The real Nelson Mandela
The tributes to Nelson Mandela have been delivered and the glow of another burst of national unity, this time with us brought together in grief, is slowly dissipating. The life and accomplishments of Mr Mandela could not, by sheer weight of their volume, be summed up in a single laudation.
A woman signs a book while holding a portrait of late former South African President Nelson Mandela during a commemoration in downtown Rome. People around the world paid tribute to the anti-apartheid hero, who died December 5 at age 95 at his Johannesburg home. (CNS photo/Tony Gentile, Reuters)
However, an abridged picture of Mr Mandela has emerged, one which in some ways serves to distort the man himself as well as the history of South Africa. Especially those discomfited by Mr Mandela’s prophetic leadership sought to depoliticise him, placing him on a pedestal that transcends politics.
Moreover, the efforts to celebrate Mr Mandela sometimes overstated his life’s work, as though it needed exaggeration.
The aggregate narrative of the tributes would suggest that Mr Mandela liberated South Africa on his own and that he single-handedly prevented a civil war in the early 1990s. It does not reduce Mr Mandela’s crucial leadership in either of these accomplishments to note that he did not act alone in them.
Mr Mandela indisputably was a principal leader of the struggle against apartheid, even when he was jailed and the nation did not even know what he looked like.
However, as Mr Mandela always acknowledged, he was one among many leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle. Indeed, there are those who suggest that the late Walter Sisulu was the greater man, but Mr Mandela the greater leader.
Importantly, for both men and many people like them, the goal of liberation from the injustices of apartheid trumped personal ambition and vanity — a commitment to altruistic service which has since lost its currency among most of our political leaders.
Mr Mandela did not create the notion of peaceful racial coexistence after apartheid. It was enshrined in the Freedom Charter of 1955 — which Mr Mandela, of course, helped to draft — and it would have been the policy of the liberation movement even if Mr Mandela had not seen the end of apartheid.
To overstate his role in the project of post-apartheid reconciliation, crucial though this contribution was, is to diminish that of many other people, most of them ordinary people, who were equally ready to seek racial accord.
Mr Mandela’s great achievement of the early 1990s was not to secure the acquiescence of the majority in effecting a peaceful transition, but to prevent a civil war launched by those who opposed full equality.
He succeeded in communicating the peaceful intentions of the liberation movement and thereby reassured most of those who were anxious about the future of the country. Mr Mandela did South Africa his greatest service in doing so, though others, such as President FW de Klerk, also merit credit.
After his retirement, Mr Mandela acquired a reputation as the jovial “grandfather of the nation” who, dressed in casual shirts, cheerfully received an endless stream of celebrity visitors.
In doing so, critics say, he was giving his time and photo ops to benefit his various foundations and charities. His intentions in holding court were noble, but they distorted the Mandela essence.
More than being the kindly face of an industry of non-governmental organisations bearing his name and prisoner’s number, Mr Mandela was the conscience of the world.
He forcefully reprimanded the United States and President George W Bush over the invasion of Iraq. He publicly contradicted President Thabo Mbeki on Aids. He directed some of his sharpest castigations at the state of Israel for visiting cruel injustice upon Palestinians.
Many of those who paid their tributes this month seemed to forget these forthright interventions by depoliticising Mr Mandela, sometimes even by stating the fiction that he stood “above politics”.
It would be a mockery of a great life if the jovial photo-op persona, attractive though it is, were to define our memory of Mr Mandela, rather than the man who always stood against injustice.
We must seek to follow Mr Mandela’s great example of forgiveness, courage and generosity of spirit.
And if we truly want to emulate Mr Mandela, then we must get unequivocally angry at injustices — political and social — and be committed to fighting them.
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