Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a South African freedom fighter, organizer, and symbol of resistance who kept the struggle against apartheid alive through the long years when its leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Born Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela in Pondoland in the Eastern Cape in 1936, she became the first Black medical social worker at Johannesburg's Baragwanath Hospital, where she saw firsthand the poverty and disease that apartheid inflicted on Black South Africans. In 1958 she married Nelson Mandela, and she joined the ANC Women's League and the growing movement against the apartheid regime.

When Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, she refused to retreat into silence and became one of the most visible faces of the struggle at home. The apartheid state answered with relentless persecution. She was banned, placed under constant surveillance, and harassed by the security police. In 1969 she was detained under the Terrorism Act and held for more than a year, much of it in solitary confinement, where she was interrogated and abused. In 1977 the regime banished her to the remote town of Brandfort, hoping to isolate her from the movement. There she organized local residents and defied her banning orders, and her home was firebombed.

Through it all she refused to bow, and the people of South Africa's townships came to call her the Mother of the Nation. Her courage inspired a generation of young militants who rose up against apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s. After apartheid fell, she served in Parliament, as a deputy minister, and as president of the ANC Women's League, and she remained a fierce voice for the poor and for those she believed the new South Africa had left behind. She died in 2018. Her legacy endures as a symbol of uncompromising resistance and of the women who carried the liberation struggle on their shoulders.