By Sello Hatang
It is two years since Nelson Mandela passed away. And so, once more, South African hearts beat as one in remembering one of the founding stalwarts of our democracy – a generation whose deft management of a fraught transition has created the platform for us to pursue a better life for all. Memories may fade and adulation fray as history marches on. But what the winds of time cannot erase is the responsibility that Madiba and his peers left us: to pick up the baton and continue the long walk to freedom.
In his own words: “We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road … I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”
By any measure 2015 was a punishing year for South Africa. Some of the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation has felt like a buffeting of bad news, crisis, conflict and disappointment. Yet the impatient and sometimes heated debates about who we are, where we come from and where we are headed, confirm the injunction that the course of change is a continuing and protracted process. They remind us that as long as the fundamental issues that inspired the struggles of past centuries have not been resolved, South Africans dare not rest.
The fundamental question is: what do we do as a generation to meet our current mission; and how should we do it? So often, former leaders offering their wisdom on the realities of today have been closed down brutally. Protagonists in public debates on Madiba’s legacy have hurled insults at one another. Too often violence is embraced as the preferred means of engagement, while dialogue is rejected as a liberal instrument of oppression. Institutions have been unravelled. Communities have been failed by their leaders. I could go on.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation takes the discourse on Madiba’s legacy seriously because we believe in his injunction to engage all views and voices in dialogue. Indeed, in 2015 we have hosted a number of forums in which the impatience, especially of the youth, has come out in bold relief. In these engagements we have insisted on the following: attention to both the work of an individual through a long life of service and the cultures of collective leadership within which he worked; and diligence in studying the complex histories of struggle, transition and transformation, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s. Recklessness with words and facts can draw attention and perhaps make others to sit up and listen. But such does not necessarily constitute an objective understanding of history and its nuances.
Of course, we can admonish and counsel caution until our voices are hoarse; but that will not help resolve the fundamental questions that drive the kind of discourse and conduct that aggravate rather than diminish the challenges. The underlying reality informing the debate about Madiba’s legacy are the crushingly high levels of poverty and inequality that re-inscribe the social patterns of colonialism and apartheid. They undermine the best efforts to address the multiple, and growing, challenges confronting our country.
This year demonstrated decisively that the great majority of South Africans are losing patience. From Parliament to workplaces, from the campuses of tertiary institutions to township residential areas, from CBDs to suburbs, rage and intolerance broke open mainstream modes of engagement.
Fuelling this are conditions of despair. Too many South Africans have nothing to lose. The imperative is to find urgent ways of more effectively distributing income and wealth, and harnessing both the liberating energies of protest and the seams of resilience and innovation to be found in our communities.
There is good news in almost every reach of our beloved country. There are initiatives at every level of society that demonstrate the potential for transformational change. Again and again the Nelson Mandela Foundation encounters projects that harness cross-sectoral support for interventions that help redistribute material and social capital, which open opportunity, which create hope for the realisation of the dream articulated by Nelson Mandela’s generation for a South Africa belonging to all who live in it. But South Africans, including those of us who work at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, are not good at documenting success, evaluating what makes it happen, and seeking ways to replicate, expand and systematise it.
Whither Nelson Mandela’s legacy at the end of 2015? Three points inform my answer. Firstly, we have to reckon with the caricatures that dominate public discourse in relation to Madiba’s work in the 1990s. So, for example, the notion of reconciliation as defined by “forgive and forget” ignores the long-term strategies for restitution, reparation and accountability that his administration defined. The failures of implementation need to be owned by all of us. For, what Mandela and other managers of the transition created was a framework within which we need to implement fundamental change, not prevent it.
Secondly, the legacy he imagined was never more than a dream to be strived for. The dream is best articulated in the Freedom Charter, our Constitution and his commitment to a walk that never ends. Arguably, the student movement that helped transform the landscape of protest embodies, very precisely, Madiba’s dream. It demands that the Constitution work for all, and that we continue to build the country we imagined in 1994.
And thirdly, no legacy is ever just received. Every legacy, including Madiba’s, lives through continuing making and remaking. This is the logic of the Mandela Day campaign. So the question becomes not what his legacy is, but rather, what we can make it become.
Part of Madiba’s genius, arguably, had to do with his stubborn endurance in the face of the challenges that life threw at him. He just would not give up. Armed struggle against an impossibly powerful regime. Over 27 years in prison. Forty years and 35 failed examinations to get his law degree. Four years of complex and treacherous transition when he was already in his seventies, and where the stakes were impossibly high for millions of South Africans. A life of nearly a century lived as a prisoner to struggle and a captive to collective dreaming. Stubborn and persistent efforts to prevent erstwhile beneficiaries of apartheid colonialism from sabotaging the transition; and clear distinction in his mind between immediate tactics and the long-term goal.
Madiba is now an ancestor to all of us. And my ears hear him calling us not to give up. Let us keep walking. Let us keep challenging mediocrity, corruption, oppression, super-exploitation, intolerance and injustice in all its forms. Let us celebrate success and strive for ways of making it normative. As he kept reminding us in the last years of his life, it is in our hands now. May these hands do most of the talking in the challenging years ahead.
Sello Hatang is CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.