Ramaphosa makes deals, but Mandela sold us the story
The political figure Cyril Ramaphosa most wants to emulate, he has often said, is Nelson Mandela. He aspires to govern by consensus, he says, not by diktat, and when it came to coaxing agreement from unlikely people, Mandela was the true master.
Such comparison is dangerous for Ramaphosa. Mandela was starkly different to him, and the juxtaposition shows up his limitations.
For one, Mandela often practised the principle of governing by consensus in the breach. Part of his genius was his ability to adapt. He was shapeshifting and pragmatic. One moment he would govern by consensus, the next as an aristocrat; it depended on what he thought was necessary. The most important decision Mandela made was to begin talking secretly to the apartheid government in the mid-1980s. He told nobody. He knew he would never get consensus, so he acted alone.
Ramaphosa never acts alone. Moving only once there is agreement is sacrosanct for him. He is wedded to a single way of exercising power in a way Mandela never was.
But there is a more revealing difference. Mandela delighted in telling anyone who would listen the story of his first day of school. He did not have the Western clothes required to attend classes and his father took a pair of his own riding breaches, cut them at the knee, and tied them around little Nelson’s waist with a rope. And so a young boy went forth into his future in his father’s clothes.
What Mandela shows in this story is his innate predilection for symbolic thinking. He thought in metaphors. The story is one of literally hundreds. And he took his taste for symbol and metaphor into public life. His gift was not for detail, nor process. It was to embody, in the image he chose to project, what he hiding wanted in people 1960 and to feel became about“the themselves and their times.
And so when he went into black pimpernel”, he took off his lawyer’s suits, grew a revolutionary’s beard and donned a trench coat. That image of him on the run was the most powerful image in black politics in the early 1960s; he understood that paying attention to that image was not some vain, superficial preoccupation; it was the heart of the matter.
Nearly a decade later, when he discovered that his wife, Winnie, had been jailed and would soon stand trial, he wrote a letter from prison, counselling her on how to confront her ordeal. What he offered her for inspiration was the trial of Jesus, not because he thought either he or she was a god, but because he understood the formidable symbolic power of martyrdom.
I offer these examples because the last few weeks of politics in SA have shown what a different leader Ramaphosa is. He is an enormously skilful negotiator. I was lucky enough to be a minute-taker at Codesa in 1992 and watched him run circles around his opposite numbers in the National Party. He also has an acute sense of reality, a quality that should never be underestimated in one who exercises authority; he is probably more aware than any other head of state in SA history of the limitations of his power.
But what Ramaphosa does not have is Mandela’s genius for symbolism. During the moral panic about violence earlier in September, he could offer only a stiff, uncomfortable persona. A leader skilled in the art of spectacle would have gathered these heightened feelings and turned them into something of his own making. He would have been there in Johannesburg’s CBD, on the ground, channelling the pain, embodying it.
Ramaphosa does not have the wherewithal. In his box of tricks there is cunning and patience, but not the artist’s capacity to make something new. Mandela had that in abundance. He used it to save us from ourselves.
Ramaphosa should take more care in claiming from whom he takes inspiration.