"Nobody Holds 100% of Anything": Ivor Ichikowitz on Twelve Years Inside The Trials of Winnie Mandela
The executive producer behind Netflix's seven-part documentary sat down with Black Film Wire to talk about the freedom fighter the world loved to hate, the twelve years it took to earn her trust, and why he refuses to let anyone turn her into either a saint or a devil.
The Trials of Winnie Mandela, streaming on Netflix across Africa. Image courtesy of Netflix.
A quick note before you dive in: this is a long one, longer than our usual interviews. It earns it. Twelve years, three remakes, and a life this contested deserve more than a skim, so settle in.
There's a moment in The Trials of Winnie Mandela where Winnie Madikizela-Mandela tells her granddaughters (Princess Zamaswazi Swati Dlamini-Mandela and Princess Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway) that nobody holds 100% of anything. That a person who's killed is a sinner, yes, but so, in her telling, is anyone who's ever failed someone else. The only honest judge, she says, is your own conscience.
That line is the whole documentary in a sentence. Across seven episodes, Netflix's docuseries refuses to let South Africa's most polarizing freedom fighter be flattened into either a saint or a devil. It took twelve years, three full remakes, the death of its original director and, by executive producer Ivor Ichikowitz’s own account, six or seven years of simply convincing Winnie to agree to tell her story at all.
Black Film Wire sat down with Ichikowitz, founder of the Ichikowitz Family Foundation and founder of one of Africa's largest defense and aerospace companies, to talk about what it took to get this made, why he thinks history treats women who fight differently than it treats men who do the same, and what he believes Winnie would say about South Africa today.
A Story Only She Could Tell
Before Winnie, a word on who is telling her story. When we sit down with Ichikowitz, the first order of business is getting his name right: “Ikovits,” he corrects us, patient about it in the way of someone who’s heard every possible mangling. (“Nice African Lithuanian name,” we tell him, only half joking.) It’s a fitting opening beat for a man who spent decades building Paramount Group into one of Africa’s largest privately owned defense and aerospace companies before stepping back in 2022 to run the Ichikowitz Family Foundation full-time, the organization behind the African Oral History Archive and the Africa Youth Survey, the Foundation’s own biennial poll, which found in its 2026 edition that 51% of young South Africans name Winnie Madikizela-Mandela the continent’s greatest female liberation fighter, more than eight times the share naming her nearest rival, Albertina Sisulu.
Ichikowitz doesn’t set out to make a documentary. He sets out to preserve a record. “I was very privileged to have lived during the time of this massive transformation that took place in South Africa,” he tells us, describing the end of apartheid not as “a modern miracle” but as a hard-won moment when Black, white, colored, and Indian South Africans realized they had more to gain by working together than by destroying each other.
Working in and around the African National Congress during that period, Ichikowitz crossed paths with many of the key figures of the democratic transition: Winnie among them. What draws him to her specifically, isn’t just her history. It’s her proximity to the ground. “So many other of our leaders who did incredible things to guide us through this important transformation process were either in exile or in prison,” he explains. “Winnie truly was” in the struggle, on the ground, with the people.
He is direct about what he sees in her that the public narrative missed. “The Winnie Mandela that I knew was not the Winnie Mandela that the media represented,” he says. “And it certainly wasn’t the villain that everybody loved to villainize.” That gap between the woman he knew and the headline the world had already written becomes, in his words, “an absolute obsession.”
A quick note on the record: Ichikowitz told us he deliberately kept the series from centering on this chapter, though it does cover it. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was accused, across her life, of directing a campaign of violence through the Mandela United Football Club, a group of young men who served as her bodyguards in the 1980s. She was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in connection with the 1988 abduction of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei. She was never charged with his murder, but his death and her alleged role in it remain the most contested chapters of her public life. She testified before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning cleric who chaired the Commission, pleaded with her, on camera, to apologize, which she eventually did, in part.
The series also doesn’t romanticize her marriage to Nelson Mandela, “Madiba” to most South Africans; it places the marriage’s breakdown, along with the infidelity scandals and alcoholism it also covers, alongside the liberation history rather than cutting away from it.
What isn’t in dispute is the record above. What’s still contested is everything around it: how much she knew, how much she ordered, and how much of what was done in her name reflects the woman herself.
No Saint, No Devil
Ichikowitz is careful, more than once in our conversation, not to let the series resolve Winnie into something simpler than she was. "There was no way we could take Winnie and turn her into a saint, because Winnie was no saint," he says. "But also, there was no way that we could allow the world to villainize her to the extent that they did, because she was no devil either."
