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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 / MUSKEGON CHRONICLE
Skubick
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Is Right to Work getting the job done? The numbers are elusive, but the sides still strongly disagree.
Demas
Hardiman
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It’s not a reversal of the n Reagan Revolution OP — yet — but key GOP g figures are starting to switch parties.
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Sometimess you don’t encounter great men like Nelson Mandela. Sometimess they o you. reach out to
What made Mandela great? His anger — and its disappearance
J
By Eve Fairbanks
Foreign Policy
OHANNESBURG, South Africa — One of my first few nights driving around Johannesburg, 41/2 years ago, I heard an eerie, captivating song on the radio. I pulled over in a congested part of downtown, despite being alone and in a rental car — both things I’d been darkly warned made me a sitting target. I looked for something with which to write the lyrics down; I knew I had to find that song again. The words were in an unfamiliar language, but I recognized again and again the word “Mandela”: “Uh-SEEM-bonanza Mandela,” it sounded like. As soon as I got home to Google, I found it: “Asimbonanga,” an ode to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela written by singer Jonny Clegg in 1987. Clegg formed the first big-name integrated pop band in South Africa in the 1980s, in contravention of the apartheid government’s rules. In moody, wistful harmony, “Asimbonanga” mourned an invisible leader: “We have not seen him, Mandela, in the place where he was kept,” the Zulu chorus goes, referring to Robben Island, the prison in which Mandela was incarcerated for 18 years. (He spent the remaining nine years in other jails.) The bereft singer tries to visualize the place where his shepherd is, somewhere across the cold sea, but fails. “We have not seen him, Mandela.” The song had a hymn-like quality, and it occurred to me that for such a large part of his time at the center of the life of South Africa, Mandela was vanished, almost like a Jesus figure, crucified by the law and spirited into darkness, leaving those who looked to him only the vague hope he would come again.
Mandela transfigured the more inchoate black South African longing to be free into a longing for a single man’s liberation. Like Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, his disappearance from public view helped create his myth. When he emerged, he did so as a changed man. Not broken, but tenderized, coruscated, and made wise and magnanimous by suffering. That incredible magnanimity, that unexpected absence of hate, forms the vast majority of the remembrances after his death. DON’T FORGET THE FIGHTER
What the narrative of that transfiguration left behind, though, was the other Mandela, the angry Madiba — the man whose African name, Rolihlahla, portentously meant “troublemaker.” Crucial to his young persona was his identity as a boxer; he founded the militant armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), against the desires of some of the ANC’s other leaders. In his autobiography, Mandela frankly recalled how — before his incarceration — he and his fellow fighters discussed the merits of “four types of violent activities” against white South Africa: “sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution.” The discussion was starkly pragmatic. “For a small and fledgling army, open revolution was inconceivable. Terrorism inevitably reflected poorly on those who used it.” In part, Mandela encouraged the narrative of his complete rebirth. He spoke often about the epiphanies in prison that allowed him to let go of his anger and become a better leader. “Hating clouds the mind,” he told The New York Times. “It gets in the way of strategy.” After his release, Mandela cultivated a benevolent, almost aggressively warm and grandfatherly persona. THE BEGINNING OF A CHANGE I was reminded of it when In prison, Mandela, who had I looked up “Asimbonanga” again today: The first YouTube risen to fame as the brilliant link gets you to a live version — and notoriously combative that Jonny Clegg played in — leader of the militant wing France in 1999. Toward the of South Africa’s black liberaend of the song, an 81-year-old tion struggle, was so divorced from ordinary life it was almost Mandela makes a surprise appearance onstage, shimmylike a death. Early on, he was ing gamely. Grinning all the allowed no phone or radio; while, he taunts the audience a prison calendar on which for not dancing energetically he noted big events recorded enough. nothing around June 16, 1976, But I think we also willfully the date of a huge Soweto proscrub Mandela’s anger from test that began to shatter the apartheid state. Mandela didn’t our memory because the story of a transfiguration forms even know it was happening. part of his appeal to us. His His flock was in the dark about him, too. He was remem- life becomes a real-world fairy tale of how suffering lifts us up bered at the time as an amaand forgiveness sets us free. In teur boxer: tall, pugnacious, fact, it’s not so simple. People headstrong, and angry for involved in the negotiations to justice. Would he still be that way when he got out, or would end white rule in South Africa — after Mandela was released prison have broken him? from prison — have often told In his absence, Mandela me how unbelievably “stubassumed a titanic symbolic born,” even disposed to flashes importance. The figure of
Nelson Mandela shows his heavyweight form, above, as a 42-year-old, political activist and an able boxer in 1961. (AP file photos)
of rage, he could be, and how that stubbornness contributed to the ANC’s gains at the bargaining table just as much as his newfound warm-heartedness. They sort of whisper it. Long before Mandela died, some young black South Africans I knew were going in the opposite direction with the leader’s legacy. They were turning their back on his postapartheid persona and asserting that Mandela’s pre-Robben Island anger was what really gave him a claim to greatness. When his anger cooled, they said, he lost his will to fight entrenched economic powers, leaving the South Africa of today still mired in inequality. The urge to reduce our heroes from complex figures to one-line lessons is fierce. Lincoln got one of his first seriously intricate treatments in mainstream art with Steven Spielberg’s film — only 150 years after his death. “Invictus” is no such work of art. On Friday afternoon, the day after his death, I went to Nelson Mandela Square, an open-air quad in a Johannesburg mall presided over by a smiling bronze statue of the South African liberator. The statue was attracting a line of photosnapping tourists, perfectly representative as it was of the magnanimous version of Mandela. Nearby, I stumbled across a small, temporary art exhibit depicting images from Mandela’s earlier, more pugnacious life, including a picture of him boxing and several of him frowning and raising a fist. There was nobody there viewing them. I’d hardly spent a minute or two inside before the man at the exhibit’s front desk apologetically called me over and handed me a plastic token. “Now this I know you’ll like,” he said. I was to go to an adjacent shop and exchange it for a commemorative coin of Mandela smiling. — Eve Fairbanks, a writer living in Johannesburg, is working on a book about postapartheid South Africa.
