On October 22, a week after the #FeesMustFall student protests began to surge across South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela told the public to expect her arrival. “I will be joining my children in Protest at Wits [University] today. Rhodes Tommorrow (sic) and NMMU [Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth] on Friday,” she wrote on Facebook. Then, with her characteristic audacity, she added, “Let us see if the police will shoot with me in the front line. I dare them to.”

Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the beautiful wife of Nelson Mandela during his 27 years in prison, has always polarized the public. Those who love her call her Mama Winnie or Mother of the Nation; they admire her charisma and revolutionary will. Forced into the political spotlight when her husband was arrested, Madikizela-Mandela stoked the flames of anti-apartheid resistance while many ANC members were imprisoned or exiled. But many others fear and vilify her. In 1997, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Madikizela-Mandela guilty of multiple counts of torture, kidnapping, and murder. Her name was most tarnished by the death of Stompie Seipei, the 14-year-old boy killed by her bodyguards. Madikizela-Mandela’s erasure as a leader corresponded with her husband’s elevation as a saint. While Nelson Mandela’s image was printed on t-shirts and bank notes, his message of peace disseminated in biopics and memoirs, Madikizela-Mandela’s brand of justice was too controversial to market. In her, some people (especially in the mainstream white press) saw a woman whose politics were fueled by hate, and as such she had no place in the mythology of a rainbow South Africa—a nation that had, by all official accounts, reconciled with its past.

During the student protests that have shaken post-apartheid South Africa, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s name was once again on people’s lips. At the University of the Witswatersrand in mid-October, a young black woman was photographed holding a placard that said, “Children of Winnie.” On Twitter, a demonstrator wrote of her leader: “This Hlatswayo girl from #Wits is a new version of mama #WinnieMandela in our generation.”  On October 19, students at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town staged an occupation of the Admin B building. Students inside quickly covered up the school crest with a makeshift poster declaring the building’s new title: Winnie Mandela House.

A spring is coming to South Africa, and the protests for free education were only its opening gestures. “Decolonization” is in the works: the struggle to eradicate the economic, cultural, and epistemological logics of colonialism, all of which endured after the end of apartheid. An American transplant to Cape Town the same age as these so-called “born-frees,” I’ve spent the past weeks straddling the line between participant and outsider, listening as my peers narrated and dissected the decolonization process in real-time. On every platform, from the streets to social media, young black South Africans urged society to reinterpret the ideas and symbols whose meanings had ossified over the past decades. Old icons were discarded. Nelson Mandela’s name is sacred no longer—today, to “Mandela-ize” a movement is to attempt to bargain with white power, to sell one’s people short through compromise and false integration. And Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, adored by the youth of Soweto in the 1980s, has gained traction in the activist imagination once more. In today’s black student movement, her historical meaning is being renewed in service of a new political warfare —one that embraces militancy and recognizes the logic of madness, that topples discourses of ‘the past’ to usher in a yet-unimaginable future.