Stop saying shit about Winnie Mandela

Stop saying shit about Winnie Mandela.

You know how Ugandans think that gay people are paid to be gay so that they promote the whole homosexual kingdom and take over? Well, I wonder why they don’t think that some people are also paid to promote chauvinism especially through religion! It makes more sense. And this is what I kept thinking as I leafed through Josephine Namukisa’s book, “The Warring Princess”.

Recently, a friend gave me this book to read.  It’s a religious book and I was hesitant to read it but she needed my opinion and I agreed to. She warned me though and said “I get the feeling she thinks the ultimate job of a woman is to nurture children, but perhaps I misunderstood her and you grew up a Christian so maybe you’ll interpret it differently”. I’m cautious around religion nowadays, but it wouldn’t hurt to check it out and see what people are saying out there about human existence. It’s usually just speculation, anyways.

So I took the book. It’s pretty small, a kind of book you can read in one or two days, if it’s interesting. So I approached it lazily, thinking it’s just one of those Christian books, nothing new. I had even started constructing the sentence I would tell my friend, after the first few pages. “You know how they say there’s nothing new under the sun, well, there’s nothing new here…” and I would add on depending on how the book ended. But now that it’s over, it’s not just about my friend anymore. It’s personal. It’s almost criminal, and most definitely wrong. I can’t remember the last time a book made me this mad.

According to Ms. Namukisa, women are the help. The real human beings who get served and make things happen are men. And the job of the woman is to praise the man so that he can be inspired to live his life to the fullest and achieve his dreams. So all women please pour perfume unto men’s feet and gently stroke their ego because men were created in god’s image, and you my dears, are to decorate their homes and bear them children, because that’s what you were created for.

Under normal circumstances, I would probably be really mad at these things. But I didn’t care much for them, because they’re not new. They’re opinions we’ve all heard before and if she didn’t take this as the factual truth for every woman but as her truth, it’s totally fine. She has a right to define herself. Her book is full of references from fairy tales and macho movies, so you sort of get what kind of person she is. She is obsessed with princesses and high heels and pink. You know, we all know a woman like that. The book itself is called “The Warring Princess”, so you sort of think you know what to expect. The real trouble comes when she refers to real life experiences of real people and compares them to fairy tale figures, acting like they’re all in the same category.  That is how she got my attention.

Apparently after she watched the movie, “A Long Walk to Freedom” this is what she got from it.

“Winnie went to war against apartheid after discarding her weapon of princesshood. She failed to recognize that, alongside her husband, her power would lie not in AK-47s and rioting but in loving her enemies, uniting her people, and seeking justice for all. No wonder another woman, Gracia Machel, a freedom fighter as well, but with the gentleness of a dove, took her place.

As a woman, you are wired uniquely, and only therein will you win. Let the devil underestimate your love for relationships, perfumes, beautiful clothes, children, preparing mouth-watering meals, decorating and fairy tales.”

“The warring Princess”P.136-137

Now, I have read the book, “Long Walk to Freedom” and not watched the movie, (which was made by Hollywood and it’s possible to get things wrong) but if you have read the book, you realise how Mandela tries to keep his conflicts with his women out of it. He talks about the struggle and the divorces but never in detail about what he thought was wrong with his women’s decisions, for the same reasons I guess why the rest of us have no right to. Because we have no idea what was going on in their lives, in Winnie’s life to be specific.

Picture a woman whose husband has gone to prison, and the country is at war with one of humanity’s worst crimes. For 27 years she’s a single mother, a freedom fighter living in South Africa. In SOUTH-cracking-AFRICA! I don’t claim to understand her struggles, and her reasons for all the choices she made. But I think no one has a right to judge her, given her circumstances. And you definitely can’t compare her to Snow White, and claim she should have acted like a dove!

A few years back I was driving in the back of a car with some British volunteers while organizing Jali Festival when one of the boys said almost the same thing. He was ‘informing’ me about how terrible a woman Winnie is, how she took ‘advantage’ of the Mandela situation and so forth. We’ve all heard the stories. I kept nodding and agreeing, wide-eyed and amazed that surprisingly, though the British are very sarcastic, he couldn’t read any sarcasm in my voice.

My point is; South Africa is a special place with a special history and some of the darkest accounts in the world. There is no way in hell you can compare Winnie to Snow White or Cinderella. There is no amount of wrongs that Winnie could have done, to make her situation any uglier. It is insulting to all freedom fighters, but especially to South African freedom fighters, to assume that you know better than them, while you’re in the comfort of your home, sipping on tea.

