Winne Mandela A Life

 Winnie Mandela A Life by Anne Marie Bezdrob

I’ve recently read Nelson Mandela’s remarkable Long Walk to Freedom, George Bizos’ autobiography and Desmond Tutu’s story (Rabble Rouser for Peace)  - but I think none of them sensitised me to what happened in South Africa between 1948 and 1994  as much as this book did.

Perhaps because she has to deal most directly with the immediate effects on her family, there’s something hyper-real about the challenges a woman on her own has to face - and Ms. Madikizela-Mandela certainly knows about being alone: held in solitary confinement, banished to the depths of the country-side (she’s a city girl through and through)  and separated for nearly thirty years from the man she loved so dearly.

You have to admire her for coming through it at all.

As Ms. du Preez Bezdrob writes: “Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned in harsh conditions and forced to perform years of hard labour, said he had found his own brief encounter with solitary confinement - three days - ‘the most forbidding aspect of prison life.’

“Winnie Mandela had been in solitary confinement for thirteen months.”

Not just during those thirteen months but during most of her adult life, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela went through hell - and I recommend this book to you because I think her story, more than any of those other liberation biographies, gets to the heart of what it must have been like for the ordinary person in the dark years.

Above all, Winnie Mandela A Life helped me to understand my country in the twenty first century.

 Buy it here