In years to come, Nelson Mandela will be analysed and criticised, worshipped and vilified. Don’t judge him by abstract notions of what he didn't do. but by the standards of successors who betrayed his legacy
On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison dressed in a grey-black suit. Grainy television images will remain with anybody who witnessed that moment. It was a time when history was moving at a very quick pace — the Soviet bloc was crumbling, the Berlin Wall had already crumbled, in India itself the era of Congress domination had ended and new ideas were gaining salience. Amid all this, Mandela’s release from 27 years in confinement not just made headlines but touched a chord in people and societies far away from his native South Africa.
Unlike some of the other events of the period, which threw up a mix of hope and foreboding, Mandela’s “long walk to freedom” denoted nothing but the triumph of idealism and optimism. In a sense, it marked the end of the colonial era, for South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle was the last battle of decolonisation.
By 1990, Mandela, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 95, had done enough to place himself among the immortals. Close to three decades in prison, a symbol of the intransigence of Africa’s final imperial-era Government, the inspiration for a culture and music of protest, famous as the resident of Robben Island Prison, the facility close to Cape Town where Mandela spent 18 of those 27 years, sleeping on a blanket in a tiny cell: All of this was already the stuff of history and legend.
There were no contemporary photographs of Mandela, so the vast majority of those who campaigned for or sought his freedom, in countries thousands of miles away, had little idea what he looked like till February 1990. Old photographs of Mandela, of a much younger man, including one of him boxing — he was apparently a skilled pugilist in his youth — were all that were available. This had made Mandela an iconic figure but somehow larger than life, almost forbidding, a saint who was above normal, day-to-day living. He was someone you felt you needed to respect, even revere, not someone to laugh with.
Mandela’s great achievement after 1990 was to chip away at this image and to ‘humanise’ himself. The best way to climb a pedestal is actually to climb down from it. Great leaders do this with a generosity of spirit that makes them stand out from regular politicians. Gandhi was not the Mahatma simply because he sermonised from a distance. He made himself one with his people, thanks to his impish smile, his wicked sense of humour and his honest emotions.
Shortly after being released from prison, Mandela received an Australian politician. The first question the visitor was asked was, “Is Don Bradman still aliveIJ” Mandela then confessed that in his early years his knowledge of Australia was limited to Bradman. It were episodes such as these, little gestures that somehow made Mandela more human and seem more accessible, that were the true measure of the man. You already respected Mandela, now you learnt to like him.
Contemporary South Africa is not a perfect society. Apartheid is dead as a legal concept, but social separateness remains a reality. Perhaps this is the way it will be because one cannot force people and communities to integrate, not in South Africa, not in India, not in the United States, not anywhere. That process has to be organic and South Africa is in the early stages of a long trek. There are also regional variations. Today, the African National Congress sees the province of KwaZulu-Natal as its principal political base. This has caused some resentment in the daughter territories of the old Cape Province, for example.
Finally, the economic empowerment of South Africa’s black population has not happened as Mandela may have dreamt. A tiny, politically-connected black elite has become very rich, using and manipulating provisions that require old white-only businesses to expand the social base of their ownership. South Africa has not fulfilled its economic potential and populist politicians have spent their way into trouble. Nevertheless, a black middle class has emerged. In many respects, the ‘glass is half-full, half-empty’ assessment of South Africa is the same that is used for India, though the two countries are at very different stages of political evolution and social development.
While Mandela’s successors have been a disappointment, it is worth noting that much of what South Africa has going for it today is a product of the man’s legacy. His legacy is defined by not just what he created but what he retained and sustained. Mandela is often given credit for reconciliation of whites and blacks in the post-apartheid years. How did he do thisIJ There are the more public phenomena, such as putting his support and rallying his people’s support behind the largely-white South African rugby team and spurring it to victory in the 1995 World Cup, the first major sports event South Africa hosted after apartheid. The sight of Mandela wearing a Springboks rugby shirt and embracing a symbol and a team that had once stood for white supremacism was almost magical.
However, reconciliation was just about black people cheering white compatriots in a sports stadium. It was also about Mandela’s maturity in not pursuing a blindly anti-Western approach, in moderating the left-wing impulses of the ANC, in refusing to succumb to a policy of rampant nationalisation and forcible wealth transfer, in retaining institutions, whether judicial or educational, that he knew would serve all South Africans well.
For all its problems, South Africa is still among the best governed countries in Africa. When Indian companies invest in that continent, business executives inevitably seek to base themselves in South Africa, because it is where security for the family and school facilities for the children are most likely. It is to Mandela’s credit that he recognised this. Many first-generation, post-colonial leaders in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world didn’t, and their countries paid.
In extolling Mandela’s virtues and achievements, his magnanimity and absence of vindictiveness, let us not forget our own founding fathers, the Nehru-Patel generation. They anticipated Mandela’s struggle, made personal sacrifices, endured prison terms and came out of it remarkably free of malice.
It’s been 14 years since Mandela demitted office as President in 1999. The pace he set has not been maintained by those who followed him. In 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru died, leaving behind a proud and robust architecture of public institutions for India. Consider the state of those institutions 14 years after he was gone, in say 1978 or 1980. look back at the independent and professional civil service that Vallabhbhai Patel inherited from the Raj and left largely untouched, and the politicisation of that same civil service 20 years later, under Indira Gandhi, the Jacob Zuma of the 1970s.
In years to come, Mandela will be analysed and criticised, worshipped and vilified. That is the privilege of history. Yet, judge him — as India must judge Nehru and Patel, for instance — not by abstract notions of what he didn’t do but by the standards of successors who mangled and betrayed his legacy.
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