Sister Wives: Female Comrades in South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Struggles, Iowa City, Iowa, October 20, 2016

- I also want to acknowledge our university and community supporters, the University of Iowa's international programs and the University of Iowa's honors program. They contribute vital time, talent and logistics to this organization. I also want to thank the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their crucial financial support, and today's special sponsors, the International Writing Program and Adam and Bridget Ingersoll. At this time, I want to introduce Hugh Ferrer who will be introducing Priya Dala. Thank you. - Thank you Sue. Our guest speaker today, ZP Dala, also known as Priya, as Sue said, is from South Africa. A psychologist and a full-time writer, she lives in the city of Durban. She's been participating this semester in the International Writing Program's fall residency. It's our 49th residency. This year she's been joined by 35 other writers, and we've been very lucky to have her in our community. Her debut novel, What About Meera, published in 2015 by Penguin Random House South Africa, was extremely well-received, and this is gonna help those of you who have been working on your trivia cards. It won the inaugural Minara Literary Award for writers of KwaZulu-Natal, was long-listed for the Sunday Times literary awards and was also long-listed for the Etisalat Prize. This is a marvelous Pan-African prize that celebrates debut writing and promotes publishing across the continent. What About Meera would go on to be named one of the top ten African novels of 2015 by Afrodiaspora.com. At the same time, her stories and articles have appeared in various newspapers and magazines in South Africa, including the Natal Witness, Marie Claire, Elle Magazine and online at the Daily Maverick. Internationally, her work has appeared in the Sentinel Literary Journal in Nigeria and the New York Times. As an investigative journalist, she contributed to the book Chatsworth: The Making of the South African Township, a volume studying the Indian township created in 1916 near Durban by apartheid planners that forcibly relocated 120 thousand Indians into a modern racial ghetto. Her second novel, entitled The Architecture of Loss, has acquired world English rights and will be published in 2017 by Pegasus New York. We very much look forward to that, and to your talk today. Please help me welcome Priya Dala. - Good day everyone, and thank you so much for having me here at the ICFRC. Thank you so much to Hugh Ferrer for giving me this opportunity. I certainly hope that in my talk, you will find some enlightenment and also some joy, even though it is quite a very heavy topic. To begin with, I want you to know a little of who I am, and perhaps more importantly, why this particular topic is so important to me. As Hugh said, I am a psychologist. I am a writer, and I was once a wife. Now I can begin speaking of the important things. In the middle of 2013, I think it was July, one of my closest friends, Ojallah, an anti-apartheid activist and a visual artist, came to my home. Whilst we drank pots and pots of tea, Ojallah appeared very distressed. She finally came out with it. She was deeply upset because Phyllis Naidoo had passed away. Phyllis was one of South Africa's strongest women anti-apartheid activists from my country. Ojallah had been with Phyllis throughout her battle with lung cancer, and when Phyllis died in a filthy government hospital in abject poverty on February 13th, 2013, we had both been present when the doctor had turned off the life support machine. The reason Ojallah was so distressed was because only Ojallah had been privy to the fact that it was Phyllis' daughter who had simply made one telephone call from London to the doctor, and all she said was "Turn it off." Phyllis Naidoo, known to all us activists as our caring motherly figure, who provided comrades in hiding with food and medicines, had chosen to send this daughter away when the child was very young. Phyllis always maintained that her life was not meant for anything but the struggle. She had no place for a husband, who divorced her. She had no place for children, who she sent away to Tanzania and other countries. I then explained to Ojallah that it was no wonder, then, that the banished daughter would not want to meet her mother or have any closeness to her mother in her dying days. Ojallah still could not understand this. But then, a process had begun, in my mind, and I now became embroiled in this process. The result of my place in this world of forgotten anti-apartheid women resulted in my being called to consult with one of them as a psychologist. I will call her Jane X, although this is not her real name. Jane was in an old age home, and was fast descending into schizophrenia and violence. I consulted with her perhaps three times before I became entangled in a court battle myself, where I lost my practicing license due to this. Jane was also a rampant anti-apartheid activist. She had lost her marriage to the struggle, and she had endured much torture and loss. Even in the middle of my sessions with