George Floyd, Racial Injustice and Making The World Anew

It has been a month since the protests over the murder of George Floyd began. And as mentioned in my previous article, it comes at a serious moment of global crisis – with the coronavirus pandemic – and this is more so the case in the United States – with over 2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and well over 100,000 dead; and 40 million people filing for unemployment – leaving the rate at 14.7% – the rate for blacks reaching 16.7%. George Floyd was one such person who after working as a security guard, found himself out of work as a result of the coronavirus crisis. He lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota – having moved from Houston, Texas in 2014. While he had five children – three of them were of adult age, and he had to take care of his youngest daughter with his most recent partner – having faced the coronavirus itself and now having to deal with unemployment.

On May 25th, Minneapolis Police were called to its Powderhorn Park neighbourhood after he purchased cigarettes and one of the store clerks claimed that he paid with a fake $20 bill. Four officers – James Keung, Tom Lane, Tou Thao, and Derek Chauvin responded to the call. At 8pm, two of the officers Keung and Lane intercepted the SUV Floyd drove in, he was pulled out, handcuffed and made to sit on the sidewalk. As they walked him towards the police car – Floyd fell to the ground. Then they picked him up and placed him towards the car’s door when officers Chauvin and Thao arrived and they forced him into the car even as he announced that he was claustrophobic. After a minute of trying to put him in, Chauvin pulls him out as Floyd fell to the pavement – then decided to kneel on his neck, with Lane and Keung pressing his legs and torso respectively, and Thao watching – ignoring the pleas of Floyd as cried for his mother and announced “I can’t breathe”, and that of bystanders’ outrage of the incident. For 8 minutes this went on, even after the ambulance arrived. Floyd was eventually taken to the Hennepin County Memorial Center where he died.

The location where he was killed became a makeshift memorial, and indeed there was a massive demonstration against the killing of Floyd. It would quickly become apparent that the manner in which was killed, the broadcasting of it on social media, and other prolific murders of black people by police – such as Ahmaud Arbery, and Breanna Taylor. The death of George Floyd eventually became for America the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For White America, the moving filtering lens which removes black suffering with the goodwill offered by the apparatus that maintains their standing, finally focused on the right time in which it could be shown that was done to protect this arrangement. For Black America, it was a gratuitous killing too many. Both were the result of the social gridlock created by the pandemic. Shared in the horror of the moment, a chain reaction spread across the country, now with no signs of ending and nothing to stop it.

Statues glorifying racial oppression were either torn down, or remade anew – with the rallying cry of justice and thoughts of the heroes that came before them. Roads repainted with the slogan Black Lives Matter, police districts destroyed – effectively abolishing them in multiple cities, and spaces carved out for the protesters to provide services for the themselves and the downtrodden within its vicinity.

Reacting to this moment, the corporations of this world – fearing that the mood would take away from their profits showed “solidarity” with nonsense such as the #BlackTuesday event – turning your profile pic black to protest racial injustice, Google and therefore YouTube had little statements (in YouTube’s case, a playlist on the main page) which ostensibly showed themselves to be on the side of the protesters, while all the while – they, and the reporters who covered the events were either arrested, or shot at. When the protests reached the gates of the White House, Donald Trump and the First Lady reportedly hid in a bunker. Cornel West’s assessment of the situation was to declare America a “failed social experiment”.

But the protests didn’t stop in America – they spread internationally. Every nation where the police was employed to brutalise and suppress black people, working people, immigrants ethnic minorities and people whose existence is resistance – took to the streets, protesting against their repression, along with those who would reject repression as a necessary to maintain what we would call – a decent life. Here in Great Britain, I bore witness on June 6th to a Parliament Square remade to reflect the anger animating those who rallied under “Black Lives Matter”.

