Splitting hairs on Mandela

‘’By your look I expected you to have headed straight to your doctors to seek help, not come and dump your stricken self on me’’.   Whatever was wrong with him I was determined not to offer him any succour or sympathy.‘’Mandela,’’ he intoned, shaking his head solemnly. So that was it. The great man’s death […]

‘’By your look I expected you to have headed straight to your doctors to seek help, not come and dump your stricken self on me’’.   Whatever was wrong with him I was determined not to offer him any succour or sympathy.
‘’Mandela,’’ he intoned, shaking his head solemnly. So that was it. The great man’s death has taken a terrible toll on Mutum and it showed visibly on him.
‘’At last, the great man is gone.’’ I said.
‘’At  last?  You wanted him dead. Why’’? Mutum asked in annoyance.
— ‘’Now don’t come here and vent your anger and frustration on Mandela’s death on me. He had been sick for a long time and everyone knew that. And if you had been alert his doctors and relatives had hinted at the coming of the great quietus, only you were not paying attention, perhaps busy as usual with your money -grubbing vocation’’.  I spat out.
‘’Great quietus, what does that mean’’? Mutum queried with a sneer on his face.
–Oh! It means death, of course. Just a coinage to bring home the truth of the unpalatable fact of the man’s death.
–Why don’t you simply say death, instead of using that fancy word? A great man has passed on and the whole world is mourning and all you can do is coin strange, meaningless words in a bid to show off your phoney mastery of the language–.    
I was certain Mutum was itching for a fight for no just cause and was equally determined not to give him one, so I ignored his pesky comments on me.
—How right you are. The whole world stopped on hearing of Mandela’s passing. That is a mark of his greatness. His kinds are rare; he was in the league of Mahatma Ghandi, Pandit Nehru and other great souls and avatars who once walked the earth. They came to teach humans how to live a purposeful live in the service of humanity. And they did this at great suffering and self sacrifice. Mandela was one of such people.
—Madiba’s life was exemplary. What with all the persecution through incarceration and the indignities heaped on him and the others. But sometimes, I think his person and his suffering have been over- romanticised, as if he was the only one in the struggle to free South Africa from bigotry and racial superiority.
—Now, how do you mean? I thought you came here to pay homage to Mandela’s greatness. So where does the notion of over-romanticising him come from? Your unexpected volte –face baffles me and you must be alone on planet earth with this view!
— Let me make myself clear. After all is said and done, Madiba brought the blacks in South Africa out of slavery and restored their dignity. For that he deserved all the eulogising and encomiums heaped on him, but we should not forget that the struggle started long before he came of age. For instance, not once did I hear anyone mention Albert Luthuli and those with whom he started the African National Congress (ANC) in all the eulogies. Remember Luthuli’s Let My People Go? Surely, you must have read the book. It was about the first account of the struggle by blacks for freedom.  Or if the Luthulis represent the dim past, certainly Mandela’s contemporaries– Walter Sisulu, Oliver Thambo, Govan Mbeki—the father of Mandela’s successor at the presidency Thabo Mbeki, and a host of others… deserve some recognition.
–Are you not backing a wrong tree here?
— Hold on, hear me out. The way I see it the whole epochal event of blacks throwing away the yoke of oppression is being ascribed to the super human prowess of one man. First, it is a wrong reflection of the liberation history of South Africa; what is more, it is a huge disservice to Mandela himself and his colleagues in arms.
–To be sure, your view does not surprise me. Ironically, it is a pitfall people who have become closely familiar with the contemporary bibliography of South Africa are likely to fall into. Your assertion betrays a certain familiarity with published works on the liberation of South Africa approached through the role of Mandela himself, starting from Mandela’s own autobiographical Long Walk To Freedom, and the biographical ones written by Anthony Sampson, Martin Meredith and Richard Stengel- the Time magazine’s managing editor. Again, let me say your view echoes those of some elements in the ANC—namely Thabo Mbeki who have warned against deification and cult of hero worship of an individual incipient in the movement. It is a view for which he has paid dearly.        
–Good that you have also noticed the tendency.
— Well, there is no tendency at all to whittle down anyone’s importance in the liberation struggle in South Africa. It just so happens that Madiba occupies an important position in the pantheon of those who had led the fight to free that country, so much so that he came to personify and symbolise the process and the outcome of that epochal struggle, but its history cannot be his alone but that of the whole of South African people. In other words, he embodied that epoch as a representative of the people.
–And if I understand you, his self sacrifice, mortification in the hands of his gaolers and eventual negotiation of freedom that culminated in democracy  earned him the title of the father of the nation.
–Exactly, and it does not in any way take anything from the importance of the roles played by the other personages—blacks, Indians and whites—who also bore similar mortification with equanimity in the struggle. All of which is saying that paying homage to Madiba at the moment of his passing is tantamount to honouring all the heroic spirits and figures that faced brutally oppressive and unconscionable force and battled it to submission as well as all the peoples of South Africa.
–Well, in all this, history will be the judge of whether freedom and democracy would amount to anything.       
–Certainly, freedom and democracy must be made to bear fruits. It’s been 20 years since democratic rule was instituted, except for a few instances of tomfoolery and idiocy, the generally high standard of public morality and etiquette still obtain. Public attitude at the public gathering on Madiba’s memoriam in Soweto stridently made it clear that behaviours that fall below expectations, not at par with the levels they had been in the early years would not be condoned. So with that at the back of the leaders’ minds, South Africa is about to enter a period of political ferment as well as gargantuan economic growth to serve as engine to Africa’s prosperity.