What strikes him most, he says, is how little Winnie herself seemed to need the documentary to protect her image. "Winnie didn't give a damn," he exclaims. "She didn't care about how people saw her. She knew that her story was of such a nature that there was no absolute good and absolute evil." She went further than most subjects ever would: she handed the filmmakers the names of people who held pieces of her story, and told them not to take her word for it. “Winnie had the guts to put herself out there and say, don’t believe my part of the story, go and talk to [them],” Ichikowitz says. “Nine times out of 10, [they] didn’t have the guts to tell their part of the story.”
We asked him where he personally lands on a tension the film itself raises: the South African writer and publisher Palesa Morudu, co-owner of Clarity Editorial, has written that she deliberately calls her subject "Winnie," not "Mama Winnie," because reverence can make accountability harder to ask for. Ichikowitz doesn’t fully concede the point. He describes sitting on stage at Winnie's funeral "one of the very, very few white faces on that stage" and watching a stadium "filled with people from all walks of life, from every political party, from every color spectrum," there to mourn a woman he calls, without qualification, the mother of the nation. "For anybody to turn around and say we're not going to revere her for the icon that she became …. I'm sorry, I don't buy that," he retorts. "Winnie was an icon without wanting to be an icon."
"You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock"
We brought up a phrase that's followed Winnie Mandela’s story for years, one many viewers, ourselves included, first encountered through comedian and longtime host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah: Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo: strike a woman, strike a rock.
Comedy Central/Daily Show clips-
We asked Ichikowitz to place Winnie inside that lineage, and to weigh in on something that's nagged at us watching her story alongside women like Miriam Makeba and Assata Shakur: does history simply judge women who fight differently than it judges men who do the same?
Ivor Ichikowitz’s answer goes wider than South Africa. "The true power of this continent (Africa) is in the hands of the women," he says explicitly. "If you want anything done in Africa, get a woman to do it." He traces both colonialism and apartheid back to a shared tactic- convincing Africans that they were dependent on their colonizers and says Winnie's defining act of resistance was refusing to internalize that story twice over, as a Black person and as a woman. "What made Winnie unusual during the apartheid period is that she refused to accept the propaganda that made her blackness and the fact that she was a female a liability."
Ichikowitz also connects that refusal directly to why the apartheid state never simply made her disappear, the way it did thousands of others. "This woman was a real thorn in the side of the apartheid government," he says. "The truth is that they were scared of her. They were petrified of her. And what were they most petrified of? They were petrified of the fact that she wasn't scared of them."
On Trevor Noah specifically, Ichikowitz doesn't treat the clip as a nice piece of pop-culture synergy, he frames it as the whole point of the project. "He wasn't talking to South Africans. He wasn't talking to Ghanaians or Nigerians. He was talking to the Black women of the world," Ichikowitz says. "Use diversity as your superpower. [...] This isn't a South African story. It isn't an African story. It's a story for the world." That’s not a sentiment we’re nodding along to from the sidelines; it’s the whole reason this interview exists. Black Film Wire was built to cover exactly this: stories that refuse to stay local, told for an audience the mainstream press keeps forgetting is global. Winnie’s story belongs to the Black women of the world before it belongs to any one newsroom’s beat, and that’s why we made the trip to tell it.
June 16, 1976
Few scenes in the series land harder than Winnie describing the Soweto Uprising, the day she and journalist Sophie Tema drove their own cars, a maroon Volkswagen Beetle and a white one, back and forth carrying the wounded and the bodies of children shot by police, and realized, watching them, that forgiveness was no longer something she could offer.
My own first encounter with June 16, 1976 wasn't in a history book. It was Sarafina!, the 1992 film with Whoopi Goldberg and Leleti Khumalo, which I watched as a kid and have loved ever since without fully understanding, until much later, that it was a dramatization of this exact uprising, shot, deliberately, at Morris Isaacson High School, the actual site where the real protest began.
Watching Winnie describe driving a maroon Volkswagen that students used as an ambulance that day, picking up the bodies of children still in their school uniforms, and saying plainly that she could never pretend to forgive it, I understood, for the first time, how much of what I thought I knew about that day I'd actually learned from a musical. I'll be watching Sarafina! again, differently, because of this documentary.
Ichikowitz doesn’t speak to that scene directly in isolation, but the throughline is clear across his answers: Winnie's radicalization wasn't theoretical. It happened in her hands.
Twelve Years, Three Remakes, and a Director Who Didn't Live to See It Finished
The series almost doesn’t survive its own making. Ichikowitz builds the project alongside the late Mandy Jacobson, an Emmy-winning director whose earlier film, Calling the Ghosts, documented Bosnian women’s testimony and helped establish rape as a war crime under international law, and who later shared in a Peabody as part of the Bill Moyers team behind Facing the Truth, PBS’s look at South Africa’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the same body Winnie would later testify before. Jacobson, Ichikowitz tells us, also helps him start the African Oral History Archive years before this project exists.
