I forgive in the light of Madiba’s smile

A 9-YEAR-old boy once asked

Nelson Mandela how he would like to be remembered. He was part of an audience that had gathered to listen and pay their respects to a revered and much loved elder.

It wasn’t difficult to respond to Madiba’s gracious presence in our lives.

The purposeful way he redirected our adulation of him to the heart of the Struggle that had freed him and his comrades from prison and from the drudgery of exile: namely, the masses of the people organised in the constituent sectors of society.

And the “Madiba shuffle”, that pen-regop dance style of his, smiling away as he slow-grooved like an uncle – last one standing – at a happy wedding reception.

His sartorial style did not measure up to the standards desired by the purple-clothed episcopal from Klerksdorp, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who once told Madiba, “Your shirts look like pyjamas.”

The archbishop, in an interview years later, remembered how Madiba had replied: “He said, ‘Tss, who can listen to a man who wears a dress in public?”

In his response to the young boy Mandela placed his ego on the weighted scale of history: “Society must decide how they wish to remember me.”

A slight smile flitting across his face, Madiba added: “They might remember me as 90-year old pensioner looking for a job.”

He took umbrage at the tendency to elevate him to sainthood unless it was from the perspective that viewed “a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying”.

Mandela’s scathing rebuke of FW de Klerk after the latter’s speech at the first session of Codesa is indicative of the man in whose name we had marched demanding his release.

That Friday night at Codesa he spoke, in a voice smouldering with rage, “I am gravely concerned about the behaviour of Mr De Klerk today.”

De Klerk had lambasted the ANC in his address, “and in doing so”, charged Mandela, “he has been less than frank”.

“Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited, minority regime as his, has certain moral standards to uphold.”

Years later, former president FW de Klerk addressing world leaders in Sandton, expressed an opinion which ironically concurred with Mandela’s view of himself:

“I do not subscribe to the general hagiography surrounding Mandela. He was by no means the avuncular and saint-like figure so widely depicted today.”

The legacy of Mandela is an unfolding one and the judgment of what is presented as his failure – to achieve comprehensive economic freedom for the struggle communities of our cities and rural areas – is an indictment on all who rest in the shades of trees that others have planted.

When they say (of Madiba) when they say, when they say you sold us out I think of the places where it’s hard to be black, to be a child.

To live. And where they sing about you to remind themselves of what can be because of you.

I think of prisoners in the jails of the countries of the unfree and where the mention of your name is a shield and spear in the everyday struggle to breathe.

When they say, when they say you forgave all those whites, but you could not forgive Comrade Winnie, I name those who I can forgive because of the memory of your smile on the day you dragged freedom from the prisons, out of exile and on to the streets of everywhere where the blood of our martyrs, the fading sign of love still signal the price of freedom.

When they say, when they say all these things about you when your songs are seldom sung I think of Auntie Marie sitting in my kitchen after a life-time of farm labour.

Her bare feet too hard for shoes and her comment on the first photo she had seen of you of how beautiful you looked, how you looked like her and the glory of her smile at the thought of how she looked like you and I know when they say, when they say these things about you that time is longer than the truth of today.