Finding a great leader is less difficult than replacing one
The world stood still last week to say farewell to one of its greatest sons. For Nelson Mandela, it was plaudits well deserved. Yet, in a few brief days, this globally reflective moment will fade as if belonging to the distant past or never having occurred at all.
Mandela is the heroic figure of our age. His stature eclipsed that of another world leader. This spoke much about the man’s greatness. It revealed much more about the tepidity of other leaders. Because of the distance that separated Mandela from others, we verge on a mistake that will do Mandela and us significant injustice. We have been tempted by his departure to elevate his evident superiority into an impression of completeness or of infallibility.
This would be a mistake. To acclaim a hero is our civic duty and moral obligation; it is symbolic recompense for deeds and sacrifices that can never be repaid. However, to lavish blind adulation without an objective assessment is tantamount to a lie. It distorts the legacy of the subject of the adulation and cripples the historic perspective and future actions of those committing the overreach.
Black people should always pause when the mass media celebrates a Black hero and liberator. The metamorphosis of Western thought about Madiba parallels the evolution of American thought about Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. As he entered into leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, the established proclaimed king was obsessed with thrusting the nation into the jowls of a race war. The charge was libelous yet represented the conventional wisdom and the operational truth of the American government and much of the political establishment. Similarly, Western nations branded Mandela a communist-influenced terrorist intent on massacring Whites.
After King was assassinated, White America’s perspective of him mellowed. The dead cleric could not threaten what remained their strong hold on power. When he became the first Black president of his nation, Mandela transfigured into the Black leader the White world loved to love. On the surface, this appears to be a wonderful story of bygone hatreds and present compassion. Sadly, the truth is not this ersatz morality play now presented. Cold self-interest is more the author of this tale than is brotherly love.
Clearly, those who once casted King and Mandela as foul embodiments now lionize them. They do so from their high perch not from their humbled hearts. Henry Kissinger, the archangel of Machiavellian international relations, attended Madiba’s memorial service. One had to wonder if the amoral Kissinger actually knew where he was. Perhaps he had nothing else to do that day and was the beneficiary of a free plane ride to picturesque South Africa. More likely, he was there to assure himself that Madiba was dead and inwardly gloat that he had survived this Black African who was his moral superior yet mortal enemy when both men actively occupied the arena of world events. A brilliant man, Kissinger is nonetheless a warehouse of banal prejudices that lends him a penchant for evil. That this bulwark against Black progress at home and abroad attended the ceremony signals something that warrants closer scrutiny.
The elite propaganda machine disseminates the tale Mandela’s show of unmatched compassion won them over, even the reptilian Kissinger. For the most idealistic among them, this may be true. However, idealism runs in short supply among the deeply affluent and powerful. For most of the elite, the story has the opposite plot. Mandela did not win them with the power of his compassion. Instead, they forced Mandela to channel his compassion and restrain his drive for justice in ways that safeguarded their pecuniary interests. They did not come over to Mandela’s side. By the sheer force of their ever hovering, destructive military and clandestine abilities and obvious economic power, they forced Mandela over to theirs.
His harsh critics, and there are many among South African leftists, say Mandela capitulated. His former wife Winnie purportedly criticized the deal with the apartheid establishment as a deep wound to the Black community. She and others anguished that Blacks obtained the ballot but Whites kept the bank.
True, South African Blacks won political equality only to retain apartheid’s economic fetters.
This tracks the fate of Black America when the Civil Rights Movement ended. Blacks were legally free to go anywhere and do anything. However, most lacked money to see to the new opportunities. The liberty they sought might as well have dwelled on the far side of the moon. The bulk of Black American poor stayed in the modest tenements of their disintegrating urban communities or in their shacks on dirt-scratch farms along the rural back roads of rich, vast and powerful America. Likewise, most Black South Africans remained in their shanties in townships that look no better now than under the harsh hand of racist governance two decades ago.
What changed in America and South Africa was the birth of a small, unprincipled Black elite that attached itself as a weak, dependant appendage to the conservative White establishment. The hard nut had been found but is yet to be cracked. What happened is a tragic lack of foresight to understand the vast distance to be crossed to complete the trek to justice and liberty. In America and South Africa, Blacks mistook victory in an important campaign for winning the entire war. We walked off the battlefield before the day was done.
Because of this, we have produced an ambivalent Black leadership with no objective greater than its self perpetuation. It knows nothing other than how to manage and profit from things as they are. This elite does not know whether its raison d’être is to represent Black interests to the White power bloc or to explain the imperatives of White power to the Black masses. On a daily basis, they tend to follow the money by turning the shoulder of indifference to their people. More at home being the junior partners in an elite enterprise, the distance between the Black elite and Black masses grows.
What also grows is Black relative poverty in both nations. In a general sense, a large portion of the scant prosperity that was once more evenly shared among the Black populace has been cornered by the new elite. This unregenerate process has become infectious, afflicting Black leadership on a global basis. Whether in minority enclaves in Western nations or as heads of nominally independent African states, Black leaders have fallen to this siren’s beckoning. They lavish in the emoluments of political independence but yoke the people to deep penury because they dare not challenge the unfair political economy that provided their soft seat at the high table. That their benefactor is unjust causes them no grief just as long as they its beneficiaries.
Critics blame Mandela for this shortfall in South Africa. I can no more blame Mandela in South Africa than blame King for Black America’s current afflictions. Both men did all they could; but this can never be construed that they did all that was needed. Some challenges had to be left for those who followed them. Sadly, those who followed them temporally failed to do so in spirit.