The two approach Winnie from genuinely different places: Jacobson arrives with a clear sense of what she thinks the story is; Ichikowitz insists on starting without a treatment, without a script, and without any editorial filter on what Winnie chooses to say. The friction between them, he says, becomes productive: "That constructive, creative conflict... provoked a huge amount of dialogue between her and Winnie that perhaps would never have happened" otherwise.
Get me an image of mandy jacobson / bts on set with or without Ichikowitz. Cant find any online. Request from team
Neither of them anticipates the project will take over a decade. “I was very angry with Mandy for passing away and leaving this passion project unfinished,” Ichikowitz says, candidly. “It was no longer about making a movie. It was no longer about just the creative process. It was about giving one of the most remarkable women in the world an opportunity to tell the world her story.”
After Jacobson’s death, the work of shaping twelve years of testimony into something watchable falls to Ichikowitz alone. "We remade this movie three times before I was happy that we were properly able to represent this," he tells us, not for lack of footage, but because the first instinct, a straightforward linear history, doesn’t hold the truth of what they have. "Winnie's life was a drama, it was a love story, it was a tragedy, it was in some cases a horror story, and you don't tell that through a linear history."
A Craft Question, For the Filmmakers Reading This
Black Film Wire's readership includes a lot of working storytellers alongside casual viewers, so we asked Ichikowitz to speak directly to the structural choice: building the series around real conversations between Winnie and her granddaughters, Zaziwe and Swati, rather than a narrator or historians.
His answer doubles as a small film-school heresy. "I'll teach you at film school that you start with a treatment, you then do a shooting plan, you basically decide up front what your story is going to be, and you then go and fill in the pieces," he says. "We did this exactly the opposite way." He deliberately keeps experienced documentary veterans from steering the project toward the chapters of Winnie's life the public already thought it knew: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony, chiefly.
"Everybody knew about the truth commission... they've made up their minds on it. I didn't want to go there. I wanted to fill all the rest."
The hardest part, he says, isn't finding the material. It was fitting a life this large into seven episodes when it could easily have been fifteen or twenty. "I think that the evolution here was as filmmakers to be able to decide what this needed to be to do the subject matter justice," he explains. "What it turned into is a drama, not a documentary and I think that's what makes it so compelling."
What the Screen Doesn't Let You Look Away From
A personal note from Sahndra Fon Dufe, outside the interview itself.
Watching the series ahead of this interview, what stayed with me wasn't always the chapters everyone already expects. It was the texture in between them.
There's a scene where Winnie is sitting with two of her friends, fellow detainee Rita Alice Ndzanga among them-recalling a matron at Pretoria Central Prison who used to kick her during one of her detentions until, one day, the said matron gets locked in a room with her, and Winnie beats her black and blue. An older Winnie recounts the story laughing. It's one of the funniest, most unsettling moments in the entire series, because it refuses to let you hold "freedom fighter" and "a woman who took the beating back with her own fists" as two different people.
Are there stills of this moment anywhere? Ask Team, I cant see online can I request for a still, pls.
Winnie’s father, Columbus Madikizela, a history teacher and headmaster, used to stop his own lessons mid-sentence to tell his children, "That is what the white man tells me to tell you… now let me tell you the real history." He passed down a line he attributed to Bismarck, on German reunification: that some things aren't won "through parliamentary speeches and debates," but through "blood and iron." Winnie says it shaped her later. Watching it, I couldn't stop thinking about how many of us grew up with some version of that same moment: a parent, a grandparent, quietly correcting the official story, and in my case, a history teacher who drilled into us the white man’s “stick and carrot method,” and how political activists had to fight to deconstruct it.
Another thing that unsettled me about Winnie was her solitary confinement, 491 days of it, described in her own words: the jangling keys, being interrogated for seven days straight, urinating blood, reaching a point where her body would simply give out and she'd faint, and waking up when they threw water on her, feeling briefly refreshed enough to keep fighting. A very problematic corrections officer, elsewhere in the film, insists she was never tortured, only "detained." Sitting with both of those things on screen at once is its own kind of argument.
And there's a quieter moment I keep returning to: her granddaughters going through old footage, trying to ask her, gently, about the chapters of her story the public has already judged: was she a murderer, a kidnapper. Watching her own family have to be the ones to ask that, rather than a journalist or a historian, says something about what this project actually cost everyone who made it, Winnie included.
What Didn't Make the Cut
In a moment that doesn’t come up anywhere in the finished seven episodes, Ichikowitz tells us the team had interviewed Winnie directly about South Africa’s recurring waves of xenophobic violence- a conversation that never made it into the final edit. Her answer, as he recalls it, was unambiguous. “She said, this is not what defines us. This is not who we are. This is absolutely not what we fought our struggle for,” he tells us. Winnie reminded him, in that conversation, that South Africa’s own liberation had depended on sacrifices made by Ghanaians, Nigerians, Gabonese, Senegalese, and Sudanese allies. “We are a product of African sacrifice.”
