THE announcement came just before midnight. You were sitting alone upstairs in your living room, watching the news, in that post-prandial haze that says the night is here and it will soon be another day.
‘Breaking News’ flashed across the screen.
Vaguely your mind leafed through the various possibilities. Another car bomb outsidea Shiite mosque in Baghdad. A drone attack has taken out twoAl Qaeda militants in Yemen, along with ten bystanders. Just cause, to some. Collateral damage.
On the screen was the face of Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, reading somberly from a prepared text.
It came to you in a rush. Madiba was dead.
It was always going to happen. You had sought to brace yourself for it. The South African people, you feared, whenever you thought about it, just might have a collective nervous breakdown. Hopefully it would be a transient one, and they would move on, eventually.
As soon as Zuma was done, the presenters went to town, talking about the life and times of Nelson Mandela. They showed the scenes from outside his house. They spoke of his long travail in prison. They began to rifle through the landmarks of his life.
All the complex emotions associated in your mind with the man began to play out.
He liked to box, and as a young man he spent many hours boxing, and watching others box. In truth, all of his life was a boxing match, and he the quintessential master of the trade, lost many rounds, gave away a few, and ended up being carried shoulder-high by the very enemy he had just defeated.
He liked to dance. The dance was de rigeur, at some point as he worked the crowd. His steps, to your trained eye, were slow and out step, at least in the latter years. You never, you remembered, knew him in his younger years, except as an abstract, unattainable concept. The Rivonia speech.The clenched fist.Free Nelson Mandela!
The image many people would remember was the dancing. The sheer joie de vivre of the man.
Where did one approach this one from, you thought, as you watched the cable channels one and all abandon their scheduled programs and begin to talk Mandela.
Incongruously, you suddenly remembered standing on the Matopos hills, at the spot named ‘View Of The World’, in the heartland of Matabeleland. Africa rolled out before your unaccustomed eye, in swathes of undulating vegetation and an endless interplay of rock and brown earth. Cecil John Rhodes had stood on this spot, and pointed northwards to his fellows, all of them white colonialists.
‘Your hinterland is there’
He was rallying his race to go up into all of Africa, having ‘secured’ the Southern tip South Africa and Rhodesia, and to take over by force, if necessary, all of the land, since it was the ‘natural’ entitlement, and even the duty of their race, to take possession, in the process executing their ‘civilising’ mission. The white man’s burden.
It was an eerie feeling being on the Matopos, all by yourself, in an age before the security situation in the new nation of Zimbabwe deteriorated to a point where it was no longer safe to wander so far afield, because the denizens of ‘Father Zimbabwe’, Joshua Nkomo, were battling the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade which the ‘liberator’ Robert Mugabe, was using against his ‘internal’ enemies. The revolution, already, was consuming its own.
You had felt the tears sting your eye as the full intellectual and philosophical underpinning of Racism hit you in the face for the first time in your life.
You looked down at Cecil Rhodes, where he lay buried in the rock, which he had loved, and where he had liked in his life to come and spend time.
‘Your hinterland is there under the ground, rotten and mouldy, you s—t!’ you said to him.
The anger was still in your heart, and in your eye, several hours later as you made your way back to Bulawayo.
At that point in time, Zimbabwe had just secured a freedom of sorts. A grim-faced man who favoured red ties was in the saddle. It was said he seldom smiled. It was said the heirs ofCecil Rhodes had subjected him to torture in the years when he was in their grip, before he became their overlord. The rumour mill even had something about jailors rough-handling his most tender, most private portions. Whether it was truth or myth, he would never forget.
But that was another story. Or maybe it was not another story but really the same story. Maybe it was part of the story of The Boxer, in a manner of speaking, since they were contemporaries, and ZANU the party of Mugabe, provided refuge and assistance to the African National Congress in its moments of greatest danger.
On a sunny day several months after the face-off with Cecil Rhodes on the Matopos, you found yourself sitting on the floor on a dusty stretch of earth in Warren Hills, on the outskirts of Harare. This was Heroes’ Acre, the place where, according to the government, all the leaders of the Chimurenga- the struggle for liberation of Zimbabwe, would be buried. You were all here this day to honour Herbert Wiltshire TapfumaneyiChitepo, a leader of ZANU, and one of the fathers of the nation. Sitting on the podium were men and women who had suffered horrendously at the hands of the Ian Smith regime – who had been tortured, banished, bombed, imprisoned. Chitepo himself had been assassinated on 18th March, 1975 in Zambia by a suspected former member of the British SAS, presumably acting on behalf of the Rhodesian government. It was impossible to forget. Heroes Acre would ensure that the people of Zimbabwe always remembered. Robert Mugabe himself would be buried there, assuredly, in the fullness of time.
