INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS
Former presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk are flanked by the members of South Africas first democratic cabinet.
Johannesburg – Nelson Mandela’s current relapse, as we know, has attracted a tremendous amount of local and foreign media interest and has prompted much – let us hope very premature – reflection about his legacy.
For instance, Trudy Rubin wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “I can’t help thinking how different the world would be if the former South African leader could have been cloned.
“So many times, in countries plagued by sectarian conflicts and bloodshed, I’ve heard people say: ‘If only we had a Mandela.’
“Mandela’s genius was his ability to forgive former enemies, along with a charisma that persuaded his black countrymen to do likewise – and convinced his white countrymen that he meant what he said.
“Such generosity of spirit is so rarely found among leaders of other troubled nations – think Syria or Iraq – as to be almost unique to Mandela.”
Rubin is right, of course. Check the website of the Yemen Post, for instance, where editor Hakim Almasmari expresses heartfelt regret that “one year into (Abdo) Hadi’s presidency, Yemen is still searching for its Nelson Mandela”.
However, it’s also true that Mandela is perhaps more revered by such foreigners and – for obvious reasons – white South Africans than by many black South Africans including his own ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, evidently.
Remember the story written by the journalist Nadira Naipaul in 2010 after she and her husband, the novelist VS Naipaul, met Madikizela-Mandela.
She reported Madikizela-Mandela saying “the name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family,” and lamenting that “Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside”. Etc.
Like many black people, Mandela’s ex-wife presumably thinks that he was soft in the head, that reconciliation and forgiveness were just sentimental fancies.
But as Rubin discovered when she interviewed Mandela in 2000, he was driven not by sainthood but rational strategy. Faced with “the confrontation between our emotions and our brains”, he chose the path suggested by the brain, a transfer of power without bloodshed – and, Mandela has suggested elsewhere, without a flight of white capital and skills which would have set South Africa back decades.
This week some Bahraini opposition politicians were in South Africa, searching, like many others before them, for ideas and inspiration from South Africans who had been involved in the transition here, to help them with their own stuck transition, their false Arab Spring. In Bahrain a minority Sunni monarchy rules over a majority Shia population and doesn’t want to let go.
Someone suggested to the visiting Bahrainis that it might help if they – like Mandela – provided more assurances of protection to the Sunni minority to convince them that democracy would not be a catastrophe. They replied that protecting minorities would play into the hands of their government which is in any case playing off the Sunnis against the Shias in a divide-and-rule strategy to help itself stay in power.
“We are offering full protection of all individual rights and freedoms. Why shouldn’t that be enough?” one of them asked. That was a useful reminder that Mandela also refused to give in to the demands of the old National Party for any sort of built-in veto right for the white – or indeed any other – minority.
Yet Mandela still managed to reassure whites, essentially by the great force of his personality, within the ANC and without, and by powerful symbolic gestures – like donning the No 6 green jersey at the World Cup final in 1995, inviting his jailers to his inauguration and having tea with Betsy Verwoerd.
But he conceded nothing of democracy, his detractors today should be reminded.
Could he have done more for black South Africans, as his ex-wife evidently believes? Should he have seized white farms and businesses, like Robert Mugabe? Perhaps. But then he would have had a war on his hands because whites, remember, still controlled all of the security agencies. Not even Mugabe tried that, at the point of transition.
* Peter Fabricius is Foreign Editor for Independent Newspapers.
The Mercury
