The passing of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela brought with it a re-examination of South Africa’s past, and that also meant revisiting the relationship between Winnie and former husband Nelson Mandela.

It is well-known that the terrors of living under apartheid placed immense strain on their marriage, but someone who knows that firsthand is veteran political activist and poet, Keorapetse ‘Bra Willie’ Kgositsile.

He worked closely with the likes of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Nelson and Winnie, and Adelaide and Oliver Reginald (OR) Tambo, and has some unique insight into the struggles they faced.

Huff Post SA interviewed him recently, focusing on these relationships, and here’s some of what he had to say:

At the height of a particular phase of our struggle, one partner, like Madiba, being incarcerated made that a norm for the relationship. A norm imposed by the enemy. When you do get visits, they were not private. To the extent that your spouse became an idea in your mind, instead of the real physical person that you would have been with. They might be in your absence undergoing certain changes in terms of how they conduct their everyday lives, that you may not be aware of (except through the grapevine). There was no guarantee that you’d see that spouse again. It really was not a picnic…

I would say part of what is meant when we talk about sacrifice is that we were forced by our own sense of commitment to pay more attention to the demands of the mission than the emotional and psychological demands of your family…

A lot of couples realised that the moments spent together during the struggle were spent more discussing issues of the struggle than on issues of the family. That meant that a lot of people would realise that they didn’t know their spouses as well as they thought they did.

Winnie herself spoke about the hardships of being married to Nelson under the apartheid regime, with this from the Washington Post:

…it was far from a conventional marriage, as she conceded in her memoir:

“I had so little time to love him. And that love has survived all these years of separation … perhaps if I’d had time to know him better I might have found a lot of faults, but I only had time to love him and long for him all the time.”

Oh, and for those who don’t know the battles Winnie faced, here’s a little reminder:

…Madikizela-Mandela would be arrested, harassed and “banned” — forbidden from most social contact…Beginning in 1969, she spent 18 months in solitary confinement. She was interrogated unceasingly and forced to sit upright for so long that she blacked out.

“My whole body was badly swollen, I was passing blood,” she wrote in her memoir of her imprisonment. “The whole experience is so terrible, because I had left little children at home in bed and I had no idea what had happened to them.”

The Winnie documentary, simply titled Winnie, is worth watching if you’d like to know more:

[sources:huffpostsa&washpost]