Jonny Steinberg

From one of South Africa’s foremost nonfiction writers, a deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

Marion

Forgiveness seldom wears its deepest motivation on its sleeve. It is hardly a sign that the anger preceding it has vanished: rather, it has been reworked into another state. What remains is the very core of anger the desire, no matter how gentle and civilized it has become, to avenge. There is one-upmanship in the offer to forgive, a soft triumph, a gentle torturing of the other into a position of compliance.!

This is how the revolutionaries of mid-twentieth-century South Africa joined the struggle: in married couples, the baggage each union carried bursting at the seams, the distribution of burdens lopsided. They raised children as a matter of course, for they were traditional enough to embrace the sanctity of nuclear families. Yet the role of women in these marriages was hardly reduced to motherhood. The Winnies and Albertinas of the world were highly educated and expected to conduct professional careers; indeed, their vocational expertise put bread on the table. They were also expected to be as politically conscious as their husbands and to engage in activism, at least insofar as their other duties permitted. And in addition to being professionals, activists and breadwinners, they performed all the household duties expected of a traditional wife.

They carried the burdens of women past and of women to come, all in one life. In this, they were very much of the global mid-century, bearing the load of one of humanity's greatest transitions.

One cannot live just off discipline. It does not, alone, produce the meaning, the people, the narrative arc, that make for a human life.

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