The totemic statue of Sir Winston Churchill – subsumed into cultural narrative of Great Britain as its finest champion, a King Arthur for the 20th century – was literally repainted with the narrative suppressed to British sensibilities. His plaque was covered by a placard covering the details the monument wanted people to read about Churchill, to reflect a narrative that is not told to the British people because it makes for uncomfortable reading even if its merely three words – “was a racist” under the name Winston Churchill – because it demanded – by force, for British people: the ones who weren’t immigrants or the children of them, to face who this man represented as a the face of British Empire. An empire so often told in grandeur, and progess – rather than the grotesque show of industrialised brutality, and enforced stagnation that it actually was.

Gandhi similarly was given the BLM dose of reality – an attempt to bring to attention that while free Indians were of Gandhi’s high priorities, blacks were not – at least that was the case during his time in South Africa. “Kaffirs” were lesser people than Indians after all, and not equal victims of colonialism in South Africa, or other colonized nations. The Mandela statue didn’t come off empty-handed – quite the opposite actually. Mandela was to told up a sign declaring that “the UK is not innocent” – now transformed into the petrified judge on Britain’s race relations. The chant “Black Lives Matter” echoed to the drums played across the streets. At this point, the police presence hadn’t descended given the lack of numbers – as activists were on poles, statues and tagged the walls either with “BLM”, or the names of black people who were martyred. The walls were made to say their names – for as much as black lives, Black Narratives Matter as well.

When the following day, in Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston – the merchant known to the town as a philantropist, who made the bulk of his wealth as a slave trader – was thrown into the canal – the commentariat became absorbed in the spectacle – generating or at least (re)animating discussions around statues of people that advanced notions of racial superiority. The reactionaries angry at this challenges sought to defend Churchill and other ‘heroes’ just like he defended them – or so the narrative they’ve been told said. The organisation Black Lives Matter pulled back but the slogan was carried by other groups and has carried since.

Even so, the pertinent question remains amidst a global standstill – were the most pernicious aspects of a capitalism in crisis – an intensification of the exploitation and the disposibility of bodies of the racialised underclasses – the question remains: we know what racial injustice looks like. But what is the world that we will create if the pursuit of racial justice is the instrument that we use? There were so many different approaches that I encountered during the protests – reformist politics, cultural nationalism, a support of what is effectively black capitalism – and I had confirmed before me that social imagination even within the pandemic still remains held together on a conscious level through capitalist realism even as states struggle to maintain the existing social relations. Perhaps the pandemic beyond our online calls has otherwise rendered us utterly isolated from one another – outside of the organised days of action. We meet each other in shared feelings of outrage, frustration and righteous fury. We march in joy of a possible new world, but we’ve never taken the time to discuss to each other what one really looks like.

George Floyd has imbued the world a level of social consciousness that is far more receptive and interconnected than prior. The tragedy that befell him has led citizens to question their assessment of what it means to be “safe” and “secure”, and why is it that those things are only expressed in terms of one another. The police exist to maintain law and order – which really means to maintain the existing social and economic relations that the state maintains. Since that has mainfested in brutality towards a particular group of people to maintain another group of people’s power – the slogan and initiative “defund the police” both imagines a society where communities do not have to scared of its own people, where security is equated with social health and where resources are diverted towards public services other than a seige force to protect people from themselves. However, we have been socialised and been subject to relentless propaganda and allowed enforcers to resolve the tensions of our society rather then ourselves – so while it has been acheivable in some form in a nation that exloded into riots – it remains on the level of academic discussion in Great Britain – where unrest is the toppling of a statue.

Make no mistake – defunding the police, is reform. Police reform at that too. It’s an idea that redefines the idea of security, and at best – rolls back the militarisation of the police and related expressions of brutality to secure safety. The police to protect its institution will be forced to reimagine its role in the public sphere, or the state will do it for them. This is why they – and their spokespeople in political parties see no interest in pursuing such a change in social relations.

It remains to be seen what will emerge or what has emerged, will remain once the protests die down. But a scream heard around the world demands more than a response – but a resolution. One not born of fear, but of care.

