Anti-apartheid campaigner and widow of Nelson Mandela

Born: September 26, 1936;

Died: April 2, 2018

NOMZAMO Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela, who has died aged 81, was both one of the most famous women in the world and also one of the most notorious.

She was widely revered among a large section of South Africa’s black society as the Mother of the Nation and the wife of an authentic political hero, Nelson Mandela, who later divorced her. Others dubbed her the Mugger of the Nation when it became clear she had been involved with the murders of a 14-year-old boy, Stompie Moeketsi, her personal doctor, Abu-Baker Asvat, who knew she had assaulted Moeketsi, and as many as 14 other black township dwellers.

Mrs Mandela was the subject of countless newspaper, magazine and book profiles that portrayed her as a living martyr to the black liberation cause in the fight against the evil of apartheid. She was up there in fame alongside Mother Teresa and was as widely photographed as Princess Diana. She suffered harsh reprisals for the beliefs of her husband, with whom she had lived for only a short time in broken spells of marriage before he was detained and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 for conspiracy to overthrow the state.

Subsequently she became the most prominent public and international face of the internal struggle to end apartheid.

She was banished in May 1977 by Jimmy Kruger, the hardline, even by apartheid standards, Minister of Justice, to Brandfort, a small and dreary white Afrikaner rural town: it was in the middle of nowhere, 225 miles from her home in Soweto, Johannesburg’s giant black township. In Brandfort she lived in a segregated black area where people lived in chronic poverty with a high rate of infant mortality. Her one-room house had an earth floor and an outside pit latrine: there was no piped water or electricity. The punishment was roughly the equivalent of being removed to South Africa’s equivalent of the Soviet Union’s Gulag

By the time she was allowed to return to Soweto, nine years later, friends said her personality had changed fundamentally. Something had gone terribly wrong. She had become a lone wild card, isolated from the African National Congress, and she quickly formed her Mandela United Football Club, a kind of brigandage with Mrs Mandela as the mafia boss feeding off the ills of township society.

Her Football Club members came across, for the most part, as low-life thugs. From poor and difficult backgrounds, they were often illiterate and were easily manipulated by Winnie, who gave them a home, food and some attention. She easily persuaded them to carry out her demands.

There followed a bizarre series of events and killings involving the Football Club, culminating in Mrs Mandela’s trial for kidnapping and assaulting the murdered Stompie Moeketsi.

Moeketsi was kidnapped from the manse of a Methodist minister in Soweto on the evening of 29 December 1988: she accused the boy of having had sex with the cleric. Stompie denied her allegation and was severely beaten by Mandela and other members of her Football Club. When she became worried about the extent of Moeketsi’s head injuries she summoned her doctor, Abu-Baker Asvat, a friend of many years, and told him Stompie Moeketsi had hurt himself falling out of a tree.

Asvat told her that Moeketsi’s injuries were so bad that he could not treat them: the boy would die unless she got him to a hospital. Asvat immediately went to his friend Reggie Jana, a Johannesburg spice merchant, and told him: ‘This effing bitch is giving me grief, causing problems and I fear for my life.’”

Within a few days Asvat too was dead, killed by two illiterate Zulu youths hired by Mrs Mandela, who gave them a 9mm pistol and promised them a reward for killing “an enemy of the people.”

Jerry Vusi Richardson, the Football Club’s chief bodyguard, was convicted in 1990 of Stompie Moeketsi’s murder on circumstantial evidence. There was widespread criticism that Mandela had not been tried alongside him. But she went on trial 18 months later on charges of kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Moeketsi. She was sentenced to six years imprisonment, overturned and replaced with a controversial Rand15,000 [about £400] fine on appeal.

In a new twist to a deeply complex tale I discovered in October 1992 a missing witness from Mrs Mandela’s trial. Katiza Cebekhulu, a member of the Football Club, was ready to testify that he saw her stab Moeketsi to death next to the jacuzzi behind her Soweto house. I found Cebekhulu in a Zambian prison. He had been kidnapped by an African National Congress hit squad and taken out of the country. Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda agreed to imprison Cebekhulu without charge or trial.

With the help of a British MP I got Cebekhulu out of prison and he came to Britain and I interviewed him in depth in a Devon retreat. He described to me how he had witnessed Mrs Mandela stab Moeketsi to death, and that became the main theme of a book and BBC TV documentary I made 20 years ago. Subsequently Cebekhulu testified before South Africa’s Truth and Reconcilation Commission in 1997 that he watched Mrs Mandela kill Moeketsi and order the death of her doctor. Mrs Mandela dismissed the accusation as a lie.

Nelson Mandela announced his separation from Winnie in April 1992 after a series of witnesses at Mrs Mandela’s trial went on record as having provided her with a false alibi. I was present at a press conference when he said the couple had agreed to part “in view of the tensions that have arisen owing to the differences between ourselves on a number of issues."

Nelson divorced her in August 1995, citing her adultery, which had left him humiliated and lonely; her “hypocritical” expressions of affection for him at public gatherings; and her lavish spending on make-up, clothes and parties she could not afford. “If the entire universe persuaded me to reconcile I would not,” he told Judge Frikkie Eloff. “I appeal to you not to put any questions to me which may compel me to dent the image of the defendant and bring a great deal of pain to our children and grandchildren.”

Mrs Mandela is survived by her two daughters, Zindzi and Zenani, and many grandchildren.

Fred Bridgland is the author of a new biography Lies and Alibis: Did Winnie Mandela Get Away With Murder?