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Njabulo Ndebele’s ”The cry of Winnie Mandela” tells the story of four women who in different ways lost their husbands during the apartheid years of South Africa, and of these women’s conversations with the number one left-behind woman of that time, Winnie Mandela. It is wonderful literature. Ndebele is good, really, really good. It is also terribly male chauvinist and incredibly disrespectful.

Ndebele has some very clear sighted analyses of white versus black and owners of Anglo-Saxon culture versus everybody else. As the women he writes about are all black, this helps. Sadly, he really does not see women as equal to men, and so the rest of his project falls apart.

The stories of the four women are not exceptional or hard to believe in. They happened and happen every day, in so many places. Women marry, and they are left for studies, or work, or prison or another woman – or sometimes all of the above. But Ndebeles book the being left is all that defines the women. They may go mad or grow very successful, but this is hardly worth mentioning as the women are not objects of their own life. Only the missing male and how she deals with his being away is given importance – except, of course, for her relations to other males. Will she, or will she not, fall for the temptation of sleeping around (which of course will bring nothing but sorrow no matter what ways her husband is cheating on her, or how hard he has dropped her, she is a woman and God will punish her harder than any male)? Oh, the suspension!

Very soon I find that I could not care less about these husbands, their imperfections and cruelty, their absence. I want to know why the woman doesn’t buy herself a carrot if the need for a penis is so great, so that she can go on with raising her children, and I’d so love to know how she does that, or how she manages to open up that store, or what actually goes down when she breaks down. Sadly I’m told none of this, just the endless waiting and longing and thinking of the male, the center point of the universe.

So far the book is simply annoying. It is, after all written by a male, and it is not news that males tend to believe the universe spins around them. And as earlier mentioned, it is very well written, and whenever it speaks of race or culture, I find myself smiling and nodding. I think I might have forgiven Ndebeles disrespect of the four women. After all, he created them. It’s not like they’ll take offence.

But then he brings in the fifth woman, and I begin to feel slightly nauseous. This woman is not an invention of his. Neither is she dead. She is Winnie Nomzamo Mandela. A real woman at whom the unreal characters hurl accusations and pour disappointment. And through his characters Ndelebele imposes on her the same moral standards as he has imposed on them. Be chaste. Wait for your man. Put all your cunning into getting him back and receiving him in a way that will preserve your marriage and the social order of things. This is your only purpose.

Through his characters, Ndebele disguises the fact that Winnie Mandela was not a woman left in peace to wait for her husband’s return. She was a woman at war. She was harassed and beaten and tortured and exiled and bombed, not because she was anyone’s wife, but because she was a leader in her own right. She fought to hold ANC together in a time when all the leaders were undercover or in prison or abroad, and when those abroad had stopped communicating with those in prison and those undercover. She fought to keep the respect and loyalty of a people who kept sending their sons to war and were rewarded with nothing but more misery. She fought to keep herself alive, and her children fed and in school. She fought to keep control of an army of kids, too young to skip the country, old enough to travel it pretending to be a football club, to keep her informed, and to keep her safe.

Why is she asked to accept responsibility for the actions of her soldiers when the male war leaders have never been asked to own up to the crimes their armies committed? How can she be expected to fight the war that men fought with grown soldiers, AK47s and the support of the Red Army with nothing but a bunch of kids and come out cleaner, less dirtied than the males? I feel like giving this Ndebele fellow a good punch now. And still, it grows worse.

Ndebele insist in defining torture as the turning point in Mrs. Mandelas life. He chants the name of the torturer and gives as much details as he has managed to find about the time she was held under torture, laying it all out as if those days broke her, and all that she has been accused of later, the infidelity, the cruelty, is simply a reaction to the power yet another male holds over her. Mrs. Mandela herself has never said much about this experience, except that it was bad but others had a worse time of it. She has chosen not to give the torturer power over the rest of her life. Ndebele does his best to take that choice away from her. He cannot see her as driven by anything but male influence, and he refuses to accept that she may spin her own fate around something other than the power of males.

Actually, he is not able to accept that she may spin her own fate at all. Instead he tries to spin it for her, writing in her voice, presuming that he can understand how she feels, how she thinks, and believing that he is in his right to display these imagined thoughts and feelings to the readers. I wonder would he do the same to Desmond Tutu? To Nelson Mandela? To any male at all? Would he steal a man’s voice and pretend to speak for him? I very much doubt it.

Having finished the book, I believe that Njabulo Ndebele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town and celebrated writer, is a prick. Still, I obviously owe the man. I haven’t felt this feminist in many, many years.

Der sparte du meg for å lese den boken, tror jeg - men den velskrevne anmeldelsen din leste jeg med interesse. Jeg er nesten blitt så nysgjerrig på boken at jeg synes jeg må lese den, men jeg tror jeg sniker meg unna denne. Jeg har en følelse av at du har gjort jobben for meg her...

Syns definitivt du skal bla gjenom den hvis du kommer over den, men jeg er lei for at jeg har betalt penger for den. Det kjennes som om jeg har vært med på å tråkke på disse damene, og det er ingen god følelse.