Invictus - Carlin [116]
Mandela was almost doubled over with laughter as he recounted the story. He laughed because it was funny, but also because he was describing the consummation of his life’s dream, the moment he understood that South Africa was one country at last.
EPILOGUE
Twelve years after the Rugby World Cup final, in August 2007, a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela was unveiled in London’s Parliament Square alongside ones of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Reporting on the event, one British national newspaper described Mandela as a “black leader.” No offense was meant, presumably, but it still felt vaguely insulting to see him described in such terms. As it would have been to see Lincoln or Churchill described merely as “white leaders.”
To identify Mandela by his race is to diminish him and to miss the point. Tony Benn, a veteran British parliamentarian, was closer to the mark when he described Mandela at the unveiling ceremony as “the president of humanity.”
But it is also to miss the point to imagine that Mandela, then eighty-nine years old, was some kind of an aberration of nature. As he said when his turn came to speak, frail but with steady voice, “Though this statue is of one man, it should in actual fact symbolize all those who have resisted oppression, especially in my country.”
Mandela’s modesty could be affected sometimes, but this time it was not. He was the expression of the best his country had to offer. I saw it myself time and again during the six years I was based in South Africa, between 1989 and 1995, a time when, amid all the hopeful forward movement, terrible violence was unleashed in the black townships, especially those around Johannesburg, where I lived. The best thing about South Africa was not Mandela, but that the country was awash with mini-Mandelas, with people like Justice Bekebeke, his girlfriend, Selina, or “Terror” Lekota, the premier of the Orange Free State who invited Eddie von Maltitz to his birthday party.
The first time I interviewed Mandela, early in 1993, I asked him how it was that the ANC’s message of “non-racialism” had captured black South Africa’s imagination at the expense of the rival PAC’s vengeful “one settler, one bullet.” He replied that history had shown his people to be warm, kind, and generous, even in dealing with their enemies. “Bitterness does not enter the picture,” he said, “even when we fought against something we regard as being wrong.” The message of the African National Congress, he said, had “merely consolidated that historical pattern.”
The truth of that was borne out by my experience, but it was not the whole truth. A different kind of ANC leader could have elected the easier option of tapping into the indignity and hurt black South Africa had endured and channeled it toward violent confrontation. It took a rare wisdom for Mandela to say to his people, as he paraphrased it for me in that same interview, “I understand your anger. But if you are building a new South Africa you ought to be prepared to work with people you don’t like.”
His generous pragmatism was all the more unlikely given the historical pattern of his own life. Albert Camus wrote this in his book The Rebel : “Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a lengthy confinement makes a man either a weakling or a killer—or sometimes both.” In defense of the French philosopher, he died in 1960, before Mandela had even been jailed.