The Call of the Madiba

It was South African President Jacob Zuma who so aptly summed up the reason behind that Mandela Appeal: people the world over see in him what they seek in themselves—and fail to find. With these qualities in him, with his pioneering status in the armed struggle, with his face so fortuitously selected by the ANC […]

It was South African President Jacob Zuma who so aptly summed up the reason behind that Mandela Appeal: people the world over see in him what they seek in themselves—and fail to find. With these qualities in him, with his pioneering status in the armed struggle, with his face so fortuitously selected by the ANC to be its symbol; and, above all, with his readiness to offer the ultimate sacrifice, Mandela, in whom expectation meets promise and reality approximates legend, rose to the mythic status of a legend in his lifetime.
At long last, his death came as an anticlimax, and this somehow robbed its mourning of the spontaneity of the outpouring of the grief that its unexpectedness would have elicited; but, none the less, the pain of his departure did come strong, deprived though it was of the acuteness of the anguish of sudden bereavement, for, it was a departure that had punished a waiting world enough by the oft-repetitiveness of its anticipation. By the time Mandela’s death was announced, the world had learnt to inure itself to the waiting, to the fear and to the pain of separation; because everything had mellowed and become routinised into the daily grind of an uneasy, wait.
Alive, Mandela was the symbol of the struggle, and, now dead, a martyr to its cause; but what plucked at the heartstrings was that he had conquered the fear of death long before it came to him. And what on earth can beat this? “During my life I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
As he stood in the courtroom on that April 20, 1964 afternoon, making that immortal declaration, his spirit rose and soared above that of all other strugglers engaged in something different.  And as the declaration issued from his mouth, it put a halo on his head, turning him into a symbol of South African freedom; and he was not unaware of what the circumstance had made of him. “I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness and democracy in a society that dishonoured those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even in the fortress of the enemy.”
The court’s verdict didn’t seek to kill him: it was his spirit that it tried to crush, but, in the end, it was the spirit that killed them; for, it was as a result of the blow dealt by that very spirit that the whole edifice of apartheid crumbled down. And because of his sincerity and dedication to the cause of his people—and even to that of his erstwhile enemies—the calm and uncomplaining acceptance of his suffering on their behalf as a duty for which he expected neither reward nor even praise, he prevailed.
With the force of personal example, he taught the barefoot and the deprived to walk tall on this earth, and for all those who wish to conquer, to believe in themselves and in the justness of their cause—and to persevere in spite of the might of the enemy and coldness of an indifferent world. And as his life showed, there is no genuine suffering for a cause that is not redemptive and, faithfully undergone, even if it initially embitters, it ends up edifying the soul and finding for it a place in that ultimate hall of fame—immortality. And none shall taste the sweetness of immortality without first tasting the bitterness of sacrifice and the singeing in the baptism of the fire of a cause, as Mandela did.
Incarcerated, Mandela conquered the world of Robben Island and its inhabitants with model behaviour in captivity; and on exiting prison—right there at the gate—he finally conquered himself. And in thus conquering himself, he finally conquered the world; and he was, by the laity of a grateful nation, beatified, and by all lovers of freedom everywhere forever canonised as the first universally recognised, accepted, modern, global secular patron saint of freedom and forgiveness. With the prison gate behind him, he had said, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
And the world reciprocated; for, it was not often given to the lot of a mere mortal to elicit such instantaneous recognition, such complete empathy, such total support and love on such a global scale that transcended religious divides, international borders and the exclusivity of race and ideology that made Mandela almost a welcome and beloved member of every family in the world—irrespective of religious belief.
Mandela said he got his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi; and Gandhi himself said he got his own from Muhammad [SAW]; and today these two modern icons are celebrated as gurus and fathers of efficacious nonviolence, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. On its own, nonviolence has never produced any result anywhere: it can only be used as a tactic not a weapon, as subsequent events proved for both icons, and as, in fact, their acknowledged source of inspiration taught. And for good measure, the doctrine of nonviolence was torn to pieces in the Indian subcontinent within Gandhi’s lifetime, indeed right before his very eyes; and, in order to succeed, Mandela himself had to have recourse to the Umknoto we Sizwe; it was the arms of Umkhonto that gave his struggle its victory—and but for it, he would have died in prison, and apartheid would have been alive and kicking today.
Even at its most hyped in the American civil rights struggle, nonviolence didn’t achieve so much as Kennedy’s so-called segregated lunch counter—and the exploits of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. would have amounted to nothing without the threatened violence of the hell raised by Malcolm X, to whom all credit for the social and political progress of the African American ought to have been given, and to the likes of Gloria Richardson, to silence whom and promote King, they came up with the Civil Rights Bill—followed thereafter by the Nobel Prize.
It was not unlikely that the ovation elicited by the entry of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe into the Johannesburg’s Soccer City Stadium venue of Mandela’s memorial is perhaps an unconscious acknowledgment of what the people of South Africa saw in Mugabe which they failed to find in their hero.
Even though violence for its own sake is the greatest evil, in the defence of right, it becomes the highest good. Eschewing revenge when you are able to take it, as Mandela counselled and practised, is not nonviolence: it is called forgiveness, and it is an act of a higher order. And while every coward can be nonviolent, only the strong can forgive—or have reason to do so.
As the world celebrating his life had now come to bury him, everybody would try to join the Mandel bandwagon. His example and legacy would push others to a contradictory joining of the chorus of celebration. Thus, even Zionist organisations and the leadership of Israel, which had supported South Africa’s apartheid system to the hilt and to the very end, could still find time from hunting down Nazi criminals—instead of forgiving them—to appreciate the greatness of Mandela’s act, and be forced to acknowledge the intrinsic goodness in forgiveness as a cardinal principle of personal conduct and state policy.
Mandela was able to forgive whites in and out of prison, because despite its length and its hard labour, his imprisonment ha dn’t in the least embittered him. It only filled him with grace and finally emptied him of any desire for vengeance against his captors. It made him, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, an icon of magnanimity who used his moral stature to push the ANC and black South Africans to embrace accommodation and compromise as the way to a future of peace for their nation.
And it was with no more than a wave of the hand that Mandela was able to stop black-on-white violence and transform a bellicose collection of races thirsting for each other’s blood into a truth-seeking and reconciliatory nation. No force in the world at that time except Mandela could have managed to pull this off successfully. But it would remain debatable whether even a Mandela had the mandate to offer total absolution for all the beastliness of the apartheid era; but, then, at the moment of hero-worship, a true hero is never questioned by a grateful nation.
The hero’s greatest moment came when he decided to forget his own pain, instantly attaining a towering greatness that was made even greater by his regal self-effacement; but his finest hour came when, as conscience of a wounded South Africa, he forced the nation to rise above the dross of its base instinct—to forgive when it could avenge, to embrace when it could spurn, and to unite when it would rather stand apart.
In the end, he made South Africans tell the bitterest of truths to themselves, something that, though therapeutic, would not by itself give catharsis to individuals or to the nation; and he therefore literally forced them to forgive. But could genuine forgiveness be forced? Should the wilfulness of malevolence be forgiven, or should forgiveness only be for the contrition of inadvertence? Perhaps the moment had gone beyond all that; and at the end of it all, Mandela taught the people, not just by telling but by showing, and by himself living out the dictum that liberty is not licence—it is a trust. And he didn’t betray it.