Winnie Mandela was definitely one of the most prominent African women political activists of our times. She was also known to be very vocal about numerous injustices in South Africa and below are 20 Must Read Winnie Madikizela Mandela Quotes.
1. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy.” – In response to an interviewer who asked why she had not dropped the Mandela surname after their divorce in 1996
2. “The years of imprisonment hardened me … Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear… there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.” – 1987 interview, cited in Lives of Courage.
3. “Together, hand in hand, with that stick of matches, with our necklace, we shall liberate this country.” – From a speech at Munsieville outside Johannesburg in 1986.
4. “You’re running around f*ck*ng at the slightest emotional excuse. The fact that I haven’t been speaking to Tata [Nelson Mandela] for five months now over you is no longer your concern. I keep telling you the situation is deteriorating at home. You are not bothered because you are satisfying yourself every night with a woman. I won’t be your bloody fool, Dali.” – Reported excerpt from a letter to her former lover, Dali Mpofu, quoted in The Sunday Times and Sunday Star in 1992.
5. “I cannot forgive him[Nelson Mandela] for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Hand in hand they went, Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.” – From an interview with journalist Nadira Naipaul in 2010.
6. “Mandela let us down, he agreed to bad deals for black people. The economy is very much ‘white’. He prefers to sip tea with the Queen, the biggest oppressor of black people, and have dinner with the Clintons.” – Interview with Naipaul in 2010.
7. “Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”– 1986
8.”I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy.”– 1996
9. “I will not allow the selfless efforts of my husband and his friends to be abandoned. I will continue the struggle for a free and equal South Africa.”– 1962
10.”They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become!”– 1962
11. “There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”– 1987
12.”All what we fought for is not what is going on right now. It is a tragedy that he lived and saw what was happening, we cannot pretend like South Africa is not in crisis, our country is in crisis and anyone who cannot see that is just bluffing themselves.”– 2017
13. “It is only when all black groups, join hands and speak with one voice that we shall be a bargaining force which will decide its own destiny.”– 1976
14. “If you are to free yourselves you must break the chains of oppression yourselves. Only then can we express our dignity, only when we have liberated ourselves can we co-operate with other groups. Any acceptance of humiliation, indignity or insult is acceptance of inferiority.”– 1976
15. “The overwhelming majority of women accept the patriarchy and protect it. Traditionally, the violated wife offloads her aggression onto the daughter-in-law. Men dominate women through the agency of women themselves.”
16. “It was in the townships where we shed so much blood. Nothing could have been achieved without the sacrifice of the people. Black people.”
17. I believe something is very wrong with the history of our country, and how we have messed up the African National Congress.”
18. “I am a product of the masses of my country. I am the product of my enemy”.
19. “There is nothing the apartheid government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”
20. “I’m not sorry. I will never be sorry. I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything.”
