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Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition)
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Nelson Mandela
A Very Short Introduction
Elleke Boehmer
1
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Elleke Boehmer 2008
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Aan mijn familie
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Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
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Acknowledgements
I have notched up a great many debts in the course of writing this Very Short Introduction. In roughly chronological order warm thanks go to:
Mark Allix, co-navigator through the streets of Johannesburg in the 1980s;
Rob Nixon, whose essay ‘Mandela, Messianism, and the Media’ opened new insights;
Robert Young, whose VSI Postcolonialism set an inspiring example;
Stephen Morton and Alex Tickell, conversations with whom about colonial terror helped foster this study;
Achille Mbembe, for thoughts on violence in the postcolony;
Leela Gandhi and Catherine Clarke, for saying that a reflective postcolonial study of Mandela was long overdue;
Ed Larrissy and the School of English, University of Leeds, Simon Glendinning and the European Forum, and Mieke Bal and her ASCA team in Amsterdam, for hosting my papers on Mandela the ‘postcolonial terrorist’ at their conferences in 2005 and 2006;
The journal Parallax for publishing the article ‘Postcolonial Terrorist: The Example of Nelson Mandela’ in their special issue 37 on
‘Agitation’ (October–December 2005) that grew out of these papers;
Tim Brennan and Keya Ganguly, fellow guests at the ASCA conference, for their searching and sustaining questions;
Marsha Filion, and Luciana O’Flaherty and James Thompson at Oxford University Press, for their encouragement and help;
Derek Attridge and David Attwell, for moral support and good guidance;
Geerthi Ahilan and her 2004–5 Year 5 group at St Ebbe’s C-of-E-aided Primary School, for confronting the question ‘Who is Nelson Mandela?’;
The Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, in particular the informal grant workshop group of Bob Eaglestone, Christie Carson, and Jenny Neville; also HoD Robert Hampson, fellow DoGS Ewan Fernie, Anne Varty, my commuting companion, and the irreplaceable Alice Christie – all for much appreciated help and encouragement;
The AHRC Research Leave Award AN/E503543/1 which indispensably facilitated the writing-up period;
The wonderful Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group for engaging with my still-unformed ideas about Mandela, in particular Helen Gilbert (for her thoughts on postcolonial performing bodies), David Lambert (for his remarkable analytic insights), Nicole King (for her deep knowledge of African American writing and politics);
Danielle Battigelli and James Rogers, for their enthusiasm and the logo-bearing apron;
Jo McDonagh, for Derrida’s Spectres and strong cups of tea;
Susheila Nasta, my co-editor on the Wasafiri special ‘Cultures of Terror’ issue, for her insightful advice;
Shaun Johnson, CEO of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, for indulging my speculations concerning the Madiba phenomenon;
The Department of English, University of Stellenbosch, especially Dirk Klopper and Meg Samuelson, for hosting me during a crucial period of research towards this book;
Sarah Nuttall who, rescuing me from a rainy Cape weekend, sat me down at a table spread with art books, vivid insights, and baby toys;
Isabel Hofmeyr, for her historical pointers and inspiration;
Simphiwe Yako and Andre Mohammed, archivists at the Mayibuye Archive, University of the Western Cape, and Carol Archibald of the Historical Papers Section, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, for their advice and help;
David Medalie, intrepid navigator through the streets of Johannesburg, especially Kort Street, at rush-hour, in 2006;
Karina Szczurek and Andre Brink, for their hospitality and helpful points of reference;
The Centre of Memory and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, especially Project Manager Verne Harris, for invaluable research support;
Mike Nicol for invigorating email chats about Madiba hagiography;
Judith Brown, for her thoughts about Gandhi the Victorian gentleman;
Josée Boehmer-Dekker, Ilona Berkhof, and the Thuiszorg team in Den Haag, for their fantastic help during my mother’s final year, which was also the final year of this book’s making;
Sandra Assersohn, inspired picture researcher;
Alison Donnell, Saul Dubow, and Steven Matthews, for thoughtful readings of the final manuscript at a busy time, and William Beinart for his attuned and measured commentary;
Steven Matthews, again, and Thomas and Sam Matthews Boehmer, for keeping the world turning, and the sun spinning through the sky.
