Associated Press
Nelson Mandela is a special, gifted man, but he has himself said many times that he is purely and simply a product of African and South African society, history and spirituality, says columnist Max du Preez.
Many people outside South Africa make the same mistake as many white South Africans: they think Nelson Mandela is an exception. Mandela is not like other black people, they say.
This misconception lies at the heart of the paranoia among right-wing South Africans, recently repeated in some foreign media, that when Mandela dies, black people will drop the pretence of the past 20 years and start murdering whites.
Mandela is a special, gifted man, but he has himself said many times, as has his old friend Walter Sisulu and others, that he is purely and simply a product of African and South African society, history and spirituality.
His character, leadership style, vision and sense of morality were shaped by his childhood in Qunu, his early years at the household of the Thembu regent Jongintaba Dalindyebo, at the Fort Hare and Witwatersrand universities, by his interaction with young ANC revolutionaries such as Sisulu, Anton Lembede and OR Tambo, his friendships with people like Yusuf Cachalia, Bram Fischer, Ahmed Kathrada and George Bizos and by his 27 years in jail – even by his contact over years with Afrikaans-speaking prison wardens.
Mandela was the right man at the right time when the almost dormant ANC needed reinvigorating in the 1950s, and again when, in the mid-1980s, the ANC and the apartheid government started realising that neither side was going to win the war and that a political settlement was the only way out.
A century from now historians will still write about Mandela’s spectacular role in bringing freedom, stability and democracy to South Africa. They will still remind their students that he became an international icon as a man of great integrity with an enormous capacity to forgive, to heal and to bridge seemingly impossible divides.
But they probably won’t record that he wasn’t the first remarkably wise and inspirational leader to emerge from the land. King Moshoeshoe (1787-1870) springs to mind. Unlike his more aggressive contemporaries like King Shaka and Chief Mzilikazi, he avoided war, gathered people from many clans and language groups to form a new inclusive nation and stabilised central South Africa at a time of great turmoil and bloodshed. Pure Mandela.
He was the protégé of Mohlomi (1750-1820), an extraordinary sage who taught a revolutionary philosophy of non-violence, participatory democracy and egalitarianism.
We can add many others to the list, like Makhanda, Adam Kok, Sekhukhune, Kgama and Sobhuza.
But there were later leadership figures of great stature that belong in the same class as Mandela: people like Albert Luthuli, Sisulu, Tambo and Desmond Tutu. Like Mandela, they were reflections of the best of South African history, culture and spirituality.
No nation will be blessed with two or more Mandela-type leaders in succession. The present leadership of the ruling party does not, to put it diplomatically, reflect the best of our society.
But there is a little bit of Mandela in most of us South Africans. He wasn’t a freak or a saint sent by some supernatural power.
There are disturbing trends of greed, abuse of power and violence in our society during these last days of Mandela’s life. We have to fight these with all our might.
But we mustn’t let anyone convince us that we as a people are now suddenly rotten to the core and irredeemable, just waiting to kill one another. There is more to South Africa than a flawed president and government. It may not feel like it right now, but we have the same potential, if not more, as we had during the golden era of the first few years of our democracy.
So how do we deal with the pedlars of hate and paranoia who proclaim from the rooftops that white South Africans are the victims of a virtual genocide, that our new democracy has turned on them, that the black majority can’t wait to persecute and humiliate them?
People like the Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr. In recent days he and others, seemingly almost disappointed that their predictions of a black onslaught as Mandela faces his end did not materialise, have vented a barrage of vitriol.
“My tribe is dying. Like flies,” Hofmeyr wrote last week in an emotional diatribe.
But it isn’t only a problem of murderous blacks. It’s the new order. Here’s one of Hofmeyr’s latest Tweets (he has 73 500 Twitter followers): “The new flag, national anthem, town and street names represent to me a red-hot iron against the cheek of a raped 80-year-old white granny.”
Mercifully, Hofmeyr represents a minority view. We should note that they exist, but we shouldn’t allow them to sidetrack us or slow down our progress as a society.
We are the products of the same history and society that produced a Nelson Mandela.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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