Zindzi Mandela, daughter of South African anti-apartheid icons Nelson and Winne Mandela, has died in Johannesburg at the age of 59.
State broadcaster SABC said Mandela died at a hospital in the South African capital, but did not reveal a cause of death. Her death was confirmed by the ruling African National Congress, which her father led in the struggle against South Africa’s white minority-ruled apartheid regime, then as the country’s first Black president.
Zindzi rose to prominence in 1985 when she read a letter from her father rejecting then-President P.W. Botha’s offer for freedom in exchange for rejecting the ANC’s strategy of violent resistance to apartheid.
Mandela was serving as South Africa’s ambassador to Denmark at the time of her death.
South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor praised Zindzi Mandela “as a daughter of our struggle heroes, Tata Nelson and Mama Winnie Mandela, but as a struggle heroine in her own right. She served South Africa well.”