FOR THE LOVE OF WINNIE
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
Column #418 -- Written 2 June 1999
"The deadliest form of violence is poverty."—Gandhi
For the millions of oppressed poor who continue to live in the "New South Africa" the days and nights of living in the post-apartheid nation are not really new. True, the vast network of political prisoners are now free; true, the various and sundry liberation groups have been unbanned, and are thus free to participate in the political process; and true, there is now a vote for all South Africans, even those who are imprisoned, who are now newly eligible to exercise their franchise.
But, for many of this nation’s black millions, many who spent the apartheid years in utter, direst poverty, the present, while pregnant with hope, is still a now that has little real material progress. Unemployment for the Black majority stands at over 50%.
For the people of South Africa, the rich that were rich in the apartheid era are still rich (if not richer) and the poor remain enmeshed and enmired in a muddy poverty. A remarkable woman, the brilliant and passionate Winnie Madikazela-Mandela, continues to fight for the interests of the poor, while the new black bourgeoisie consolidates its place in the new South Africa, and while class becomes a new barrier inserting itself in between the vast population, and the still-wealth-encrusted Boers. She remains the bane of this new bourgeoisie, and the thorn in the side of the wealthy white elite who remain in control of the economic levers of power in the nation. She is projected in the international white supremacist press as a terrorist in a nation that practiced state terror on a scale that was rivaled only by Hitler’s Germany at the height of the Nazi Reich.
When the media attacks someone, it is because they threaten the interests of their corporate and wealthy owners and masters. For this reason, she has lived in the eye of the storm. For her fierce devotion to the Revolution, she remains loved and admired by millions around the world, despite what the media projects!
The white supremacist media has lionized the former political prisoner, Dr. Nelson Mandela, for his efforts to create reconciliation between the Africans and the Boers, while Winnie has been damned.
The fierce and bloody repression visited upon the courageous Black majority by the Afrikaners was a withering thing, reflected by the term, kragdadigeid (which means: a brutal crushing). And the heaviest brunt of white racist state repression was dropped on the poorest of the poor; the women and their children. And from where did the resistance come? The women and the young! It was the women who kept the legends of the African National Congress, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, and the Azanian Peoples Movement, alive in the minds and souls of the children, and it was the children—those beautiful, bold and courageous children, who fought machine guns with stones and songs, leaving us with the tragic wonder of Sharpeville; the massacre of the children by the criminal apartheid state.
Their blood, and their noble sacrifice gave life to the Black Revolution that forced the Kragdadigeiders in Jo-burg and Pretoria, to sit down at the table with Dr. Mandela.
Who can believe that Revolution is women’s work?
South Africa makes us all a believer, and a lesson for oppressed peoples the world over.
Copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.