Massie pays tribute:
We lapse into cynicism all too easily and sometimes cynicism is an appropriate response to the daily degradations of ordinary politics. But there are other times – and this is one – in which cynicism is best put aside. If we can – and we do – recognise greatness in other fields of human endeavour we should be prepared to countenance the idea it can exist in politics too. Few may be admitted to the pantheon but the pantheon exists.
Nelson Mandela was a great man. The greatest man of my lifetime. No-one else these past forty years has had such an impact. There were many heroes who helped tear down the Berlin Wall but none of them as individuals played as decisive or transformational role as Mandela did in South Africa.
Mark Gevisser reflects on yesterday’s news:
The words “Nelson Mandela is dead” feel strange in the mouth today, almost impossible to say, given the unique way he was both martyred and canonised during his lifetime. He embodies a paradox: on the one hand we love him for his humanity; on the other, he already passed long ago from the world of the flesh. He is a peak of moral authority, rising above the soulless wasteland of the 20th century; he is a universal symbol for goodness and wisdom, for the ability to change, and the power of reconciliation.
Gevisser considers how his halo affected South Africa:
Mandela’s perceived sanctity has had a powerful effect, not always positive, on the growth of the democracy he played so great a role in nurturing. Certainly, it has conferred on South Africa a moral heft that has enabled the country to punch significantly above its weight in the global arena, and it has accorded us South Africans an internal moral voice, even if we have not always heeded it: “What would Madiba do?”
But the Mandela legacy has also given South Africa a distorted sense of exceptionalism. We were, the world had us believe, the “world’s greatest fairy tale.” We were, our own beloved Archbishop Desmond Tutu told us, “the rainbow children of God.” How could we ever live up to such hype? How could we be as good—as forgiving or as a noble—as Mandela? And how could we ever deliver to the expectations of a global community that used Mandela as its measure? With every massacre, every national strike, every corruption scandal, we were found wanting, not least by ourselves.
Richard Stengel compares the man Mandela was before prison to the one he was after:
In many ways, the image of Nelson Mandela has become a kind of fairy tale: he is the last noble man, a figure of heroic achievement. Indeed, his life has -followed the narrative of the archetypal hero, of great suffering followed by redemption. But as he said to me and to many others over the years, “I am not a saint.” And he wasn’t. As a young revolutionary, he was fiery and rowdy. He originally wanted to exclude Indians and communists from the freedom struggle. He was the founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress, and was considered South Africa’s No 1. terrorist in the 1950s. He admired Gandhi, who started his own freedom struggle in South Africa in the 1890s, but as he explained to me, he regarded nonviolence as a tactic, not a principle. If it was the most successful means to the freedom of his people, he would embrace it. If it was not, he would abandon it. And he did. But like Gandhi, like Lincoln, like Churchill, he was doggedly, obstinately right about one -overarching thing, and he never lost sight of that.
Prison was the crucible that formed the Mandela we know. The man who went into prison in 1962 was hotheaded and easily stung. The man who walked out into the sunshine of the mall in Cape Town 27 years later was measured, even serene. It was a hard-won moderation. In prison, he learned to control his anger. He had no choice. And he came to understand that if he was ever to achieve that free and nonracial South Africa of his dreams, he would have to come to terms with his oppressors. He would have to forgive them. After I asked him many times during our weeks and months of conversation what was different about the man who came out of prison compared with the man who went in, he finally sighed and then said simply, “I came out mature.”
Max Boot has high praise for Mandela:
[T]he largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nations–why, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption, and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighbors–is the character of Nelson Mandela. Had he turned out to be another Mugabe, there is every likelihood that South Africa would now be on the same road to ruin as Zimbabwe. But that did not happen because Mandela turned out to be, quite simply, a great man–someone who could spend 27 years in jail and emerge with no evident bitterness to make a deal with his jailers that allowed them to give up power peacefully and to avoid persecution.
