The idea of Winnie Mandela poses a problem for the tidy-minded. You can’t really file her. She won’t sit still in the moral stationery cupboard, neatly labelled saint, sinner, victim, perpetrator, heroine, liability. According to the annals of history, she was too grand for innocence and too battered for purity. What The Trials of Winnie Mandela, a new seven-part documentary series, seems to understand with unusual sophistication is that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela wasn’t just a woman or political figure — certainly not just Nelson Mandela’s wife. She was a country’s wound dressed up in class, sophistication, and fierce individuality.
And that, for one thing, is what makes this series so intriguing. In a culture addicted to the simple verdicts — thumbs up, thumbs down, canonise, cancel, approve, or throw in the dustbin of history — this production does something less monotone: it looks deeper. What you discover about this South African icon isn’t always comfortable, but the contradictions in her story offer multiple readings, considering the complexity of the context. There’s no easy interpretation of her life; with Winnie Mandela, the contradictions are half the story.
The series begins away from the clang of public myth in the domestic embrace of family. Winnie’s granddaughters, Swati Mandela-Dlamini and Zaziwe Manaway, sit with the woman they call “Big Mommy” and ask her to revisit the acts, loyalties and consequences that made her both adored and feared. It’s a clever and disarming frame: instead of pretending towards some antiseptic, BBC-ish neutrality, the filmmakers put it on the table that this is history approached through the lens of love. But, they insist, love shouldn’t make the inquiry less rigorous; rather, it makes evasion harder. Strangers can genuflect or accuse. Family can ask the simple question: “What happened?”
The granddaughters told me that what makes the series exceptional isn’t simply that they narrate it, but that Winnie is present “from the first episode to the last episode”, in her own voice. The series isn’t a posthumous autopsy created by commentators with sharpened scalpels and no skin in the game. “She entrusted us to tell her story,” said Mandela-Dlamini, and you can feel the burden of that trust.
She entrusted us to tell her story.
— Swati Mandela-Dlamini
There have been, they say, “so many narratives about our grandmother. What this series offers isn’t the final word, but the nearest thing to proximity: extreme access into our home, into her safest place”.
That access is what the series is all about: revealing Winnie in a different way from how she’s usually treated — as either a political symbol or tabloid fodder. Symbols are flattening and tabloid stories tend to dehumanise their subjects in favour of scandal and sensationalism. This documentary, instead, restores some texture. The sisters describe seeing personal and political archive material they’d never seen before. They explain what it felt like to discover forgotten fragments of history and also the experience of being startled by the intimacy of what was unearthed. There is something moving in the reality that the series exposes; even the family wasn’t privy to everything there was to know about Winnie. She remained, even to those closest to her, partly sealed.
Great public figures are often made unbearable by over-explanation. Many documentaries suffer from a dreary therapeutic compulsion, as though every titan must ultimately be reduced to a manageable set of traumas and coping mechanisms. But Winnie Mandela defies being manageable. The apartheid state brutalised her, isolated her, banished her, jailed her, and hounded her with a vindictiveness that would have obliterated weaker constitutions.
Manaway recalled being struck not by a new revelation about Winnie’s personality, but by her endurance — by the ability to survive things the magnitude of which would shatter less constitutionally fortified figures. Mandela-Dlamini described a photograph taken the day Winnie emerged from solitary confinement — outwardly composed, effortlessly elegant, while the agony of the family hovered in the frame. That image seems to encapsulate the paradox of her public life — both spectacle and aftermath.
The series doesn’t flinch from the ugliest chapters: the allegations of kidnapping, assault and murder; the shadow cast by the Mandela United Football Club; the voices of those who loathed her. Manaway admitted that hearing people criticise her with such vitriol was painful because their “Big Mommy” wasn’t, to them, a figure in a textbook but “our beloved grandmother … the woman who raised us”. But they’ve had the requisite neutrality to include those voices. “Everything’s there,” they said.
Hagiography is only the opposite face of slander; both are forms of dishonesty. Mandy Jacobson, the late director whose statement accompanies the release, seemed alert to precisely this danger. Admiration hardening into adoration, she noted, can subjugate the subject matter — she advised avoiding that at all costs.
There’s also something refreshing and brave in the refusal to manicure Winnie for contemporary appetites. We live in an age that likes its public women’s lives redeemable, explicable and, above all, exemplary. Winnie wasn’t that type of person. She wasn’t bland, she was too furious to be exemplary and too damaged to be white-washable by the history books. Her persona was too politically inconvenient to claim as a saint by anyone. “To profile her without reckoning with the racism and hypocrisy that shaped her global reception is absurd,” says Mandela-Dlamini.
The series asks how history decides whose violence is forgiven, whose suffering is erased, and whose story is reframed for political expediency. That question has force because it’s not abstract. Men who behave monstrously in the name of politics are frequently granted historical complexity; women who do the same are more often branded permanently unnatural, sometimes as monsters.
This doesn’t excuse Winnie — and neither does the documentary, which insists that explanation doesn’t equal exoneration, and condemnation isn’t comprehension. The film makes this distinction clear. The granddaughters aren’t trying to “resolve” their grandmother or offer her any absolution. They say that they’re explicitly resisting that. They want viewers to decide for themselves.
Then there’s the unexpectedly tender details: Winnie as cook, as matriarch, as the woman standing in the kitchen for hours preparing Friday lunch; Winnie insisting grandchildren eat first because she and Nelson had so little time to raise their own kids. This is where the documentary achieves something more interesting than political rehabilitation — it shows the domestic scale of a woman so prominent in our history.
For younger viewers especially, that may be the series’ real contribution. Mandela-Dlamini said she hoped youngsters would understand that women were integral to the liberation struggle. “There’d be no Nelson without Winnie,” she said. South African history, like most national narratives, tends to place women in the footnotes, expecting them to carry the plot and keep the pots boiling.
The Trials of Winnie Mandela doesn’t offer absolution and doesn’t lead with accusation. Instead it offers its subject matter the dignity of serious attention, approaching Winnie not as a monument to be garlanded or toppled, but as a human battleground. This sounds truer to life, and to politics, in an age when our global leaders tend to staunchly divide populations into critics and fans.
Winnie, according to the series, asked a question that history must answer: who, if anyone, ever held 100% of sainthood? Obviously, no one. Some figures make the need for saints look childish and uninformed.
