LET’S HONOUR MADIBA WITH WORLD PEACE

THE UN General Assembly unveiled a statue of Madiba this week – a fitting tribute in this, the commemoration of the centenary of his birth.

But there was plenty of grousing that the statue does not look much like him.

The critics are right. There are far better statues of the great man.

The recent one in Cape Town at the City Hall commemorating the former president’s first speech as a free man on February 11, 1990, isn’t bad.

However, it’s nowhere near as good as the one outside Victor Verster prison or the bust outside Parliament.

Up here in Joburg even the colossal statue overlooking the shrine to consumerism that bears his name in Sandton is far better, but nothing beats the huge statue of him in the Union Gardens in Pretoria, arms outstretched to the world.

But then again, 24 years into our democracy, South Africa doesn’t much look like the country he led. For a start, we are still emerging from a dark age of selfishness and greed characterised by, but not limited to, the Zuma kleptocracy. It’s not just the me-first millennials that are the problem, there’s also the abject a-literacy of the “I didn’t struggle to be poor-ites” and “getover-apartheid-already” callousness of the privileged that together conspire to steadily suffocate the dream that once had those of us who were privileged to live through it, deeply in its thrall.

The race-preneuers and the historical revisionists have had a field day for the last 18 months, putting the boot into a dead man and his legacy – because he can’t defend himself.

Everyone else is too terrified to say anything that might swim against the instant zeitgeist that the thought commissars define every day on social media.

No history can be read without context – of a deeply fractured, deeply scared society with real inequalities and generationally entrenched hatreds and ignorance coming together through the unprecedented moral courage of a single man who had already lost the best part of his adult life to jail.

South Africa shocked the world because we didn’t start killing each other in an orgy of racial hatred. But then we shamed the world because Mandela and his administration reached out to the world as truly non-aligned leaders.

This week, the UN recognised just that when the general assembly set aside an entire day to debate his legacy.

There were many speakers, but Kumi Naidoo, the South African head of Amnesty International and the former head of Greenpeace, stood out.

He’s like Mandela in so many ways: he speaks truth to power, he sincerely cares for everything and everyone from penguins to refugees. He did it again in New York. He pithily reminded us of how we’d lost sight of humanity on the altar of sectarian interests, how those who have are blind to those who don’t. He could have been speaking about our South Africa today. Instead he was talking about the world.

Maybe when the world eventually comes right, that’ll be the time to give the UN a proper statue of Mandela.