Bono, the U2 singer and philanthropist, wrote in Time:
It certainly fell to Mandela to be great. His role in the movement against extreme poverty was critical. He worked for a deeper debt cancellation, for a doubling of international assistance across sub-Saharan Africa, for trade and private investment and transparency to fight corruption. Without his leadership, would the world over the past decade have increased the number of people on AIDS medication to 9.7 million and decreased child deaths by 2.7 million a year? Without Mandela, would Africa be experiencing its best decade of growth and poverty reduction? His indispensability can’t be proved with math and metrics, but I know what I believe …
Mandela would be remembered as a remarkable man just for what happened — and didn’t happen — in South Africa’s transition. But more than anyone, it was he who rebooted the idea of Africa from a continent in chaos to a much more romantic view, one in keeping with the majesty of the landscape and the nobility of even its poorer inhabitants. He was also a hardheaded realist, as his economic policy demonstrated. To him, principles and pragmatism were not foes; they went hand in hand. He was an idealist without naiveté, a compromiser without being compromised.
Surely the refrain “Africa rising” should be attributed to Madiba — the clan name everyone knows him by. He never doubted that his continent would triumph in the 21st century: “We are not just the peoples with the oldest history,” he told me. “We have the brightest future.” He knew Africa was rich with oil, gas, minerals, land and, above all, people. But he also knew that “because of our colonial past, Africans still don’t quite believe these precious things belong to them.” Laughing, he added, “They can find enough people north of the equator who agree with them.”
He had humor and humility in his bearing, and he was smarter and funnier than the parade of world leaders who flocked to see him. He would bait his guests: “What would a powerful man like you want with an old revolutionary like me?”
Younger South Africans aren’t sure quite how they feel about Mandela today
Zakes Mda, a South African who knew Mandela and now teaches at Ohio University, wrote in the New York Times:
It is ironic that in today’s South Africa, there is an increasingly vocal segment of black South Africans who feel that Mandela sold out the liberation struggle to white interests. This will come as a surprise to the international community, which informally canonized him and thinks he enjoyed universal adoration in his country. After he initiated negotiations for the end of apartheid and led South Africa into a new era of freedom with a progressive Constitution that recognizes the rights of everyone (including homosexuals, another admirable contradiction for an African aristocrat), there was, of course, euphoria in the country. But that was a long time ago. With the rampant corruption of the current ruling elite, and the fact that very little has changed for a majority of black people, the euphoria has been replaced with disillusionment.
The new order that Mandela brought about, this argument goes, did not fundamentally change the economic arrangements in the country. It ushered in prosperity, but the distribution of that prosperity was skewed in favor of the white establishment and its dependent new black elite. … The blame-Mandela movement is not by any means a groundswell, but it is loud enough in its vehemence to warrant attention. … Mandela’s government, critics say, focused on the cosmetics of reconciliation, while nothing materially changed in the lives of a majority of South Africans.
This movement, though not representative of the majority of black South Africans who still adore Mandela and his A.N.C., is gaining momentum, especially on university campuses.
I understand the frustrations of those young South Africans and I share their disillusionment. I, however, do not share their perspective on Mandela. I saw in him a skillful politician whose policy of reconciliation saved the country from a blood bath and ushered it into a period of democracy, human rights and tolerance. I admired him for his compassion and generosity, values that are not usually associated with politicians. I also admired him for his integrity and loyalty.
Mandela wasn’t perfect, but had ‘unmatched moral authority’
From the editors of the conservative National Review:
Among world leaders, Nelson Mandela had unmatched moral authority. When George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, he said, “It is this moral stature that has made Nelson Mandela perhaps the most revered statesman of our time.” Bush could have done without the hedge word “perhaps.” Mandela was by far the most revered statesman of our time. Every July 18th is Nelson Mandela Day. The United Nations declared it so, in 2009. Mandela was born on July 18, 1918. Thursday, the great man died at 95.
The reverence the world feels for him has to do, in part, with the nature of his adversary: the white, racist apartheid government of South Africa. … White racism is held to be probably the greatest evil of our time, and Mandela was a lion against it. …
Mandela’s moral sense could be horribly askew. In 2003, he opposed the Iraq War, as a great many all over the world did. But Mandela opposed it with a peculiar venom. Two months before the war began, he said, “What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.” He could not see any moral value in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.”
Nelson Mandela, like many another great man, had blind spots and other defects. His selectivity where human rights were concerned was hard to fathom. But he certainly knew that apartheid was wrong. And the good he did, especially as president of the new South Africa, was enormous. The continent of Africa could do with more such leaders, and so could the world at large. His Nobel Peace Prize is richly deserved, and so is the gratitude of his country.
