THE AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) was yesterday trying to contact Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, to verify an astonishing attack she launched against him in an interview this week.
Ms Madikizela-Mandela (73), an MP with the ruling party in South Africa’s parliament and a member of its National Executive Committee (NEC), reportedly told London’s Evening Standard newspaper Mr Mandela had betrayed the country’s poor black population.
ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said yesterday the former liberation movement was trying to track down Ms Madikizela-Mandela, who is in the US, so she could be asked if the quotes attributed to her in the British press were accurate.
“We have to be fair, so we would want to hear from her whether she has been correctly quoted. It sounds very much out of character, but we will want to know in what capacity she was speaking because this sounds like a very drastic attack on the former president,” he told local reporters.
The newspaper reported Ms Madikizela-Mandela said her former husband was a “corporate foundation” that was “wheeled out” when the ANC wanted to raise money. “This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family,” Ms MadikizelaMandela said in the interview.
“You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died. Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out. Mandela let us down.
“He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize] with his jailer [former South African president FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand, they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart?” she asked.
The relationship between Winnie and Nelson Mandela has never been an easy one. The couple divorced in 1996 after 38 years of marriage, although her husband spent the vast majority of that time behind bars because of his struggle against apartheid.
The 91-year-old’s former wife is no stranger to controversy. Among other things she was sentenced to six years in jail in 1991 for the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi, a 14-year-old boy subsequently murdered for allegedly being a police informer. Her sentence was later reduced to a fine.
In addition to her attack on her former husband, Ms Madikizela-Mandela lashed out at Arch-bishop Desmond Tutu, who she called “a cretin” for the work he carried out with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to bring a level of closure to relatives of those murdered under apartheid.
“What good does the truth do? How does it help anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried? That Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here . . . I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me,” she reportedly said.