Ladies and gentleman, family, friends and all those who’ve travelled from near and afar to be at my mother’s funeral, good morning. Your presence means everything to me and my family. Ever since we announced that my mother had departed this world, we’ve been comforted and strengthened in our hour of grief and weakness by your love, your messages, your visitations, and above all your testimonies of what my mother meant to each of you..

We gather here to bid farewell to Mam’ Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela Mandela – a mother, a grandmother, a great grandmother, a sister, a great leader who we have come to refer to as the Mother of our Nation.

The Madikizela and Mandela Families, Mrs Graca Machel and children, Friends and relatives of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Fellow Mourners, The Mother of Nation is gone. When she passed on, we heard the skies weeping as if to mirror the emotions felt by the nation and the world.

It is with profound sadness that we inform the public that Mrs Winnie Madikizela-Mandela passed away at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa on Monday the 2nd of April 2018.

Listen attentively and you will not miss the humming sound of the fire of the furnace as the ironsmith forges the spear that Winnie carried to pierce the heart of injustice and racial oppression.

I have not been a very successful writer. As a journalist, I seldom took advantage of the many chances I had to interview big names, or created work that would render me a household name one day. I’m often the person who agrees to get things done, as countless women can attest to in most professions. I’ve kept a low profile as an editor or manager for most of my career thus far.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela meant wildly different things to different people. As a mother, hers was a fighting spirit. But, she was also rejected..

Although 76-year-old Mary Zwane has an injured knee and Mrs Evelyn Matshepo is on crutches, both women were determined to remember Winnie Madikizela Mandela at Orlando Stadium on Wednesday.

It’s been years since Happiness Lubazana waited at a bus stop in Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape. That day, she was burdened by a ticket to the big city, despairing she may not find her a place in the strangeness of Johannesburg.

No other woman – in life and after – occupies the place that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela does in South African politics. A stalwart of the African National Congress (ANC), she nevertheless stands above, and at times outside, the party. Her iconic status transcends political parties and geographical boundaries, generations and genders. Poets have honoured her, writers have immortalised her and photographers have adored her.

Apartheid’s racist spatial planning is evident in Brandfort in the Free State. Thick vegetation and a national highway separate town from township, and members of different races seldom interact.

In many ways, it is fitting that it is Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda that acts as our chaperone into this powerful documentary on struggle hero Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s life. Both women have lived their lives in the shadow of towering figures and yet their roles as backers, advisers and influencers of these men have often gone uncredited.

There’s a scene in Pascale Lamche’s phenomenal documentary Winnie that would make for an interesting graphological study on the relationship between Bantu education and its effects on the handwriting of the people who were sausaged through its inferiority. The scene is a still frame of archival footage of a white wall somewhere in Soweto in the early 1990s, with the camera focused on the words: “Swop Nelson for Winnie’’, written in large, light-blue block letters.

It is no mistake that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was the subject of the poetry of one of the finest American poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, who also happened to be a black woman. No, it is no mistake at all. Through Brooks’s pen we see Winnie Mandela both for what she was — the “ointment at the gap of our wounding” — and for what she might have wanted to be — “a young woman, flirting, no cares beyond curl-braids and paint and effecting no change, no swerve, no jangle”.

Just hours after the death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, ANC leaders started to flock to her home, reminiscing about their shared moments with the fallen freedom fighter and offering condolences to her family.

ANC national executive committee member Tony Yengeni did not take kindly to negative criticism of struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died in hospital on Monday.

I feel proud to be a security guard here, even if the house is burnt and damaged, because I’m guarding uMam’Winnie’s legacy and her memory. Maybe 10 people come here a month; they come to see the house and only ask me for permission to take pictures. Sometimes they ask about uMam’Winnie’s comrades, and I take them to see her friends. I know them all. But what I have to be careful of is the ­nyaope boys.

Former president Jacob Zuma delivered a touching tribute to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, calling the ANC stalwart a leader whose contribution to liberation can never be doubted.

For her neighbours and her comrades, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was both an adviser and friend. Unlike many of her fellow comrades, Mam’ Winnie remained in Soweto.