Strange bedfellows with a common goal

MANDELA D 33 STANDS NEAR A STATUE OF CECIL JOHN RHODES AT THE HANDOVER OF A BUILDING DONATED TO THE MANDELA RHODES FOUNDATION BY DE BEERS IN ST GEORGES MALL PICTURE ROGAN WARD 25 08 03

MANDELA D 33 STANDS NEAR A STATUE OF CECIL JOHN RHODES AT THE HANDOVER OF A BUILDING DONATED TO THE MANDELA RHODES FOUNDATION BY DE BEERS IN ST GEORGES MALL PICTURE ROGAN WARD 25 08 03

Published Jul 29, 2013

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Nelson Mandela and Cecil John Rhodes each, in his unique way, sought a better future for SA, writes Michael Morris

In a hundred years, Nelson Mandela’s most telling legacy might conceivably and perhaps ironically lie in his symbolic bond with the corporate colossus of the imperial age, Cecil John Rhodes, for theirs stands to be a joint endowment through succeeding generations of young leaders to an Africa sapped by neglect and pessimism and the lapses of vision and narrow, pecuniary pursuits of self-serving elites.

Developing inspired leadership founded on the idealism of Mandela and the enterprise of Rhodes is the core objective of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, formed just 10 years ago and poised to expand dramatically.

Most of the 200 beneficiary graduates of the scholarship so far, who range from cellist to physicist, gathered in Cape Town this weekend to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the leadership initiative and participate in discussions and masterclasses that underscore the objective of their continuing investment in their communities, across South Africa and Africa.

One of the principal custodians of the project is author and former journalist – Rhodes Scholar himself – Shaun Johnson, who, as the energetic and single-minded chief executive of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation over the past 10 years enjoys the satisfaction today of presiding over a fund that he has played a decisive role in growing to a staggering R350 million.

Income from this permanent endowment, which far exceeds the initial target, guarantees the scholarship programme for the next century at least.

In this, it matches the comparable Rhodes Scholarship, which was established – the first of its kind – after the mining magnate’s death in 1902. It counts among its beneficiaries Bram Fischer, leading South African jurist and Mandela’s defence counsel in the Rivonia Trial, former US President Bill Clinton, astronomer Edwin Hubble, American senator JW Fulbright, creator of the eponymous scholarships, and writer Edward de Bono.

“Building exceptional leadership in Africa” is the plainly stated objective of the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. “The example of Mandela,” Johnson notes, “is that with good leadership you can do anything; without it, you can’t. Mandela himself has always felt strongly that you can’t simply rely on good fortune, that good leaders will emerge – you have to identify and nurture them.”

The scholarship, the selection for which is rigorous, is founded on four principles; reconciliation, education, entrepreneurship and leadership, qualities identified in the life and work of Mandela and Rhodes.

The two men are, by a figurative stretch, doppelgangers of a sort, heretical though such a unity of being may seem.

They were very different men, yet alike in striking ways. Both were willing to act alone, seeing boldly a future others had neither the generosity of vision nor stamina of conviction to steer towards. Willing to be autocratic to see their vision endorsed, both were capable of inspiring multitudes who did not know or barely knew them, but were stirred to act.

Rhodes, the somewhat rapacious-minded imperialist who, not alone, but primarily, guided southern Africa’s almost peremptory entry into the maelstrom of modern industrial capitalism, held always before him – rather like Mandela in a different time and a different way – a larger idea that was detached from his own self, his own comforts, interests or personal desires. Both devoted themselves to ideas they knew would not be wholly or satisfactorily realised in their lifetime. For Mandela, it was an ideal he lived and was prepared to die for. For Rhodes, it was an audacious vision of enterprise and advancement.

If Rhodes’s last words were not the apparently apocryphal “So little done, so much to do” – a good enough metaphor for an ambitious man’s untimely death – there doesn’t seem to be any disputing his having said while very much alive, “I would annex the planets if I could”.

Mandela’s sense of a quieter striving, a vocation of service and forbearance, is best expressed in the pastoral grandeur of the closing passage of his political biography, Long Walk To Freedom: “I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me ... but I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

Whether planetary or pastoral, the metaphors underscore the nearly superhuman quality of the impact of these two men, historical figureheads at opposite ends of the 20th century - a dynamic economy which, for all its inequities, rewards endeavour, and a constitutional democracy spared the depredations of sanguinary civil strife that less fortunate states emerging from a divided past fail to avoid.

In the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, these strands merge, an intersection that seems at once a clash of contradictions. Mandela was doubtless aware of the dissonance, but embraced it, calling it a “closing of the circle of history”.

When he announced the partnership 10 years ago, he said, in the rather regal plural he was fond of, “Ours is the name for the labourer who toils on the African farm, fighting for a life of dignity; the girl child battling against great odds for an opportunity to realise her potential; the poor Aids orphan bereft of family or care; the rural poor eking out a subsistence, deprived of the most basic services and facilities. It is in their names and those of others like them, and in the name of all South Africans, that we lend ours to this initiative, seeking that a better future be built for all of them. In this, I am certain, Cecil John Rhodes and I would have made common cause.”

The endowments of the two men – economic and political, intellectual and administrative – are various and extensive and, tellingly, dependent on the investment in them of others, and other generations.

In this, the fraternity of young African leaders who will be noted through the coming century as Mandela Rhodes Scholars stand to be the embodiment of the complex and enduring legacy of the polar titans of southern Africa, vividly and lastingly reconciled.

Cape Argus

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