Just as the proceedings were about to commence, a Mercedes Benz sedan rolled up. All in the crowd craned their necks the better to see the new arrival. It was Oliver Tambo, the leader in exile of the African National Congress, the diplomatic face of the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Nelson Mandela his more ‘radical’ companion, according to the prevailing perception, co-founder of Umkonto we Sizwe the Spear of the Nation the army that would so they said – battle the Boers to the death, was in prison serving a life sentence on Robben Island. A deep-throated cheer went up among the crowd. It was like the roar of some primordial beast. You joined in the roar, waving your fist aloft with the rest. Up on the podium, Oliver Tambo responded to the crowd, waving his fist. He was embraced by Mugabe.
Bottom line
The bottom line, said the strategists and pundits in those days, was that the story of African liberation was no tale of gentlemen with queasy stomachs telling tender tales to wimpy school children. This was about grit, and life and death. The black tide was rolling from North to South, rolling over Rhodesia, and rolling relentlessly down South to The Final Battle. And what a final battle that would be!
This was the mood, that afternoon, at Heroes’ Acre, when they re-buried Herbert Chitepo. Oliver Tambo was there, but theemblem of The Final Battle everyone wanted to think or talk about was Mandela, out there behind the bars on Robben Island.
Not the Press, nor the pundits, not even the greatest writers of Literature on that day, or several years after it, could have foreseen that Mandela, or Tambo, or any black man, would become President of a South Africa where the monuments and princely structures had not been reduced to rubble in a bitter, scorched earth war in which no prisoners would be taken, and the white tide – of English or Dutch antecedents – would have been rolled back into the Atlantic Ocean, no matter how horrendous the cost.
Nadine Godimer, Nobel Laureate, wrote, in July’s People about such a South Africa, where white ‘civilisation’ had been reduced to rubble, and people were fleeing to the countryside.
Years of bitter sentiment
Those years! They were years of bitter sentiment and high fervour. Men, and women behaved in ways they would like to forget now. Henry Kissinger wrote officially to the President of the United States that the ‘rabble Armies’ of the ‘so-called’ Liberation Struggle including the ANC, were no match for the disciplined armies of the America’s allies that were their foes, especially the South Africans, no matter how objectionable some people might consider Apartheid to be.RealPolitik dictated that America should continue to support the ‘white’ government, so that the Communists would not take over.
Newsweek, the respected news magazine, in writing the story of school children in Soweto who protested and were shot dead by policemen, quoted a subservient black policeman to illustrate its understanding of the issues. ‘Those people (meaning the blacks) have lost their head’. The implication was that it was pointless to struggle. The enemy was too powerful, and too entrenched.
They were heady days to be aPan-Africanist. The issues were clear, and the answers were simple. When your friend Reuven, who had served in the Israeli Defence Force, expostulated ‘If I have to choose between the survival of Israel and the rest of the world, I will tell the rest of the world to go to hell’ you had responded to him, without a second’s contrary thought
‘If the destruction of Apartheid and the liberation of Africa puts the rest of the world in jeopardy, for me the world can go to hell’
He had looked at you askance, swallowed and held his peace. It was his first education to the reality that everybody had a bottom line.
And then the world had begun to change. Everybody was looking their nightmare in the eye, and recoiling from it.
Bob Marley came to Harare and sang the classic ‘Africans Are Libe-rate Zimbabwe ‘
Mugabe the staging post for the final push, was himself now the problem. His greatest revolutionary strength his unflinching conviction and his unshakable determination, was also his greatest flaw he just could not see why anyone should disagree with him. Zimbabwe became not the epitome of the promise at the end of the struggle, but the prototypical ogre of what not to become, at any cost.
Twenty three years ago, The Boxer left Robben Island. He had become in the last 10years of his incarceration, the most powerful rallying force for moral good in a world that was being stripped of its old assumptions, but was yet to create a new set of working assumptions. His every word became a tome to be carried and shared with reverence.
