Tragedy is the motor that drives change

WRITING a biography of any individual means virtually living with that person for the duration of your project. You move from the realm of abstract theory to the actual experiences of individual human beings.

Biography thus insists on phenomenological truth in a way that other genres of writing rarely do.

I have spent every day of the past year thinking, reading and writing about Nelson Mandela.

I choke up reading about the pain and suffering that Mandela went through, and just wonder how university students who have known only freedom could possibly call him a sell-out.

The problem lies with the way Mandela’s story is told, which is to say, as a fable whose credibility diminishes with every repetition.

Over time, people, especially those born long after apartheid ended, become inured to the pain of his experience.

The fable also enrages those for whom little has changed.

If Mandela was so great, how come they still live in poverty, they ask.

Good biography must go beyond fables and tell us the full story of the hero, and why he was not able to deliver all that we expected.

The first thing we will discover from the vast literature on heroes is that they always fail. In fact, Britain and several African countries. Given his experience of persecution and the likelihood of imprisonment he might have been tempted to stay outside.

He explained his choice: “I am prepared to pay the penalty even though I know how bitter and desperate the situation is of an African in the prisons of this country. I have been in these prisons and I know how gross the discrimination is, even behind the prison walls, against Africans.”

He was to experience that brutality on Robben Island.

His former prison warder, Christo Brand, has described as “intentional sadism” the cruelty on Robben Island.

These middle-aged, respectable men were stripped naked by Afrikaners young enough to be their sons. These middle-aged respectable men were made to stand naked in the rain as punishment.

Mandela said the physical pain was bearable but not his personal losses: “I lost my mother only 10 months ago. On May 12, my wife was detained indefinitely under the terrorist act (sic), leaving behind small children as virtual orphans, and now my eldest son is gone, never to return.”

He remembers watching his mother leave the island “and somehow the thought flashed through my mind that I had seen her for the last time”.

But nothing could be likened to the death of his son – “suddenly my heart seemed to have stopped beating and the warm blood that had flowed freely in my veins for 51 years froze into ice. For some time, I could neither think nor talk and my strength appeared to be draining out. Eventually I found my way back to my cell with a heavy load on my shoulders, in the last place where a man stricken with sorrow should be.”

The government refused to grant him permission to go bury his child, just as they had done with his request to bury his mother: “Though I had never hoped to succeed, my heart bled when I finally realised that I could not be present at the graveside – the one moment a parent would never like to miss.”

He would later say those experiences “eat too deeply into one’s being, into one’s soul”.

And yet he refused offers of release – first by the Transkei homeland leader and relative Kaizer Matanzima, then by PW Botha, on the condition that he renounce violence.

Mandela was of course not the only person to suffer like this, and it is wrong to focus on just his pain. Heroes are always part of a collective.

But not even as a member of a collective would Mandela deserve the kind of denigration he has received at the hands of the people who are supposed to record our history, and do so truthfully.

Whether it is Steve Biko or Robert Sobukwe or Mandela, the falsification and denigration of our heroes raises a serious question for black scholars in particular: what will decolonisation look like in the era of fake news?

• Mangcu is a professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town.