Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Who was Winnie Mandela?
South African anti-apartheid campaigner and former first lady Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has died aged 81.
She and her former husband Nelson Mandela, who were both jailed, were a symbol of the country's anti-apartheid struggle for three decades.
However, in later years her reputation became tainted legally and politically.
Crowds of mourners and political figures flocked to her home in Soweto, in Johannesburg, after news of her death broke.
Family spokesman Victor Dlamini confirmed earlier on Monday that Mrs Mandela "succumbed peacefully in the early hours of Monday afternoon surrounded by her family and loved ones" following a long illness, which had seen her go in and out of hospital since the start of the year.
'Mother of the Nation'
Mrs Madikizela-Mandela was born in 1936 in the Eastern Cape - then known as Transkei.
She was a trained social worker when she met her future husband in the 1950s. They went on to have two daughters together.
They were married for a total of 38 years, although for almost three decades of that time they were separated due to Mr Mandela's long imprisonment.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "I know my soul is scarred": Winnie Mandela on her and Nelson's struggle
It was Mrs Madikizela-Mandela who took his baton after he was jailed for life, becoming an international symbol of resistance to apartheid. She too was jailed for her role in the fight for justice and equality.
To her supporters, she became known affectionately as "Mother of the Nation".
Who has paid tribute?
In a televised address President Cyril Ramaphosa - whom Mrs Madikizela-Mandela praised earlier this year - called her as a "voice of defiance" against white-minority rule.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Mrs Madikizela-Mandela outside court the day her husband was sentenced to life in prison
"In the face of exploitation, she was a champion of justice and equality," he said on Monday.
"She as an abiding symbol of the desire of our people to be free".
Retired archbishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu said she was a "defining symbol of the struggle against apartheid".
"Her courageous defiance was deeply inspirational to me, and to generations of activists," he added.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Mike Wooldridge watches as Nelson Mandela was released from prison
Energy Minister Jeff Radebe, reading out a statement on behalf of the family, paid tribute to "a colossus who strode the Southern African political landscape".
"As the ANC we dip our revolutionary banner in salute of this great icon of our liberation struggle," he said.
"The Mandela family are deeply grateful for the gift of her life and even as our hearts break at her passing we urge all those who loved her to celebrate this most remarkable South African woman."
African National Congress (ANC) chairperson Gwede Mantashe said: "With the departure of Mama Winnie, [we have lost] one of the very few who are left of our stalwarts and icons. She was one of those who would tell us exactly what is wrong and right, and we are going to be missing that guidance."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa paid tribute to the 'Mother of the Nation"
South Africa's pride and joy - and my neighbour
Analysis by Milton Nkosi, BBC News, Johannesburg
I knew Winnie Madikizela-Mandela personally. We come from the same neighbourhood in Soweto.
To many, she was the pride and joy of the nation, an icon in her own right - never mind the fact she was Nelson Mandela's wife.
Mrs Madikizela-Mandela was also the first black social worker in the country. Her love and desire to help those in need was always burning from deep inside.
But she was not nothing but sweet talk. She met the brutality of racial segregation with fire. Each time the police came to arrest her at her home in Orlando West, she held her own.
She never gave in. Not one inch - and sometimes, this landed her in trouble. As anti-apartheid activist Mosioua Lekota noted in her defence: "Those who did nothing under apartheid never made mistakes."
She will be remembered for her fight against an inhumane system, rather than for the mistakes she made in that fight.
Why was she controversial?
However, Mrs Madikizela-Mandela found herself mired in scandal for decades.
She was accused of conducting a virtual reign of terror in parts of Soweto by other members of the ANC in the late 1980s, and heard backing the practice of "necklacing" - putting burning tyres around suspected informants' necks.
She was also found guilty of kidnapping and sentenced to six years' imprisonment for her involvement in the death of 14-year-old township militant Stompie Seipei. She always denied the allegation, and the sentence was reduced to a fine.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mrs Madikizela-Mandela (pictured in 1988) became a symbol for the anti-apartheid movement in her own right
Mr Mandela, who stood by her throughout the accusations, was finally released from prison in February 1990.
But two years later, their marriage crumbled. The couple divorced in 1996, but she kept his surname and maintained ties with him.
She stayed involved in politics, but was again embroiled in controversy when she was convicted of fraud in 2003.
South African anti-apartheid campaigner and former wife of Nelson Mandela became mired in controversy
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa but also one of its most controversial figures, has died aged 81.
The ex-wife of the former South African president Nelson Mandela, she died at a hospital in Johannesburg after a long illness, her personal assistant, Zodwa Zwane, said.
