Like many of history's more difficult and complex women Winnie Mandela was always going to be judged by people who had never walked a mile in her shoes.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
And, like Joan of Arc, Madam Mao, Eva Peron and even Imelda Marcos to name a few, she was destined to suffer that fate both before and after her demise.
We have already seen how, within hours of her death, many have been quick to remind us of her infidelities, well-documented personal greed and complicity in acts of terrorism and brutality during and after Nelson Mandela's imprisonment.
The latter, which included the murders of a suspected police informer, 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, and the doctor who tried to save him, Baker Absu Avat, in 1989, contributed to a damning finding against her by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the 1990s.
In its final report the TRC ruled that Madikizela-Mandela, as she was by then widely known, was "politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club.
The MUFC was the cover for her Soweto enforcers. Its activities led to many characterising her as the "mugger", not "mother" of the nation.
Madikizela-Mandela was not intimidated by this, saying in later years she had little respect for the softer methods espoused by her former husband and the moral judgements passed by Tutu.
"Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning, young revolutionary," she said in 2010. "But look what came out. Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks."
Complications arising from the terms of that deal between F W de Klerk and Nelson Mandela are still reverberating through South Africa's social, political and economic structures almost 30 years later.
Her views on Archbishop Tutu were even more scathing. She considered him to be a "cretin" and described the Truth and Justice Commission as a circus.
"I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting here because of our struggle and me - because of the things I and people like me had done to get freedom," she said.
"I would do everything I did again if I had to. Everything."
That is why so many South Africans are mourning Madikizela-Mandela today.
She was the one who returned to Soweto in defiance of the white government to lead a new generation of activists in 1985; not her husband and not the Archbishop.
It was during this period, gripped by a fervour for reform that made it easy to believe the end justified almost any means, Seipei was kidnapped and murdered.
It was also when Madikizela-Mandela made her infamous reference to "necklacing" suspected collaborators; burning them alive by placing a rubber tyre around their necks and dousing it with petrol.
While such atrocities are unforgivable, Madikizela-Mandela's anger against apartheid and its enablers should be balanced against her own experience.
During her own lengthy periods of imprisonment and exile she suffered indignities and humiliations at least as bad as anything inflicted on her husband and quite possibly worse.
Like many other revolutionaries before her Madikizela-Mandela was ready for every contingency but one. Victory.
