 2019