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shown that it is preferable when oppression is bad. What is really wrong
with anger, even if another attractive way of conducting a revolution can
be found?
In response to this imagined challenge, Gandhi and King repeat-
edly turn to religious metaphysics, giving us accounts of divine love.23
Such metaphysical accounts were and are deeply appealing to those who
hold one of the religious views in question, but they seem insufficient
to answer our philosophical questions, and insufficient, too, to persuade
citizens in a pluralistic society. In Mandela we get something more.
IV. Mandela’s Strange Generosity
In Mandela’s writings we find not a systematic theory of non- anger, but
a self- aware human being of remarkable insight. I shall construct his
responses into a quasi- theory, and I shall note the likely influence of Stoic theories on his personal development. But it is important to observe that
in so doing I add nothing: I just point to the structures already latent in
his thought and conduct.
I have argued that anger leads down two paths, each of which has
an unattractive error built into it. Either anger’s wish for ill to befall the wrongdoer is pointless, since payback does no good for the important
elements of human flourishing that have been damaged, or it remains
focused on relative status, in which case it may possibly succeed in its
aim (relative abasement), but the aim itself is singularly unworthy. I shall
now argue that Mandela instinctively comes to the same conclusion, in
a way shaped by his long period of self- examination, which included
daily introspective meditation (LW 200– 212), during twenty- seven years
in prison, a time that he says was extremely productive in meditating
about anger.
What did Mandela realize, in those long hours of what he calls
“conversations with myself,” alluding to the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, a text that was almost certainly brought to Robben Island by
Ahmed Kathrada, and read by other prisoners?24 First, he recognizes
that obsession with status is unworthy, and thus refuses to go down that
road. (Perhaps his royal origins helped him, relieving anxiety.) He never
fussed about whether a particular role or activity would be “beneath”
him. Through introspection, he pruned from his responses any hint of
status- anxiety, even when it would have been defensible and natural.
Thus, when a new prisoner on Robben Island was asked to clean the
toilet bucket for another prisoner who had had to leave for Cape Town
at 5:00 a.m., before buckets could be emptied, the new man objected,
saying that he would never empty the bucket of another man. Mandela
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227
intervened. “So then I cleaned it for him because it meant nothing for me;
I cleaned my bucket every day and I had no problem, you see, in clean-
ing the bucket of another” (C 149; the transcript reports that Mandela
chuckled telling this story). Later on, he showed none of the reluctance
about the Afrikaans language that bitter and angry black revolutionar-
ies often evinced. So far was he from thinking it beneath him to speak
Afrikaans that he took a course in the language while in prison and took
advantage of every opportunity to converse in Afrikaans, for example
with the warders (Inv 28)— having no sense that this was giving them
a status victory, and thinking only of future utility and present respect.
He repeatedly told his fellow prisoners that it was important to learn
Afrikaans and Afrikaner history, in order to understand how their oppo-
nents think: for the time for negotiation would come sooner or later.25
Writing to Winnie from prison in 1975, he says that most people focus
wrongly on status: instead, they should focus on their own inner devel-
opment (C vii).
Mandela knew, however, that most people did worry a lot about
status. Leadership, for him, meant patiently training your capacities as
an athlete trains, and one capacity he constantly trained was the ability to
understand how other people think (Inv 138). He therefore understood
that to disarm resistance you needed to disarm anxiety first, and that
this would never be accomplished by expressions of anger or bitterness,
but only by courtesy and respect for the other’s dignity. The key to good
relations with warders— often burdened by class anxiety— was “respect,
ordinary respect” (Inv 28). When his lawyer arrived on Robben Island
during Mandela’s first year there, Mandela made a point of introduc-
ing the attorney to the warders, saying, “George, I’m sorry, I have not
introduced you to my guard of honor.” He then introduced each warder
by name. The attorney remembers that “The guards were so stunned
that they actually behaved like a guard of honor, each respectfully shak-
ing my hand” (Inv 29– 30). He was told by one warder that the warders
don’t even like to talk to one another because they “hate their status”
(219). Mandela’s reaction was to get to know the man’s story: he was
brought up in an orphanage, and never knew his parents. Mandela
concludes, “The fact that they had no parents, no parental love, and his
bitterness, to me was due to that. And I respected the chap very much
because he was a self- made chap, yes. And he was independent and he
was studying” (219).
