LESLEY MOFOKENG | ‘The Trials of Winnie Mandela’ review: A life too large for any verdict

Winnie Mandela has been dead for eight years, yet even in death her trials have not ended.

The release last week of Netflix’s The Trials of Winnie Mandela documentary has sparked a raging debate over a deeply divisive figure. A polarisation that cannot be easily bridged over a woman at the centre of South Africa’s painful struggle for liberation. She lived up to her middle name, Zanyiwe, meaning one who was tried. Her public trial, this time over her legacy, continues unabated.

Divided into seven episodes, the project is extraordinary, maddening and necessary, in the year she would have turned 90.

There is a moment in episode seven when Winnie says something no public figure, in my experience of watching documentaries, has ever said quite so plainly: “I don’t think anyone of my generation, anyone who was as tortured as I was, would have any tears left. You almost got to a threshold of being beyond feeling pain. And if I still felt pain I don’t think I would be alive. You live with that pain, and in a way, I don’t even want to be deprived of that pain. I don’t. I am one of those who want to be reminded of my painful past, so that it does not happen to my grandchildren and to my great-grandchildren. Dare I forget.”

This comes from a woman who has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the breaking and rebuilding have become the architecture of her identity. It is also, cinematically, one of the most quietly devastating pieces of testimony.

It is a dedication to the invisible infrastructure of liberation, to the women whose names were never in the headlines even as their labour sustained the movements that made the headlines possible

It tells you, almost completely, what kind of film this is: a rare attempt to look at a human being in full, without flinching and without mercy, and to ask what we owe the full complexity of what we find.

The documentary’s dedication announces its thematic ambition immediately: “To those whose names we know, and the ones we never will, who sacrificed everything for freedom, justice and human dignity — we honour you.”

It is a dedication to the invisible infrastructure of liberation, to the women whose names were never in the headlines even as their labour sustained the movements that made the headlines possible. Winnie straddles both sections as a woman whose name was everywhere, and a woman whose work (including as one of the first black social workers and the 30 years of holding the ANC’s public existence together in South Africa while its leadership was imprisoned or in exile) was systematically undervalued in proportion to its importance.

Directed by Mandy Jacobson, we follow Winnie’s granddaughters Swati Mandela-Dlamini and Zaziwe Manaway as they travel through their grandmother’s life following the trail of archive footage, court records, testimonies of survivors and supporters, and ultimately to Bizana in the Eastern Cape where the story of her life begins herding her father’s cattle.

The grandchildren appear to be sympathetic intermediaries and interlocutors and do their best to push, whether their line of questioning succeeds or not. It is the source of major debate. But I see them sit with answers that do not satisfy them and do not pretend they do.

The documentary’s greatest technical achievement is the quality and range of its archival footage. There are images and footage I had not seen before: Winnie and her second daughter Zindzi at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration, unescorted, walking through rows to find their seats while Nelson takes centre stage with the elder daughter Zenani as his designated companion.

The Trials of Winnie Mandela is at its finest when it allows Winnie to speak for herself at length and trusts the viewer to sit with what she says

The spatial grammar of that moment; who is placed where, who is escorted, who is left to find their own way through a crowd at the most significant public ceremony of the post-apartheid era; says everything the film needs to say about how Winnie was positioned, used, and ultimately sidelined by the political movement she had kept alive.

Equally remarkable is the footage of Winnie crying over the death of Samora Machel, sitting on a mattress and sobbing with an abandon her public persona almost never permitted. The irony overwhelms the viewer.

This is the woman who later comforted Samora’s widow, Graça Machel, and who then watched Graça marry her ex-husband and she comforted Graça when Nelson died. This gives the documentary some of its most complex emotional texture. History, in Winnie’s life, had an unusually sharp sense of irony.

The Trials of Winnie Mandela is at its finest when it allows Winnie to speak for herself at length and trusts the viewer to sit with what she says. Her account of Nelson, delivered to her grandchildren with a candour that is both revealing and poignant, is the emotional centre of the documentary.

“He was a ladies man, I knew I was one of many.” “Politically, Nelson betrayed me, big time.” “We never had time to love each other, it was expressed through pen and paper.”

These are not the words of a bitter woman. They are the words of a woman who loved enormously, was loved inadequately, gave everything, and received a complicated mixture of devotion and betrayal in return.