He understood his foe, knew where he was coming from, and worked from a certainty that he could prevail against him by giving him space to breathe. It ran against everything the natural human instinct dictated. It ran against the expectation of the masses, who were braying for blood. Even his wife Winnie opposed his readiness to dialogue and find accommodation, and opposed his sharing of theNobel Peace Prize with his erstwhile adversary.
The Boxer has proved a consummate psychologist, working in the mental space of his people, who are not just his Themba race but all the people of South Africa. He – the master of the little gesture. Wearing the captain’s jersey of the rugby team and willing them to victory in the World Cup. In so doing permanently winning the hearts of his audience, and all the millions they represented.
Leadership style
Leadership came easy to him. Leadership that could not be canned into theory, and taught in Business School. He was confident, so he did not need to take credit. Rather he gave credit lavishly to other people, and would even put himself down. He wanted nothing from the argument. Nothing except to prevail in the end.
Was the wound of the murder of loved ones cauterized by facing the killer on the platform of Truth and Reconciliation? Or must it be, as tradition demands, an eye for an eye, even if everyone ended up purblind?
And there was the most recent of innovations – a new type of war, driven by a poisonousvictimology, where a young man could crudely slaughter an unarmed man in uniform in broad daylight on a street in London and be perfectly at ease in his warped soul, because the government had a foreign policy that he believed was hostile to people of his religion.
As the midnight hour passed, the presence of The Boxer seemed to fill the room, deepening the eery feeling. You were tracking the bits and pieces of his story in your mind, stringing the patchwork together.
There was the enigma of Winnie. She was, while he was on Robben Island, the beautiful temperamental Amazon of the struggle the managers of Apartheid were not quite certain how to handle. She was the editor’s dream photogenic, flawed, with a ready sound byte. Nadine Godimer had written, as gently as it was possible to write about such delicatematters, how she was not physically faithful to a husband who was away from her bed for three decades plus something. You had once written a piece in your column on her titled ‘Winnie And The Ghost Of Stompie’. Stompie was a young man who was alleged to have been killed, and he was not the only one, and hidden away on the orders of Winnie.
It was always going to end badly between them and it did.
Looking back, it seemed just appropriate that the only person you ever heard speak ill of Mandela was a former Information Minister of Nigeria, amoustachioed buffoon of a man, generally accepted as a jolly good fellow who did not know anything about anything. When General Abacha put Ken SaroWiwa to death, Mandela, as President of South Africa, and moral conscience of the world, spoke against the act and called for the isolation of the Nigerian leadership. The jolly man with the moustache, who was not even in government at the time, perhaps impelled by patriotic fervour, or perhaps to impress the dictator, unleashed a torrent of abuse against the South African.
Other issues
Other bits and pieces flitted across your eye.
The visit to Harlem.
Coming out with the information about his son’s death from HIV, and so bringing the disease out of the closet and enabling his country to face it down.
Becoming a universal role model and a force for good in a world where all the lines of distinction were blurred.
Reserving the right to be friends with people who were held to be pariahs by the people who controlled the world press and purported to define what was received wisdom.
Reserving the right to criticise even his best friends, when their nations fell short.
The past one year of illness had been a long goodbye.
As he grew silent, the things he stood for became even louder and more emphatic all around the world.
Everybody would want to come to say goodbye, you concluded. Obama. Bush. Blair. Even Jonathan.
Everybody who was anybody, and a great many who were nobody – till he gave them hope.
And you – what did he mean to you?
You hated to ask direct questions of yourself. That was a pain you reserved the right to inflict on others.
This man showed that the African could lead. That was one thing. In the end, that was everything.
Everybody, coming out of this, perhaps would feel that they could reach for the Mandela in them, and nurture and cultivate it.
It was an option.
There were other options.
They could give in to anger, or despair.
Righteous anger could lead them to a Mugabe-esque passion to right old wrongs, in the process drawing everybody back.
Or they could embrace the symbolic futility of the angry young man in the new type of war, slaughtering an unarmed soldier on the street in Woolwich.
The picture on the television screen was fading.
It was not the picture it was your eyes, which were filled and brimming over.
Perfectly ridiculous, you thought, severely the spectacle of a grown man sitting alone in his living room, two hours past midnight, feeling the tears dripping down onto his night shirt.
What irked you was that you were not certain whether the tears were for The Boxer, or for your troubled people.
Dr. Olugbile, a renowned writer is the Permanent Secretary of the Lagos State Ministry of Health