Jane, she would remain silent for a long time, but then launch into rants directed at her ex-husband. How did I find myself in this situation? I often asked myself. In all this time that I now had in my hands because I could no longer practice my profession, I began ranting this question on my own husband. And he provided no recourse or comfort. I went in it alone. I still probed and I dwelled on it. In the immersion, I suddenly became this conduit. I began collecting letters and documents and stories from lost women stuck in old age homes and low-income flats. The burden of all this grief and all this depression melded into a burden of my own life. The only recourse I had, having none from those close to me, set me up on a series of lenses and mirrors within me. I did not want to become one of the characters in this slowly emerging narrative. But I became one. For two years, I have lived in the language of these women, and although writing it down in a novel, that is called fiction, this was supposed to be my catharsis, but this has not happened as yet. I am still there. I am very honored to have these stories, but I am mourning the losses that came my way as the collateral damage. I must admit, I would probably have it another way. I would prefer a world of happy endings. I will share a smidgen of these stories with you now, but this sharing, I know, will not make any difference to the landscape of my own loss. I am in no way likening my losses to the losses of the many women during the anti-apartheid struggle. My paltry days spent in hearing chambers, defending my right to practice my profession, or my lonely days spent at my desk, defending my right to be comforted as a wife paled in comparison to the lives of these women. There are too many women to mention in this particular conversation, and too many layers that the mind simply bolts out, like afterthoughts asking me to stop, and perhaps have a drink at the Foxhead. But let me tell you these stories, and I hope that I can do justice. I was born on a sugarcane plantation. My great-grandfather had been brought to South Africa as an indentured laborer. And the Moreland Estate, the place of my birth, was the first place that he, as a boy of 18, labored on the sugarcane fields. In the years to follow, it was my grandfather and then my father who eventually saved up enough money to buy ten acres of this very plantation, and this was where I grew up. My childhood house had a large thorn tree that had been there since the time of the indentured laborers. And it was tradition that the people of the Moreland Plantation, the laborer people, would gather to discuss social and political matters. This tradition was called Panchayat, which in my native language roughly translates to "gossip." When I was eight years old, I clearly recall my mother telling me of one such Panchayat. What was so special about this one? Well ordinarily the women and children were allowed to linger on the fringes of the circle of men during these gatherings. The men who discussed important social matters with my grandfather, who was informally designated as the leader of this gathering. But, on this particular day, the children and most especially the women, were hushed away and told to remain indoors and not listen in on the discussion. My mother was, and still is, something of a rebel, and she stole away from the women hidden in the kitchen and went to stare at the thorn tree through a fine lace curtain that hung poorly in the front room of our house. This is how she tells it. All she remembers seeing was the gathering of men from my village, and there, towering above all of them, was a man she had never seen before. His stature struck her. His posture astounded her. But even though she could hear nothing of what he was saying, his animated hands waving wildly in the air is an image that will always remain with my mother. This man was Nelson Mandela. And many years later, when my mother told me this story, I lashed out angrily at my father for not allowing her to sit near the men and listen to what this important man had to say. I cannot say that it was ever explained to me why the women and children were hushed away. But my father told me this story. My father said that this tall man was running away from the white police. He said that this tall man had come to our village because of its remoteness, asking to be hidden away so that he could avoid arrest. My father hid his face from me when I, now an adult woman listening to the story, asked him why the women were instructed to stay indoors and not listen. I still don't know the answer to that question. He does not provide me the answer to that question. But I feel that in all my writings and in all my research, this is the one answer I am searching for. Nelson Mandela, then a dangerous fugitive with a death sentence of terrorism hanging over his head, was given a job at a petrol filling station in our village, where he hid his face behind a large cap, filling up petrol for the heavy tractors that carried burnt sugarcane to the sugar mill. My father also told me, with deep embarrassment in his eyes, that it was one of the men from my