Mandela’s great legacy
HAD he still been alive, Nelson Mandela would have been 100 years old today. Instead, five years after his death, the world – and South Africa in particular – is left pondering his legacy.
It’s a legacy that has come under particular scrutiny in recent years, particularly in the wake of the brave and brash Fallist movement that swept this country and galvanised debate around the reality of life today and the disconnect from the muchvaunted “better life for all” that was the mantra of the heady days post-April 27, 1994.
Much has been achieved – an incredible amount, in fact, in the intervening 24 years – but the gap between expectation and lived reality yawns ever wider. We have a middle class that is a middle class in name only, saddled with debt in moribund jobs in a shrinking economy squeezed on both sides by ever increasing taxes.
We have a growing underclass of unemployed who are rapidly becoming unemployable – with many of them, tragically, potential first-time jobseekers who are fast giving up hope. South Africa’s unemployment rate came in at 26.7% in the first quarter of 2018 – with the unemployed increasing by 100 000 to 5.98 million.
And we have the wealthy – an elite that is no longer just “white monopoly capital”, the 21stcentury iteration of the old Hoggenheimer bogeyman, but also politically connected and black.
Some of those – and there are many – who ponder the lack of the economic dividend that they thought would follow the political dividend of 1994 blame Mandela for its absence, for having sold out to white interests in his vanity project to reconcile this fractured society and weld a rainbow nation during his short time as president.
A nation that they claim has been a chimera beloved of latter-day mythologists.
It’s the same ahistoric revisionism that led to the post-mortem beatification of Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the crass demonisation of his legacy.
Immediately after her death in April, she was lauded for her steely resolve in the Struggle against apartheid and racial discrimination, and hailed as a true revolutionary.
The truth, as always, is both different and more difficult to swallow.
Madiba’s legacy does need to be thoroughly and objectively studied, but one thing that can never be whitewashed is the role he played in pulling back the country from the brink of the abyss – against prevailing world opinion.
His efforts at reconciliation afterwards were critically important to ensure the peaceful momentum of the transition – and he was successful in both. The more difficult question is what successive administrations did with the legacy he bequeathed them.
He set an example that was will serve as a template of reconciliation and forgiveness, a man who extended a hand of friendship and amity to those who sought to break his soul.
Our challenge today – and tomorrow – as South Africans is simple by comparison. We must, as the Nelson Mandela Foundation enjoins us, find the Madiba in ourselves; we must be the legacy.
We must root out injustice in whatever shape we find it, speak truth to power, and create a world of peace and forge a nation united and empowered in its diversity.
It’s an injunction that will stick in the craw of the political and ethnic entrepreneurs finding fertile ground for racist populism and fascism at the moment. If we are serious about Mandela’s legacy, we must never allow these charlatans to succeed – under any circumstances.