open Democracy News Analysis - Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon , Tom Lodge - Comments

ideataxi on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

ideataxi — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:28:06 +0000

Agreed, he has done a lot but now look at the situation in the country. Things are not looking good are they.

hano on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

hano — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:40:30 +0000

i thnk mr nelson mandela is a greatest man has done a lot for his country .

Strike on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

Strike — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:57:25 +0000

A great piece of work - well done. It is still disheartening to say the least, to have characters like Paul Kruger who till today regards Madiba as a terrorist who planted bombs to kill innocent White lives. Forgetting that the bigges torrorist of that time was the very apartheid government that indicriminately killed, maimed and displaced the entire Black populance. The miracle of Madiba was convincing the nation to let by gones be by gones and get on with the challenge of nation building - a taskl that is surely going to extend beyond Mandela's lifesan

jubineau48 on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

jubineau48 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:25:33 +0000

Mr Lodge,

Have you been to South Africa recently ??? Well if not you will witness decay and chaos : years and years of marxist (a.k.a anti apartheid resistance) preparation for power have created this situation plus may i dare say a typical (cultural for you ??) african mentality regarding goverment skills. Mr Mandela was ans is stil is a creation of the western medias.His personal bravoury in the afrikaaner jails should not over shadow tons of weaknesses and monumental ignorance of what is the modern world.Just look at the african countries involved with communism and look at the one ones that did not : i'm thinking of a little country that nobody talks about and is doing quite well despite it's problems (aids) and that's Botswana.

Francesco Sinibaldi on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

Francesco Sinibaldi — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:06:31 +0000

Facing the sea...

A delicate and
soft wind is
blowing near an
empty space,
while the curtain
covers a silky
notepaper describing
a picture and the
love for the youth;
I call you my
darkness, I wait
for a dream......

Francesco Sinibaldi

peter.vodicka on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

peter.vodicka — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:59:31 +0000

Nelson Mandela has been greatly diminished by his total failure to speak out against Mugabe's gangster regime in Zimbabwe. A few choice words from Mandela would have guaranteed Mugabe's demise. Instead, his lame near silence when coupled with Mbeki's near criminal 'softly, softly' approach can only lead one to the conclusion that because Mugabe was a fellow black 'liberation' fighter then a lesser standard of 'freedom' applies. Breathtaking hypocrisy and a great tragedy. However, it's still not too late for Mandela to make amends...he can crack jokes with the Queen so he should use his moral standing to help crack the Mugabe regime.

john problem on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

john problem — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:19:24 +0000

A remarkable man with human faults. The most regrettable thing about his political career is that he never used his authority to gather together African leaders - in a sort of Club Afrique - with a view to making the desperately needed improvements to the daily life of the average African.

Paul Kruger on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

Paul Kruger — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:03:00 +0000

Mandela was a terrorist who was under house arrest [...] .He would have been released at any time if he renounced violence i.e. the ANC terrorist campaign.He is a non entity who has failed to condemn the fellow ex terrorist despot Mugabe.This is undoubtedly because Mugabe is black. The English who love Mandela aren`t so keen on Terrorists in their own back yard.The ANC bombs which went off in Wimpy bars in Joburg were the work of freedom fighters but the IRA ones that went off in Wimpy bars in London were terrorism according to the hypocrites.

Susan de Villiers on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

Susan de Villiers — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:22:39 +0000

Tom Lodge, as usual, presents a fair and rounded portrait of one of (if not the) most prominent and loved political figures of our time.
However, I would like to take issue with his assertion that De Klerk deserved the Nobel Prize. In the first place, this doesn't take account of the fact that De Klerk was pretty much picked for the job of "leading" South Africa into the next phase at a time when this had become the only solution. His own political record makes the likelihood of his acting without a significant push from the rear most unlikely.
Second, it seems undeniable that the the same powerful group believed that they could outwit Mandela and the ANC and expected Mandela to agree to a form of government that would continue to favour disproportionate white power.
And third, the widespread violence unleashed on South Africa almost immediately after Mandela's release looks overwhelmingly like a campaign aimed at destabilising the ANC and its political organisation on the ground. Whether De Klerk was part of that plan or whether he simply failed to address the violence that ensued, his failure to act was certainly the major cause of Mandela's anger with De Klerk during that period.
Last, De Klerk's reputation was, to a large extent, the result of the extraordinary generosity of Mandela himself.

Susan de Villiers
London

Not logged in on "Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon "

Not logged in — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:44:54 +0000

Historical episodes are very often unique and can be analytically many-sided or interesting. Sometimes the icons they feature also do appear mysterious. The article blogged on Mandela is revealing indeed, but He is only "human". Telescoping him from the travails of struggles and there on to leadership cannot be easy. What should be easy, is the "inner gift" to see how he shows an example of overcoming the pains of history with a lovable heart that endears him to the admirers.
I simply also join to wish him a Happy 90th Anniversary.