village who had been present at the Panchayat gathering at the thorn tree, who had eventually informed the apartheid special branch of the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela. Upon hearing that he had been found out, Mandela was given a vehicle, and as he was making his escape on a bridge an hour away from my hometown, he was apprehended by the police. He was charged with terrorism under the Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967, and during the infamous Rivonia Trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 27th, 1963. He was sent to Robben Island with two other comrades. They are the founding fathers of the African National Congress. They were Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu. I did not grow up in a political environment. My father attempted at all times to place my siblings and I under a false sense of manicured security. But somehow, whilst in high school, I became involved in many protests, then peaceful, and attended as many rallies as I could duck out of the house to go to. When my father found pamphlets and literature, essays written by Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement, and Chris Hani of the South African Communist Party hidden under fashion magazines in my bedroom, he ordered my mother to burn the papers. He was more terrified than livid with me. My mother burned the papers behind the old washer tap. Seeing my fury, she knew that it would be someday that she would tell me the story of how she saw Nelson Mandela through a lace curtain speaking animatedly under a thorn tree. She made sure she told me the story. We never spoke of this again, and even though I subversively attended many gatherings and gathered literature, I did all of this in secret, while pretending to learn how to drape the perfect sari. After he was released from prison on February 11th, 1990, it was a year or so later than Nelson Mandela visited my hometown of Tongaat. It was his choice that this will be one of the first places he will visit. This time, he did not have to speak under a thorn tree. This time he was given a red-carpeted event at our town hall. My mother insisted on going to this event. She took me along. I was 17 years old. She knew what she had burned behind the old washer tap, and she did not want to hide herself or her daughter behind the silence of lace curtains and closed windows any longer. The looming threat of being a girl who was pushing herself into active political awareness instead of preparing for a marriage I did not want no longer bothered the elder men of my family. The marriage was a given anyway, but in my mother's final act of rebellion, and freeing her daughter, she took me to this event. I saw Nelson Mandela for the first time that evening. He was beautiful, one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. He was a man in his early 70s, and to a girl of 17, he was still beautiful. But somehow, when I remember that evening, I don't remember him as much as I remember my mother. She had dressed resplendently, as if she would be given an audience with him. Her eyes shone brighter than I'd ever remembered it. And whilst he spoke on stage, she looked and looked at him. And when he invited the 90 year old mother of the man who had housed him at the petrol station onto the stage, and enveloped her tiny sari-clad body in a bear hug, my mother could not contain her tears. Neither could I, neither could anyone. When he was leaving the hall, many bodies blocked us from trying to reach him. But my mother swears, to this day, that she did indeed touch his blue shirt sleeve. I believe her. And because I believe the fairy tale that my mother touched his sleeve, I believe in the absolute seduction of Winnie Mandela. If just seeing him could make a 17 year old girl cry, and a 45 year old woman behave like a 17 year old girl, Winnie Madikizela didn't stand a chance. I am not here to speak about Nelson Mandela. Much has been said about him, and about the brotherhood of the African National Congress in articles and books. I want to talk about the silent sisterhood of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. I agree that much has also been written about the women of the struggle as well. But much has also not been written. Much has not been said. I doubt that my paltry attempts at speaking of these women will even tell every single narrative of every single one of these women, but in the telling of these three women's stories, I hope to have created a microcosm or perhaps cast a lens for you to look at. I spoke of Phyllis, I spoke of Jane X my patient. Now I will speak of Mama Winnie. Winnie Madikizela was born in Bizana, a town in the Transkei area of South Africa. Her father's name was Columbus, and he taught in a Bush School, which is basically a school for every single age or every single grade, under a tree. Her mother died when she was only eight, and Winnie grew into a woman never having a mother to teach her how to become one. Strangely, the hand of fate saw Winnie and Nelson Mandela's daughters also grow up without a mother. But their mother was not dead. She was as close to it as possible for most