So often the question is asked, “What does Nelson Mandela’s legacy mean for us today?” I wonder what kind of exercise this is, don’t we have more important things to think about? It’s in the same scheme of questions such as “What principles of leadership did he live by; What did Madiba dream for this country;” or worse still, “What would Nelson Mandela say if he was still alive.” as if the answers to these questions would mean anything whatever.
To be unfair, I don’t know that we can afford these questions about Nelson Mandela’s legacy right now. Not unless we are prepared to say that his legacy is this country as it has come to be. So many people say that Nelson Mandela brings us together but after 105 Nelson Mandela Days, we are still the most unequal society on this planet. How can we justify the excesses of statues, street names, bank notes, harbours, buildings, and any of it? Why is it that we are not ashamed to honour Nelson Mandela while this country devolves in the ways it has come to devolve? Teetering, always teetering, on the verge of another July Unrest, 8 Marikana Massacre, another Phoenix Massacre, another Life Esidimeni, another Gupta brother, and collapsed Transnet, Eskom, Post Office, SABC, SAA, Fort Hare? Surely we are being grossly indulgent.
On the other side of unfairness, in the main, it is perfectly reasonable, necessary in fact, to honour Nelson Mandela. To leave a legacy as significant and consequential as Nelson Mandela’s is something worth deeply revering and properly honouring. In fact, understanding the gravity of his birthday on 18 July 1918, he asked that we use this day to focus on the immense challenge we have only yet begun to understand.
I was born in 1993, and although Madiba would only die 20 years later, by the time I became conscious of Nelson Mandela, he was already constructed as an opaque, unrelentingly venerated legend of history who spent 27 years on Robben Island. Having worked for the Nelson Mandela Foundation for close to 5 years now, I’ve grown to appreciate that the 27 years in prison were the least of the reasons we should care about Nelson Mandela.
During Fees Must Fall, for the first time, I encountered the notion that Nelson Mandela was a sellout. And not a sellout in the sense that there must have been something in the briefcase he was pictured with upon leaving Robben Island. Not a sellout in the sense that he placed his personal interests above the interests of the people. But rather, a sellout in the sense that he had every opportunity to make good on the land question, to make good on the Freedom Charter and even the Bill of Rights in the Constitution and chose instead to appease the feelings of White people to the detriment of Black people.
While I understood this, I did not believe it until I understood that the legacy of Nelson Mandela was part of a fable of one man who saved us all. In the Feest Must Fall movement, young people were demonstrating the incongruencies of the story of a saviour with the realities of not being saved from poverty and landlessness. Over time, though, I grew weary of the sellout story as it was clear that it had nothing to do with anything other than a way for public intellectuals to identify as radical, as counterculture and in opposition to neoliberalism and a backlash against the saint narrative of big cuddly grandfather that chose forgiveness in the place of justice.
I’ve grown equally despondent to cultural pundits, astutely and sophisticatedly pointing out that Nelson Mandela was seldom alone in the struggle, in the camps, in the prisons and even in the executive branch when he led government. It is not enough to merely be a sobering voice, resisting the sellout narrative as much as one resists the saint narrative because neither of these well-curated and manicured narratives about Madiba is going to free us from the bondages in which we find ourselves trapped.
In many ways, the thing that lies beneath these questions of his legacy and his beliefs is grief. Grief, and the belief that things, our lives, would have surely been different if Nelson Mandela was still alive. That he would save us like he saved us from Apartheid. Perhaps these questions come from the desire to close our eyes and imagine, if only just a moment, how good and just it would be if Madiba was still here. We want to slip into reveries where he returns and pulls us out from this hole we have been falling through. We want another Mandela who will rise up and give a strident and profound address to parliament and make them suddenly stop betraying the Constitution.
What can be said beyond the cliches and poetic adages about his leadership principles that will be useful and of consequence? What strikes me as curious is that, of all the men we have had as consecutive presidents since Nelson Mandela, all had extensive access to him - in the struggle, underground in Lusaka, on Robben Island, working under him when he was president. And still, after working with him, after fighting next to him, after being locked away beside him, they were not able to emulate or reproduce the progressive impact in our context today that Madiba had in giving us a way out of Apartheid.
Does it matter whether his legacy is relevant for us today if it is not useful or practicable? It can’t be that “we just haven’t read enough, or thought enough about him, or feared disappointing him enough that we find ourselves in the mess we find ourselves.
What we have not done well is surrender to the reality that nobody is coming to save us. Nelson Mandela is dead. And we must remember him, read him, and explore him to understand how something like Apartheid could end, and to understand the enormous contributions of his contemporaries. But chief of all, we must begin confronting that things are like this because we allow them to be this way. We must begin surrendering to the reality, too, that the “Madiba way” may not be fit to combat the kinds of crises we are wading through today where “the enemy” is poorly defined and the eutopia even poorer.
In a country like South Africa today, celebrating Nelson Mandela as a saviour does his legacy a great disservice because if we are saying we have Madiba to thank for this, then we make Madiba a sellout because this state of affairs is so palpably unsustainable. His legacy is humiliated by our failures to hold power to account and to make the Constitution a lived reality.
And I think that he understood this situation very deeply in fact. There’s this story about him that after visiting the unveiling of a bust of him in the United Kingdon, he issued an instruction to the Foundation that we should not allow any more statues of him to be erected. Shortly after, the South African government shared their plans to erect a statue of him the size that would rival the African Renaissance Monument in Senegal. After many difficult negotiations, the result was that the statue at Union Buildings would only be as tall as it is and not any taller.
How can we put up monuments to the farmer in the middle of a forest fire? These questions should trouble us. And we need to have the courage, the temerity even, to begin confronting these incongruencies. There is a lot of work to be done.
Originally published in News24