Transition 116: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 1918–2013

By IU Press Journals

The 116th issue features essays, as well as some fiction and poetry, dedicated to the remembrance of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.

December 2014 marked a year since the passing of Nelson Mandela—a man who was as much myth as flesh and blood. Transition pays tribute to Mandela’s worldly attainments and to his otherworldly sainthood. Featuring remembrances from Wole Soyinka, Xolela Mangcu, Pierre de Vos, and Adam Habib, this issue assembles Mandela’s staunchest allies—for whom he approached saintliness—as well as his most entrenched critics. Other contributors consider the iconicity of Mandela—including his representations in films; the importance of boxing to his political career; his time studying with the revolutionary army in Algeria; his stance on children’s rights; and even his ill-fated trip to Miami. Whoever you think Mandela was—or wasn’t—this issue is the new required reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253018540

Book preview

IN MEMORIAM

FEW TRANSITION WRITERS could be said to have been more fearless, fiery, or intellectually curious than Ali Mazrui (1933–2014). A political theorist by training, Mazrui was one of Transition’s most frequent contributors and one of the magazine’s earliest associate editors. His contributions were always guaranteed to spark controversy. Most notably, his essay Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar, published in Transition 26 just months after Nkrumah was forced into exile, reads as a forensic report of failed leadership. It was hotly debated by political and literary luminaries in the pages of numerous Transition issues, in the days when Rajat Neogy delighted in publishing rowdy, no-holds-barred letters from readers. However, Mazrui’s interest could hardly be contained by politics alone, and he wrote on topics as diverse as heart transplants, the religious dimensions of suicide, and (in one of the most vivid personal battles to ever play out in the pages of Transition) why Wole Soyinka was wrong about nearly everything. In more recent years, in the wake of 9/11, Mazrui had risen to even greater prominence as a public intellectual who spoke eloquently in defense of Islam, against the absolutist claims of radicals on all sides. As Africa mourns the passing of a famous son, the world mourns the loss of a brave and creative mind. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un!

—The Editors

Nelson Mandela . . . ‘The True Electric State’ (detail). Acrylic on canvas. 4.2 × 4.2 meters. ©2013 Paul Blomkamp

Of Flesh and Blood

Alejandro de la Fuente

I AGREE, WE are not ready to let Mandela go. Not now. Not yet. Not after Michael Brown, the teenager from Ferguson, Missouri. Not after Trayvon Martin, the teenager from Miami Gardens, Florida. Not after Eric Garner, the cigarettes guy, of Staten Island, New York. There are many more.

We desperately need that which Mandela was uniquely capable of giving: hope. Many writers here agree—even when they agree on little else—that Mandela’s most important legacy was his ability to reach out across boundaries of race, culture, and class, to fabricate unusual moments of shared humanity, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Such humanity was not sustained in perfection (although it is tempting to flatten him into something devoid of life and sweat), but in the conviction that it is only through the lives, needs, and dreams of others that a person can fully be. As a dear friend of his once put it, his was a way of living for the freedom of others.

That dear friend needs no introduction. Not here, not in Transition, a magazine that published her work as early as 1965. As we prepared this special issue to honor Mandela, as we paused to reflect on his accomplishments and legacies, we learned of the death of Nadine Gordimer. The winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gordimer’s writing captured the anxieties, conflicts, and horrors of South African society under apartheid. Even if it wasn’t apartheid that made her a writer, as she once said, it is difficult to imagine her writings without apartheid. Several of her books were banned by the South African regime, which knew of her contacts with Mandela, whom she had met in 1964 during the Rivonia Trial. That’s the trial that sentenced him to life imprisonment, the trial that condemned him to immortality. To have lived one’s life at the same time, and in the same natal country, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a guidance and a privilege we South Africans shared. I also knew the privilege of becoming one of his friends, Gordimer wrote after Mandela’s death. Mandela: not a figure carved in stone but a tall man, of flesh and blood, whose suffering had made him not vengeful but still more human—even toward the people who had created the prison that was apartheid.

