South Africa: Trying to live up to Mandela

That South Africa was prepared for the death of Nelson Mandela is one of his greatest legacies, said the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) in an editorial. The father of the free nation, who inspired us with his “tough-minded commitment to reconciliation based on the restoration of justice,” spent his last years showing us how to continue without his guidance. By declining to run for a second term as president, and then by withdrawing from public life in 2004, the man we called Tata Madiba was teaching us the basic principle of democracy: “This must be a nation of laws, and of institutions, not of men, certainly not of one man.” South Africa will always be inspired, of course, by his spirit, intelligence, and compassion. “He was, is, and always will be the lodestone to which our national voyage must tend.”

Not everyone in South Africa shares that view, said Zakes Mda in The Guardian (U.K.). Many black youths, particularly university students, see Mandela as a sellout whose policy of reconciliation with the oppressors was “a fraud perpetrated on black people who are yet to regain their land, stolen by whites during colonial conquest.” Those too young to remember the tremendous upheaval of apartheid’s end don’t realize that Mandela’s insistence on a negotiated transition “saved the country from a bloodbath.” Still, I understand their disillusionment. Two decades after apartheid, a quarter of blacks are unemployed and whites earn on average six times more than blacks. “South Africa has never been a place of equal opportunity, and that was reinforced instead of changed by Mandela’s presidency.”

Some white South Africans now mistakenly fear that Mandela was the only figure keeping black radicals in check, said Simon Howell in the Mail & Guardian. There is a common racist view that the truth-and-reconciliation process, involving confession by whites and forgiveness by blacks, only deferred rather than destroyed blacks’ desire for retribution. That view also surfaces when international media ask whether South Africa will now descend into chaos—as if only “the sheer power of Mandela’s political will” held back a tide of racial resentment that will now burst forth. He was, indeed, a towering moral presence, said Archbishop Thabo Makgoba in The Sunday Independent (South Africa). South African leaders today, by contrast, are wallowing in corruption, infighting, and partisanship. We must try to follow Mandela’s “example of love, compassion, and moral rectitude so that we can rebuild in his honor the collapsing moral fiber of our nation.”

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To do that, though, we can’t revere him as a saint, said Michael Morris in the Cape Argus (South Africa). Mandela was no superhero, but a “complex human figure” who invited his enemies and his followers alike to do the hard work of peace and self-government. “He wasn’t looking for adulation, but collective resolve.” As we face an era without him, remember that Mandela “counted on ordinary South Africans to live the dream.”