Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Mandela is also gracious enough to suggest that his warders played a part in his development. While most were brutish and racist, a few isolated acts of kindness reinforced his conviction that there was humanity behind apartheid’s uncompromising veneer. One of his jailers, James Gregory, was even asked to his inauguration as a guest of honour. Gregory said that after the ceremony Kobie Coetsee, the Minister of Justice, who had brokered the secret talks between Mandela and P.W. Botha, introduced him to a judge as ‘the man who took the hatred for the white man out of Nelson Mandela. (4)

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  But the Nationalists' argument that prison indirectly did him a good service is scant consolation. He had every reason to emerge embittered and enraged. So packed and colourful has been his post-imprisonment career- and so warm and embracing has been his smile - that it is easy to forget he was released well into his eighth decade. His emergence as a visionary and reconciliatory statesman has nothing to do with the Nationalists who initially did all they could to break him. One of the most striking aspects of his autobiography is the way the four years of transition from white rule are tacked on to the end almost as an epilogue. He devotes 200 pages to his imprisonment and barely sixty to the bloody and fraught time between his release and taking office. During his first eighteen years in prison on the few visits from his wife Winnie, he could not even hold hands with her and had to communicate through a glass screen. He was not allowed to attend the funeral of his mother, or that of his eldest son, who was killed in a car accident. All this was against a background of relentless baiting by warders and, on the bigger canvas of South Africa, of increasingly ruthless repression.

  Conditions in prison improved in the last few years when the Nationalists were grooming him for release. He had his own cottage in the grounds of Victor Verster prison outside Cape Town where he could receive visitors and make telephone calls. But no one knew how he would react to freedom. For twenty seven years he had been deep-frozen. His words had been proscribed. There was just one photograph of his life in captivity. When his warders took him on walks in Cape Town to acclimatize him to life in freedom, he met several people but no one recognized him. He was more a symbol of a people's hope- and repression- than a reality.

  Certainly when he made his famous first steps of freedom in February 1990 his status as an international icon owed a lot to ANC marketing. The 'Free Mandela' campaign was one of the most effective decisions of the ANC in all its years in exile. By personalizing the 'struggle' the organization made it easier for the world to understand, as was reflected by the success of the Wembley 'Free Mandela' concert marking his seventieth birthday.

  But there is far, far more to Mandela than marketing and charm. He was from his early years in politics an intuitive leader. While he led as he played draughts in prison, in a slow and deliberate manner, crucially he could throw off the strait jacket of inflexibility, most audaciously in 1986, when he decided to open talks with P.W. Botha without consulting his colleagues. He knew many in the ANC would have been deeply suspicious of such a move and also that it would have taken months to get the party's approval, so he pressed ahead. It is for such flashes of individualism and bravery that he can lay claim to being a truly great politician.

  Try as journalists did throughout his presidency, it was next to impossible to cleave the private from the public persona. Outside the immediate political arena his guard seldom drops. But just occasionally his mouth folds into an uncompromising grimace, belying the platitudes he feels obliged to vouchsafe, and hinting at his old passion and anger that in the interests of reconciliation he has hidden away.

  The first time I saw Mandela close at hand was at the official party for his seventy-fifth birthday in, of course, the Carlton Hotel. Surrounded by white businessmen, who made up the bulk of the guest list, he was beaming away, nodding his head thoughtfully as if he had long since forgotten their long history of profiting from apartheid. But as I watched from the shadows, a look of utter sadness transformed his face.

  For the outside world Mandela has become known as the living embodiment of reconciliation. But it may be more accurate to describe him as the personification of ubuntu, the mystical African ethos which loosely translates as 'humanity' but means so much more. An old Nguni saying gets as close to its essence as anything: 'Ubuntu ungumuntu ngabanye abantu' - 'People are people through other people.' To be branded as lacking ubuntu is, in many parts of Africa, the ultimate insult, implying a betrayal of identity and Africa itself. Ubuntu became something of a catchphrase for South Africa's whites in the post-apartheid era. It was adopted by copywriters in advertising firms and became part of the sophisticates' argot. To feel ubuntu was to be part of the new era and by extension to be with-it and cool. Invoking it drifted perilously close to the old romanticized dreams of purple sunsets and noble natives. Inevitably this devalued it in the eyes of many blacks, for whom it became a symbol of whites trying - and in their eyes often failing - to understand what it means to be African.

  But the debasement of the word ubuntu has not undermined its essence. Ubuntu is more than a wistful Africanist musing. In its most tangible form it is to be found in the community spirit which relieves the bleakest of tableaux all over the continent, and in the tradition of extended families and hospitality. Africans working in the cities invariably remit most of their earnings to support their relations in their home villages. On a philosophical and sentimental level it is an aspiration, which is hankered after around the African hearth. It reflects how Africa in its dreams would love to be. Africans proudly attest it as a powerful moral corrective to the West's cult of the individual, which they brand as selfish and cold.