Quick Updates: George Floyd, Lockdown, And Other Stuff

To be honest, a lot has went on. Pretty much every day I get involved in some form of activism is every three weeks that I do not write. Technically, I ‘write’ all the time – as does everyone in the digital age – but I imagine that you know what I mean by this. I’ve been musing a bit about whether to instead set up a Medium page instead, but I guess that would have to mean abandoning this website in favour of another one – and approaching a whole new outlook on this – particularly with respect to the anonymity that I have previously maintained. It’s a bit annoying since this announcement has come when I’ve written in total less than forty posts so far. Most of the ones that I do follow somehow are able to squeeze out dozens in a month. I can scarcely imagine the level of free time that these people actually have. Nevertheless, these are the topics that I have in mind:

Racial injustice

It’s on everyone’s lips after the dying scream heard around the world. It’s been exactly a month since the murder of George Floyd on the hands of police, particularly one Officer Derek Chauvin, who after pinning him to the ground, forced his knee into Floyd’s neck as he begged for his life. This came at a pivotal moment in human history – particularly the coronavirus pandemic and video-sharing across social media – millions across the world saw the final moments of a 46-year old black man in America whose life ended because he was alleged to have forged a $20 bill. The protests that took place across America has overshadowed almost completely the presidential race and has – at least for the moment reshaped the politics and society as never before. While the Civil Rights Era remains on the public consciousness as comparative event, even that was never in comparison to what has occured over the past month. More so, the reaction triggered an international show of solidarity in support of the Black Lives Matter movement – and included their contemporary instances of racial injustice. Media (both traditional and online) and the public space in those countries have either responded affording it the space with sensitivity towards the situation or having the conservation thrust upon them with the removal of statues and works represnting racial oppression. This article is coming very soon.

The lockdown of lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an end of the regular daily Downing Street press conferences of the coronavirus situation in the United Kingdom and has all but indicated that lockdown measures are slowly being lifted – people can meet up to “two households” and up to six people from different households. Public places such as the library, community centres, places of worship, playgrounds and gyms would be able to open provided that measures are taken to limit the transmissions. The same with cinemas, bars, hotels and campsites. The recommended social distancing has now reduced to 1 metre between other people. All of these are to take place from 4th July. It is worth noting that there have been many false starts thanks to the inconsistent and in some cases, overly optimistic assessment of the containment measures that had taken place – leading to a confused message and several instances of people flouting the government advice. It being summertime also plays some part of it. Officially, there has been an estimated 300,000 cases of coronavius, with 43,000 deaths – though the real number could well be as high as 70,000. Perception of Boris Johnson’s has plummeted over the weeks – and he has resisted so far all attempts of an inquiry into his government’s response to the crisis. This too, will receive an article in due course.

Other stuff

Topics like my ever mosaic daily routine, and current thoughts on party politics – and the scope of possibility of a different system are playing in my mind. The problem is the range of stuff that I’m up to occupying my time – not all of them are urgent, but must are educational. I would say everything in some form is “educational”, but there you go. There’s also the edts to old articles that I’ve not come around to doing, but that will happen very soon. Beyond that, this space is gonna be open for a while.

Cornel West

Cornel West (1953-) is an American philosopher, social critic, and activist. He was born the son of a Baptist preacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he grew up in Sacremento, California. He attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in Near Eastern studies, and later attended Princeton University and eventually received a PhD – Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1980. He received tenure as a professor in Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Pepperdine University and Union Theological Seminary.

He was taught by figures such as Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell. But he was informed by the Black church, Karl Marx, The New Left, the Black freedom strggle (in particular Malcolm X, MLK, and the Black Panther Party), and Richard Rorty.

He stands as an icon of the American Left, the Black Left, the Christian Left, and is something of a gadfly for democratic socialism and anti-racism.

