As a black South African woman facing relationships that other me both as Black and as woman, I’ve never recognised Winnie Mandela as my “role model” or tried to locate her in my own struggles. She’s never offered the convenient signifier to fill the blank in my sentence: “As a …. I admire Winnie Mandela”.

I’m also made uneasy by the thought that my dismissal of Winnie Mandela becomes something of a cop-out. A “commonsensical” way of beginning a reclamation would be to access the “real facts”, to subvert the pattern of misrepresentation surrounding her, to interview her extensively. Because of my battles for autonomy, I would, however, end up writing about myself.

Rather than write about Winnie Mandela, I want to write about how she has been talked about: what she has “meant”, how and why interpretations of her have ranged so dramatically between extreme idealisation to vilification – both inside South Africa and beyond.

On one obvious level, the answer rests on her previous prominence as Nelson Mandela’s wife: she has been visually represented as the photogenic symbol of her incarcerated husband, a woman-to-be-looked-at whose striking, aloof and emphatically African appearance has aroused strong feelings of solidarity, sympathy and admiration from opponents of apartheid.

She has been photographed as the aesthetic spectacle of black South African suffering and resisting, and to gaze at her has meant being outraged by apartheid’s injustices without being jolted into horror, helplessness or too much self-scrutiny.

She has also been written about as the vocal proxy of her husband. Together with his banned presence, the voice of Nelson Mandela has been made substantial by the substituted voice of “Winnie”. As wife, her message promised unmediated access to him without the danger of drowning his out. Winnie Mandela’s every movement has been opened to public scrutiny: every strength inflated; each weakness exaggerated by media sensationalism.

I first saw Winnie Mandela when I was a student in the mid-80s. Striding across the campus surrounded by reporters and students, she was wearing a fur coat, large earrings and an enormous Afro. She did not appear to be conscious of anything but herself. At the time, Winnie was emphatically defined by the (marginal) left-wing South African media as the mother of the nation, and by the international media mainly as the ennobled spectacle of black South African oppression and defiance. She was invincible.

Winnie Mandela also positioned herself in the ANC and the national liberation movement at large as a spokesperson for the male-dominated anti-apartheid struggle, giving credence to the image of the national liberation movement as an organic one. Her acclaim extended beyond South Africa; she was defined both as a symbol of assertive black womanhood and as a figure of black anger and defiance.

She graced the pages of the foreign media; she was hosted, toasted and quoted from Amsterdam to New York. Black feminists looked up to her in the United States and in the African diaspora. Young activists in the US and Africa claimed her as their spokesperson. Her represented utterances and visual images during most of Mandela’s imprisonment consequently buttressed the images of first-lady, suffering wife, assertive African woman, dignified spectacle of injustice against Blacks.

It was towards the late ’80s that the media began to seize on ugly stories, stories about the orchestrated murder of a small boy, about lovers and private armies masquerading as soccer teams, about misused funds, an extravagant life-style, and about shady deals.

On one hand, the local right-wing media initiated a slander campaign, the details of which only came to light later. Its intended effects were to be far-reaching. It would discredit a prominent symbol of the ANC, and the organisation at large; it would also sow major dissent within the ANC.

On the other hand, The Weekly Mail (now the Mail and Guardian) conducted extensive investigations into rumours and came up with startling evidence, evidence that could not easily be dismissed as propaganda.

We could speculate endlessly about the extent to which Winnie Mandela was set up, and the extent to which the state’s propaganda machinery built on “evidence” and “facts. ” Evidence against Winnie jointly consolidated conventional stereotypes of black woman as other: sexual promiscuity, excess, immorality and imperviousness to codes of social decency and morality.

Yet the stories subsided. By the time of Nelson Mandela’s release, Winnie’s image was once again idealised, restored now primarily as that of first lady. The father of the nation had been released, and the mother of the nation had no symbolic role in relation to Nelson Mandela’s paternal authority.

By the time of Nelson Mandela’s release, Winnie had accrued around her too much meaning, too many images and too much idiosyncratic presence, to be absorbed by the singular figure of her husband.

ANC patriarchs agonised over the dilemma of how to keep Winnie in line and erode her powers as: Mandela’s wife; a central figure within the ANC; a leader in the future government – without alienating important constituencies and encouraging factionalism. The fathers of the new government handled her with a mixture of caution and dismay.