Winnie Mandela was loved and loathed, but she earned her place in history | Ralph Mathekga Read more
Seen as the “mother of the nation” by many who admired her steely leadership, firebrand rhetoric and courageous activism against a brutal racist regime, Madikizela-Mandela was also repeatedly accused of being linked to violence andcorruption.
She was one of the few remaining representatives of the generation of activists who led the fight against apartheid. Her often negative image abroad contrasts with her deep and long-lasting popularity within her homeland.
A statement from her family said the former political prisoner, who used her family name of Madikizela after her divorce, had been “in and out of hospital since the beginning of the year”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nelson and Winnie Mandela at their wedding in Transkei, South Africa, in 1958. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock
“She succumbed peacefully surrounded by her family and loved ones in the early hours of Monday afternoon,” the statement said.
“Mrs Madikezela-Mandela was one of the greatest icons of the struggle against apartheid. She fought valiantly against the apartheid state … sacrificed her life for the freedom of the country and helped to give the struggle for justice in South Africa one of its most recognisable faces.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another veteran of the struggle, was among those paying tribute. He said she was “a defining symbol” of the anti-apartheid struggle whose “courageous defiance was deeply inspirational to ... generations of activists”.
Fikile Mbalula, a senior member of the African National Congress (ANC), described “Mama Winnie” as “a great symbol for the resistance against a brutal government”.
Jeff Radebe, South Africa’s minister of energy, said: “Mama Winnie Mandela was recognised by the people as the Mother of the Nation. As the ANC we dip our banner.”
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela obituary Read more
Yet there was a darker side. “What you have in her is both the sense of possibility and failure together; hope and disappointment,” Njabulo Ndebele, the author of a novel about her life, told the Guardian in 2011.
Born in the poor Eastern Cape province, Madikizela-Mandela’s childhood was “a blistering inferno of racial hatred”, in the words of British biographer Emma Gilbey, and she became further politicised at an early age in her job as a hospital social worker.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nelson Mandela and his then wife Winnie after his release from prison in February 1990. Photograph: Reuters
Attractive, articulate, clever and committed, the 22-year-old Winnie caught the eye of Mandela, 18 years her elder, at a Soweto bus stop in 1957. They were married a year later.
But the union was short-lived. Mandela had gone underground by 1960, was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason.
During her husband’s 27-year incarceration, Madikizela-Mandela campaigned tirelessly for his release and for the rights of black South Africans, establishing a massive personal following.
Tortured and subjected to repeated house arrest, she was kept under surveillance and, in 1977, banished to a remote town in another province.
Madikizela-Mandela said the experience of more than a year in solitary confinement changed her. “What brutalised me so much was that I knew what it is to hate,” she said.
“The years of imprisonment hardened me ... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life ... 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.”
As the violence of the apartheid authorities reached new intensity, Madikizela-Mandela was drawn into a world of internecine betrayal, reprisals and atrocity.
“We have no guns – we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol,” she told a township crowd. “Together, hand-in-hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.” Necklacing was the term for killing a perceived traitor with a petrol-filled burning tyre around the neck.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Madikizela-Mandela at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December 2013. Photograph: Herman Verwey/REX/Shutterstock
Most notoriously, Madikizela-Mandela was found guilty of ordering the kidnapping of a 14-year-old boy, Stompie Seipei, also known as Stompie Moeketsi, who was beaten and later had his throat slit by members of her personal bodyguard, the “Mandela United Football Club”, in 1989.
Within a year, she gave the clenched-fist salute of black power as she walked hand-in-hand with Mandela out of Cape Town’s Victor Verster prison on 11 February 1990.
For husband and wife, it was a crowning moment that led four years later to the end of centuries of white domination when Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.
But for Madikizela-Mandela, the end of apartheid marked the start of a string of legal and political troubles that, accompanied by tales of her glamorous lifestyle, kept her in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: a life in pictures Read more
Appearing at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up to account for atrocities committed by both sides in the anti-apartheid struggle, Madikizela-Mandela refused to show remorse for abductions and murders carried out in her name.
Only after pleading from Tutu, the anguished TRC chairman, did she admit grudgingly that “things went horribly wrong”.
In its final report, the TRC ruled that Madikizela-Mandela was “politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the MUFC”.
She and Mandela separated in 1992 and her reputation slipped further when he sacked her from his cabinet in 1995 after allegations of corruption. The couple divorced a year later.
“I have a good relationship with Mandela. But I am not Mandela’s product. I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy,” she told reporters.
Still unafraid of controversy and still popular, in 2008 she took up the cause of immigrants who had come under attack in widespread riots. A year later, she won a parliamentary seat.
