/ 12 December 2013

Saluting Mandela, an autocratic democrat

A trained soldier
A trained soldier

Nelson Mandela was not always a softie. He was once a militant youth leader who broke up meetings of comrades he disagreed with. The Mandela who later pushed for the ANC to abandon the armed struggle was the chief architect of the same, becoming not only its first commander-in-chief but also its first trained soldier too.

He believed in action and led by example, both by getting military training and becoming the chief volunteer during the defiance campaign. But at the core of all this militancy was always a desire to get the white colonial regime to come to the table and talk.

So for him, even the armed struggle was not to win victory in the field, but to shake the system in such a way that it would want to talk. It was an ambitious project and with a succession of staunch racists such as Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster and PW Botha at the helm of the National Party, prison looked more and more like a final home.

For in the time of the National Party, life imprisonment for political offenders meant just that. No return, except in a coffin. The early letters to his wife, Winnie, reveal a streak of militancy with signatures like "My fist is still high", meaning the revolution continues.

But those letters also reveal the pain of a man unable to look after his kids and reduced to begging from friends to ensure that they went to school. They reveal, too, the naïveté born of concern, as when he asked Police Minister Jimmy Kruger to allow Winnie to own a gun to protect herself.

Longing for a family reunion
The trouble with his late son, Makgatho, who was bunking school, and threats to take the only house he had because rent could not be paid, also worried him greatly. A longing for a family reunion when they would have supper together runs through his correspondence with Winnie.

Fast forward to the release and later the divorce, and his revelation in court that his then wife had never been in their common bedroom when he was awake. The pain of the unfulfilled dream of a happy family must have been immense.

His time on the island was interesting too, for those who spent time there say any new arrival would be asked: "Ungumni?", meaning, literally: "What tribe are you?" But at the same time, efforts by the regime to seduce him with possibilities of release were rejected outright, as when he was told first to renounce violence or was made an offer to settle in the Transkei Bantustan.

What all this reveals is a complex persona with a perceptive mind. He could see even from the island that the armed struggle had been moribund until the infusion of youth following the 1976 national uprisings. But even this resurgence was not enough to bring the regime down.

However, when the sporadic attacks by Umkhonto weSizwe were accompanied by mass uprisings inside the country, and sanctions and the isolation of the regime ­internationally rippled its economy, Mandela could see that the window for talks was prising open bit by bit.

That was when the talks started. We now know that, at first, it was a unilateral action that was later broadened, despite his earlier assertions that prisoners could not negotiate. Using his acquired international iconic status, he cajoled Oliver Tambo and the exiled leadership into accepting that this was what the ANC had always wanted, and it should grab the chance and move on.

True democrat
Once he was released, the concept of him as the first among equals persisted, and thus the announcement that the ANC would not follow through on nationalisation as promised in the Freedom Charter was made in Europe, with the rest of the ANC leadership left to scramble either to understand and follow, or to contradict the icon. The decision stood.

Danny Jordaan, the president of the South African Football Association, tells the story of how the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee decided that the Springbok emblem should be abolished in favour of the Protea for all sporting codes. Mandela forced it to rescind a democratically taken decision that was designed to show that sport was transforming.

All this shows a streak of autocratic decision-making that belies the image of the true democrat. It was because he had determined where the country should go and how it would get there, and would not brook what to him were worthless gestures. Primary to this was not to appease, but rather to cajole people – particularly Afrikaans-speaking whites – into believing that they had a place in this country.

So the Springbok had to stay. When General Constand Viljoen spoke of a separate state for Afrikaners, Mandela threw money at the problem, setting up a Volkstaat Council of 20 people that would look into the feasibility of the idea. Respected right-wing academics spent years looking at locations, economic bases, the composition of the people to populate this new Orania and what would happen to "non-Afrikaners" in those areas.

As the Volkstaat Council grappled with these problems, the country was settling down and more and more of the prospective residents of this racist banana republic realised that the new South Africa under Mandela was actually a good place. Viljoen and his cronies lost support organically.

Right-wing uprising
By 2001, the constitutional stipulation of this council was removed. The threat of a right-wing uprising had been removed. And it was with good reason that the right wing lost ground. As the late politician Harry Gwala once said: "Whites are not the only people with fears. Blacks have fears, too, that their own concerns are being ignored in a rush to please the former oppressor."

Mandela made reconciliation between races one of his major concerns in government. Visits to Orania for koeksisters with Betsie Verwoerd and the Volkstaat Council are just two examples of his attempt to deal with a white community that had stocked up on canned food by the truckload in 1994 as it waited for the apocalypse to happen.

The 1993 Codesa agreements left the economic power base almost intact in white hands, with the land question locked into a willing buyer, willing seller policy and land claims pegged only to post-1913 dispossession, by which time the landlessness of the African majority had been consolidated. The efforts now under way to review this offer prove that the haste to sign in Kempton Park ushered in a new political era sustained by the old economic order.

On the other hand, basic issues affecting the black majority were attended to under Mandela: free education and medical treatment at public hospitals for children and the pregnant, social grants, affirmative action policies for employment, and black economic empowerment to facilitate entry into the mainstream economy became government policy.

Subsidies for low-cost housing, which came to be known as RDP houses, were introduced and transformed many shanty towns into townships, and water was piped into village homes, or at least to street level. Electricity was laid on and it transformed the rural areas at night. Many black people felt they were free to go about as they wanted and the middle class grew.

Townships such as Soweto were transformed into virtual suburbs with tarred streets and the smog from coal stoves was cleared, bringing about cleaner environments.

And at the centre of these programmes was one man, and his name was Nelson Mandela. People who had been bludgeoned by apartheid saw him as a messiah who brought them freedom and grants, water, electricity and free medical care for the infirm. And they loved him.

Whiffs of scandal
Mandela, the great statesman, was brilliant in his analysis of a situation and in cajoling others to follow his path and dream. He was a leader who worked for them, not for himself. And so when his family was torn apart, the nation wept with him, for they knew that part of the reason for his pain was his sacrifices for them.

It was his human frailties that drew people to him. In him, they saw a superhero who – though unafraid to confront the regime, to serve long prison terms for his beliefs and to come out and help them to regain their dignity and provide true leadership – had the same human failings.

And as he passes on, in the midst of persistent whiffs of scandal over huge amounts of public funds used to pamper the new leadership, the abuse of office to affirm family and friends and quashed corruption ­ trials, the nation mourns his passing.

It does so because it misses him and what he represented. It mourns him because the new is becoming too different from his old. It sees in his death the possible demise of his legacy of selfless service to the people, and it wishes he could have lived forever.