MANDELA

IN MY WORDS He has gone.

The tears, words, and songs of his family, friends, and countrymen have expressed

what everyone knew all along, that he touched us, even those like me who never met him,

very personally.

But there is a reason why we go to funerals rather than just grieving from afar.

When it is personal, no-one else has quite the same feelings to express. It has to be your

own voice, with your own presence, and in your own words.

These are my words.

They are the words of someone born in South Africa in the shadow of Sharpeville;

who was taken out of the country shortly after the Rivonia trials; who yearned for South

African freedom from the first he understood that it was not so and what that meant; who

has had the honor to count Ruth First, whom Apartheid assassinated in Maputo, as a

friend of the family; who returned to South Africa to work in a modest capacity with its

first free government; and they are the words of someone who has never managed--and

who never wants--to get the country and its people, maddening as both can be, out from

under his skin.

For me, in all the remembrances, the greatest truth about Mandela has yet to be

spoken. It is that his gift is not and never was individual at all, but comes from and lives

on in the lives of the most ordinary of South Africans. For me, what made him

extraordinary is that there were none like him and that he is one of millions.

That is how I understand his long and testy resistance to the epithet of "saint"; not

because the word has been so devalued by the rush of recent canonizations and their

association with church scandal, but because it wrongly singled him out.

Tata.

If others feel that too, I have not heard it expressed. Instead, many of the

reminiscences recount how he alone ended South Africa's Fascism--Apartheid--from his

prison cell, how he prevented descent into civil war, reconciled the races, ushered in

democracy, and, by stepping down from the Presidency, established peaceful political

transition under majority rule. Miracles indeed, by an astonishing individual! But that is

not how I see it.

There are two common but rather different tellings of the end of Apartheid. One

puts Afrikaners center stage. The other, expressed in those reminiscences, puts Mandela

there. In my view, neither of those tellings gets to the heart of the matter.

The first captures an important truth--that Afrikanerdom moved. But it is, for me, a

profound mis-telling of that change. By that account, Apartheid began to erode as long

ago as the early-1970s--with Mandela long jailed by then--as most Afrikaners escaped

lives scratching a living from the land and began to prosper as teachers, clerks,

technicians, programmers, accountants, nurses, officials, shopkeepers, policemen, trade

unionists, and lawyers. With that, their collective fear of being wiped off the face of the

earth--the political bedrock of Apartheid--began, slowly, to recede.

As this tide turned, so the story goes, and in the face of ferocious resistance from

hardliners, the Afrikaner political elite began to open doors to some black people--the

select--to rise to similar occupations as themselves, including teachers, technicians,

officials, and lawyers. The overtly cynical calculation was that these select would boost the

economy and would stand with "us" against political radicalization, both under Apartheid

and in the event that majority rule ever came. The rest, the overwhelming majority, could

be left to fend for themselves.

Thus reassured by and in order to help "the select", the Pass Laws--the legal

cornerstone of Apartheid defining the races and where each could live and work--were

scuttled in the mid-1980s. This was long before substantive negotiations with Mandela in

his prison cell had begun, and it helped to deflect domestic political resistance and

international opprobrium as expressed in sanctions.

And success was sealed, according to this telling, when with Apartheid already

reduced to a chronic legacy and a generic term of abuse--and Mandela still detained--the

Berlin Wall fell. At a stroke, the bugbear of Soviet-sponsored political groups in Africa--

including the ANC--vanished, both for Afrikaners and for their white Western backers,

and with it a key reason for either to cling to South Africa's decrepit dispensation.

And so, with the Afrikaners and the select blacks economically secure, the Apartheid

laws already scrapped, and the Soviet Union in its death throes, the waves had been

parted for Mandela. His task upon release in February 1990 was to walk through them. A

long walk perhaps, requiring charm, tact, and nerve--especially after Chris Hani's

assassination--to "keep the lid on the powder-keg", but a walk nevertheless. No miracle-

worker needed. Lesser men--saints even--could have managed that much.

