Fusion of wealth and esteem creates a lopsided world

It has become ever so fashionable to blame Nelson Mandela for our woes. He cursed his descendants, it is said, because he negotiated a settlement that kept the worst of the past alive.

Fashionable, but also careless and lazy. The forces that have shaped our world were not only beyond the control of Mandela and his generation, but utterly alien to them. He and his comrades have little to do with the inequalities that have evolved since the end of apartheid.

A story or two shows that this is so.

When Walter Sisulu was elected secretary-general of the ANC in 1949, he gave up his job as an estate agent, his sole source of income at the time. He was 36 years old and the father of a growing brood of children. He needed to earn decent money. The ANC offered to pay him £5 a year but never did. And so it was left to his wife, Albertina, to support the family on her nurse’s wage.

For Walter, there was a choice: he could either do something of great significance or he could earn a living. It was a no-brainer for him. Poor Albertina was to feed the family; her husband’s job was to make history.

Walter and Albertina set the standard. A decade later, Mandela, father of two infant children, neglected his legal practice, causing it to almost collapse, for the sake of his ANC work. Winnie was left to feed the family from her social worker’s wage.

These marriages were hardly equal, as you can see. It was for men to run public affairs and for women to provide. My point, though, is that men like Walter and Nelson were ravenously hungry and extremely ambitious; they wanted honour and glory and they set the bar very high. Their aim was to become historical figures who would be remembered. And yet their vaulting ambition did not entail earning money. Getting rich, for them, was mundane, uninteresting and a little grubby.

Certainly, Mandela liked the finer things in life. He wore tailored suits and drove a car he could barely afford. Famously, he would arrive at ANC Youth League meetings in the late 1940s wearing a white silk scarf. But his bank account was periodically empty and he did not care to do much to fill it. He had other fish to fry.

Today, wealth and prestige are fused. It is hard to be anyone of significance if one is not rich.

When Cyril Ramaphosa stepped out of politics it was to make a pile of money. And when Jacob Zuma became president it was also to make a pile of money.

This fusion between being rich and being significant is something Mandela and his generation discovered when they left prison. It was not of their world.

Mandela himself became wealthy, but only as a by-product of being famous; it was never his ambition. And it caused him endless grief. Years before he died, family members swarmed above him like vultures, fighting for his legacy, as if he were already a corpse.

The fusion of wealth and significance is a force of enormous depth and it swept people like Mandela aside.

It is also at the heart of growing inequality; when an old and a new elite both measure prestige in wealth, it is clear what sort of society they will build.

To blame Mandela for our ills is to make him a scapegoat. The causes are in us and in our world. They are not in a man who left it to his wife to earn a living.

WHEN AN OLD AND A NEW ELITE BOTH MEASURE PRESTIGE IN WEALTH, IT IS CLEAR WHAT SORT OF SOCIETY THEY WILL BUILD