How a Zimbabwean columnist advised Winnie on surviving Stratcom nearly 15 years ago

An old column by Zimbabwean journalist Kempton Makamure re-emerged on Saturday in a post by broadcast journalist Bongani Bingwa that showed the Stratcom plot against Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was well understood by some, though perhaps not as much within South Africa’s borders.

Bingwa told his followers on Twitter to read the column “and weep. We were told!”

In Makamure’s analysis in Zimbabwe’s Sunday Gazette, published in about 2004, he detailed the full extent of the propaganda campaign to destroy Madikizela-Mandela’s reputation, particularly the ultimately successful plan to ensure her marriage to South Africa’s first black president would fail.

Makamura felt out that Madikizela-Mandela ranked among the greatest African heroines in the history of the continent but the “current events” (of the 1990s and early 2000s) “are tending to distract us from understanding and appreciating Africa’s greatest living heroine”.

Makamure then, based on his experience of what had happened to freedom fighters in Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa, wrote her an open letter on “how to survive the tragedies of her current tribulations”.

In the two weeks following her death, numerous media reports have emerged to suggest that Madikizela-Mandela was the victim of a vicious, far-reaching smear campaign aimed at utterly destroying her reputation and any hopes of a rise to power.

Read the photographed version of Makamura’s old column below:

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