Everyone’s eager to cash in on Mandela, but at what cost to his legacy?
THE saga began last Friday when an email from the Graca Machel trust was sent out just before noon, condemning Mandela’s Last Years penned by former SANDF surgeon general Vejay Ramlakan and published by Penguin.
By Monday, the book had been recalled, sparking a social media frenzy among journalists – and others – to get their hands on a copy.
Why all the fuss? Why the reaction? After all, Penguin had always claimed Ramlakan had permission from the family.
“What about patient-doctor confidentiality?” asked the worthies. “Ramlakan could be jailed” screamed a headline on a Joburg daily, following the same thread. And, of course, they’re all correct.
Ramlakan could be jailed, theoretically, just like most of us could be jailed for breaking the sub judice rule with a 14-pound hammer day after day during the Oscar Pistorius trial. The truth is that these days the conventions that once seemed to hold fast no longer do; not in an age of instant information and instant gratification, aided and abetted by social media.
The public interest is no longer an abstract legal concept, but actually more the reality of what interests the public, with the net result that the bigger celebrity the less the protection, often aided and abetted by the celebrities themselves.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: cui bono (Latin for who gets the bucks).
Mandela is big bucks. He’s a brand that just got bigger in retirement and even now in death.
He’s always been, ever since the ANC took the decision to personalise the struggle against apartheid through the frame of his incarceration on Robben Island and his then-wife’s lonely courage, first in Brandfort and then back in Soweto.
He became an industry. His ghosted autobiography Long Walk to Freedom remains a publishing phenomenon and spawned tens of other books about him, from the surreal to the banal, including recipes from his prison cook. Just about anybody who’s ever come into contact with him has written a memoir: his Robben Island guard, the young police colonel who oversaw his protection, his personal assistant Zelda la Grange and now the military doctor who oversaw his final years, particularly as he drifted inexorably to death.
Each was slated for breaching confidences to make money and aggrandise themselves at his expense.
But they weren’t the only ones who cashed in on their proximity to the great man: his grandkids have been some of the worst. There have been wines, copper bangles bearing his signature (as opposed to his prison number), clothing, even a cheap line of locally made cellphones that went bust almost immediately afterwards and a thankfully short-lived reality TV show.
Then there was the art work scandal involving Madiba’s erstwhile lawyer Ismail Ayob in 2007. Mandela’s legal advisers sued Ayob in an exceptionally bitter battle for selling the art – effectively Mandela’s handprints accompanied by his signature – without his permission. They closed down the messy public battle with a legal settlement, but not before we’d all been informed of myriad family trusts set up for the kids, some empty, others with millions in funding from donors.
Almost 10 years later, his daughters used Ayob to sue the trust to get the money back.
But it’s not just the money, it’s also the influence, the cachet of being the inheritor of the mantle of the great man – and being able to leverage that to their own benefit.
There’s Winnie, the second wife, a Struggle icon in her own right but totally ignored by the world and eclipsed by him after the country’s liberation, and there’s Graça, the official widow. Then there are the children and, most importantly, the grandchildren.
The fault lines seem most apparent in times of domestic crisis, almost always at odds with one another – like eldest daughter Makaziwe becoming self-appointed spokesperson when Madiba was on his death bed, or grandson Mandla fighting a legal battle to exhume the remains of the Mandela ancestors and have them re-interred at the Mandela homestead at Qunu in the Eastern Cape. Mandela’s will, with its estimated assets of almost R46 million, was a perfect case in point.
This week a book was recalled.
A friend of mine who has actually read it – as opposed to everyone else scrabbling to get their hands on it – mused that maybe the real reason for the anger shown by members of the family isn’t about the great man’s medical condition at all, but rather the impossible position some of his relatives put the doctor in, motivated by their own selfish demands rather than any concern for their patriarch. We’ll never know. There can be no doubt someone senior in the family gave Ramlakan permission. There’s no doubt either that Penguin was happy enough with this, until the balloon went up and then it acted with unprecedented haste to recall a book that had already been on the shelves for almost 10 days.
The reality is that this won’t be the last bid to cash in on Mandela’s name, whether in good taste or bad. There are simply far too many outstretched hands grasping in a market that’s more than prepared to pay.
But at what price to his legacy?