Offering a dissenting opinion at this moment of a general outpouring of grief at Nelson Mandela’s death is not likely to court popularity. It is also likely to be misunderstood.
So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous respect for the great personal sacrifices he made, including spending so many years caged up for his part in the struggle to liberate his people. These are things impossible to forget or ignore when assessing someone’s life.
Nonetheless, it is important to pause during the widespread acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.
Perhaps the best way to make my point is to highlight a mock memo written in 2001 by Arjan el-Fassed, from Nelson Mandela to the NYT’s columnist Thomas Friedman. It is a wonderful, humane denunciation of Friedman’s hypocrisy and a demand for justice for the Palestinians that Mandela should have written.
Soon afterwards, the memo spread online, stripped of el-Fassed’s closing byline. Many people, including a few senior journalists, assumed it was written by Mandela and published it as such. It seemed they wanted to believe that Mandela had written something as morally clear-sighted as this about another apartheid system, an Israeli one that is at least the equal of that imposed for decades on black South Africans.
However, the reality is that it was not written by Mandela, and his staff even went so far as to threaten legal action against the author.
Mandela spent most his adult life treated as a “terrorist”. There was a price to be paid for his long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.
In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years.
First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.
Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was required to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.
It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.
It is for that reason, rather simply to be contrarian, that I raise these failings. Or rather, they were not Mandela’s failings, but ours. Because, as I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.
For too long we have slumbered through the theft and pillage of our planet and the erosion of our democratic rights, preferring to wake only for the release of the next iPad or smart phone.
The very outpouring of grief from our leaders for Mandela’s loss helps to feed our slumber. Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those watery-eyed leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber. Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters.
No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.
I’m decidedly mixed about this post.
Yes, inequality in the Western world has risen, as it has in China, but the average wealth of the global citizen has multiplied by manyfold over the last few decades alone. Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty.
There are fewers wars fought than ever before. There are more democracies than ever.
It’s easy to be cynical about democracy in the Western world, since we know just being given the right to vote isn’t a full indication of how democratic the system is. But voting rights matter. It matters a lot. It isn’t the end of the process, but it’s a huge deal for people who have lived under totalitarian oppression, like my mother who lived in Communist East Europe. And there were a lot worse places which didn’t have democracy and later got it, where people who did get the vote are much better off than under the dictatorship. Anyone not acknowledging that is either ignorant or jaded.
This bit in particular is merely bizarre, a mindless rant against modernity:
I think this piece smacks of euro-centrism. A lot of people in the left, and I’m talking about the white left of a certain age, see the era of the 1950s and especially the 1960s as the golden age. Jobs were plentiful, racism was still strong but declining fast. The cultural left was very strong, the economic left was so, too. If you lived in homogenous Europe, or your parents did(like Cook’s), then you had no experience with racism directly and everything seemed even better.
The problem is that 90% of the planet’s population didn’t live in Whitopia.
And they had it much, much worse back then than now.
Look at the absolute poverty rates, calculated by the UN, in places like Brazil, India or China. In Brazil alone it has gone from 30-40% of all children to 5% today. China was similar, India is making huge gains. This is simply the left’s stupidity on these issues. Because the people who write these things don’t live in those societies, their cultural anchor is Europe/USA 1960s for a white family. But sorry, that’s not representative.
I’m not saying global inequality isn’t an issue, it is, or global warming(which Cook never explicititly states, but which can be sensed in his writing), but as I said, on issues like wars, democracy, famine, absolute poverty, starvation and so on and so on; these past few decades have been a complete miracle for the majority of the world’s population.
The issues of inequality and a rising dominance of the capital class have to be adressed, but to somehow suggest that the world has gotten much worse the past few decades is not borne out of facts, and it’s an indication of eurocentrism.
Secondly, I’m not sure why Mandela’s name should be hijacked for a socio-economic discussion. This article feels like a cynical attempt by the writer to stand on Mandela’s grave and use his name to talk about a subject which is not about Mandela, but about the author’s poltical views. One of the few things I agree with in the article is Mandela’s less than stellar record on I/P but I do still think that’s a bit harsh. He was early on those issues and got a lot of attacks from the Jewish organizations(ADL etc). In many ways, he gave legitimacy to the Palestinian cause in the Western mainstream as well as many other societies around the world which wasn’t necessarily sympathetic to the Palestinians.
What a piece of rubbish, written by someone probably not even old enough to remember what SA apartheid was all about, or, more to the point, what Mandela’s presidency was all about. Not a word here about Truth and Reconciliation.
After 27 years in Robben Island you apparently think Mandela was supposed to emerge and solve every problem in the world, and you fault him for falling short of your juvenile expectations.
Why don’t you at least give the body time to come to room temperature before start in with your anti-eulogy and trying to show the world what a spiffy, out-of-the-box thinker you are.
My guess is that your real, inner complaint is that he wasn’t Jewish.
“It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.”
It is mistaken to claim that, upon his coming to power, Nelson Mandela was “defeated”. He had achieved, I’m sure far beyond his expectations, what he set out to do and that achievement was remarkable. The fact that he remained to focus upon managing his revolution in his own homeland rather than directing his efforts globally in no way implies that he was defeated, even less a defeated man. He was a man of unimaginable courage and heart who engineered the freeing an oppressed majority and managed to establish a democratic nation without retribution against the minority, indeed with a place for the minority in that nation. Briefly scan the revolutions and coups of the last two-hundred years to see if you can find the likes of what Mandela accomplished.
“He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana”
I went down to London for that. A totally surreal experience.
I recall thinking then that the only other figure in the world whose death could cause such an outpouring of grief would be Mandela.
Excellent, and sobering, analysis that is very needed in this moment as Mandela’s legacy and South Africa’s apartheid & post-apartheid struggle is being re-shaped, distorted and contextualized to fit the political class’s narrative.
“Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.”