So the status path of anger was not only a path that Mandela care-
fully eschewed, but also one that he understood with empathy and thus
deftly undermined.
As for the wish for payback, Mandela understood it very well, and
felt it in his own life. He recalls incidents that made him extremely angry.
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“This injustice rankled,” he says of an early incident at Fort Hare school
(LW 62). Moreover, anger was not just a constant possibility, it was at one
time a crucial motivation for deciding on a political career:
I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth,
but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand
indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced
in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that
imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which
I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my
people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not
do otherwise. (LW 109)
But he recognized, he tells us, that payback simply doesn’t get you any-
where. Anger is human, and we can see why wrongdoing might produce
it— but if we ponder the sheer futility of the payback wish, and if we
actually want good for ourselves and others, we quickly discover that
non- anger and a generous disposition are far more useful.
As he tells his own story, the early roots of these attitudes were
taught to him in tribal meetings, where the regent listened calmly to
each person’s opinion, and respect was shown to each (LW 25). Stories of
heroes of former times stressed their “generosity and humility” (LW 26).
Whether this is strictly veridical or a reconstruction of African traditions
suited to the present and future is of course unclear; what is important is
the message for the living.26
Mandela was no saint, and his tendency to anger was a constant
problem with which he wrestled. As he records, much of his introspec-
tive meditation in prison focused on his tendency to anger in the form
of a payback wish. Thus on one occasion he concluded that he had spo-
ken too sharply to one of the warders, and he apologizes (C 219). The
deliberate choice to frame his conversations as analogous to Marcus
Aurelius’s Meditations shows a determined self- watchfulness, which may have been directly modeled on Stoic sources, although his ideas also have
deep connections with the African concept of ubuntu.27 (By contrast, he never reports trying to get rid of disappointment and grief, and indeed
he always acknowledges such experiences forthrightly, although he also
emphasizes that it is important not to lose hope.) Repeatedly he draws
attention to the importance of systematic self- inspection. In a letter to
Winnie, then in prison, from his own prison in 1975, he writes (encour-
aging her to adopt this same meditative discipline): “The cell is an ideal
place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the
process of your own mind and feelings” (C vii).
Notice that even in the early experiences of anger that Mandela identi-
fies as formative, the forward- looking predominates. He wants to change
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the system and to liberate his people, not to inflict pain or bad conditions
on others. So his early anger, while it seems to be genuine anger and
not Transition- Anger, still heads very rapidly toward the Transition. And
even that anger was carefully pruned away through prison meditations.
In general: Mandela never seems to have had the thought that mak-
ing white South Africans suffer or inflicting on them any form of payback
would be of the slightest interest. As he saw it, the goal is to change the
system; but that would very likely require the cooperation of whites, and
would at the very least be unstable and continually threatened without
white support. Albie Sachs, an important (white) member of the freedom
movement, and later one of the founding justices of the South African
Constitutional Court, says that they always felt that they were strug-
gling for the positive goal of political equality, a goal that in principle
included all.28
Non- retributive attitudes, in Mandela’s view, are particularly cru-
cial for the person who is the fiduciary of a nation. A responsible leader
has to be a pragmatist, and anger is incompatible with forward- looking
pragmatism. It simply gets in the way. A good leader must move to the
Transition as rapidly as possible, and perhaps for much of his life just
stay there, expressing and even feeling Transition- Anger and disappoint-
ment, but leaving genuine anger behind.
A good summary of Mandela’s approach can be found in a little par-
able he told to his interviewer Richard Stengel, as one he had previously
used with his followers:
I told the incident … of an argument between the sun and the
wind, that the sun said, “I’m stronger than you are” and the wind
says, “No, I’m stronger than you are.” And they decided, there-
fore, to test their strength with a traveller … who was wearing a
blanket. And they agreed that the one who would succeed in get-
ting the traveller to get rid of his blanket would be the stronger.
