Speech delivered at the World Leaders of Peace and Solidarity conference in Seoul, South Korea:
I find it easy to separate out in my mind Nelson Mandela the iconic public figure, on the one hand, and the human being I call Madiba on the other. The former is fundamentally a construct, a tapestrying of fact, fiction and adulation. The latter is the man I got to know as his employee. The former, ironically, brought out the worst in everyone, including me – the allure of association with celebrity on such a grand scale, the desire to use the influence of such association, the temptation to want just another piece of it. The latter, Madiba the human being, I learned to love and to listen to with the greatest care.
This, of course, means that as much as I might strive for a scholarly impartiality when thinking about his life and work, it is never quite possible for me.
And then there is a third ‘Nelson Mandela’ – what I call Mandela the social figure. For my University, the Nelson Mandela University, it is of fundamental importance that ‘Nelson Mandela’ means far more than a significant individual and biography in history. Ultimately the name must be understood as a social figure still under construction. Scholarly work for an institution carrying the name requires engagement with the processes of construction, positioning as a key player in those processes, and a continuing demonstration of the value (the power, the utility) of the figure to the work of making a just society. To state it crudely in the form of two questions: what does that name signify in society now, and how can that name be mobilised for the work of justice?
In the short time available to me today, I will try to address those questions as well as two others: what did I learn from Nelson Mandela the human being as he moved into the last phase of his life, and what is there still to be discovered about him from scholarly research and historiography?
In 2018, I presented a seminar paper on what I called the Mandela publishing industry. Let me briefly rehearse four points I made about that industry:
1) It supports a saturated market dominated by work which reproduces the same basic narrative and the same well-known images. All too rare are the fresh line of enquiry, the unexpected insight, sustained critical analysis, and the deep, deconstructive reading of archive.
2) This industry, this literature, this discourse, is dominated by voices that are male and white. No surprise of course. An inordinate number of these are either non-South Africans or South Africans based outside the country.
3) The space is characterized by an extraordinary number of coffee-table books, authorised work and what I call ‘sweetheart quick-buck’ films. There is money to be made.
4) While the body of popular work is huge, there is relatively little scholarly work in the Mandela Studies space. And that work is severely constrained by the challenges of access to archive.
In the last five years, these patterns have begun to be disturbed in interesting ways, with fresh perspectives and new voices emerging, and archive long neglected or deliberately hidden becoming accessible. Two examples.
In 2019 scholar Xolela Mangcu published the first piece of his research toward a new biography on Mandela, in which he positions Mandela within a lineage reaching back before colonisation and through generations of encounter with British imperial forces and with white settlers. By exploring the longer histories of the Thembu polity Mandela was born into, by engaging with the archive of that era, and by reading the colonial archive accordingly, Mangcu offers a new perspective on Mandela’s formative years and an original interpretation of the longer roots to Mandela’s strategies of negotiation in later life. He unlocks the long trajectory of modernity in Thembuland and other parts of the Eastern Cape, describes what I would call a Thembu politics of accommodation developed over centuries, and dismisses the simplistic accounts of the influence on Mandela of ‘tradition’ which characterise the dominant Mandela discourses.
The second example also involves Mangcu. He and a number of other scholars have finally secured access to the transcripts of the conversations Nelson Mandela was having with visitors he received in prison between 1985 and 1990. Critical related intelligence records have also emerged, documenting Mandela and the African National Congress through the 1990-1994 negotiations. Mangcu’s book is still forthcoming. Jonny Steinberg’s book Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage was published recently, providing readers with a rich, fresh and compelling account of Madiba and Winnie in both personal and political spaces. And it deconstructs the dominant Mandela discourses in many ways.
