Romance and Freedom: Nelson and Winnie Mandela's Politics of Gender in Three Post-Apartheid Novels
- Autores: Lorenzo Mari
- Localización: Altre Modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, ISSN-e 2035-7680, Nº. 12, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Mandela), págs. 95-113
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This paper aims to retrace the influence of the politics of gender enacted by Nelson and Winnie Mandela on post-apartheid gender relationships, as represented in three novels: Phaswane Mpe�s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Njabulo Ndebele�s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) and Lewis Nkosi�s Mandela�s Ego (2006).
Recently, Nelson and Winnie Mandela�s marriage has been also described as the �unusual founding-family romance� (Munro 2014) of the post-apartheid nation. Their marriage lasted from 1958 to 1992, including, thus, the last decades of the anti-apartheid struggle, as well as the demise of the apartheid regime. Their separation, which was due in the first place to Nelson Mandela�s imprisonment and, later, to their divorce, eventually marked the disruption of this founding-family romance, making it �unusual�.
As a consequence, the deconstructive take on Nelson Mandela�s fatherhood and masculinity and Winnie Mandela�s femininity and motherhood which is enacted in the three novels also allows to reassess the possibility of that �founding-family romance�, envisioning an alternative understanding of the origins of the post-apartheid South African nation.
