by AIJAZ AHMAD
Nelson Mandela—whose followers and admirers referred to him often by his clan name, Madiba —passed away on December 5, 2013, at age 95. He was undoubtedly one of the most inspirational figures in the period since the Second World War: a humane visionary with exemplary courage, gentle but firm in his dealings and demeanour, proud in the face of racist humiliations, with monumental patience and indomitable revolutionary will to liberate himself and his people from the apartheid system into which he was born. The dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s was one of the great events of the turbulent 20th century, even though the manner of its dismantling was deeply marred by the fact that the critical negotiations that made it possible came in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, in a significant coincidence, those negotiations on the issue of South African settler colonialism ran parallel to those other negotiations on the Israeli settler colonialism, which led to the Oslo Accords. Mandela and Yasser Arafat had more in common than meets the eye easily. Both were revolutionaries in non-revolutionary times, and both fought first with the gun, then offered an olive branch to their oppressors, in search of a dignified peace between very unequal antagonists. In both cases, the question was starkly posed: is Dignity possible with Equality?
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Universalist in a racist society
Mandela shall always be remembered, for centuries to come, as the noblest, the most formidable among those who led South Africa out of the apartheid nightmare. He shall be remembered even more as the man who refused to fight white racism with the weapon of black racism, or to forge a majoritarian racism against the racial minority—the racism of the victor against the racism of the vanquished. For him, being African was a matter not of race but of trans-racial belonging in which whites and blacks could share equally, if racial privilege was abolished. All through his own sufferings, and the sufferings of his people, he held fast to the universalist belief in the equality of all human beings, beyond race, religion or nationality. This universalist belief was there not only in the moment of his triumph during the 1990s but from the earliest days of his victimisation by the apartheid regime. Facing the death penalty during the Rivonia Trial, he spoke eloquently of the Equality he envisaged as a normative moral value for all humanity at the end of his speech in court, on April 20, 1964:
“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
In different circumstances, such words could perhaps be treated as the expression of a familiar kind of liberal conscience. In the concrete circumstance of a black prisoner facing an all-white court in apartheid South Africa, under threat of death, those same words come to command a very different kind of majesty and heroic resonance. In the event, he was awarded life imprisonment, of which he actually served 27 years. The fundamental moral grandeur of Nelson Mandela resides in that universalist vision in the midst of a racist society.
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It is difficult to say why he knowingly settled for a neoliberal dispensation in the course of reaching a settlement for the dismantling of the political and legal structures of the apartheid regime. Five different hypotheses have been offered to explain this. One, that as a descendent of a traditional royal family and then a member of the black professional middle class, Mandela was surely opposed to white racial privilege but did not have any serious anti-capitalist commitments. Second, that he wanted to secure total victory on issues of racial equality and democratic rights of majority rule while postponing other battles to another, later historical phase. Third, that the general collapse of the socialist bloc, Third World anti-imperialist nationalism, the myriad “African socialisms” and so on, had left him so unhinged, so bereft of alternatives, so acutely aware of an unfavourable balance of power on the international scale that he felt compelled to settle for much less than he desired. Fourth, that he, with all his moral grandeur, was surrounded by men—his own comrades of a lifetime, men like Mbeki and Zuma and countless others—who had been so corrupted in the process that he simply did not command the supra-human resources that would make it possible for him to concentrate on completing the arduous process of deracialisation and also, somehow, stem the rot in other spheres. Fifth, that the issue of Mandela’s personal role is quite secondary to the fact that what happened in South Africa after the advent of black rule was structurally very similar to what has happened in a host of Asian and African countries after decolonisation: the rise of the national bourgeoisie as a class rapacious in its exploitations and oppressions at home but dependent and comprador in its relations with global capitalism. As Frantz Fanon memorably said: the historical phase of the national bourgeoisie is a useless phase.
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