Kameraad Mhambi

There are a few Mandelas. The Hyde Park Mandela is one. It’s the Mandela of the West. The one that’s always got the most column inches.

This Mandela is a simplistic construction: A good man that fought unspeakable injustice in the form of racial oppression. He reconciled with and forgave what was essentially undeserving oppressors, and won a democratic and multi-racial future for South Africa.

Inside South Africa things ain’t that simple. Here we have other Mandelas.

Many of the leading lights of the ANC, the party he once lead, regard him at best as a dotting old timer, way past his revolutionary sell by date. At worst he is the embodiment of the one good native syndrome. This Mandela is not completely different form the first. This Mandela is the negative flip side of the simplistic hagiography that is his Western image.

The one good native syndrome is a belief that the West and many white, asian and coloured South Africans perpetuate the view that blacks are simply not up to the job of running a country. Bar the one good native: Nelson Mandela. This Mandela is great to his followers because he is the Afro-pessimist exception.

But for believers in the one good native syndrome Mandela comes with allot of negative baggage. An over emphasis on reconciliation at the expense of the maintenance of white privilege.

Thabo Mbeki is the prime believer in the one good native syndrome and as such has sought to undo much of what Mandela built. But there are others.

Zwelenzima Vavi, secretary general of the labour federation Cosatu recently referred to the South African Human Rights Commission as yesterday’s hero. The Commission, a product of the Mandela lead ANC is now a potential stumbling block to his ‘revolution’. Is Mandela by implication yesterday’s hero?

There are more subtle allusions to the over-sized fuss made of Mandela. Pierre de Vos, the popular law blogger on Constitutionally Speaking is a case in point. He wrote this week:

I was wondering though: what about all those other guys who were on Robben Island with Mandela, who have died or are now forgotten. Don’t they get a bit irritated that the chattering classes make such a fuss about Mandela while they do not warrant a mention?

Mandela is a remarkable man and we are an incredible lucky country to have such a leader. But many others also sacrificed to make freedom possible. We should not forget them.

There is also a Mandela that is a neo-liberal pawn. The Mandela that ditched the distributive Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) in favour of the business friendly Gear. The result, an entrenchment of a more insidious type of apartheid.

This Mandela exists in the minds of John Pilgers and Naomi Kleins the world over. And like the one good native Mandela, this Mandela was way too reconciliatory with the agents of neo liberalism – exploitative whites.

Fashion bad girl Naomi Cambell

The redemptive Mandela

It’s my contention that Mandela really is remarkable, and that much of the fuss about him is warranted. Not because he is a saint. But because his personal narrative is such a powerful human story of redemption. And stories are powerful.

Stories help us make sense of the world. They carry emotional weight. We remember them. The BBC ran a program on JACKANORY POLITICS. Looking at the narratives politicians like Bill Clinton projected they explained how all good and captivating stories share certain features and how powerful they can be.

All these features are present in the life of Mandela and in a way thats much larger than anything Clinton could boast. And its present in a way that’s far more real.

“They have the passion with which you tell them; a hero, which provides a point of view for your listener to make the story their own; a problem the hero is confronting; an antagonist – sometimes that’s personified as a villain but it’s really just an obstacle; a moment of awareness that allows the hero to overcome that obstacle; and the change that occurs.”

Mandela is a great character, somebody with flaws and human desires, someone with whom we can identify. He left his first wife, was a bit of a dandy – a lover of nice clothes and bling. He has always had an eye for beautiful women.

He loves to hob knob with celebrities (from David Beckham to the Queen) and has described meeting the Spice Girls as one of the greatest moments in his life.

He made plenty of mistakes.

He moved the ANC to what turned out to be an imprecise and shambolic armed struggle, something they were never good at, and which arguably now still leaves a negative legacy, contributing to South Africa’s violence.

Mandela was caught and put on trial and sent to prison.

But remarkable he is

But Mandela overcame all these considerable obstacles. Not least of which was his chief antagonist: Afrikaner racism and Afrikaner Nationalism and the system we built – apartheid.

