Hard on the heels of Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s feel-good movie about the story of Nelson Mandela, and how he skilfully used the 1995 rugby union World Cup to heal some of South Africa’s racial and cultural wounds, comes another major film covering the country’s struggle with apartheid, with an Oscar-winning star in the lead role of Winnie Mandela.

The script for Winnie the movie is based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob’s uncritical biography of Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson’s divorced wife. Jennifer Hudson, who shot to fame with a brilliant performance in Dreamgirls, takes the title role.

Winnie will begin shooting at several South African locations early next year. It will be directed by Darrell Roodt, whose past credits include Cry, the Beloved Country, Sarafina and the outstanding Yesterday, about a young rural Zulu mother dying from Aids.

Hudson says she is thrilled to be playing the role of a “powerful and extraordinary woman”, a liberation heroine who at one time was more internationally revered than Princess Diana. Hudson will also sing the theme song of Winnie, for which she may well win another Grammy to go with the 2008 award she won for her powerful ballad You Pulled Me Through.

But if the film is faithful to the book, it will not include the story of Phumlile Dlamini, a young Soweto girl who courageously testified against Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – widely hailed as the Mother of the Nation – at Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in Johannesburg in late 1997.

Just before Nelson Mandela’s sweet walk to freedom in 1990, after 27 years of imprisonment under the apartheid regime, Phumlile had been severely beaten up by the then-undivorced Mrs Mandela. Phumlile’s crime, the TRC records show, was to have slept with and become pregnant by Winnie’s driver, Johannes “Shakes” Tau, who happened also to be one of Mrs Mandela’s many bedmates.

In her testimony, Phumlile – whose brother Thole had earlier been shot dead on Winnie’s orders by her notorious bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club – told Archbishop Tutu that the Mother of the Nation ordered her kidnap and severe beating.

“I was in love with Shakes and someone told Winnie,” said Phumlile. “My mother pleaded with Winnie, ‘Please do not kill my child.’ But Winnie personally said [to her Football Club]: ‘Guys, see what you are going to do with this one because she doesn’t want to speak the truth.’

“Winnie herself started assaulting me with klaps [slaps] and fists all around my body, and I was three months pregnant by Shakes at the time. I was wearing my maternity dress. It was blue and white. Then they all started assaulting me and kicking me in accordance with Winnie’s instructions and I think this continued for about five hours. I was bleeding through my nose as well as my mouth.”

Mrs Mandela, when called to testify over the course of an entire week, said Phumlile, like scores of other witnesses who gave evidence against her, was lying. “They are all lying,” she said.

Phumlile responded: “This is not a figment of my imagination. She [Winnie] knows deep down inside of her that I am not telling lies.”

Phumlile’s baby son was born with brain damage, probably as a result of his mother’s beating. She said she did not report the assault by Mandela to the police because she was scared. “I was scared of having my house burned down. I [once] loved Winnie, but after I was assaulted and after my brother’s death I changed my views completely. I didn’t want to hear that she was the Mother of the Nation.”

The TRC officially concluded that “Ms Phumlile Dlamini was a credible witness and that her allegations of assault at the hands of Ms Madikizela-Mandela and other members of the MUFC is consistent with the modus operandi of other incidents of assault that have taken place at the Mandela house.”

Phumlile’s fear of house-burning was well justified. At about the same time Winnie Mandela had ordered the burning down of the Soweto house of a prominent African National Congress Women’s League activist, Dudu Chili. Mrs Chili had refused Mandela’s demand that her son, Sibusiso, join the Football Club. A Football Club attack party, bearing guns, grenades and petrol bombs, set the Chili house ablaze. All the adults escaped, but afterwards the body of Dudu Chili’s 13-year-old niece, Finkie Msomi, was found burned to a cinder in the wrecked house. A pathologist found an AK-47 rifle bullet in what remained of Finkie’s skull.

Winnie seems designed to rehabilitate the image of a woman again being hailed as the Mother of the Nation and who is back in the South African Parliament as an MP. “I’m honoured to be the actress asked to portray her,” says Jennifer Hudson. “This is a powerful part of history that should be told.”

But while Invictus succeeds in being one of Hollywood’s more accurate depictions of history, Winnie, if faithful to du Preez Bezdrob’s Winnie Mandela: A Life, will be a travesty. However, it might serve posterity if it leads to an examination of the many murderous crimes associated with the Mother of the Nation and her football club.