He saved the bacon of Yasin Bey (then Mos Def) on a shared panel on Real Time With Bill Maher. He sat on the Council of Zion in The Matrix Reloaded, and its sequel The Matrix Revolutions. He spoke at the Million Man March. He got arrested while protesting Occupy Wall Street, Protested the murder of Michael Brown and took part in the Baltimore protests of 2014, and remained a persistent critic of the Obama administration in particular and the Democratic Party in general – calling Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats’’. His critiques were interpreted by a not insignificant portion of the Black commentariat as stemming from Obama snubbing him during his inauguration party. However, this betrays an ignorance or indifference to West’s hatred of neoliberal capitalism and American exceptionalism – including, and especially if the person or persons espousing or advancing these doctrines were black.

This led to him turning his ire towards two prominent African-American social critics – Melissa Harris-Perry and Ta-Nehisi Coates, based on what he perceived as their blinkered apologetics to the Obama presidency. He called the former a “fraud and a phony”, and the latter a “clever wordsmith” and “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle”. Both of these disputes proved controversial, provoking reactions either condemning West as an egotist and blowhard, or an unapologetic and uncompromising jeremiad.

Cornel West for his part endorsed Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and when he wasn’t nominated, endorsed Jill Stein of the U.S. Green Party (even when Sanders endorsed the victor Hillary Clinton). He has endorsed Sanders again for his 2020 presidential run.

The true range of West’s political endorsements and engagements has led to him endorsing Al Sharpton’s presidential run to co-organizing the Stop Incarceration Network with the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. He was also the Honorary President of the Democratic Socialists of America.

West believes that America was built and is currently sustained by white supremacy, which defines the lives of Americans. He interpreted the shock from the September 11 attacks as a glimpse for white Americans to understand what life is like for black Americans – an experience defined by feeling “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hatred”. However, unlike Coates – he does not view white supremacy as totalizing, if hegemonic in America’s social structure.

He got into a well-known public dispute with Lawrence Summers, who was Treasury Secretary to the Clinton administration and then-president of Harvard University in 2002. Summers criticized West for not keeping up his classes to focus on his political engagements, and was too lenient in his grading. He also criticized West’s rap album, calling it an “embarrassment” to the university. West eventually left Harvard for Princeton some time after surgery for prostate cancer, and denounced Summers as “the Ariel Sharon of higher education”, and later wrote that he was an “unprincipled power player” in his book Democracy Matters.

Martin Luther King: The Whitewashing Of A Pro-Black Radical

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By the time Martin Luther King spent his last day attempting to organise the Poor People’s Campaign – a march to highlight the plight of America’s disenfranchised poor and went to Memphis to assist working-class black sanitation workers on strike. It was at 6pm in the early evening, that King was shot in the head – The authorities did not issue a message to all law enforcement officers in the area, and so the assassin was free to leave the scene of the crime. It wasn’t until two months later, in London Heathrow Airport that a man named James Earl Ray was arrested holding a fake Canadian passport. During that time, King’s assassination had set America ablaze as riots spread across the country.

The Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, rushed towards Indianapolis, Indiana after hearing of King’s death, and pleaded with its citizens to remember the life that King held, and to uphold his legacy of nonviolence. The words Kennedy spoke brought calm onto the city of Indianapolis, even as Harlem, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore burned. This is when the sanitation of a man who called himself an agitator.

King was the subject of nearly 30 arrests, allegations of treason, and a FBI surveillance program that went on for six years up until his death. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Kennedy and the Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover authorized the surveillance on King ostensibly because he was a communist. King indeed recognised the social and economic inequalities that America was founded on, and continues to be blighted by – but King for his part dismissed communism, regarding it as too focused on materialism and invited totalitarianism. Even so, during Dr. King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech, which had itself been the product of pressure from the Kennedy administration, it was when Hoover regarded King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country”. The real purpose for the targeting of King bis that he represented a threat to white supremacy – the system women to the fabric of American society.