Lawrence Efana [Finland]

Nelson Mandela: assessing the icon , Tom Lodge

Tom Lodge — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:09:51 +0000

On the whole, the public celebrations that accompany elderly politicians' birthdays are not voluntary. If they are still in power it is not by popular choice and if they are retired their anniversaries are private affairs. Nelson Mandela must surely be the first public figure whose 90th birthday on 18 July 2008 was anticipated with an internationally televised rock concert held in a packed public space in London. The audience on 27 June included a fair share of people who were on average a decade or two older than the crowd that would camp out at Glastonbury the upcoming weekend, but among the statesmen, divas and television personalities there were plenty of fresh faces. It's a fair bet that many of the concert-goers in Hyde Park that day were still learning to stand when Nelson Mandela walked out of his prison cell. For them, the anti-apartheid struggle is a history lesson, something that happened in another country in another time. But the affection and admiration Mandela commands across such a vast and varied public following was very evident. How can we explain it?

Tom Lodge is professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He was formerly professor of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the author of Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 2006). His previous books include Politics in South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki (Indiana University Press, 2003)

The straightforward answer was the one that Stephen Fry supplied in his interview backstage in Hyde Park. Mandela is a good and great man; such people are rare; and they have an unusual capacity to inspire public optimism and social solidarity. This is all true but it can be only part of the explanation. It doesn't take much imagination to think of public figures with equivalent moral qualities that do not evoke such adulation. Vaclav Havel? Aung San Suu Kyi? It takes a bit more effort to identify public figures with comparably heroic careers, but they exist and indeed include many of Mandela's own compatriots.

The flaws on the icon

It won't be long before the first fully revisionist biographies of Mandela appear and they will emphasise his political shortcomings and moral lapses. Political critics are likely to focus on his early relationship with the South African Communist Party - which at least one influential authority, RW Johnson, thinks he actually joined - as well as (for example) the tactical and strategic errors that he made as the first commander of the African National Congress (ANC's) armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and his disregard for the most elementary considerations of security.

Those with shorter historical memories might focus on the inconsistencies in Mandela's foreign policy, an area of government in which he assumed a decisive role, promoting a human-rights programme in Africa while be-medalling the Indonesian dictator Suharto for his donations to the ANC. It was Suharto, incidently, who gave Mandela the first of the comfortable tunic-like shirts that are now the distinctive attribute of the "Madiba" sartorial style.

Revisionist critics will also make mileage from Mandela's private life. Mandela's marriage to Winnie was such an important romantic ingredient of his international appeal. Winnie Mandela's own autobiographical writings, Part of My Soul (1985), preceded Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom (1994) as a global bestseller. Yet Mandela's loyalty to Winnie represented (as Elleke Boehmer notes in her superb Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction) "a major moral blind spot"; and it was a blindness with significant public consequences, given his insistence on appointing her to important positions within his party and government which she all too predictably abused.

Also in openDemocracy

Gillian Slovo, "Making history: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (5 December 2002)

John Matshikiza, "Johannesburg: shanty city, instant city" (13 December 2002)

Paul Kingsnorth, "Apartheid: the sequel" (20 May 2003)

Nahla Valji, "South Africa: no justice without reparation" (2 July 2003)

Achille Mbembe, "South Africa's second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome" (15 June 2006)

Achille Mbembe, "Whiteness without apartheid: the limits of racial freedom" (4 July 2007)Roger Southall, "South African lessons for Kenya" (8 January 2008)

Roger Southall, "South Africa and Zimbabwe: the end of ‘quiet diplomacy'?" (29 April 2008)

Faten Aggad & Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, "South Africa's tipping-point" (2 June 2008) on South African politics and society:

All the issues here have already been well worked over even by the "authorised" biographers. What receives less attention is the marriage itself. It was Mandela's second marriage. Mandela's behaviour in his first marriage was unattractive by any standard. On one occasion his wife Evelyn arrived back home to discover a mistress installed in the bedroom. Mandela was faithful and loyal - to a fault, as already noted - to Winnie. In the context of the time, he was a considerate husband, teaching her to drive and arranging an ante-nuptial contract. All too often, though, if we are to believe Winnie, she found herself cut off from him, excluded from the first passions in his life. When Mandela went "underground" in March 1961 he bid her only the most impersonal of farewells: one story has it that he stayed in the car outside while one of his political minders entered the house to ask Winnie to pack a suitcase.

My guess is that Mandela's reputation will survive revisionist deconstructions. He himself has made no secret of his personal and public failures; and it is indeed the confessional quality of his autobiographical testimony, both published and unpublished, that makes him such an attractively accessible public hero. Very few public personalities have had so much of their intimate correspondence published during their active careers, and Mandela's private voice is compelling because of its vulnerability, and its self-insight. Mandela knew he had failed his children and imposed privations on his wife at a time when she could not be an equal partner in his decisions. Through the years in prison he became more uncomfortably conscious of his increasing age and of her relative youth, of his powerlessness to help her, and of her increasing potency - a consciousness that could prompt him to defend the inexcusable, as in, for example, his approval of her notorious speech about "necklacing".