Though factually correct, this account--which has Afrikaners opening the door on

their own terms--borders on travesty. But it touches on something real--that Afrikanerdom

changed. And for me, even if this telling is a radical distortion of how, why and even

when that happened, that movement has been too little acknowledged in recent days. The

Nobel Committee did not make a crass mistake or perform an act of political correctness

in awarding President De Klerk the Peace Prize along with President Mandela.

And even though there was much more to the story of South African liberation

than this account acknowledges, the emphasis on the other common version of events in

recent days--with Mandela at center stage as freedom fighter and politician, ultimately

prevailing over resistance at every step--also, even equally, fails to recognize what seems to

me most fundamental in the story. It is not as simple as both of these versions conveying

different parts of the truth. Rather, both versions were carried along by a deeper current,

one which has gone almost totally unremarked in the remembrances, and without which,

neither Afrikaner movement nor Mandela's great work could have been accomplished.

To reveal that current, a more dispassionate view has to be taken, difficult as that

may be, of the armed struggle and of Mandela's role as politician.

From its founding in 1912 to the adoption of "armed struggle" in the early 1960s,

the ANC was innocence itself--led by earnest white collar professionals, churchmen, and

chiefs. But this mothers-milk activism was no match for the Apartheid behemoth and,

frustrated, more militant and Africanist members began to split off to get more serious

about forcing change, particularly after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. This heralded

the ANC's worst nightmare: division leading to impotence and irrelevance.

The ANC's adoption of armed struggle was the response, primarily motivated at the

time to avert its own political extinction at the hands of those breaking away from it. But

the struggle itself was completely quixotic, less David and Goliath, more a cape fox

attacking a hyena: frenetic, improvised, cunning, wildly courageous, honorable, and

brutally outmatched despite the mythical words "Treason", "Scarlet Pimpernel", and

"Terrorist" and despite the dreadful sentences, ultimately 27 years in Mandela's case, that

were attached to it. Even the name "Umkhonte we Sizwe" (Spear of the Nation)

inadvertently reflected the hopeless odds against Apartheid's cannon, machine guns,

hippos, parcel bombs, poison letters, informers, dogs, detentions, torture, banishments,

press gags, propaganda, laws, courts, prisons, international supporters, and brazen

ruthlessness. After an initial spate of small-scale successes, Umkhonte was driven back

deep into neighboring countries for two decades, suffered terrible losses, with not much

more than a handful of substantive attacks in South Africa to show for its efforts.

The main and near immediate effects on the ANC of armed struggle from 1961

were calamitous. It drew them away from the familiar waters of their vibrant and long-

standing alliance with the South African Communist Party--the sole substantial non-black

organization at the time with a completely unblemished anti-Apartheid record--and into

the treacherous swirls of dependence on Soviet, Cuban, and Chinese intrigue in Africa.

And it decapitated the ANC leadership through imprisonment, the death penalty, and

exile, and so brought about the domestic political demise it had been intended to avert.

So much so that fifteen years later, having already been eclipsed by Steve Biko, the

churches, the reemerging black trade unions, and other social groups, the exiled ANC's

initial reaction to the student protests in Soweto against mandatory schooling in Afrikaans

was panic. Even if the students demonstrated that the broader spirit of protest had

survived against all odds, the ANC had played no part in, let alone had any forewarning

of the riots. So they feared that, along with Mandela, they had become nothing more

than tired old men from the distant past in a South Africa that had moved on.

And the armed campaign, for most of its life, received nothing more than half-

hearted support from sanctions. No exports, and only arms and oil imports and

investment were subject to serious bans and boycotts. These were a burden, but even in

the 1980s, when they combined with droughts, gold price gyrations, and broader

economic mismanagement, the economy still trended upwards. Sanctions yielded nothing

remotely approaching the juddering halt and economic reversal that has been wrought

since 2010 by their namesakes in Iran. And for all their beneficial impact in raising

awareness abroad, the cultural embargoes changed few minds at home.

It took fully a quarter-century from their inception for the armed struggle and

sanctions to gain ground, as they finally did from the mid-1980s. But even then and even

together, they never rose to the status of game-changers. Even together, they remained

more symbolic--important as that was--than substantial. The minority regime could have

weathered them for much longer had they been the main elements at work.

