‘I have given dignity to the white man. There is no dignity in the oppressor’
A Complete Man | Bob Geldof recalls the rare human being whose manners were those of an Edwardian gentleman
WHEN someone you have known or loved dies, there seems to occur a great tearing in the fabric of the world. A weird emptiness opens for a moment and then the impatient air rushes in quickly to fill the momentary vacuum. Soon, life picks up its rhythms again and you learn to live with sad absence.
What if that tearing is not directly personal, not one’s immediate own? What if the great absence is felt by everybody of the world as seemingly personal, as everyone’s own? What if the hole left behind cannot be filled? What if the shape of the person is too huge, so important to our sense of what it is to be correctly human?
That is where we now stand with Nelson Mandela’s death. History stops, kneels and bows its head. His like is rare in all of human history. There will be others, but not for a long, long time — and certainly not in our lifetime. But we did live with him.
We could see what humans could be even if we failed so utterly to live up to his impossible example. We have been privileged to have known such a man.
Unbelievably for me — the irreverent boy from Dun Laoghaire — I did know this giant. Possibly, he was a friend. I think so. The world will go to the funeral, but I do not want to. I will stay at home and look at my pictures of Madiba with the children, or the band, or making me listen to something I should know and something that was always worth listening to.
He was a complete man. He adored children. They played around him. He would scoop them up, plonk them on his knee, make them laugh. He would be in heaven and they would be shouting and laughing with him. I have pictures of that with my kids. Can you imagine!
He was a dandy. He loved his clothes and particularly those mad “Mandela” shirts that no one else could get away with wearing, but that looked great on him. He loved women. He was quite definitely, overtly and obviously a ladies’ man. He flirted, followed them with his eyes, made them laugh, but his manners were those of the impeccable Edwardian gentleman. He was elegant and never vulgar or presumptuous.
He understood and treated women as equals and engaged in as meaningful conversation with women as he did with men.
Conversation was fluent: deep political analysis and discussion backed by a penetrating psychological curiosity of the personalities behind the political decisions. He would listen intently as much as he talked. He would argue strenuously for his views and once, when I would not give way, said sarcastically and with a touch of irritation: “I will bow to your greater knowledge in this area.”
As we happened to be talking about events in Ireland that occurred while he was imprisoned, I agreed that he should.
He was obsessed by sport, having been a boxer, among other things. He had a razor-sharp mind, being Africa’s — not South Africa’s but Africa’s — first black lawyer. He was beyond courageous, a revolutionary, someone whose principles were so intense that he was prepared to die for what he believed in.
“Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” Yeats reminds us in his great poem Easter 1916. The true miracle of Nelson Mandela is that it did not: 27 years of incarceration but he did not break and, most remarkably of all, his soul did not harden.
Rather, his great intellectual discipline sought to understand the mind of his tormentor. He learnt his language, studied his history and even came to appreciate his literature.
In that cell on Robben Island, he endured the slights and humiliations of 27 long years. But now he knew his enemy. As he endured, they withered.
Churchill preached “magnanimity in victory”, but who could have imagined the humility, dignity and forgiveness that Mandela displayed to his oppressors on his final total success?
In private, he pitied them. He knew precisely what he was doing. One visitor said: “Mr President, you have given great dignity to the black people.” Madiba replied instantly (and you can hear the inimitable cadence in his reply): “No, young man, you are wrong. I have given dignity to the white man. There is no dignity in the oppressor.” — © The Daily Telegraph, London