That tall man of flesh and blood was no saint. Nor was he universally adored, as some contributions to this issue make clear. He had critics. He had failings. Some of his public actions were polemical, perhaps even condemnable. We need to retain his great gestures of conciliation and inclusion—the cup of tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the Springboks jersey—but we also need to retain other aspects of his complex life. That life was not devoid of violence, as his training with the Algerian anticolonial forces demonstrates. Nor was he above polarization, his conciliatory demeanor notwithstanding. He was a friend to Muammar Qaddafi. He was a friend to Yasser Arafat. He was a friend to Fidel Castro. These friendships were rooted in gratefulness, but each of those friends meant enemies, people who felt betrayed or, worse, disregarded by Mandela. As if their pain did not matter. As if they did not deserve their own gestures of conciliation and human touch.

Mandela was almost seventy-two by the time he walked out of prison. And yet this tall man of flesh and blood found the energy to fight racism, hatred, poverty, disease, and intolerance. He bequeathed Africa with a precious gift, the rare democratic gesture of stepping down from office after one presidential term. He lowered his salary, in a place and age where office is frequently a shortcut to enrichment. His freedom he used, and used well, to enhance the freedom of others.

So my answer to Adam Habib’s question in this issue of how to say goodbye to a global icon is: we don’t. We have much to do, too many freedoms to enhance. And neither that we itself—nor the tasks that await us—can be conceived without Madiba.

The Dance Is Not Over

Wole Soyinka

INDEED, IT DOES not look like stopping soon. It does not look as if it will ever stop. Frankly I am not anxious that it should. I warned Nelson Mandela, even as I complained of being threatened by his inhuman generosity. No, not directly, but I do have it on record. Here it is, from the poem Your Logic Frightens Me.

Your bounty threatens me, Mandela, that taut

Drum skin of your heart on which our millions

Dance . . .

Living, the drum skin did not slacken. For twenty-seven years on Robben Island it did not, and now, migrated to the dwelling place of the ancestors, that drum skin refuses yet to sag. Will it ever? From the Arctic wastes of the Urals, to the southernmost tip of Australasia, the world beats and dances on that drumskin. So, what is it that incites and sustains this incessant evocation? We hope that the peace of the indulgent ancestors remains unbroken by this recent, irrepressible entrant to whom the entire world appears to serve as a devoted retinue, a stoic giant whose very absence threatens to redefine eternity. So be it. In this affair—and an affair it is in a very mortal sense—we mortals are not answerable to envious gods.

When he lay ill, battling mortality, his life-long friend and comrade pleaded with his countrymen, and indeed the world, saying, It is time to let him go. How wrong he was! How wrong he is. And why? Well, look around the world today and examine the pathetic contrast, the gallery of aliens who lay claim to the leadership of a continent. Given the abattoir of religious frenzy from which I have just emerged, I must be forgiven for succumbing to temptation and proposing a new word to distinguish the species of leaders with which the planet is cursed: I’ll call it bleedership. That is what comes to mind when I consider the ubiquitous species whose mission on the planet is not to lead, but to bleed a continent dry of its human, material, even spiritual resources, of which—in my estimation—freedom is the most innately experienced by most. Mandela was a warrior leader, but of that breed that is averse to bleedership. He proved it, and in the process, threw a challenge to the world.

Funeral of two comrade youth abducted and killed in the ‘Natal War.’ Mphophomeni, Howick. Photo by Cedric Nunn. ©1987 Cedric Nunn

The treachery of leadership is, of course, a universal curse, more so in some places than others. Cast your glance in the direction of Syria, Somalia, Central Africa and further away, most lately, the Ukraine. How else to describe a feudal move towards territorial theft by King Putin, an anachronistic gambit against a neighbor that just happens to be smaller and weaker? Such in-your-face provocations, designed to inaugurate new zones of avoidable hemorrhage, compel one to reach for contrasts in responsible neighborliness and ethical leadership. As long as comparisons between the real and the possible—not even ideal, but simply possible—are provoked into being, it becomes clear: the world is simply not yet ready to let Mandela go.

