Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
Anti-apartheid leader whose own record was stained by violence carried out in her name
Nomzamo Winnifred Madikizela was born in the Transkei and trained as South Africa's first Black medical social worker before marrying Nelson Mandela in 1958. When he was jailed for life in 1964 she became the public face of the banned African National Congress inside the country, and the state answered by banning her, restricting her movements and detaining her repeatedly, including seventeen months in solitary confinement in 1969 and 1970 under the Terrorism Act.
Exiled to the remote town of Brandfort for eight years from 1977, she turned isolation into a platform, giving interviews to foreign journalists and building a following that made her a symbol of defiance in her own right, known to supporters as the Mother of the Nation.
Her later years told a darker story. In the violent townships of the late 1980s she surrounded herself with young men known as the Mandela United Football Club, who beat and killed people accused of collaborating with police. Fourteen-year-old Stompie Moeketsi was murdered after being held at her house in 1988, and in 1997 South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found her politically and morally responsible for the killings carried out by the group.
She was convicted of fraud in 2003 but remained an ANC member of parliament until her death in 2018, an unresolved mixture of liberation heroine and perpetrator of abuse.