Tag: Mandela

As rumours of the imminent release of Nelson Mandela gained ground, several nagging questions must have assailed even his most ardent admirers.

What if the man turned out to be but a shadow of the legend? What if he emerged stooped and walked with tentative steps and a shuffling gait after 27 years in prison, most of them in the unspeakably inhospitable conditions on Robben Island? What if his shoulders drooped and his clothes hung on him as if on a peg?

What if his speech was slurred and he could not give the rousing orations to the crowds that were sure to gather wherever he stopped? What if his memory no longer served him well? What if he was wizened and could not even withstand the strain of a brief address to the teeming crowd of chanting admirers? What if he had to be helped up and down the dais?

His remarkable strength of character and indomitable will are of course well known. But what if prison had sapped his will, his vigour and his spirit, and there was no fight left in him? And surely, he is not superior to the laws of biology?

Questions, questions, and more questions.

True, the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, of which our own General Olusegun Obasanjo was co-chairman, had reported some four years earlier that they found him in remarkably good physical shape, in full possession of his faculties and enormously well-informed. But anything could have happened since then to a person of Mandela’s age.

Besides, sheer surprise at finding that the man was not so derelict as they had expected might have led them to exaggerate his condition. And, in any case, did they interact with him long enough to be able to make valid judgments about his physical and mental condition?

Doubts, doubts, and more doubts.

But the answers to the questions and the doubts came when he stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl, in the Western Cape, on February 11, 1990.

Age and the prison regimen had taken their toll. The robust frame that once belonged to South Africa’s leading amateur middleweight boxer, the tireless people’s lawyer and guerrilla chieftain had yielded to a spare body. The cherubic face of the heydays of the resistance was now deeply lined. The hair was freckled with grey.

But the gait was erect. His steps were measured, firm. His voice resonated with authority. He read from prepared texts with the unaided eye. The fighting spirit that had led his associates and admirers to call him the Black Pimpernel had not waned.

Apartheid had got to go. The state of emergency must be lifted. The armed struggle would continue until conditions for meaningful negotiations were created. All political prisoners, including most of those whom the apartheid regime was holding on trumped-up charges, must be released. Sanctions must be sustained. Far too many people had died in communal violence. The killings must stop. Students should go back to their school; workers to their mines and factories

White domination must end, but it would not be replaced by black domination. South Africa would be a home to all who want to live in a democratic, just, non-racial society.

By one account, Mandela gave in a single day nine interviews to television crews from across the world. Nobody could have judged from his performance that he had never until a month or two before, seen a television camera. Without the slightest trace of unease, he responded calmly and confidently to questions that ranged from the personal to the public, and from the past to the future.

Whether he was sitting in front of television cameras or addressing a huge crowd or receiving endless streams of visitors that poured into his Soweto home, he displaced, according to The New York Times, “the measured dignity” that the ancient Romans called “gravitas.” In a perceptive essay for The Observer, South Africa’s eminent journalist Allister Sparks described him as a “patriarch.”

Even The Economist, that consummate master of the elegant putdown, especially of persons and institutions that do not regard capitalism in its rawest form as something divinely ordained, allowed that Mandela “turned out a finer man than South Africa” – by which it probably meant the racists “had a right to expect,”

Mandela is an authentic martyr who chooses not to come across as one. He is the symbol of the struggle of justice and freedom in South Africa and without question its most authentic spokesman, but he insists that he is only a member of the African National Congress.

Even when the rusty Iron Lady was again putting to ridicule whatever pretensions Britain still makes to greatness by calling for an end to sanctions, Mandela said he would have to clear with the ANC before answering her.

Mandela’s travel plans also reflect a deliberate sunning of the limelight. His first port of call will be Liusaka, Zambia, to renew ties with ANC leadership and cadres. From there, he will proceed to Sweden to greet Oliver Tambo, his comrade-in-arms, who is recovering from stroke. While Mandela was in jail, it was Tambo who animated and kept the struggle alive from outside.

Then, on to India and Canada, perhaps the two most unyielding protagonists of sanctions.

A lesser man would have headed straight to Britain and the United States, for sumptuous banquets under glittering lights; he would have jumped at the opportunity to be photographed with those we have been conditioned to regard as the high and the mighty.

Not Mandela.

By now Mandela has shattered all the stereotypes, the fears, the greed, and all the ignorance that have sustained for almost half a century one of the most inhuman systems of government the world has ever known.

I hope, for the sake of the apartheid regime that South African television has been presenting a faithful portrait of the man. The disciples of apartheid should study and understand and appreciate him. For, as matters now stand, he is probably the only person who can liberate them from the incomparable prison that is apartheid.

First published in The Guardian (Lagos) on February 27, 1990, this is the first installment of a three-part retrospective on Nelson Mandela.

Thumbs up for our GEJ

Remembering especially his dismal performance in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and other unflattering outings, many Nigerians must have fretted when the BBC announced that President Goodluck Jonathan was going to favour its global audience with his reflections on Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

They need not have worried.

It was a lexical triumph for Dr Jonathan.  He delivered himself with semantic and syntactic aplomb, even taking a dig at those leaders who, instead of voluntarily relinquishing office like Mandela, sit tight and plunge their countries into chaos – no need for him to name them, said Dr Jonathan; you know them — and those leaders who leave office but continually lurk in the corridors of power.

Is this perchance an indication that he intends to “play Mandela” by seeking neither a second term nor an elongation of his current term?

In whatever case, I hope he is not scheduled to be in the same room anytime soon with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.  I can assure him that Mugabe, one of the most gifted polemicists in Africa and indeed anywhere, will respond in kind at the earliest opportunity,  and most likely with compound interest.

When it came to naming an example of those who, according to Jonathan, vacated office but carry on as if they are still in power, I was stuck.  Can you help?