THERE is a passage in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah that seems particularly poignant at this moment of our national history. The passage has everything to do with how we will remember Nelson Mandela after all the eulogies have been written, all the praises have been sung, all the newspaper columns and the film footage filed away and all the dignitaries have left our shores.
In this passage, Achebe writes: “The sounding of the battle drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle feather, I will say boldly: the story ... Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of the war drums and the exploits of brave warriors. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort, without it we are blind.”
As an academic I am naturally inclined to think that scholars have a particularly heavy responsibility in telling Madiba’s story in all of its complexity and dimensions. The almost sonorous repetition of his role in reconciliation hides from view these other dimensions in what was a lifetime of service to his people.
Some years ago I invited Wole Soyinka, Henry Louis Gates Jr and Cornel West to visit South Africa to give lectures about the meaning of Mandela.
In the introduction to the book of the same title I expressed a “niggling concern that even though Mandela has been celebrated by every institution imaginable – governments, universities, cultural and sports organisations, the entertainment world and international organisations, there was very little scholarship on a man who had become the towering figure of the 20th century political landscape”.
I said this because I also suspected that Mandela’s stature as a global leader may have had something to do with historical developments that went beyond the struggle against apartheid. The global outpouring of love and respect over the past few days has only served to strengthen my conviction of Mandela’s role as a symbol who spoke to the struggles of people everywhere in the world.
Two such developments in particular seem to explain his emergence as a global phenomenon, not just apartheid as we like to believe.
First, Mandela entered the world’s consciousness during a moral revolution that was beginning to take shape around the world at about the same time that he was sent to jail. The post-World War 2 period saw convulsions against all forms of oppression around the world. These ranged from the decolonisation movements in Africa to youth and student rebellions in European, Asian, and American cities.
Other movements emerged on the back of the struggles for racial justice, including the feminist and environmental movements and the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America.
While racism was on the retreat in other parts of the world, it still stood triumphant in South Africa.
Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko had all come and gone. Mandela would remain the only one standing.
The second development was an ideational revolution that was touched on by US president Barack Obama when he said that Nelson Mandela taught us action but also taught us the power of ideas, reason, argument with those with whom we disagreed.
Mandela stood as a symbol of conscience in a world that was pulled in different directions by the contending ideologies of capitalism and socialism, and by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
While Mandela’s signal achievement has been described as the reconciliation of irreconcilable differences between blacks and whites in South Africa, he was also a lightning rod for this tectonic shift towards the recognition and toleration of difference.
To be sure, totalitarian regimes still rule in many part of the world from Latin America to our own continent. The Soviets even tried to clamp down on those who thought differently even about socialism when they invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
I once hosted the late Julius Nyerere at a conference in Bellagio, Italy. I will never forget what even this socialist leader said about those events: “What kind of socialism was this? How could you build socialism with that brutality? What I saw there was an addiction to power and that addiction cannot be part of socialism at all. I was in London when those tanks moved into Hungary in 1956. I cried! I wept!”
We are truly privileged that our story became the pivot for these global struggles. Mandela’s contribution to humanity confirms a point Steve Biko made when he wrote: “We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationship. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face”.
It is also often said that Mandela was being modest when he objected to being singled out for the transition in South Africa. I don’t think those who offer this explanation ever stop to think how uncharitable it actually is – implying as it does that he was play-acting.
My own view is that modesty had nothing to with Mandela’s sensitivity on this question. He was acutely aware that without the people, he was nothing. If his risky endeavour of starting negotiations with the apartheid government had backfired, he would have been completely discredited for all of eternity. Discredited in his own country, he would have been of no value to the world.
He knew, as Richard Sennett put it in his book Authority, that: “what people are willing to believe is not simply a matter of the credibility or the legitimacy of the ideas, rules or persons they are offered . It is also a matter of what they want to believe”.
Mandela’s successors have been blind to this lesson from him. While leaders in other parts of the world studiously translate Nelson Mandela’s life and actions to guide their countries, the occupants of power in his own country are, as Achebe warned, “blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence”.
