/ 13 December 2013

Madiba’s magnanimity led to false love

Madiba's Magnanimity Led To False Love

Our father is gone! A muffled cry is heard in the house as the dark cloud of death settles and nestles.

A deep yet confused search for the meaning of the loss registers in the souls of the living. Tentative at first, then Vilakazi Street bursts into dance and song for, in death, all quarrels are suspended and the desire for sainthood is pronounced even more loudly.

There is an unsaid truth: blacks want Nelson Mandela to be their first black saint who stands the test of time.

Madiba is gone! We blacks are denied all, including our hard labour and our unsurpassed intellectual innovation that created Egypt's eternal pyramids. Black hands and brains built that ancient civilisation. But we know these words strike the world as lies and hallucinations, to be fobbed off with an impatient and arrogant wave of the hand.

What will it help us to wail our truth: "We gave Europe civilisation and tamed the barbarian spirit of the West with the gift of mathematics and philosophy"? Truth is, Timbuktu is buried deep in the sands of white supremacy, denied and refused.

Blacks now want the figure of Mandela to stand against the winds of erasure. The ephemeral and ritualistic clay with which to build such an eternal monument is song and dance in Vilakazi Street. This desire for black sainthood defies politics and history; it refuses to hear the truth of who and what Madiba really was to blacks.

This is so because truth has not served black people very well over the ages. A people denied so much deserves its bout of self-deception and its dizzying spells of celebration.

Whereas Vilakazi Street is populated by song and dance, Houghton, the seat of old money, burst into tears that ran into deep rivers – up to the cathedral of consumption, Sandton's Nelson Mandela Square. Zakes Mda's Tolokie, the professional mourner, comes to mind. Is the white world crying for Madiba or for itself? Is this strategic mourning?

The loss of Madiba is also the loss of a pillar upon which reconciliation without justice rests. Against the wishes of many messengers of truth and principle, Madiba extended his hand, called for peace and for the embrace of one another, while leaving untouched the colonial elephant in the room.

Those who benefited from the conditions that forced a minor Xhosa chief to abandon his throne and travel to unknown worlds forgot his many years of breaking white rocks on the forlorn island. Because Madiba embraced them, the beneficiaries of whiteness embraced him back – without giving up any of their ill-gotten privileges.

An unethical exchange was inaugurated. Madiba was real but his interlocutors were devious. That Madiba did not raise the difficult subject of reparations became another black gift to be taken without acknow-ledgement. Madiba loved the whites because of his belief in common humanity; they loved Madiba because they could keep the loot.

In the daze of death, let's permit ourselves the pleasure of irrational questions. Let us ask, for instance, whether Madiba's magnanimity was perhaps not so much a sign of weakness but rather a gift of clarity? Is it not an invitation to us, the mortal and the ordinary, to see more clearly that the path to absolution and change lies not in sainthood?

That magnanimity only produces false love between the formerly oppressed and oppressor. Here, the black world is thrown into a cruel conundrum. Because we want both – our black saint as well as our freedom and reparations. We don't want one without the other. It is this desire for the unity of the two that pulsates through our souls.

There is another truth: we don't know blacks. I will vouch for this, because I don't know myself. A people repressed for so long becomes unpredictable. There is dance and song. There will be tears. Then the inevitable depression will follow, for the world will remain a hostile place even after giving it our beloved father, who through his acts of unmatched humanity staked our claim to a place in the common human family.

Yet doors remain shut. Without the authoritative rebuking voice of the father who is respected by all, we stand and wonder: Will the blacks explode? No, the explosion will not come today or the day after. It will come like a thief in the night.

Is the explosion inevitable? We don't know. But as long as the conditions that would ignite it remain as they are, it is a possibility threatening to engulf us all.

Madiba is gone; a new world lies open before us, frightening in its possibilities, but imbued with endless promise of a new birth. The children must grow up and remake the world without the guiding hand of an attentive, authoritative, saintly father.

Andile Mngxitama is an executive member of the Economic Freedom Fighters