South African play revisits Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and women’s waiting during apartheid

A new play currently running at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg revisits the life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, offering a broader reflection on the experiences of Black South African women left to wait for absent men during apartheid.

Adapted from Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, the play blends fact and fiction to explore themes of isolation, betrayal and moral ambiguity. In doing so, it places Madikizela-Mandela’s complex legacy within the wider narrative of women who held families and communities together while their husbands disappeared into exile, prison or distant labour camps.

Madikizela-Mandela’s story is well known. As the wife of Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years, she became one of the most prominent public faces of the anti-apartheid struggle. Her defiance made her a target for constant police surveillance, harassment and eventual banishment to Brandfort, a rural town nearly 350 kilometres from her Soweto home.

But The Cry of Winnie Mandela and its stage adaptation look beyond the headlines, asking uncomfortable questions about loyalty, infidelity and the weight of public expectation placed on women in her position.

Through fictional monologues and imagined conversations, Madikizela-Mandela, played by Thembisa Mdoda, confronts her choices and actions — including her alleged affairs and accusations of involvement in the brutal actions of her personal bodyguards during the final years of apartheid.

The play does not seek to offer easy answers. Instead, it allows her character to wrestle with the contradictions of being both a hero and a figure mired in controversy. In one pivotal scene, Madikizela-Mandela’s appearance before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is reimagined. Rather than apologise for the alleged kidnappings and murders linked to her during apartheid, she delivers a fictional monologue rejecting the very premise of reconciliation.

“I will not be the instrument that validates the politics of reconciliation, because the politics of reconciliation demands my annihilation,” her character declares. “All of you have to reconcile not with me, but the meaning of me.”

Alongside Madikizela-Mandela’s personal story, the play brings forward the voices of other women who belonged to a fictional support group called Ibandla Labafazi Abalindileyo — or the Organisation of Women in Waiting. Each woman’s story offers a different perspective on what it meant to be left behind.

One woman describes her husband returning after 14 years studying abroad, only to end their marriage when he discovered she had given birth to another man’s child. Another tells of a husband who came home from prison and promptly left her to start a new life with a white woman.

For director Momo Matsunyane, the play is not just about the political history of apartheid but also about how that era fractured the very fabric of Black families. “Apartheid dismantled the Black home in a very deliberate way,” she explains. “We want to show how these women were left not only to raise children alone, but to make sense of their own desires and vulnerabilities.”

Matsunyane also highlights how the play refuses to shy away from the women’s sexuality, depicting them as proud, sexual beings — a facet of their lives rarely acknowledged in mainstream narratives about the anti-apartheid struggle.

Set against a soundtrack of protest songs from the era, the play blends historical moments with imagined dialogue to create a layered portrait of Madikizela-Mandela and the countless women who, like her, were left waiting.

The Cry of Winnie Mandela is running at The Market Theatre until 15 March, offering audiences a chance to reflect not just on the life of a controversial figure, but also on the untold stories of the women who held families, communities — and themselves — together in her shadow.

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