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The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela - Taylor & Francis · The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela Alex Lichtenstein As the whole world knows, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, popularly

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Page 1: The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela - Taylor & Francis · The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela Alex Lichtenstein As the whole world knows, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, popularly

The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela

Alex Lichtenstein

As the whole world knows, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, popularly known by his Xhosa clan

name “Madiba,” passed away on December 5th

, 2013 at the age of 95. In many ways, he can be

regarded as the last of the great giants from the twentieth-century’s historical stage. By force of

personality, clarity of vision, and stubborn persistence he led the transformation of South Africa

from a country marked by brutal white minority rule—“Apartheid”—into a country with a

democratically elected government devoted to political freedom, multiculturalism, and racial

reconciliation: the much-lauded “rainbow nation.”

Most remarkably, Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994 after spending a third

of his adult life—27 years—imprisoned by South Africa’s white rulers. In 1964, the apartheid

state convicted him of sabotage, for his role in turning the African National Congress (ANC)

from a non-violent campaign for black rights into an armed liberation struggle. Eighteen of

these years he was confined to a windswept atoll within sight of Cape Town, the notorious

Robben Island. The conditions there were isolated and harsh, and indeed the pulmonary infection

that ultimately led to Mandela’s demise was a lingering result of his long years in its damp chilly

cells. Robben Island is now a museum to Mandela’s memory and to the struggle he led for

democracy in South Africa, and indeed around the globe.

Characteristically, Mandela transformed his many years in prison into an opportunity. As one of

his biographers observes, on Robben Island “he developed the subtler art of politics: how to

relate to all kinds of people, how to persuade and cajole, how to turn his warders into

dependents, and how eventually to become master in his own prison.”1 But we should not let

Mandela’s evident self-mastery and relentless commitment to a non-racial South Africa disguise

the complexities of his political journey.

Born in 1918, Mandela grew up in an extraordinarily traditional society. As a member of a

Xhosa royal African household, he was imbued with certain notions of leadership that served

him well later in life. In particular, he proved adept at balancing confident authority with the

creation of consensus, a priceless skill within the fractious ANC and in a deeply divided country.

Page 2: The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela - Taylor & Francis · The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela Alex Lichtenstein As the whole world knows, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, popularly

At the same time, Mandela was undeniably a product of the colonial world. Evangelical

Christianity and the British Empire deeply marked his upbringing and schooling. Complicit as

these forces surely were in the subjugation of his people, Mandela still took from them Victorian

notions of fair play and the possibility of universal self-improvement.

Mandela also managed to straddle the two great forces that remade the colonial world in the

aftermath of World War Two, nationalism and communism. As the ANC came into its own as a

political force during the 1940s, he at first embraced the prevailing “Africanist” ideology of

“Africa for the Africans.” Yet his social and political encounters with courageous white, Indian,

and African communists in Johannesburg—Ruth First, Bram Fischer, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses

Kotane—drew him closer to the Communist Party’s cosmopolitan interracial political world.

Neither communist nor racial nationalist, Mandela helped fuse these two world-views into a

democratic “non-racial” ideology of African liberation that proved to have staying power.

African chief, Victorian Christian, African nationalist, Communist Party member, democratic

socialist, freedom fighter, political prisoner. Yet comfortable myths notwithstanding, Mandela

never fully embraced Gandhian non-violence. The movement he led in the 1950s championed

non-violent protest for a moment. But in the face of the intransigent violence of the apartheid

state, unlike Gandhi or King, Mandela came to embrace revolutionary violence as a necessary

tool to achieve freedom for his people—and he paid the price.

His passing, nearly twenty years after he won the first democratic election in South Africa’s

history, comes at a fraught moment for the ANC, the political party that continues to govern the

country in his name. Widespread disgust with the ruling party’s corruption and cronyism,

perceived incompetence, failure to deliver on its promises (“a better life for all”), and unchecked

incidents of police violence (like the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in August 2012) mark

the run-up to 2014’s national elections. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance

threatens to capitalize on this growing dissatisfaction by drawing into its still largely white ranks

increasing numbers of aspirant middle-class Black, Indian, and Coloured voters, and may even

win Gauteng, the country’s richest and most populous province, outright. On the other side of the

socio-economic scale, a new party—the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by defrocked ANC

Youth League leader and populist firebrand, Julius Malema—will surely cut into the ANC’s

waning constituency amongst black township youth, who suffer from unconscionable

Page 3: The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela - Taylor & Francis · The Political Worlds of Nelson Mandela Alex Lichtenstein As the whole world knows, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, popularly

unemployment rates. The EFF’s red berets seem ubiquitous in the townships that 25 years ago

stood at the epicenter of the revolution. The reliably compliant ANC partner in the “Alliance,”

the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU), is on the verge of an internal rupture led

by the large and powerful metalworkers union, as swaths of the rank and file have had enough of

a movement that claims to govern in the name of the working class while doing nothing for it.

What then does the increasingly tarnished reputation of the ANC mean for Mandela’s legacy?

The ANC will, of course, remain the majority party, although even its most optimistic partisans

recognize that its command of the vote will likely drop below to an all-time low of below 60 per

cent. Now a prosaic and compromised political party, rather than a heady liberation movement,

the ANC will no doubt seek to capitalize on Mandela’s departure from the scene by proclaiming

itself the only true bearer of the Struggle fought under his banner. Some South Africans may

continue to find this persuasive. In my view, however, such political hagiography will do little to

shore up the ANC’s standing among the disgruntled or to recapture the devotion of the ever-

growing ranks of dissenters, torn between cynicism and desperate hope for a viable alternative.

To the contrary, now freed from loyalty to the ANC in Madiba’s name—Mandela, himself, never

wavered in his commitment to the party he helped forge into an instrument of liberation—many

South Africans will seek new forms of political expression and allegiance. This, indeed, is the

meaning of democracy, and will remain Nelson Mandela’s greatest gift to South Africa and to all

who live in it.

Alex Lichtenstein, an Editor of Safundi, teaches South African and US history at Indiana

University.

1. Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography (New York, 1999), xxvi.