On the arduous approach to obtaining power, Mandela wrestled with a decision freighted with historic magnitude. Should he insist on the ANC platform of radical economic restructuring or be content with gaining political independence now and hope for economic justice later? The fate of previous Black leaders who dared press for both must have shaped his fateful answer.
An idealistic Patrice Lumumba actually believed the Congo had gained independence from its sadistic Belgian masters. When he began acting like an independent leader, little did he understand he had issued his own death sentence. His bones are yet to be found and his nation yet to recover five decades after his exit. Malcolm X and Dr. King were killed when they began to focus on economic justice. Nkrumah was hounded from office because of his socialism. For seeking an independent economic base, Sekou Toure’s Guinea was punished with draconian French sanctions that have mired the nation ever since. The mourning Dr. Kissinger once intrigued against Allende’s Chile until Allende was no longer and his dream of a more just nation was buried with him and the thousands of martyrs who believed as he did.
From further back in history comes the benighted example of Haiti, the tiny speck of an island that became the first Black republic by overthrowing a violently oppressive White planter society. For their desperate lunge at freedom, Haitians were rewarded with harsh trade sanctions by the great powers and the infliction of a massive war indemnity by France. The indemnity was so steep, cutting a large chunk of the infant nation’s GDP, that there could be no other destiny for the tiny country than perpetual debt peonage and the poverty and political instability spawned by such abysmal economic conditions.
Mandela did not want to follow these examples. His contemporary Robert Mugabe took a different approach. For that he has become an international pariah. Mugabe is a despot and his politics should be excoriated as such. Yet, the story of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse s not the straightforward calamity the media portrays. Western propagandists would have us believe Mugabe’s policy of economic affirmative action for Blacks broke the economic spine of his nation. Surely, his clumsy, often cynical, implementation of this policy caused hardship. However, the hardship his policies caused was probably no greater than the hardship emitted by Ian Smith’s supremacist policies when the nation was Rhodesia. However, the West did not complain about Smith’s errant tutelage.
The bulk of the hyperinflation that deracinated the economy was not from Mugabe’s hand alone. Reacting to Mugabe’s recalcitrant independence in forging ahead with land redistribution despite Western opprobrium, the international financial institutions (IMF and World Bank) refused to rollover over Zimbabwe’s loans as was established custom. To repay these dollar loans, Zimbabwe was forced to print enormous amounts of its currency in a pitiful attempt to buy dollars to repay the financial houses. This was the strong engine of the nation’s horrendous inflation. Mugabe has committed enough wrongs to fill a book. Yet, in this important instance, he was more victim than perpetrator.
Now we hear little about him because he has been whipped into economic submission. Having forfeited currency sovereignty, the South African rand and America dollar are legal tender in his nation. This means Zimbabwean monetary policy is determined more by Pretoria and Washington than in Harare. The dictator is being dictated to.
For all of our long history of struggle, the bitter truth is no Black community or nation has yet won both full political and practical economic independence from its former masters. This harsh fact had to influence Mandela into accepting a couple of slices of bread instead of gambling on snatching and being able to keep half the loaf.
Had he gambled, the weight of Western economic and political power would have descended on him like a ton of bricks dropped from high altitude. His government would have been ambushed and its failure would have been recorded under the familiar theme of Black inability to rule a complex nation. Thus, Madiba accepted the smaller victory, hoping it would forestall a larger defeat.
It would be left to those who came after to initiate the economic reform he could not do. Sadly, it is easier to find a great leader than to replace one. What was necessary strategic restraint for Madiba became a blind way of life for his successors. They moved not a muscle to alleviate the burden on the people. Instead, they turned from the people. Thus, many socio-economic indicators for Black South Africans today are worse than under apartheid. How can that be?
All one needs to do is look at the mummified performance of Jacob Zuma at the Mandela memorial service. The man appeared to have overdosed on depressants. It is hard to determine which man least belonged on stage: Zuma or the fake deaf/sign interpreter. lt was not that Zuma was overcome by grief. He was overwhelmed by his own inadequacy. In a sense, Zuma had died before Mandela. Thus, the people bristled at watching a talking corpse eulogize their lost father. They booed Zuma. The breach of protocol was justified.
Today, Madiba is to be buried. Buried with him shall not go our best hopes. He did enough to bequeath them to us, frail but alive and intact. Lamentably, the leaders who have followed him throughout the Black world have not advanced from where he left off; they have backtracked. He faced down one challenge that they may face down another. Instead, they return to where he trod, claiming they seek to defeat that which he already conquered.
The Western world and its media machine extol this practice because it keeps us in stagnant place. They want us to believe the battle Mandela waged was the last one for Black people to fight. The end has been achieved. The telegenic Obama’s ascendance to the American White House is proof of this, they say. They want us to believe that Mandela’s transitional compromise decision represents the zenith of race relations and the final answer regarding racial reconciliation. They want you to believe this because it neither hurts their ample pocketbook nor fills your empty purse.
Mandela epitomized greatness. Yet he was as mortal as the rest of us. The time for his leadership has come and gone. There are issues left undone. In the spirit of his greatness, let us dedicate ourselves to doing them.
Those who consider themselves Black leaders must now grapple with the fundamental challenge of our period. They must devise prudent yet bold strategies to achieve genuine economic independence and fairness but do so in a manner that does not attract punishing blows from the heavy hand of the major economic powers. Neither reckless stridency nor sheepish compromise has a place here. We need smart leaders courageous enough to take the steps required but astute enough not to attract destructive backlash. Those who fail to tackle this challenge have done just that – they have failed us.
When a selfish leader peers into a mirror, he sees nothing he dislikes. As the mirror peers back, it views things it would rather not see. With the passing of Madiba, it is time that we all take a long look into the mirror that looks back.
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