Winnie Mandela

Paper Summary:

This paper follows the life of Winnie Mandela, born into an affluent black family in South Africa. The paper traces her education and her growing awareness of the injustice of the apartheid system in her work as a social worker in one of Johannesburg's poorest hospitals. The paper follows her career as an activist in the African National Congress, her arrests as a political prisoner, and the formation of the ANC's Women's League. The paper ends with the reasons for Winnie Mandela's downfall in the Stompie case where she was accused of the murder of a fourteen year old boy and her banishment from the South African political arena.

From the Paper:

"While many of her followers turned on her in light of these new revelations, there were others who understood how she came to condone and order murder. They point to the fact that she spent year being afraid and paranoid because of the various government and political factions that wanted her dead. She had to constantly hide, and when she was in public she was forced to present a face of defiance so that her followers would remain strong and calm in the fight against apartheid. If she displayed fear or weakness then the followers may have believed they had no hope of winning. After years of having to hold her head up while being handcuffed and jailed, years of being away from her children in the name of equality and years of hearing rumors that there were plans to kill her and stop her leadership for good she had to develop a hard shell of protection. This caused her to be able to rationalize to herself that whatever actions were needed to further the cause of freedom were actions well worth taking."

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