A special edition of Chimurenga Chronic, exploring the intellectual, social and political work of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela during the period of her banishment in Brandfort from 1977-86.
Banished to Brandfort in 1977, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela noted that this act, carried out by the apartheid authorities, was intended “to bury me forever.” However, it was her presence that ultimately repositioned the small rural town in the Free State as a centre for black radicalism.
Before Mama Winnie was removed from Soweto, along with her daughters Zenani and Zindziswa, and dumped outside of 802 Mothupi Street, Brandfort, the town was infamous as the location of British concentration camps, during the Second Anglo-Boer war, and the once home to Hendrik Verwoerd, a man synonymous with apartheid. Mama Winnie fundamentally changed that, as she recalled, “I was never as active as in Brandfort.”
Although the period in Brandfort is well documented with international news teams arriving and publicizing speech acts by Madikizela-Mandela, it is under-examined in the formation of her political positionality and later subjectivity. While Mama Winnie’s life and work in Brandfort is the locus of the project, the aim of this publication is not to reinforce the depiction of her as a heroic and radiant symbol of the revolution, a fierce and unyielding fighter for justice and equality.
Rather, we seek to de-exceptionalise Mama Winnie by placing her life and actions within a larger context that looks to past traditions while supporting new life. More than a feminist recovery of narrative, it is a method through which the lives of black women are reimagined and remade in conversation with and through the lives of others, a mode of hospitality in which lives coalesce and transform one another. In so doing we aim to make Winnie Mandela dangerous again.
Building on the archival research produced by Natal Collective toward the setting-up of a permanent exhibition at the Winnie Mandela Museum in Brandfort, we initiated a research residency in Brandfort in July 2024. We produced an oral history of Brandfort in the time of Winnie Mandela, through interviews with townspeople, collaborators and friends, re-examining themes such as: her operation of a clinic, creche and library in the context of the Black Consciousness Movement’s community programmes; the network of collaboration that facilitated her political work in Brandfort, and the impact of such work on the broader liberation struggle; the modes of communication and speech-acts she used during her banishment; and more.
Collectively, the interviews tell the story of Mama Winnie’s time in Brandfort, a story about mothers and daughters, about female pain and female beauty, about performance and shame, but—further down, and beyond—a story about how everyday practices, sartorial elegance, and a feminist politics and poetics of care have been and can and must be harnessed in struggles for freedom.
The interviews are supplemented with print archives, original maps of the “human infrastructure” Mama Winnie built in Brandfort and liberation networks across the Free State during this period, and, importantly, original works by musicians, poets, photographers and visual artists from Africa and its diaspora, responding to Mama Winnie’s banishment to Brandfort.
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