Winnie Madikizela Mandela was born on September 26, 1936 and died on April 2, 2018. She was Nelson Mandela’s second wife and a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician.
Winnie Mandela was a deputy minister of arts and culture from 1994 to 1996 and a member of Parliament from 1994 to 2003 and 2009 till her death in 2018. She was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) political party’s National Executive Committee and served as the leader of the ANC’s Women’s League. Winnie was nicknamed “Mother of the Nation” by her supporters.
She married anti-apartheid rights activist Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg in 1958, and they had two children together. She was born to a Xhosa royal family in Bizana and was a skilled social worker. After Mandela was imprisoned in 1963, she became his public face for the next 27 years. She rose to prominence in the domestic anti-apartheid struggle during this time.
Winnie Mandela was detained by apartheid state security forces on multiple occasions, tortured, and transferred to a remote town, where she spent months in solitary confinement.
17 Winnie Mandela Quotes
- “They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become!”
2. “It was in the townships where we shed so much blood. Nothing could have been achieved without the sacrifice of the people. Black people.”
3. “I was the most unmarried married woman.”
4. “It is only when all black groups, join hands and speak with one voice that we shall be a bargaining force which will decide its own destiny.”
5. “I’m not sorry. I will never be sorry. I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything.”
6. “We have a shared destiny, a shared responsibility to save the world from those who attempt to destroy it.”
7. “I will not allow the selfless efforts of my husband and his friends to be abandoned. I will continue the struggle for a free and equal South Africa.”
8. “The overwhelming majority of women accept the patriarchy and protect it. Traditionally, the violated wife offloads her aggression onto the daughter-in-law. Men dominate women through the agency of women themselves.”
9. “To those who oppose us, we say, Strike the woman, and you strike the rock.”
10. “There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”
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11. “We have no guns — we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol. Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”
12. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy.”
13. “Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”
14. “Preventing the conflicts of tomorrow means changing the mindsets of the youth of today.”
15. “I cannot forgive him “Nelson Mandela” for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.”
16. “The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.”
17. “If you are to free yourselves you must break the chains of oppression yourselves. Only then can we express our dignity, only when we have liberated ourselves can we cooperate with other groups. Any acceptance of humiliation, indignity or insult is acceptance of inferiority.”
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