The social costs of being Mandela

There are individuals that people sometimes wish could be exempted from this inevitability. Mandela was one such person. However when he was hospitalized on June 8 2013 – his fourth in seven months – many people across the world gradually came to terms with his mortality. Given his age and how frail he had become, […]

There are individuals that people sometimes wish could be exempted from this inevitability. Mandela was one such person. However when he was hospitalized on June 8 2013 – his fourth in seven months – many people across the world gradually came to terms with his mortality.
Given his age and how frail he had become, there was a general feeling that the end was nigh.
Mandela was to defy all odds and live another six months before he was called home by his maker on Thursday, December 5. And when he was eventually called home – people were shocked, as if surprised that death did not show him any respect.
Mandela’s memorial event on November 11 2013 – part of extended observances that will culminate in his burial on Sunday, November 15, 2015 in the rural village of Qunu where he spent his early childhood – brought together 91 serving Presidents, hundreds of former Presidents and A-list dignitaries across the world. The interesting thing is that sworn enemies found a common ground in Mandela. Raul Castro, President of Cuba and Obama, the US president even shook hands. It had been an article of faith that every President of USA inherited enmity with Cuba since Fidel Castro’s revolution in that country in 1959.
In life, Mandela was celebrated and deeply revered as one of the greatest living moral voices. He was perhaps the only living soul that has a date set aside every year to celebrate him. July 18, Mandela’s birthday, is globally celebrated as the Mandela Day. During last year’s Mandela Day, the United Nations launched a campaign asking people to mark the day by devoting 67 minutes of their time to helping others – one minute for each year Mandela spent fighting for his cause. The Mandela Day is aimed at encouraging people to set aside some minutes to consciously do something that will help change the world or their environment for the better.
In death, Mandela was deified, with his position firmly assured in the pantheon of eminent human-deities the world has known of in the last 100 years and probably in the next 100 to come. If the voice of the people is indeed the voice of God, then given the global celebration of his life, Mandela  is heading straight to heaven.
Mandela served 27 years in prison, many of those in the notorious Robben Island where he performed hard labour in a lime quarry. As a D-group prisoner (the lowest classification), he was allowed one visitor and one letter every six months. His letters were often delayed for long periods and made unreadable by the prison censors. Amid the hard labour Mandela was offered release several times on the condition that the ANC would renounce violence as an instrument of struggle.
On each occasion he turned down the Greek gift. Following his eventual release from prison on 11 February 1990, Mandela led his party in the negotiations that led to the establishment of democracy in South Africa in1994, with himself as the first President.
Though Madiba was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, his greatest legacy to the country is in creating a Rainbow nation and being a unifying symbol for the various cleavages in the deeply polarized country. I believe that another gift from Mandela is that his name has become a metaphor for knowing when and how to bow out gracefully when the ovation is loudest.
Mandela paid a heavy personal price for being Mandela. As he reportedly told a delegation that visited him in Johannesburg in 1994, his biggest regret was the way he found his family when he was released from prison in 1990. Before he became very famous, his first marriage – to Evelyn Ntoko Mase – unravelled in 1957 after 13 years largely because of the multiple strains of his constant absences, his devotion to revolutionary agitation against the apartheid policies in his country and because she was a Jehovah Witness – a religion that requires one to be politically neutral. Of the four children from that marriage – two boys and two girls – only one Dr Maki (born in 1953 and named after her older sister who died when she was only nine months) still survives. Mandela’s first son – Madiba Thembekile (Thembi), who was born in 1946, was killed in a car crash in 1969 at the age of 23 while Mandela was in prison on Robben Island and he was not allowed to attend the funeral. His other son Makgatho died of AIDS in 2005, aged 54.
Mandela’s second marriage – to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – produced two daughters – Zenani (Zeni), born 4 February 1958, and Zindziswa (Zindzi) Mandela-Hlongwane, born 1960. Zindzi was only 18 months old when her father was sent to Robben Island. In 2010 Mandela’s great granddaughter Zenani Mandela died in a car crash on her way home after attending the World Cup soccer tournament kick-off in Soweto. She was aged only 13. Recently Zenani’s mother, Zoleka Mandela (33), Mandela’s granddaughter, launched a book – When Hope whispers – about her battle with drugs, sex addiction and breast cancer. Zhindzi, Mandela ‘s 52 year old daughter and mother of four, in March this year, got married to Molapo Motlhajwa, 37.
In 1996, Mandela divorced Winnie after being separated since 1992. Winnie, alone for 27 years and often hounded into prisons and detentions by the apartheid regime, found solace in the arms of younger men and could not stop even after Mandela had been released. The open adultery and humiliation forced Mandela to divorce her in 1996.
 Perhaps all these challenges in his private life were worth the gifts he bequeathed to the world. And I am not just talking about the gift of forgiveness – the ability or nobility of forgiving those who stole 27 years of his life. Many of us lesser mortals find it difficult to forgive minor slights until we have had a payback time!
There are other less-sung gifts from Mandela: that the world has not passed you by if you have not ‘made it’ by the time you are 50. When Mandela was jailed in 1962, he was well in his forties – and he wasn’t exactly a household name at that time. And when he became the President of South Africa in 1994, he was already 76. Your destiny can manifest anytime.
There is yet another lesson: When Mandela fell ill, he was treated in South African hospitals – even though the best hospitals in the world would have been happy to offer him free medical facility.
Even if it could be argued that he did so because the Whites built world class hospitals in South Africa, he demonstrated the consciousness of embracing whatever his country could offer when he entrusted the task of chronicling his life’s story to the South African producer of Indian descent, Anant Singh, said to be a personal friend of the late leader. There had been a stiff competition for a film on Mandela from Europe and US. Paradoxically Mandela’s daughters Zindzi and Zenani learnt about the passing of their dad during the London premiere of the film – Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. They excused themselves but asked that the film should go on – even though the producers had suggested that the film be stopped in honour of Mandela’s transition.
 Mandela did not become a globally adored figure by being a pleaser to all. He made tough choices and invariably disappointed many: the Black hardliners who longed for a payback time were disappointed in Mandela’s reconciliatory posture; Mandela’s former socialist colleagues were disappointed by his abandonment of the Socialist perspective, a number of the Western countries were disappointed that he refused to inherit their enemies such the Ghaddaifi and Fidel Castro who were treated as pariahs by Western countries. Even some church militants felt enraged by Mandela’s pro-abortion stance. Yet even those who were disappointed in him appeared to intuitively appreciate why he had to disappoint them.
I have always maintained that the main trouble with Nigeria is the crisis in the country’s nation-building, which conflates with the challenges of underdevelopment to create an existentialist crisis for several Nigerians. The latter in turn triggers a de-Nigerianization process as individuals and groups retreat from the Nigeria project into primordial identities where they seek meaning for their lives, often regarding the Nigerian state as an enemy of sorts. Following from this, my kind of President for the country is not necessarily one that is incorruptible or one with the best programme for economic development for the country but simply a leader, who like Mandela, is capable of unifying a fractious nation. I believe that it is only through this that the stalled nation-building process can be re-started.
Despite the challenges in his private life, Mandela, we were told by Graca Simbine Machel, whom he married on 18 July 1998 at the age of 80, was very much at peace with himself and the world at the twilight of his life. What else can a person ask for? Rest in Peace, Madiba.