TORONTO -- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela learned she had been denied entry to Canada just hours before she was to be driven to Johannesburg's OR Tambo International airport to fly to Toronto to give a speech at a fundraising event last night.
The controversial 70-year-old South African political activist - who applied four weeks ago for a visa - was sitting in her house in the Orlando section of Soweto dressed all in pink and putting the final touches on her speech. Her luggage was packed neatly beside her.
Two assistants came through the door after visiting the Canadian High Commission in Pretoria and told her they and Ms. Mandela's daughter, Zindziswa (Zinzi), had been granted visas. But Ms. Mandela had not. People in the house said she burst into tears.
A spokesperson for the Department of Citizenship and Immigration in Ottawa said people convicted of serious crimes are not given visas to enter Canada. The spokesperson did not explain why Ms. Mandela learned only hours before her departure that she would be denied admission.
In 1991, Ms. Mandela - the divorced wife of South Africa's first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela - was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in connection with the death of 14-year-old James Seipei, known as Stompie Moeketsi. Her six-year jail sentence was reduced to a fine on appeal.
In 2004, she was convicted of fraud and given a suspended sentence after an appeal court ruled her crime was not committed for personal gain. Just prior to her sentencing, she resigned her parliamentary seat and all leadership positions with South Africa's ruling African National Congress.
Questioned outside the House of Commons yesterday about Ms. Mandela being denied a visa, Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion acknowledged her "problems in the past," but said the government still needed to justify and explain why they now were preventing her from entering the country.
Ms. Mandela was admitted to the United States three weeks ago to be honoured in New York for her work with AIDS sufferers.
Ms. Mandela had been invited to speak at a fundraiser gala - titled A Night in Soweto - for Toronto's MusicaNoir, a company that presents contemporary classical music by composers from Africa and its diaspora communities.
An opera, The Passion of Winnie (Part 1), created by South African expatriates Warren Wilensky, a filmmaker, and Bongani Ndodana-Breen, a composer and MusicaNoir's artistic director, debuts Friday as part of Toronto's Luminato arts festival.
Mr. Ndodana-Breen said the opera follows Ms. Mandela's life through her growing up, her graduation as one of South Africa's first black social workers, her romantic encounter with Mr. Mandela just prior to his conviction for treason by South Africa's apartheid court and sentence to life imprisonment in 1962, and her emergence as a major force in the anti-apartheid struggle.
The opera's narrative includes Ms. Mandela's controversial endorsement of the practice of necklacing - filling car tires with gasoline, putting them around the necks of police informers and setting them alight - but stops in 1986 before the death of Stompie Moeketsi, a supposed informer. Ms. Mandela was accused by her bodyguard of ordering him to kidnap and kill the teenager.
Two years after Mr. Mandela's 1990 release from prison, he separated from Ms. Mandela. The couple divorced in 1996.
Ms. Mandela remained popular among many ANC radicals, and she was elected president of the ANC Women's League. But she was not liked by the ANC hierarchy and the successor to her former husband as president, Thabo Mbeki.
Journalists who called the South African High Commission in Ottawa for information were passed to the answering machine of someone named Serge who didn't call back.
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