And Mandela himself played little direct part in either during his long years in jail.

Despite its terrible personal cost to him and others, and its critical role as proof in the

dark years that determined resistance had not been extinguished, the armed struggle did

not turn the tide. The magic in South Africa's story, and in Mandela's, lies elsewhere.

And the "Mandela as supreme politician" mantra seems to me to be even further

from the truth. This title is bestowed on him almost exclusively by politicians who see,

simply, that--in that telling phrase again--he "kept the lid on that powder-keg", won

election, passed the baton to his chosen successor, and is universally loved even after

stepping down, somehow escaping the injunction that all political careers end in failure.

But for me, those accolades miss the point almost entirely. Those things happened

precisely because he did not think or act like a politician. From the outset, he did not seek

office for his own gratification, gain, or glory. He did not track polls, focus groups, or

count votes. Nor was his fundamental goal to win election--that was a means to greater

ends--and there is every sign that when he won it, he disliked holding high public office.

And if President Mitterrand is correct that the most important quality in a

successful politician is "not to care"--so that anything and everything can be bargained

away in pursuit of power--then Mandela failed utterly as a politician. Certainly, he was

astute and he bargained, learned, and adapted. But as anyone who is not a politician can

see, he won as a politician by not behaving like--by not being--a politician at all. For it is

no mere politician who stays at his post for 27 years completely out of it. He is in a

different league entirely.

And those accolades also overlook a dark political failure which occurred after

freedom had been won. And, by doing so, they conceal the underlying currents even more

profoundly. Telling of that failure, which Mandela himself acknowledged, is no act of

indifference to the man or the moment. Instead, for me, it draws attention away from

both the Afrikaners and from Mandela as an individual back to where it belongs in the

story of South Africa's liberation--and so to what makes Mandela himself so special.

Given the dominant power granted to the President by the new constitution, along

with the ANC's hierarchical structure and his personal standing within it, it fell to

Mandela as South Africa's President to pick his successor as party leader. He chose Thabo

Mbeki. It was a fatal choice.

Mbeki's resistance credentials were beyond reproach. He was the son of a lifelong

friend and co-prisoner of Mandela's, spent years in exile for the ANC, and was sharp and

utterly loyal to his boss. He was also a key negotiator with the outgoing regime, and,

critically in Mandela's traditionalist eyes, was older than other contenders and without

background in any organizations other than the ANC. He was chosen.

But he had a preternatural ability to disassociate himself utterly from anything and

everything around him. You could see it in his eyes. I met Mbeki only once and only

briefly when he was still Deputy President. His eyes had no expression whatsoever. They

were totally dead. I had never before, and have only once since, seen eyes like his.

Those powers of disassociation would take a terrible toll. When he acceded to the

Presidency in 1999, all-but-beyond accountability, he staked out his own idiosyncratic

position on HIV-AIDS and refused to move on it, even when Mandela himself raised the

alarm. Mbeki took the view that AIDS was not caused by HIV, and he appointed

Ministers of Health of the same mind. These views, holding sway fully a decade after the

pathology of the virus had been cracked, prevented the South African health service--

unlike many of its far-lesser-resourced African counterparts--from providing the necessary

medications. Other, including traditional remedies, were recommended. One fifth of

South African adults are now infected. It is a plague of biblical proportions.

Its roots lie in the destruction of African family life under minority rule--an

especially appalling part of Apartheid's chronic legacy--and in the particularly virulent

strain of the virus that is prevalent in Africa. And as President, Mandela himself refused

to take up the issue. But by the time he did so as ex-President, he had installed as his

successor a man whose powers of disassociation stopped progress dead, even when

appeals were cast as powerfully as in the 2004 Mandela foundation-sponsored film

"Yesterday".

It took an almost unheard of Cabinet revolt against Mbeki to start South Africa on

the path to tackle its HIV-AIDS nightmare. But he continued to resist, so that even by

2009, less than one-third of AIDS sufferers were receiving appropriate treatment in by far

the most wealthy country on the continent--and this under majority rule. A complete

program was only implemented after his ouster in 2009.

