Nelson Mandela was an avatar, and his legacy in Africa will redefine the meaning of statesmanship. Unlike most African strongmen and despots, he did not come from poverty and anonymity to grasp the opportunity of his lifetime when he became, first, the leader of a struggle, and later, the first black president of South Africa. No. He had choices. He could easily have remained in the Eastern Cape of South Africa where his royal lineage guaranteed him succession or embraced his newfound life in Johannesburg where he had become, along with Oliver Tambo, the first black South African with a law firm. He had all that, and family too.
And yet, and yet, he chose his nation over and above family and comfort. During his months of evasion and flight from security services, his child had asked him why he could not be with them always. And he had responded to that deeply personal question by saying that millions of other South African children needed him to be there for them too. On April 20, 1964, standing on the dock at Rivonia, he had proclaimed with uncommon courage and firm conviction: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
This sense of sacrifice and willingness to pay the ultimate price for his conviction came naturally to him. His empathy—the touchstone of good leadership— could not allow him live a normal life in the face of a system that robs his fellow South Africans their humanity and dignity. It made him give his freedom that they might be free. Later, this very character would propel him to seek for the total eradication of poverty and disease (HIV/AIDS).
The jail forged him, and truly formed him into a mature, disciplined and dedicated man. Behind the bars, he had quickly transformed the struggle from a physical resistance into moral confrontation. “Free Mandela”, soon quickly turned into a rallying cry not just in South Africa but around the world.
Mandela was truly different. Day after day of hard labour in a limestone quarry, chipping away at white rock under a merciless sun without as much as a protective eyewear, would eventually undo his tear-duct, but not his mind and heart. Eddie Daniels, a fellow prisoner in Robben Island, had recalled how anytime he felt the depression and the pressure of the prison condition; he would just have to see the 6-ft. 2-in. Mandela walking tall through the courtyard and he would be revived once again. He had wept as he narrated how Mandela—“Mandela, my leader!”—came into his cell and crouched down to wash out his pail of vomit and blood and excrement.
Mandela was a man of character and intellect, and both for him are intrinsically interwoven. As a parent, a prisoner, and later as a president, education was dear to him—a far cry to its blithe disregard among many African leaders, past and present. He saw education and learning as lifelong commitment. And even while in the island, he pursued his legal education and encouraged others to do the same. He realised that intellectual emancipation comes first before social liberation, and that the greatest bondage was the bondage of the mind.
In Africa, Mandela was not the first to move from prison to power, but he is now its greatest figure, and self-consciously so. The true character of the man was revealed when upon assumption into office, he continued to be the humble, sincere, and moral leader of the nation he so loved in his youth and struggled for before and during incarceration. In his consistency, conviction and courage, he unveiled a truly remarkable character the likes of which is a rarity in the continent.
More importantly, unlike Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe that seized the land of white settlers and nationalised foreign industries, Mandela’s greatest gift was nurturing a rainbow culture of multi-racial, free, and tolerant society. He made a deal with the men who put him in prison for 27 years—a deal that temporarily protected the jobs, the lands and the industrial wealth of the white minority, a deal that made the disenfranchised majority wait patiently for their reparations, a deal that minimised the flight of white capital and expertise and averted a prolonged bloodbath.”
His final stage of apotheosis was his resistance to become an autocrat by freely choosing to be a one-term president. In this stroke of genius, Madiba rose above the tumult of African nationalists into its defining legend. It was certainly an action that made him the equal of the likes of George Washington who in serving one term in office, provided the basis of national unity and the model of future political succession and was said to be “the prime native hero, the necessary creation for a new country”, “the Patriot Hero of our Revolution, the Christian statesman of our Republic, great in goodness, and good in greatness.”
In these three phases of his life—protester, prisoner, and president—Nelson Mandela has proved once and for all, that leadership matters, that good leadership is possible, that a nation becomes great when there are people who self-consciously choose principle over power, reconciliation over revenge, greatness over greed, the nation over the self, sometimes over the tyranny of cousins and tribes. Africa will never be the same became Madiba lived here.
Culled from PUNCH
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