It is why—to speak the language of my stock of unabashed mythologists—we leave him suspended across that invisible space that I once named the Transitional Abyss. It is a cosmic realm through which, in Yoruba cosmology, the soul must pass on its journey from the living into the ancestral world, or from the world of the unborn into the world of the living. That liminal space, saturated with emanations from cosmic, inhuman energies, is a way station for those we call avatars, a birthing realm for new beings, rare species of humanity. Some have chosen to name Nelson Mandela a messiah come to earth via the prison gates. I come, however, from a culture where the pantheon expands effortlessly and takes life from new encounters, where godhead energy is neither static nor unitary but multiple, replenished daily by mortal makers of new histories, bearers of new visions and new designs—that Transitional Realm which I have now renamed, in my private mythology, Mandeland, the dwelling place of avatars.

When I was called upon to add my pennyworth to the tidal waves of eulogies after his death, I had only this pronouncement to make: The soul of Africa is departed, and there is nothing left miraculous in the whole wide world. Those who recall their Antony and Cleopatra know that there was nothing original about those lines. The only arresting aspect was a personal one—perhaps the spontaneity with which my mind flew to such a passage which, in the original, reads, The crown o’ the earth doth melt . . . / And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon. As you see, one can only try, but there is only one Shakespeare, just as there is only one Mandela!

The soul of Africa is departed, and there is nothing left miraculous in the whole wide world.

Only later, in retrospect, did that play strike me as being singularly appropriate as Source. The entire wide world has indulged in a love affair with the person called Madiba, including those who were not born at the time of the Rivonia Trials, or those who never heard of a bearded revolutionary named Fidel Castro and his equally legendary defense—La historia me absolverá, History will absolve me. It is within that ancient tradition—of Martin Luther, his eponymous civil rights leader, King, and others—that Mandela’s Rivonia affirmation belongs, and continues to challenge the world. Yet there is a critical difference among the followers of that path. That difference is caught, I think, in the afterthought that followed my spontaneous recourse to Cleopatra’s lines. I recognize it, very simply, as the phenomenon of love. You need only compare Mandela’s post-apartheid disposition with Castro’s post-victory disposal of Batista’s henchmen.

Antony and Cleopatra—with some competition here and there—is often referred to as the greatest love story the world has ever known. Perhaps because it is a love story with a historic sweep, a grandeur that is missing from, for instance, one of its major rivals, Romeo and Juliet. The love we are speaking of, however, is of utterly different attributes from either, or indeed from the many dramatic essays on that rapture—Love—to which humanity is so prone. Madiba’s is marked by an abnormal largesse—call it universal compassion. This is what makes it possible for the world to reciprocate, find a niche within it, and remain enamored with a legend, a return that Nelson Mandela himself recognized and respected, though I remain convinced that it did eventually become a burden from which he had to be protected. For me, early and fortuitous evidence of his resignation to this life burden took place shortly after his release, when he traveled to Jamaica. So, all I have done once again is to borrow words—this time, Mandela’s—from a seemingly insignificant incident that was, however, symbolic of his fate.

As the officials, security, and hosts flapped around like stranded fish, he simply gave his broad smile and said, Don’t worry. It was simply excess love.

By one of those remarkable accidents of timing, I was in Jamaica at the time. Nelson Mandela arrived for a civic reception. Even the so-called dons, those murderous garrison lords of Jamaican criminal turfs, had declared a total truce, and were even reportedly present at the event, with all their lieutenants. The tumult of that afternoon can be imagined. Eventually, even Jamaica’s irrepressible ardor died down. Madiba mounted the podium, looked to one side, then the other, reaching instinctively for his prepared speech. I have forgotten some of the details of that incident, Mandela’s first visit to the Caribbean, but the core event was this: on this special outing, Mandela was robbed. The folder containing his speech, supposedly kept by one of his aides, had vanished. In the melee that submerged him and his guards between the car and the venue, the world’s Number One ex-prisoner had been dispossessed. It all fitted in. Dispossessed of land for centuries, dispossessed of freedom for a generation, it was a fitting coda that he should be dispossessed of his words but, this time among his own people—in the diaspora—and also through, in his own submission, a crime of love.

For this was precisely Nelson Mandela’s response to that act of—to you and me, perhaps—violation. Certainly, an inhospitable act. Inconsiderate, if not downright disrespectful. As the officials, security, and hosts flapped around like stranded fish, wondering what to do, he simply gave his broad smile and said, Don’t worry. It was simply excess love. And he proceeded to deliver an impromptu address.

