We should learn from the example of the great man
WHAT do you write that has not been written since President Jacob Zuma told the nation that our beloved Nelson Mandela has departed?
What do you say that has not been said save to draw from one’s own memories and moments with Mandela.
Paying homage to his predecessors after prison — he cast his vote in Ohlange, a school built by first ANC president John Langalibalele Dube in 1994 — appeared high on Mandela’s priority list.
Our paths first crossed in KwaDukuza at the home of Chief Albert Luthuli, the first African recipient of the Nobel Peace prize and eighth president of the ANC.
As a qualified graduate from the university of toyi-toying with a PhD in stone-throwing, I found myself thrust as one of the marshals cor- doning off the house while izinkokheli (the leaders) chewed some cud inside the living room.
Coming out of Luthuli’s house Madiba gave his famous “how are you” while shaking my hand, saying “you must be a boxer”. My strong suspicion is seeing me now, he would have said you should be a wrestler.
He was angelic and I was ecstatic. Batho — my late grandfather whose three sons and nephew had joined uMkhonto weSizwe in exile — never tired of shaking the hand that shook the hand of Madiba, the first MK commander.
The second encounter occurred at Oribi airport in Maritzburg. Our broadcast journalism lecturer took a group of her students to meet Madiba.
He strode with grace across the room to meet and greet. Pride swelled my chest. Tears welled my sockets as it hit me that before my eyes stood a colossal man who in months will swap his apartheid prisoner tag for the people’s president title. He was charismatic and I was orgasmic.
But the more poignant, profound and heartstrings-tugging moment with Madiba was in Switzerland in Zurich on May 15 2004.
After the vertically challenged father of the football chapel Sepp Blatter pronounced “Sous Africa” as 2010 hosts, the raucous sound of the vuvuzelas reverberated across the room.
Clutching at the trophy like a young boy does a teddy bear at bedtime, Madiba said: “I feel like a boy of 15.” Desmond Tutu had promised each Fifa executive mem- ber a first-class ticket to heaven if they voted for SA. His friend Madiba once said when he gets to heaven he will look for the nearest branch of the ANC.
While he joins Chris Hani, who was killed in 1993, and Walter Sisulu, who died in 2003, in the after-life, Mandela gave us lots of lessons.
The primary one for those of us who worship on the altar of sport was that Mandela set his sails on using sport as a powerful weapon for social cohesion.
He stood against a tide of black Africans impatient to see the back of the Springbok insignia, which the majority saw as the emblem of oppression.
The people wanted it dumped in the dustbin of all things apartheid. He wanted it to be preserved for all things reconciliation.
For him sport was not only entertainment but a platform on which to practice an education in forgiveness.
If education is the key to liberation, the question we should ask ourselves is: have we done justice to living Mandela’s ideals of inclusion, especially in the sport where blacks were previously good enough to be groundsmen and garbage collectors after the games.
We should not shy away from taking stock and asking ourselves these hard questions.
We can’t paper over the cracks. We can’t pretend things are hunkydory when they’re not. Burying our heads in the sand will only serve as a smack on Mandela’s face.
Let us use sport as a catalyst for change, an ideal for which Mandela — to paraphrase the man himself— was prepared to die.
We should learn from his example and ensure that the national teams that were the exclusive preserve of a few elite are well and truly reflective of the demographics of the country.