Johannesburg:
South Africa's governing party, the African National Congress, said on Wednesday that its leaders would talk to Nelson's Mandela's ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, when she returned from abroad about published remarks attributed to her in which she caustically described him as a figurehead who had made a bad deal with the country's former white rulers.
She was quoted in the London Evening Standard this week as saying her former husband, South Africa's first democratically elected president, had let the black majority down. "He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks," she was quoted as saying. "Economically, we are still on the outside."
It is the harsh, belittling tone of the quoted remarks, as much as their substance, that has created a stir here. Madikizela-Mandela, still admired by many for enduring harsh treatment from apartheid authorities during Mandela's 27-year-long imprisonment, has long cast herself as a champion of the dispossessed.
Just last month, on the 20th anniversary of Mandela's release from prison, she sat with him and his current wife, Graca Machel, in Parliament as he was honored. The frail 91-year-old leader, widely revered here, is rarely seen in public these days. Madikizela-Mandela, despite convictions over the years on kidnapping and fraud charges, serves on the ANC's national executive committee.
She has not yet commented on her quoted remarks in the article, written by Nadira Naipaul, the wife of the writer V.S. Naipaul. The Naipauls met with Madikizela-Mandela in her home in Soweto and Nadira Naipaul, who was a newspaper columnist in Pakistan before her marriage, relates
the conversation that the three of them had in The Evening Standard. The article does not say when the conversation took place.
In the article, Madikizela-Mandela is quoted as describing the Mandela name as "an albatross around the necks of my family" and declaring that she cannot forgive Mandela for accepting the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with "his jailer" F.W. de Klerk, the white South African leader. The two men were honored for negotiating a peaceful end to apartheid.
She also suggested that the foundation that bore his name found him useful in raising money.
"Look what they make him do," she said. "The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more. They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent white area of Johannesburg. Not here where we spilled our blood and where it all started. Mandela is now a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money and he is content doing that. The ANC have effectively sidelined him, but they keep him as a figurehead for the sake of appearance."
There has been some speculation in the press here that Madikizela-Mandela may have thought that the conversation was off the record. Nadira Naipaul, reached by telephone at her home in Wiltshire, England, replied, "At this moment, I'm saying nothing," then hung up before any further questions could be posed.