Nelson Mandela's Birthday

Don’t let Mandela become a myth

Yesterday was Nelson Mandela’s birthday, 18 July, having reached the age of 93. It is an amazing person, not only did he make his political career at a late stage, thanks to his imprisonment for 27 years, he also voluntarily resigned from being President of South Africa out of own free will in 1999, and since then he has just lived on to this day. There are therefore many things to give thanks for regarding him, his courage, and his persistence and not least, his adamant conviction that reconciliation is possible. But having had his 93^rd birthday, and being very frail, we should just let the man, our Madiba, be left in peace.

Not so within ANC circles. It is to them vital that they should at each turn of events, also at a birthday of his, show that he is “owned” by them, by the movement. This is really quite disturbing. He is so much larger than the movement and to recognise this would also be for the better of the ANC as well. The current president Jacob Zuma made sure that he could congratulate Mandela in the latter’s home village of Qunu in Eastern Cape yesterday. But it was a closed meeting and no photos were allowed of him, which became clear to those journalists who met up at the airport in Mthatha. In fact it seems that there are no recent photos of Mandela available, the latest one seems to be about two years old.

It is indeed pathetic to see how the ANC takes charge of this man. It reminds me of the early 1980s when there was no photograph of Mandela, as he was in prison and the apartheid government had a regulation forbidding any such photograph being taken. They managed to uphold this regulation and the latest photo was taken in the 1960s. Rumours spread as to what he actually was looking like and many, not only whites were filled with fear at the very thought of him. We should not again be exposed to this, not knowing what he looks like the last couple of years of his life. At the same time what is wrong is to stage a celebration that is not on par with his health and at such an age. He should be left in peace largely and at the same time it should be no secret what he looks like today, if anybody cared to know that.

Two more comments; it is about Nelson Mandela’s relationship to his own movement and about him being an icon. In fact Mandela is part of the problem when his own movement is claiming him as theirs. Almost invariably, when Mandela spoke as leader, and also as president, he would say “we” have decided so and so, referring either to the ANC or to the government (and they were easily confused as it was an ANC government). In other words, he almost never spoke in terms of “I”; this was a strategy, and one can understand part of it. Had he not spoken in such language after having on his own, by his own decision, made contact with the apartheid regime for talks while still in prison in the latter part of the 1980s, the movement would probably not have sanctioned this undertaking. Mandela was a man of strategy rather than ideology. This indeed has led to certain pitfalls or grave mistakes. There will be a time when his legacy will be scrutinized critically and it may come soon. I will briefly mention three such pitfalls or traps. In order to reach power certain far-reaching compromises had to be made with the sitting government and president F W de Klerk. He may have had no other choice, but nevertheless history may judge that this compromise was a false start. Whites were let off the hook too easily and the poor who happen to be all black (almost) are still amongst us. Secondly, on his way to power one can register an unwarranted insensitivity towards the Black Consciousness Movement, without which change of power might not have bee possible in the first place. Thirdly, Mandela was extremely even-handed in dealing with leaders around the world and he had a point, which is well taken: he wanted to show gratitude to that host of leaders around the world who, by the early the 1990s, all had showed such valuable support in his and the ANC’s cause for liberation. But this even-handedness may have a price. Also the Muammar Gadaffis of this world were embraced and brought to the party of liberation, and at this time, almost 20 years later, exposed to the falsehood of a rhetoric of freedom coupled with a completely disgusting self-enrichment of people like Gadaffi, one gets a bad taste in the mouth.

Finally I am definitely disturbed by the widely usage of the word “icon” for people like Mandela. The term originates in Orthodox Christianity for pictures, paintings of Christ, Mother and Child, apostles and other people who in their life reflect God. Nelson Mandela has not been too fussy about what image has been projected of him to the world; perhaps he should have cared for that a little more. However, I am pretty convinced that he does not see himself as so special. He took courage, he was extremely persistent and he held out as a leader. Not least, he had the guts to know when it was time to finish. He by and large has regarded himself as an ordinary human being. We would do well to learn from him what is possible to achieve for an ordinary human being. In that case we are all icons, at least potentially, as we are all created in the image of God. Nelson Mandela knows this and this insight is probably still far more important to him than being shielded by his old movement ANC at this high age so as to keep up an already past stage of a Mandelaesque iconography.