  Unfortunately, however, in ubuntu's strength lies its weakness. It is a beguiling ideal but its culture of tolerance is easily abused. Too often in Africa it has become an excuse for subservience or tyranny or both.

  Such was the desire for a new beginning in Liberia after seven years of brutal war that Charles Taylor, the most notorious warlord, was greeted at election rallies in 1997 with the cry:

  'He killed my father. He killed my mother. He get my vote.' Taylor's lust for power had prolonged the civil war for six years after the overthrow of the dictator, Doe, and yet he was elected with a massive majority. His victory reflected Liberians' war weariness and their desire for a 'strongman', not to mention their liking for the T-shirts and biros which Taylor's campaign organizers showered on the crowds t his rallies, but it also reflected a popular desire to look forward, stemming from the realization that the past was so appalling that there was no point in looking back.

  The celebration of the group over the individual implicit in ubuntu, poses a couched threat to basic freedoms of speech and assembly. Moi, Mobutu and countless other Big Men have over the years endlessly resorted to versions of ubuntu as a defence on the lines that the West does not understand their Africanness. Ubuntu's defenders counter that Moi and co. misused the hallowed principle, but the fact remains that for many Africans as well as outsiders the continent is more often synonymous with chaos and discord than with cosy ubuntu. The West may be 'selfish' and 'cold' in comparison with Africa, but in running a state all but the most ardent Africanists would have to concede it has been more successful.

  For much of his presidency Mandela represented the best of ubuntu. When he was on song, it felt as if Africa at last had a leader who stood for all that was good about the continent. As a corrective to the cynicism of Western politics, he tore up the old rule book of government. When he walked into world summits, his fellow heads of state seemed tawdry and insignificant. His aura was all the more potent in a society which had long been run as the opposite of ubuntu.

  From Mandela's first day of freedom it was clear that much, indeed too much, was to be expected of him by both South Africans and the rest of the world. His age, experience and moral stature set him so far above his colleagues that he became the ultimate arbiter. Only he could hold the radical black youths in check. Only he could reassure whit
es that they would be led by a man they could trust. When disgruntled former ANC guerrillas wanted to show their dissatisfaction with the integration process into the white-led army, they marched to Mandela's residence late at night, insisting they would not go until he had addressed them. White right-wingers said they would trust only 'Mister Mandela'. Striking refuse workers outside my Johannesburg office said they would desist only if 'Madiba' addressed them.

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  Mandela clearly rather liked the idea of cutting through the bureaucracy of government to tackle problems. He telephoned a British businessman who had been frustrated by officialdom in his attempts to get a work permit. He contacted the relatives of victims of high-profile murders to commiserate with them. Time and again he proved he alone had the moral authority to calm large crowds, most strikingly in Katlehong, a crowded township south-east of Johannesburg, in the wake of three days of bitter fighting between the security forces, the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party in the countdown to the April 1994 election. Packed into a tiny stadium, the crowd of about 10,000 ANC supporters was baying for blood. A lesser leader would have been tempted by populism. Mandela instead gave a withering criticism of ANC vigilantes.

  ‘We should put our own house in order. If you have no discipline you are not freedom fighters and we do not want you in our organization. If you are going to kill innocent people and old men you don’t belong in the ANC. I am your leader ... If you don’t want me, tell me to go and rest. As long as I am your leader I will tell you when you are wrong . . . Your task is reconciliation.’ Remarkably, the shouting died away and we all, journalists, ‘peace monitors’ and demonstrators, looked at our feet like chastised school-children.

  It was a speech worthy of Pericles, the Athenian statesman.

  There were indeed parallels in the way the two men were regarded by their electors. Thucydides said of Pericles’ relation ship with the Athenians: ‘It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them.’ The same applied to Mandela, although he would have denied it vehemently. Loyal party man, he always pays lip-service to the ANC’s collective tradition.

  But in the running of the government Mandela was no Pericles. His dazzle sustained South Africa through the inevitable post-election hangover. His mere presence in the Union Buildings, Pretoria’s imposing sandstone government headquarters, was enough to reassure doubters in the outside world. But his ‘magic’ was not always enough for the rigorous demands and Machiavellian requirements of high office. As South Africans were to discover, even a demi-god has flaws, particularly when exposed to the close scrutiny of the press.

  One of the most erratic objects of his presidency was his foreign policy. Some of his early undiplomatic gaffes, such as his declaration of support for the IRA’s ‘struggle against colonialism’ in 1990, shortly before a visit to London, could be excused by his Rip Van Winklesque re-emergence into the real world. But he had less excuse as president when he gained a reputation for making off-the-cuff foreign policy. He stunned American officials when one day in Cape Town out of the blue he criticized the American aid programme as ‘peanuts’. John Major was startled when he was telephoned by Mandela following the execution of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists and asked outright to impose an oil embargo on the Nigerian junta.

