REDI TLHABI: Winnie was a fighter when fighters were needed
'She showed up when it mattered the most. Her love for people was as fierce as her politics'
In her lifetime, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was called names, many of them scathing; from terrorist, rebel and murderer to being reduced to "Nelson's wife". These pejoratives have stuck to her despite no court ever finding her guilty of murder. A section of our population and Western media have ignored the fact that her lawyers, prominent human rights lawyers like George Bizos and former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke, have reiterated that Winnie had no hand in the murder of Stompie Seipei. White South Africans who have never cared about the hundreds of black lives butchered by the state in its bloody onslaught, who have not bothered to learn the names of those who died in police cells, who did not blink when men and women were disappearing in numbers as the state cracked down on anti-apartheid activists, who did not care that Winnie spent months in solitary confinement - tortured, harassed, violated, banished while her little girls had to fend for themselves and her husband w...
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