Xolela Mangcu is associate professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town
Madiba spoke to struggles of people all over the world
In this passage, Achebe writes: “The sounding of the battle drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle feather, I will say boldly: the story ... Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of the war drums and the exploits of brave warriors. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort, without it we are blind.”
As an academic I am naturally inclined to think that scholars have a particularly heavy responsibility in telling Madiba’s story in all of its complexity and dimensions. The almost sonorous repetition of his role in reconciliation hides from view these other dimensions in what was a lifetime of service to his people.
Some years ago I invited Wole Soyinka, Henry Louis Gates Jr and Cornel West to visit South Africa to give lectures about the meaning of Mandela.
In the introduction to the book of the same title I expressed a “niggling concern that even though Mandela has been celebrated by every institution imaginable – governments, universities, cultural and sports organisations, the entertainment world and international organisations, there was very little scholarship on a man who had become the towering figure of the 20th century political landscape”.
I said this because I also suspected that Mandela’s stature as a global leader may have had something to do with historical developments that went beyond the struggle against apartheid. The global outpouring of love and respect over the past few days has only served to strengthen my conviction of Mandela’s role as a symbol who spoke to the struggles of people everywhere in the world.
Two such developments in particular seem to explain his emergence as a global phenomenon, not just apartheid as we like to believe.
First, Mandela entered the world’s consciousness during a moral revolution that was beginning to take shape around the world at about the same time that he was sent to jail. The post-World War 2 period saw convulsions against all forms of oppression around the world. These ranged from the decolonisation movements in Africa to youth and student rebellions in European, Asian, and American cities.
Other movements emerged on the back of the struggles for racial justice, including the feminist and environmental movements and the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America.
While racism was on the retreat in other parts of the world, it still stood triumphant in South Africa.
Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko had all come and gone. Mandela would remain the only one standing.
The second development was an ideational revolution that was touched on by US president Barack Obama when he said that Nelson Mandela taught us action but also taught us the power of ideas, reason, argument with those with whom we disagreed.
Mandela stood as a symbol of conscience in a world that was pulled in different directions by the contending ideologies of capitalism and socialism, and by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
While Mandela’s signal achievement has been described as the reconciliation of irreconcilable differences between blacks and whites in South Africa, he was also a lightning rod for this tectonic shift towards the recognition and toleration of difference.
To be sure, totalitarian regimes still rule in many part of the world from Latin America to our own continent. The Soviets even tried to clamp down on those who thought differently even about socialism when they invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
I once hosted the late Julius Nyerere at a conference in Bellagio, Italy. I will never forget what even this socialist leader said about those events: “What kind of socialism was this? How could you build socialism with that brutality? What I saw there was an addiction to power and that addiction cannot be part of socialism at all. I was in London when those tanks moved into Hungary in 1956. I cried! I wept!”
We are truly privileged that our story became the pivot for these global struggles. Mandela’s contribution to humanity confirms a point Steve Biko made when he wrote: “We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationship. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face”.
It is also often said that Mandela was being modest when he objected to being singled out for the transition in South Africa. I don’t think those who offer this explanation ever stop to think how uncharitable it actually is – implying as it does that he was play-acting.
My own view is that modesty had nothing to with Mandela’s sensitivity on this question. He was acutely aware that without the people, he was nothing. If his risky endeavour of starting negotiations with the apartheid government had backfired, he would have been completely discredited for all of eternity. Discredited in his own country, he would have been of no value to the world.
He knew, as Richard Sennett put it in his book Authority, that: “what people are willing to believe is not simply a matter of the credibility or the legitimacy of the ideas, rules or persons they are offered . It is also a matter of what they want to believe”.
Mandela’s successors have been blind to this lesson from him. While leaders in other parts of the world studiously translate Nelson Mandela’s life and actions to guide their countries, the occupants of power in his own country are, as Achebe warned, “blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence”.
Xolela Mangcu is associate professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town
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