Kind acknowledgement to Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to quote ‘Brief Dream’ from Collected Poems by Samuel Beckett
(2007). The poem first appeared in Jacques Derrida and Mustafa Tlili (eds), For Nelson Mandela (Seaver Books, 1986).
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and obtain permission prior to publication. If notified, the publisher undertakes to rectify any inadvertent omissions at the earliest opportunity.
Abbreviations
AAM Anti-Apartheid Movement
ANCAfrican National Congress
BCMBlack Consciousness Movement
MKUmkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’)
PACPan-Africanist Congress
SACPSouth African Communist Party
SAICSouth African Indian Congress
TRCTruth and Reconciliation Commission
UDFUnited Democratic Front
ANCYLAfrican National Congress Youth League
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List of illustrations
1 ‘The Early Years’ Zapiro cartoon 5 Zapiro
2 Nelson Mandela doll 15
3 The first known photograph of Nelson Mandela 27
UWC-Robben Island Museum
Mayibuye Archives
4 The 1958 Treason Trial accused 42
UWC-Robben Island Museum
Mayibuye Archives
5 Mandela’s notes from the Rivonia trial 49
William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand
14 Nelson and Winnie Mandela outside court 127 Alf Kumalo
15 Mandela in Springbok rugby gear 130
Dave Rogers/Allsport/Getty Images
16 Letter to Helen Joseph 140
William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand
17 Mandela’s desk in his prison cell 146
National Archives and Record Service of South Africa
18 Robben Island 155
Elleke Boehmer
19 Prisoner in garden 164
Nelson Mandela Foundation
20 Last Supper 175
Rebecca Goldberg
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Map of South Africa during apartheid
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Chapter 1 Mandela: story and symbol
His given Xhosa name Rolihlahla signified he could be a troublemaker. His clan honorific Madiba associated him with his aristocratic Thembu lineage. And his European name Nelson, his best-known name, given by his primary school teacher, imprinted his life with the name of one of imperial Britain’s naval heroes. Between these three nodal points of his names – signifying resistance, social stature, and heroism, respectively – Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s life has played out in extraordinary, mythmaking ways. His face and his form, his raised-arm salute and walk into freedom, are among the most widely reproduced icons of the 20th century.
Nelson Mandela – is it possible to say, in a phrase, who or what he is? Yes, he was one of the world’s longest-detained political prisoners; during the time of his incarceration easily its most famous. He is a universal symbol of social justice certainly, an exemplary figure connoting non-racialism and democracy, a moral giant. Once a man without a face (photographs of political prisoners in South Africa being banned), he became after his 1990 release an internationally recognizable image. For over four decades, while his country was vilified the world over for its policies of state-sanctioned racism, called apartheid, Mandela symbolically and to some extent practically led the movement of resistance to that injustice.
But why should his story be important to us in the world at large today? What do his achievements signify, not only nationally in South Africa but also internationally? How do we justify yet another short introduction covering the events of his long life? To be sure, he is a hero in his own country, whose freedom he worked to win. But how is it that he became a big name worldwide also – a prominent figure in the campaign to raise HIV/AIDS awareness; the 2006 Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience; a moniker in UK comedy shows (Mark Thomas’s As used on the famous Nelson Mandela)? Why is it his face above all others (including Gandhi’s) that is chosen to grace the covers of potted histories of our time? How was it that at the time of the unveiling of his statue in Westminster Square in the summer of 2007, he was hailed as ‘President of the World’ (by analogy with the ‘People’s Princess’ Diana)?
If one wanted an example of an absolutely upright man, that man, that example would be Mandela. If one wanted an example of an unshakably firm, courageous, heroic, calm, intelligent, and capable man, that example and that man would be Mandela. I did not just reach this conclusion after having met him in person. … I have thought this for many years. I identify him as one of the most extraordinary symbols of this era.
