Property Of The Ages? President Obama borrowed Abraham Lincoln's famous epitaph to honour the passing of Nelson Mandela. But was Prisoner 46664's ultimate contribution to the fate of Black South Africa entirely benign? Who benefited the most from the bargain he struck with South Africa's last White President, F.W. de Klerk? Will the Ages judge Mandela as kindly as they received Lincoln?
AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN breathed his last in a fetid boarding
house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, his friend, the Secretary of War,
Edward Stanton, declared: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
President Barack Obama borrowed Stanton’s magnificent
epitaph to honour the passing of Nelson Mandela – the man who, throughout
Obama’s political career, had served as the living exemplar of political
heroism.
The American President is merely the mightiest of world
leaders to pay tribute to this remarkable man. The fortitude he demonstrated
through 27 long years of imprisonment, and the readiness with which he forgave
his former enemies, greatly eased South Africa’s transition from racial
oppression to multi-racial democracy, and made Nelson Mandela a statesman for
all seasons.
But how will the ages, to which President Obama has now
dispatched him, judge Nelson Mandela?
The Apartheid-era judges who sentenced Mandela to life
imprisonment on that tiny speck of offshore rock called Robben Island knew what
they were doing. Martyrs are politically useful only to their own side, but an
imprisoned leader may one day be of service to both. This is especially true
when, as the duration of his captivity lengthens, that leader’s reputation,
unblemished by the inevitable compromises and crimes of politics and war, is
permitted to grow to almost mythic proportions.
Hundreds of anti-Apartheid fighters (most infamously Steve
Biko) were murdered in police custody. Why Nelson Mandela did not share their
fate is one of those important political questions that contemporaries
consistently deemed it better not to ask.
But we may be sure that, alone in his cell on Robben Island,
Prisoner 46664 asked himself: “Why am I still alive? Why haven’t they killed
me? What role do the Whites expect me to play in South Africa’s future?”
The answer, of course, and if you’ll pardon the rather cruel
pun, is that Nelson Mandela was the Apartheid regime’s “Get Out of Jail Free”
card. If repression failed; if the opportunity to preserve the property of
White South Africans – even at the expense of surrendering their political
dominance – presented itself; then Prisoner 46664, beloved by his people, the
world’s most celebrated political prisoner, would be there to avert the fire
and the blood that a Just Providence held in store for the architects and
beneficiaries of the hated Apartheid system.
But Mandela was not White South Africa’s only saviour.
In the early 1980s the prospect of a Soviet-backed African
National Congress replicating the triumphant national liberation struggles of
Angola, Mozambique and Namibia seemed entirely plausible. With a continent-wide
front of socialist enemies to the north and their backs to the sea, White South
Africa’s future looked bleak.
By the end of the 1980s, however, Soviet power was
collapsing. In 1991, its European empire gone, and its world-wide network of
national liberation regimes scrabbling for more reliable sponsors, the Soviet
Union, itself, simply blipped-off History’s screen. And with it went any chance
of securing Black majority-rule in South Africa by outside force. Democracy
would arrive there in one of only two possible ways: either blood-soaked and
fatally compromised by a racial holocaust of historic proportions; or
peacefully, via the ballot-box.
The White leaders of South Africa, understandably, opted for
the latter. In February 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
last White President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, authorised the release of
Prisoner 46664. Nelson Mandela got out of jail.
But he was not free. Like Abraham Lincoln, to whom he is so
often compared, Mandela found himself caught up in political and economic
currents beyond his control and in whose grip he struggled to keep the frail
craft of South Africa’s hopes afloat. If he was not to bequeath his people an
economy stripped of all essential expertise, materiel and capital, then the
socialist elements of the ANC programme would have to be abandoned.
It was no accident that Mandela’s new offices were located
in Shell House. Without the endorsement of transnational capital, South African
democracy would be a poor and ragged thing. But Mandela’s parallel guarantee to
protect the farms and businesses of the hated Afrikaners also meant that the
poor and the ragged of South Africa would remain black.
Will the Ages welcome Nelson Mandela with the same solemnity
that they received Abraham Lincoln? Surely the avoidance of a racial bloodbath and
the likely fracturing of South Africa along tribal lines – not to mention the
introduction of a working multiracial democracy – is a legacy worthy of
posterity’s approbation? It has certainly merited the applause of the Present
Day.
And yet, in the story of Nelson Mandela there remains a
nagging sense of saintliness too readily and too easily bestowed. Great
victories are not won except at great price. Abraham Lincoln paid for his at
Ford’s Theatre. Nelson Mandela died in his bed.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
10 December 2013.
