Falsification and denigration of our heroes raises a serious question for black scholars, writes Xolela Mangcu

the definition of heroes is that they die, punished by the gods for thinking they could do the impossible.

Chinua Achebe was often asked why he allowed Okwonkwo to fail in Things Fall Apart. His response was that “this is the stuff of tragedy – did Okwonkwo fail? In a certain sense, obviously yes. But he also left a story strong enough to make those who hear it even wish devoutly that things had gone differently for him.”

Tragedy is thus the motor of historical change, not its conclusion. Mandela was never going to bring us to “the end of history”.

Biography can also make us more empathetic towards heroes. This, too, requires a change in the way we talk about his imprisonment.

We speak so much about the 27 years he spent in prison that it has lost any meaning for young people. We need to focus more on the actual experience.

This is difficult when the tendency is to present Mandela as a successful hero – which is simply a contradiction in terms.

It is also difficult to talk about Mandela’s actual experiences when the dominant culture is that the past is something best left behind. If that were true, we’d all be dead right now, for nothing grows from nowhere.

Mandela is largely to blame for this, with his insistence on letting bygones be bygones, which makes it difficult to speak meaningfully about his own experiences.

I highlight his actual experiences here in the hope of evoking some empathy for the man from those radicals who call him a sell-out.

First, we must add a dozen more years to those he spent in prison. In quick order, the apartheid government served Mandela with banning orders from December 1952 until his imprisonment in August 1962.

Now one can repeat the word “ban” and still leave some people numb or, as Jimmy Kruger said after Biko’s death, “it leaves me cold”.

But that would be underestimating how painful a banning order was to its victim.

Steve Biko admitted to this in a letter to Aelred Stubbs: “You know I am (so I think) a reasonably strong person, but quite often I find the going tough under the present restrictions.”

Mandela had said something similar: “It has not been easy for me during the past period to separate myself from my wife and children, to say goodbye to the good old days when, at the end of a strenuous day at an office, I could look forward to joining my family at the dinner table.

“This has been infinitely more difficult than serving a prison sentence. No man in his right senses would voluntarily choose such a life in preference to one of a normal, family, social life which exists in every civilised community.”

Yet he made such a choice. When his banning orders expired in 1961, Mandela was elected secretary of the All-in African Conference, which was the only organisation that remained after the ANC and PAC were banned in 1960.

With Robert Sobukwe in prison and Oliver Tambo in exile, Mandela emerged as the national spokesperson for the black world outside prison.

He left the country to visit