The Unequal Telling of Our History: Who Gets Judged, Who Gets Shielded?

I am not much of a television person, and I rarely watch TV, except for the occasional documentary on a quiet Sunday afternoon. This past weekend, my son was home and asked me to watch The Trials of Winnie Mandela.  He said, “Mom, you will relate to some parts; there are similarities with your work.” I have never thoroughly studied Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, but after watching, I can honestly say that those who compare me to her are being far too generous. She is in a league of her own. I do not think many women of today will achieve the kind of leadership she embodied in her lifetime. I remember a journalist once told me, after reading my book Invincible Pain, that it felt as if Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was alive and speaking through my words. However, the truth is that Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela stands far beyond any comparison. She was, and remains, a true Mother of the Nation.

There is something unsettling about how the story of our liberation is being told and, perhaps more importantly, how it is being retold to new generations. Watching the renewed focus on the Trials Winnie Mandela and controversies surrounding this documentary, one cannot help but ask, whose violence is being remembered, and whose is being quietly buried?

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela did not exist in a vacuum. She was shaped, hardened, and, at times, broken by the brutal machinery of apartheid, a system that thrived on terror, humiliation, and the systematic dehumanisation of Black people. To isolate her actions from that context is not only historically dishonest but it is also morally questionable. It risks turning a victim of structural violence into the primary subject of scrutiny, while the architects and enforcers of that violence fade into the background.

I also find myself struggling with a more personal discomfort. Those closest to her, her grandchildren, had an opportunity to defend her memory, to offer a fuller picture of who she was beyond the headlines. They knew her in ways the public never could. Yet their silence, lack of interrogation, leaves a gap that others are too quick to fill. It reminds us how important it is to separate the human being from the struggle they carried, because even the strongest among us are still human.

At the same time, I question what it means when the story of a Black woman of such magnitude is told through the lens of a white filmmaker. Whether intentional or not, it risks reproducing a familiar imbalance, where the voice of the oppressor, or those historically aligned with power, is given more authority than the lived truth of the oppressed. And when we accept that without question, we must also ask ourselves how we may be participating in that distortion.

Under apartheid, violence was not incidental; it was policy. Black communities lived under constant surveillance, arbitrary detention, torture, and assassination. Families were torn apart. Activists disappeared. Children grew up in the shadow of state brutality. Yet, when we are involved with mainstream portrayals of this era, the narrative often narrows, zooming in on the controversies of a single Black woman, while the widespread and systemic violence of the apartheid state is insufficiently confronted.

This imbalance is not accidental. It reflects a broader discomfort with confronting the full extent of state-sanctioned violence, especially when that violence implicates institutions and individuals who have not been subjected to the same level of moral interrogation. The figures who operated death squads, who orchestrated killings, who terrorised communities, are confined to the margins of public memory. Their stories exist, yes, but they are not amplified, not revisited with the same intensity, and not interrogated with the same persistence.

Meanwhile, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains under a microscope.

This raises an uncomfortable question: why are we more willing to repeatedly examine the moral failures of those who resisted oppression than to fully reckon with the system that necessitated that resistance?

To be clear, acknowledging the complexities and controversies of liberation figures is not the problem. History must be honest. It must be able to hold contradictions. But honesty requires balance. It requires context. It requires a willingness to tell the whole story, not just the parts that are sensational or convenient.

When the violence of apartheid is softened or treated as background noise, and the focus is placed primarily on the alleged wrongdoings of those who fought against it, we risk distorting public memory. We risk creating a narrative where the oppressed are over-scrutinised, while the oppressor escapes sustained attention. And that distortion matters. It shapes how future generations understand the struggle. It influences whose legacy is honoured and whose is questioned. It determines whether we see liberation movements as necessary responses to injustice, or as sites of moral failure detached from their context.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a complex figure, both a symbol of resistance and a subject of controversy. Both truths can coexist. But neither should be told in isolation. To focus on one without fully grappling with the other is to tell an incomplete story.

If we are serious about justice, then our storytelling must reflect it. It must name the full weight of apartheid violence. It must centre the lived realities of those who endured it. And it must resist the temptation to simplify history into narratives that are easier to consume but harder to defend.

Because the question is not whether we should examine Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The question is whether we are willing to examine everyone else with the same intensity. Until then, our history continues unevenly told.

There will never be another quite like you, Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. In many ways, you carried the weight of a Nation long before freedom arrived, and long after it came. History may debate you, but it cannot erase the force of your leadership. As women of this country, we must also confront how we failed to stand firmly beside you; how easily we allowed patriarchal comfort to outweigh truth and courage. You were, and remain, a leader in your own right.

Rest in power, Mother of the Nation.