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december 21, 2013 vol xlviiI no 51 EPW Economic & PoliticalWeekly12

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)Some Recollections and Reflections

M S Prabhakara

M S Prabhakara (kamaroopi@gmail.com), a

long-time contributor to EPW, was a member

of the editorial staff of the journal from the

mid-1970sto the early-1980sand later with

The Hindu, including as the South Africacorrespondent from 1994 to 2001. He now lives

in Kolara, Karnataka.

In death Nelson Mandela is

undergoing a droll kind of

transformation. A revolutionary

fighter who led an armed struggle

against the apartheid regime

became towards the end of

his life a universally beloved,

almost cuddly, icon of peaceand reconciliation. It is true that

Mandela mellowed towards the

end of his life, evident in what

one saw of him in photographs.

But the fire never died, except to

the extent that the body itself

was losing its vigour. Mandela

himself took pains to deny that

he was a saint.

The death of Nelson Mandela (b 18

July 1918, d 5 December 2013) is

an occasion for both grief and

celebration, in the best African tradition.

One grieves even if death came at the

fullness of his years as one celebrates the

remarkable life and achievements of the

man. Both grief and celebration are visible

in abundance in South Africa and indeed

throughout the world as the funeral is, at

the time of writing, under way.

Perhaps, it would be useful to begin this

tribute by recounting some obvious and

well-known facts about Nelson Mandela

best encapsulated in the titles of his two

books:No Easy Walk to Freedom(1965) and

The Struggle Is My Life(1978), both pub-

lished when he was in prison. Together,

they make the statement that his whole

life was the struggle for freedom, as much

for personal freedom as for the people ofhis country; and that struggle would be

long, arduous. Even when as a young man

he left home, he was seeking freedom,

escaping a marriage not of his choice that

had been planned for him. This search

for personal freedom evolved as he grew

up in the relatively liberated environ-

ment of the big city into a struggle for his

people, as he made the connections bet-

ween the unfreedom that overwhelmed

his people, the African majority of the

population, in the supposedly liberated

environment of the city which superfi-

cially had promised freedom, but where

too he found chains more burdensome

than the chains of the world he had fled

from seeking freedom, and the even

harsher chains that bound the majority

of the dispossessed people, everywhere.

From Xhosa Nationalist to

African Nationalist

These connections did not come toMandela easily. The journey from being

a Xhosa nationalist to becoming an

African nationalist to becoming a revo-

lutionary fighter leading an armed strug-

gle for the freedom of all the people of

South Africa, across the colour lines, has

been charted by Mandela himself.

Recalling in his autobiography the visitof the great Xhosa poet, Krune Mqhayi,

to his school at Healdtown, Fort Beau-

fort, when he was in his final year, he

describes how, while reciting one of his

poems, the poet weaving his assegai in

the air for emphasis accidentally hit the

curtain wire above him, causing the cur-

tain to sway away. After a pause, the

poet drew an analogy between the as-

segai striking the wire, and the fight

against the oppression of the African

people by the white colonial rulers, bet-

ween the culture of Africa and Europe.

The assegai, the symbol of the African as

a warrior and as an artist in this poetic

conceit, stood for what was glorious and

true in African history. The metal wire

became an example of western manu-

facturing, skilful but cold, clever but

soulless. The poet went on: What I am

talking about is not a piece of bone

touching a piece of metal, or even the

overlapping of one culture and another,what I am talking about is the brutal

clash between what is indigenous and

good, and what is foreign and bad. We

cannot allow these foreigners who do

not care for our culture to take over our

nation. I predict that, one day, the forces of

African society will achieve a momentous

victory over the interloper. For too long we

have succumbed to the false gods of the

white man. But we shall emerge and cast

off these foreign notions.

The words, Mandela recalls, galvanised

him. They also confused him with their

call to move away from an all encompass-

ing theme of African unity to a more paro-

chial one addressed to the Xhosa people,

of whom Mandela too was one.

