Nelson Mandela: the ripple effect

Abstract

This article considers how Nelson Mandela’s immediate family members intellectualised themselves within his legacy when he was terminal and upon his death. These specifics sublimate and set him apart from the eulogising tendency such as it has energised the scholarship on him. The tactics highlight tradition as an analytical category. Citing succession as a key episteme, the discussion delineates how tradition rarefies in non-hegemonic, mobile and fragile subject positions. In this approach, the paper invokes subtleties in the African Customary Law of Succession in South Africa.

Keywords:

• Graça Machel
• Makaziwe Mandela
• Mandla Mandela
• Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
• South African Law of Succession
• tradition

Notes

1. Tomaselli and Boster, “Mandela, MTV, Television and Apartheid,” 6.

2. Ibid., 4.

3. Modisane, “Mandela in Film and Television,” 225.

4. Barnard, “Introduction,” 5.

5. Nixon quoted in Barnard, “Introduction,” 6.

6. Barnard, “Introduction,” 6.

7. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom.

8. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “From a Terrorist to a Global Icon,” 912.

9. Ibid., 917.

10. Tomaselli and Boster, “Mandela, MTV, Television and Apartheid,” 6.

11. Evans, “Mandela and the Televised Birth,” 310.

12. Ibid., 311, 312, 316, 318.

13. Tomaselli and Boster, “Mandela, MTV, Television and Apartheid,” 6.

14. Uimonen, “Mourning Mandela,” 1.

15. Ibid., 2.

16. Ibid., 4.

17. Ibid., 1.

18. Ibid., 4.

19. Ibid., 2.

20. Ibid., 1, 5.

21. Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen, 14.

22. Himonga, Chuma and Nhlapo (eds.), African Customary Law in South Africa, 159.

23. Ibid., 162.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 159.

26. Ibid., 163–5.

27. Tomaselli and Boster, “Mandela, MTV, Television and Apartheid,” 6; Modisane, “Mandela in Film and Television,” 225.

28. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 94.

29. Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen, 14.

30. See Ngwane, “Mandela and Tradition,” 115.

31. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.”

32. Ramphele, “Political Widowhood in South Africa.”

33. Ibid., 102.

34. Ibid., 103.

35. Ibid.

36. Lewis in Munro, “Nelson, Winnie and the Politics of Gender,” 108.