By Robin Washington
The Boston Globe
April 4, 2018

The death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, on Monday, at age 81, brings to mind a happier occasion, a day of pure celebration in Boston, June 23, 1990. Before a July Fourth-sized Esplanade crowd and a Hatch Shell full of political elites, a gaunt but ebullient 71-year-old pumped his fist to an anthem composed just for him, standing next to the woman called “The Mother of the Nation.”

“Bring back Nelson Mandela, bring him back home to Soweto.

I want to see him walking hand-in-hand with Winnie Mandela!”

Just four months after his release from 27 years in prison, Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s visit to Boston was no accident. The city had played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle, eventually shaping American policy toward the white minority regime.

Now, they were here to give thanks, and did the town: Madison Park High School in the morning, the Kennedy Library at noon, the Esplanade, and a $5,000-a-plate, State Department- secured dinner at the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Make that State Department-secured with a TV reporter and producer sneaking in. Then working at WBZ-TV, Tanya Hart and I had been plotting for weeks for an interview — and realized everyone else was, too. So we switched gears: “If they’re all trying for Nelson, let’s go for Winnie.”

After countless maybes and we’ll-sees, nothing. But as midnight approached, it was finally a go — the exclusive of a lifetime! We first had to commandeer a camera crew to replace ours, which had clocked out hours earlier. A guest room was equally hastily acquired, and into it she walked: her imposing blue headwrap and commanding bearing the definition of regal.

So what did she say?

If the expectation was that Winnie would echo the emerging forgiveness of her husband, she wasn’t there yet . . . and never would be. Only recently herself released from house arrest, she instead told of her continued distrust of the men with whom Nelson was attempting to make peace.

“Whilst I am prepared to listen to my leaders who say that the only solution is a peaceful one now; [and that] ‘We have buried enough . . . let us sit and talk with these same men,’ I cannot trust them,” she said, adding that their home had been raided while on their trip.

Yet she also spoke of being as awestruck as a child, by the throngs rushing them, and countless luminaries. Sitting next to her in New York was Betty Shabazz, widow to Malcolm X.

“I identify so directly with her,” Winnie Mandela said. “I identify . . . with the ideas that Malcolm X stood for. And in her, I just saw a real connection with Malcolm X himself. And of course, it is no secret how I feel about the armed struggle.”

If Winnie played militant Malcolm to Nelson’s peaceful Martin, the two grew even further apart after majority rule and Nelson’s election as South African president (events that were far from certain that day in Boston). Nelson grew to embody reconciliation, while an unrepentant Winnie was found “accountable, politically and morally,” for her bodyguards’ horrific killing of a teen. United in the struggle but distant at its end, the couple divorced, and at his 2013 death, Nelson left her nothing in his will.

Exclusives mean little outside the news business, and unfolding events can place an asterisk on any accomplishment. Did my career-moment “get” get diminished when Winnie got got?

Perhaps. But history is lived as a series of moments, none influenced by events yet to come. And for many in her country and beyond, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela remains an unquestionable she-ro, no one denying her role in ending a terrible injustice.

The historians will sort it out. What I know I’ll remember is a day of celebration in Boston, and the hopes of a people just shy of freedom’s grasp, as the Mother of their Nation strode into a room to give us a few moments of her time.

Globe contributing columnist Robin Washington was a producer for WBZ-TV in 1990. He can be reached at robin@robinwashington.com or via Twitter @robinbirk.