The long walk is over: Nelson Mandela obituary (The Economist)

[Steve Hayes]

Nelson Mandela
The long walk is over

Dec 5th 2013, 22:10 by The Economist

The man who freed South Africa from apartheid died on December 5th, aged 95.
We assess his claim to greatness

WHO was the greatest of the statesmen of the 20th century? Discard the mass
murderers such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong; set aside the autocratic
nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and the more admirable but probably less
influential anti-communists like Vaclav Havel; then winnow the list to half a
dozen names. On it would perhaps be Mohandas Gandhi, Winston Churchill,
Franklin Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Jack Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. For
many people, in many lands, the most inspirational of these would be the last,
who died on December 5th, aged 95.

Mr Mandela’s heroic status is a phenomenon. For years his fame was largely
confined to his own country, South Africa. He did not become widely known
abroad until his first trial, for high treason, ended in 1961. Though
acquitted, he remained free for little more than a year before being convicted
on sabotage charges at the Rivonia trial, which began in 1963. During his long
subsequent confinement, more than 17 years of which were spent on Robben
Island, a wind-scorched Alcatraz off the Cape coast, little was heard of Mr
Mandela and nothing was seen of him. When he emerged from captivity on
February 11th 1990, no contemporary photograph of him had been published since
1964; the world had been able only to wonder what he looked like.

He was by then 71 years old, and barely ten years of semi-active politics
remained to him. Nonetheless, more than any other single being, he helped
during that decade to secure a conciliatory and mostly peaceful end to
apartheid, one of the great abominations of the age, and an infinitely more
hopeful start to a democratic South Africa than even the most quixotic could
have imagined 20 years earlier.

A pattern of paradox

That someone who had been in enforced obscurity for so long could exercise
such influence suggests a remarkable personality. Personality alone does not,
however, explain the depth of the outpourings of affection he met on his later
travels, whether touring Africa, greeting 75,000 fans in a London stadium or
sweeping down Broadway in a motorcade festooned by more ticker tape, it was
said, than had ever fluttered onto a New York street before.

Mr Mandela was a celebrity, and this is an age that sets a high value on any
kind of fame. When every pop star is “awesome”, reality television makes idols
out of oafs and “iconic” is so freely applied that it has become meaningless,
it would be absurd not to see in the lionisation of Mr Mandela some of the
veneration that came to attend Princess Diana: the world needs heroes, or
heroines, and will not always choose them wisely. In Mr Mandela, though, the
need for a hero was met by the real thing.

Like most great men, even apparently simple ones, Mr Mandela was complex and
often contradictory. He had granite determination: without it, he would have
left prison years earlier, just by agreeing to renounce violence or make some
other concession. Yet he was by nature a compromiser and a conciliator. In the
1950s he would often argue for restraint against more headstrong colleagues,
and throughout most of his life he fought to keep his movement, the African
National Congress (ANC), non-racial, though at times he had reservations about
Indians and much stronger feelings about whites. When he came to accept the
principle of armed struggle, his strategy was not to seize power by force but
rather to make the government negotiate. And when, in turn, the government
eventually yielded, Mr Mandela showed neither bitterness nor vindictiveness,
but an astonishing capacity for forgiveness and conciliation.

He was a guerrilla, the commander-in-chief of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto
we Sizwe, which, as the “Spear of the Nation”, was supposed—however
implausibly—to lead an armed insurgency, organise an invasion by sea and bring
the government to its knees. It was this commitment to armed struggle that
made Margaret Thatcher shun the ANC and dismiss it as “a typical terrorist
organisation”. But that was always too simple a view. Chief Albert Luthuli,
the president of the ANC from 1952 to 1967, though not a pacifist, was a
staunch believer in non-violent resistance, as at the outset was Mr Mandela.

