President Cyril Ramaphosa described Zindzi Mandela, who died in hospital in Johannesburg in the early hours yesterday, as ‘an icon’ of transformation, and a ‘fearless political activist who was a leader in her own right’.
Mandela, the youngest daughter of Nelson Mandela and anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, was 59. She was serving as South Africa’s ambassador to Denmark. The cause of her death had yet to be revealed yesterday.
Ramaphosa said: ‘Zindzi Mandela was a household name nationally and internationally, who during our years of struggle, brought home the inhumanity of the apartheid system and the unshakeable resolve of our fight for freedom. After our liberation, she became an icon of the task we began of transforming our society and stepping into spaces and opportunities that had been denied to generations of South Africans.’
Zindzi Mandela was Nelson Mandela’s sixth child and his second with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his second wife.
African National Congress spokesperson Pule Mabe said: ‘This is untimely. She still had a role to play in the transformation of our own society and a bigger role to play even in the African National Congress.’
Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor said: ‘Zindzi will not only be remembered as a daughter of our struggle heroes, but as a struggle heroine in her own right.’
The Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said in a statement that Zindzi, along with her mother Winnie and sister Zenani ‘played a critical role symbolising the humanity and steadfastness of the anti-apartheid struggle’ over the period of Nelson Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment.
The statement said: ‘With Zindzi’s death, aged just 59, South Africa loses an important generational link connecting our divided history to the promise of better, more inclusive, tomorrows.’
Zindzi Mandela gained international prominence as a young woman when it fell to her to read out her then jailed father’s rejection of former president PW Botha’s offer for conditional release from prison at a rally in February 1985.
More recently, she was much in the news for controversial remarks about land reform in South Africa, which critics lambasted as evidence that she was unfit for diplomatic office.