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Winnie is arrested with twenty-one others and detained for five months. She is interrogated and tortured. As the spokesperson for Mandela, and for the ANC, which has been banned, Winnie is harassed by the government throughout Mandela's years of incarceration. |
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The government passes the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, which makes every black a citizen of a homeland, or a rural tribal area, rather than a citizen of South Africa. The country was built on white capital and
black labor. The two were interlocked. It couldn't function without
both. The black population went on growing exponentially. They couldn't
be crammed into these small rural homelands, which were not economically
sustainable. |
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Soweto students hold a rally to protest mandatory instruction in Afrikaans, the language of the white rulers. Police open fire on the students killing 23 and injuring hundreds more. Protest spreads throughout the country. 575 people are killed over the next eight months, a quarter of them are under age 18. I've never seen that many police. I mean,
this is a group of kids with shining black shoes, white socks and
little tunics singing freedom songs, holding one another. We actually
looked cute! It's unbelievable to think that anyone could have stood
firm on their feet and actually shot into that crowd. |
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Winnie Mandela is banished to Brandfort, a small, conservative Afrikaner town. She immediately became a leader of the community.
She interacted, learned to speak Sotho, their mother tongue, and
started projects. She got somebody to donate a caravan and yours
truly to donate medicines. I would go regularly to Winnie's little
clinic. But she was very lonely and isolated. No telephone." |
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Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consiousness Movement, dies after being beat up by the police in detention. The answer is power of the black people.
We worked in their factories, built their roads. If we stopped doing
all those things they would understand how powerful black people
are. |
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