Mr Mandela changed his mind only reluctantly, insisting at first on sabotage
that would involve no casualties (liberation without bloodshed) rather than
direct attacks on people. When he did come round to guerrilla warfare, it was
partly because he concluded that the government’s increasing repression left
no other way to bring about change (“The attacks of the wild beast cannot be
averted with only bare hands”), partly because he feared that the ANC would
lose out to more militant rivals, notably the exclusively black Pan Africanist
Congress.

His views about communism were less evolutionary. In the 1950s he had pictures
of Lenin and Stalin on the walls of his home in the Johannesburg township of
Orlando. He was influenced by Marx and made common cause with the Communist
Party of South Africa; his writings then were full of sub-Marxist drivel. And
he continued to the end to hold in deep affection such people as Joe Slovo,
the chairman of the party, who was to him “dear comrade, dear brother, dear
friend”, but to his opponents the “KGB general”.

Mr Mandela insisted he was not a communist, though. He saw the ANC’s bond with
the communists as a link with the only group that would treat Africans as
equals and as a natural alliance with his enemies’ enemy. He showed no desire
for Soviet models, often speaking admiringly of British institutions, even to
the point of calling the British Parliament “the most democratic institution
in the world”. Moreover, he was consistent both in the 1950s, when the ANC was
debating its objectives, and 20 years later, when the aims of the “liberation
movement” were under discussion, in holding that the movement’s great
statement of principles, the Freedom Charter adopted in 1956, was not a
commitment to socialism but “a step towards bourgeois democracy”.

A more blatant conflict of principles and practice could be seen at the end of
Mr Mandela’s life in his attitude to countries like Cuba, Libya and Syria. For
years he had fought to place human rights at the centre of the ANC’s political
philosophy, and as president he even sought to define his country’s national
interest to include “the happiness of others”. With characteristic courage, he
openly criticised Sani Abacha, a brutal and egregiously corrupt dictator of
Nigeria in the 1990s, thus breaking the lamentable code that no African head
of government criticises another African head of government. But would he
likewise condemn Fidel Castro or Muammar Qaddafi? No. These men had long
supported the anti-apartheid cause and, for Mr Mandela, gratitude to loyal
friends trumped all other considerations. The Americans were appalled.

This episode involved a straightforward clash of principles, in which one
triumphed: “To change Mandela’s mind about a friend is virtually impossible,”
said Ahmed Kathrada, one of the seven others sentenced to life imprisonment
with him at the Rivonia trial. Other apparently out-of-character actions were
more easily explained by Mr Mandela’s general adaptability, which may have
been forced upon him by his separation from his family as a child. At first he
was looked after mainly by his mother and then, after the age of ten, when his
father died, by the regent of the Thembu, one of a dozen Xhosa-speaking
groups, who accepted him as a ward. If this disturbed upbringing bred a
capacity for accommodating to events, it often served him well, but it
sometimes made his behaviour hard to predict.

Mr Mandela was, for example, a patrician, almost aloof young man. Some of his
colleagues considered him remote, even authoritarian, with a strong sense of
proper behaviour. But that did not mean he was conservative or socially stuck
in the mud. It was Mandela who, to the dismay of some of his fellow prisoners,
was prepared to regard tolerantly the angry young members of the Black
Consciousness Movement when they started arriving on Robben Island in the
mid-1970s, preaching a gospel of black exclusiveness. Later, when the
townships were in turmoil, he was to be consistently conciliatory towards
discontented youth.

Some of his own children might not have agreed, or perhaps they would have
said that his efforts to understand other people’s children were an
acknowledgment of his failures with his own. For the contradictions and
paradoxes in his views and politics were matched in his character, and nowhere
was this more evident than in his relations with his family.

His first son, Thembi, had become estranged from his father several years
before his death in a car crash in 1969 (a daughter had died at nine months in
1948). Thembi had sided with his mother, Evelyn, when Mr Mandela divorced her
in 1958 after a marriage of 14 fairly unhappy years. His brother, Makgatho,
failed to live up to his father’s expectations and moved away; he died of AIDS
in 2005. Maki, Evelyn’s surviving daughter, remained on better terms but also
felt neglected.

