GHALEB CACHALIA | Docuseries reframes Winnie as political actor, not icon

The release of The Trials of Winnie Mandela arrives at a moment when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is being remade in the public imagination.

As the Netflix series draws on her own voice and archival record it joins a broader cultural and intellectual movement intent on reclaiming her, not as Nelson Mandela’s embattled spouse but as a political actor in her own right.

Recent scholarship and art have worked to decaricaturise Madikizela-Mandela. From Sisonke Msimang’s The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela to feminist collections and visual reinterpretations, she is recast as a figure of radical, even proto-intersectional feminism, who resisted apartheid, patriarchy and social constraint before such frameworks had formal language.

In this telling her defiance, style and refusal to submit become political acts of reclamation.

This reclamation matters. Madikizela-Mandela bore the gendered burdens of struggle in ways that were distinct and often invisible. Exile, harassment, banishment and the policing of her body and identity were not incidental to her politics; they were constitutive of them. To ignore this is to misunderstand both her and the broader experience of black South African women under apartheid.

But the present moment risks sliding into canonisation. The docuseries, like much of the recent revival, confronts us with a view that participation in a just struggle does not confer moral immunity. Madikizela-Mandela’s life does not resolve neatly into heroism or villainy. It insists instead on a more difficult recognition that oppression degrades not only the lives of its victims, but also the moral terrain on which they act.

This is not a call for false equivalence. Apartheid was a system of profound and violent injustice, and resistance to it was necessary. But necessity does not sanctify all methods and nor does it absolve all actors. It’s best to steer clear of oversimplifying; replacing a myth of purity in place of a caricature of excess.

There is a yearning for figures of unyielding defiance, set against what is often seen as the compromise and moral ambiguity of the democratic era. In this binary she becomes the militant counterpoint to Mandela’s reconciliation.

To defend Madikizela-Mandela uncritically in the name of gender justice is to elevate the exceptional at the expense of the many.

But this flattens both figures into archetypes ― saint and radical ― and obscures the fact that each navigated a different moral landscape shaped by circumstance, temperament and historical moment. Neither was reducible to the roles now assigned to them. What is needed is a more demanding honesty.

As Njabulo Ndebele suggested in The Cry of Winnie Mandela ― disrupting her singularity; allowing us to hear not only her voice but also the silences that surround it ― other lives are shaped by absence and endurance. In that context she becomes less an icon to be defended or condemned and more a lens through which to examine the ethical complexities of struggle itself.

Feminism too must resist easy answers. To defend Madikizela-Mandela uncritically in the name of gender justice is to elevate the exceptional at the expense of the many. To judge her without regard for the gendered violence she endured is equally incomplete. A more robust feminism would hold that women are moral agents accountable for their actions and that the conditions under which they act are profoundly unequal.

So, let’s not resolve Madikizela-Mandela and refuse resolution, allowing her to remain discomfortingly where admiration and unease coexist ― resisting closure that myth demands. Let’s also take seriously the idea that a society’s maturity lies not in how it venerates icons, but in how it confronts contradictions.

In revisiting Madikizela-Mandela the question is not whether she can be redeemed or reclaimed but whether we are willing to engage her fully as a figure shaped by extraordinary courage, profound damage and much moral ambiguity. Anything less is not remembrance. It is escape.

• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.