Ex-wife lashes out bitterly at Nelson Mandela


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South Africa’s controversial ex-wife of former President Nelson Mandela, Winnie has rebuked him for neglecting the poor and coming out of prison a changed person.

His former wife of 38 years, bitterly lashed out at him for betraying South Africa’s black population and claiming that the “name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family”.

She said she will never forgive Mandela.

Winnie Mandela, 73, was never first lady of South Africa because she and her husband divorced two years before he became president. The two divorced in 1996.

Winnie said the world should “realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died”.

She claimed that the sacrifices of Steve Biko and others in the fight against apartheid were being overlooked.

Winnie accused the now frail Mandela for “failing to help the poor, instead becoming a corporate foundation who only ever appeared in public to raise money for the ANC political party”.

Winnie added, “Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out. Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks.

“Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded.

“I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel with his jailer de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart?” She asked.

She made the remarks during an interview with a British publication. Mandela’s former wife became notorious in 1991 when she was jailed for
six years for the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi – a sentence that was later reduced to a fine.

Stompie, 14, had been murdered three years earlier by members of her
bodyguard team.

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