We Put the Question to Him Directly
We also asked Ichikowitz himself about the current rise in xenophobic attacks on West and Central African nationals in South Africa, and he doesn’t soften it.
We’ll say plainly what we hope comes through anyway: Black Film Wire stands with the African nationals being targeted. Community and care aren’t side themes in this film, they’re the architecture holding it up, and that’s exactly the kind of story this platform exists to carry.
"It's absolutely horrific," he says. “There is this very unfortunate psychology that if people... are taking jobs from South Africans, then they are the guilty ones. “
The Money Behind the Memory
Here's a tension worth naming plainly, because we'd be doing readers a disservice not to: Ichikowitz built his career across a wide range of business sectors including real estate, aviation, tourism mining, energy, defense, and aerospace. He founded Paramount Group, one of Africa's largest privately owned defense and aerospace companies, before turning his attention full-time to the Ichikowitz Family Foundation in 2022. We didn't put that question to Ichikowitz directly in this conversation. It's one we think is fair to leave on the record rather than leave unsaid.
The Drumbeat That Lives With Him
We closed somewhere gentler. South African music, especially amapiano, has taken over global playlists, and we wanted to know if the man behind this project moves to any of it. “I have African rhythm in my soul,” Ichikowitz says. “My whole life is defined by a drumbeat that lives with me constantly.” He points to the series’ original score as one of its most deliberate creative choices. “It’s the music that makes this thing work,” he says. “If you do watch it again, just listen to the music.”
We happen to agree, the score is one of the things that moved us most watching the series, and it’s worth naming the person behind it: composer Benjamin Willem wrote the original music, and it does exactly what Ichikowitz says it does.
Ivor Ichikowitz studied drama at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the same university where Madiba studied law, and one of South Africa’s top research universities, where he became involved in protest theatre, and once trained to be a theatrical producer and filmmaker before what he calls “an accident of history” pulled him into business instead, a detour that, twelve years and seven episodes later, brought him back to telling stories after all.
Interview by Sahndra Fon Dufe
Our Review
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ (4.5/5 stars)
The Trials of Winnie Mandela
A small complaint to close on: as of this writing, The Trials of Winnie Mandela is streaming across Africa but isn’t yet available here in the US. Work this excellent, about a story of this magnitude, deserves a wider screen than geography is currently giving it, and I hope that changes soon.
Because it is excellent. I went in expecting a history lesson and came out having learned more than I bargained for, which is rare. The archival footage alone carries more weight than most documentaries manage with a full arsenal of talking heads, and critics agree: the Mail & Guardian said the film does not try to resolve the tension between Winnie’s conflicting legacies but “leans into it,” and Sowetan named the archival work the series’ “greatest technical achievement.” There’s an intimacy and a carefulness here that reads as real admiration, not hagiography, precisely because it never stops making room for the contradictions. And the choice to let her own granddaughters, Zaziwe and Swati, ask the questions a journalist never could, and sit with answers that don’t fully satisfy them, is, frankly, gangster. It’s the boldest structural decision in the whole series, and it’s the reason this documentary feels less like a verdict and more like a family finally being honest with itself, in public, on purpose.
From The Black Film Wire Team
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela spent a lifetime being written about by people who'd already decided what kind of woman she was. What Ichikowitz and his team built, across twelve years and three remakes, resists that same impulse, even when, as he's candid enough to admit, his own reverence for her sometimes pulls against it. That tension is the most honest thing about this project, and about this conversation. We're grateful he sat with us in it.
TL;DR
Ivor Ichikowitz, executive producer of Netflix's The Trials of Winnie Mandela, has spent twelve years and three full remakes bringing South African icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s story to screen through his Ichikowitz Family Foundation. In our conversation, he talks candidly about the death of original director Mandy Jacobson mid-production, the deliberate choice to structure the series around Winnie's own granddaughters instead of a narrator, and why he believes history judges women who fight differently than it judges men who do the same. He also addresses South Africa's current wave of xenophobic violence head-on, relaying a Winnie Mandela quote on the subject that never made the final cut. Separately: Ichikowitz's other career, founding one of Africa's largest defense companies, has drawn its own scrutiny, a tension we've chosen to put on the record rather than leave unexamined.
Iconic Quotes From This Conversation
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PROJECT DETAILS Series: The Trials of Winnie Mandela Platform: Netflix Episodes: 7 Premiere: April 23, 2026 (Africa) Executive Producers: Ivor Ichikowitz, Mandy Jacobson, John Nyoka Producer: Swati Mandela-Dlamini Featuring: Zaziwe Manaway, Swati Mandela-Dlamini Production Entity: Ichikowitz Family Foundation / African Oral History Archive
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Sahndra Fon Dufe is the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Film Wire, covering Black and African cinema, industry trends, and global storytelling across the diaspora.
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