He was tall. You had to look up to him. His hand, when you shook it, reminded you he had once been a boxer, and, differently, that he and his fellow prisoners had been put to breaking rocks in the lime quarry on Robben Island. Remaining unbroken himself, resolute, with hope intact. In one of his early post – release interviews he stated: “If I had allowed myself to become bitter I would have died in prison.” It is the statement of a man who, among other things, had mastered the inner disciplines of freedom, for himself and others. In the mid – 1980’s he had refused to be released if it was going to mean others would be kept inside: “I cannot sell my birth right, nor can I sell the birth right of my people to be free.” It is a telling interweaving of the spiritual and strategic dimensions of his person and work, the intuition and courage of which are staggering.
Live and in person he could be stern as well as gracious, as we all discovered at the FNB Stadium in Soweto on the third day following his release. The crowd of some 130,000, many of them youth cadres, had been increasingly impatient through the earlier speeches, such was its desire to hear the voice of the man whose very face had been banned from sight for a generation. Singing, dancing, chanting up a storm—we were all “higher than hope” in the poet Sipho Sepamla’s famous phrase. When the roar that greeted his arrival at the microphone abated, Mandela left no one in any doubt—it was personal and political discipline that was wanted. “Discipline!” he insisted, “It is with discipline we will win our freedom!” Students were to return to school, workers to work, comrades to governability, criminals to civil society. Riveting in his authority, compelling in his integrity and dignity, he was more schoolmaster than superhero on the day. I remember thinking the struggle, as we knew it, was going to have to grow up.
In the coming months the elder and middle generations of political leadership, returning from prison and exile, worked with the younger generation of leaders that had weathered the Botha years to chart a course from resistance to governance.
Mandela’s call to discipline resonated powerfully with those for whom the struggle against apartheid was at the same time a personal and political discipleship of Jesus Christ. Further, those who practised the disciplines of ubuntu – botho—of “I am because you are”—welcomed Mandela’s challenge as a natural part of his homecoming. It was a deeply rooted call to return to the traditional strength and beauty of Africa—a Mayibuye iAfrika call for Africa to return to those to whom it belonged and who belonged to it. And there were millions throughout the country in whom these disciplines were interwoven, robustly, in life and struggle.
Now, as we mourn his passing, we need to remember not only his softer virtues—his grace, wisdom and beauty, if these are soft virtues—but also his political virtues. What marks him out from the Dalai Lamas and Desmond Tutus of our time is that he exercised political power as a head of state, having fought and won the historic election of April 1994. It was from that locus he faced the moral and political challenges that inhere in decision – making concerning the meeting of great need and expectation with limited and contested resources. It would be fair to say his long walk to freedom continued after he entered office. And it will do us no good to blame him for not satisfying in five years a need that it took decades, and centuries thinking of the forcible dispossession of black South Africans from ancestral land, to stoke.
Yet it must be said, for all the care that was taken that none be left out, many are being left behind in the new South Africa. The fall of the Berlin Wall, of huge political advantage to the African National Congress as a liberation movement, proved to be a mixed blessing when it came to setting a progressive economic policy in government, as the neo – liberal agenda for the global economy gained traction. That equality as a social good was to be understood to mean equality of opportunity, as distinct from equality of outcome, was asserted early in the transition. All right for those who are able to get to the starting line with something in the tank and an advantage to press against those who have built up large leads. But millions remain rooted in pre – liberation poverty. To cite one indicator, the official rate of unemployment is reported to be 36.8 per cent. This is the expanded rate which includes those who are said to have stopped looking for work. It raises again the old question: what has political liberation to do with economic empowerment? And at what point does corruption and criminality in high and low office make nonsense of this question?
Freedom, when the party’s over, wants direction and discipline if it is to be the theatre in which we realize ourselves and our dreams, as opposed to a license for drift and dissipation. The discipleship of freedom, exercised in freedom, allows us to address what Abraham Joshua Heschel called the “insecurity of freedom.” Freedom, he insisted, “is not an absolute but a relative possession, an opportunity.” Thus did Mandela practice the spiritual and political disciplines of justice and reconciliation, from Robben Island to the presidency to global eldership, as he sought to take the nation on the journey he had himself been on.
Mandela knew, too, the power of symbolic engagement, the importance of his image, his bearing and style. His bespoke Madiba shirts established a new chic, marvellous in their beauty and freedom, a personal statement of dignity and office. He was invited—it seemed fantastical at the time—to be guest editor of Paris Vogue for the Dec. 1993/Jan. 1994 issue. And here he is in Captain Francois Pienaar’s No.6 jersey following South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, with the iconics rocketing round the country. In 1996 it was soccer’s turn, with Mandela in a Bafana Bafana jersey as South Africa won the Africa Cup of Nations at home. The number 46664, Mandela’s prison number, gained new significance as the name of a series of AIDS charity concerts that brought together performing artists from around the world. Mandela was cool, a singular figure with global influence and much loved. It was a magic time, bound not to last.
Nostalgia will not sustain the work of justice and renewal. Mandela himself worked hard to pass the torch—he retired after one term in office—and internationally, never more clearly than at his 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park, London in 2008. Supported by his wife, Graça Machal, he issued a stirring challenge to younger generations the world over:
“Even as we celebrate, let us remind ourselves that our work is far from complete. Where there is poverty and sickness, including AIDS, where human beings are being oppressed, there’s more work to be done. Our work is for freedom for all. It is in your hands now.”
Dignity, wisdom, grace, yes, and steel. The disciplines of freedom—the torch he has passed us. And the best way to honour him.
