Shrine to the memory of a ‘secular saint’
Mandela 26 Leake Street Gallery, Waterloo ★★★
The name Nelson Mandela has a special ring to it. Gravedigger of apartheid, lifelong anti-racist campaigner; it’s often said that he’s the closest thing in the post-cold War era to a secular saint. And Mandela: The
Official Exhibition, based at a new gallery underneath railway arches in Waterloo, London does nothing to challenge that view.
Billing itself as a “journey through the life” of the South African leader, it’s more like a religious event. The nigh-150 artefacts are what the Catholic Church would term “second- class relics”: things that a saint has owned or touched. (Even the gallery itself seems fittingly like a crypt.)
That’s not to say that it doesn’t tell Mandela’s story diligently. The exhibition is subdivided into several sections, from his impoverished childhood in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape to his political activism, his 27-year incarceration on Robben Island, and his eventual release and ascent to the presidency.
It’s a smoothly linear story, and one that comes with the benefit of being globally known. The interest, then, depends on the props that a number of British and South African archives and trusts have brought together here.
The most starkly impressive are those from a vanished world. South Africa under apartheid is a society that those under 30 cannot remember, and those who are able might rather not. Forbidding signs declare
Slegs Blankes (Whites Only); a black
bench reserved for “Europeans” makes relaxation a privilege. The things that touched Mandela’s hands are, by their nature, trivial; they’re only here because they were his. The nguni cattle horns and ceremonial calabash are pieces of life in Mvezo and Mqhehekezweni, where Rolihlahla (rechristened “Nelson” at school) was raised.
But the exhibition is stronger when these artefacts conjure a system, not a single man. In the Robben Island section are the straw mats on which political prisoners slept, and protest posters in raging colours that decried their treatment from abroad. Mandela’s personal tennis racquet, amid all this, looks like a curio.
I’m sceptical of hagiographies. Their good intentions bleach the complex hues out of any human life, and Mandela had flaws like anyone else. He was unfaithful to his first wife Evelyn and walked out on her and his children. At work, Mandela’s soft spot for Castro and Gaddafi was an inconvenience for politicians in the West. And, after he became president, young activists criticised him for not returning land that had been stolen by whites. You’re deprived of reality when you’re told that a man was a saint, and the more you’re told it, the more the glossiness starts to nag.
That’s how Mandela: The Official Exhibition is. As apartheid is dismantled, Mandela enters his glorious retirement, and you feel like you’re leaving a shrine. The ANC were history’s rightful winners; apartheid was, as the opening film declares, “an evil system... that infected every arena of South African life”. I agree entirely, but these artefacts are less proofs of it than illustrations for those who already believe. Younger visitors will come here on school trips. Older ones will feel like they’re going to church.
Nelson Mandela: The Official Exhibition runs until April 8; tickets available from ticketmaster.co.uk