Mandela also had a moment of awareness that paved the way for his success against all odds. And in the process he changed from young firebrand to agent of peace and reconciliation. And through it he changed South Africa.

It’s Mandela redemptive promise – not just his own – but the effect he has on others, that makes this him so powerful. This redemptive quality come in part from his history of suffering, and his personality.

Mandela is a remarkably positive individual. He believes that people are actually good. He also has a keen understanding of human nature, and unlike leaders like Mbeki, he has immense self belief freeing him to interact in ways other South African politicians have not been able to.

A number of incidents highlight this resilient and warm personality. Much have been written about the day during the Rugby World Cup Final in 1995 when he walked into the seething pit of Afrikaner and white power and had the crowd chanting his name. This was no isolated incident.

Below is a Radio 4 documentary of people that met Mandela. In one, an ex police body guard from the old police service tells how Mandela spontaneously walked up to a wide eyed police colonel on the day of his inauguration and told him: “You are now our police Colonel”. The Colonel proceeded to bowl his eyes out.

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Zelda le Grange, an Afrikaner woman form Pretoria is Mandela’s personal assistant. The day they met is another case in point for Mandela’s redemptive power:

She had to find a job closer to home and a typist position became available in the president’s office, working not with Mandela but with his economics department, and she applied for it. But when she went for an interview at the Union Buildings she was buttonholed by Mandela’s private secretary, Mary Mxadana, who was desperate for people to work alongside her. Before she knew it, she had become a typist on the president’s personal staff.

‘I had been working there two weeks – this was in August 1994 – when I ran into him for the first time as I was going into Mary’s office to fetch a document. He came out as I entered and I shivered. By that time I had started reading a bit about him. I knew that he was a friendly man. I had seen him greeting other people, but I had never had any encounters with him. But then I ran into him, as I say, by accident and he started speaking Afrikaans to me, which I didn’t understand immediately because the last thing I expected was for him to speak in my own language to me. His Afrikaans was perfect but I was in such a state that I didn’t understand what he was saying. I was shivering.’

Why? ‘Because I was scared of him, not knowing what to expect of him, whether he was going to dismiss me, humiliate me … and instantly it was that feeling of guilt that all Afrikaners carry with them.’ Guilt? As regards black people in general, or him in particular? ‘No, him in particular, because you could see he wasn’t 60, he was 75 at the time, and you could see he was old and the thing that immediately crosses your mind is, “I sent this man to jail”. My people sent this man to jail! I was part of this even though I couldn’t vote. I was part of this, of taking from a person like him his whole life away. And then I started crying. And then he shook my hand, and he held my hand.

A month after the rugby world cup final Mandela decided to visit Betsy Verwoerd, HF Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid’s widow, in Orania.

Orania is a small white only Afrikaner community that set itself apart of the new South Africa. Betsy Verwoerd proceeded to read a prepared speech after she and Mandela had some tea and koeksisters in private. Beeld reported:

Tant Betsie het van ’n velletjie papier begin lees: “Baie dankie, meneer die president, dat . . . ” Toe begin die papier in haar hande bewe.

Madiba vat die papier sorgsaam vas en voltooi die sin: “ . . . u Orania besoek het”.

Aunt Betsie took the piece of paper and began to read: “Thank you very much, Mister President that… “. And then her piece of paper began to shake.

Madiba took a firm hold of the paper and completed the sentence: “… that you visited Orania.”

Mandela’s realisation

These were all examples of Mandela’s moment of awareness that came to him sometime during his time in prison. In an article this week Time Magazine identified this awareness when they remarked of Mandela:

Mandela understood that blacks and Afrikaners had something fundamental in common: Afrikaners believed themselves to be Africans as deeply as blacks did. He knew, too, that Afrikaners had been the victims of prejudice themselves: the British government and the white English settlers looked down on them. Afrikaners suffered from a cultural inferiority complex almost as much as blacks did.

It was this awareness that guided South Africa’s peaceful transition.

The redemptive power of Mandela at work has held this country together. Nobody knows this better than Afrikaners. He redeems no one as much as he does redeem us.

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