I was beginning to see that Africans of all

tribes had much in common, and here was

the great Mqhayi praising the Xhosa above

all; I saw that an African might stand his

ground with a white man, yet I was eagerly

seeking benefits from whitesMqhayis

shift in focus was a mirror of my own mindbecause I went back and forth between pride

in myself as a Xhosa and a feeling of kinship

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with other Africans. But as I left Healdtown

at the end of the year, I saw myself as a Xhosa

first and an African second.

The story of the transition of Mandela

from a Xhosa nationalist to an African

nationalist and an anti-colonial nation-

alist with no leavening of any exclusivist

tribal nationalism to a universal human-ist is well known in South African litera-

ture, and has been charted by Mandela

himself. This is not a unique transition

but something that many leaders of

the South African liberation movement

went through both out of conviction and

necessity. Central to this transition was

the evolution of the ideology of the Afri-

can National Congress (ANC)that moved

from the original exclusivist African

nationalism to an inclusive South African

nationalism that accommodated all the

people of South Africa.

To an Inclusive Nationalism

Even the ordinary membership of the

ANCwas initially restricted to Africans,

partly because the laws of the apartheid

regime did not allow interracial mixing,

and also because this exclusivism had

been internalised across the racial

divides. Thus, even in the period when

the ANCwas not banned (the ANCwasbanned in 1960, after the Sharpeville

massacre), the resistance to apartheid

was organised by the Congress Alliance

comprising four different structures

with the segment of the population it

represented within brackets: the ANC

(Africans), South African Indian Con-

gress (Indians), Congress of Democrats

(whites, many of the communists who,

after the Communist Party of South

Africa was banned in 1950 under the

Suppression of Communism Act had

clandestinely founded the underground

South African Communist Party whose

public face was the CODD, and the South

African Coloured Peoples Congress

(Coloureds)). It was only after theANCs

May 1969 conference at Morogoro, Tan-

zania, that non-African supporters of

theANCand the liberation struggle were

allowed to become ordinary members of

the ANC; and it took another 16 years

(the June 1985ANCconference at Kabwe,Zambia) for non-Africans to get elected

to decision-making bodies.

These facts are being recalled and enu-

merated in order to underline the deeply

ingrained apartheid mindset in South

Africa that did not spare even the libera-

tion movement. Perhaps I may recall a

small personal experience. When I arrived

in Johannesburg in the middle of 1994 as

the resident reporter of The Hindu, myvery first initiative was to familiarise my-

self with the ANC headquarters, a vast

building on Plein Street in Johannesburg,

by visiting it as often as I could and meet

whomsoever I could, using the introduc-

tions I had from some of my old ANC

friends going back to the mid-1960s. At

lunch time on my first day when I went

down to the canteen in the building, the

few persons, Africans and Indians, having

lunch had formed into small exclusive

groups eating at different tables: about

half a dozen Africans at two tables and the

two Indians at another table, all comrades

chatting familiarly with each other across

the tables. I broke the unspoken barrier

the very next day, but that is another story.

Those were early days of freedom;

and I could see that a lifetime of habit

was not easy to break. Eight years later

when I left South Africa, this instinctive

herding with ones kind had disap-

peared. One did not by then need tomake any political statement by sharing

a table with others not of ones kind.

Strange Misconceptions

The death of Nelson Mandela has revived

some strange and persistent misconcep-

tions in writing on South Africa, and

Nelson Mandela. A few months ago,

annoyed at the persistent description in

BBCOnline World News reports of Nelson

Mandela as South Africas first black

President, I wrote a very brief 50-word

Letter to Editor that was carried in The

Hindu, in which I said that what defined

Mandela in political terms was not

his colour but the fact that he was the

first democratically elected president of

South Africa. I did not expect the imperi-

ously prescriptive Auntie to even see my

point, and the practice has continued.

Even The Hindu, the paper I was with for

the major part of my professional life,

referred to Nelson Mandela as the coun-trys first black president in its editorial

tribute on 7 December.

