Tafelberg Short: Moments with Mandela. Wilmot James

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      Mandela’s idea remains with us; it is his legacy, but it is unfinished business.

      Reconciliation was, and had to be, a work in progress, but it dissipated after he left office. Nationalists and ethnic entrepreneurs now occupy that space.

      It did not take very long for former guerrilla and intelligence chief Jacob Zuma to sully Mandela’s bequest by turning the soft power of moral suasion into the hard power of organised intimidation. Zuma’s leadership appears to have no morality at all. It is about who survives electoral contests and who has power, the basest motivation of the crass politician. It is a betrayal of Mandela’s vision.

      I published a book on these themes in 2001 – After the TRC, reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa (David Philip Publishers and Ohio University Press, 2001) – based on a conference I’d arranged. I don’t think much of the political economy of South Africa has changed since then.

      Jeffrey Lever and I wrote the concluding chapter, The Second Republic, which we ended by observing that the democratic values promoted by the TRC can only be sustained if the inequalities of our political economy are bridged by astute political leadership.

      A decade later, this still has resonance. The poverty, inequality and unemployment in our country, bad in itself two decades into our democracy, threaten whatever sense of nation unity remains.

      Mamphela Ramphele, then vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town (UCT), made a short, punchy contribution at the conference where she cautioned against a false bonhomie, and the ‘failure to do enough about the truth that we have spoken and uncovered’.

      ‘If we find the courage to look at ourselves in the mirror,’ she wrote, ‘and stop pretending that we can simply talk ourselves into being a Rainbow Nation or into being a true democracy, we can develop into the kind of society we want to be.’ She professed to being ‘very optimistic’ on the grounds that she felt South Africans had the energy and the will to succeed in this; but, she concluded, ‘we must get down to work’.

      Njabulo Ndebele, who succeeded Mamphela at UCT, wrote with considerable imaginative flair about the lessons to be learned from the story of the lion that caught a rabbit in the act of helping himself to a meal he had found in a trap the king of the beasts had laid in a cave. Just as the enraged lion was about to devour the thief, the rabbit, desperate to escape, screamed in terror that the cave was about to collapse and unless the lion, who was stronger, immediately propped up the roof, they would both perish. Of course the rabbit fled, and only after some time did the lion realise the cave was not about to fall, and that he had been tricked. Ndebele offered a range of interpretations in the context of the new South Africa as to who was the lion and who the rabbit. However, what was central to their condition, the rabbit and the lion, was the cave itself, for it represented their shared fate and their shared world. And the question was: who keeps up the cave’s roof?

      These thoughts serve to help us in reflecting on how things have turned out in the ensuing years – beyond that ‘place of wrath and tears’ of Henley’s conception.

      It is safe to say we are ever mindful of the implicit challenge in the poet’s idea that, despite the ‘Horror of the shade ... the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid’.

      By a typically unforeseen confluence of events, I was to have a wholly unexpected association with Invictus in the following years.

      In the early 2000s I had taken up the directorship of a new division of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), which I framed as the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme, based in Cape Town.

      At the time, I had become a sort of unpaid project leader dealing with values in education for Kader Asmal, then minister of education in Mbeki’s cabinet.

      When, in 2002, I was preparing to take up the Gordon Moore Visiting Professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) the next year, I was anxious not to leave Asmal in the lurch, and so persuaded my friend David Chidester, Chair of Religious Studies at UCT, who was spending a year at the HSRC, to fill in for me as Kader’s sounding board.

      I arranged a meeting and the three of us met at Kader’s house. After the meeting Kader, graciously escorting us to the car as was his habit, mentioned that he really wanted to do something special for Mandela to mark his 85th birthday the following year. What he had in mind was the political equivalent of a festschrift, but it was all a bit hazy. Chatting in the car on our way home, David ventured the idea of a book of Mandela’s speeches. Would it work? Could it be done? It seemed a mammoth undertaking, yet overnight, and to his immense credit, David produced a table of contents which, in a remarkably short time – with both of us working on it night after night – became the birthday volume we presented to Mandela on his 85th birthday.

      Nelson Mandela, From Freedom to the Future (published by Jonathan Ball, and Little Brown in the UK) was distinguished by having two forewords, one written by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the other by the 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton.

      It was quite a thing.

      Kader delivered the speech at the handover ceremony at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s offices in Johannesburg. He made a telling point which struck a chord with all us there for the occasion, a group that included the late Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert and Graça Machel, who both have chapters in the book. Mandela, he noted, ‘is noted for his distinctive merger of the personal and the political’. He went on to say that political transformation in South Africa ‘was enabled by Nelson Mandela’s personal capacity to purge any poison of hatred or revenge from his soul, to rise above bitterness, to demonstrate a generosity of spirit, and to reach out to others, all the while remaining true, even under the harshest conditions of injustice, imprisonment and oppression, to his political principles.’

      Within a month of Mandela’s 2003 birthday celebration, I left for the United States.

      I had undertaken to teach a course on South Africa, and the book came in very handy indeed. I ordered many copies and shared them with new and old friends – among them Michael Burawoy of the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, who was teaching a course just then on Mandela, Antonio Gramsci and Lenin. It was a very interesting time to be in America, and in the intellectual milieu of California there was a great deal of discussion about South Africa post-Mandela.

      One of the people I enjoyed seeing again was a family friend Caroline Graham. (Caroline is the former daughter-in-law of Washington Post proprietor Katherine Graham and features in the Frost-Nixon debates.) Mamphela Ramphele once asked me to look after Caroline in Cape Town because she (Mamphela) could not be in town to host her, which is how I first met Caroline. Not long afterwards she got in touch to say that a friend of hers who was a movie producer wanted to meet me. In due course, my wife Delecia and I were introduced to Mace Neufeld. Our meeting appeared to be a useful opportunity for him, for he had been mulling over a movie script about South Africa and was keen to hear our thoughts. After reading it, we told him that while we weren’t movie people, it seemed an attractive script. I have to say we had private anxieties about the risk of a Hollywood gloss rendering the subject superficial.

      The script, of course, was Invictus – though it didn’t have that name yet.

      The story is based on journalist John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. The game in question was the cliffhanger 1995 Rugby World Cup final which South Africa won before a roaring crowd and a beaming Madiba when Joel Stransky booted the ball through the posts in the tense closing moments of the game.

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