Long before Victoria Beckham or Coleen Rooney were born, South Africa produced the first and foremost uber-WAG. Even before the acronym for ‘Wives & Girlfriends’ was coined, she was making the headlines and gossip columns of the British tabloids. Not only was she married to the future president of South Africa at the time, she had an entire football club as her bodyguards with half of them drooling over ‘The mother of the nation’.
Our one and only Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is no ordinary woman. Her Xhosa name is Nomzamo, which means ‘having a hard time’ and she is surely living up to it! As she dances her way through history, controversy follows.
At the age of 21, Winnie met a young lawyer whom she married a year later in 1958. Her new husband’s name was Nelson R. Mandela.
A while after Mandela’s well publicised imprisonment for treason, Winnie also surfaced as a leading anti-apartheid activist earning herself eighteen months in solitary confinement at the notorious Pretoria Central Prison in 1969. Some say the ‘visit’ changed her attitude – and life – forever.
By the 1980s she was hot international subject matter attracting immense national and international media attention. She was interviewed by a string of foreign journalists, but her reputation continued to take a knock and mostly she had only herself to blame. Her bloodthirsty rhetoric didn’t earn her many friends – notably the apartheid uncles – and even her best pals sold her out. One of her bodyguards at the Mandela United Football Club claimed she ordered the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Stompie Moeketsi, an orphan they picked up from a local church orphanage. Winnie was convicted of kidnapping, but her six year jail sentence was reduced to a fine on appeal.
When hubby was released from prison in 1990 and offered to smoke the peace pipe with his former oppressors, she was not similarly inclined. She did zip it just long enough to appear on Madiba’s arm as he made his freedom walk from Victor Verster Prison, but when the 38 year marriage ended with rumours of Winnie having an affair, she started to spit fire. Her bitter criticism of her former husband and the new ruling party continues being reported to this day. But in certain circles Winnie remains ever so popular. In 1993 and 1997 she was elected president of the ANC Women’s League, and despite being convicted on multiple charges of fraud she had her stint in parliament and even the cabinet.
So much did she fascinate the world, that Hollywood is planning to immortalise her on the silver screen. But even this is dogged by controversy. The Creative Workers Union of South Africa have opposed plans to have Jennifer Hudson play Winnie and Winnie herself has threatened legal action claiming she was never consulted about the film.
Who knows what the 73 year old will get up to next?
Sarah Baartman – The Khoikhoi Venus
Long before reality TV and Britain’s Got Talent, Londoners were besotted by freak shows. So when Sarah Baartman hit the London high streets in 1810 with her enormous buttocks and other peculiar bodily features, the crowds ran riot.
Born in the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern Cape in 1789, Baartman worked as a slave in the old Cape Colony. When William Dunlop, a Pommie with knack for business, spotted her, he promised her great fortune and shipped her off to the English capital where she had to parade half naked to the delight, and horror, of the establishment. Historians recorded that the shows were at 225 Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket on a two feet high stage where she was ‘exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit’ on the orders of her ‘keeper’.
The liberal folk started protesting so much that Baartman was promoted from the circus pages of the local newspapers to the headlines. Under some pressure the attorney general banned the shows, but Baartman testified in a London court that she was a willing partner receiving half of the income from the shows. This gave her ‘performances’ a new lease of life until 1814 when she was sold to a wild animal trainer who took her to Paris to join a traveling circus.
Her story is ultimately a very sad one. She died in Paris in 1815 at the age of 25 as a destitute alcoholic, some even suggesting that she turned to prostitution to survive. But her legacy is massive. Her story today embodies the plight of suppressed African women.
When her remains was released by the French government in 2002, receiving a dignified burial on Women’s Day of the same year, dignitaries scrambled to be part of the gathering around her burial site on a hill overlooking the Gamtoos River. Attended by the then president Thabo Mbeki, the event was drawn on to highlight the plight of women’s rights in southern Africa.
Today, 200 years after her appearances in London, the name Sarah Baartman lives on back home. One of four South African environmental protection patrol ships is named after her as well as The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, a refuge for survivors of domestic violence, opened in Cape Town in 1999.
Zola Budd Pieterse – Britain’s most infamous athlete
She was by far the first South African youngster to get a go at a gap year on the Queen’s mighty mud patch, years before Her Majesty so kindly (and temporarily) opened the UK’s borders for other young South following the birth of democracy.
In 1984, at the age of 17, Zola Budd – of that insignificant place in the Free State, Bloemfontein – broke the women’s 5,000m world record with a time of 15:01.83. Since her performance took place in apartheid South Africa, her record was never recognised by the rest of the world. But seeing that Britain had no real talent of their own and the Los Angeles Summer Olympics was just a few months away, the British gutter press (in particular the Daily Mail) started a campaign for Budd to become a British citizen on the grounds that her grandfather was British.
Her red passport was issued faster than a township taxi as Budd settled in Guildford to train for the Olympics. Her participation in pre-Olympic events in Britain was something newspaper bosses can only dream of. Every anti-apartheid activist with a paintbrush, a piece of cardboard and half the ability to spell ‘apaarthate’ criss-crossed the country to kick up a stink.
Budd made the British Olympic team running barefoot and without breaking a sweat at the Olympic trials. Her big day came i
