How could Mandela possibly be called a sell-out? The problem lies with the way in which the story is told, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Writing a biography of any individual means living with that person for the duration of your project. You move from the realm of abstract theory to the experiences of individual human beings.
Biography thus insists on phenomenological truth in a way that other genres of writing rarely do. I have spent every day of the past year thinking, reading and writing about Nelson Mandela. I choke up when reading about the pain and suffering he went through, and wonder how university students, who have known only freedom, could possibly call him a sell-out.
The problem lies with the way Mandela’s story is told - as a fable whose credibility diminishes with every repetition. Over time people, especially those born long after apartheid ended, become inured to the pain of his experience.
The fable also enrages those for whom little has changed. If Mandela was so great, how come they live in poverty, they ask.
Good biography must go beyond fables and tell us the full story of the hero, and why he was not able to deliver all that we expected.
The first thing we will discover from the vast literature on heroes is that they always fail. In fact, the definition of heroes is that they die, punished by the gods for thinking they could do the impossible.
Chinua Achebe was often asked why he allowed Okonkwo to fail in Things Fall Apart. His response: “This is the stuff of tragedy. Did Okonkwo fail? In a certain sense, obviously yes. But he also left a story strong enough to make those who hear it even wish devoutly that things had gone differently for him.”
Tragedy is thus the motor of historical change, not the conclusion of it. Mandela was
never going to bring us to “the end of history”.
A biography can also make us more empathetic towards heroes.
This too requires a change in the way we talk about his imprisonment. We speak so much about the 27 years he spent in prison that it has lost any meaning for young people. We need to focus more on the experience.
This is difficult when the tendency is to present Mandela as a successful hero, which is a contradiction in terms.
It is also difficult to talk about Mandela’s experiences when the dominant culture is that the past is something best left behind. If that were true, we’d all be dead, for nothing grows from nowhere.
Mandela is largely to blame for this, with his insistence on letting “bygones be bygones”, which makes it difficult to speak meaningfully about his experiences.
I highlight his experiences here in the hope of evoking some empathy for the man from the radicals who call him a sell-out.
First, we must add a dozen more years to the years he spent in prison. In quick order, the apartheid government served Mandela with banning orders from December 1952 until his imprisonment in August 1962. Nowadays one can say the word “ban” and leave some people numb, or as Jimmy Kruger said after Steve Biko’s death: “It leaves me cold.” But that would be underestimating how painful a banning order was to its victim.
Biko admitted this in a letter to Aelred Stubbs: “You know I am (so I think) a reasonably strong person but quite often I find the going tough under the present restrictions.”
Mandela said something similar: “It has not been easy for me during the past period to separate myself from my wife and children, to say goodbye to the good old days when, at the end of a strenuous day at an office, I could look forward to joining my family at the dinner table This has been infinitely more difficult than serving a prison sentence. No man in his right senses would voluntarily choose such a life in preference to the one of normal, family, social life which exists in every civilised community.”
And yet he made such a choice. When his banning orders expired in 1961, Mandela was elected secretary of the All-in African Conference, which was the only organisation remaining after the ANC and PAC were banned in 1960.
With Robert Sobukwe in prison and Oliver Tambo in exile, he emerged as the national spokesperson for the Black world outside prison.
He left the country to visit Britain and other African countries. Given his experience of persecution and the likelihood of imprisonment, he might have been tempted to stay outside.
He explained his choice: “I am prepared to pay the penalty even though I know how bitter and desperate is the situation of an African in the prisons of this country. I have been in these prisons and I know how gross is the discrimination, even behind the prison walls against Africans.”
He was to experience that brutality on Robben Island. His former prison warder, Christo Brand, has described as “intentional sadism” the cruelty on Robben Island.
These middle-aged, respectable men were stripped naked by Afrikaners young enough to be their sons and made to stand naked in the rain as punishment.
However, Mandela said the physical pain was bearable but not his personal losses: “I lost my mother only 10 months ago. On May 12, my wife was detained indefinitely under the Terrorist Act (sic), leaving behind small children as virtual orphans, and now my eldest son is gone never to return.”
He remembers watching his mother leave the Island, “and somehow the thought flashed across my mind that I had seen her for the last time”.
But nothing could be likened to the death of his son: “Suddenly my heart seemed to have stopped beating and the warm blood that had freely flown in my veins for the last 51 years froze into ice. For some time, I could neither think nor talk and my strength appeared to be draining out. Eventually I found my way back to my cell with a heavy load on my shoulders and the last place where a man stricken with sorrow should be.” The government refused to grant him permission to bury his child, just as they had done with his request to bury his mother:
“My heart bled when I finally realised that I could not be present at the graveside - the one moment a parent would never like to miss.”
Yet he refused offers of release - first from the Transkei homeland leader and relative Kaizer Matanzima, and then by PW Botha on condition he renounced violence.
Mandela was, of course, not the only person to suffer, and it is wrong to focus on just his pain.
Heroes are always part of a collective. But not even as a member of a collective does Mandela deserve the kind of denigration he has received at the hands of the very people who are supposed to record our history and do so truthfully.
Whether it is Steve Biko or Robert Sobukwe or Mandela, the falsification and denigration of our heroes raises a serious question for Black scholars in particular: what will decolonisation look like in the era of fake news, of history as alternative facts?
* Mangcu is Professor of Sociology University of Cape Town.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.