I have been talking about Nelson Mandela the historical figure. Let me move now to the social figure, and I want to share briefly what is emerging from a project at the Nelson Mandela University designed to get clarity on what the name signifies for the institution and those who work and study in it. Over the last 12 months we have listened closely to the views and the needs of key University stakeholder groupings and constituencies. Last year we ran a social media survey open to the whole University community. We’ve been in meetings at different levels of hierarchy, we’ve convened scholarly seminars, and have run deep dialogue focus group sessions with students and with faculty. These focus groups have explored the possibility of a disciplinary significance for the name Mandela – does it signify (or register) differently, for instance, for law students as opposed to architectural students? Is a political science student more likely to engage with the name than a graphics design student? We were delighted to encounter a group of sociology lecturers exploring an ‘African Sociology’ inspired by the name; equally by the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies deconstructing Mandela patriarchies through research of the multiple women’s voices erased in and by the dominant Mandela narrative; and by the transdisciplinary course Social Consciouness and Sustainable Futures, which begins with a module by Professor Nomalanga Mkhize titled Mandela Name, Value, Person, Intellectual Legacy and Institutional Culture. We were relieved to find ourselves in conversation with lecturers in the sciences who had no doubt that the name called them to a practice of science oriented to social justice and rooted in ethics.
Of course, we’ve heard voices which either indicate no interest at all in the name Mandela, or who argue that it is increasingly irrelevant to a generation grappling with the multiple challenges of today. And there are voices espousing the view that Nelson Mandela sold out Black South Africans, so that the name is profoundly problematic. And there are those just fatigued by the referential repetitions.
Multiple threads of enquiry have tapestried our conversations. From those attempting to create artistic expressions of Mandela to those wanting to understand better the Mandela who led an armed struggle for liberation. We’ve pondered Mandela as the exemplar of the young Eastern Cape person leaving for greener pastures and only returning to die.
Multiple threads. For most there is both opportunity and responsibility attached to the name, with, to my ear, four compass points:
• For both individuals and institution, it is not about living up to a name. Rather, it is about living a singular responsibility before that name.
• Individuals within the institution are called to be engaged fully in building just spaces.
• The institution itself is called to make its spaces just (liberatory) and to contribute to the realisation of a modern African post-apartheid university.
• Research and learning, across all disciplines and fields, should be geared to the making of a just society, and should be shaped fundamentally within an ethics frame.
Which brings me, finally, to Nelson Mandela the human being, and what I learned from him in the years I spent working with him on the assembling and curation of his personal archive. I did a lot of listening in those years. And a lot of reading – notebooks, diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, transcripts, annotations. Three very important life lessons, which shape how I conduct myself fundamentally, I attribute to him. And they might sound counterintuitive in relation to the dominant Mandela discourses, but they are what they are – a subjective reading of a life well lived.
The first is that hope is not helpful. One needs belief that doing the right thing, fighting the good fight, never giving up, matter irrespective of what the future brings. One needs more than hope to endure, even thrive, through 27 years of imprisonment. One needs more than hope in tackling the array of intractable problems confronting South Africa in 2023.
The second is that while an army might be needed to liberate a country, only you can liberate yourself. In 2005, for instance, he told me that he had been a male chauvinist, and that it was only years of reflection and reading in prison which brought him to the realisation that his attitudes were completely wrong. Liberating himself from prejudice as an old man. And, of course, the work of liberation never ends – it’s the work of a lifetime.
The third is to learn how to laugh at yourself. While he was in prison he recorded the following reflection in his desk calendar – “To gossip about others is certainly a vice; to gossip about oneself is a virtue.” As an old man I saw him living this practice. I remember him once confessing to the vanity he had as a middle-aged man being trained to be a freedom fighter. In a manuscript he wrote about how as a young man he used arrogance to hide his weaknesses. As a very old man he would make fun of his own frailty as a way of putting us at ease as he needed us more and more. A final instance of this quality: Every December he would gather all the staff in his office to thank them for their service during the year. The last time he did this was in 2009. “This might be the last time,” he said, “because I am ancient now. You know, when I get to the pearly gates, they will ask me ‘who are you?’ I will say ‘Madiba!’ They will respond: ‘where do you come from?’ I will say ‘South Africa!’ ‘Ah,’ they will say, ‘you are that Madiba. No, you have come to the wrong gates. You see those ones far away down there, the very warm ones? Those are your gates.’” A pause, before he concluded: “But don’t worry. Big business and the ANC will be there to assist me.” And then, of course, the vintage Madiba laugh.
I learned much from Madiba. And I continue to learn about Nelson Mandela the historical figure and Nelson Mandela the social figure. In an age of climate crisis, deepening inequality, growing polarisation and conflict, and a paucity of good leadership, Madiba remains an inspiration. It is in our hands now, to liberate ourselves and to keep fighting for a just world no matter how hopeless we feel.