The legacy

As Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela started his final journey, mourners outside his Johannesburg residence could be heard singing: “Mandela ha hona ea tshwanang le yena” (there is no one like Mandela).

Looking back at the wasteland of the latter half of the 20th century, there was indeed no one quite like Mandela. And we are not likely to see a man of his stature in our lifetime.

As someone generally wary of icons, I have reasons for taking my hat off at Mandela. My admiration of the man grows as I discover the moral impoverishment of many contemporary human rights champions whose ideological positions and personal conduct remain firmly wedded to ideas of revenge and retribution. Where Mandela would have looked to the future, they get stuck in the past. Where Mandela would have called for forgiveness, they seek prosecutions.

To me Mandela is the person who taught the world how to overcome rancour, bitterness and divisiveness. The underlying idea was never to condone atrocities of the apartheid era but to realise that we are bigger than our hurt and our suffering. That to hold the culprits accountable, to make amends for past atrocities, and to lay the foundations of a new era, you need not inflict a fair measure of pain through political vendettas or through the institutions of retributive justice.

To those who would care for a bit of introspection, Mandela is a constant reminder of the fact that humility does not amount to weakness. Nor does compassion mean giving up in the face of tyranny.

Mandela’s middle name, Rolihlahla, loosely translates into English as ‘trouble-maker’. In a sense he never ceased to be a trouble-maker. He only refined his trouble-making strategy. Where it initially comprised sabotage against the apartheid regime, following his long walk to freedom, it turned into repeated interventions to prevent South Africans from indulging in ‘all-too-human’ blood-letting and score-settling.

In his famous 1964 ‘I-am-prepared-to-die’ speech from the dock, Mandela had explained his involvement in sabotage thus: “I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites”.

Afterwards, reminiscing on his incarceration years, Mandela noted he was thankful for having been captured as otherwise “I might have ended up with innocent blood on my hands”, referring to a plan by some in the military wing of the African National Congress to blow up public places.

Mandela was sentenced to life in prison with hard labour on Robben Island off the Cape Town coast, which he soon transformed into a ‘University of Struggle’. Never to stay silent when a fellow inmate was beaten up, he also learnt the futility of violence as a political strategy within the South African context through those years of brutal confinement.

Underestimating the power of his moral authority, the apartheid regime kept sending South African youth in droves to the Robben Island only to allow them an opportunity to learn at his feet his refined political vision. At its irreducible core, that vision meant not to mimic the oppressor as you fought oppression, never to wear a ‘white mask’ on ‘black skin’, to borrow a phrase from that great anti-colonialist, Frantz Fanon.

Chinua Achebe, the African novelist, “in whose company”, according to Mandela, “the prison walls fell”, wrote of the African Igbo philosophy: “We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own… He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.” That would be Mandela’s political creed for the rest of his life.

When he eventually walked out into the sunlight having spent 27 years in prison, Mandela had already thoroughly exposed the bankruptcy of apartheid South Africa now reeling under the impact of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. He had the power to exact his pound of flesh and to call for retaliation. Instead, he chose to work out a painstaking arrangement with the minority white government headed by de Clerk.

Three years into the process, Chris Hani, former chief of staff of the ANC’s armed wing and Communist Party secretary general was shot dead by a white supremacist. As ensuing violence threatened to spread throughout the country, Mandela appeared on television to call upon his people to avoid retaliation.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which owed its existence in great deal to Mandela’s moral position and perseverance, was a unique mechanism to deal with a bitter past. Even today, it is a bone that sticks in the throats of many in the human rights industry who would be satisfied with nothing less than full-fledged criminal prosecutions of apartheid leaders and functionaries.

What is unique about the TRC model is that it manages the potential conflict between the values of peace and justice in an innovative manner. Those seeking amnesty had to apply to the Amnesty Committee and were required to make a full public disclosure of the ‘political crimes’ they had committed.

Through the establishment of truth, confession of guilt, and a parallel mechanism for compensation, the TRC addressed rehabilitative and restorative functions of justice, reaffirming the human dignity of criminals as well as victims.

But then, as many involved in the process have remarked since Mandela’s death, TRC would not have been possible without Mandela or the culture of forgiveness and magnanimity that he worked so hard to instil in his followers and comrades.

Asked how he would like to be remembered, Mandela is reported to have said in his characteristic humility, “I would like it to be said: here lies one who did his duty on earth.” Mandela’s abiding legacy then is a constant search to extend the boundaries of our moral imagination, to soar above an egoistic sense of personal entitlements, and to understand and recognise humanity in all its strange guises.

The author is an independentresearcher.

Email: adnan.abdulsattar@gmail.com