The avoidable loss of life as a result of this decade-and-a-half delay is likely to

significantly exceed half a million by the time it has fully run its course, and it has already

spawned an untold number of AIDS orphans. It is a terrible blight on Mbeki's record, on

that of the man who personally endorsed and chose him, and on that of the ANC.

Who knows what happened to produce this in Thabo. Perhaps, like Winnie

Mandela, at some point a good person fell victim to Apartheid's relentlessness. But in her

case, Mandela saw it and separated himself, painfully, from her. In Thabo's case, though

his formal credentials were faultless, it fell to Mandela to make the final judgement of

character of a man who would come to enjoy all-but-total power. It was there to be seen

at the time. Mandela did not see it.

This is an excruciatingly painful episode for anyone who yearned and strived for

South Africa's freedom. But, painful as it is, it also points directly to the greatest wonder

of Mandela's life. It is that the ordinary people of South Africa, who have borne the

burden of this disaster most intimately nevertheless celebrate him with totally unbridled

joy. Just look at the dancing, smiles, and singing in celebration of his life in recent days!

Those astonishing acts of stoicism, exuberance, and generosity, reflect for me the most

fundamental truth about South Africa's path to freedom--the extraordinary humanity of

ordinary South Africans.

For it is that humanity--not the Afrikaners, nor Mandela as an individual--which, for

me, belongs center stage in the story of South Africa's liberation. And it is their

extraordinary humanity that is the greatest unsung truth about Mandela himself--his gift.

That truth is not just overlooked in the conventional tellings of South African

liberation, it is denied. Instead, there is the instinct--implicit in that phrase "kept the lid

on the powder-keg" and many like it--that has been expressed so casually, implicitly, and

routinely in praise of Mandela that it almost goes unnoticed. To take that instinct out of

those shadows and put it under a glaring spotlight, it is that Mandela's greatest work for

multiracial South Africa was to "hold back the black hordes". A miracle indeed!

But this view of Mandela's role in the ending of Apartheid, which is common to

both typical tellings of the story, is utterly false for me, and poisonously so. It takes for

granted that the "black hordes" were on the point of eruption and were baying for blood,

as--though this view is only expressed in dog whistles these days--black hordes are wont to

do. I reject this without reservation.

Indeed, the persistence and strength of this view of black people worldwide

completely defies my understanding. It seems immune to the observation that none of the

greatest crimes of the past century had anything to do with them: the three European/

World Wars (two hot, one cold); the Holocaust; warfare directly targeting civilians by

conventional and nuclear weapons, germs, gas, and other WMDs; the Partition of India;

the Gulag; the Great Leap Forward; the Disappeared; the Killing Fields; the Bosnian

genocide; and most obviously, of course, Apartheid itself. Only Rwanda troubles this

record. But awful as that was, it was small-scale beside these others, had immediate

colonial roots, and occurred only because everyone else looked away, again.

And in South Africa itself, fear of the dark defies all the evidence that rather than

baying for blood, the overwhelming majority of ordinary South Africans endured the

injustices inflicted upon them under Apartheid with astonishing fortitude. How many

black nannies nursed and raised white infants--who would later be taught to despise and

fear them--with completely committed loving care? How many black farm workers

rescued their racist white overseers who'd fallen down a hole in the middle of nowhere,

rather than abandoning them to their fate? Just as in the Jim Crow United States, over

the entire Apartheid era, how many black people helped white blind or elderly folk to

cross the street, and fixed white folks' cars, meals, medications, wounds, hair, gardens,

houses, refuse, clothes, and beds without sabotaging them? Ask yourself how white folk

would have behaved in their stead. Yet somehow, this dark dog-whistled dread lives on

and on and on and on.

It is not just an old lie, but it seems to me to be an outrage to imply that Mandela

performed some sort of miracle by prevailing over such dark elemental forces in South

Africa, and it is particularly misplaced to do so in remembrance of him. Feelings were

certainly running high in the early-1990s as liberation neared, but "one settler, one bullet"

was the intent of no more than a small disorganized minority and did little more than

vent all-too-understandable and long-pent-up anger. Instead, the overwhelming majority

of ordinary South Africans showed--and even as democracy approached and came,

continued to show--unbelievable forbearance. Most evidently in the long lines at polling

stations on election day, rather than seek revenge they exuberantly celebrated that the

injustices inflicted upon them were at an end and that their voices would finally be heard.