Mandela knew that South Africa could not afford to nationalize the economy or to chase out the white and mixed-raced middle class. He knew that the price of revenge for the undoubted evils that apartheid had inflicted upon the majority of South Africans would be too high to pay–that the ultimate cost would be borne by ordinary black Africans. Therefore he governed inclusively and, most important of all, he voluntarily gave up power after one term when he could easily have proclaimed himself president for life.
Beinart recalls that many Americans didn’t always view Mandela so favorably:
They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now.
We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places—Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”.
Moynihan wants a clear-eyed understanding of the civil rights leader’s flaws:
[H]ere is where one must bring the knives out for Mandela. For a man imprisoned for his political beliefs, he had a weakness for those who did the very same thing to their ideological opponents, but were allowed a pass because they supported, for realpolitik reasons, the struggle against Apartheid. So Mandela was painfully slow in denouncing the squalid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. He was rather fond of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (it won’t take you long to find photos of the two bear-hugging each other in Havana) and regularly referred to Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi as “Brother Leader of the Revolution of the Libyan Jamahariya.” It was on a return visit to Robbin Island, when Mandela, as president, announced with appalling tone deafness that he would invite both Castro and Qaddafi to South Africa.
Eve Fairbanks highlights the continued economic inequalities between blacks and whites in South Africa and wonders, “How much truth is there to the perception that the terms worked out by Mandela and his fellow negotiators during South Africa’s democratic transition enriched a few blacks at the expense of the masses?”
I asked Pierre de Vos, a University of Cape Town–based constitutional scholar. “If you look at the final constitution, the African National Congress”—the ANC, Mandela’s party—“got about eighty percent of what they wanted,” de Vos told me over the phone. “I think the ANC out-negotiated the [Afrikaner] National Party completely.” However, there was also “a deal that was made outside” the constitutional negotiations, de Vos added, a “gentleman’s agreement” between Mandela and “the commanding heights of the economy.”
Adam Roberts also wants people to acknowledge Mandela’s flaws:
His achievements are the greater because he himself admitted to errors, at times bungling policy. Those failings matter. He was more likely to learn from mistakes than the haughty sort of leader who refuses to accept he made any. Others should pay as much attention to his slip-ups as to his achievements.
Take the great post-apartheid misery that South Africa suffered in the first two decades of democracy: the AIDS epidemic. Mandela failed as president to tackle the spread of HIV, even as terrifyingly large numbers of South Africans became infected. As early as 1991 he had grasped (judging from one of his private notebooks from that year) that the disease threatened a “crisis for the country.” Yet in office he did almost nothing to stop its spread. …
To his immense credit, however, Mandela conceded his early error. After leaving the presidency, he became a significant part of a campaign for a new AIDS policy. In retirement, he would speak up for effective education and treatment, especially when his own son succumbed to the disease in 2005.
Burroway recognizes Mandela’s strong support for gay equality:
He was also a strong supporter for human rights generally, including those of LGBT people. Mandela was President of the African National Congress when it added an LGBT-rights plank to its platform in 1993. That same year, the interim constitution included a provision banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, making South Africa the first nation in the world with such a constitutional provision. The discrimination ban remained in place when South Africa formally adopted its permanent constitution in 1996. Soon after Mandela became President in 1994, he appointed Edwin Cameron, an openly gay, HIV-positive judge, to South Africa’s High Court of Appeal. That set the stage for South Africa to become the first (and, so far, only) nation on the African continent to provide marriage equality for its LGBT citizens.
All of this reflected Mandela’s view in which all human rights were linked together: “I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
How Charlayne Hunter-Gault ends her post on Mandela:
I am reminded of something else I learned during my years in the country—which is probably why South Africans, though sad now that the Father of the Nation has closed his eyes forever, will not be desolate. It is the tradition that takes South Africans to the gravesite of a departed one to speak about whatever problems they may be having, in the belief that wisdom will come from one who is now an ancestor, and who lives forever.
(Photo: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images)
