Winnie Mandela dies at 81

Winnie Madikizela- Mandela the anti-apartheid campaigner and former wife of Nelson Mandela has died aged 81.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela became a symbol of resistance and rallying point for poor black township residents who demanded their freedom. She headed South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaign when she was banished and jailed for campaigning for the rights of black South Africans and her husband’s release.

For several decades she and her then-husband Nelson Mandela were South Africa’s most famous political couple but Mr Mandela divorced her in 1996.

Born at Bizana in the Transkei in 1936, she met Mandela in 1957. Mandela was jailed for life in 1964 and only released in 1990. While he was in prison, she took on an increasingly political role despite constant harassment by the South African security police. In 1976, the year of Soweto riots, she was banished from the township to a remote rural area and at one stage her house was burned down, which led to her being dubbed as the “Mother of the Nation”.

By mid-1980s signalled the start of a long period of township militancy against the white South African government of President PW Botha, and she was at the heart of the struggle in Soweto. Her prominence led to greater influence over young radical township activists men who became her personal bodyguard and known as the Mandela United Football Club. The activists allegedly turned on suspected police informers and collaborators,  and used rubber tyres filled with petrol as brutal murder weapons known as “necklaces”.

In 2003, Ms Mandela was convicted of fraud and theft in connection with a bank loan scandal, but the appeal judge overturned the conviction of theft, but upheld the fraud, handing her a three-year