Though she was harsh about his record in office, Madikizela-Mandela could be seen almost daily visiting her ailing former husband during his last months in 2013.
In her last interview, given last month and rebroadcast on Monday afternoon by state broadcasters, Madikizela-Mandela spoke of how she had always put the collective good of the ANC before her individual wellbeing.
The party, in government in South Africa since the 1994 elections, faces a tough election next year. Officials and supporters hope that the new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who took power in February, can reverse the decline in support suffered by the ANC under previous incumbent Jacob Zuma.
Ramaphosa’s office said the president would be visiting Madikizela-Mandela’s home in Soweto on Monday evening.
Though analysts have now upgraded expectations of economic growth in South Africa, huge challenges remain. Unemployment remains at an historic high of 27.7% across the general population and as high as 68% among young people. Corruption has not just undermined public finances but also public confidence in the state.
“I would be extremely naive if i suggested to you that South Africa today is what we dreamt of when we gave up our lives .... We came from a very brutal period of our history, a country that was segregated, [and] to transition from that era to where we are today has been a really painful journey, ” Madikizela-Mandela said in the interview.
Madikizela-Mandela’s given name, Nomzamo, has been variously translated as “one who strives” and “she who must endure trials”.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist and former wife of Nelson Mandela, has died. During her husband’s incarceration, she campaigned tirelessly for his release and the rights of black South Africans. She later became a controversial figure in South African politics due to allegations of corruption and involvement in acts of brutality
During Nelson Mandela’s 1962 trial in Pretoria, before he was sent to Robben Island, Winnie turned up each day, often magnificent in traditional chiefdom dress.
My anti-apartheid activist mother Adelaine was often alone, showing solidarity, in the whites-only section of the public gallery. Once, when my younger sisters went with her, dressed in their primary school uniforms, Winnie bent down and kissed them, to the very evident horror and disgust of the onlooking white policemen, who spat and cursed. The very notion of a black woman behaving that way towards two blonde girls offended every apartheid instinct. But Winnie didn’t care.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela obituary Read more
She was indomitably defiant. Later, suffering so much and bringing up her own two girls while Nelson Mandela served his 27 years in prison, she was beaten up, banned, then banished to remote Brandfort in the Orange Free State, harassed and imprisoned too.
Once, when relatives turned up unexpectedly in Brandfort, she was convicted of contravening her banning order. This, among many other things, restricted her to meeting only one person at a time. Fearless in the face of the apartheid police state, she became the increasingly iconic representative of Nelson Mandela.
She also tutored him. Winnie was among the first to understand the significance when, in 1976, black children were gunned down while protesting against apartheid schooling in Soweto, outside Johannesburg. Soweto exploded, triggering fresh resistance and repression in other black townships throughout the country.
Tragic, heroic and ultimately deeply flawed, Winnie can be correctly criticised for her rogue later life
Visiting Mandela on Robben Island, she urged him to identify with and support this new wave of unrest, even when it took the form of a wave of “black consciousness” that veterans in his African National Congress saw as offensive to their non-racialism.
It was nothing of the kind. Mandela listened to Winnie, and embraced the young activists, who soon began joining him on the Island, rebellious and suspicious of his old guard.
The two had fallen in love after Nelson, two decades older, had spotted the vivacious, charismatic young social worker waiting for a bus as he drove past.
But as she later observed, she never had the conventional marriage she hoped for. She had married a freedom fighter, not a husband. Soon he was on trial, then released, then driven underground when they would occasionally meet illicitly; he hardly knew his two daughters when he was sent to prison.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nelson and Winnie Mandela in their wedding day Photograph: AFP/Getty
Security services made it as difficult as possible for her to visit, preventing her from travelling by train, forcing her to fly or drive the 800 miles. Mandela’s letters to her displayed a touching affection and deep admiration. Throughout, she was steadfast in his support. But she became increasingly wayward, taking younger lovers into her new Soweto home. In the 1980s she became embroiled in the murky murder of young activist Stompie Moeketsie, for which she was later tried and found guilty, the judge labelling her “a liar”.
Nelson, after his release, spoke of being the “loneliest man” after their divorce. But he never shunned her. She had become a quasi-revolutionary to Mandela’s reformism in the transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy, presaging a debate live today, especially among younger elements in South Africa.
Tragic, heroic and ultimately deeply flawed, Winnie can be correctly criticised for her rogue later life, but her courage and radical spirit in adversity should never be forgotten.
• Peter Hain is a former Labour MP and minister for Africa. His biography, Mandela: His Essential Life, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in July