Mandelas pigmentation (which, strictly

speaking, is not black, just like the pig-

mentation of his oppressors was not

white) is not relevant and is not even

useful as a description, except in politi-

cal terms: that he and others like him

were oppressed and denied their very

humanity under apartheid. What is rele-vant is that he was the first democrati-

cally elected President of South Africa.

One can see why many find it hard to

accept such description. For implicit in

that description is the glaringly obvious

reality that all so-called elections in South

Africa held before April 1994 were utterly

fraudulent exercises that excluded the

overwhelming majority of the citizens of

the country who, of course, were not even

citizens of the country of their birth under

apartheid laws. Further, the description,

first democratically elected president, also

holds some deeply disturbing menaces

for those, and their name is legion, who

still viscerally identify themselves with

the apartheid regime, and who still can-

not get over the fact that the long-banned

Communist Party is now a legitimate party

of government though in their identity as

members of theANC.

Yet another significant feature of these

first democratic elections was that theoverwhelming majority ofANCmembers,

including the 76-year-old Mandela and

some others even older than him, voted

for the first time in their lives. Voted for

the first time, got elected for the first time,

and became president of the country that

very first time. Surely, this is a record in

the history of democratic elections worth

taking note of, rather than the obvious

fact that the person in question was black.

Another malicious error that is creep-

ing back is the description of South Africa

as a multiracial democracy. For those

with their historical and institutional

memories intact, the word multiracial

is simply a fancy word for apartheid. In

plain words, democratic South Africa is,

by definition, a non-racial democracy.

From Multiracial to Non-Racial

However, there is much confusion,

even among those who abhorred apart-

heid, between multiracialism andnon-racialism. Even a well-informed

writer like Anthony Sampson, author of

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Mandela: The Authorised Biography(1999),

uses the two terms interchangeably as if

they mean one and the same thing. They

do not.

Mandela himself has put the record

straight in the book Nelson Mandela:

Conversation with Myself(2010):

We have never really accepted multiracial-

ism. Our demand is for a non-racial society,

because when you talk of multiracialism, you

are saying that you have in this country so

many races. This is in a way to perpetuate the

concept of race, and we preferred to say we

want a non-racial society We discussed and

said exactly what we are saying, that we are

not multi-racialist, we are non-racialist. We

are fighting for a society where people will

cease thinking in terms of colour It is not a

question of race; it is a question of ideas.

However, with a kind of separatist and

exclusivist political mobilisation whose

defining feature is the hatred of the

Other projected by ideologues with anti-

democratic agendas as assertions of a

subaltern underclass against majorita-

rian oppression, gaining ground multi-

racialism is set to acquire a new legiti-

macy. The other side of the coin is the

dismissal of democratic struggles thatalso emphasise the unity of the exploited

people as revival of Stalinist practice of

unity and struggle.

Droll Transformation

Finally, in death Nelson Mandela is also

undergoing a droll kind of transforma-

tion. A revolutionary fighter who led an

armed struggle against the apartheid

regime became towards the end of his

life a universally beloved, almost cuddly,

icon of peace and reconciliation. It is

true that Mandela mellowed towards

the end of his life evident in what one

saw of him in photographs. But the fire

never died, except to the extent that the

body itself was losing its vigour and fire.

Let Nelson Mandela himself have the

last word on the prospective St Nelson:

As a young man Icombined all the weak-

nesses, errors and indiscretions of a country

boy I relied on arrogance in order to hide

my weaknesses. As an adult, my comrades

raised me and other fellow prisoners, with

some significant exceptions, from obscurity

to either a bogey or enigma, although the

aura of being one of the world's longest serv-

ing prisoners never totally evaporated. One

issue that deeply worried me in prison was

the false image that I unwittingly projected

to the outside world: of being regarded as a

saint. I never was one, even on the basis of

an earthly definition of a saint as a sinnerwho keeps on trying.