King envisioned the birth of a new American society – free from the marginalisation of people on the basis of race and class – built on a foundation of peace, and not the military-industrial complex. He denounced the Vietnam War as another form of American imperialism, and ruefully lamented that the United States was “the single greatest purveyor of violence today”.. From then onwards for the rest of his life, he was viewed as a traitor to America, and solidified in the minds of White America that he was a demagogue. Life magazine more or less referred regarded him as good as a propagandist for Radio Hanoi. But King saw no difference from the violence America used at home than abroad. It was not as if they enjoyed King’s tactics of using sit-ins in businesses, stopping traffic with marches, and his chastisement of white moderates in his struggle against racism, that told him to wait for progress. Indeed, 84% of White Americans felt that demonstrations by blacks hurt the cause of integration. The paternalistic white moderates urged “good blacks” to distance themselves from King.

Far beyond the month that President Kennedy recommended for gathering evidence of King’s alleged communist sympathies, the FBI monitored each and every aspect of King’s life and placed wiretaps in his home, offices, and even the hotels that he stayed in. They discovered his extramarital affairs, and then an anonymous letter was sent to his home which read:

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

King interpreted this as an attempt to push him into suicide, and the result of J. Edgar Hoover’s wider attempts to curry favour with the American South. Yet with his death, not by his own hand – but a white racist, King had exposed the brutality of system that is white supremacy so clearly, that there could be no question on its immorality, and had embarrassed America itself. The following decades since then came the American establishment rewriting King’s legacy, with extensive mythologising as a scion of America in the vein of Lincoln. The Boston Globe and Time Magazine now hails him as the father of modern America. Modern America – where income inequality is higher than any other in the developed world. Where nearly 60% of the prison population is Black and Hispanic, with blacks five times more likely than whites, and where blacks are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. And spends $700 billion on military spending, as it engages in violent conflicts across the Global South.

This “honor” is just one more indignity to King’s memory, from what Cornel West described – is the “Santafication” to MLK. The man who called for economic raparations for black Americans, is now used as a rhetorical bludgeon against Black Live Matter activists. Rioters can expect a verbal tut-tut from conservatives and liberals alike, even though King was clear in explaining that disempowered people will turn to riots if they are not heard. As it stands, America is nowhere close to the true racial harmony, and economic equality Dr. King’s dream entailed. Even the dream is reduced to a single sentence at best and four words at worst, along with the inoffensive icon of MLK erected serving only as the American establishment’s contentment with its supposed egalitarianism. This mythmaking was so successful, that even blacks – not just in the US, but abroad came to view the sanitized MLK erected as some sort of monolithic messiah with an inexhaustible capacity for forgiveness against his oppressors. It is a lie. And a lie designed to obscure the truth of what he was committed to – the end of social and economic inequality. Honoring King means continuing the commitment to this struggle until his dream became a reality.

She Who Resists – Winnie Mandela

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Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela-Mandela was a South African activist and politician, as well as the former wife of Nelson Mandela. The daughter of teachers Columbus and Gertrude, she was born in a village in Bizana, Tanskrei (now Eastern Cape) – as the fourth of eight children, with the given name Nomzamo – Xhosa for “one who resists”. Even during her youth, she was known to be fiercely independent and observant – she watched a White youth kick out a Black family from his father’s store because the father used the place to feed his children, and noticed her own father do nothing about it. It was then she began to understand the system of apartheid and the society it created. She moved to Johannesburg to pursue studies in social work in 1953, completing her degree at the top of her class in 1955. When she was twenty-two, she met Nelson Mandela, then already an famous anti-apartheid activist, and married. He was 16 years her senior, but both fell deeply in love in a rollercoaster romance. Mandela eventually left his then-wife Evelyn Mose for her, and Willie and Nelson married in 1958.