Revisionists will try to make him something different, and will fail
From the British poet and musician Musa Okwonga, at his blog owkonga.com:
Dear revisionists, Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try to hide his anger from view. … You will say that Mandela was about nothing but one love, you will try to reduce him to a lilting reggae tune. “Let’s get together, and feel alright.” Yes, you will do that.
You will make out that apartheid was just some sort of evil mystical space disease that suddenly fell from the heavens and settled on all of us, had us all, black or white, in its thrall, until Mandela appeared from the ether to redeem us. You will try to make Mandela a Magic Negro and you will fail. You will say that Mandela stood above all for forgiveness whilst scuttling swiftly over the details of the perversity that he had the grace to forgive. You will try to make out that apartheid was some horrid spontaneous historical aberration, and not the logical culmination of centuries of imperial arrogance. …
Well, try hard as you like, and you’ll fail. Because Mandela was about politics and he was about race and he was about freedom and he was even about force, and he did what he felt he had to do and given the current economic inequality in South Africa he might even have died thinking he didn’t do nearly enough of it. And perhaps the greatest tragedy of Mandela’s life isn’t that he spent almost thirty years jailed by well-heeled racists who tried to shatter millions of spirits through breaking his soul, but that there weren’t or aren’t nearly enough people like him.
Because that’s South Africa now, a country long ago plunged headfirst so deep into the sewage of racial hatred that, for all Mandela’s efforts, it is still retching by the side of the swamp. Just imagine if Cape Town were London. Imagine seeing two million white people living in shacks and mud huts along the M25 as you make your way into the city, where most of the biggest houses and biggest jobs are occupied by a small, affluent to wealthy group of black people. There are no words for the resentment that would still simmer there.
Nelson Mandela was not a god, floating elegantly above us and saving us. He was utterly, thoroughly human, and he did all he did in spite of people like you. There is no need to name you because you know who you are, we know who you are, and you know we know that too. You didn’t break him in life, and you won’t shape him in death. You will try, wherever you are, and you will fail.
His legacy is complicated by the poor leadership that followed him
Max Boot writes in Commentary (commentarymagazine.com):
…Mandela knew that South Africa could not afford to nationalize the economy or to chase out the white and mixed-raced middle class. He knew that the price of revenge for the undoubted evils that apartheid had inflicted upon the majority of South Africans would be too high to pay – that the ultimate cost would be borne by ordinary black Africans. Therefore he governed inclusively and, most important of all, he voluntarily gave up power after one term when he could easily have proclaimed himself president for life.
The (not unexpected) tragedy for South Africa is that Mandela’s successors, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, have not been men of his caliber: Mbeki, the previous president, was a colorless technocrat who could not inspire his people or face head-on the challenge of AIDS; Zuma, the current president, is a rabble-rouser who has been accused of numerous improprieties from rape to corruption. Their struggles and that of the ANC bureaucracy they preside over only place in starker relief the transcendent genius and sheer goodness of Nelson Mandela.
His example should dispel any illusions, so popular in the historical profession, that history is made by impersonal forces. Mandela’s example is a ringing endorsement of what is derisively known as the “great man school of history” – the notion that influential individuals make a huge difference in how events turn out. He certainly made a difference, and for the better. He will go down as one of the giants of the second half of the twentieth century along with Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.
Remember how much he needed the African National Congress
From Tony Karon, in Aljazeera America:
The passing of Nelson Mandela finds many South Africans who fought apartheid under his leadership sad and reflective — even anxious over the fate of the country he leaves behind.
But don’t mistake this anxiety for affirmation of the popular Western myth that it took a “Mandela miracle” to spare South Africa a bloodbath of racial retribution. The idea that black people would have slit the throats of their white compatriots were it not for some magical bonds of restraint conjured by our wise leader on his release from prison is not only deeply racist and disrespectful to the majority of South Africans, it profoundly misunderstands the political culture of the African National Congress, of which Mandela was both an architect and a product.
The principle that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people” was not some epiphany that occurred to Mandela after years in prison or after his release; that was the principle he told the court that jailed him in 1964, the principle for which he was willing to die. Indeed, it is the first premise of the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter.
“Our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality,” the document notes, and “our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities … only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of color, race, sex or belief.”
If there was a miracle in South Africa, it was that the leaders of the apartheid regime changed course, partly under the coaxing of Mandela but also because the end of the Cold War had left Pretoria isolated from its key Western allies, surrendering to the very principle of democratic majority rule for which it had been willing to kill countless South Africans in order to avoid. …
Madiba was a giant whose courage and commitment inspired us all to face down a regime bearing arms to defend racism; he remained steadfast and principled throughout his 27 years in prison, and seamlessly moved into the role of the leader not just of the ANC but of a whole nation looking for a way to live together amid the legacy of decades of violent racial oppression.
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