His errors — and admissions By Adam Roberts
cessor, Thabo Mbeki. The result was a pandemic that claimed millions of lives, many unnecessarily, as drugs to treat victims ELHI, India — Be in no doubt that were long withheld. Nelson Mandela, the world’s most To his immense credit, however, Mandela famous political prisoner, camconceded his error. After leaving the paigner against racist rule and presidency, he campaigned for a new AIDS magnanimous leader, was a great policy. In retirement, he would speak up for man. When spending time with him, one education and treatment, especially when felt awed, weak at the knees. Madiba, the tribal name by which he was fondly known his son succumbed to the disease in 2005. To Mbeki’s fury, too, Madiba pushed the by many, had charm and warmth. He was also responsible, more than any other indi- ruling African National Congress to tackle AIDS seriously. Thankfully the country has vidual, for the remarkably peaceful transinow come to grips with it. tion in South Africa. Or take economic policy. After years in Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Madiba’s prison, Mandela emerged to lead South close friend and fellow leader of the antiAfrica still believing, in effect, in Soviet-style apartheid campaign, once told me how he economics. It took advice from China’s leadfelt an immense “generosity of spirit” from ers (among others) to change his mind. But Mandela. he was willing to get the Afrikaner stateBut you shouldn’t remember him as a run economy to open up and flourish. saint. Bishop Tutu didn’t think of him this For that, and for two decades of relative way — guffawing at the idea that Mandela was anything so dry, hollow and uninterest- stability and steady growth, South Africa should be grateful. Yet many young, jobless, ing. The myth should not overpower the reality of a richly complicated and passion- and angry South Africans are, understandably, still angry. Whites still control a huge ate individual. proportion of capital in South Africa. The In comparison with other politicians, in deal he struck at the end of apartheid, they Africa and beyond, he stands out for his feel, saw a shift in political power but too self-restraint. As free South Africa’s first little economic change. president, he volunteered for only a single But Mandela made the best of a very difterm. Look to Zimbabwe for a striking ficult job, stabilizing South Africa’s vulnercontrast: Its near-despotic leader, Robert Mugabe, is in his fourth, disastrous, decade able post-apartheid economy, encouraging growth, and handing out welfare, even as ruler. if rapid redistribution of assets between Yet Madiba is far more interesting than whites and blacks proved impossible to either the villain next door or the saintly achieve quickly. figure. His achievements are the greater His great achievement in policy was, because he admitted to errors, at times bunof course, to oversee a profoundly liberal gling policy. Those failings matter. Other leaders should pay as much attention to his constitution for South Africa that enshrines racial, sexual, gender and other rights. But slip-ups as to his achievements. also he could compromise, and admit the Take the great misery that South Africa need to shift policy. suffered in the first two decades of democIn his achievements as a rich, humane racy: the AIDS epidemic. As early as 1991, but at times flawed figure — Mandela has Mandela had grasped (judging a private much to offer other leaders. He liked to joke notebook) that the disease threatened a about his eventual death, chuckling that the “crisis for the country.” Yet in office he did first thing he would do in heaven would almost nothing to stop it. He recalled later that after so many years be to sign up for membership at the local branch of the African National Congress. It in prison, he was shy when it came to talkwas his way of saying that he was a political ing about a sexually transmitted virus. South Africa, too, faced a host of other chal- and pragmatic man: not a saint. Remember him as a warm, powerful figure. Not an lenges on his watch — political violence, economic upheaval, ongoing racial tension. unearthly one. — Adam Roberts was the Economist’s corBut his inaction on AIDS then gave way to respondent in South Africa from 2001-05. outright denial of the epidemic by his suc-
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