The couple had little opportunity to experience life as a married couple. She had two daughters with Nelson – Zenani and Zindziwa. However, Nelson’s involvement with the African National Congress forced him underground in 1960 – only given the opportunity in secret, until his arrest in 1961. Nelson used the opportunity to voice “ANC’s moral opposition to racism”, Nelson Mandela was nonetheless sentenced to life imprisonment on four counts of sabotage. During her husband’s incarceration in 1963, Winnie was left to take the reins, and become the face of the ANC to the outside world for the duration of his 27-year imprisonment, and eventually became a highly influential figure in her own right within the anti-apartheid struggle. She set up local clinics, and vigorously campaigned for her husband’s release and for racial equality.

Winnie herself was subjected to a banning order in 1965 limiting her movements to no further than her own neighbourhood, forcing her to give up her job as a social worker. The authorities pressurized any business that hired her, going from dry cleaner to a clerk, to eventually fire her. No school would take her daughters because who their parents were. Winnie noticed the effect the constant police harassment were having on her children, and sent them away to Swaziland, to a private school.

She was eventually imprisoned by the apartheid government in 1969; subjected to torture, solitary confinement and was held under house arrest under constant surveillance. During her trial in 1970, she as part of the “22 detainees”, Winnie – along with 21 other defendants, was made to wear cardboard with a number with a string around her neck. When the Afrikaner prosecutor referred to Winnie by the number attached to her, she defiantly retorted that she was not a number and was Winnie Mandela. The detainees were later freed, and the charges dismissed. The experience of imprisonment, however, had an indelible effect on Winnie, remarking of her treatment in prison “I knew what it was to feel hate”. Even after the release of Winnie, she could not be free; She was served another five-year banning order restricting her movements by forbidding her to be outside of her house in Soweto between 6pm to 6am.

For her involvement in the 1976 Soweto Uprising – the protests by black schoolchildren and their parents for equal education rights as White South African children, and resisting government attempts to force them to learn Afrikaans alongside English as languages for education; Winnie was held under police custody for four months, and later banished by the Apartheid government to a black township in Brandfort in 1977 – in a house without running water, floors, or ceilings. Winnie spent the time setting up several organisations, including a soup kitchen, a clinic and and organisation for orphans. After eight years, her banishment came to an end, and she returned to her neighborhood in Orlando West in 1985.

The struggle separated from her husband, her children, fragmented her family and invited several instances of betrayal by people she believed to be friends only to learn they were informants. Winnie became hardened, and somewhat paranoid of potential informants. Despite her role as the face of the imprisoned Mandela, Winnie and Nelson moved in different directions philosophically – Nelson during his time in prison, moved further towards reconciliation and non-violence, Winnie became increasingly militant. In a 1986 speech, she announced that “Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country” – Necklacing refers to a practice where a tyre is set alight to hang around a person’s neck, to be burnt alive; it was a common punishment for those suspected of treason.

The youth football club, the Mandela United Football Association – formed by coach Jerry Richardson, eventually turned into Winnie’s very own security detail. The MUFC went roughshod and terrorized Soweto in what was described as “a reign of terror”, causing a spate of violence and murder. Even Winnie and Nelson’s home in the Orlando West neighbourhood was burned down from a conflict with the MUFC and local pupils. Winnie relocated to another home in Diepkloof.

At the end of 1988, the MUFC kidnapped a 14-year old called James Seipei – also known as Stompie Moeketsi; along with three other children, under the suspicion that at least one of them was a police informant. Stompie was severely beaten – and so Dr. Abu-Baker Asvat, a personal friend of Winnie’s examined his injuries shortly before his murder. Stompie’s body was later found a week later on a waste ground near Winnie Mandela’s house, with stab wounds on his neck. Dr. Asvat was himself murdered by the MUFC on 7 January 1989. Winnie was implicated in both – and in spite of her image being permanently stained by the reaction to the murders, the then-President of South Africa, F.W. De Klerk – announced that the ANC were no longer a banned political party, and that Nelson Mandela was to be released.