of their childhood. Winnie trained to become a social worker, and she was an exemplary student. She completed her social work degree in 1955. She was awarded a prestigious scholarship to study in the United States. She turned this opportunity down and remained as a social worker in an extremely challenging environment. She was the first black social worker at a horrible government hospital in Johannesburg, a hospital called Baragwanath Hospital. I know this hospital well. Before I began studying psychology, I had enrolled for a degree in human anatomy, and spent my time in the human dissecting hall at this hospital, trying to earn money as a specimen technician to pay for my university fees. Needless to say, I dropped that course very rapidly, after seeing that most of the cadavers we harvested were from black John Does who had been murdered or who had died wracked from diseases of poverty, like tuberculosis and HIV. In anatomy class we would play a very stupid game, where we would award a bottle of alcohol to the technician who, by his or her dissection of the body, could discover the cause of death first. My first awarded bottle of black sambuca only did one thing. It took away the stench from my throat. It was an easy win for me. My cadaver, a black man in his early 20s, had died from a bullet wound to the head. But I digress. Winnie Madikizela was not politically inclined. As a young woman, and a very beautiful one at that, she admits to spending more time looking at fashion than at politics. But, while conducting her research dissertation, she began to look deeply into infant mortality rates amongst people of color. She realized to her horror that for every one thousand live births, there were ten infant deaths. She began digging deeper and deeper into this, and, on finding herself in controversial waters with the apartheid system, she stopped her research with the threat of losing her license. As I said before, when Winnie Madikizela, a shy yet astoundingly lovely social worker, met Nelson, a charming lawyer, neither of them stood a chance. It is often said that there was no force on heaven or earth that could separate them once they laid eyes on each other on a street one day. But it played out that neither heaven or earth were necessary. It was hell that separated them. In keeping to the facts, and not romanticizing, it follows that Nelson Mandela married Winnie Madikizela on 19th of June, 1958. Their marriage sustained a very short honeymoon period, during which time two daughters, Zenani and Zindzi, were born in quick succession. Zenani was barely three, and Zindzi was just 18 months old, when their father Nelson had to leave Winnie and their little home in Soweto, and go into hiding. Often, Winnie would soothe her crying babies, wondering which part of the world her husband was in, or whether he was alive or dead. She had enjoyed perhaps two years of being a wife. She had lost her husband to a mistress, and this mistress was the struggle. After Nelson was sentenced and imprisoned, Winnie suddenly was thrust into a spotlight she could ill afford, and she was very ill-equipped to handle. She was a very shy woman, often looking through demure lashes into camera lenses, and giggling with a hand over her stunning smile. She retreated. She mourned the marriage that any young woman in love deeply craves, and she protected her children. But it was not in Winnie's stars to remain cloistered. The country was baying for a face, someone who would take the place of the great Nelson Mandela. Who would show the clout and appearance to the advancing apartheid authorities, those who celebrated his arrest at sunset cocktail hour on a croquet lawn. Winnie's beautiful face became this poster. Suddenly, the coy social worker was thrust into the spotlight. Cameras flashed in her face. People sang praise songs that they had found the mother of the nation. She smiled broadly in one photograph, one that caught her off-guard, as hordes of people gathered around her house in Vilakazi Street, Soweto. People then criticized this unguarded smile. People wondered, how could she smile when her husband was rotting away in prison? The gossip mill had begun for Winnie. Little did she realize how vilely and rapidly this smile would be snuffed out. It was probably the day when she was again photographed with her fisted hand stuck into the air, the symbol of Amandla, or power, that she now became the target. Suddenly, the shy wife had been slapped with an arrest warrant under the Suppression of Communism Act No. 44 of 1950. Winnie was asleep in her marital home, her two sleeping daughters clinging to her body, when the apartheid police barged into her bedroom and dragged her from her bed. Her pretty pink nightclothes were ridiculed and tugged at. They asked her which mad she had worn this lingerie for. They prodded at her. They enjoyed glaring at her admirable tall body. They grabbed. And then they would leave her alone, sending warnings to her that she would pay for what her husband was doing. If you want to break Nelson, break Winnie, became the oppressor's song. Winnie found herself then banished to a small town in the then purely