Mandela and Beyond: Thinking New Possibility in the 21st Century

Abstract

This essay probes the value of Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela’s career and life’s work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. Using two case studies – of the 2019 ‘Official Exhibition’ and of a poem by Koleka Putuma referencing Mandela – the essay asks how South Africa’s first democratic president’s way of doing politics and his facility of interacting even-handedly with political enemies and friends lay down models for the country in the future. In particular, what might Mandela’s story continue to teach us about social justice, empathy and political transformation?

Keywords:

• Nelson Mandela
• 21st century
• theory-in-practice
• legacy
• social justice
• reconciliation
• decolonial perspectives

Notes

1 E. Boehmer, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2 For an account of the Official Exhibition, see R. Dex, ‘Story of Nelson Mandela’s Mission of Peace Told through Treasured Possessions in New Exhibition’, Evening Standard, London, 7 February 2019, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/nelson-mandela-new-exhibition-treasured-possessions-a4059981.html, retrieved 21 November 2019. This exhibition differed from, but is comparable to, the late 2018 British Council ‘Mandela and Me’ exhibition sponsored by Anglo-American and featuring ANC and Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) posters from the decades of Mandela’s life, as well as inspirational videos. See A. Higginbotham, ‘The British Council’s Mandela Exhibition: History or Corporate Whitewash?’ The Conversation, 18 September 2018, available at https://theconversation.com/the-british-councils-mandela-exhibition-history-or-corporate-whitewash-103450, retrieved 21 November 2019. The former exhibition’s international tour points to the regard in which it has evidently been held if not also to the influence of its curators and organisers.

3 K. Putuma, Collective Amnesia (Cape Town, Uhlanga, 2017), p. 101.

4 The scene formed the climax of Clint Eastwood’s 2007 film Invictus.

5 J. Burke, ‘We’ve Won It’, Observer, London, 3 November 2019, p. 2.

6 This is the figure that I am still quite often invited to speak about at business schools and on leadership courses: the unvanquished leader of ‘Invictus’ fame; the legend who can tell us about resilience, overcoming, persistence. ‘Invictus’ here refers both to his favourite inspirational poem, by late Victorian W.E. Henley, and to Clint Eastwood’s film.

7 Admittedly, of course, the country-wide jubilation was not bound up with memories of Mandela alone but had also to do with other important factors, including the ‘mixed’ team and the remarkable trajectory traced by Kolisi from a poor township childhood to the Springbok captaincy.

8 See footnote 2.

9 S. Žižek, ‘If Nelson Mandela Really Had Won, He Wouldn’t be Seen as a Universal Hero’, Guardian, London, 9 December 2013, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/if-nelson-mandela-really-had-won, retrieved 21 November 2019. See also Zakes Mda’s obituary in the New York Times (6 December 2013), in which he too observed that an increasingly vocal segment of black South Africans now felt that Mandela sold out the liberation struggle to white interests.

10 See, for example, R. Barnard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

11 Y. Omotoso, panel statement at BIGSAS Festival of African and African–Diasporic Literatures ‘Space, Feminism and Resistance’, Bayreuth, Germany (25–27 June 2018). Author’s own notes.

12 See R. Chikane, Breaking a Rainbow, Building a Nation: The Politics behind the #Must Fall Movements (Johannesburg, Picador, 2018).

13 See Z. La Grange, Good Morning, Mr Mandela (London, Allen Lane, 2014).

14 S. Nuttall and A. Mbembe, ‘Mandela’s Mortality’, in Barnard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion, pp. 267–90.

15 B. Obama, ‘Renewing the Mandela Legacy and Promoting Active Citizenship in a Changing World’, 17 July 2018, C-Span video available at https://www.c-span.org/video/?448781-1/president-obama-delivers-2018-mandela-lecture,retrieved 21 November 2019.

16 On the international consecration effected through the Nobel Prize, see J. English, The Economy of Prestige (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2005).

17 N. Mandela and M. Langa, Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years (Edinburgh, Canongate, 2017); V. Naidoo and S. Venter (eds), I Remember Nelson Mandela (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2018).

18 H. Twidle, Firepool (Cape Town, Kwela, 2017), p. 266.

19 Mandela and Langa, Dare Not Linger, p. 289.

20 Twidle, Firepool, p. 120.

21 G. Slovo, ‘An Impossible Act to Follow’, review of Dare not Linger, Guardian, 22 October 2017, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/22/dare-not-linger-presidential-years-nelson-mandela-mandla-langa-review, retrieved 21 November 2019.

22 J. Steinberg, ‘Cyril Ramaphosa’s Clear Eye Lacks the Vision of Mandela’, Business Day, Johannesburg, 19 September 2019; Nuttall and Mbembe, ‘Mandela’s Mortality’, p. 285.

23 For a fuller account of Mandela and bricolage, see E. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2018), pp. 55–7.

24 See, for example, the exhibition, ‘Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking’, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gabriela Rangel and Asad Raza, Americas Society, New York, 9 October 2018–12 January 2019.