That was enough.

And just as they had done for the entire Apartheid era and its antecedents under

British rule, they had no need of Mandela to lead them to behave this way. It was and is

how they are, even in the face of well over a century of vile provocation. The absence of

bitterness in him and his single-minded focus on the future have rightly stirred the world.

But those were only reflections in him of the people from whom he came. He did not

guide them to it; rather, they raised him to it. Tumultuous as the decade to freedom was,

laced with necklacing and the AWB, Mandela was always swimming with the current.

This extraordinary humanity of ordinary South Africans is, in my view, what

belongs center stage in the story of South Africa's freedom, the story of AIDS, and at

Mandela's remembrances. Because Mandela did not single-handedly end Apartheid, nor

did he usher in majority rule. Instead, a terrified behemoth, which had been lashing out

at everyone around it for well over a century and which had not been coerced into

submission even by the combined force of armed struggle, sanctions, labor unrest, and

political tensions in the townships, was calmed. And neither its own economic progress,

nor its select blacks, nor the Berlin Wall accomplished that. Fear of revenge would have

easily overwhelmed all of those. And even had Mandela been a miracle-worker, he alone

could not have eased those fears because, thanks to Apartheid's best-known crime, by

1990, he was an elderly man who after 27 years behind bars was not long for politics.

It was not his character that calmed, but the character--the gift--of ordinary South

Africans as would be reflected in those they would elect as his successors. Praise is due to

Mandela because he made their gift apparent.

For, make no mistake, Mandela, exceptional as he was, was no exception. Like him

as inmate, for long years the most ordinary of South Africans were unjustly held against

their will in their own country, so they could not live where they wanted to, could not

work where they wanted to, could not be with their families, were exploited, suffered

untold abuse, were forgotten, and were forever subject to the careless whims and petty

humiliations of their terrified-but-all-powerful masters. His 27 years was their life writ

small. And they bore it in the same way he did, seeking Peace and Justice, not revenge.

For longer than anyone can remember, they lived that every time they nursed a white

infant or fixed white folks' cars and meals--and much more besides--without malice. And

they lived it again, consciously and together, and in possession of full political power, in

giving and hearing the wrenching testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,

insisting only that the most heinous of Apartheid's criminals confessed in order to receive

full pardons.

Peace did not come when the frightened beast saw that it would not come to harm

at Mandela's hand, but when it finally saw that it would not come to harm at all. Beyond

all the currents swirling in the 1980s, it is this gift of ordinary South Africans which

parted the waves, pushing the waters back on both sides. In the parting after his release,

Mandela held the course politically. That was an historic accomplishment, but not one

which required him to make water flow uphill. And by making their gift apparent, he

enabled even the hyena to see that it could pass safely through the waters because its

hopes did not rest on a select few or on him alone. Rather, in his person, even as he

donned the Springboks' green and gold, it came to realize that it could make peace

because it enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of living in a nation of Mandelas.

And that same character appeared again with AIDS, this time in the unfettered

embrace of the man--Mandela himself--who became so closely tied to the disaster by his

failure to head it off with the powers he had devoted his life seeking to secure on behalf

of the people he cared about more than anything else in the world.

No wonder he rejected the epithet of "saint", not only because he knew that he was

not holy, but because it profoundly diminished the truth about ordinary South Africans,

both in ending Apartheid and in the warmth of their embrace of him afterwards.

But do not mistake their patience and generosity for quiescence. They are proud.

And no matter the source of insult, white or black, and no matter how long it takes, they

will be respected. Mandela was once their voice in expressing anger and demanding a

new dispensation. Now, having followed his lead, they have taken up their own voices.

And, no longer able to speak for himself, they, it seems to me, have been returning the

favor and have been speaking up for him.

You might have heard it or seen it most recently reported at his remembrance

ceremony as booing. But the leadership, squirming in their armchairs in the stadium that

day, were under no such illusion. They knew that it was a warning growl directed straight

at them, from ordinary South Africans, and through them, from Mandela himself.

