Nombuso Mathibela reviews the latest edition of Chimurenga Chronic, themed “Brandfort, Liberation Capital [1977-86],” an enquiring timepiece into the location of Winnie Mandela Town, formerly known as Brandfort.
Brandfort is often spoken of as a destitute town. The narrative is that Mam’ Winnie was banished to the middle of nowhere. The images that populate her banishment frame her in no man’s land, behind a house that reeks of condemned isolation. Through these photographs, her nine years of banishment look like seventy years in the wilderness. I am not disregarding the diabolical experience of banishment and its offensive effects of native commissioning. I am rather pointing to what the official frame often leaves out, what is outside, behind and beyond what photography can give us. Brandfort, Liberation Capital [1977 – 86] brings together conversations, newspaper clippings, photographs, texts, poems, records, and sightings, that cite Mam’ Winnie’s presence in Brandfort as a way of telling the social history of a small agricultural town that later becomes Winnie Mandela. This publication is the most heart wrenching body of work that I have ever read about Mam’ Winnie, aside from her own accounts. Through it, the image of Brandfort as an empty town, is arrested. It is clear that writers can no longer continue to write and think about Brandfort through caricaturesque perspectives. It is no longer acceptable to write about Brandfort as a deserted land of no time or people.
The people of Brandfort were Mam’ Winnie’s contemporaries who shared generational time, and some were co-contemporaries who lived through this temporal moment across different generations. They witnessed how she transformed a small town by creating a mobile clinic in her garage, a feeding scheme through Operation Hunger, a crèche for children, Brandfort’s very first high school and, crucially, how she converted a small shelf in her house into a public library. We learn about how she connects Brandfort with her resourceful friends. Social work is a political project not simply a vocation. These moments of radical activity are made possible by many hands, and women in particular who conscript themselves voluntarily into carrying the burden of Mam’ Winnie’s banishment. Kabomo Mota tells us that there were constant raids, threats of imprisonment and complete destruction of lives for those who worked and lived in close community with her. These conditions of terror deter some members of the community but there are people who chose to walk through the fire with her. Mam’ Winnie is never truly alone as official photographs tend to show us.
House 802 in Mothupi Street is inundated with people. There are stories that orbit the house about her seething temper. A revolutionary who wore her big feelings on her chest as much as she displayed them with her fist. Brandfort is emotionally charged. Humor and trauma sit side by side, figuring both tension and contradiction that we owe to ourselves. The narrations insist on grey areas, they are suspicious of people who think they know Mam’ Winnie, and they contest how she is remembered. Put differently, these accounts are not simply about Winnie but her story figures how voices in this publication narrate their own lives. Historical practice is an interior practice. And how we interpret the past often hinges on our relationship with the present. And the extent to which we have reckoned with the hauntings of time. Nomvola Khetsha is a fascinating intervention. She talks about writing a book about Winnie Mandela as a ghostwriter for Ntate Jack Menera about his time with Mam’ Winnie. Nomvola talks about how divisive history can be and how contested memory is. Ntate Jack’s words “There’s no Mama Winnie in Brandfort without me!” shook me off my seat. Apartheid was personal. It is impossible to interpret Mam’ Winnie without reckoning with how the present in this publication manifests in the lives of its greatest interlocutors. I am taken back to the first image that I ever saw of Mam’ Winnie with her arms leaning over a wire fence and her body staring into a place that one cannot read in the image. Brandfort gives us a sense of this place. Her ‘bodily vernacular’, to borrow from K’eguro Macharia, is given a language that we can recognise. Every yellow paged image, passing graphic of her red Beetle, stills of her bookshelf, images of women who shared their youth with her, every image of children and grandchildren; give us a grammar of how to navigate the life of a human being who became a metaphor for what apartheid does to renegades.
Brandfort has stories that reintroduce apartheid to our forgetful minds. For those of us who only know the embodied and inherited afterlife of apartheid, some of these stories feel like a re-fueling of existential outrage. The stories in this publication do not allow you to wallow in anger or obsess about the details of harm. Brandfort has moments that refuse totalising despair. I am hurt and laughing in the same paragraph. There is complexity and recourse. This is critical to how we interpret the past. I am convinced we need practices of history that refuse to pathologise black life in excessive binaries. We need practices like Black music that bite and blow. There are instances that hold unspeakable grief like the list of musical tributes to Mam’ Winnie during the Brandfort years. Sathima Bea Benjamin’s ‘Song for Winnie’ has an infamous bassline that cooks the most delicious nostalgia and epic compositional style, which humanises Nomzamo. We are not left tethered by the controversies that follow her name. The bassline is didactic. It reorientates our gaze away from what history has taught us to foreground: the dangers of an unruly, unstable and unpredictable woman. Mam’ Winnie’s heroism emerges in the music. She is balmed with praises and admiration. She is a reflection of our fearlessness as much as she is a by-product of a system that she did not create.
Brandfort chips away any romanticism that one might attach to having Winnie Mandela in your community. Apartheid communist rhetoric saturates the air in Brandfort with growing murmurs of peril for Mam’ Winnie’s associates. These spells of propaganda swell through newspapers and police raids and threats. Her arrival is not a joyous occasion for everyone in the community. For some she is walking trouble. For others, her big figure presence disappears the existence of local political activity. Her arrival also signals an extension of Brandfort’s prior grassroots activities and the new awakening of a small town. None of these positions exist in isolation. She is deeply central to how the politics of the time exploded into people’s lives.