white province called the Orange Free State. And she was placed under constant surveillance and house arrest at Branford, a dusty, dirty town. Being Winnie, she immediately set to work, organizing a creche and a school. But then she was rapidly stopped from even doing this. After a long battle, she was allowed to return to Soweto, but it didn't end there. Desperate to break Nelson, the Apartheid Special Branch attacked Winnie. One icy cold night in May, they dragged her away from her home in the middle of the night. The two children held onto her skirts screaming "Mommy, mommy, don't leave us!" Zindzi screamed and grabbed her baby sister, running to a neighbor's house. Winnie screamed "Ubuntu!" an African phrase that says "What is mine is yours" and the neighbor grabbed the two baby girls and took them into her care. What followed was, and still is, a very difficult story to tell. For brevity and perhaps my own ease, I will simply state that Winnie Mandela was detained in solitary confinement for 491 days. And she was violently tortured. These are details of which I find difficult to talk about. She was prisoner number 1323/69 in the Pretoria State Prison, constantly watched over by a host of wardens, the scariest warden of them all being a woman named Brigadier Aucamp. Winnie called her Brig. In a cell that measured 4.5 meters by 1.5 meters with gray walls, a gray floor and gray ceiling, she spent out 491 days. She was refused her medication for her existing heart condition, and she began blacking out and getting seriously low blood pressure. She constantly thought of suicide. But, as she writes in her journal, and I will quote, "I have decided I should commit suicide, but to do it slowly, to spare Nelson and the children the pains of knowing I do not have courage." Brig, as Winnie used to call her, constantly taunted this woman inside a tiny cell, where the bright naked light bulb was never switched off, such that Winnie didn't know if it was day or night, winter or summer. Brig would tell Winnie how well Nelson was doing, how he was putting on weight and looking handsome. This taunted Winnie. Winnie speaks of how she saw, scrawled onto the walls, "Joyce was here" "Nondwe was here" "Shanti was here" And then she scrawled, "Winnie was here." These were all sister fighters. Her comrades, who had been in that miserable coffin before her. Their names gave her courage. Of course, before anything, I have to mention that Winnie Mandela, who radiantly celebrated her 80th birthday party in early October this year, still carries much shadow and controversy. In my country and throughout the world. She had come out of prison an angry woman, a changed woman. But stay with me, I will speak to you of this soon. Yes, she came out in rage. She went wildly against the slow and peaceful advance of Nelson's African National Congress. She was accused of murdering the young alleged police informant Stompie Seipei. She had a torrid and much publicized affair with a younger man, advocate Dali Mpofu, whilst Nelson Mandela was in prison. She advocated burning the white man to the ground. She disappointed Nelson. And although she held his hand when he was released from prison, and walked through the gates with him, their marriage was over. Nelson and Winnie Mandela divorced in March 1996. Winnie never remarried. Her named was conspicuously absent from his will after his death on December 5th, 2013. And this year, after she had tried to return to their ancestral home, she was barred from this. Winnie still resides in that home in Soweto. She has become an alcoholic, lashing out with cuss words in national newspapers that the African National Congress is wrapping themselves in silk sheets. She became an Evita-esque figure in Soweto, arriving in Mercedes Benzes, wearing expensive shoes and bright-patterned headscarves. She took her young lover to trips on the Concorde to Paris. She shouted and she howled and she raged. She was openly compared to the other wives of the struggle, the silent graceful ones, like Albertina Sisulu, who had borne their torture and marital separation with poise. Whilst they were graceful, Winnie was wild. But, 40 years after she was released from prison, a package arrived from London at Winnie's door, with an English lawyer she barely knew. This package was a stack of documents Winnie had forgotten existed. This was her journal of when she was in prison, the one she kept and the one she and forgotten about, once she had been allowed paper and pen. She was 75 years old then, and the memories and the horror returned to the somewhat false peace that this woman's soul had finally found. She couldn't look at those documents. She could not bear to touch them. But suddenly her granddaughter died in a car accident, and a torrent was unleashed. Winnie attacked the journals like this wolf woman people knew her for. She poured through them, and then finally, at the age of 75, the words began to flow. The book began to write itself. Her autobiography, 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69, was published in 2013 by Ohio University Press. The world now came to know Winnie Mandela. And then I came to read