The Seduction of NelsonMandela, By DeleOlojede

The old man was sneaky in that way. At
various moments when his country
tottered and seemed all about ready to
pitch into an orgy of violence and
retribution, he would step in, he would
berate and he would coax, and he would
invariably ask if we were not better than
this.

And so it was that he planted himself
squarely in front of this crowd baying
for blood, a people incensed by the
brutal murder of the anti-apartheid icon
Chris Hani. It was nearing dusk in the
misbegotten township of Sebokeng, not
that far from Johannesburg, in 1993, just
a few days after Hani had been shot in
his driveway by a white migrant.
The people wanted their revenge, and
they were not ready to listen to the old
man who has come with a message of
peace. Eventually, Nelson Mandela
raised himself to his full height, lowered
his voice, and in effect told the people: If
there was any killing to be done that
day, then they had better kill him, but no
one else.
The crowd hushed. The mere thought
was sacrilege, for to harm the frail old
man was to harm oneself. Someone
tentatively broke into a somber
liberation song, joined by the others,
and soon leader and led were one,
singing of their grief and their hope
together. The moment passed. Three
months later the white government and
the mainly black liberation movement
had reached an agreement to hold South
Africa’s first all-race elections. A few
months after that, on May 10, 1994, I
stood off to one side and watched Nelson
Mandela become President Mandela,
surrounded by leaders of the world, most
of them lesser than he.
How do you consider a man like this,
and try to steer away from hyperbole
and tame the raw emotion unleashed by
his passing? How does head assert itself
over heart, and is it even desirable?
“The soul of Africa has departed,” said
the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka,
“and there is nothing miraculous left in
the world.”
It was my extraordinary good fortune to
have covered the post-prison rise of
Nelson Mandela, whose sheer audacity
lay in his stubborn insistence that we
are better than we actually are. He was
the only public figure I ever met who
was more impressive in person than
from the remove of a television screen.
And over the years the stories
accumulated until it was impossible to
escape the impossible conclusion that
very little distance existed between his
public and private lives.
In order to break down the apartheid
wall of resistance he first had to accept
the humanity of the oppressor. For a
long dispossessed black population to
turn away from vengeance he first had
to prove, through a long life of sacrifice,
that he was worthy of their trust.
It is quite obvious that Nelson Mandela
was a great man because he was far
greater than us, and therefore it was an
act of deception for him to make us
believe that we were a true reflection of
his own greatness, which he disguised as
quite ordinary and quite normal.
If that were true, then how come we feel
so small, now that he has “slipped the
surly bonds of earth?” How come we
went from Nelson Mandela to Jacob
Zuma in 10 years flat, like a race car in
reverse? Why is it, that Mandela built
himself a modest country home,
fashioned after his prison bungalow to
maintain a measure of familiarity, and
with his own money, while Zuma spent
more than 200 million rand in public
funds erecting a village compound to his
own ego? A veritable basilica of
Yamoussoukro in the poverty-stricken
hills of Nkandla, in Zululand?
If we are as good as Mandela made us
believe, how come the evidence to the
contrary is so overwhelming? Why did
he insist on being president for only five
years, and yet many of our leaders up
and down the beloved continent find
ever creative ways to maintain
themselves in power, mostly to
perpetuate their misrule?
We were seduced by Nelson Mandela
because we were so desperate to believe.
Everywhere on our blessed earth terrible
leaders abound. But no region has been
as hard done by as Africa. And so we
clung to Nelson Mandela for as long as
possible, and now we will try to cling to
his memory for all time. It is comforting
to us, that our region has produced one
of the towering political leaders of the
last century. We secretly and not so
secretly take pride in the universal
affection showered upon him. His
example inspired us to try to be better.
But we are weak, and we are human,
and therefore greedy, dissembling, vain.
We too easily slip into our selfish ways,
and hedonism is ever appealing.
Am I the only one who thought that, in
announcing Mandela’s passing, Jacob
Zuma said the right words but the
messenger got in the way of the
emotional power of the message? And to
my mind the words tumbling from
Zuma’s lips sounded so phony because
his own conduct has been the opposite of
what he claimed we all value in the
departed.
So now all we have left is memory,
which is fickle, and which degrades and
eventually crumbles. We will remember
that a giant walked among us, and we
will justify our own limitations by
asserting that he set an impossible
standard. And then we will resent him
for it.
What have you wrought, Nelson
Mandela?