Few women have enjoyed a truly national profile in South African history. Winnie Mandela has changed this but not in the expected way. Once an icon of anti-apartheid struggle, she eventually appeared as a downgraded icon, the epitome of all the wrongs of South Africa — once “Mother of the nation”, now “Mugger of the nation”. The object of this paper is to illustrate how and why Winnie Mandela has confronted aggressively key principles of the orthodoxy of the “New South Africa”, such as nation-building and reconciliation, both in word and deed, and how she became an iconoclastic icon.