Fidel Castro, from ‘We will never return to the slave barracks’ (1991)
In the celebrity culture that marks the new millennium, with its focus on the individual as maker of their destiny, it is often assumed that Mandela was not only the master of his individual fate (as his favourite poem puts it), but the chief architect of the new South Africa. It is taken as read that he fought a single-handed fight for the rights of black people, and that in his case the theory that Great Men make history is well justified. And yet, as he himself often reminded people, his nation South Africa’s
liberation struggle was effectively fought for and won while he languished in gaol. Already at his 1962 trial he emphasized, ‘I have been only one in a large army of people’.
His personal charisma is of course palpable and itself famous. All who have met him remark on the charm, the Madiba magic, that radiates from him: a combination of his fame, height, and good looks, his encyclopaedic memory for faces, plus an indefinable something else, an attractive Mandela-esque je ne sais quoi. Central to his character, writes his admirer the novelist Nadine Gordimer, is ‘a remove from self-centredness, the capacity to live for others’. His good guidance and charisma represented important sources of inspiration for the making of post-1994 South Africa. Yet it is also true that he did not himself strictly speaking author that new democracy. With Mandela it is manifestly the case that his leadership alone cannot explain the historical development in South Africa from apartheid to freedom. Inner radiance alone cannot account for why his icon should bulk large in the world’s imagination.
The true picture – the real-life constituents of Madiba magic – is a great deal more complicated than the story of individual specialness suggests. It is based in a quality of character certainly, but this is combined with other key factors which this book addresses, not least his talent as a performer, and career-long proximity to several outstanding colleagues and friends, themselves astute political minds, especially Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Ahmed Kathrada. Then there are the ways in which his social make-up impacted on political developments in his country, especially in the 1950s, and how he shaped and reshaped his nationalist stance in response to those developments, while also increasingly reaching for transnational models of resistance, and appealing to an international audience. Throughout, he both referenced and drew upon, yet worked in skilful counterpoint to, his highborn background and its legacies of consensual authority, in order to shape the democratic,
Mandela: story and symbol
collective leadership structures of his organization, the African National Congress (ANC).
More than any other living person, Nelson Mandela has come to symbolize all that is hopeful and idealistic in public life.
Bill Shipsey, Art for Africa founder, on Mandela’s 2006 Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award
A mundane point to make about a memorable man it may be, yet Nelson Mandela is one of those historical figures who, in the mid- to late 1950s, and then in the 1980s and 1990s, was not merely the right man to stand forth at the right time. He was also, importantly, the one who did so with notable political acumen, adaptability, and style, as well as self-consciously and determinedly. At a time when the polarized racial struggle in South Africa justified a sharp turn from till-then effective passive resistance to a more militant response, he spearheaded the difficult decision to take up arms, and was able to persuade his organization to support the new line of action. But when, 30 years on, he deemed that the time had come to move beyond warring polarities towards the negotiation table, again he found the means to stand upon his moral status, push through that decision, and take his organization with him. Repeatedly, he created a role for himself within the ANC’s structure and ideological landscape, and then exceeded it. Never doubting he had right on his side, he retained faith in his vision of a non-discriminatory South Africa through 27 years of incarceration. Eventually he staked a place in his nation’s future, as a figure embodying not only justice, but, above all, hope.
Nelson Mandela: the story
This book is about the different, interconnected stories, histories, symbols, and values that are referred to using the ‘famous’ name Nelson Mandela. As captured in the Zapiro cartoon marking
1. Destined to play a bewildering array of roles
his 80th birthday (Figure 1), across his life Mandela has filled a rich range of roles: diligent student, city-slicker, dashing guerrilla, the world’s longest-suffering political prisoner, the millennial saviour-figure, and so on. He has proved to be a versatile, even postmodern, shape-shifter who at each stage of his career, or his shape-shifting, succeeded in projecting an omnibus appeal. A variety of different constituencies – black nationalists and white communists, rugby players and novelists, world leaders and township dwellers – feeling themselves addressed by him, claimed his emblem for themselves. Mandela the tale represents individual journeying and overcoming, but it also at the same time tells the collective, many-voiced story of a nation’s coming-into-being.