So the wind started. It started blowing and the harder it blew, the tighter the traveller pulled the blanket around his body. And the
wind blew and blew but it could not get him to discard the blan-
ket. And, as I said, the harder the wind blew, the tighter the visitor tried to hold the blanket around his body. And the wind eventually gave up. Then the sun started with its rays, very mild, and
they increased in strength and as they increased … the traveller
felt that the blanket was unnecessary because the blanket is for
warmth. And so he decided to relax it, to loosen it, but the rays
of the sun became stronger and stronger and eventually he threw
it away. So by a gentle method it was possible to get the travel-
ler to discard his blanket. And this is the parable that through
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peace you will be able to convert, you see, the most determined
people … and that is the method we should follow. (C 237– 38)
Significantly, Mandela frames the entire question in forward- looking
pragmatic terms, as a question of getting the other party to do what you
want. He then shows that this task is much more feasible if you can get
the other party to work with you rather than against you. Progress is
impeded by the other party’s defensiveness and anxious self- protection.
Anger, consequently, does nothing to move matters forward: it just
increases the other party’s anxiety and self- defensiveness. A gentle and
cheerful approach, by contrast, can gradually weaken defenses until the
whole idea of self- defense is given up.
Mandela, of course, was neither naïve nor so ideological as to refuse
reality: thus we would never find him proposing to drop armed resis-
tance to Hitler or to try converting him by charm. His parable is offered
in a particular context, that of the ending of a sometimes violent libera-
tion struggle, with people on the other side many of whom are genuine
patriots, wishing the future good of the nation. He insisted from the start
of his career that nonviolence should be used only strategically. Still,
behind the strategic resort to violence was always a view of people that
was Transitional, focused not on payback but on the creation of a shared
future.
So Mandela has a reply ready for the imaginary opponent who says
that the oppositional payback mentality is appropriate and a fine alterna-
tive to non- anger. It is that payback just doesn’t do any good. That way
of approaching his opponents would have set back the cause for which
he was fighting. He readily accepts the criticism that his way of seeing
opponents is only one option, not dictated by morality: so he advances a
weaker claim than I do. His reply is that his way works:
stengel: People say, “Nelson Mandela’s great problem is that he’s too
willing to see the good in other people.” How do you respond to that?
mandela: Well, that’s what many people say. That has been said right
from my adolescence and I don’t know. … There may be an element of
truth in that. But when you are a public figure you have to accept the
integrity of other people until there is evidence to the contrary. And
when you have no evidence to the contrary, and people do things which
appear to be good, what reason have you got to suspect them? To say
that they are doing good because they have got an ulterior motive? It is
until that evidence comes out that you then either deal with that point,
with that instance of infidelity, and forget about it. Because that’s how
<
br /> you can get on in life with people. You have to recognize that people
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231
are produced by the mud in the society in which you live and that
therefore they are human beings. They have got good points, they have
got weak points. Your duty is to work with human beings as human
beings, not because you think they are angels. And therefore, once
you know that this man has got this virtue and he has got this weak-
ness you work with them and you accommodate that weakness and
you try and help him to overcome that weakness. I don’t want to be
frightened by the fact that a person has made certain mistakes and he
has got human frailties. I can’t allow myself to be influenced by that.
And that is why many people criticize me. … So it’s a criticism I have
to put up with and I’ve tried to adjust to, because whether it is so or
not, it is something which I think is profitable. … And one has made
a great deal of progress in developing personal relationships because
you [make] the basic assumption … that those you deal with are men
of integrity. I believe in that. (C 262– 63)
To Mandela, the angry and resentful approach is simply not appropriate
to a leader, because a leader’s role is to get things done, and the generous
and cooperative approach is the one that works.
He made the case this way to his allies and followers too. When
a group of prisoners from the Black Consciousness group arrived on
Robben Island determined to show resistance by rage and angry attacks
on the guards, he gradually and patiently prevailed on them to see that
militancy can also be expressed, and more productively, by non- angry
strategies.29 Much later, in the first days of the nation, after the murder
of black leader Chris Hani by a white man, there was a real danger that
the payback mentality would derail unity. Mandela went on television
expressing deep grief but appealing for calm in a paternal way, so that
people felt, “If the father himself was not baying for revenge, then what
right had anybody else to seek it?” (Inv 119). He then tried to redirect
emotions by pointing out that the murderer was a foreigner30 and that
an Afrikaner woman had acted heroically, writing down the hit man’s
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