With Winnie deposed and the Mandela family disintegrated, the image of Mandela vis-a-vis the broader national family became extremely powerful, and Mandela combined an indulgent and yet authoritative populist manner which managed the public father image very well.

How did the vilification of Winnie acquire the prominence it did, and to what extent did it discursively feed off representations of Winnie as othered black woman? How could representations of Winnie from within left-wing newspapers like The Weekly Mail and the now-defunct New Nation possibly be connected to the propagandist arm of the NP, and ideas that dominated the SABC, conservative radio stations and daily newspapers like Cape Town’s The Argus and Johannesburg’s The Citizen under nationalist party rule?

We need to acknowledge the intersecting agendas in different campaigns of discreditation. One is specifically racial, the nationalists’ last-ditch attempts to dishonour the ANC resulting in the escalating sensationalism and investigative journalism that reached a climax in the ’80s.

A second is primarily gendered. The dread and anxiety within a future black-dominated male government that Winnie Mandela, far from effacing herself and shedding her various identities, would thrive by continuing to consolidate them. That she would have far too much autonomous power and uncontainable meanings for a first lady.

In the nineties, Winnie was maligned and marginalised by many ANC kingpins and by the progressive media. Because of information disseminated by these reliable sources, her reputation among many former fans was seriously eroded.

Many of the narratives of Winnie’s deviance or immorality are anchored in a very specific, although often hidden notion of sexual excess. The distaste/ horror/ repugnance/ outrage/ squeamishness often shown towards Winnie has a lot to do with projections about her sexuality, about her alleged promiscuity, about her young lovers, and about insatiable and aggressive sexual desire.

Not long ago, I listened to a black man give his account of how Winnie once greeted Thabo Mbeki: “She came at him like a demon with her mouth wide open and her tongue right out”, and he graphically mimed, with much arm-flailing and face and tongue contorting, his sense of how this had been done. I was with three other black women, and we were all profoundly shocked. Not by what he was telling us about Winnie, of course, but about himself. And said so. He didn’t seem to register, though, and went on to eulogise the contrasting graciousness of Graça Machel.

But of course the guardians of morality here are not necessarily male, or white or rich or right-wing. The custodians of morality are dominant discourses a web of institutionalised and “natural” ideas and standards that are dispersed everywhere and settle on everyone.

The guardians of morality do not include only the racists, the sexist patriarchs, the elite, but also the progressive reporters, ordinary women in the street, activists. And of course myself. When I say I cannot write about/talk about/admire/ or in any way relate to a black woman who is just so…

The orchestrated chorus shouts Winnie down as wild and willful Winnie, unspeakably bad, beyond the pale, not a good role model, not an honourable, decent or acceptable figure, an abuser of power, otherness incarnate.

The politics of Winnie Mandela’s deposition can most clearly be explained in terms of her deviation from the image of “role model”, one of the most bandied about compliments paid to black women. When black women are described, by white women, by black men, by white men, as feisty role models, they become the receptacle of dominant cultural, racial, gender and socioeconomic standards.

Women like Albertina Sisulu and Mamphela Ramphele are admirable role models: Sisulu by virtue of her austerely self-effacing image, her consistent commitment to the ANC, to her late husband, to her supportive political role, and to absolute and unqualified respectability. Ramphele because she straddles an incredible contradiction: an extremely independent and individualistic affirmed woman – evidenced in her successes in a global patriarchal world of power represented by the World Bank.

Although constantly pushed to the margins of meaning, of political life, Winnie Mandela constantly erupts into sites of power to claim new positions of authority without the consent of the discursive system that supports this authority.

Winnie Mandela’s multiple and complex images allow others to make meanings that connect with their social experiences of powerlessness and subordination and also, more importantly, for resisting positions of victimisation. Her images do not offer conventional role models.

I realise now why Winnie as a signifier of resistance and power endures for so many marginalised constituencies in South Africa and indeed groups around the world, for example, for many black women and for the youth in South Africa.

She offers a symbol of contradiction, of subversion, of disrespect, of impatience, an anarchic symbol, a symbol that appeals to those who have nothing at stake in the available status quo.

(This is a slightly revised version of an essay first published in SAFERE, 2,1, 1996. As was the case then, I’m indebted to Pat McFadden for urging me, despite my defensiveness, to write this.)

Desiree Lewis is co-ordinating editor of Feminist Africa.