Johnny Steinberg at the 2025 Summer School

WINNIE AND NELSON MANDELA

Jonny Steinberg, university professor and writer

Thursday 23 January  5.00 pm  COURSE FEES R110; Staff and students R55 This lecture will be followed by snacks and drinks at 6.00 pm.

Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s marriage is the most famous union between two people in South African history. They wanted it that way: they self-consciously chose to make it a public institution. Their aim was for their relationship to embody their people’s struggle for freedom. Yet it ended up embodying one of the deepest conflicts in black South Africa: whether to negotiate a peaceful, but compromised, settlement with the apartheid government, or fight on for deeper and more radical change.

Winnie and Nelson have both left us now and the apartheid system they fought has been gone for 31 years. And yet the matters that divided them are very much alive. This lecture looks at their legacies here and now after the movement to which they dedicated their lives has lost its majority and governs in a coalition.

Recommended reading

Boehmer, E. 2008. Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hassim, S. 2019.‘The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,’

Journal of Southern African Studies. 45(6). pp. 1151–1171.

Mandela, W. 1984. Part of My Soul Went With Him. New York: Norton. Madikizela-Mandela, W. 2013. 491 Days. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Steinberg, J. 2023. Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

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