  His insistence on remaining loyal to the ANC’s old friends from the struggle era was particularly controversial. When he flew to Libya to see Colonel Gaddafi in 1997, hosted Fidel Castro in 1998, and conferred South Africa’s highest humanitarian award on Indonesia’s autocratic President Suharto, who was a few years later overthrown, there was talk of his frittering away his moral authority. Domestic critics also complained that many of his ties were linked to the need to fill the ANC’s depleted coffers following its expensive 1994 election campaign.

  To be fair to Mandela, in an age when expediency takes precedence in politics his sense of loyalty is to be admired. He did not limit his affections to his old friends. When President Clinton was enmeshed in the scandal of his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Mandela gave him unequivocal support, calling him a great man and a friend of Africa. He also remarkably championed the search for a permanent exile for Mobutu and was talking of providing a home in South Africa when the Zairean dictator died, ending the dilemma.

  South Africans were rather proud of Madiba’s iconoclastic approach, which was seen as embodying a new national identity and patriotism. ‘We• are not going to be type-cast,’ he was saying. His forthright style certainly sent an invigorating blast through the world’s foreign ministries. He defended his ‘open doors’ approach vigorously against criticism, arguing that he had learned from dealing with the Nationalists that you had to be prepared to talk to anyone, however unsavoury their reputation. He was also determined not to be seen as the patsy of the West. Rather he wanted to be a bridge between the Third and First Worlds, a role he played brilliantly when he helped to broker a deal over the Libyan suspects of the Lockerbie bombing.

  Nonetheless, South African and Western diplomats were right when they muttered that idealism was not enough in international relations. For years Africa had been badly in need of a statesman with unimpeachable credentials to take the lead and steer it out of the abyss. Mandela tactfully argued it was not right to assert himself too swiftly, because of South Africa’s history of destabilization in the continent, and because of the weighty matters that needed his attention at home. But many of Africa’s leaders understand only one thing, power, and proved less amenable than South Africa to his touch. As the years passed his caution prompted criticism that he was failing his responsibilities to the rest of the continent.

  For years African leaders had been past masters at using the rallying cry of ‘African solutions for African problems’ as an excuse to have their own way. They soon realized that they could run rings round Mandela. His first humiliation came in 1995, when he thought that by talking to Nigeria’s military despot, General Abacha, he could guide the West African rogue nation back into the world’s embrace. He wholly underestimated Abacha. Even as Mandela a prepared to brief a Common wealth meeting of heads of state on the Nigerian problem, it was announced that the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists had been executed.

  The bubble of expectation over South Africa’s role in the continent finally burst in 1997 with the negotiations for the hand-over of power from Mobutu. The talks took place off the Atlantic coast on the Outeniqua, a South African naval ship, in an ingenious bid to find a neutral venue for Mobutu and Kabila. But Mandela was left empty-handed as both men played for time, broke their pledges and paid the barest of lip-services to his authority.

  In another blow to his prestige, Mandela’s call for peace talks on the Congo in 1998 was ignored by the key players. Paying no attention to Mandela’s position as head of the regional grouping, the South African Development Community, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola sent troops to shore up Kabila against a rebellion from the east. For Mugabe it was a golden opportunity to snub the man he felt had usurped his position as regional leader. In the Eighties Mugabe had been southern Africa’s senior statesman. At the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban in August Mandela had to do an embarrassing U-turn and he announced his support for the intervention.

  In a final setback that was heavy with irony, when Mandela did decide to intervene in Africa’s bloody politics by sending troops to shore up the government of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, he besmirched both his government’s and the South African army’s records. Lesotho, a tiny landlocked state in the heart of South Africa, with a population of just two million and an economy a fraction of the size of its giant neighbour, should have been little more than a policing operation. Instead it hastened the very descent into anarchy the South Africans argued they were trying to prevent.
The sight of white officers commanding armoured vehicles sent out all the wrong signals with the echoes of apartheid’s incursions into Angola. It took two days to take control of the capital, Maseru, by which time the city centre was a looted shambles and twelve South Africans and dozens of BaSotho had been killed.

  The repercussions of the Lesotho debacle were depressing for the rest of Africa, at least for those dreaming of a new era. Not only did it once again highlight the difficulty of enforcing order in the continent, it also entrenched a suspicion in South Africa of foreign entanglements, suggesting that hopes that it might be able to nudge, bully and guide the continent towards democracy were hopelessly over-ambitious. The lesson of Lesotho was clear: South Africa was far from ready to fill the shoes of the retreating West.

  The ANC bridled at the hypocrisy of the world’s expectations of Mandela and the idea that he had failed just because his ‘magic’ had been unable to resolve the mess which had defeated- and partly been created by – so many more powerful states. But there was no such excuse for the blots on Mandela’s domestic record. Once again his reputation was diminished by an excess of loyalty.