No one really knew what to expect when Mandela was released en route to his election as South Africa’s first black ruler. He was known to be eloquent, and had put himself through college and law school, much of it while a political prisoner.
Then the horror story ends and the fairy tale begins. Unlike Robert Mugabe to the north, Mandela did everything possible to hold the country together. He didn’t want to drive whites out as Mugabe was doing, guaranteeing the economic destruction of what had been a country that could provide itself with everything it needed, partly because it was forced to by international sanctions.
If he was a Roman Catholic, Mandela might well be canonized. Yet this man, strong but not prideful despite hundreds of awards including the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote in Conversations With Myself that he was never a saint, even when he tried to do good. "I never was one. Even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
The book was way too late. His people have already beatified him.
While he was president things ran fairly smoothly. Since he retired in 1999, his ANC constantly has been the victim of power struggles. Crime has soared, particularly violent crime. Corruption is rife.
Can the fairy tale continue after the 92-year-old, hospitalized this week with a collapsed lung, dies?
Or will it become more like Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, where a black Anglican priest goes from Zululand to find his son, only to learn the boy has murdered a white man who had fought for black rights. Even then, though, there was hope, as the family of the victim began working to help blacks raise themselves up. But a year after it was written apartheid became law.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy
Robert, the fairy tale ended in SA when Mandela left power. All the ANC rats came out from under the rug. They had to - they were now "statesmen" and leaders. And Mandela has hung on, trying to be a symbol of good for a nation slowly deteriorating into corruption, violence and crime.
Hope for SA lies, ironically, in the Afrikaners, the Dutch speaking whites who call South Africa home. Witness this story of a fiend of mine. He left SA in 1993, convinced the country would go to hell. He left for the Netherlands and tried to adapt himself to the country of his forebears 4 centuries back. But Holland had moved on - The Dutch were importing thousands of Muslims to cover the labor shortage there, and were finding themselves on the receiving end of a culture of savagery and mass rape and abuse, not to mention murder. My Afrikaner friend had his wife and daughters to protect, and finally went home to his beloved country. Now, instead of being a farmer, he sells farm equipment.
If the Afrikaners are allowed to become the benevolent stewards of a nation where they were once selfish oppressors (and if they are willing to take up that role), there may be hope for South Africa. Otherwise, the place is finished, foredoomed to be yet another failed state on the African continent, a terrible tragedy set in a land of beauty that could have been an alabaster castle.
2 - Christopher Rose
The number and range of subjects that you are mistaken about is really impressive, Ruvy.
Your latest "story" is of a single person who found that they no longer fit in the modern world, that's all. Sometimes we just have to wait for the old guard to die off before new growth can flourish.
You point to the Afrikaners as a source of hope for South Africa, whilst wrapping your delusional point up in ifs and maybes.
Asking you to abandon the customary predictions of doom you are so wedded to is clearly pointless, so I'll just confine myself to pointing out the many inadequacies in almost all your ideas.
In this case it is the laughable notion that a newly liberated people are going to put their former masters back in power or the country is finished.
I predict that that will never happen and that South Africa is not "foredoomed" to become a failed state.
It seems to me that you just want to keep the world in a state of misery and fear so you can find opportunities to sell your bizarre failing ideas as "solutions", final or not. Fortunately, reality isn't really listening...