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Nelson walked hand in hand with Winnie amidst thousands of supporters; Winnie threw up a clenched fist, representing her transition to Black Power during Nelson’s period in jail. What was beginning was the transition towards the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the birth of a multi-ethnic democracy. However, while the Mandelas left Victor Verster Prison as the power couple of the anti-apartheid movement, a rift between them emerged in time. Indeed, Winnie was aware of the contradiction between her militant stance against white supremacy and the National Party in particular and the conciliatory approach her husband was now making with the NP for his vision of a multi-ethnic state.

Winnie was granted a post within the ANC as its head of Social Welfare; an action that was divisive among the party, though it was understood that Winnie had a positive reputation in South Africa’s black youth. Later that year, Winnie Mandela and her MUFC associates were standing trial for the murder of Stompie Moeketsi. Winnie was acquitted of all but four counts of kidnapping and accessory to assault, for which she was sentenced to five years – later reduced to a two-year suspended sentence, and a fine of 15,000 rand. Her role as head of Social Welfare was also fraught with controversy over allegations of fraud, contributing to the diminishing favour she held in the ANC. In terms of her personal life, rumours of Winnie being unfaithful to Nelson spread rapidly, and she eventually admitted to him instances of infidelity. On April 1992, Nelson announced his separation from Winnie.

By 1994, South Africa’s transition to democracy was finalized, signalling the end of of apartheid, with Nelson Mandela elected as president. Even with the problems in her personal and political life, Winnie stood at the side of Nelson Mandela during his presidential inauguration. Winnie was elected head of the ANC Women’s League, and the Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology – the latter post lasting only 11 months from further corruption allegations. Winnie remained popular among ANC supporters, and black South Africans – Her election into the national executive signified that she still had political influence. In 1995, despite Winnie expressing a desire to reconcile, Nelson initiated divorce proceedings which finalized the following year. Winnie kept her ex-husband’s name, but reclaimed her family name as well, now known as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The same year, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid era. The TRC sought to avoid favouring one side over the other, and so called Madikizela-Mandela to the committee hearing to testify before them on her involvement with the MUFC, and the violence and murder that they committed. Winnie was specifically accused of paying the equivalent of $8,000 and supplying the handgun to murder Dr. Abu-Baker Asvat. Winnie rebuffed the allegations during the hearing; only the pleas of Desmond Tutu implored her to admit that “things went horribly wrong” and apologised to the Seipei and Asvat families.

In 2003, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was convicted on over 40 counts of fraud and 20 counts of theft – the charges relating to money taken from loan applicants for a funeral fund; sentenced to five years in prison. She subsequently resigned from all her ANC posts. Eventually she appealed and overturned the theft charges, save for the ones on fraud – leaving her with a suspended sentence of three years and six months. In 2007, she returned to politics again, and was elected in the National Executive Committee again, where she would remain for the rest of her life. She campaigned against anti-immigrant violence and for better housing provisions towards its victims of the riots that ensued.

Towards the end of her life, Winnie expressed disappointment with the South Africa that emerged with the end of the apartheid system she fought against. She reportedly criticized her ex-husband Nelson Mandela “for letting blacks down” as well as Desmond Tutu in an interview for the Evening Standard. Winnie released a statement claiming that the interview never happened. In spite of the complicated relationship with Nelson, she continued communicating with him, and visiting him as his health was failing he eventually passed on 5 December 2013. Winnie was devastated, and attended the state funeral of her ex-husband on 15 December 2013, wearing dark black and beside Nelson’s widow, Gracia Marcel.

Winnie passed away on 2 April 2018 at the Netcare Milpark Hospital – her personal assistant reporting “a long term illness” as the cause.