a collection of her correspondence. I love letters. I write them to many people. I even write letters to myself. And the nectar of letters from Winnie to Nelson and from Nelson to Winnie was too sweet for me to resist. Too much nectar. And now, after all this, I can tell you why I understand Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, as I understand my own personal narrative. Reflection and drawing intersecting lines and been my blessing and my curse. I begin with citing a letter that Nelson wrote to Winnie on the day she was released from her months in solitary confinement, and later from imprisonment itself, although, it must be noted that although she was released she remained under constant state watch throughout most of her life. "My dearest Winnie, I had to wait two weeks before I could send you my warmest congratulations for serving 491 and still emerge the lively girl you are, in high spirits. From your beloved Nelson, October 1st, 1976." In her response to him, Winnie writes, "My darling, in a way, during the past two years, I have felt closer to you. Eating what you were eating, and sleeping on what you sleep gave me the satisfaction of being with you. October 26th, 1970." I will now read a few excerpts of the letters between Nelson and Winnie, in their apparent chronology. Because one must remember that letters were often written, but often remained with the Special Branch, screened, many words blacked out with thick ink. And they were often returned to sender. If they did reach the hungry recipient, it was always a hodgepodge of dates, a pastiche made even more confusing, with the confusion of whether it was day or night, winter or summer, birthday or deathday. "Dear Winnie, Most people don't realize that your physical presence would have meant nothing to me if the ideals for which you have dedicated your life have not been realized. Nothing can be as valuable as being part and parcel of the formation of history of a country. Devotedly, Dalibhunga." Dalibhunga is a term that Nelson Mandela was referred to after he underwent initiation ceremony to become a man when he was 13 years old. He always signed his letters to Winnie, Dalibhunga. She replies, "My darling Nelson, I have learned from you. How I laughed when I recalled that medical student, you know? Remember the horrible green car? It refused to start? Remember the funny story of the evangelists? Love, Winnie, November 11th, 1969." Nelson responds, "Dear Winnie, We stand in a relationship now, not as husband and wife, but as sister and brother. In the past, I have addressed you in affectionate terms. For then, I was speaking to a wife. But now, in the freedom struggle, we are all equal, and your responsibility is as great as mine. Hugs and kisses to the girls, Nelson, November 16th, 1969." At this particular point, Winnie's responses became conspicuously absent in letters. She retreated. And then she tries again. Between Nelson and Winnie, there are hundreds of letters now found. Many, I am quite certain, will never be found. But the striking thing is that in the few letters that I have read, Nelson's voice is asking a wife to become a sister, a comrade of the struggle. Somehow, he has admired his beautiful wife now, whilst he sits in prison planning and reading and discussing the future of the advance against the apartheid government. Winnie sits alone in her house, surrounded by two children who grab at her, surrounded by a desperate country who grabs at her. She receives no comfort that a wife is craving from a husband, even in words. The result is that Winnie decides that the way to Nelson's heart is through his mind. She wanted to win his love. She wants letters of undying love, affection, mounting passion. But perhaps it is censorship, perhaps it is just that he could not say it inside his loneliness, but the subtext and text in Nelson's letters talk of freedom, literature, law, struggle, and those important things. Slowly, Winnie begins to realize she is no longer a wife. Not even a widow. Now, as a comrade of the struggle, she has become Nelson Mandela's sister-wife. This is the worst place for a woman to be, most especially a woman who is brimming with repressed passion for a man she just cannot get ahold of. Even in letters, even in blacked out sentences, she just cannot get ahold of her man. She begins to academicize herself. Do you think she will win his passion? Listen. "Dear Nelson, I still cannot believe that at last I have heard from you, my darling. In my handwriting you will notice the hypnotizing effect your letters have on my soul. All I have needed is a natural drug, after all. We were hardly a year together when history deprived me of you, your formidable shadow which eclipsed mine, left me naked, a young political widow. I looked in the mirror. My hair is white, there are bags under my eyes at age 36. When I visited you at the fort, do you remember you said, this is not the beauty I married. You have become ugly. Then you sent me a magazine on the reigning beauties of the world, the women and the power behind politically successful men. Nelson, I was furious. I had taken such a lot of trouble to look nice