Winnie and Nelson Mandela

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.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554787744

Jonny Steinberg is a writer and scholar. He is the author of a number books about everyday life, in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. He is a two-time winner of South Africa’s premier non-fiction prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, Midlands (2002) and The Number (2004), an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize in 2013. Until 2020, he was professor of African studies at Oxford University, and he currently teaches part-time at Yale and is visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) in Johannesburg. His latest book, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage releases in South Africa in May 2023.unifying approach to a more coherent South African foreign policy.