All in all, Winnie Madizikela-Mandela was a complicated woman, fraught with idiosyncratic contradictions – much of which could be best understood in the personal cost a South Africa under a racist hierarchy, and as a woman living in a society with entrenched patriarchal values. The people we uphold as heroes are never simple – we just have the habit of watering them down to fit into boxes. Winnie refused to be defined by white supremacy, by her husband, and even by the world around her. She had as much a reputation for vindictiveness, ruthlessness and being uncompromising, as her fearlessness, her devotion towards the young, and strong sense of justice. Any discussion of the legacy Winnie left should focus on the truth of her character, and reflect the candour she held.

Discovering Miriam Makeba

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Today is probably the first (well, maybe not the first, but certainly one of the few times) that I’ve taken the time to actually listen to Miriam Makeba. I guess I vaguely knew about the global cultural impact that she had through her music and her activism before, but never fully understood the degree to which she is important in either. Forgive me. I’m not a cultured man. It’s the same with me and Nina Simone, and to a (much) lesser extent Harry Belafonte.

But to take the time to actually listen to her songs, and realised what an amazing singer and performer that she is. It’s from this I have come to see how she became a cultural icon.

For those who don’t know who she is, Miriam Makeba was a South African singer, UN goodwill ambassador and anti-apartheid activist. She would have been 86 today. Her musical influence was so great that she came to be nicknamed “Mama Africa”. She would have been 86 today.

She was born in a black township near Johannesburg to a healer mother and a doctor father. Her father died when she was six, and as a result, she was forced to find work and found it as a nanny. Because her mother was working for white families in Johannesburg doing domestic work, she had to live away from Miriam and her five siblings, so they were raised by her grandmother.

When she was 17, Makeba got married to a policeman, and had her only child – Bongi, in the following year. She overcame both breast and cervical cancer, and was left to raise her daughter on her own.

Makeba was influenced by the music of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and became a cabaret singer and later part of the jazz band, The Manhattans. In 1953, she recorded “Laku Tshoni Ilsanga” which became her first hit. Two years later, she would have a chance meeting with a lawyer named Nelson Mandela, who felt that she would one day be truly great.

In 1960, during the Sharpeville massacre, two of her family members were killed. Makeba began vocally declaring her opposition to apartheid, and in response, the South African government rendered her passport invalid. After testifying before the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, where she recommended that economic sanctions be put in place against South Africa and an arms embargo, her South African citizenship was revoked. She, at that point resided in the United States, and working with Harry Belafonte’s band, released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album in 1964. In 1967, she recorded her most famous single, “Pata Pata” – which became a global sensation. Americans, or least white Americans embraced her and her music up until she married Stokely Carmichael, a prominent figure of the Black Panther Party. Her popularity in the US declined significantly, and she was made the target of the FBI and the CIA surveillance. After a trip to the Bahamas, the pair discovered that she was no longer welcome in the US either, and resided in Guinea under the patronage of its dictator, Sekou Toure.

It was during this period that Makeba’s activism grew broader from anti-apartheid, to Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism. After her daughter died in childbirth in 1985, Makeba took custody of both her grandchildren and left Guinea for Belgium. In 1987, she met Paul Simon of the Simon & Garfunkel fame, and joined his lineup for the Graceland World Tour. Controversy emerged over Makeba’s presence in the tour as Simon’s Graceland album was recorded in South Africa – and her appearance in the tour was seen as breaking the cultural embargo which she herself had endorsed.

She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute held at Wembley Stadium, London on June 11th 1988 to raise global awareness of apartheid. After Mandela’s release in 1990 from prison, finally returned to South Africa after 31 years of exile. She spent her final years as a Goodwill Ambassador in 1999, and working closely with Grace Machel-Mandela advocating for HIV/AIDS awareness, and aid towards the disabled. In 2008, while on tour in Italy, she had a heart attack after performing “Pata Pata”, and taken to a nearby clinic, where doctors failed to revive her. Mama Africa died on November 9, 2008 – doing what she was born to do, and had always done: sing her story. And through singing her story, she reminded us that the personal is the political.