WINNIE MANDELA traces the fascinating story of the second Mrs. Mandela from tomboy and champion stick fighter to social worker, reluctant revolutionary to disgraced political leader. Insightful performances by Jennifer Hudson as Winnie Mandela and an astonishingly spot-on turn by Terrence Howard as Nelson Mandela will cut you to the core. While not perfect these two actors take huge bites out of the hard-to-duplicate South African accent and the indigenous mannerisms.
I must admit that I slumped in my chair when I saw in the opening credit that the movie had been produced by the pop minister T.D. Jakes, whose disastrous film Woman Thou Art Loosed featured an incest survivor forgiving her rapist in saccharine scene that rang false. But this unsentimental depiction of Winnie Nomzamo Mandela poignantly illustrates the duality that exists in her very name: Winifred (Welsh for reconciliation or peace) Nomzamo (Xhosa for trial). With exacting attention to details from costumes to filming in South Africa Winnie Mandela is an ode to this modern-day heroine, whose imperfections, contradictions and even demons fight to tarnish her legacy as the mother of modern-day South Africa.
Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson shows off chops seemingly no one knew she had in a riveting scene where she talks to an ant, the only “friend” Winnie Mandela had during her brutal confinement (which happened in real life and was documented in her autobiography Part of My Soul Went With Him). When Terrence Howard’s Nelson Mandela cries out to no one in particular after seeing his wife for the first time since her imprisonment, “What have you done to my wife?” your stomach will drop to your toes. I personally hope that Howard will win another Oscar nomination for this role; he certainly deserves it.
The Mandela story first entered my consciousness during my first week at the Waterford Kamhlaba school in Mbabane, Swaziland. I was 11. One of my classmates pointed out an older girl with commanding presence who was surrounded by a swarm of classmates and asked me if I knew who she was. I didn’t. The girl was Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s younger daughter Zindzi. Older sister Zennie, also a student at the school, had a luminescent beauty reminiscent of her mother in her youth, and unlike Zindzi was bubbly and approachable.
Standing on the quad in front of the tuck shop I got my first history lesson on the personal devastation of apartheid—a story the preeminent South African paper, The Rand Daily Mail, wouldn’t tell. Although the Mandelas were not separated by the mines and domestic work in the pristine homes of white South Africans, or by other menial jobs in places far flung from home, like scores of Black South African families, they were forced to live apart by the “system” and saw each other seldom.
Increasing unrest from across the Swazi/South African border and Zindzi’s coded, anonymous political poems in the Phoenix, the school magazine, became part of my landscape. My schoolmates and I huddled in groups and whispered news and opinions; we never expected Nelson Mandela to ever leave prison on his two feet, and the fate of Winnie Mandela was a question mark. It was just a matter of time. We never openly discussed the Mandela parents with their girls; it was our collective secret and we all closed ranks around Zennie and Zindzi and fell in line.
Fast forward almost three decades later and I get the opportunity to interview Zindzi for a small women’s specialty magazine. I tease her about expecting to see her name in the bright lights of South African politics. She tells me wryly that politics has taken enough of her life. If I didn’t fully grasp her meaning then, I certainly did after watching WINNIE MANDELA.
Walk good affirming community. Or as is said in that part of the world, hamba kahle.
WINNIE MANDELA is in select AMC theaters nationwide. Please see the trailer on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqNhuoguiFE
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