Mandela's iconography projects an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses who was nevertheless capable of magnificent courage, compassionate generosity, and at certain key points, righteous acts. Identifying mistakes and blemishes hardly detracts from these noble capacities and actions - it only makes them more remarkable.

The politics of style

Another revisionist interpretive approach is to understand Mandela's greatness as a collectively manufactured achievement - the deliberate assembly of a messianic personality originating in a movement's awareness of its own organisational shortcomings and willingness to compensate for them by directing its ideas through a charismatic individual. This is indeed part of Mandela's story, for the ANC certainly began to intentionally contrive a public legend around Mandela's leadership well before he went to prison - during the 1952 "defiance campaign", when collective decisions and activities were attributed to his personal genius. The appearance in South Africa at this time of popular photo-journalism aimed at black readers made this easier, and Mandela himself took pains to ensure that the media images matched the messages he and his comrades wished to project.

How much of Mandela's "voice" represents his own testimony and how much is the outcome of a collectively created script will remain a point of biographical contention. For example, Mandela's autobiography was ghosted but much of it sticks quite closely to a manuscript Mandela composed in prison that never appeared in print. So how much of Long Walk to Freedom (published in a new edition in 2002 as No Easy Walk to Freedom) expresses Mandela's own understanding of his past? Mandela certainly didn't write all his speeches; but was his most powerful public address, his statement from the dock at the "Rivonia" trial of 1963-64, his own work? All the textual evidence indicates that he wrote it, but detractors have ascribed authorship to defence lawyers as well as senior figures in the Communist Party.

The internationalisation of Mandela's appeal can be explained by the circumstances that enabled "Anti-Apartheid" to become a global cause: decolonisation and the creation of the "third world", the expansion of European higher education that generated such a massive activist constituency for new "post-industrial" social movements, the empowerment of African Americans, the transnational revival of liberal democracy at the end of the cold war, among other factors. Mandela's political achievements were magnified by the extent to which South African politics has attracted international empathy, partly a consequence of the representation of that politics as moral fable in a globally influential English-language literary genre. In another words, as a public personality, Mandela is a cosmopolitan social construction, a celebrity in a global setting in which media personalities have become generational mentors.

To be sure, hagiographic treatments of Mandela's accomplishments exaggerate his role in key events. For example, FW de Klerk probably really does deserve his joint status with Mandela as a Nobel peace-prize recipient; his courage and initiative in helping to lead the democratic transition was as indispensable as Mandela's forcefulness, and the concessions he chose to make to his opponents were certainly comparable to Mandela's willingness to conciliate Afrikaners. Today, Mandela's reputation as the manager of South Africa's transition would be less secure if South Africa's democratic experiment had stalled: by and large it has not and the credit for that belongs to many people, including Mandela's less popular successor, Thabo Mbeki. Even so, Mandela deserves much of the credit for the relative civility of South African political life. In office he maintained a political style that engendered civic participation and democratic deliberation. Through his deference to legal constitutional proprieties, his predisposition for consultation and delegation, and his evident delight in everyday contact with ordinary people Mandela encouraged his compatriots to behave as assertive citizens.

The voice of leadership

True, Mandela had important collaborators that helped him to become a hero and he was the beneficiary of social context and historical circumstances. But no reassessments are likely to detract from Mandela's achievements as a political performer whether following his own strategic intuitions or acting out a collectively contrived script. Mandela's understanding of politics as performance is well documented - it is obvious and explicit in his courting of the media as early as the 1950s, and his fascination from that time with costumes and disguises. But Mandela's iconic status is not just the consequence of his theatrical capacity to motivate and inspire. His authority is also the product of the occasions when he has acted against the grain, when he has asserted his own individual will. Such actions have continued since his supposed retirement.

In a domestic South African setting, his embrace of HIV-Aids activism is an example of his willingness to challenge political convention: his charitable enterprise followed his challenge in 2001 of government policies within the ANC's leadership, a moment when he found himself painfully isolated. His statement on Zimbabwe on 25 June 2008 represents another instance of his willingness to transcend partisan orthodoxies - and what seemed a somewhat qualified reservation about a "tragic failure of leadership" can be read as much as a criticism of South African executive authority as a condemnation of abuses across the Limpopo.

Then there are plenty of instances of Mandela imposing his will upon an unruly movement during the transitional period of South African politics, between 1990 and 1994, not least in his insistence that South Africa should adopt a hybrid national anthem, incorporating verses from Afrikaner nationalism's Die Stem. In 1986, Mandela's decision to begin speaking to members of PW Botha's cabinet was his own and it was made against the advice of his fellow prisoners. Much earlier, in 1961, Mandela was the most influential voice in persuading reluctant ANC elders to sanction "armed struggle". In their own different ways each of these occasions represent instances when an individual shaped history powerfully with long-term consequences. There are enough of them to keep the historians arguing over Nelson Mandela's legacy for at least another nine decades.

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