Lady Naipaul a liar, says ex-Mrs Mandela

Winnie Mandela has labelled writer Nadira Naipaul "a liar and a fraud" following a controversy over an article written by her in which the estranged wife of South Africa's apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was critical of him.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has called writer Nadira Naipaul “a liar and a fraud”. At the root of the accusation is an article written by the former in which she says the estranged wife of South Africa’s apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was critical of him.

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“It’s a figment of her malicious imagination,” Madikizela-Mandela wrote in an article of her own in the Sunday Times. She denied Naipaul had interviewed her while on a visit to Mandela’s Soweto home here with her husband, author Sir V.S. Naipaul.

In Naipaul’s article in the London Evening Standard, Madikizela-Mandela was quoted as saying her former husband had let down the black citizens of South Africa by entering into a deal with the then white apartheid government.

“Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks,” the article read.

Madikizela-Mandela also allegedly told Naipaul she’d never forgive Mandela for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize along with the then President F.W. de Klerk of the all-white National Party.