People of History: Winnie Mandela

She was born in the village of Mbongweni Bizana, Pondoland, in what is now South Africa's Eastern Cape Province.

she earned a degree in social work from the Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, despite the restriction on education of Blacks during the apartheid, and several years later earned a Bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of Witwatersrand.

She was married to an anti-apartheid activist, Nelson Mandela in 1958 and had two daughters, Zenani and Zindzi. In 2010, she lost her daughter Zenani to a car accident on the eve of the opening of South Africa's World Cup.

She emerged as a leading opponent of the white minority rule government during the later years of her husband's imprisonment (August 1963 – February 1990). For many of those years, she was exiled to the town of Brandfort in the Orange Free State and confined to the area, except for the times she was allowed to visit her husband at the prison on Robben Island. Beginning in 1969, she spent eighteen months in solitary confinement at Pretoria Central Prison

Appointed Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology in the first post-Apartheid government in May 1994, she was dismissed eleven months later following allegations of corruption.

Monitored by the government, Winnie Mandela was arrested under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and spent more than a year in solitary confinement, where she was tortured. Upon her release, she continued her activism and was jailed several more times. Then after the Soweto 1976 uprisings where hundreds of students were killed, she was forced by the government to relocate to the border town of Brandfort in 1977 and placed under house arrest. She described the experience as alienating and heart-wrenching, yet she continued to speak out, as in a 1981 statement to the BBC on black South African economic might and its ability to overturn the system.
In 1985, after her home was firebombed, Winnie returned to Soweto and continued to agitate against the regime even during government media bans. Her actions continued to cement the title bestowed upon her, "Mother of the Nation." But Winnie also became known for endorsing deadly retaliation against black citizens who collaborated with the apartheid regime.