Winnie down, but not out

2003-04-25 21:03

Pretoria - Winnie Madikizela-Mandela might have been found guilty on dozens of fraud and theft charges, but her loyal supporters have vowed to stand by her until the end.

"Your fall from grace was enormous. You are a well loved person who has suffered lots of hardship," Magistrate Peet Johnson said on Friday while sentencing former South African president Nelson Mandela's ex-wife to five years in jail, one suspended.

He found her guilty of 43 charges of fraud and 25 of theft for obtaining fraudulent bank loans for non-existent employees of the women's league, which she heads, of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

She was released on bail pending an appeal, along with co-accused Addy Moolman, a broker, who was sentenced to seven years in jail with two suspended.

While Johnson was handing down sentencing, hundreds of supporters of the "Mother of the Nation" gathered outside the court.

"We are prepared to do anything in our power to ensure that she is not in jail," said Julius Malema, the president of the Congress of South African Students.

"If it means burning the prison she is locked in, so be it," he said.

Veteran liberal politician Helen Suzman said Madikizela-Mandela had suffered enough under the hands of apartheid police forces.

"To a great extent she has paid in advance for anything that she has since done," Suzman told SABC radio.

Madikizela-Mandela came into Nelson Mandela's life about six years before he was jailed in 1964 by the apartheid government for 27 years for high treason.

"I cannot say for certain that there is such a thing as love at first sight, but I do know the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzano (her Xhosa name, meaning "she who perseveres, who fights"), I knew that I wanted to have her as my wife," Mandela wrote in his autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom".

"Her spirit, her passion, her courage, her willfulness - I felt all those things the moment I saw her."

The couple married in June 1958 and had two daughters.

Soon after the wedding she was arrested for an inciting speech, leading Mandela to remark - proudly and prophetically - "I think I married trouble."

In the coming years she would be in and out of jail as the police hounded her in a bid to demoralise her husband.

In 1969, she was held in solitary confinement for 13 months on terrorism charges and in 1973 there was another six months in jail, but when the 1976 student riot revolt broke out in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, she was unbowed, urging crowds to to "fight to the bitter end."

The police saw her as a mastermind of the uprising. She was locked up for five months, then banished to the desolate central town of Brandfort for seven years.

When she returned to Soweto, the beautiful militant-martyr became a liability for Mandela and the liberation movement.

In 1986, at a time when suspected traitors were being burned alive in the volatile townships, Winnie declared that South Africans would be freed "with our matchboxes."

She surrounded herself with a band of thugs christened the Mandela United Football Club who murdered a young activist called Stompie Sepei.

Her bond with Mandela had endured through letters and visits to prison and when he was released in 1990, Winnie was there holding his hand, but in private she became involved in liaisons with other men, according to Anthony Sampson's biography of her husband, "Mandela".

He stood by her when she was convicted for kidnapping Sepei and only in 1992 announced their separation.

Winnie's six-year sentence on the kidnapping charge was suspended on appeal and in 1994 she was made deputy minister of arts and culture in Mandela's government, but her ex-husband later sacked her for insubordination.

She remained president of the ANC Women's League, and last year came in sixth in voting for the ANC's 50-member national executive commitee.

"(The fraud and theft trial) has enhanced my appreciation for the support I continue to enjoy among my fellow South Africans," Madikizela-Mandela said shortly after being sentenced.

"Their loyalty has remained unstinting and confirms to me that my life, with all its turns, is worth it."

- AFX