One of the prominent stories associated with the name Nelson Mandela is inevitably a nationalist story, a nation’s story. From at least as far back as the midpoint of his presidency, around 1997, Mandela’s life-narrative was officially elevated as South
and
Mandela: story
symbol
Africa’s main governing tale, its modern myth, as reflected in government school-readers and children’s cartoon-book histories. His autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (1994) itself is not surprisingly styled as a parable in democracy-building. In his biographies, the character and thought of the historical figure are everywhere overlaid with faithful accounts of the political-historical processes in which he was involved. At a more general level, as if to reinforce these representations of the national saviour, condensed histories of the 20th century enshrine the Mandela story as one of the few ethically affirming national tales to emerge from its decades of devastating conflict, often between rival nations.
A short introduction to the career of a figure bulging with this kind of national meaning – not to say heroic symbolization –presents obvious pitfalls, not least the temptation to reproduce the dominant accounts of the secular saint and architect of democracy, where surprisingly few other interpretations exist. The more scholarly biographical studies of Mandela (by Benson, Meer, Sampson, Meredith, Lodge, amongst others) tend to approach him by his own lights, as, for example, the determined leader of the more militant tendency in the ANC, or the disciplined pilot of his country’s destiny. Writing at different historical moments, the biographers differ in their interpretations of his political role, yet do not take issue with his national symbolic significance. For each and every one, Mandela embodies a post-apartheid South Africa. For some, additionally, he is a model, a history with a nationalist moral attached, a pedagogic tale bearing political truth.
For Benson in 1986, writing at the quarter-century point of his incarceration, Mandela is all liberal democrat and responsible party man, a reassuring figure for sceptical Western audiences (and noticeably less radical than in a 1965 collection of articles edited by communist colleague Ruth First). For Meer in 1988, prior to the uncertain hour of his release, he is the consummate
patrician, translating familial and ethnic loyalties into a strong network of nationalist affiliation. For Sampson, author of still the most authoritative biography to date, Mandela is in 1999, at the end of his presidency, a shining example of unifying leadership, at once Western and African, ‘the people’s president’. For the political historian Lodge, in a cooler though still admiring portrait, Mandela accommodates his charismatic authority to protect South Africa’s fragile structures of democratic politics.
As is clear, despite these varying assessments of his politics, each individual biographer takes the decision to co-operate with a dominant strain in Mandela’s own make-up: his emphasis on how a leader’s work for the nation moulds his own future, and vice versa. This emphasis is reflected, too, in the numerous African leaders’ auto/biographies published since 1950 – by Nkrumah, Azikiwe, Kaunda, amongst others – to mark the moment of their country’s independence, to which group Mandela’s obviously belongs. Typically, in most of these biographical narratives, the upward trajectory of the life is amplified by way of a process of metaphorical extension, whereby the story is projected through the exemplary patterns of pilgrimage and metamorphosis. The biographical subject’s long period of removal from the world, in gaol or in exile, for example, is often followed in the biography by miraculous change or transformation, intended as edifying for readers.
Over-determined though he may be as the symbol of democratic South Africa, this book cannot sidestep telling the iconic national story figured by the name Nelson Mandela. His achievement is in fact probably incomprehensible outside the historical context of South Africa’s freedom struggle, which he did choreograph in several ways. ‘Mandela’s story is central to an understanding of the outcome of the liberation struggle’, cultural historian Annie Coombs writes. In other words, this study approaches the national Mandela story conventionally, which is to say chronologically, across two chapters of scene-setting,
Mandela: story and symbol
from a narrative viewpoint which almost inevitably assumes the metaphorical sub-structure of the long walk and the slow, upward climb. Though the study retraces certain familiar pathways, reinforced by a supporting timeline of important dates and events, it attempts, however, to refrain from enshrining Mandela as exemplary. Cross-sectional digressions and sideways pointers to other possible readings will fret the smooth progression of the biographical narrative, anticipating the five topic-based chapters that follow.