For the leadership's relationship with him has always been awkward. They were

never comfortable with him being both one of them and being special. While he was

punctilious in maintaining "discipline" and following their orthodoxies over many years,

even as these veered, it always grated that his force was greater than and independent of

theirs. So the largely exiled group of leaders--many of whom succumbed to seeing things

backwards through the Soviet-tinted squint--were perennially concerned with a cult of

personality around him. And their line that they "allowed" him to rise in order to keep the

organization visible in its darkest days was always a convenient fiction.

The difficulties between the two mounted when, despite the painful personal

experiences and honorable intentions that initially drew them into the struggle and kept

them there, many of the broader leadership came to see ordinary people as abstractions--

collective nouns--in whose name actions were undertaken, more than as people from

whom they came and from whom their authority was derived.

That distancing was completely alien to Mandela. Even as a child, he insisted on

putting aside his Royal status to be with all the other boys. And that instinct remained his

whole life, always at ease with their like, even to electing to be buried not in some Stoney

State Sarcophagus in Pretoria, but in Qunu, among those with whom he had grown up.

But distancing often caused many among the broader leadership to misread turns in

the tide. So whereas, from the mid-1960s onwards, they became instinctively suspicious of

the diversity of anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, Mandela celebrated and sought

to encourage and collaborate with it. Similarly, while they were initially alarmed, he was

exuberant upon hearing of the 1976 Soweto riots. A decade later, while they blackballed

the Graceland CD project as a breach of the cultural boycott, he welcomed it as a

powerful new symbol of the basic principle expressed in the Freedom Charter, that free

black and white union would always far surpass anything that either could achieve apart.

Shortly thereafter, he was willing to negotiate with the regime, even alone, while they

insisted it was just another trap. And they relied on him completely to hold their nerve in

the exhilarating-terrifying days that followed, as liberation finally approached.

And perhaps because Africa is so big, dry, and dusty, the three great European

"isms"--Fascism, Communism, and Racism--only really fire the imagination of ideologues

there. So, as freedom approached, Mandela was ready to drop the agenda and rhetoric of

nationalization and socialism far earlier and with much less ceremony than the broader

leadership. He grasped that on top of everything else that had gone wrong following the

adoption of the armed struggle, it had drawn the ANC into the stifling embrace of the

Soviets. That, as much as reaction to the regime's attacks, had poisoned its philosophy,

organization, and perception--with "comrade" being the deceit on the tip of that iceberg--

and it had spawned mindsets within the ANC that were alien to the needs and priorities

of ordinary South Africans. But for him, that alliance had always been tactical, never

heartfelt. So with the Berlin Wall holed and the armed struggle history, he was ready to

put it behind him, in substance, rhetoric, and deed, long before the other leaders.

That switch still rankles with many of them. But, given their resentment, it is telling

that once in office, he had no taste for the power and wealth that seduced so many of

them. And that having left office, he continued to use symbolism--as had been central to

the entire Anti-Apartheid effort--to separate himself, subtly but clearly, from the ANC's

loyalty to its erstwhile but rights-denying comrades in the region. And, finally, he broke

the ANC's ultimate taboo--publicly stepping out of line with the leadership--on AIDS.

The Mandela shuffle, those unique shirts, and his clipped intonation are the

defining personal traits of a truly remarkable man, but remarkable, most of all, because

he was one of millions of remarkable people who were and are just like him.

At every stage, the ANC leadership leveled the charge of indiscipline at him. And

they did so again from the podium during his remembrance ceremony, rebuking that

growl: "Be disciplined!"

It will not be so. He has spoken. If he is not heeded, he will speak again:

"Amandla! Awethu!"

It rained during his remembrances. By custom, that signifies that the Gods are

pleased. It did not rain on Mandela alone but on all of the most ordinary of South

Africans.

Peter Doyle  1

Washington DC January 1, 2014

p.t.d.y@outlook.com http://equalizersunited.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/mandela1.pdf

� My warmest thanks to Edward, Sam, Byron, Peter, and Karen for their help.1