Mandela’s life of faith, hope and love

In our issue of March 13, MIKE?POTHIER looks at Nelson Mandela’s legacy through a spiritual lens.  St Paul wrote: “There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13).

Nelson Mandela’s recent spell of hospital treatment around Christmastime was a reminder that he is moving towards the end of a noble life. At the age of 94, he is frail and susceptible to the vagaries of advanced years.

Indeed, if we consider that he spent so long in prison, sometimes under harsh conditions, it is remarkable that he is still with us.

When Madiba stepped down as president of South Africa in 1999, the then leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, quoted Shakespeare in his parliamentary tribute: “we will not look upon his like again”.  How true that has proved to be.

In much of the recent comment on developments within the African National Congress, and more generally in South Africa’s political life, people have recalled the “Mandela era” or the “Mandela generation”, holding them up as an ideal to which the subsequent leadership is unflatteringly compared.

No doubt, when Madiba’s earthly life comes to an end, the world’s media will be filled with tributes, obituaries, reminiscences and analyses. Many will focus on his political impact, his statesmanship, his role in the struggle for liberation and in the subsequent transition to democracy.

Few, I would expect, will take an overtly spiritual approach. Mr Mandela has seldom, if ever, made public pronouncements about his religious beliefs, preferring this aspect of his life to remain private.

I think, though, that it is more than worthwhile to consider Mandela’s legacy though a spiritual lens; and what we see there may prove to be more significant and enduring than his achievements as a liberator and politician. St Paul’s famous triad of “faith, hope and love” presents itself as a point of focus.

Faith

Nelson Mandela knew, back in the 1940s and ’50s, that his commitment to the liberation struggle could result in his death by execution; and almost certainly would result in long-term imprisonment. In both the treason trial of 1956 and the Rivonia trial of 1963, the death penalty was a real possibility. Although he was acquitted in the former, his conviction in the latter brought with it a distinct fear that he and his comrades would be hanged.

It seems to me that to embark on a course of action such as that chosen by Mandela and his comrades at the height of apartheid oppression requires a great deal of faith. Not specifically religious faith, of course, but a conviction nevertheless that the dangers you are confronting, the relationships and comforts you are sacrificing, the punishments you are inviting, are all endurable — and necessary — precisely because they will lead to freedom.

This is something entirely different from the motivation of the fanatic, the suicide-bomber, the one who seeks “martyrdom”. Such a person may want to make a grand statement, but it is more one of despair than of faith in a better future.

Mr Mandela’s calm, rational acceptance of the risks he ran by dedicating his life to the struggle was not the act of a fanatic or a political martyr; it was the act of someone who could envisage the “promised land” of a free and just South Africa, and who was prepared to set off for it with faith that, even if his personal journey was to end in prison or at the end of an executioner’s rope, his people would get there in the end.

Indeed, this is how he saw it, in words he spoke during his speech from the dock at the Rivonia trial: “The invincibility of our cause and the certainty of our final victory are the impenetrable armour of those who consistently uphold their faith in freedom and justice in spite of political persecution.”

Even after more than 20 years in prison, cut off from family and friendships, and with liberation not apparently on the horizon, Mr Mandela was quite firm in rejecting the first overtures made by the apartheid government.

It wanted him to make concessions, to “renounce violence”, and to enter into negotiations while still a prisoner.

Mr Mandela famously rejected these approaches, sending a public message via his daughter Zindzi: “My father says: ‘Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return [to prison]’.”

It would have been easy to give in at that point, having sat in jail for two decades, and having won international status as the world’s most famous political prisoner. And surely that temptation must have been great — Madiba was by then nearly 70, an age when most people permit themselves to slow down and enjoy the fruits of their labours.

Instead he kept faith with the values and principles that had brought him to prison in the first place; and as a result, when he was eventually released, it was on his own terms, not as a compromised or weakened figure, but as the man of stature that we came to know after February 1990.

Once again, it is not necessary to claim that the faith exhibited by Madiba was a specifically religious one (though it is well-known that he appreciated spiritual reading material and had close relationships with prison chaplains who visited Robben Island, especially the late Fr Brendan Long of Cape Town archdiocese).

His faith in the correctness of what he was doing, and in the ultimate outcome of his commitment, was what kept him going and kept him strong in spirit. And that is surely the essence of what all kinds of faith should do for us.

Hope

Anyone who remembers the early days of 1990, when Mandela toured the country as a free man after 27 years, speaking to huge crowds of people, will recall how his words, and his mere presence, gave hope for a united, just and peaceful South Africa.

Those who had suffered under apartheid found a leader who understood their hurt and anger, who shared their hopes for a better life, and who had the vision to lead them, through years of difficult negotiations, to the moment of freedom in April 1994.

Equally, those who had benefited from apartheid, and who feared some kind of backlash, had their hopes for a place in the new, free South Africa renewed and strengthened.

To hope is more than merely to wish for something. To have real hope is to be reassured, to shake off anxiety, to feel confident that one’s dreams and desires will be realised.

It is a rare person who can inspire such feelings in a nation; rarer still when he or she inspires those feelings in people on both sides of the huge divides that characterised South Africa before 1994. But that is exactly what Mr Mandela did.

Looking back, it is easy to see that much of what we hoped for then has not come to pass. We have become sidetracked, many people’s lives have not improved at all, and self-advancement and corruption dominate much of public life.

There are many, and complex, reasons for this, no doubt, but part of the reason is certainly that those who succeeded Mr Mandela were cut from poorer cloth; they lacked his vision and his big-heartedness, his discipline and self-assurance.

When we compare the more muted hopes we have today with the confident, joyful hope we felt 20 years ago, let us acknowledge the man who embodied that hope and gave it voice.

Love

We do not usually associate political leadership with the idea of love. Courage, determination, vision, passion, all these will be found in a good politician, but love is somehow too gentle, too soft a virtue to be applied to someone who has risen to the top in the hard, rough world of politics.

Perhaps, sadly, this is because so many professional politicians, instead of being motivated by love, are driven by ambition, power-lust and ego.

What sent Mr Mandela to jail, ultimately, was love — a love for all the people of South Africa which would not allow him to sit back and quietly pursue his career as a lawyer.

At the end of his speech from the dock, he said famously: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Selflessness and self-sacrifice are surely two of the hallmarks of love. To be prepared — really prepared, not just as a matter of cheap, rabble-rousing rhetoric — to die for the good of others is, as we know, the highest form of love.

But Mr Mandela’s capacity for love manifested itself in other, more personal, ways as well.

When people speak of “the Madiba magic”, they are referring to his warmth, his broad smile, the evident delight he takes in the company of children, his ability to make everyone he meets feel welcome and important.

It was surely love, and the desire for harmony that flows from love, that took him off to the conservative Afrikaner stronghold of Orania in 1995 to visit the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the apartheid-era prime minister. Likewise love that caused him to form deep friendships with some of his jailers and with their families.

Indeed, all over South Africa and across the world, there are people who have been made to feel special by the little things Madiba did for them or said to them.

Nelson Mandela will not live forever; each month and year that passes now is a bonus for all of us who have admired his life and who will mourn his death.

When the time comes the analysts will make their pronouncements, the obituaries will be written, and history will have the final say about his political successes and failures, and about the policies and strategies he pursued as liberation leader and as president.

But these are all ultimately transient things, soon replaced, soon forgotten. Faith, hope and love, on the other hand, as St Paul tells us, are “things that last”; and it is these that will form Madiba’s most lasting legacy.

Mike Pothier is the research director of the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office. He is writing in his personal capacity.