Josephine has very sexist and annoyingly shallow sentiments in her book, but many would have been overlooked if she stayed within the confines of religion, because religion is forgiven for most of its old fashioned views. But to taint people’s names alongside fairy tale characters and biblical harlots is an unforgivable act. At some point I thought maybe she’s being paid to say these things. Because no human being in their right minds, without being compromised by money, would downplay their purpose in life like this.

A few months ago I was chatting with a professor who had just completed a book that amazed me by its vast coverage of opinions. He said how he pitied my generation because we look at things only from our point of view. We have a limited view of the world that’s centered on only what we know. I thought it was quite misguided at the time but when I read this book, by a graduate architect, I realised the professor was right. Here’s a woman who looks at the world through the eyes of a stay-at-home mother and there is nothing more to it for her. The problem is she thinks every woman should be like her. I have no doubt there are women who are very fulfilled decorating and buying shoes, but to think that this is the place of every woman is not just evidence of narrow-mindedness but also of a lack of knowledge of her bearings. This lady lacks context and is oblivious to reality.

Picture an ordinary Ugandan woman in the countryside who must toil every morning to put food on the table, and tell her that her job is to look for pretty clothes and decorate the house. Or tell her that her job is to raise men to be doers and kings, and not for her to do things. This is not just old fashioned, it’s misleading and false. Even culturally, it does not make any sense. And yet culture evolves. 

According to Josephine Namukisa, women are not supposed to do things. They are supposed to inspire men to do them. No wonder she’s being disappointed in men. Her image of men is faulty at many levels. Obviously she expects too much from men and thinks of them as gods. She has no regard for female leaders and is the kind of woman who would make fun of men who enjoy homemaking and raising children. She takes all power (which comes with responsibility and decision making) from women and gives it to men. She is very disrespectful to female pillars of good leadership like Angela Markel and Rebecca Kadaga. Apparently, according to this mouth-watering princess, if you ignore being gentle, keeping your mouth shut, seducing men with your ‘beauty’ to cause them to do ‘great’ things (for you or for the world), colours, decorations and being the help, and you pursue careers in mainstream professions, you are ignoring your ‘feminine’ qualities and trying to be masculine. I’ve never seen a more trivialization and wrongful labeling of femininity!

For instance she says in Uganda, women should not fight the war on corruption, because women are not created to be leaders. They should rather nurture their sons and husbands to carry on this fight and take their place as kings. And why does she think so? Well, because that’s what happened in “Lion King”. Honestly? Does this woman know that fiction is not a template for human living?

On the 192^nd page of her book, she says;

“Corruption does not start in the government coffers when officials misappropriate funds but way back in the kitchen when mummy was not present to punish her little ones for stealing cookies.”

Her advice is; women, quit your jobs (like she did) and go home to support your husbands (though she’s still looking for one –it’s never too early to prepare) and children to be who they are meant to be. This is not to say that people who have done so are any less human, because they have chosen to do so, for reasons best known to them.  But to take this as the ultimate and only way is quite delusional. Her classification of woman as mother is inaccurate and unrealistic, because not all women are mothers and the opposite, which would reduce men to just fathers, is not what she has in mind.

Uganda has made big steps in empowering women, and we have numerous examples of great female leaders, who have led better than men. To say that it is not their job to lead but to nurture men to lead is one of the most unconventional lies of all time. And to tell our girls in schools that all they are preparing for is homemaking and walking like Kate Middleton is not just petty but sad. Her idea of beauty is centered on make-up and fashion, which says a lot about what she thinks of herself. Obviously, what is in her head does not matter to her as much as how she looks. This is quite a waste of her intelligence.

Lastly, Ms. Namukisa does not only lack understanding of the real world but of the bible which she started out trying to write about in this book. In this “The warring Princess”, she says;

“Learning to praise your heavenly king will teach you to praise earthly ones as well. Men, like God, desire to be praised. He built a desire for praise in men called ego, and in that aspect they are more like god than women are… However, men’s desire for praise stems from the fact that they were created in the image of the king of kings.” P.89

Biblically speaking, Gen1:27 says“…so he created them, male and female, in his own image.” If you go further to people who studied theology, the ones who taught us divinity in high school, it is said that this refers to the human spirit, not the body. And the spirit has no gender, so it’s only the bodies that are distinguished as male and female, but the spirit is free and that is what is supposed to be the image of god in humans. So what image is this woman talking about? Is she saying god is male? If she lacks understanding of these basic principles of Christianity that she seems to base the book on, how much more does she need to learn? My advice to her is she can say anything she wants about creation, and princesses and prostitutes; nobody cares. But please don’t say shit about Winnie Mandela; that’s a human being, not some fairy tale or bible character. So you can’t just speculate and claim you are telling the truth.