Do something for others in homage to ‘saint’ Mandela

WHAT is Nelson Mandela to you? Is he a tea towel, a wall clock? Is he a T-shirt, a bangle? Is he a sell out? Is he a saint?

For many South Africans, he’s all of this and more: a favourite mug, a blanket, a wall hanging, even a bedside book (in different iterations).

For me, it’s simple. He’s a saint, a secular one to be sure, but a saint nonetheless.

Unlike the Catholic variants, he might not have brought anyone back from the dead or healed disease, but he certainly brought about miracles.

The first one was on the night of April 10, 1993, Easter Saturday. Chris Hani had been shot dead that morning at his home in Boksburg. As the news spread, tempers flared. But that night, Mandela spoke on SABC – not President FW de Klerk – and pulled the country back from the abyss.

With the passage of time, we often forget just how long we spent teetering on the rim of that pit of hell: Boipatong, Mmabatho, Bhisho. We airbrush the Shell House massacre, the last bloody writhing of the white right wing, and the deadly bomb blasts throughout the Joburg CBD, and even the erstwhile Jan Smuts International Airport, as the fractured nation prepared to go to the polls for the first time as one on April 27, 1994.

We forget the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal. The blood feuds masquerading as politics, the desperate underhanded bids to hold on to power at any cost, people slain and left to rot in the undergrowth, corpses driven over by police Casspirs.

Instead, we were gifted the miracle of the Rainbow Nation and the space 20 years later to deride it as “rainbowism” and sneer at its adherents, all deep into middleage and more than a little confused at how it all curdled.

We can do this because of a myopia that lets kids grow up in classrooms not knowing that their grandparents had to carry the dompas, that they couldn’t do certain jobs because of the colour of their skin – or that they had to be educated a certain way that would limit their prospects, in a language that was only spoken in the white south of the continent.

It’s the same insularity that allows us (and the world) to ignore the fact 1 million people were slain in 100 days in Rwanda – at the same time we were emerging from our storm into the rainbow; starting on April 6 and ending in mid-July 1994. The carnage was so bad, so widespread, dogs ate the flesh of their dead owners, corpses decayed in the hills and decomposed in communal cesspits undiscovered for years afterwards.

That’s the reality of what awaited us. That was our race war.

Except it wasn’t, because Mandela wouldn’t let it happen.

I’ve often wondered what it was that made him so special, just why he’s been lionised and commercialised to the unparalleled extent that he has been – and why his death in December 2013, even though we had all been preparing for it for years, still took us by surprise and left us feeling so bereft.

It wasn’t simply because he was in jail for his beliefs, laudable though they were. Robert Mugabe was in jail for 10 years (and then spent almost 40 reducing his country to ruins).

In fact, just about every African leader of a freedom struggle would have been imprisoned at one stage or another by the colonial authorities.

Mandela was actually jailed for longer than all of them, but the key thing is how he behaved when he got out: He didn’t want revenge. On the contrary, he had an ideal to build a brand new nation, but more than that, for a man who had been so deprived of creature comforts, he was almost anti-materialistic, living a personal life that bordered on asceticism.

He gave away things, he didn’t take. He gave away part of his salary to start a children’s fund, he gave away his time, he gave away his right to hate.

In turn, he received. The world opened its wallet, doors were opened in capitals across the globe. He was revered.

The contrast could not be starker today. What promised to be a Garden of Eden looks more like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and that’s without reading the newspapers. Self-enrichment, greed, hatred and devil-take-the-hindmost have displaced selflessness, love, ubuntu and the greater lived belief of ke e: xarra ke (Diverse People Unite).

In this, our third decade of democracy, we’ve developed new words to replace disparaged concepts like Rainbow Nation, Masakhane, ayoba and Ke Nako; now we’ve got tenderpreneurs, fire pools, blessers and Penny Sparrow.

On Monday, let’s roll up our sleeves and do something for others, not for reward or honour, but because if ever there was a need for a Mandela Day to pay homage to the man and remind ourselves of what we are squandering, then July 18, 2016 is it.