What we miss is not the magic of an overblown mythology, but the sense of a considered leader who represents a fraternal objective, writes Michael Morris.
Cape Town - Madiba is hot property in the political market - a brand everyone wants to own.
Not a month goes by without someone holding him up as the exemplar of the what-could-have-been vision of a democratic South Africa free of corruption, cynicism and caustic racial nationalism.
His extraordinary achievement was perhaps not so much to retain the declared loyalty and adulation of so many South Africans, but of so many different South Africans, men and women who, in 2016, are just about daggers drawn on every topic from property to free speech, street-naming to labour law.
And while they fight it out to claim the greater proximity to the liberator’s truest ideals, it’s only the fiery populist minority who have been willing to risk painting Madiba as the sell-out who scuppered the revolution just when it was warming up.
We all know well enough Nelson Mandela was not a saint, and his greatness was one of humanity, a generosity of spirit that enabled him to contain seeming contradictions.
He could be a cunning and even, at times, ruthless political strategist and party leader who knew what he wanted and made for the objective without undue scruple, but he could also be the father figure for whom all South Africans were family and whose beaming smile could be taken as the genuine proof of their collective belonging.
Former opposition leader Tony Leon - whose deft political sense enabled him to balance a high and genuine regard for Mandela with a conviction he had to be stood up to as the leader of a not-always-democratically minded governing party - captured this dual aspect of Nelson Mandela’s persona in his book of a few years ago, Opposite Mandela - Encounters with South Africa’s Icon.
Leon’s reflections arose from considering Mandela’s part at
the turning-point ANC conference at Mafikeng in 1997, an occasion when Madiba led the charge
against the media and his government’s political opponents and lent his considerable moral weight to the ruling party’s shift towards a deliberately racialist outlook on socio-economic transformation.
The great leader’s performance, Leon reminds us, was decried by The Daily Telegraph as a “depressingly paranoid tirade” and, by The Observer, as a “profoundly depressing assault”.
With a great deal more equanimity, Leon saw it differently.
“The fact is,” he writes, “Mandela’s personality and his presidency were a living embodiment of Walt Whitman’s famous poem Song of Myself - “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” - and he more or less brushed off Mafikeng and continued to champion his more generous vision of what he wanted his country to become.”
It is doubtful many of those today who swear Mandela was the best of the best - and if only he were around now to show Zuma and the rest of 'em where they could put their Guptas - would care to spend any time contemplating the I-am-large, I-contain-multitudes complexity of democratic South Africa’s first and, arguably, too much venerated president.
Yet it does seem worth the effort.
Writing in The Guardian a few years ago, Gary Younge observed perceptively that most criticisms of Mandela as a leader “were simplistic because they started from the basis of proving or disproving his sanctity, rather than trying to understand him for who he was: a political leader guiding a developing country through a transitional phase”.
And Younge’s judgement of his efforts was plainly stated: “His singular and considerable achievement was to pave the way for a stable democracy.”
The annual routine of writing
up Madiba can be depleting in the sense that there are really only so many thoughts one can have about even as large a figure as he - and what else is there to do but recycle them and hope that no one will notice?
But, by way of coming clean, it does seem to me the concluding passage of the article I wrote on the first anniversary of his death, in 2014, is unimprovable, at least in so far it still says what I think.
I wrote then: “What seems true about Madiba is that while he was around, most South Africans had the sense of a shared fate which, if someone like Mandela could embrace, having been through all he had been through, they could embrace, too.
"Today, in the absence of any such essential affinity, we risk falling back on name-calling, othering, ethnic arithmetic and all the envy, resentment, mistrust and incomprehension that go with those kindergarten impulses.
“What we miss - in the first year (and now the third) of Mandela’s mortal absence, no less really than in the years since he left the presidency - is not the magic of an overblown mythology, but the sense of a considered leader who represents a fraternal objective, not of unanimity, but common interest. It has always been a rare quality in our history.”
A lot of people genuinely hanker for that, even if they overlook much else.
Yet it says something about that “stable democracy” of Younge’s acknowledgement of Mandela’s demythologised contribution, that whenever in the past two years - and, heaven knows, there have been occasions - when we might have thought or been tempted to think we were just about on the rocks, it wasn’t true; we weren’t.
* Michael Morris is a senior writer for Independent Media.