Malema: If Winnie was a man, she’d have been cheered for killing Stompie

“What we are learning from Mama Winnie Mandela is that women are important.”

This is according to Economic Freedom Fighters commander in chief Julius Malema, who launched a scathing attack on the ANC on Wednesday afternoon in an impassioned address at the party’s memorial service for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in Brandfort.

He slammed the ruling party for its treatment of the struggle stalwart and Mother of the Nation, saying Mam’ Winnie was “a thinker, not a wheelbarrow that you would leave and come back from exile and use her and push her”.

“What we are learning from Mama Winnie Mandela is that women are important.”

He said the country’s first female president should come from the EFF, “so that we demonstrate that we treat women as equals; we are not like the ANC who use women as tools in bedrooms”.

“Instead of focusing on the brutality of the apartheid government towards Mama Winnie we are being told about her through criticism by sexist ANC members. Instead of being told of all the good that she has done, they highlight the negativity,” he charged.

“The leadership of the EFF must never be the same as the leadership of the patriarchal ANC. We must not even condemn the tyre and the match box [statements of Winnie’s] because [former ANC president] OR Tambo killed with a rifle. Under OR Tambo there was a firing squad. Why is no one reminding us what OR Tambo and [SA communist party leader] Chris Hani did in the camps? [He was referring to detention camps in exile where suspected informers were tortured and killed by the ANC].

“But because she is a woman we are being reminded of her wrongs. And if it was a man who had killed Stompie, he would have been celebrated and given titles.

“We must respect women. The reason why we don’t listen to women is because they are reasonable.

“There is no woman who has ever started a world war. There is no woman who has bombed a nation for oil. All these unreasonable acts are committed by men,” Malema said.

Malema then highlighted problems in the small Free State town to which Madikizela-Mandela had been banished by the apartheid government, saying she had done more in the 1970s for Brandfort than the ANC government had done for the town in more than two decades of democracy.

“Winnie Mandela was able to provide a clinic for the people even though she was under oppression, and yet the ANC government, even without anything to fear, has failed to provide the people of Brandfort with better healthcare,” he said. He also mentioned the lack of a TVET college and the dismal supply of water services.

“They could not protect the house that housed our struggle stalwart. Yet, they protect the statue of Paul Kruger. They protect each symbol that reminds us of our struggle and oppression,” he fumed.

“Mama Winnie did not want the youths sitting on corners, and yet till today there is no institution of higher learning in this place.

“We are here to bring attention to Brandfort. Even if they neglect you, even though you are not employed and you have no running water, you housed a stalwart,” Malema said.

In a reference to newly confirmed information that Madikizela-Mandela was the target of a massive propaganda campaign by the apartheid government to discredit her, Malema even went so far as to mention the “Winnie of The Sowetan and The Citizen” as the reason ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe is allegedly misinformed about the late stalwart, since various newspapers, including this one, were allegedly once part of campaigns in the struggle era to besmirch her with rumours of drunkenness, lechery and links to murder.

“Gwede says that Winnie Mandela’s funeral will be chaos. Her funeral will not be chaos. I forgive Gwede because he joined the ANC in 1992; he knows the Winnie Mandela of The Citizen and Sowetan.”

[Editor’s note: The Citizen changed ownership post-democracy. We’d like to think that we are fiercely independent about our editorial freedom these days.]