The inauguration of Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa this week has been characterised as the end of the Mandela era. But, while it may be a convenient description of a period of time in South African politics, the phrase is inappropriate to a larger audience which would also claim the great man as its own and for whom the saga, the romance and the tragedy that is the life of Nelson Mandela, still has to run its course.
Part of the fascination of Mandela, which leads to worldwide identification with him, is his essential humanity. To describe him, as so many do, as “one of the great men of the 20th century” is almost to do him a disservice, because it tends to distance the man from the common experience which is where his greatness surely lies.
Some commentators have expressed puzzlement as to the foundations of the “greatness” in Mandela, particularly those closest to him in South Africa who are most aware of his shortcomings, both political and personal.
Understanding is perhaps offered not by way of an appreciation of his uniqueness – although, obviously, it is there – but rather of the role in which he has been cast as a modern Everyman. Mandela’s personal life seems to have run almost the entire gamut of human experience, at least in terms of extremes. A felon convicted on capital charges, once subject to the judgment of judges, now flattered by their bows. A lover and husband consigned from the heights of passion born amid the flames of revolutionary battle to the humiliation of public cuckoldry and more. An individual catapulted from the loneliness of penal solitude to that of arguably (with all due respect to The Beatles and other relegated deities) the most popular man to have walked the planet …
But shared experience of whatever extremes does not alone account for greatness; it is in dealing with triumph and disaster that the quality of the man is gauged. And in the enduring popularity of Mandela hopefully lies a message which will be heard by lesser politicians as well as diplomats the world over: that the future does not lie with cynicism posing as sophistication and the quackeries of spin doctoring, but with virtues of a simple kind recognised by the public.
This week’s ceremony in front of Pretoria’s Union Buildings provided yet another testament to Mandela’s sure judgment where basic values are concerned, in his early appreciation that his presidential term of office was of importance more by way of the limit he imposed on it than his enjoyment of it. His early and easy surrender of office offers a potentially enduring, symbolic lesson for South Africa’s fledgling democracy on the desirability of the limitation of power.
He has hammered the message home by his show of humility in making way for a successor who is, at least technically and in terms of age, better equipped to deal with the problems now facing the country.
But if Mandela has doffed the formal powers of office, his moral authority remains undiminished. And as he takes up at least notional residence in his retirement home at Qunu – amid the hills which remember him as a herd boy in ragged trousers – the temptations will surely come to return to centre stage. In the end they are temptations he will no doubt resist, for the most basic of his virtues is a common sense which will tell of the pitfalls of an old man’s pride.
So, even though his authority remains, it does so in a vacuum which probably means that Wednesday’s ceremony did represent the end of Mandela’s active political career, if not the Mandela “era” as such. Which suggests that perhaps it is time we begin paying him the huge debt we owe him as a nation, by way of an honour he richly deserves. We would suggest the renaming of the administrative capital of Pretoria after him.
We have argued before in these columns that municipalisation (as a secular variation of canonisation) should not be countenanced where politicians are still alive, for fear that the distorting lens of patronage make collective fools of us in history’s eyes. And it is obviously dangerous to argue that one’s own candidate for such honour is somehow “special” and, as such, deserving of exception to the general rule.
But Mandela has at least retired. And there are considerations which do make his case exceptional. Most obviously the naming of a city is usually designed to bring honour to the individual. But in Mandela’s case the effect is reversed. His worldwide reputation is such that adoption of his name will serve to rehabilitate a lovely city which has suffered sorely from the stench of apartheid, with which the name “Pretoria” is indelibly associated.
And then the annual flowering of the jacaranda trees for which the city is justly famous can be taken as tribute to one who nobly endured the vicissitudes of life and thereby truly became “a man for all seasons”.