The feminist in me cannot celebrate Mandela Day

I have always struggled with celebrating Mandela Day. For me it’s a window-dressing gimmick: giving is not a show-and-tell affair lasting all but a day – but more particularly because the emerging black feminist in me is struggling to identity with the man.

He may have been a struggle icon, but his failure to rise to the occasion for the black woman who stood behind him is what makes him unrecognisable – so unrecognisable that it chips away at all his good works. Works he could not have produced without a wife, no matter how flawed she may have been. She kept the home fires burning, raising his offspring, continuing to echo his name so that it may not be lost in the archives of history: say what you will, Ms Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was the tenacity that Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela needed.

When I repeatedly say that we did not all make it to leadership’s promised land, I mean it – especially women have not seen this land of milk and honey. Yes, women must count, women must be addressed as equals – but mostly we are degraded, seen as ungovernable, tolerated. We are called angry, bitter and with a misplaced sense of importance.

Madikizela-Mandela was no different. Her sacrifices were muted because her shadow was engulfed in patriarchy. Their stances may have been different, but the couple’s sacrifices were the same. Why are we celebrating one when they were a collaborative duo?

The place of the woman requires praise. Today we are slaughtered, the face of poverty and the parents who are forced to step in for the absent fathers who elect the level of the deadbeat.

But we stay, as did Madikizela-Mandela, despite her sacrifices being tainted because they weren’t picture-perfect in society smothered in patriarchy.

It was the inactions in all things gender-related of the Nelson Mandela Foundation that could never enjoy my approval; the same foundation that has, through its silence, allowed for the dissemination of the name of Madikizela-Mandela. He may have remarried but she is central to the very existence of the foundation. Without a past that included her, there would have been no present name to enjoy.

We have allowed ourselves to be guided by Mandela’s personality. We have immortalised the human being but buried his principles of being humane in everything we do… We have dumbed down to simply being followers of a character. But where is the empathy for his ex-wife?

I do not reject Mandela the man, but I do want to celebrate not only his legacy, but Madikizela-Mandela’s too.

Mandela Day must be bigger than one individual. A family in its entirety was sacrificed. When we call out the name Mandela, let it encompass that family raised by Madikizela-Mandela in the absence of a father. We cannot separate the man from an entire family to suit our agenda.

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