The passing of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela brought forth both praise and damnation.
The image of her, fist high and shouting “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”, has been revived from the past of that cold, autumn day in April 1985.
Yet there is more to maWinnie than these words of rage and fire.
Who remembers what South Africa was like then?
The presence of Askaris and their apartheid state-engineered execution of ones with whom they had shared the trenches of exiles?
The Wit Doeke and their sponsored rampage through the lives of the people of Crossroads.
The Koevoet paramilitary police unit and death squads spawned by a regime that hated us and was contemptuous of our fist-in-the-air, unarmed militancy and love of each other and that singular, enamouring word, solidarity.
You who condemn maWinnie, have you ever marched in a crowd of a mere 100 or so people - young and old - when the tear-gas choked the breath out of you and the rubber bullets thudded into hungry bodies? When impotent rage brought forth songs about guns in Angola and the dark humour of “julle moer” sung in exquisite, four-part harmony as the police van trundled into Pollsmoor Maximum Prison.
While we sang praise songs about Nelson Mandela it was maWinnie - beautiful, unbowed and audacious - who kept our untethered hope alive.
Recall the words of the burning tyre - the so-called necklace that condemned so many of our own, mouthed by one who refused the relative safety of exile - within the broader context of apartheid state terror. Its capacity to infiltrate and coerce our people into acts against themselves.
She was a woman - representative of many others - isolated and sexually terrorised by the Special Branch Gestapo who invaded her home and bedroom - be it in Brandfort in the Free State or Soweto - at whim and with impunity.
(Pause at this moment. Close your eyes and place yourself in this dungeon of dread. You are alone. Stripped naked. The vilest of words are spat out about your womanhood. The threats to your children. And when they are gone, eventually, you are left with only the comfort of your arms wrapped around your silent body).
Whenever resistance gained momentum, maWinnie bore the brunt of white fear and anger.
The likes of OR Tambo condemned her words as counter-intuitive to the aims and purpose of the movement. Yet she was understood and embraced by him.
But more so by our people because they witnessed how she held aloft the flickering flame of freedom when few dared.
There are times in life when our unseen suffering becomes unbearable. When we lament our grief and our fear to an uncaring world and a silent God.
But the media, local and beyond, were not there to capture and amplify our very soul’s cry for a people’s redemption.
This mother of our people fought for our very lives and to the scarring of her soul so much so that even God cried.
She deserves our understanding and the acknowledgement that none who fought in a struggle for liberation emerged unscathed, body mind and soul - and with our sainthood untainted.
And deep in my heart I know that God who made, loves and understands maWinnie, when he saw her beyond the gates of paradise ran with arms wide open to receive her and embrace her home to the heaven of the beautiful, made even more so because of the likes of Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions us to be wary of “the danger of the single story” which, “creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”.
Perhaps it is best you be guided, in this instance, by the words of the bard-prophet, “Don’t criticise what you can’t understand.”
Ons is almal mense en Mama Winnie was een vannie mooiste.
* The Very Rev Michael Weeder is the Dean of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.