The world’s love is expressed in many different ways. Purloining an essential, active ‘souvenir’—as opposed to beard shavings, for instance—may seem unkind and thoughtless but, well, love does different things to different people in different ways. Many simply love to be in love with a legend. They do not wish to be left high and dry while the rest of the world is immersed in waves of a universal love fest. Others simply wish to bask in the glow of a phenomenon, a rarity that seems unlikely to be manifested ever again in their lifetime. For a vast majority, however, the adulation goes deeper, much deeper, and—ironically—simpler. I believe that, even among those who have never undergone the condition of servitude—in whatever form—and perhaps cannot even empathize with those who have, there is an innate recognition of a basic constituent of what we call humanity. I mentioned the word earlier; it is known quite simply as Freedom. That ineradicable human right to self-volition. Suppressed, even sometimes across generations—sometimes, as we have learnt to learn, even across centuries—it remains embedded somewhere in the recesses of the human genome, dormant, obscured by the seeming acceptance of a condition of subservience. Of external imposition. One day, however, from an unrecognizable source, from a remote nowhere of circumstance, often not immediately traceable to source, it erupts.

Inkatha Freedom Party members bury their dead in the Natal War. Midlands. Photo by Cedric Nunn. ©1987 Cedric Nunn

Every revolution, every human uprising, is subject to objective analysis. Even before it happens, the iniquitous material circumstances of society, disparities in material possessions, privileges, and opportunities make it possible to predict its coming eruption. Afterwards, there is the post-facto analysis. Our most recent example is the so-named Arab Spring that began in Africa’s Maghreb region and swept away decades of feudal dictatorship that, to all appearances, had become enshrined as a way of life for life. But suddenly it happens. We are left to cite history, economics, statistics—these can even be transmitted in the language of quantification. There is, however, a less palpable trigger that is often understated, a subjective product of objective conditions, an enabling factor in origin or intensity, one that is often dismissed as an irrelevant factor, regarded as mushy, undialectical, almost theological (I hinted earlier at spiritual) in apprehension, much given to sloganeering. That innate particle of existence is Freedom. Undiluted. Unqualified. Freedom and the dignity that comes with it. Everyone understands what that is—its deprivation creates a tension—even within the individual, but most commonly between the individual and the external world, be that externality known as family, clan, community, state or nation, religion, creative self-expression, Freedom as sought even from the factory floor drudgery for an absentee boss. It represents one end of a historic axis, mostly an eternal one, with Bondage at one end and Freedom at the other.

Prayer service at the scene of a massacre in which twelve people were gunned down. KwaMakhuta, KwaZulu/Natal. Photo by Cedric Nunn. ©1987 Cedric Nunn

On that axis—Control and Resistance—spins the history of humanity. Take the notorious instance of slavery. Economic factors are rightly cited as the basis of the slave trade, resulting in its prolonged, stubborn retention, just as that very factor also played a role in its abolition. Nonetheless, the definition of that inhuman condition called bondage or servitude is what is experienced by the victim: the absence of freedom. And that—let us be clear about this—is the ultimate factor in social revolt, the triggering mechanism that detonates the critical mass of individual or communal resentment. This, I am persuaded, is what is subconsciously absorbed into the minds and emotions of millions as they watch Nelson Mandela (turned protagonist of Universal Man), namely, a recognition that each human entity remains incomplete without the felt essence of Freedom, that one’s humanity is a sham without the self-realization that Freedom confers. Thus, both through objective history and subjective temperament, Mandela stood tall as the very expression of the innermost craving of each and every one of us. Nearly three decades’ loss of freedom in pursuit of, and in defense of, that core of human validation. It is thus an affair of self-love that derives from inner recognition, from inner-directed empathy. It becomes infectious, communally embraced, then conferred, bestowed, projected unto a deserving protagonist for our innermost craving. This is how the figures of mythology come to exist, the figures of rebellion against supremacy, even seeming-omnipotence. The Promethean in each of us, the Ogun essence in whatever guise, Loki in defiance of Thor.

One of my favorite stories from Nigeria’s struggle against dictatorship under the murderous regime of General Sani Abacha was enacted on the podium of the United Nations. I have cited it on a few occasions but that story has a very special relevance to this occasion, so forgive me if you’ve heard it before. The nation’s representative to the UN