Brandfort is filled with stories that narrate Mam’ Winnie’s confrontational and defiant character. There is a lot that lies in between the lines of the sentences that describe her movement in Brandfort. We witness a simmering feeling of rooted rage that guides Mam’Winnie’s actions. She lived in a full house despite the conditions of banishment. Her stubbornness is consistent. She is walking into shops that bar black people, trying on clothes in Foschini, standing against racially segregated grocery queues, barging into the police station, taking children through school, buying impoverished mothers groceries, helping with school supplies and uniforms. I loved her soft playful routine of dropping off oranges for school children.
Nobusuku ‘Myses’ Georgina Mbajeni recalls that Mamane liked to cook samp and beans. She would dish up generous mountainous portions that could probably bury the surveilling security branch across the hill from her house. In many ways, it is your average African home in the heart of an irreparably evil system. It is a place of refuge for children who need school fees, supplies and uniforms. A place of strategic solutions for impoverished mothers. And a home that reorientated the intellectual lives of young people on the cusp and crossroad of either life altering revolt or succumbing to the fate of docile African subjects that apartheid produced. People remember these focal moments of Mam’ Winnie’s interventions. She wasn’t a saviour but she did create paths and avenues to navigate apartheid in Brandfort. I will never forget how much I loved reading that she also liked her wine and loved listening to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Mam’Winnie lived all these moments, blacklisted from all realms of employment, sandwiched in a three room house by policeman neighbors on both sides and surveillance from a big hill that overlooks her house.
MK Malefane tells us about Mam’ Winnie’s operational militancy in Brandfort. She ran a full liberation operation, transiting young people into Swaziland and Lesotho undetected. Brandfort is a glimpse into how Mam’ Winnie’s intellectual, social and political work consolidated in a town that was intended to kill all possibilities of revolt. The Apartheid State made a terrible decision. Wherever the spirit and bones of her perpetrators may lie, regret haunts them. Winnie Mandela’s house became ‘Parliament,’ destabilising all fronts of Apartheid authority in Brandfort. It became a place of refuge for the wounded. It was the reason for trouble and trauma that lingered for those in close proximity to Mam’ Winnie. And also the source of entertainment that echoed the songs by Mam’ Miriam Makeba and Bra Hugh Masekela on vinyl. A home of crossing affairs, love bugs and chaotic romance. It is difficult to talk about Mam’Winnie’s love life. The ageist in me feels that it is intrusive. It is not quite my business. Black writers cannot get away with that. There are unspoken instincts and ethics that english or technique cannot break. We are not held to the same standards. Winnie’s marriage, Winnie’s personal relationships are not footnotes to resolve historical beefs. It is worth mentioning how this publication attends to this area of her life. There is a veil that white writers cannot even fathom. It is learned behaviour, you learn how to talk by reading the social cues around you. Her private life sits in passing sentences that you cannot peel. There is a clear code that there are certain things that we do not say as a way of saying. Black life is not on the nose, it is idiomatic praxis. The Special Branch has a long repulsive history of crossing the lines of her privacy. We are inundated with salacious details that are weaponised to undermine her legacy and rightful place in the ecosystem of liberation history. Brandfort attends to her private life without inviting familiarity or making the reader feel like they’ve now barged into her bedroom.
I cannot unsee the image of Mam’ Winnie driving through the repetitive streets of Brandfort in her red Beetle. I want to keep this image as a frontier against the propaganda that still permeates the archive. I am relieved it has replaced the thirst ridden and flat image of resounding destitution that officiates my memory of Brandfort. I hope the stories that sit on these pages do the same thing. I hope they repair the warfare of forgetfulness that has been waged against generations that encounter this history. I hope readers are drawn to stories of how she ritualised a stylish posture in everything. This has been etched in my heart. I hope we remember how Nora Nomafa Moahloli talks about how Mam’Winnie insisted that you just have to wake up and dress stylishly in the morning. Her radical disdain for the idea of looking like the system that terrorises you and the refusal to succumb to the authority of apartheid’s imagination of black people is a stunning black strategy that Brandfort brings into the fold. The stories in this publication are reparative in the sense that they confront the binary narrative that often burdens how we remember Mam’ Winnie, through oppositional perspectives that either seek to moralise her revolt or invent her into a saintly figure who can do no wrong. The community of Brandfort tell their own lives through shared stories about Mam’ Winnie. There is a stunning portrait of Emily Mogoro in the publication, she is dressed in a statement fur coat and long leather boots, and gracefully seated on a white leather chair with golden finishes fit for a queen. Her stoic and stubborn generational elegance alone tells us a lot about the people that Mam’ Winnie lived with. Mam’ Emily has two dresses gifted by Mam’ Winnie that she will not let anyone touch. The sentiment still sits with me. Black people have a lot to lose. There is a lot at stake in our lives, dresses too.
Yes, there is life before Mam’ Winnie arrival in Brandfort. However, her presence brings this golden trail that recentres sociality and style. The word ‘community’ is verbalised in sticky claustrophobic ways. The town itself is suffocating in its smallness. It is prey to all kinds of gossip, murmurs and tales. There isn’t much to do. It forces routine. It elaborates and unfolds with every social reparative move that Mam’ Winnie instigates. Her life in Brandfort isn’t simply social work as vocation, it is what we have come to learn in Black Studies: how people transform concepts into methods as strategies of not just spewing subjectivity but doing something a bit more straightforward than that – defining the terrains of how to be human.
To purchase The Chronic: Brandfort, Liberation Capital [1977-86] head to our online shop or visit Chimurenga Factory at 157 Victoria Road, Woodstock.
This article and other work by Chimurenga are produced through the kind support of our readers. Please visit our donation page to support our work.