The matriarch of South Africa’s liberation and vice-captain to South Africa’s national icon, Nelson Mandela, is dead!
News of her departure was broken by her spokesman, Victor Dlamini who stated that her death came eventually “after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year” at the Netcare Milpark Hospital in South Africa.
The SABC said she was admitted to the hospital over the weekend complaining of flu after she attended a church service on Friday. She had been treated for diabetes and underwent major surgeries as her health began failing over the last several years.
While her husband went into incarceration for decades, she was the bastion that held forth and so fiercely too that the world forgot, and possibly herself too that she was female.
The demand of the ANC leadership under prosecution and guerrilla rebellion took its toll and she got tainted by allegations over her involvement in the kidnap of four youths, of which one died, corruption and bribery scandal.
She stood defiantly for the women, poor, and oppressed which may be attributed to her earlier profession as a social worker but found popularity in the days of the struggle through her husband’s role in the leadership of the ANC.
In April 2016, the government of President Jacob G. Zuma gave Ms. Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s highest honours: the Order of Luthuli, given, in part, for contributions to the struggle for democracy.
Till she died, she remained a political presence in South Africa as a member of Parliament, representing the dominant African National Congress, and she insisted on a kind of primacy in Mr. Mandela’s life, no matter their estrangement. In fact, she was reported to have told a British interviewer in 2013, about Nelson, saying “Nobody knows him better than I do”.
She died aged 81 early on Monday morning.
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