Embracing Chaos: Winnie Mandela and the South African Diaspora

Abstract

Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) concludes with the complex, chaotic figure of Winnie Mandela demanding that all South Africans recognise themselves in her. This paper argues that for approaching the colonial, apartheid and postapartheid history of South Africa, diaspora provides a more useful lens than simply that of a liberatory black nationalism rising in opposition against an oppressive white nationalism. In a frame narrative, Ndebele develops with reference to the classical figure of Penelope, a thesis about the black South African woman: ’Departure, waiting, and return: they define her experience of the past, present and future. They frame her life at the centre of a great South African story not yet told’. The lives of African women in South Africa have been overdetermined by their husbands’ migrant lives, and Ndebele’s novel tells the stories of four unknown women, and that of South Africa’s most famous woman, Winnie Mandela, who waited. Beginning with the migration to the mines of Johannesburg and Kimberley, Ndebele identifies four waves of diasporic dispersion in twentieth-century South Africa. The large-scale external and internal displacement of black South Africans under colonialism and apartheid and the concomitant dream of eventual homecoming may be seen in terms of the more conventional ’old’ diasporic framework, whereas Ndebele’s four case studies in The Cry of Winnie Mandela may offer versions of ’new’ diasporic thinking. However, the stories of each of the four South African descendents of Penelope, all seen in relation to the combination of power and energy, and banality and depravity that characterises the figure of Winnie Mandela, point to a more useful understanding of diasporic migrant flows in South Africa in terms of chaos complexity theory.