Trouble and strife

Matrimony proved just as difficult as fatherhood. At the age of 22 he had run
away to Johannesburg to escape a marriage arranged for him by his guardian,
the Thembu regent. Three years later, in 1944, he would marry Evelyn, the
first cousin of his lifelong friend Walter Sisulu. A nurse, she bore him four
children, but was drawn more to religion than politics, and politics was by
then his all-absorbing concern.

Winnie, his second wife, whom he married in 1958, came to share his political
cause, but from the first realised that “he belongs to them”, the public. This
was a complaint of the children too, as Mr Mandela himself confessed. He was,
one told him, “a father to all our people, but you have never had time to be a
father to me.”

Despite his devotion to the courageous Winnie—in his 1994 autobiography he
would publish for the first time some of the poignant letters he had written
to her from Robben Island—the second marriage also failed. Winnie suffered
almost all the blows that apartheid had in its arsenal: banishment,
imprisonment, remorseless harassment. But suffering did not ennoble her: just
the opposite, and in the end she did her utmost to humiliate her husband. He
was wounded, but also guilt-ridden, conscious of his failings with his wives
and his children. Not until he married a wary Graça Machel, widow of
Mozambique’s first president, on his 80th birthday did Mr Mandela find
enduring wedded fulfilment.

In love, at least, the private man was the very opposite of the public. Mr
Mandela inspired affection among millions he had never met and, among those he
had, few failed to remark on his extraordinary ability to empathise and in
return command respect. Most striking among these, perhaps, were his political
opponents, especially Afrikaners, the descendants mainly of the country’s
early Dutch settlers.

One of the first was P.J. Bosch, the prosecutor at his 1962 trial (for leaving
the country illegally and incitement to strike), who before his sentencing
asked to see him alone, shook his hand and wished him well. That was not
exceptional. Throughout his career, he would be sharing his food with his
police escort (after arrest in 1962), helping warders with their essays (also
1962), and earning the respect of their Robben Island counterparts by speaking
to them in Afrikaans, which he studied assiduously. Later, summoned from
prison to take tea with President P. W. Botha, he would show that he could
charm even one whose defence of white supremacy had earned him the name of
“the crocodile”. And then, when he was at last released, came the grand
gestures of reconciliation: the honouring of the Boer-war guerrilla, Daniel
Theron, as an Afrikaner freedom-fighter; the donning of a Springbok rugby
shirt, hitherto a symbol to blacks chiefly of white nationalism; and the visit
to Betsie Verwoerd, widow of Hendrik, the uncompromising architect of
apartheid.

Some manifestations of empathy were harder for him to make. When he came out
of jail the subject of sex was awkward for him. Whether that was because he
had been behind bars for most of the 1960s sexual revolution, or because the
many years of isolation had made him unused to female company, or because some
element of reserve had remained in his character since childhood, is not
clear. But he plainly found it difficult to overcome, most seriously, by his
own admission, in his reluctance as president to take up the issue of AIDS.
Eventually, he did so, however, openly siding in 2002 with the campaigners who
were fighting for wider provision of drugs in the face of President Thabo
Mbeki’s cranky resistance. A lesser man might have chosen to stay silent.

Modesty, humility, vanity

Mr Mandela startled ANC colleagues when, at 33, he announced that he looked
forward to becoming South Africa’s first black president. Yet he did not
expect rewards; even when he was a figure of world renown he was modest, and
seldom took his authority for granted. Time and again in jail he would refuse
privileges if they were offered to him but not to other prisoners. He
complained, for instance, about having to wear shorts, one of the ways in
which the government humiliated and emasculated black prisoners, but rejected
the long trousers he was then given—until two years later when the authorities
agreed to let his colleagues wear them too.

