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This chapter places Winnie: The Opera (Bongani Ndodana-Breen, Warren Wilensky, and Mfundi Vundla, 2011) in a larger comparative framework that includes the Western opera tradition, opera in the United States, and the representation of blackness in opera more generally. With a reading of postcolonial and post-apartheid theorists (for example, Homi Bhabha and the “unhomely,” Karin Barber and entextualization, and Sarah Nuttal’s entanglement), this chapter also draws upon the Global South (and global studies) along with transnationalism. This chapter examines events from the opera in Winnie Mandela’s life (torture, the Mandela United Football Club, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) as they are characterized musically and in the drama.

This chapter explores the struggle of the Scottish National Party (SNP) to be a part of mainstream of Scottish politics and the potential of blackmailing. The Hamilton by-election was an important milestone in the party's development. The election of Winnie Ewing as Hamilton's MP pronounced the beginning of a new era in Scottish politics. The SNP's blackmail potential was linked almost exclusively to its capacity to win votes from other parties. Scottish politics became polarised in the late 1980s. The SNP had succeeded in determining itself on the left by 1997. The double whammy of the referendum defeat and election losses in 1979 had a devastating effect on the SNP. The most striking feature of the SNP during the 30 years after the Hamilton by-election was that it succeeded in maintaining a parliamentary presence at all.

Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela confronts the double colonization suffered by women of imperially oppressed nations. In depicting a selection of South African women, Ndebele offers a new Penelope paradigm for the twenty first century, one constructed by women who admire and empathize with Winnie Mandela—that famous ‘Penelope’ figure left alone by her husband, but whose choices are very different. Offering an alternative approach to that espoused by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both the form of Ndebele’s novel and the characters within it suggest a different way to heal the wounds of apartheid. Furthermore, with the focus on the women, it is their journeys that become central, and which are seen to be—unlike the journeys of the male protagonists examined in this volume—centrifugal, rather than centripetal.

This chapter reflects on humming, which usually implies rhythm—the rhythm of the body in motion. It argues that humming, which involves the voice and is usually sung, moves in and out of understandable language and often works in tandem with body movement. Humming is evident in Iroquois ritual or in the utterance of Winnie-the-Pooh. The chapter stresses the creative force of the voice and its power to make things happen.

This chapter looks closely at Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he gives a compelling and impassioned voice to five South African ‘descendants’ of Penelope, and to Penelope herself. It argues that the book puts into practice Ndebele’s belief that it was important for South African writing to resist the orthodoxy of spectacle, to rediscover the ordinary, to fashion a new narrative of intimacy and introspection, and thereby envisage a future of promise and complexity. It shows how Ndebele challenges the classical paradigm of the faithful waiting woman and, in so doing, urgently interrogates the notion of Home in the new South Africa.