The unique, warm voice of reason

HEARING the recorded voice of the dead is one of the most raw moments of grief. A voice transmits its owner’s spirit, encodes the shape of the heart, in a way that a face never quite can. So a photograph on your mantelpiece is a comfort — but listen to the cellphone voicemail message of your dead kin and it feels like a blow to the stomach.

Slowly, the dead voice leaves your memory, unless you keep listening to it. That is another kind of loss carrying another flavour of pain.

It will not happen to us — we have no shortage of Madiba’s words on tape, and the best of them will be replayed and sampled for centuries.

But that is no consolation right now.

Remember his first word to the world on the day of his release? A summer dusk was creeping over the Grand Parade and the massed crowd were nearing desperation. Four hours had passed since we had gathered.

Cyril Ramaphosa stood at his shoulder on the steps of the city hall, holding the microphone to his mouth, and quietly reminded Madiba to begin his speech with a struggle salute.

From the mouth of the myth came a 1962-vintage “Amandla”— short and teacherly. The power of the reply fortified his second salute. Then he warmed up, indulging in a long “uuuuuu” in “Mayibuye”.

So that was the voice. It was not fiery, or booming, or exultant. It was oddly constrained and had a peculiar timbre: high and slightly nasal, projected from the top of the throat, but still fatherly in its unerring gravitas. Mandela mixed the striding, chiming metre of Xhosa royal oratory with the meticulous precision of courtroom rhetoric. No rush, ever.

It was often a warm voice, but it was capable of sudden cold fronts — remember those withering rebukes to FW de Klerk during the tensest episodes of the Codesa negotiations?

And it was a comical voice: grist for a million adoring mimics, nearly all of them direly inaccurate.

His accent was funny because it was so endearingly old-school and because its vaulting cadences and emphases gave it an oddly Oriental flavour.

He was no demagogue and not one of the great orators, but he knew of the dramatic pause. The longest example — lasting 27 years — was imposed on him. But even after walking free, Madiba kept silence close by his side. He deployed countless pauses between words and clauses to make sure we understood — to

Mandela mixed the striding, chiming metre of Xhosa royal oratory with the precision of courtroom rhetoric

pace out the route to nationhood. Many of his greatest “words” were wordless gestures: the loving smile, the disarming embrace, the raised fist of triumph.

At the Grand Parade, he said something beautiful. Having thanked the people for their sacrifices, he made an offering in return: “I therefore place . . . the remaining years of my life in your hands.”

At that point, there was every chance he would be slain within days. As it happened, he placed 24 years in our hands.

We have no cause to feel so robbed. But, hell, we do.

One comfort we might give each other is to start communicating in his style and in his honour — gently and patiently, without fear of silence.