He was proud, it is true, to be a member of a royal family, as a descendant of
Ngubengcuka, one of the Thembu kings from whom he took the traditional name,
Madiba. Yet he disdained to behave like some African “big men”, always being
embarrassed on Robben Island that he received more visits than other
prisoners, one of whom saw only three visitors in 15 years. As a free man in
the 1990s, he chose to live in suburban comfort rather than palatial luxury in
Johannesburg, and in the holidays returned to Qunu, where he had spent the
happiest days of his childhood, to build a house based on the design of his
quarters in the Victor Verster prison that had held him during his final years
of captivity. He encouraged no cult of personality. Grandiose museums,
reverential monuments and statues were alien to him.

But flash suits, white silk scarves and a physical-fitness regimen at least
partly designed to maintain a boxer’s muscular physique were not. He was no
stranger to vanity, and would make good use of his appearance. In his youth,
his looks and smart suits had done him no harm among female admirers. He was
then considered more at ease with women than with men. Later, when he donned a
kaross, a traditional Xhosa leopard-skin cloak, to appear in court, he knew it
would “emphasise the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white
man’s court.” This proved electrifying.

It suited the ANC to make a messiah, and if necessary a myth, out of Mr
Mandela, first to galvanise the masses at home, then to keep spirits up during
the long years of repression, military impotence and political hopelessness.
It could have ended badly. The mythic figure whose defiance so captured the
public imagination—Prisoner 466/64 on Robben Island—could have turned out to
be a broken man or a paper hero. Instead, he proved to be a remarkably
effective politician.

Mr Mandela made political mistakes. The decision to abandon non-violence lost
the ANC some support abroad, put no real military pressure on the government
and, most seriously, diverted the movement’s energies from the task of
organisation at home, which was essential if strikes, boycotts and civil
disobedience were to be effective. Mr Mandela, who had set so much store by
strengthening the ANC, a small and weak organisation when he joined it, might
have foreseen that.

But without him the transition to majority rule would almost certainly have
been a bloody shambles. First, he decided in 1985 to ask for a meeting with
the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, who had become interested in his case.
Mr Mandela did this without telling his colleagues, let alone seeking their
approval, since he knew it would not have been given. But, as he later
explained, “There are times when a leader must move ahead of his flock.” He
then played a vital role in ensuring compromise during the negotiations that
preceded the constitutional settlement of 1993-94 and the election that
followed.

He alone could sway opinion for or against the acceptance of agreements, which
was crucial in the case of the constitution, greeted by many ANC supporters
with disappointment. He alone could assuage the fury of the crowds after Chris
Hani, a popular ANC hero, was murdered by a right-wing Polish immigrant. He
was also central in securing the support of General Constand Viljoen and thus
the Afrikaner far right. Later he was equally influential in the creation of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when a different man who had been
through the same experiences might have been calling for war-crimes tribunals.

In place of retribution

Mr Mandela did not single-handedly end apartheid. The collapse of communism,
yoked to African nationalism by white opponents, played a part; so did
international sanctions, domestic economic pressures, non-ANC internal
resistance and the person of F.W. de Klerk, president from 1989 to 1994, whom
Mr Mandela did not treat altogether well. But Mr Mandela’s symbolic role was
hard to exaggerate.

His greater achievement, though, was to see the need for reconciliation, to
forswear retribution and then to act as midwife to a new, democratic South
Africa built on the rule of law. This was something only he could do. He gave
hope to millions of Africans and inspired millions of others elsewhere, but if
his successors in government have been less admirable, and if his example has
not been followed in countries like Zimbabwe, that should not be surprising.
Heroic though he was, he did not have the messianic powers some attributed to
him, nor could others be expected to match his capacity to hold high
principles, to live by them and to use his moral stature to such effect.
Circumstances, after all, could hardly suit everyone so well. Hard though much
of his life had been, Mr Mandela lived long enough to see his work through.
That gave him his great achievement, and the story of his long walk to freedom
a happy ending. And the modern world loves a happy hero even more than a
tragic one.

Correction: Chris Hani was murdered by a Pole, not an Afrikaner as we
originally wrote. This was corrected on December 9th.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2013/12/nelson-mandela
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
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