This article aims to shed light on South African women who waited for their absent husbands during the apartheid years, and in some cases, after apartheid as well. Even in the absence of husbands, Njabulo S. Ndebele’s depicts four fictional women in The Cry of Winnie Mandela, with the rhetorical nostalgia and intimacy. Behind the narrative voice, waiting is a story of the restoration of homes. Ndebele is sensitive to the social positioning of women waiting in homes while experiencing intimacy cluster largely waxed in their lives. This study argues that Ndebele’s female protagonist, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is nostalgic through her experience of waiting. The overall approach of this study unveils the intimate and private re-constructions, without subsuming women in the home and barring them from the civic and political sphere. This paper focuses on the concepts nostalgia and intimacy in order to examine discourses of the re-making of nationhood and the positioning of the ‘Mother of the Nation’ who indefinitely waited for her absent husband in both apartheid and post-apartheid resistance space.