for you that day. Winnie Mandela, October 26th, 1970." And herein lies the fracture. It is a complicated fracture. I doubt that anyone who tries to dissect letters between anyone will ever really know the full story, least of all these confusing letters between this particular husband and wife. What I strongly believe is that Winnie loved her husband and she lost him. His mistress was not a woman in a miniskirt that you could slap in the street. His mistress was a large and important purpose, and Winnie could not slap this mistress. She had to learn the secrets of seduction from this mistress called freedom. And then she had to transmogrify into this mistress called freedom. In this process, she stopped becoming Nelson Mandela's wife. And when they walked together, holding hands, out of the prison gates that day that Nelson Mandela was freed, it was already too late. Now, a brother and a sister who stood with their backs together against an ugly world suddenly were forced to turn towards each other, and when they did they saw that their love was over. Winnie was a woman of great and intense passion. This passion blazed from her eyes. But in her one and only love she believed that her passion was unrequited. There is no doubt she committed atrocities, alleged murders, she incited a country to burn and kill, she had an extramarital affair, and she descended into alcoholism and drug abuse. But my plea for Winnie Mandela is not and never will be academic. I am one woman who knows this. Hence, my plea for Winnie Mandela is a plea to recognize Nomzamo Mama Winnie as a broken-hearted lady who hated becoming a sister-wife. In the closing chapter of her autobiography, Mama Winnie writes a prophetic warning to South Africa that is now burning to the ground. She says "I felt strongly that this journal and these letters needed to be published, in this way, exactly as they were written at that time, so that my children and my grandchildren, and whoever else reads them should please see to it that our country never ever degenerates to levels such as those. It is for their future. Right now, people like myself who come from that era become petrified when we see us sliding, and becoming more and more like our oppressive masters. To me that is exactly what is happening now, and that is what scares me." Thank you. - Right, the first question we have is, do you agree with Winnie's diagnosis of her country descending into the same patterns as its previous oppressors? Yes, please. - Yes, I do agree with that. The current situation in South Africa is reaching a point of complete fracture, and our current president, Jacob Zuma, has now been, he's taking on the role of dictatorship, where he is, he's essentially using economics to enrich himself and enrich his family. He is building large homesteads and farms for himself. He's basically raping the entire treasury of our country. So, the people that were disenfranchised during the times of apartheid are still the same people. They are still the same people that are losing everything. So poverty has not changed for the black people of the country, so essentially it is a sense of colonialism that is being imposed by the very people that we have now chosen to become the leaders of our country when we fought against that colonialism. So I do agree that the country is descending into that point. I hope to be surprised, but from the news that I've been receiving lately, that is not the case. There's many stories, and there's many news information that's coming out where Jacob Zuma, who is our current president, is refusing to step down, and he is refusing to let go of the stronghold into the economic power of our country. Even to the point where he has now issued an arrest warrant to out finance minister. So history is repeating itself in inverted form. Thanks. - Don't get comfortable. Alright, one of the audience members writes, it's my sense that the Western press has demonized Winnie Mandela, and I think you went into this a little bit. Did you feel that this demonization originated in South Africa or in the West? - I think that the demonization of Winnie Mandela originated in South Africa. And it began long before she became, long before her very public arrests and the case of Stompie Seipei, the case of the necklacing of police informants, and also her violent attitude towards the white oppressors. I think that she was demonized immediately after Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, because Winnie chose to remain regal throughout the entire process, where she would be smiling in photographs. The South African people were demonizing her then. As I said in my talk, how could a woman whose husband is rotting in prison, fighting for the struggle, fighting for the freedom of our country, wear beautiful dresses and smile in photographs? So I think she began being demonized then, but internationally she began becoming demonized, I think I'm uncomfortable with the word demonized, but internationally she became known for the controversial murder trials, and the affair that she had with advocate Dali Mpofu. So, it began in South Africa but it became very widespread. And her