A biography for Winnie Madikizela-Mandelahasn’t been written yet.
“We shall liberate our country.”
“I'm like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons... I stand defiant, tall and strong.”
“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.”
“There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn't any pain I haven't known.”
“The life of the President's First Lady would not have been for me. And I don't know how I would have been as a housewife.”
“I was so hooked by the fight for freedom that nothing mattered to us so long as we fulfilled the dream of years and years of our people being liberated. I thought normal life would come the day after.”
“Mandela did go to prison, and he went in there as a burning revolutionary. But look what came out. Mandela let us down.”
“I am not the sort of person to carry beautiful flowers and be an ornament to everyone.”
“We have a shared destiny, a shared responsibility to save the world from those who attempt to destroy it.”
“I believe in myself and the justice I've fought for all my life.”
“I am a living symbol of the white man's fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.”
“You all must realize that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others - hundreds who languished in prison and died. Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle.”
“Nelson was locked up on Robben Island, and wives like me had been warned we would bring our husbands home as corpses from that place. But I always believed he would be released. It was my duty to have a home ready for us.”
“This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.”
“I often wonder why I attract so much criticism.”
“In the normal course of things, journalists want their story, and as soon as they are through with it, they pack their cameras and go. That was never the impression that David Astor gave when you were interviewed by him. It was far deeper than that.”
“I wanted to be a doctor at some point, and I was always bringing home strays from school: people who were too poor to pay fees or have food. My parents never rebuked me or told me that they were hard-pressed, too.”
“It dawned on me then that you either had to survive apartheid, or you had to perish with it. And I decided to survive.”
“I don't want a grand villa in a rich suburb alongside white people where many of my former comrades choose to live. I would never betray my roots in that way.”
“Those 18 months in solitary confinement... bruised my soul. If I had had a weapon, I would have fought my way out.”