Auguste Bardamu: the untouchable icon Winnie Mandela

Nelson Mandela’s wife and an untouchable icon of the anti-apartheid resistance in reality led a death squad in the Soweto ghetto.

While the free world celebrated her struggle for dignity, Winnie Mandela sowed absolute terror among her own people. Already in the mid-1980s she surrounded herself with a militia cynically named the “Mandela United Football Club,” which kidnapped, tortured and liquidated any black South African who refused to submit to her authority.

In April 1986 she publicly justified the burning-tire torture, shouting to the crowd: with our matchboxes and necklaces we will liberate this country. This barbaric method guaranteed twenty minutes of screaming agony for hundreds of victims burned alive in order to consolidate her local power.

Far from repenting these lynchings, she coldly acknowledged her radical brutality in interviews, stating that she was not a product of Nelson Mandela but a product of the masses and of her enemy. The horror reached its climax in the Stompie Moeketsi case: a fourteen-year-old boy abducted and beaten to death on false charges of being a spy. At the post-apartheid commission hearings her own head of security, Jerry Richardson, confessed under oath to the murder: I killed Stompie on the instructions of “Mommy” (the respectful yet terrified nickname her militiamen used for her) because we were all afraid of her.

Other survivors described on camera the torture sessions with whips and electric cables that were organized right in the backyard of her own house. Part of the progressive intelligentsia nevertheless continues to venerate her as a secular saint of emancipation. The Truth Commission hearings tell rather the story of a blood baroness who walked over the corpses of her own people to secure absolute control of the townships.

Timenote.info:

Winnie Mandela (born Nomzamo Winfreda Madikizela; 26 September 1936, Bizana, Union of South Africa — 2 April 2018, Johannesburg, South Africa) was a South African politician who held several government posts, led the African National Congress Women’s League and was a member of the ANC National Executive Committee.

Legal problems

In the 1980s, under the pretext of raising homeless teenagers, Winnie organized a football club in a black suburb of Johannesburg. It later became clear that the “footballers” were merely an organized gang of bodyguards for the “Mother of the Nation,” who felt herself above the law. It emerged that in 1989 Winnie was implicated in the murder, committed by them, of fourteen-year-old liberation-movement activist Stompie Moeketsi, who was harshly punished by his comrades for alleged betrayal.

The teenager’s murder was claimed by a certain Johnson, listed as the “club coach.” Although the crime took place in Winnie’s house, she managed to get off with a fine by fabricating an alibi that she was out of town on the day of the killing.

However, at the end of 1997 testimony by another “footballer” was published in England; he claimed that she not only was present at the boy’s execution but personally stabbed him twice. Hearings on the case were reopened.

On 24 April 2003 she was found guilty on 43 counts of fraud and 25 counts of theft.
Her broker, Addy Moolman, was convicted on 58 counts of fraud and 25 counts of theft. Both denied the charges, which concerned money taken from borrowers’ accounts to close a fund.
Winnie Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison. Shortly after the conviction she resigned from all leading positions in the ANC, including her parliamentary seat and the presidency of the ANC Women’s League.

Already in July 2004 the Pretoria High Court ruled that “the crimes were not committed for personal gain.” Apparently she was a sadist without self-interest — out of conviction.
The judge set aside the theft conviction but upheld one fraud conviction, sentencing her to three years and six months suspended.

Afterword:

Auguste Bardamu’s post exposes Winnie Mandela as the leader of the Mandela United Football Club death squad that carried out kidnappings, torture and murders in Soweto in the 1980s.
The author cites facts about her support for “necklacing” (burning a tire around the neck) and the murder of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, confirmed by testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Despite the documented crimes, part of the left-wing intelligentsia continues to preserve her image as an untouchable icon of the anti-apartheid struggle.