Long Walk to Freedom, that is the title of Nelson Mandela’s definitive autobiography that captures his life odyssey: a classic of exceptional suffering that cleared the Mandela essence of any dross of bitterness; and left only the purity of exceptional grace and magnanimity.
Was Mandela human or divine? Were it to be the medieval ages in Europe, this question would have earned the asker a charge of apostasy, and probably a one-way ticket to damnation.
Indeed, were Mandela to be native of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria, instead of his Thembu nation in South Africa, his deification would only be a matter of time.
He would therefore be in the class of Ogun, Oya and Sango – phenomenal humans deified after their death for their great deeds, as distinct from Olodumare, the Yoruba Supreme Being, Obatala, god of creation and Orunmila, god of divinity: godheads, according to Yoruba cosmogony, that existed with Olodumare from the beginning; and Olokun, Osun, Olumo rock, Idanre hills etc, awesome natural phenomena that provide their communities with spring of life and security.
Indeed, such is the infectious beauty of greatness that, at Mandela’s passage on December 5, the Nigerian ruling elite have joined, with their empty rhetoric, the band wagon to share in the matter of the moment.
Doyin Okupe, the peculiar master of Okupe-istic cant, has swiftly canonised his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan as “Nigeria’s Mandela”! Even for the un-rigorous Jonathan presidency, that claim sounded particularly comical.
And their Baba, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, weighed in with stunning self-indictment. He had gone to Mandela, he read out a statement with graveness and piety peculiarly Obasanjo’s, and urged him to go for second term.
But Mandela had told him “Olu” [pronounced with distinctly un-Yoruba accent], “have you ever seen a nation where an 80-year ran the show?” – or something to that effect. Yet, Obasanjo did two terms and was plotting an illegal third, before political realities stripped him of the costly illusion! Of course, he denied the third term gambit. But he should tell that to Nasir El-Rufai, the no-nonsense, all-conquering hero of The Accidental Public Servant!
Okupe’s roguish canonisation of his boss and Obasanjo’s holy self-indictment just prove one point: greatness is sweet. But only a few are willing and ready to pay the price.
The Mandela-Obasanjo parallel is a classic study in greatness and non-greatness.
The one went to jail for 27 years, under apartheid, perhaps the most evil political system ever imposed on any people, yet as president, after helping to kill that system with rare grace, he felt he owed his nation!
The other went to jail, for a few years, despatched by the same post-12 June 1993 presidential election political contraption of convenience he helped to erect, but as president after, felt his country owed him!
The one endured the harshest of cruelties to, with near-divine grace, forgive and forget. The other never lets pass a slight, with his graceless vindictiveness.
As for Okupe and his laughable canonisation, it is the same story of court zealots leading their principals down the road of perdition. In the Nigerian power cosmos, so was it at the beginning, so is it now and so it ever shall be, except of course some drastic change happens. If Nigerian leaders cannot pay the price for greatness, how can they lead their country to greatness?
Nelson Mandela never bothered about the trappings or gravy of power, the Genesis to Revelation for our leaders here. All he went for were fundaments of common humanity: irrespective of race, creed or colour. And that he did it as the most globally acclaimed victim of a hideous system that dignified or criminalised strictly on the basis of one’s colour, without betraying any bitterness, was the stuff of which legends are made.
Mandela was such a force for universal good in the 20th century and beyond simply because he shattered the ingrained Western racial bigotry of the Joseph Conrad school: Africans were savages and Europeans were the guiding angels divined to bring — by cruel force, if necessary — Africans and other Black peoples of the world out of their savagery.
Though the Afrikaner overlords of Apartheid South Africa would later develop Afrikaner Calvinism, a rogue theological ideology on the pedestal of the Dutch Reformed Church to justify their evil, anti-Black racial discrimination would appear to stem from sentiments from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which bigotry Chinua Achebe, in his famous 1977 essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” took apart.
Though racism predated Conrad’s 1899 work, Heart of Darkness would come as noxious understanding, if not outright justification of the evil, with the matter-of-fact rendition style of a not altogether unsympathetic narrative voice.
But even with all of these, Mandela’s sheer humanity and political sagacity came across with two principal statements, among others. He declared, in his post-Robben Island prison years, that never in South Africa would one race oppress the other. He also declared that what he fought for was not majority, but democratic rule.
The race-neuter quality of the first statement was not lost on many, for it insisted on equity and mutual respect for all races, in South Africa’s rainbow coalition, which Mandela would inspire from 1990, after apartheid as state policy since 1948.
The equity and justice of the second statement is even more telling. Majority rule would have consigned South Africa to reverse apartheid: perpetual Black rule, which nevertheless would not be undemocratic, for democracy, in its most cynical form, is a game of numbers.
Still, Mandela’s stress on democratic rule, as against majority rule, is a muted promise that one day, even a white South African, hopeless minority though he might be, could rule the rainbow nation, so long as he gets the go-ahead of the Black majority.
No wonder then that while other African leaders would virtually invest anything to get photo-ops with American, European and other global leaders, it was the other way with Mandela, as who was who in the world happily scrambled to land a photo-op with him.
The African, hitherto a savage in the bigoted White eyes, had in Mandela turned a global icon, without whose aura none of these world figures was complete! An armada of these leaders would also be at his funeral on December 15.
Nigerian leaders that fatally distract themselves with the dross of office, instead of seeking greatness, have the Mandela story to seek redemption and change their ruinous ways. But perhaps they are beyond redemption?
In that case, Nigerians must seize the moment and stop suffering fools gladly, by ending the relay of selfish, arrogant and incompetent leaders.
Meanwhile, Madiba’s was a glorious life walk to legend — and you could feel that the way common South Africans trooped to Mandela’s Johannesburg home, at the announcement of his passage, to celebrate his life. How many Nigerian leaders would enjoy such privilege after their passage?
Adieu Madiba. When comes another?
