“Now
he belongs to the ages.” Those were Edwin Stanton’s words upon the passing of
Abraham Lincoln and they seem an apt epitaph for the late Nelson Mandela, the
world’s last great political icon. Belonging to the ages is a state of
post-mortem immortality in which the deceased figure is claimed and
counterclaimed by various factions for various purposes. Madiba’s name and
image will become even more ubiquitous, gracing everything from t-shirts and
currency notes to airports, stadiums and universities. His story will be told
and retold in books, movies and songs assuming the resonance of legend and
popular mythology.
With
his place in the pantheon of immortals established, Mandela’s spirit will be
invoked by a bewildering range of diverse and even opposing interests to
sanctify their own aims and ideologies. This is part of the price of
immortality. Lincoln is invoked in this way by both Democrats and Republicans
and cast either as a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal depending
on the argument being made. This is the posthumous fate of many political
icons. The African-American scholar Michael Eric Dyson once remarked that
Martin Luther King Jr., another immortal, has been given “a national birthday,
iconic ubiquity and endless encomiums” but has also “been idealized into
uselessness…immortalized into a niceness that dilutes the radical politics he
endorsed. His justice agenda has been smothered by adulation.” King’s critiques
of structural poverty, inequality and militarism – the sinews of American
imperialism – have been subsumed in the vortex of popular cultural iconography.
Che
Guevara who died trying to spread Marxist revolution in South America is now a
hip revolutionary figure idolized in the distinctly capitalist trafficking of
merchandise and memorabilia. Being banalized, trivialized and commoditized is
part of the price of immortality. Six months before his death, Mahatma Gandhi
complained, “Everyone is eager to garland my photos and statues – nobody really
wants to follow my advice.”
In
South Africa, where Gandhi first encountered repression and the earliest
stirrings of the compulsion to fight it, Mandela’s political legacy will be
contested by various groups. Both the African National Congress and a clutch of
opposition parties will attempt to appropriate Mandela as the guiding spirit of
their competing political projects. The ANC still casts itself as the
liberation movement which Mandela led to the attainment of black majority rule.
The opposition parties will invoke Mandela’s moral stature as a rebuke against
the ANC’s cronyism. The country’s restive youths will also appropriate
Mandela’s earlier incarnation as a young militant leader who eluded apartheid
authorities while masterminding sabotage operations directed at the white
supremacist state. Mandela in this guise becomes the prophet and portent of
black youth revolt against the as yet unfulfilled socioeconomic promise of the
post-apartheid era.
But
Madiba’s legacy possesses an enduring resilience that resists any attempt to
conform it to a narrow and permanently partisan mould. He belongs to the ages
not to any tendency; his ultimate significance is universal not sectarian;
temporal and national but also transcendent and global. If Mandela were an idea,
he would belong in the public domain but as a person, he has entered into the
cosmic domain where he cannot be patented or copyrighted.
Much
is said about how Mandela readily relinquished power when he could have clung
on as South Africa’s president. In so doing, he avoided the trajectory of many
once esteemed liberation fighters who have become autocrats desperately
clinging to their thrones. Yet Mandela’s lessons are for the world at large.
It
is too soon to forget that the Western governments that released odes to
Mandela preferred him in the dungeon at the time that they favoured maniacs
such as Idi Amin and Mobutu. Or that their countries led by Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan (two acclaimed champions of freedom whose vision of liberty
did not extend to black South Africans) essentially supported the apartheid
regime. The White House considered Mandela a terrorist at precisely the time
that it was collaborating with real terrorists like Angola’s Jonas Savimbi and
more scandalously, a certain Osama Bin Laden.
His
spirit of compromise and progressive pragmatism is distinctly missing from
Washington where partisan recalcitrance has gridlocked American politics. It is
often said that the Israeli – Palestine conflict would have been resolved if either
side had a Mandela-type figure.
Black
majority rule could so easily have become an occasion for vengeance against
whites. The Afrikaner nightmare was that black rule would ignite a racial
holocaust directed against the former overlords. This is the path that Mandela
averted for his country. His genius was intuiting when to beat his sword into a
plowshare. He discerned that militancy had done its work and had created
conditions conducive to negotiations. To have continued to push the
revolutionary card further would have been to invoke anarchy. By initiating
dialogue with the apartheid regime while still in prison, he moved ahead of the
curve establishing his leadership among a very distinguished cast of liberation
luminaries such as Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, as well as younger lions
like Chris Hani and Thabo Mbeki. Mandela’s transformation from militant to
peacemaker in many ways prefigured his country’s transformation.
War-weary
yet battle-hardened soldiers, vigilant veterans tempered by the unremitting
toll of conflict and the limits of violence as a political tool, often make the
most dogged peacemakers yet they also pay a steep price for their conversion.
Anwar Sadat who made peace with Israel was assassinated by Egyptian extremists
who saw his peacemaking as treason against the Arab cause. Yitzhak Rabin was
killed by an Israeli zealot for conceding Israeli land in a peace deal with
Palestine. Sadat and Rabin were both veteran warriors. They were also Nobel Peace
Prize laureates as was Martin Luther King. In opting for non-violence and
dialogue, Mandela rendered himself vulnerable to both black and white
extremists intent on a racial apocalypse.
In
a world of extremists, zealots and military-industrial complexes, peacemakers
are an endangered species precisely because they threaten the powers built on
the perpetuation of hate and strife as well as the fortunes based on the
commercialization of conflict.
It
takes courage to fight for one’s beliefs. It takes courage and wisdom to change
tactics when violence has exhausted its usefulness and yield to other means.
Sometimes, it can become far easier to kill and die for one’s principles than
to live by them. Violence can easily become its own motive, purpose and reward.
Mandela moved from Gandhian non-violence to armed struggle in response to the
brutish totalitarianism of the apartheid state and, even so, chose sabotage
operations because they did not involve loss of life and offered the best hope
for future racial reconciliation. Mandela’s violence was not a fundamental
blood thirst and when the utility of violence had expired, he was courageous
enough to change his tactics again.
The
hardest thing to ask of the victimized is that they relinquish their right to
morally justifiable vengeance. Forbearance is lovely in theory but fiendishly
difficult in practice. Mandela undertook this task on behalf of himself and his
people with grace and dignity, forgiving enemies, and releasing his country’s
destiny from the spectre of interminable cycles of racial violence. In this he
equaled the prophetic stature of Dr King whose valiant pacific labours ensured
that a black intifada or for that matter, a black al Qaeda, did not arise as an
entirely understandable response to the atrocities of white supremacy in
America.
It
is profoundly significant that while South Africa was transiting from apartheid
state to rainbow nation in 1994, Rwanda was showcasing the catastrophe that
South Africa had narrowly avoided by the grace of Mandela as that small nation
surrendered to the demons of ethnic hatred and genocidal depravity. These two
possibilities – multiracial democracy and sectarian hate – continue to stalk
our age.
All images sourced online
