Nelson Mandela as poetic trope

Abstract

Over the last fifty or sixty years, Nelson Mandela has almost certainly been the most frequently mentioned public figure in South African poetry. As with the “shape-shifting quality” (Barnard 5) of his political iconicity, so his representation in poetry has varied over time. More often than not, the meaning of “Mandela” in any given poem tells us as much about the poet’s attitudes as about Mandela the (once-)living man, but the sheer frequency of the references attests to his unique stature. This essay illustrates the range of meanings ascribed to Mandela by poets from the 1960s to the present day: the stoic embodiment of resistance during his imprisonment, the messianic figure leading his people to freedom in 1990, the potentially compromised/compromising politician following his release, and finally the revered elder trapped by his own iconicity and weighed down by the burden of public (over-)expectation. The essay concludes by suggesting that Mandela’s name will continue to be invoked in the future as a kind of touchstone of personal character, political probity, and national promise.

Keywords:

• South African poetry
• Nelson Mandela
• messianism
• (post-)apartheid

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Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the input from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that this essay limits itself to representations of Mandela in published poetry. The iconicity of Mandela in slogans, popular song and other verbal and visual media has generated its own secondary material. Documentary films about or dealing with Mandela and music would include Amandla! Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (dir. Lee Hirsch, 2002) and Music for Mandela (dir. Jason Bourque, 2013).

Lize van Robbroeck’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela provides an outstanding analysis of “the visual aspects of [Mandela’s] image as model African and global citizen—the cumulative result of both his public performances of self and his depictions by others” (van Robbroeck 245). On the latter category, South African art historian Zamansele Nsele has written about visual representation of Mandela noting in particular that “The cheerful forgiving figure of Mandela functions as a reliable nostalgic trope for forgetting an embittering past” (Nsele 112).

There has been plenty of controversy over memorial statues of Mandela, too, both in South Africa and elsewhere. Critics considered the massive statue in Sandton, Johannesburg, for example, to be inappropriate both because of its monumental size and its placement in a site dedicated to the consumerism of South Africa’s economic elite. A closer-to-lifesize statue in London originally proposed (2003) for placement in Trafalgar Square was eventually erected in Parliament Square in 2007 after protracted and expensive legal wrangling.

2 The countries represented are Angola, Barbados, Canada, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, England, France, Ghana, Ireland, Mauritius, Mozambique, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Scotland, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Syria, the United States, and Wales. Translations come from Afrikaans, Arabic, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Welsh, isiXhosa, and isiZulu.

3 The poem refers to Mandela’s famous rejection of an offer of conditional release in 1985. In the statement read by his daughter Zindzi at a rally in Soweto—which Soyinka presumably heard about—Mandela asserted his commitment to the ANC and to the people of South Africa: “I cannot sell my birthright,” he declared, “nor am I prepared to sell the birthright of the people to be free” (Long Walk 623). The statement ended with a personal promise—“I will return” (623)—that echoed the ubiquitous freedom slogan “Mayibuye iAfrika” [Africa shall return]. For the full text of Mandela’s letter to P.W. Botha rejecting the conditional offer, see Venter 452-58.

4 By the time Mandela’s Earth was published, Mandela was no longer being held on Robben Island. His association with the island, however, as opposed to Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons, where he was held from 1982 on, is as ubiquitous in the poetry as it is in visual representations of Mandela’s life whether in illustrated biographies or film documentaries. The austerity of the island’s landscape frequently serves as a metonym indicating Mandela’s resilience and stoicism.

5 For a brilliant analysis of the trope of messianism in South Africa, see Rob Nixon’s 1991 essay “Mandela, Messianism, and the Media.”

6 For Zindzi Mandela’s recollection of the famous meeting, see her comments in the Timeline special “How Mandela Changed South Africa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk-Lxgp9NWg), c. 10 minutes in. Ingrid de Kok’s justly famous poem “Small Passing” refers to the visit as indicative of the daily violence visited on black families in apartheid South Africa, as does Lynne Bryer’s “Through a Glass Quietly.”

7 See, for instance, Nkosinanthi Yengwa’s performance in honor of Albert Luthuli (Gunner 110-17).

8 The poem appeared under the title “The Way” in Illuminations 9 (1990), but was subsequently published as “Release, February 1990” in de Kock and Tromp, eds., The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995. Penguin, 1996, p. 55-56. It is reprinted under the later title in Halala Madiba, pp. 179-80.

9 Cf. Luke 19, 1-4.

10 A number of poets drew on the coincidence of wildfire on Table Mountain and Mandela’s release as if the former were some kind of divine signal of approval. Heaney’s prefatory verses to The Cure at Troy referred to “fire on the mountain” as a divine omen “mean[ing] someone is hearing/ The outcry and the birth-cry/ Of new life at its term” (Bartlett 186). In the poem “A New Africa,” Xhosa poet Daluxolo Hoho recorded that “Firefighters struggled to contain the blaze/ Because the power of God is unbelievable” (Bartlett 215.)

11 Guarducci comments on the oddity, for instance, of Richard Bartlett’s use of an epigraph by Marianne Williamson in his Introduction to Halala Madiba. Although Bartlett’s opening paragraph scrupulously goes on to explain that the epigraph’s words were not written by Mandela but have “come to be associated with” him, his neglecting to attribute the words to Williamson ironically cements the association.

12 Similar skepticism that Mandela’s release would not lead to fundamental changes in South Africa lay behind critiques of one of Mandela’s signature initiatives as President. Running between 1996 and 1999, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), was frequently interpreted internationally as an emblem of South Africa’s “miraculous” transition, but it failed to bring to trial any of the architects of the apartheid state and delivered only paltry financial reparations to a limited number of people deemed to have been victims of gross violations of human rights. The secondary literature on the TRC is voluminous. For a relatively early critique, see Bell, Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth. For a more recent, retrospective analysis of the Commission’s achievements and shortcomings, see Swart, ed. The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 20 Years On.

13 Many spawned counter-tributes pointing out the gaps between the soft-edged representations of a long-suffering and forgiving “Saint Nelson” and the steel-willed politician. See, e.g. Karon “Three Myths about Mandela Worth Busting.”

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Simon Lewis

Simon Lewis has been teaching African literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. He is the author of two monographs on Anglo-African literature, and numerous articles on South African writing, especially poetry.