own people turned against her first. - We have a question here about the link between identity and nationalism, as the links between, and I'm assuming it means, well I'm not a hundred percent sure whether it means the individual identity and how the individual identity is wrapped up with the nation's identity, or how that plays out in the separate cases of Nelson Mandela and his quote-unquote wife. - Yes that is a good question. I will address it talking about Nelson Mandela. He always says that his identity began forming when he became an activist, and his identity became stronger as his advance against the apartheid government became stronger. So his individual identity as a man, as a husband, just as an individual human being, I think was something he pushed to the wayside so that he could assume the larger identity. When it came to Winnie Mandela, I think that she was constantly grappling to keep the individual identity. So she was not so easily transformed into a freedom fighter. He appropriated the role very easily, and I doubt it was easy. In his years in Robben Island, he endured a great amount of difficulty, but he shaped his identity on a public platform. On a personal platform, I think he ignored that identity, which is why, when he was released from prison, he was a man that could not relate to his family, and to those that are closest to him. Because we have to remember, apart from his being a freedom fighter and being the father of the nation and the face that the entire world knows as a freedom fighter, he was also a man and a husband and a father, which he found very difficult to become once he was released from prison. To talk about Winnie Mandela, I think that she grappled with identity because she was not someone who really wanted a political life. She wanted a normal wife, woman's life. If that answers your question. If it doesn't, you can repose it to me. Thanks - Last question that I have here. You spoke a little bit about the scale of difference between your own circumstances and the circumstances of those that you report on in this piece. With that understood, would you like to expand a little bit on what drove you to write this piece, what causes you to focus your attention and your scholarship and your creativity here? On this particular topic, and this theme that runs through South Africa's recent history. - I think as I said, you know, I did not, I've always been angry at the fact that I did not grow up in a political environment. I was sheltered from it at most times. The events that drove me towards this particular story, and the story of these women came from my own curiosity and perhaps digging around in places that I should not have been, and asking the questions. But that actually is a very small factor. The main thing is that, as a psychologist, I was called in to consult with some women. I was just told to come and consult at an old age home with a group of women, and one particular woman who I call Jane X, and when I went to consult with her, she was just another patient who was descending into schizophrenia, and that is how I saw her. But as I began to look deeper into her file, and into the files of the other women that I was seeing, I began to realize that all these women were anti-apartheid activist fighters. Many of them had fought in the Umkhonto we Sizwe, which is the military branch of the African National Congress. So on the surface, they were just patients that I was seeing, displaying schizophrenic behavior. But when I began to delve into why, and delve into their histories, that's when I began to realize the political undercurrent that brought on the behavior that they were displaying. And I felt, and this was my own personal decision, to pursue these stories, and to pursue asking these questions instead of allowing these women to just be forgotten in the old age home, the result of which is that I was taken off the cases and subjected to hearings, and I have now lost my practicing license. So, to answer your question, it was a progression from my career as a psychologist that drove me into writing this particular narrative. - And with that, we're gonna conclude our program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, let's give a big thank you to Priya Dala. Once again, I wanna thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa international programs, the U of I honors program and the Stanley UI Foundation Organization for their generous financial support, as well as today's special sponsors, the International Writing Program and Adam and Bridget Ingersoll. Again, thanks to City Channel Four for making our programs available to so many audiences. I can't do a song and dance. But we have a gift that we're gonna give to Priya, as soon as it appears here. Again, I'll take this moment, I hope to see everybody here next Tuesday, Ambassador John Lang on Global Health and Sustainable Diplomacy. Thursday, November 3rd, Michael Chmelik, the lecturer from UI History, speaking on Seven Myths About Immigration. So, finally, Priya, we have our very very coveted mug, one of the reasons to come to Iowa City, of course. Thank you again. Thanks again for coming.