Bearing in mind how Mandela has worked throughout as the astute author of his own image, or how he scripted life’s text, these later chapters set out to offer a readerly, interpretative account of the defining episodes of his biography and key aspects of his approach and achievement. Though frequently sidelined in the biographical studies, these aspects are arguably as important as his national vision in bulwarking his moral and international stature. The alternative windows on Mandela focus, inter alia, on his cosmopolitan receptivity to transnational political influences; his protean skills as an urban performer yet projection of an uncompromising masculinity; his ‘dialogic’ prison garden projects; and his international repute as the humanist ‘icon who outgrew his country’ (journalist Shaun Johnson’s phrase). In this way the study will in its latter half offer a more interiorized, speculative analysis of Mandela than biographies centred on the towering public figure as a rule provide.
The book’s approach via a range of themed (though still chronologically based) readings is informed by anthropologist James Clifford’s fruitful idea that an individual life constitutes ‘a narrative of trans-individual occasions’, a crossing point between different inspirations, motivations, traditions, relationships, and roles. The accent will be on how individual histories are formed in relation to one another, in connection with struggles and counter-struggles in other places. True, the crosshatched, sideways, or synchronic perspective may initially seem
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Australia! Hast thou no enchanted castles within thy vast domain? Is there not one gallant youth, ready armed to do battle for the fair ones, sleeping ’neath the spell of wicked genii?
Come, youngsters, draw up your chairs. Come, mothers, ye who live your romantic girlhood o’er again in that of your children. Form up, gentlemen, fathers, hard men of the world, whose brows are wrinkled with care and worry, take rank in rear of your fair helpmates. Merchant, lock thy safe, close thy ledgers; horny-handed sons of toil, [10]throw aside your implements of trade; gather near. I am going to draw aside the magic curtain which hides the great continent, marked on our map . Turn down the lights—our magic lantern is quite ready. Hey presto! Look!
Why, what is this? The heart of a deep mine! A gold mine, with all its dim and rugged corridors, its tunnels and windings, lighted only by a dull taper here and there. There is no one at work, for it is Christmas Eve. Yet the underground region is not altogether untenanted. One man whose duty it is to watch the place, until relieved on the morrow, lies coiled up asleep in one of the long drives. He is a young man, not tall, but strongly made, and with limbs like another Hercules. On account of his great strength and a certain good temper combined, his mates call him, Samson the Nugget.
For what length of time the Nugget slumbered on this good Christmas Eve will never be known. Certain it is that he suddenly opened his eyes and beheld one of the biggest, and withal one of the ugliest, hulking fellows he had ever seen standing over him. The Nugget was a brave youth, but fear began to take possession of him as he looked at the intruder—a giant in
stature, with a huge, flat head upon his shoulder, and a mouth as large, [11]and about the shape of the newspaper receiver at the General Post Office. He carried a lamp in his hand, but there was a queer sheen from his eyes, which illumined the cavern with a fiery glow. His dress was a brown russet, his hat, sugar-loaf in shape, and he carried a sapling for a cudgel.
“Get up, Samson the Nugget, and follow me,” said he in a brief, gruff tone.
“Who are you?” cried our hero, rising to his feet, and seizing a heavy iron drill.
“I am the strongest man in Golden Cloud, and my name is Grapple,” rejoined the other grimly. “Will you come?”
“Where?” said the Nugget. “There is no way out of this mine except by the cage up the shaft.”
“That’s all you know about it,” returned Grapple, with a grim laugh. “If I find a way, have you courage to follow?”
The Nugget felt inclined to refuse point blank, but curiosity being strong within him, he bowed an assent.
Grapple, without a word, turned on his heel and led the way further down the dark recesses of the tunnel. Our hero followed. Of one thing the miner felt certain—that the end of the drive would [12]effectually bar the progress of his unwelcome visitor. Strange to relate, such was not the case.
The narrow passage appeared to extend and widen out before their advance, until it took the shape of a long railway tunnel, from which the pair emerged at length into the bright beams of day. The transit from what seemed to be the bowels of a high mountain range to a landscape fairer and more beautiful than our hero had ever seen, filled his mind with wonder. His companion, now that daylight was upon him, did not seem such an ugly customer after all. He was certainly a huge, grotesque-looking personage, but there wasn’t a bit of malice in anything he said or did.
Our hero’s amazement was so great, that it was some considerable time before he found words wherewith to address his companion.
